“What if the stalks don’t show?” Michaelson asked.
“Then we’ve still got good fortifications,” Hoffman said. “Which won’t eat or drink anything, as Sergeant Mataki is fond of saying.”
“Is she talking to you yet?”
“Mataki?” Hoffman was all too aware that Bernie wasn’t happy. He’d have preferred a good bust-up to clear the air, but she seemed to be at loggerheads with something else, something internal; age, and her denial of it. If he hadn’t known her better he would have said she was suddenly scared of dying, which was an odd thing for a Gear who faced it every moment in her job. “She prefers the company of that goddamn dog. She even lets it sleep on her bed now. Damn thing growls at me.”
Michaelson gave him that indulgent look, an amused kind of sympathy. “It’s tempting to think we know what’s best for people.”
“That’s the nature of command, Quentin.”
“As long as we’re sure we’re not just doing what’s best for us. I wonder how you’ll take it when Prescott retires you. In the not-too-distant future, as well.”
“I haven’t retired Mataki. I’ve taken her off frontline duties while she’s recovering.” Hoffman was still trying to think of a way to climb down from his position without putting Bernie back in a job for which she was no longer fully fit. It didn’t preoccupy him as much as he felt it should have. It had become a worry he fitted in around the main business of the day, and he almost heard Margaret’s voice asking him when he planned to divorce her and marry the army. “If and when we face an attack, I’ll deploy her to Pelruan to support Lieutenant Stroud.”
Hoffman braced for a lecture on sending the womenfolk to safety, but Michaelson said nothing. He knew all the various histories and complications by now. Hoffman grabbed the opportunity for a change of topic.
“Baird thinks polyps won’t climb vertical walls well. So we get them in the pits and we blow the crap out of them. Or we burn them. Either way—they do not come out again.”
“But we don’t know where the stalks will emerge.”
“No, but we know the last place we want the polyps to go—toward humans.” Hoffman tapped Michaelson’s chest with his forefinger. The captain had taken to wearing the lighter naval armor, which somehow changed him from raffish to quietly menacing. The man had commanded amphibious special forces and it suddenly showed. “You just keep them away from the shore side.”
“Okay, you’ve convinced me utterly.”
“What else am I going to do, sit on my ass and do nothing because I can’t predict what’s going to happen?”
“No, I mean it.” Michaelson caught his shoulder and turned him around to walk back to the gates of the naval base. “I haven’t got a better idea. I’m falling back on what I know, just like you. Shore battery. Big guns. Torpedoes. Depth charges. Because nobody’s ever had to fight something that can appear pretty well anywhere and dump troops in your lap. It’s like fighting ghosts.”
It was absolutely the right word, and yet Hoffman found himself hunching his shoulders as if hearing it physically hurt.
Sometimes Hoffman saw the naval base’s gun battery as an historic but effective piece of artillery, but sometimes it was a reminder that Anvil Gate had to be faced and put to rest. There was only so long a man could obsess over his past. Everyone here had sleep-wrecking memories that would never leave them, and maybe his would look nothing special if he could experience the traumas of others.
I’m just an ordinary man. I’m not a saint, but I’m not a monster. This is where I stop beating myself up.
If he was going to be doomed to relive the siege of Anvil Gate, then he would make it work for him, not against him. He chose to see it as a training run for an even more critical battle. He would make himself think differently.
Doesn’t that make a mockery of all the lives lost? Does anyone deserve to burn to death? Does anyone deserve to be shot for trying to save their loved ones?
Hoffman decided that ends did justify means, and it was a decision he’d taken unconsciously when he enlisted more than forty years ago. The essence of soldiering was doing something bad to stop something even worse. This time, the end was saving what little was left of his world, and Anvil Gate was helping him do it.
“Yeah, ghosts, Quentin. Goddamn ghosts.”
