“Let’s stay put until it gets light,” he said. “Too damn dangerous to wander around out there at the moment. Maybe there’ll be army patrols around.”
“What can you see?”
“Just fires. It’s all a long way away. Don’t you worry about it, sweetie. You feelin’ okay?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m just scared.”
He sat down again and Rosalyn put her head in his lap. She dozed off a long time before he did. But eventually he couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer, and his head started to nod.
It was the light that woke him. It didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere in particular this time. It was just very bright, almost like a sunny day but cool and white instead of golden. He shook Rosalyn awake and got to his feet.
“Must be a patrol,” he said. “Leave ’em to me, sweetie, I’ll explain.”
“There’s no cars out there,” she said sleepily. “That’s snow.”
“What is?”
“That weird light. Haven’t you ever woken up to snowfall? It’s all the reflected white light.”
It was the end of Bloom, high summer. It wouldn’t snow for months. Dizzy didn’t want to see what he was going to find out there, but he had to know because they couldn’t stay in here forever. He opened the door and found Rosalyn was right about a few things.
There wasn’t any patrol vehicle, and the sky was overcast. It looked like winter. It even felt chilly.
He picked his way through the broken shelving and glass, realizing that the feast he thought he’d found last night was just a handful of candy bars and other junk. Even when he got to the front door, he still couldn’t work out what he was seeing.
It was pale, but it wasn’t snow.
It crunched under his boots as he walked down the deserted road, just a thin layer of the stuff, and it was whirling in the air like a snowstorm was just starting, but it wasn’t snow.
It was ash. He could taste it.
Even before he reached the ash-frosted trees and got a clear look at the landscape to the south, he could see the palls of smoke hanging like ladders up to the sky. Then he saw the horizon and a red glow that wasn’t sunrise. He could pick out distant skylines now.
There were no buildings that he could identify, not a damn thing. He knew what should have been there, more or less, and it just wasn’t there anymore.
Heels clattered on the road behind him, getting closer. Rosalyn trotted up behind him. He felt her hand search for his and grab it like she was afraid of falling.
The towns and cities had simply gone. What was left was burning. He couldn’t hear any sound at all; not a bird, not a distant car, not even an emergency siren. Rosalyn took a deep gulping breath.
“Oh, God,” she said. “What have they done? What the hell have they done?”
CHAPTER 15
SITREP #37D
Extent of contaminated zones and stalk ingress at 0001/G/12/15
NEW STALK INCURSIONS since 0001/G/11: 9
POLYPS: Not detected.
BEDROCK DISTRIBUTION: Sedimentary: 3. Metamorphic: 0. Igneous: 6
Current SOUTHERN extent of CZ: 12 km approx. northeast of New Jacinto, grids Delta 6/Echo 6. Other CZs by grid: see Appendix 5. Rate of spread: variable, slowing. Last 26 hours: 5cm approx. per hour.
Action: Four-hour monitoring to continue. Evacuation contingency team to remain on one-hour alert. (Prepared by: Major G. Gettner and R. Sharle, 12th day of Gale, 15 A.E.)
NEW JACINTO, VECTES: PRESENT DAY—GALE, 15 A.E.
“Boomer Lady, what you doin’?” Cole asked.
“It’s monster bait,” Baird said. “She’s been watching too many movies.”
Bernie was hammering a big wooden post with a tethering ring into the patch of grass between the Gorasni camp and the walls of the naval base. She straightened up and shielded her eyes against the sun to look at Baird. A large brown cow was chewing thoughtfully, watching Bernie.
“We’re going out to find Edlar’s missing livestock,” Bernie said. “We need every cow we can get. Can’t let him go looking for them with polyps about.”
A Packhorse was parked nearby. Mac the mutt had his head hanging over the tailgate, looking bored, and Alex Brand sat cross-legged on the hood, smoking. She waved to Baird with her free hand and slowly turned it to extend her middle finger.
“Yeah, cows, I can see that,” Baird said, turning to drop his pants and bend over in Alex’s direction.
Cole gave him a look as he straightened up. “Damon baby, you realize Anya’s sittin’ in the Pack, don’t ya?”
