One day, he’d be dead, and then all this crap would be over. That was something to look forward to, Hoffman decided.
He leaned out of the Raven’s crew bay and surveyed the changed landscape as best a man could when he hadn’t the slightest idea what he was looking at. The granite cliffs that formed the western limit of the naval base had fallen into the sea, exposing tunnels like a broken beehive and leaving walls trying to bridge thin air.
And the ancient cannons were gone. They lay somewhere below in the pounding waves. Hoffman thought of Anvegad for a moment and wondered if the Anvil Gate gun battery was still in one piece. He suspected it was.
But here, he’d lost a third of the base. At least most of the ships—were still afloat on the eastern side.
If we ever need to run again—can we?
One of the Raven’s Nest carriers, Dalyell, looked as dead as the former Chairman she had been named for. She was listing to one side and down at the bows. Hoffman watched the activity on her decks as teams of Gears and seamen tried to repair her, an emergency pump at her stern spewing water over the side.
It was the hectares of tents and wooden huts that made him privately despair, though. Where there had been a growing city, temporary accommodation gradually turning into solid, permanent buildings a road at a time, the ground now looked like the aftermath of a Hammer strike.
I’ve seen this all before. I don’t think I can stomach seeing this again. And again …
The road layout was still visible, a neat grid spreading out from the walls of the naval base into what had been open countryside and fields when they’d landed here. Nearly half the new homes had gone. Where there had been roofs, there were now piles of charred wood and ash.
But the people survived this time. This isn’t Ephyra. You can always rebuild the bricks and mortar.
“Shit, sir.” Mitchell stared down from the crew bay with him. “How much more of this can they take?”
Hoffman was trained to say uplifting things and crack down hard on the easily daunted. Morale mattered. It wasn’t an illusion. Losing the will to go on was the difference between life and death in extreme crisis. But he just couldn’t spout the required lines any longer because he didn’t believe them himself.
Admiralty House was a wreck. It hadn’t burned, but the roof and windows had been blown out. Paper was still drifting everywhere on the wind. And still people got on with the task at hand. It should have made Hoffman proud to see orderly lines of Gears and civilians moving equipment and supplies out of the main building to safe cover. Instead, it just broke his heart.
He reminded himself that he was entitled to just five minutes of negativity and despair per conflict, and then he had get back out there and do the job. He had to be seen to be holding it all together.
“Got to walk the course,” he said. “Set me down there, Sorotki.”
“What happened to the kid and his dad?” Mitchell asked. “You know. The bombers.”
There was nothing like a brand-new monster to take your mind off the old ones. “Last time I checked,” Hoffman said, “they were in the detention block.”
“Only reason for asking, sir, is that the detention block’s now forming a rather decorative breakwater down there.”
Hoffman had another torn moment like so many; a burst of serves you right, you bastards, followed almost immediately by imagining what it was like to be locked in a cell and unable to escape as disaster struck. Is that concern for those assholes? He had his doubts. He suspected he was simply reliving his guilt and bewilderment that he had once left Marcus to the grubs as they overran the prison in Ephyra.
“Better check,” Hoffman said. “But it’s not a priority.”
It was, of course. He wanted as many seeds of future guilt swept out of the way as he could. But it wasn’t Mitchell’s job to do that. He jumped down from the Raven and made his way from the main gate, through the barracks blocks, and out onto the parade ground. Deep fissures had opened up in the concrete. He expected the paving to subside under him at any moment.
New Jacinto had escaped the fate of the old city, though. It got an earthquake-sized shock, but it hadn’t sunk.
Lucky. Or maybe fate’s keeping us around to punish us.
No; lucky, definitely lucky. He had to think that. And thinking it made it so, because a man could choose to feel joy or misery by selecting the things he compared his plight with. It was all relative—pain, hunger, loneliness, joy. The trick was finding the comparator. By the time he got halfway across the open square, he was in a bullish mood again and ready to start over.
I survive. We all survive. And those who don’t are out of it anyway, free, oblivious. Margaret, Samuel Byrne, every Gear I lost, every Kashkuri who died in Anvegad—and everyone on this planet who died when I turned that command key to launch the Hammer of Dawn.