Prescott was holding a public meeting over in the main housing zone. He expected his minions to show solidarity, even Trescu, and Hoffman was prepared to indulge him if it meant a quiet life. He was still the lawful chairman under the Fortification Act, which had never been repealed. And he still believed utterly in his right and capacity to govern. Hoffman could see it in every jut of the chin and squaring of the shoulders. The man wasn’t floundering, and he wasn’t out of ideas. He wasn’t hapless; he wasn’t a clueless bureaucrat. He just seemed to have his mind on something even more pressing. Sometimes Prescott reminded Hoffman of a man who knew he was going to fire his staff, but still made an effort to behave impeccably right up to the moment he showed them the door.
He was also a goddamn liar. He lied the regular way, and he lied by omission. Hoffman still wondered how much classified material Prescott kept from him. Prescott fed him information that he desperately needed a crumb at a time even when Jacinto was facing its final attack, even after the damn city had been sunk.
He’s a politician. He’s a politician who still isn’t scared enough to tell me the truth and ask for help.
There was quite a crowd at the fire muster point. The open space had become the informal town square in this section. Prescott walked casually into the crowd, his close protection Gears a little way behind him, and dominated the gathering just by the way he stood. The crowd was mainly Old Jacinto citizens, but there were also quite a few ex-Stranded—what a goddamn joke—and Gorasni. Trescu arrived late.
“I often wonder who the Chairman feels his security detail needs to protect him from most.” Michaelson feigned a turn to look toward Trescu, but whispered in Hoffman’s ear. “The Jacinto mob, the assorted riffraff, or us.”
I wish I could find a crass motive. Money. Power. Greatness. Whatever. But he’s got absolute power, money means damn all now, and there’s nobody left to parade his status to. He really believes it all. He really does think he’s been chosen by fate to save humanity.
That was what made a politician really dangerous. There was no common animal motive for the likes of Hoffman or any other man to understand.
“We’ve faced the unknown before,” Prescott said to the crowd. “Many times. Things we couldn’t even begin to imagine existed. But we survived it all. We’ve seen nightmarish things, we’ve come through a terrible war—”
“Ephyra might have come through it,” a Gorasni voice yelled. “But the rest of the planet—we burned, thanks to you, Mister Chairman Prescott. Even your allies.”
“Ahhh,” Michaelson said. “I wondered how long it would take for someone to point that out. They did awfully well to ignore that elephant for so long, didn’t they?”
Trescu piled straight in. He was just a few strides from the heckler, and he simply walked over and cuffed him hard across the back of the head.
“I don’t ask you to forgive, and I don’t ask you to forget.” Trescu turned to the Gorasni crowd. “But I demand that you focus on what will save our lives. We have a new war coming. You don’t need to resurrect another old one.”
Hoffman caught yet another glimpse of what made Gorasnaya willing to follow Trescu into a deal few of them seemed to want. Damn it, he admired the man. Disliking him was a totally separate issue.
Prescott seemed unruffled by the interruption. “I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t had to do terrible things. And I won’t lie to you and tell you we’ll defeat the Lambent. I don’t know if we can, any more than I knew if we could beat the Locust. All I can do is point to the fact that we’re still thriving in the face of overwhelming odds. We can do the impossible.”
A handful of people clapped. Then the smatteri
ng of applause picked up pace, and within seconds Prescott was being cheered by most of the crowd. The bastard had the touch, he definitely did.
Ends justify means. I shoot people: he lies.
But he hadn’t. Prescott had actually leveled with the civvies.
“I’ve had it with moral relativity,” Hoffman said. “Come on, Quentin. Let’s get back to CIC.” He beckoned to Trescu as he passed. “You too, Commander.”
One of the windows of the main CIC room looked out over the sea. Hoffman could see lookouts with their field glasses trained on the horizon, and two radar picket boats dragging white wakes as they patrolled the inshore limits. A Raven hovered low over the water about five klicks out to dunk its sonar buoy. If anything was heading this way through the water, they’d probably detect it.
Probably.
“No movement with Ollivar’s flotilla, then?” Michaelson asked. “And do you ever leave this office?”
“No to both questions, sir.” Mathieson pushed his chair away from the desk for a moment to grab a pencil from another one. “I like it here.”
“They’re waiting for something,” Trescu said. “I cannot imagine why.”
