Marcus emptied another clip into the bottomless well of polyps. While he was reloading, one of the things got its front legs over the edge of a deck hatch. Dom moved to fire just as Marcus put his chainsaw down through its head. It went off with a loud bang, throwing him back a couple of paces, but he kept his balance and opened fire again.
Apart from an occasional shout of “Gangway gone!” nobody was coordinating the defense of the rig now. Nobody could see what the hell was going on. Dom wondered why the Ravens weren’t taking over, but then it occurred to him: they couldn’t see much from the air, either.
For a few moments, the flow of polyps stopped. Dom risked looking into the opening, and Marcus called across the compartment to Trescu.
“We’ll need to evacuate if these assholes don’t call it a day soon.” Marcus wiped sweat from his nose with the back of his glove. “The smoke’s going to choke us either way.”
Dom expected Trescu to spit defiance and swear he’d die before he’d abandon the platform. But he didn’t.
“If Gradin tells me the fire has spread, then I shall order it.” Trescu stepped back and cupped his hand over his ear as he tried his radio. Another explosion—much bigger, much louder—shook the rig. “Gradin, this is Trescu. Is the fire contained?”
Dom didn’t hear the answer, but he saw the look on Trescu’s face. The man put his hand on Marcus’s back to get his attention.
“Get your people off,” he said. “There is still gangway access to the lifeboat under the flame boom. That will take thirty.”
“Yeah, and your guys?”
“Very well. We go too.”
It was an instant decision. They used the lull to run, dog the doors shut from outside, and head for the boats. Even in the fog of smoke, Dom could now see the state the platform was in.
Everywhere he looked was burning. The smoke was black and chokingly bitter, and he couldn’t stop himself breathing it in. Out of nowhere, a memory stopped him in his tracks: Maria, worried, scolding him for not wearing a helmet with air filters, telling him he had to at least cover his face with a scarf if he was going to go out into the ash-clogged air after the Hammer of Dawn had incinerated most of Sera. Dom shut it out of his mind and tried to concentrate on working out which end of the rig had the free-fall lifeboat. He was totally disoriented. He simply followed Marcus.
Astonishingly, some of the platform’s systems were still working. The immediate evacuation alarm started that bowel-gripping honk-honk-honk as he jogged along the walkways, spitting to clear his mouth of the acrid smoke. Polyps could have been lurking around the next corner, but they seemed the least of his problems now.
Marcus ran along ahead of him, grabbing rig crew by their collars and hauling them away from the flames.
“Leave the thing!” he yelled. “You can’t save it. Get to the boats. Jump. Anything. Just get off while you still can.”
Dom found himself counting as he went. He knew how many men and women were on this platform. He knew two were missing. So he counted every individual he saw and subtracted one from the total, and then shoved the person down the nearest intact ladder toward the boats or an open deck where a Raven could hover. It was completely pointless; he couldn’t work out how many survivors were left to evacuate, but it made him feel better trying. He was just one of a dozen Gears still on the rig struggling to evacuate everyone.
And some Gorasni still refused to give up.
Gradin was playing a jet of water into an open compartment, but it looked like steam was coming straight back out. Dom didn’t even know what was burning in there or if seawater was the right thing to use. But even if it was, Gradin might as well have been pissing on it. The whole platform looked red-hot. Marcus caught Gradin’s arm.
“You’re done here,” he said. “Trescu called it off. Let’s go.”
Gradin shrugged him away. Dom could feel the heat on his face even though he was a few meters away from the door. “I will not abandon this rig. You go.”
“It’s just a fucking piece of metal,” Marcus said. “It’s not people. You can’t rebuild people.” And he knocked Gradin flat with a single punch.
The guy fell back and hit the deck. Marcus had only stunned him, but it put Gradin off balance long enough for Marcus to grab him bodily and heave him over his shoulder like a firefighter.
The enclosed boat hung on ski-slope rails, ready to free-fall into the sea. Marcus managed to run for the boat under the flare boom and force Gradin through the open hatch.