Hoffman had never discussed that night with Prescott. It was the kind of soul-searching intimacy and admission of ghosts that you could manage only with the people you trusted, sometimes not even with the ones you loved. But at that moment he was in the right frame of mind to ask Prescott questions that had nothing to do with trusting the man.
The Chairman should have been back by now. Half the civilians had come back to New Jacinto even if their homes had gone. Hoffman was surprised by how easy they found it to move, but then they still had very few possessions that couldn’t be bundled into a bag. It was the administration that was now weighed down by its attachment to material things.
“Is this damn building structurally sound, Lennard?”
Hoffman stood outside the main entrance to Admiralty House and looked up at the frontage. Staff Sergeant Parry was wearing a helmet, which was unusual for him.
“Can’t guarantee it, Colonel,” Parry said. “But I’ve been up to the top floor and I’m still in one piece, so if you need to go in, feel free. I shut off the power, though. The radio net’s been transferred back to the emergency management response truck. I told the Chairman to mind where he steps.”
“He’s back, then?” Asshole. Never told me. “Up top?”
“Sifting through his office.”
Fine. Let’s lance that boil, shall we?
“I’ll go up and see him.” Hoffman found himself rehearsing his excuses for breaking into the desk, and despising himself at the same time for even feeling a need to. “Sitrep meeting at eighteen hundred today with Sharle and his team, in—hell, where’s a safe, dry place to meet now?”
“I’ll radio you when I find somewhere, sir. But we’ll have a better picture of the habitability of the site by then. We’ve got water and generators, we’ve got food, the field latrines are intact, and the weather’s good. All in all, it beats having grubs smashing through the sewers and water mains all the time.”
Hoffman was going to make sure that Parry got a medal. Sappers had kept Old Jacinto running for all those impossible, terrible years, and now they were doing the same for the new city. Their never-ending job was slightly easier here. Parry had chosen to be a satisfied man, if not a happy one, living proof of Hoffman’s theory.
But was Prescott going to be happy? It was time to find out. Hoffman climbed the stairs slowly, crunching on broken glass in the stairwell, partly out of caution and partly to give Prescott warning that he had company. When he got to the top floor, he could feel the breeze coming through the old sail loft. The roof had been ripped up.
Prescott was rolling charts and stacking them carefully in a cardboard box. His two close protection Gears, Rivera and Lowe, stood at the broken windows watching the cleanup. Hoffman wondered what Prescott felt he needed protection from at that moment, other than falling plasterboard.
“Victor.” Prescott looked up, just a little too slowly to be natural. “So we lick our wounds and return to the fray. It could have been much worse.”
“That’s the spirit, sir.” Anything less than a growl was sarcasm, and most people knew that about him by now. “Keep calm and carry on.”
“Corporal, would you and Lowe excuse us for a few minutes?” Prescott knew Hoffman’s tone only too well. “Take a meal break while things are quiet.”
Hoffman waited for the two Gears’ footsteps to fade on the stairs.
“That sounds as if you’re expecting trouble,” he said. “People are pretty shaken up, but they haven’t started lynching COG officials yet.”
Prescott was still a model of leisurely calm. “We stand at a difficult crossroads. There’ll be many questioning my judgment and fitness to lead, for bringing them all this way to face more hardship.”
“Is there something you want to share with me, Chairman?”
“Are you one of them, Victor?”
Okay, let’s get down to it. “I’m the one who thought we’d be better off on an island in a more temperate climate. Not you.”
“Ah, still taking sole responsibility for our joint decisions. Do you want to be a martyr, Colonel? Or a politician?”
“Cut the bullshit.”
“I get a very strong feeling that you no longer have confidence in me.”
Hoffman folded his arms. He had no idea why he made sure his hand was tucked loosely under his left elbow so that he could draw his sidearm instantly, but it was. Prescott had a pistol. Hoffman had never known him even to look as if he might use it under any circumstances. But now wasn’t the time to test that impression.
“I wish it was an easy yes or no,” Hoffman said. “There’s not one major decision you’ve made that I would have done differently. I never saw you do anything dumb. I’ve never known you to even get drunk or screw a woman. But you’re a liar, Chairman, and that makes my job too hard. There’s no possible reason left for keeping information from your defense staff.”