“Oh fuck…”
“And Sam’s there too.”
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
Bernie was laughing her ass off. “Blondie, you’re supposed to drop your boxers as well, you dickhead. Never mind. They’re clean, and that’s all that matters.”
“Interesting choice of fabric for a boy,” Sam called.
“Yeah, princess, very individual.” Alex swung her legs off the hood and leered at him before stubbing out her smoke and getting back in the Packhorse.
“Ladies’ only patrol, Bernie?” Cole asked. “Man, my momma warned me to stay away from girls in gangs.”
“Don’t worry, it’s not a feminist statement.” Bernie finished hammering in the stake and tied one end of the cow’s tether to it. “This is Rose, by the way. She’s a seismologist.”
“Oh, I get it.” Cole patted Rose warily. Baird kept well away from the animal’s rear, which struck him as both lethal and messy. “She goes crazy when she feels stalks comin’ up somewhere, yeah? A kind of early warning system with horns.”
“I could make you a seismometer, Granny,” Baird said. “All you had to do was ask.”
“Well, yes, but cows don’t need checking for readings.” Bernie climbed into the Packhorse and started it. “And you can’t milk a seismometer. Now you boys behave yourselves while we’re gone, okay? No fighting.”
“Yes, Granny. Interesting plaits, by the way. Looks classy with the dead cat boots.”
Bernie winked and the Packhorse rumbled off down the track. Baird watched it go. Mac gazed at him from the back of the vehicle with a mute plea to be saved from the tyranny of harpies.
“Can’t wait to see Bernie smack Alex frigging Brand into line,” Baird said, looking around for the Gorasni fuel tanker. “She won’t take any of that I’m-a-sergeant-too shit from her. Ah, here comes our ride.”
The tanker rumbled out of the Gorasni compound and slowed to a halt beside Baird. Eugen stuck his head out the driver’s door.
“Hey, Mr. Cole Train! You coming to teach our kids thrashball?”
Cole climbed up the metal ladder to the top of the tanker and gave Baird a hand up. “Yeah, lookin’ forward to it. ’Bout time I got back in the groove.”
“Trescu’s boy’s very excited. It’s good of you.”
“Hey, no problem, baby. I love doin’ it. Long as the little ones don’t show me up by runnin’ rings ’round me…”
“I take good care not to drop you when we go over bumps, hey? Then you’ll be fit to face them.”
The tanker set off with Baird and Cole riding shotgun on the top. It was a great view. For a few kilometers they could still see the Packhorse ahead of them, but then the tanker peeled off to the right and followed the road to the imulsion field, where the view went from picturesque to grim brown death.
Maybe it’d stop. And maybe it wouldn’t.
It was all about timing, Baird decided. If they were ever going to evacuate, they had to reach their destination in the summer to stand a chance of preparing for a shitty winter. Baird couldn’t think of anywhere he particularly wanted to go as long as it wasn’t as eye-wateringly cold as Port Farrall had been. If he had to starve to death, he’d do it somewhere warm.
“Ooh, that don’t look good.” Cole pointed left. The regular skyline of trees in full leaf was interrupted by a bald patch and the twisted shapes of new stalks. “Cole to Control… yeah,
we’re on the drill site road, ’bout seven klicks southwest of the site. I can see a couple of stalks west of here… No, they must be five klicks away. You might wanna get a Raven to take a look at that. Cole out.” He hung on to the walkway rails as the tanker bounced a few times over ruts in the road. “Damn, all them stalks poppin’ up, and only one imulsion site.”
“Perverse bastards,” Baird said. “And they’re messing up my tidy theories.”
The contamination had created its own weirdly alien landscape. If you drove far enough into it, there was no sign that there was a green and living world beyond. It looked like the entire island was dead and brown. The smell of imulsion and a flat, bitter scent that Baird couldn’t identify just added to the feeling that this wasn’t Sera. The only reassurance that he was still in the world he knew was the sound of the imulsion drilling machinery drifting on the air.