Dom found the hull was full of exhausted, wet, grimy people. It could take a few more, though. The boat wouldn’t have to wait long to be picked up. Marcus tried the radio.
“Anyone still on the rig—either jump now or get down the lifeboat at the flare end. I’m counting down two minutes. Run!” He waited for responses. But there was always the possibility that someone’s radio had gone down, and most of the Gorasni didn’t have earpieces anyway. “Are all Gears accounted for?”
Hoffman responded. “All off the rig except Baird, Cole, Santiago, and you. We’ve got a few more civilians to winch clear.”
Trescu appeared at the end of the walkway, smoke-stained and disheveled. He was leading a guy with bad burns to his face and hands. Dom was about to risk running back into the smoke to find Baird and Cole, but they emerged from the smoke haze a few meters behind Trescu.
“We go,” Trescu said. “While we still have the light to find people in the water. Get ready to launch, Fenix.”
It was a brutal choice, but Dom knew it was the only one they could make. Dom thought about the stalks and wondered if everyone who escaped was only postponing the inevitable. A stalk could skewer a small lifeboat like a kebab.
“Who’s driving this thing?” Marcus said.
“Me.” Baird stepped through the hatch and sat in the helm position. “Always wanted to try this. Move over, Indies.”
The more flippant Baird was, the closer he was to pissing his pants. Dom would have to explain that quietly to some of the folks on board, because they’d lost buddies—maybe even wives. He waited with the hatch open until the two minutes were up and nobody was responding to last calls. When he squeezed into a seat, he found it was missing a safety harness, but he was ready to take a few broken bones if it meant getting out of this inferno.
“Hatch secure.” Marcus was already in the second helm position, watching for Baird’s cue to release the hydraulic mechanism that would send the boat shooting away from the rig. “Okay. Lower away.”
“Sure. Easy does it.” Baird reached for the handle. The seats all faced aft. This was going to be a crash dive. “All that shit’s for davits.”
It was a long way to plummet. Somehow, it was even weirder falling backward. Dom’s stomach caught up with him as the boat hit the water and he cracked his elbow hard against something. It hurt worse than anything he could remember for a very long time. But it beat being burned alive, or worse. There was worse, he knew.
How much more? How many more times are we going to scrape through?
“Baby, that’s enough of the high seas this week …” Cole muttered.
Baird seemed to have taken over as skipper. He started the engine after a few stalls, and the boat chugged away. But even with the hatch shut, the light through the porthole was still visibly yellow from the flames.
“Far enough,” Marcus said. “Let’s see where we are.”
The stern hatch opened onto a small platform, just big enough for two or three people to stand very carefully in quiet seas. Marcus stepped out onto it.
“Ahh … shit.”
Marcus had turned that one word into his own complete language, depending on tone. There was a dismissive shit, a regretful shit, and even a pleasantly surprised shit. But this was his weary, distraught, can’t-stand-another-death shit. Even Dom had to listen hard to get the right translation. He got up to look at what Marcus could see.
Emerald Spar was almost completely engulfed in flames, trailing long palls of black s
moke in the wind. The ships heading from Vectes wouldn’t have any trouble finding it now. The rig was one big smoke flare. Now that it was getting near dusk, the fire could probably be seen for kilometers, too. Five Ravens hung around the platform, one of them still winching someone to safety. Dom couldn’t tell if they were plucking people from the water or the burning rig. Every time Dom saw a Raven pilot hovering above flames, or taking fire, or getting into some seriously lethal shit to haul someone to safety, he wanted to hug them and tell them that he loved every last damn one of them. Yes, even that snarly bitch Gill Gettner; he loved them all.
“Baird, get back over there and let’s see what we can do,” Marcus said quietly. “The Ravens can’t take them all.”
There were only a few people left to pull from the water. One of them was Aurelie. She’d lost her flamethrower, which was just as well, and she submitted to Cole wrapping her in a stained emergency blanket. There was no sign now of stalks or polyps.
“How long is that going to burn?” Dom asked.