“I take it you’re handing back Nial and his father.”
Trescu shrugged. “Not my prisoners. Your call, Colonel.”
It was suddenly a tough decision. The Stranded were leaving. From a security point of view, the bombers would no longer be a threat, but they were responsible—perhaps personally, individually—for the deaths of both Gears and Gorasni. Hoffman’s sense of justice demanded that they didn’t walk away free men. And yet it seemed pointless to hold prisoners right now.
He found himself almost wishing that Trescu had solved the problem the 9 mm way and not told him until afterward. And he wasn’t proud that he could even think it.
“Sir?” Mathieson, listening on his headset, beckoned to Hoffman. “Ollivar’s vessels are moving into the MEZ. Quite a few more hulls than we’d imagined—the Stranded contingent here must be bigger than we thought. He wants to talk to you.”
“Tell him to cut the crap and get his people out. That was the deal.” Hoffman dreaded having to let the two surviving bombers go and then explaining that to Bernie, or any other Gear for that matter. “Tell him no torpedoes up the ass this time, if that’s what he’s worried about.”
Mathieson went off the channel for a moment. “Sir, he’s insistent.”
One last gloat about the end of the COG. They can never resist it. “Very well. Patch him through.”
“Hoffman? Tell us where you need us,” Ollivar said.
“You arrange your own RV point, Ollivar.”
“No, we’re landing troops,” Ollivar said. “And don’t think this is some heart-of-gold moralizing shit where I do the heroic forgiveness thing because I don’t want to descend to your level. This is just survival. We’ll fight those things with you, because if we don’t, they’ll just come for us after they’ve wiped you off the map.”
Well, shit. Hoffman would need every rifle, lookout, and pair of hands he could get. His honor didn’t feel compromised and he didn’t feel the need to consult Prescott.
I’m a warfighter. I’m here to win. What else is there to worry about except whether humankind is still here tomorrow, next week, next year?
The only thing he balked at was hearing these scum call themselves soldiers. But he’d swallow that for the time being.
Trescu shrugged. “About time they put something useful into the fight. Go on. Let them.”
Hoffman went as his gut guided him and pressed his earpiece to answer. “Okay, Ollivar, you might want to spread your vessels around,” he said. “In case we lose the docks. Other than that—disembark your men at the jetty next to the carriers, and Sergeant Fenix will meet you. We have a plan.”
Michaelson had plenty of free berths. He gave Hoffman a thumbs-up.
“Oh, good,” Ollivar said sourly. “All square-jawed noble infantry stuff.”
“No,” said Hoffman. “Dirty warfare. As dirty as it gets.”
The Lambent were the kind of enemy he preferred. There were no rules of engagement for absolute, literal monsters.
All he had to do was wipe them out and forget they ever existed. They would never nag at his conscience.
NAVAL BASE STORES, TWO DAYS LATER.
They needed anything that would burn.
In a world of desperate shortages, Dom had learned never to throw anything away. There was no garbage. There were only things that had to be reused, from fabric to old cooking oil to human waste for fertilizer. Food scraps went to the pigs and chickens; used paper was pulped and bleached repeatedly until the end product was useless for writing on. Then it would be shredded for insulation or made into ragged, uneven pieces of bathroom tissue. The idea of finding stuff specifically for burning was a whole new habit to learn.
Dom explored the warren of stores cut into the rock under the naval base, feeling vaguely uneasy in the way he did when he entered tunnels. At least he had a rational reason now. The grubs might have been gone, but a stalk that could come up in the middle of a new volcanic island could do exactly the same right here.
“Hey, Marcus? You down here?”
Dom’s voice echoed. The tunnels and chambers leading off them were built along the same lines as the ones under Port Farrall, probably because they dated from the same era. There were plenty of old ammo crates that would burn well with a little tar. There would probably be all kinds of stuff soaked in oils and lubricants, too. It would all go up in smoke easily enough.
“In here,” Marcus called. “End of the tunnel through the painted doors. Don’t go right.”
