“I’ll monitor the local net,” Sam said. “You keep an ear on Control.”
There was one advantage to patrolling Pelruan—visibility. It was small, low-rise, and there were a couple of points around the place where you had a panoramic view of the whole town. And there was no underground city of tunnels to worry about, either. If anything popped up here, they’d see it right away.
It’s just a question of what we can do about it if it does. Twenty Gears, some dogs, and a mostly unarmed population that’s never fought a grub, let alone dealt with Lambent. Great.
To the western side of the town, there was a flat-topped cliff the Ravens sometimes used as a landing pad. The view from there had almost no blind spots. Rossi’s squad had built a small observation post up there as shelter against the constant wind. Bernie and Sam walked up the long slope and stood there for a while, familiarizing themselves with the detail below.
Sam turned to face the sea. “Shit. If I turn at this angle, it looks as if there’s nothing left on Sera except the ocean.”
“Lonely spot.”
“Yes.” Sam raised her binoculars. “It is.”
Life went on below, probably the same as it had for decades except for the defensive ditches and garlands of razor wire put in place to deter a two-legged enemy. Bernie found herself looking south and wondering if she’d ever want to go home to Galangi again.
“Hey, Bernie, take a look.”
Bernie turned and followed Sam’s line of sight out to sea. She strained to spot the outline of a stalk, but there was nothing like that out there.
“What is it?”
Sam handed her the binoculars. “Line up with the pile of fishing floats on the slipway and elevate fifty degrees. Track right to left.”
Bernie didn’t see anything at first, then Sam said, “There it is again,” and the movement passed in front of her focus.
Something was swimming out there at a leisurely pace, breaking the water in a slow, wavelike motion like a porpoise. It could have been porpoises, of course. There was a lot more regular life in the ocean now that most of the human population had been wiped out. Those two ratios seemed to go hand in hand. But the longer Bernie looked, the more she decided it was a single large creature, and it wasn’t a whale.
She lowered the binoculars and got on the radio. “Control, this is Mataki at Pelruan. Contact—possible leviathan, two to three kilometers offshore. Might be the same one, if they can move that fast, or it might be its mate. Have you still got a fix on yours?”
“Negative, Clement lost contact with it,” Mathieson said. “Thanks for the heads-up.”
“Okay,” Sam said. “I just let Stroud know. She’s making sure everyone’s back on dry land.”
The warning sirens positioned around the town let out three long, wailing bursts, sparking a flurry of activity. Nobody seemed to be out fishing, but crews ran down to the beach to haul the shore-launched boats farther up the pebbles. There was nothing they could do about the trawlers moored in the harbor. The fishermen just had to hope the leviathan didn’t venture into shallower water.
Bernie tried to locate the creature again, but she couldn’t see it. That was the problem with looking away from the sea for a few moments. Sam shook her head.
“No idea where it’s gone,” she said. “They must have escaped from the Locust tunnels when we flooded Jacinto. They’re making the most of their freedom.”
Bernie had never thought about monsters that way before. But half the creatures the COG had come across back on the land seemed to be dumb animals that the Locust had adapted for their own use, all kinds of things that probably didn’t have the brains on their own to plan attacks on humans. When she stopped to think about it, it was nightmarish.
Mac was back with Berenz, probably dozing in his kennel or just being a dog with the rest of the pack. She wondered if grubs grew fond of their beasts and let them sleep on their beds—did they even have beds?—then set off down the slope to walk around the harbor.
The coast around Pelruan was all headlands and bays, getting steeper and more spectacular further from the town. Bernie was starting to imagine a life where they never went to sea or left the island, a life pretty much like the one she’d known as a child. She stood looking out to sea, ten meters up the beach, and heard a distant helicopter over the sound of the waves hitting the pebbles.
Movement in the water caught her eye. She scanned the choppy water. A column of dark, shiny scales rose from nowhere out of the waves, so fast and silent that she froze for a second and couldn’t take in what she was looking at. Then it crashed down on the water like a breaching whale, raining spray on the beach. She’d aimed her rifle before her brain had worked out what the thing was.