“We stopped pumping.” Gradin looked terrible. “But we didn’t complete a shutdown. If the seals hold … it’ll burn itself out.”
The platform was sagging visibly now. Another gangway collapsed into the sea. The whole rig was falling apart, sinking piece by piece, and for Dom it was one reminder too many of watching Jacinto vanish under the water.
He turned his back on the destruction and leaned on the lifeboat’s canopy. “Sometimes I think we’re going to sink the whole planet.”
“Or blow it apart,” Baird said. “Look, what’s the common factor here? Why are these things coming out to sea?”
“Who cares?”
“Us. Either they hate us, dumb as they are, or there’s something that draws them to us. Ships. Rigs.”
“Engine noise? That travels a long way in water.”
“Hello, submarine? Stealth? Low cavitation props?”
“Okay, what, then?”
“Fuel. Imulsion. They’re following the imulsion.”
“The first trawler wasn’t running on imulsion. That was some vegetable oil.”
“You sure?”
Dom wasn’t, actually. He looked at the pretty spectrum of colors shimmering on the waves in the fading light. That stuff got everywhere. It leaked from ships. It was dumped from tank-flushing. Its more volatile fractions dispersed on the breeze.
Imulsion traces crisscrossed the ocean.
And at least one big imulsion trail led to Vectes, to all the vessels that came and went, from the naval base to the fishing grounds to the imulsion platform.
It was almost dark now. Dom still had his back to the burning rig, watching the reflection on Baird’s goggles.
“Whoa,” Baird said, looking past Dom. “Photo moment. One to show Prescott, so he can kiss his new empire good-bye.”
Dom shuffled around to look back at the rig. He turned just in time to see another explosion send a ball of searing yellow flame into the sky. Then there was another, and another, and a firecracker sequence as the smaller tanks ruptured in the fierce heat. When the loud boom died away like the echo of an artillery barrage, another sound drifted across the water, quieter but more disturbing.
It was almost like an animal. It started as a low moan but then rose up the scale to painful peaks before falling back to rumbling agony again.
It was the creaking and tearing of metal. The platform was collapsing.
The rivets and welds of its framework were gradually giving up under the stresses of buckling, red-hot metal. The whole structure lurched as something gave way and half the topside slid into the sea, sending up clouds of steam. There was a crack almost as loud as the last explosion before the rest of the rig dropped like a beaten man falling to his knees.
Then the rig vanished.
Dom stared at the clouds swirling on the surface for a while. He couldn’t tell if they were just steam or smoke from the burning fuel floating on the waves.
But Emerald Spar was gone. Like Jacinto and Tollen, it had simply drowned. There was a long silence across the water. All Dom heard was the lapping of the waves on the hull and the sound of Raven engines, followed by Baird swallowing.
“Man, that breaks my frigging heart,” Baird murmured. He meant every word. Dom saw his lips set in a thin line. “Fantastic engineering. Fantastic. Just fucked in a couple of hours by things that probably don’t even understand what it is.”
It was Sera’s fate in a nutshell. Dom couldn’t bring himself to berate Baird for focusing on the loss of objects and not people. For some reason, he kept thinking about a Pesanga Gear who gave up his place in a boat so that Dom could see Maria and the kids again. It was after the raid on Aspho Point. The guy didn’t make it. Dom tried hard to recall his full name. All he could manage was Bai.
People—no, grieving for people just hurt too much. Mourning machines was bad enough.
“Fuck ’em,” said Baird, to nobody in particular.
CHAPTER 11
The backbone of military aviation will always be rotary, and tactical airpower must remain in the hands of ground commanders. Fixed-wing costs too much to do too little—I see no reason to waste any more taxpayers’ money on the Petrel strike-fighter program when we could spend that on helicopter-launched missile systems. These birds represent better value and can do everything we need, and do it better in most cases—transport, combat, observation, maritime, and special mission. We do not need to fragment our defense strategy by creating a separate air force.