Dom found Marcus in a storeroom lined from floor to ceiling with shelves full of box folders with damp-faded labels on the spine. Marcus was sitting on an upturned box, rifling through piles of papers.
“Archives,” he said. “Some of these date back centuries.”
Dom peered at the labels along the shelves. The ink on most of them had faded to gray and sepia, and the handwritten dates and titles were sloping and ornate, the formal penmanship of another era. The files were carefully arranged by year.
“Okay, this would burn great,” Dom said carefully. “But I’d feel really bad about it.”
“Me too. Shit. Imagine what’s in here.”
It was just as well Baird wasn’t down here. The archives were probably full of all kinds of engineering detail. He would have gone berserk at the idea of setting fire to it. Dom felt like a vandal for even thinking about it.
“We could leave it,” Dom said. “Loads of wood and other combustibles down here.”
Marcus didn’t answer. He’d picked up a bound book about fifty centimeters across—an old ledger with a leather cover and a gold-blocked title. When he balanced it on his knee to open it, Dom read VISITOR SECURITY LOG on the cover. Marcus leafed through the pages and then stopped for a moment.
“Shit,” he said.
That could have meant anything from the end of the world to pleasant surprise. Dom guessed it wasn’t the latter.
“What is it?”
Marcus didn’t answer. He just moved on to the next pile of paper, leaving the visitor log open on the floor. Dom squatted to take a look.
It was about halfway down the list, a name written in careful block capitals and then followed by a signature in a different and more confident hand. The date beside it was more than twenty years old.
NAME: FENIX, DR. A.
VISITING: MAJ. SHARMAN, COB 3. EXT: 665.
Dom knew Marcus’s father had visited Vectes when it was a bioweapons research facility, and so did Marcus. The mayor of Pelruan had told them. But that wasn’t quite the same as seeing your dead father’s handwriting, unexpected and out of context. That kind of reminder of the dead punched above its weight.
Adam Fenix’s life was a disjointed series of snapshots that Marcus still seemed to be putting together from things that popped up where he least expected them, from s
mall personal stuff like this to finding those unexplained audio recordings in the Locust computer. Adam Fenix never told his son things, and even lied about others—by omission, yes, but that was still lying as far as Dom was concerned, and he knew Marcus felt the same. It was years before Marcus found out why his mother had gone missing. His father had kept it from him. Dom knew the Fenix family as well as anyone could, and it still shocked him that a man could hide so much from his son, his only child. Dom would never have done anything like that to Benedicto. He was damned sure of it.
“You okay, Marcus?” he said.
“Yeah.” It was a rasping sigh as much as anything. “Even when he’s dead, I still get surprises.”
Dom would have torn out the page and kept it if it had been his own father’s handwriting. It would have been the last precious link to the man himself, something he had touched and shaped. Marcus just picked up the book, closed it, and put it to one side.
“So what else have we got?” he said, as if nothing had happened. “Anyone collecting the wood shavings from the lumberyard?”
They’d been as close as brothers since childhood. Dom knew Marcus as well as he’d ever known anyone. But sometimes Dom still had to stop himself asking the one question he knew Marcus would never answer: Do you want to talk about it?
Marcus never wanted to talk about anything. It would have been pointless to ask. If he needed to, he knew by now that Dom was always there.
“I’ll go see what we’re piling up,” Dom said. “Someone’s got to stop them burning the bathroom tissue. A guy has his limits.”
Marcus jogged down the passage ahead of him. “Got to brief Ollivar’s irregulars with Hoffman.”
He disappeared down the dimly lit tunnel. Dom heard his boots clatter up the stone steps to the ground floor.
Reminders of the dead were everywhere, even the ones that you were sure didn’t affect you any longer. In the locker room later that afternoon, Dom caught sight of his tattoo in the mirror—a heart with Maria’s name on it. Even if he could have had it removed, he wouldn’t have. But it felt all wrong now, as if he was still pretending she wasn’t dead, like the occasional days when he still felt the urge to do what he’d done for ten solid years—to take out her picture and show it to anyone who might recognize her and tell him that they’d seen her.