Sam inhaled sharply, backing away with her Lancer raised. “Shit.”
“Where is it?” Bernie got her voice back. “Where’d it go?”
Leviathans stuck to the water. Dom said they had tentacles, so as long as she kept well clear of the waterline, it was fine. It was okay. It wasn’t coming ashore. It wasn’t a stalk.
“There.” Sam pointed. The tip of a tentacle lashed out of the sea. “Bravo Control, this is Byrne—we’ve got a leviathan inshore, in the harbor. Anyone got a really fucking big harpoon?”
“Bravo Control to Byrne, I’m calling in a KR unit. Stand by.”
The tentacle rose out of the water again, and then the head followed. It was the first clue Bernie had that things had gone even worse than horribly wrong. It was bad enough seeing the open maw for the first time. But there were luminous blisters on the thing’s face, like lights, and then all the scales shook off the huge tentacle and landed on the shingle like the creature had shaken off a terrible infestation of lice.
Except they weren’t lice. They were dog-sized and they scuttled up the shore.
Bernie hadn’t seen a live polyp before. Baird’s descriptions and the grainy recon pictures that one of the Ravens had taken on the imulsion rig didn’t cement the thing in her mind. She wondered what the hell all these crabs were doing coming up the beach, and then reality kicked in. They were knee-high. And even in broad daylight, she could see the luminescence. She opened fire into the seething mass, setting off detonations that splattered the things everywhere. Sam went wide and opened fire to stop them swarming past and surrounding her.
Stalks. They’re supposed to come out of the stalks.
Where are the frigging stalks?
“Sam, fall back! Call Rossi!” Bernie wasn’t sure if her mike was open or which Control could hear her now. “Tell him the bloody polyps are here, no stalks, just a leviathan—a Lambent one.”
Bernie emptied her magazine into the polyps, then turned and sprinted to the quayside to get some height over them, reloading as she went. She was only concentrating on the ranks of creatures right in front of her. She couldn’t see if there was an endless stream of them, but she could hear Sam running along the pebbles and firing long bursts. All Bernie knew was that if she stopped and looked away from that squirming carpet of legs and fangs, if she lost her concentration for a moment, she’d be dead.
Suddenly more automatic fire started up from her right. She had to reload, and when she let herself look up for a second she saw Rossi, Anya, three helmeted Gears she couldn’t recognize, and a few of the locals with shotguns, all letting rip into the invasion of polyps.
“KR-Three-Three inbound,” said a voice in her earpiece. “Bravo Control, if you folks in the harbor want to thin out, we’ll hose them from here.”
It was Eldon Rorry and his door gunner, Braley. You could always rely on the Raven crews, Bernie thought. The helicopter banked over her head—low enough for her to see the ammo belt in detail and the reflection off Dav Braley’s goggles—and hovered on the seaward side of the polyp invasion. Everyone ran for it. Bernie took cover behind a stack of cable drums that wouldn’t have stopped a round at all, and then she saw for herself just how lethal the polyps were.
Braley kept up a stream of
fire on the polyps below. But a tentacle rose slowly out of the water. Bernie yelled and waved frantically to get the crew’s attention, expecting the tentacle to lift and smash the chopper down into the harbor, but instead it simply flicked as if it was shaking off water. A mass of polyps was catapulted into the crew bay. One went clean through and skidded out the other side, but the rest—
The explosion sent a fireball high into the air.
Bernie’s instinct was to duck as metal fragments and whirling chunks of rotor blade shot in all directions. It took her a couple of seconds to look up, hoping it would be a mistake and there’d still be a Raven hovering there, but there wasn’t. There was just burning fuel on the water, a lot of smoke, and the tail section slowly turning in the sea before it sank.
But she went on firing. Instinct took over as it always did, and she simply found her targets and killed them until she ran out of ammo and had to reload. She couldn’t stop, not even for dead friends.