(GENERAL JOD LOMBARD, GIVING EVIDENCE TO THE COG DEFENSE COMMITTEE ON THE LACK OF NEED TO CREATE A SEPARATE AIR FORCE AND EXPAND FIXED-WING PROCUREMENT, TWO YEARS BEFORE ACCEPTING A SEAT ON THE BOARD OF HELICOPTER MANUFACTURER AIGLAR)
COG GARRISON ANVIL GATE, KASHKUR; 17 B.E., 32 YEARS EARLIER.
Hoffman paused on top of the mound of rocks to look up at the approaching helicopter. It had taken the COG HQ at Lakar an hour to get a bird in the air, but at least it was one of the new Ravens. Hoffman knew he was going to spend a lot of his career looking up at the undercarriage of one of those.
It circled for a while before the pilot came back on the radio.
“Yes, you’re up shit creek,” she said. “This is going to take more than a shovel and a bucket.”
“I’m glad you came all this way to tell us the goddamn obvious.” Hoffman didn’t like the way the rubble under his boots shifted from time to time. “No signs of any infiltration out there?”
“Negative. It’s like the end of the world between here and the next city—just scrub and goats. Do you need any immediate assistance? Any casualties?”
“Don’t let me keep you. Our phones are out and we can’t move vehicles, but apart from that it’s a goddamn vacation.”
“Sorry, but it’s going tits up at Shavad. They need every helicopter they can get. If Shavad falls, you’re going to get pretty lonely out here.”
“Okay, we’ll wait for the heavy engineering boys.”
We just have to sit here and blow away anything that comes from the south. And that’s what we’ll have to do until the road’s open.
The Raven banked away and vanished. Carlile, the combat engineer, was making his own plans to clear the gorge. He clambered over the stone and then gestured to Hoffman to climb back down. It was scarier than being shelled. Every handhold felt like grabbing thin air, and the constant rumbling and clicking threatened another collapse. When Hoffman’s boots hit the road, he was more than relieved.
“Is anyone under that?” he asked.
Carlile studied the dam of rocks, fists on hips. “If they are, then we won’t know for a while. We need one of the big obstruction-clearance vehicles to even start to shift that. A Behemoth.”
Hoffman visualized the map, and the lowlands that ran the width of Kashkur like the mountains’ skirt.
“That’s got to come across from Lakar. A bit close to Shavad for my tastes.”
“Yeah.” Carlile caught his breath. Sweat dripped off his chi
n. “That’s going to take four days, maybe five. I’ll get on it.”
Hoffman had put his priorities in immediate order. The first worry was security—who was out there, whether this was the first attack of many, and whether there were casualties. Gears had set up machine-gun positions on the fort walls to handle any close-in defense. So far—apart from the landslide—there was no sign of enemy activity, but Hoffman couldn’t imagine any enemy going to the trouble of altering the landscape and leaving it at that.
So being cut off wasn’t top of the list at the moment. Anvegad—both the city and the garrison—had two weeks’ supplies at any one time. People here, civilian and military, were used to being stranded by the weather or just not getting supplies on the day they were expected. It was nothing to shit bricks over yet.
Why now, and what’s coming next?
“This would have taken them some time to set up.”
“Oh, definitely, sir,” Carlile said. “It’s thousands of kilos of explosives. And to ship that in without being spotted, they’d have to do it on foot over the hills a load at a time. Then they’ve got to bore holes and set the charges. It’s a long job.”
“UIR spec ops pros, or local sympathizers?”
“Hard to tell. It’s the level of blasting skill that civvies in the mining industry have.”
Hoffman had to assume the road had been cut for a reason, not just because it was as close as the bastards could get to the garrison.
No point relying on Intel for help. We’ll have to go look for these assholes ourselves. If they’re not already back across the UIR borders by now, of course.
“Well, we won’t get any assistance from Vasgar, so we’re stuck here until this road’s open again.” Hoffman kept a wary eye on the craggy slopes above as he moved back to the ATV. Pad Salton was perched high on the rocks with his sniper rifle, providing over-watch. “I’m just waiting for the next incident.”