For a few minutes the tanker trundled along hard-packed soil interspersed with stretches of rubble and trackway. Sitting on top of the vehicle’s walkway suddenly felt exposed and scary rather than bracing. Baird was relieved to see flashes of bright yellow through the dead trees before the tanker pulled into a clearing full of human beings and nodding derricks.
The site was operating twenty-six hours a day. The more imulsion they could extract, the more options they had. Without a stockpile, they’d be stuck here, and stuck on the ground.
Rossi and Lang passed Baird in their Packhorse as the patrols handed over. “It’s all quiet,” Rossi said. “Just a couple of glowies overnight. I hope you brought your knitting.” Then they were gone, a pair of fading taillights in the shade of the dead branches.
Baird climbed down from the top of the vehicle and watched Eugen couple the pipe from the reservoir tank. Stefan wandered over.
“What’s it like out here at night?” Baird asked. “Must be pretty scary.”
“Ah, we have lights, and so do the polyps, which is very considerate of them,” Stefan said dismissively. He took something out of his pocket and chewed on it. It looked like it was putting up a manly fight. “And we can run away when the polyps come back. Which was pretty damn hard to do on Emerald Spar, yes?”
“That was a great piece of engineering.” Baird still felt depressed when he thought about the platform crashing into the sea. They’d never be able to build anything like that again. “Glowie assholes.”
“You take care of our assholes for us, Baird. You are the champion asshole-slayer.” Stefan rummaged in the pocket of his imulsion-smeared overall and held out a chunk of whatever the hell he was eating. “You want some?”
It looked like jerky. The one food on the island that was instantly available in large quantities was the local wildlife. Like Bernie, the Gorasni shot anything that moved and then ate it, and that worried Baird.
“Tell me it’s not cat,” he said. “I’ve only just come to terms with Bernie and her many uses for domestic pets.”
Stefan roared with laughter. “It’s only seabird.”
“Thanks,” Baird said, appalled, and took it.
He did it because he didn’t want to offend Stefan. It was a watershed in his life. He hadn’t even been that bothered about offending Cole before he got to know him. Now he was about to eat something disgusting that would probably give him a tapeworm or liver flukes, just because he didn’t want to hurt someone’s feelings.
The Gorasni only knew him as the guy who could fix anything, the guy who’d been the first to fight off polyps and nearly got killed doing it. They didn’t know him as Baird the mouthy asshole and social misfit. Even Baird wasn’t sure which Baird he actually was these days.
He took a cautious bite out of the jerky. It was beyond awful. It tasted like a decomposing corpse that had been soaked in fish oil. Even as he chewed, he was keeping an eye out for somewhere he could hide and spit it out. Shit, he’d need to gargle with imulsion to get the taste of this out of his mouth. Stefan slapped him on the shoulder and went back to the derricks.
“What you eatin’?” Cole asked. “’Cause you look like you’re gonna chuck it up any minute.”
Baird tried to amble casually into the trees. His mouth was filling with saliva. “Don’t ask.”
I’m fucking insane. I’m poisoning myself to get approval. I never used to give a shit.
Baird managed to get about five trees deep in the woods before he was satisfied nobody could see him. For some reason he recalled the moment when the burning wreckage of Emerald Spar sank into the sea. That was when the war against the glowies really became personal for him. He’d thought it was all about the fantastic, impossible, brilliant structure lost to civilization forever, but now he accepted it was more about the men and women who’d lived a lonely and dangerous existence taking care of it.
Whoa, steady on. People? Me? Fuck that. No. Okay, maybe. Maybe I admire these guys. And that’s why I volunteered for the rig patrol here, then. Never realized that before. What’s happening to me?
Baird spat as quietly as he could. The lump of mummified seagull, barely changed by chewing, hit the trunk of a dead tree and slid down it. He could still taste it. He spat a few more times, but there wasn’t enough spit in his whole body to get rid of that and he found himself gagging. His radio crackled.
“Baird, where are ya?”
Cole was on the far side of the drilling compound, pacing the perimeter with his back to the row of derricks. Baird found himself doing a creep line search vertically, looking up into the branches then running his eyes down the trunks, scanning a section along the ground, then scanning up again. The one good thing about polyps, other than the satisfying way the fuckers exploded when you shot them, was their lights. In the gloom, they lit up like a fairground ride.