The firing around her eventually slowed to a stop. The shore fell absolutely silent except for screeching gulls, and she was still too flooded with adrenaline to take in the bigger picture, but she focused on the shocked, chalk-white faces of Rossi and Anya.
“Ahh fuck.” Rossi turned to Anya. “Lieutenant, we have to sink that leviathan before it lands more polyps.”
“Where is it?” Bernie said. “Where the hell has the thing gone?”
VECTES NAVAL BASE, NEW JACINTO.
It was typical, shitty, rotten luck.
They were ready for an attack at New Jacinto. Now the first strike was at the other end of the island. Baird had been convinced that the assorted Lambent menagerie was following imulsion in the water, and maybe it was, but it had followed it to the least likely place.
I’m guessing. Everyone’s guessing. We didn’t have a clue what the frigging grubs were or what they wanted—and maybe we still don’t. How much can they expect me to work out about glowies?
Nobody gave him a hard time about it. Cole was standing in KR-239’s crew bay talking to Mitchell, occasionally patting his shoulder. They hadn’t lost a Raven for some time, and the fate of KR-33 seemed to have shaken all the crews as the news rippled around the comms net.
Dom bent his head, straining to listen to the voice traffic as he waited to board the Raven. The alert siren was still wailing at an ear-bleeding volume.
“Okay, they’re pretty sure they’ve killed all the polyps,” he said. “No sign of the leviathan. Shit, are these things going to hitch a ride on everything? Are they parasites or something?”
“No idea. Where’s Marcus?”
“Over there.” The siren stopped and Dom rolled his head in exasperation. “Thank fuck that’s stopped. Oh, and don’t ask.”
“Why?” Baird turned around. Marcus and Hoffman were almost nose to nose, having a heated but low-volume exchange about something. “Okay. I get it.”
Baird could guess. He knew the history between those two. It was just a case of working out which of them was telling the other that he couldn’t race off and save a woman just because he felt like it. Suddenly they turned away from each other and jogged in different directions, Hoffman heading for the dock and Marcus running to the Raven.
“I’m getting the picture now.” Baird climbed into the crew bay and strapped himself in. He had to come up with some answers. He was starting to doubt himself for the first time. “The glowie grubs. The mutating exploding Brumak. Now the glowie leviathan. What’s the common thread?”
Cole broke off his conversation with Mitchell and gave Baird his mildly disapproving look. “Baby, I gave up biology class when I was in short pants. Too many dead things floatin’ in jars.”
“It’s mutagenic.”
“That don’t sound healthy.”
“Remember the luminous snot in the tunnels?”
“Yeah, one of my treasured memories.”
“I bet it’s an infection.”
“So what was that glowie shit flyin’ around on its own? See, flyin’ snot don’t sound like infection to me. Sounds like a thing.”
Cole might have quit biology class, but there was nothing wrong with his powers of observation or logic. Baird couldn’t answer that one. Yes, the luminous stuff had evaporated from dead Lambent grubs like some kind of vapor and then shot off at speed.
Air currents. That’s all. Just because something moves, it doesn’t mean it decides where it’s going.
Marcus put one boot on the sill of the bay. “Let’s go sink that thing now before we lose it. Hoffman’s scrambling the standby squads. That includes Ollivar’s men.”
“If I was Gorasni, I wouldn’t turn my back on them,” Baird said.
Marcus shrugged. “Take a look. Side by side.”
“All pals together.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
The alert siren started wailing again. Dom shut his eyes. “Shit, somebody turn that thing off.”
“That’s a new alert.” Mitchell fiddled with his headset. “Stand by.”
Marcus was getting agitated. The signs were subliminal compared to a regular guy’s, but Baird had learned to spot them. Instead of getting more restless, he seemed to shut down all nonessential movement and even erase any expression. It was as if he was making a conscious effort to lock down and not let anyone else see he was running out of patience.
Yeah, he’s worried about Anya. You’re not fooling anyone, Marcus …
“Control to all call signs.” Mathieson had become the Voice of It’s-All-Going-To-Be-Okay since Anya had moved on to infantry duty. He’d really got that tone down pat: calm, even reassuring, but with just enough steel to make it clear that shit was on an intercept course with the fan, and that he was telling everyone the holy truth. It was quite an art. “Message relayed from one of Ollivar’s units—leviathan spotted heading south about two klicks off the western coast. All call signs, stand to.”
Delta’s stand-to position—the place they were supposed to go if an attack started—was at the vehicle compound, ready to mount up and deploy by ’Dill to wherever the stalks first made landfall. Now they were dealing with a thing that was cruising around the coast and would lob its polyps ashore. The whole plan had gone down the pan in minutes.
“Hang on, do they still want us in Pelruan, or has that been scrubbed?” Dom asked. “Control, this is Santiago—what are we tasked to do now?”
“Normal stand-to position,” Mathieson said. “Pelruan’s clear. The leviathan’s coming this way. KR units, get airborne and stand by. Rig drivers—get started.”
“That leviathan must be turbocharged.” Baird did a quick calculation in his head as he jogged after Marcus. “Maybe it could swim the length of the island in hours, but we’re talking maybe thirty or forty minutes here. Not possible.”
“They glow, too,” Dom said. “They’re not normal, Baird.”
“Why does no asshole listen to me?”
He thought Marcus was out of earshot, finger pressed to his ear as he talked on the radio. But he stopped and turned.
“Baird, where do you think this thing is going to front up?”
At least Marcus knows who’s got the functioning brain in the squad.
“If it does what it did at Pelruan, it’ll come into the harbor,” Baird said, feeling a little useless now. He hated not having real answers. “No idea why. Maybe it’s trying to shed the polyps. Or maybe they’ll hitch a ride on anything until it happens to get close to dry land. I can’t tell.”
“Good enough,” Marcus said. “Control—you getting this? They’ll probably come ashore over the walls and the jetties.”
Hoffman’s voice cut in. “All call signs—remember we want to channel these things, Gears. If there’s more than we can kill outright, then we channel them to the pits. You let them through. However hard you want to stop them—you let them through. We trap them and we kill them. Keep your nerve.”
“Where’s the other one?” Baird said. “That thing can’t do a hundred and f
ifty klicks an hour. There’s two. There’s got to be two.”
Marcus was jogging ahead of Baird. All Baird could see was his back, but he definitely reacted to that, as if he either realized and didn’t want to be reminded, or hadn’t thought through the timings. He didn’t respond for a couple of seconds.
“If it’s got a buddy,” Marcus said, “there’s fuck-all we can do about it right now.”
Cole headed Baird off like a sheepdog. “Baby, don’t remind him that Anya’s in the shit, okay?”
“Hey, we’re all in the shit. You think this plan of Hoffman’s is going to work?”
“Gonna work about as well as taking potshots at ’em one by one until we run out of ammo.”
“Who’s going to be the lure, then? Us.”
“That’s the way it is.”
“And where’s Hoffman when all this is going down?”
“Right behind you, Corporal.” Hoffman’s bark made Baird nearly crap himself. And it wasn’t over the radio.
Baird turned to see Hoffman jogging a few strides behind him, Lancer clutched to his chest, looking homicidal. Baird regarded all officers as parasites, moved rung by rung up the promotional ladder until they couldn’t do any more hands-on damage, but Hoffman was a different animal. It was written all over him: he’d joined the army to fight, nothing more, and the whole officer thing had just ambushed him. He stuck with it because it was his duty. He’d keep on doing it until it killed him. He was Chief of Defense Staff by default because everyone else above him was dead, and rank meant less than nothing these days.
“Beats a desk job,” Baird said.
“Any day,” Hoffman grunted.
Baird took up position on the long quay that ran almost half the width of the base. Ahead of him, the navy’s last remaining Raven’s Nest carriers stretched along the deep-water jetty like a bridge. Two destroyers, Fenmont and Vale of Dane, had shifted position and were now sitting with guns aimed west.