“I’m puking my ring,” he said. “No cracks in front of the Gorasni, okay? They mean well.”
“Goddamn, you’re growin’ a heart. Better go see Doc Hayman ’bout that.”
“Yeah, that sounds malignant to me.”
Baird bent over and braced his hands on his knees to try to work up more spit without throwing up and getting the dry heaves. He almost took a swig from his water bottle, but he was convinced that the oily dead-fish taste on his lips would contaminate it. Then movement caught his eye. He looked up slowly.
“Cole?”
“You hear anything, Baird?” he whispered.
“I don’t feel anything.” Baird shifted his weight from one foot to the other a few times to test for tremors. No; nothing, nothing at all. “You see anything?”
Cole was level with him now, a few meters away. He held up his hand for silence as he walked slowly between the trees with his Lancer raised. The sawing rhythm of the derricks and the steady putter of the generators didn’t stop, but the Gorasni chatter died away a voice at a time until nobody was talking. Baird followed Cole, going wide so they’d have overlapping arcs if they had to open fire.
Whatever it was, they’d have to take it down before it got near the drilling area. It was peppered with imulsion seeps, a bomb waiting to go off. They’d already had to fight a fire here once.
“I hear it,” Cole said. “But it sounds a hell of a lot bigger than polyps…”
He was about fifty meters into the woods now. Baird could hear it. Something big was crushing twigs, moving at a lumbering pace.
“Baird, what is it?” Stefan called.
“No idea. But stay back.”
“Eugen’s going to move the tanker, just in case.”
“Yeah. Great. Good idea. Do that.”
It sounded like a single creature. Baird made sure he could still see Cole and kept walking, casting around for movement. What the hell would be that big, out here?
Oh great. If the stalks made it here, maybe the grubs did too. We’ve got a Berserker on a day trip. Or a Brumak.
“Left,” Cole said suddenly. “Left, one hundred meters.”
Baird looked around, lost for a moment, but then he saw it: a white shape moving slowly between the dark trunks, something
big and heavy. It wasn’t a Berserker.
“Okay, everybody relax,” Baird called, almost giddy with relief. “It’s the frigging prize bull that went AWOL when we evacuated the farm. He probably wants his dinner.”
Cole was still stalking it carefully. “Baby, you saw the horns on that sucker, didn’t ya? Well, I ain’t relaxing just yet. He’s a bad-tempered meat tank and he can stomp us into shit if we piss him off.”
“Well then, we can shoot the thing and claim self-defense,” Baird said. “I think we should do that anyway. I’ll have the rib eye.”
The animal wandered to the edge of the clearing. There was nothing for the bull to graze on, so maybe he’d heard humans and decided that they usually meant food was nearby. Baird could see the sweep of his horns now.
He was huge. Scary huge. He was panting like a steam engine.
“Baird, you know anything about cows and stuff?” Cole asked quietly.
“No, that’d be Bernie. Not me.”
“I mean, do they usually look like that? Like they got rabies?”
Baird suddenly saw what Cole meant and almost shat himself. The bull was drooling. Animals always seemed to be leaking something messy from one orifice or another, but this just wasn’t right. It had a faint yellow glow to it. The bull lowered his head and stared swinging it from side to side, making a mournful groaning sound.
“What’s the luminous stuff?” Stefan said. He was right behind Baird now with his shotgun aimed at the bull. “What is it, Baird? Is it what I think it is?”
No, the bull didn’t look well at all. He took a few steps forward. Now that he’d emerged from the trees, Baird could see his flanks heaving. There were reddish patches on his ass, suddenly conspicuous on that white hide.
“Oh, terrific.” The realization hit Baird more slowly than he expected. “He’s gone glowie. Look.”
“Come on, Baird. Do we shoot it now?”
“Stefan—listen to me. It’s fucking Lambent. I was right. I was goddamn right. This stuff is catching.”
“Yeah, you get a gold star for that, baby,” Cole said, circling around to the other side of the bull. “But we better persuade him to move along, ’cause if he’s a glowie, he’s a thousand-kilo bomb.”