Prescott was still salvaging the contents of his office. He didn’t even seem to be doing it as distraction. He walked around to his chair and rattled the desk drawer.
“This is really rather juvenile, Victor. You feel slighted because I didn’t tell you every detail?”
“Like the existence of classified research facilities, like New Hope? That kind of shit isn’t detail. It’s what I need to know.”
“The army is the servant of the state. It’s not the government, and that’s who decides what needs to be known.”
“True. But you’re still a goddamn liar.”
“So why did you do it, Victor?”
Prescott could have been fishing for information himself, of course. He had a talent for that. He homed in on faint guilt like a shark following a molecule of blood in the water. Hoffman didn’t care what Prescott found out now, but he couldn’t stomach the idea of being played again.
“Mistrust corrodes,” Hoffman said. “Rots the whole working relationship. And this isn’t any old job—it’s about you and me keeping the human race from extinction.” What the hell. Say it. What can he do to you? What’s left to break? “I want to think that it’s just some compromising pictures of you and a sheep. Just sleaze. Dumb, petty shit. I really do.”
But Prescott wasn’t sleazy or greedy or conventionally corrupt. Hoffman knew it, and for a moment that almost made him cave in. Prescott’s motive was just salvation. It wasn’t malice.
No. This shit stops right here. His motive doesn’t make any difference to the consequences. I need to know. I need to know all the things he still won’t tell me.
Hidden things, buried things, encrypted things, things lurking under the surface waiting to drag him down—grubs, monsters, secrets, it didn’t matter which. Hoffman had had a gutful of them all. He wanted everything out in the open. He wanted to shine the light in its face and see it for what it really was.
Prescott’s expression didn’t change. Hoffman wanted a fight, an air-clearing showdown. He wasn’t going to get one. He knew it. The Chairman tried the key in the lock, jiggled it around, and eventually got the drawer open. He looked inside but didn’t actually touch the data disk.
“You didn’t really intend to cover your tracks,” Prescott said. The wind whipped through the gap in the roof and scattered odd papers around. “That’s far too sly for you. But seeing as you want to be told things—whatever information you have is also stored somewhere else.”
“Very wise precaution.”
“So what have you done with the disk?”
“Kiss my ass, Chairman. I’ll tell you when you tell me.”
“So you haven’t managed to break the encryption.”
You crafty asshole. I walked right into that. Shit, I must be getting senile.
Prescott could have done plenty to Hoffman right then. He would have been within his rights under the Fortification Act to draw his pistol and shoot Hoffman on the spot. Part of Hoffman thought he should have done just that, because he’d made that call himself in the past.
But maybe Prescott knew that calling in Gears to arrest the Chief of Staff—not just any old brass, a real Gear like them, one of their own—was going to unleash a shitload of trouble in its own right.
And maybe Prescott wasn’t sure they wouldn’t turn on him instead. He’d been prodding around that issue for weeks.
Hoffman now had no idea where to go next. He couldn’t argue about what he couldn’t decipher, he was pretty sure he couldn’t beat it out of the man, and the animal reflex—to punch him right in that smug, fucking patronizing face—wasn’t going to feel satisfying for more than a few seconds.
The only option left was to stop trying to guess what he was doing. It was letting him set the agenda. Hoffman simply had to ignore him. If that wasn’t a bloodless military coup, he wasn’t sure what was. The test would be which Gears followed him when the time came that his orders didn’t match Prescott’s.
Prescott just carried on gathering his stuff. Hoffman had to walk away and resist the temptation to pick up the ball left lying in his court.
He walked down the stairs, feeling like a complete asshole for not ripping the man a new one, but he knew that he didn’t have anything concrete to object to except never knowing what resources Prescott had kept hidden.
But in a world of shortages, just hiding resources was a life-threatening crime.
Yes. It is. Look at me, what I did at Anvil Gate. I’d still do it again. You don’t hold out on your neighbor when it’s life or death.
Hoffman passed Lowe and Rivera on the way out. They’d put their helmets on a windowsill while they stood around in the lobby eating a snack, and they looked at Hoffman as if they were embarrassed. Fine; it was no secret that Hoffman and the Chairman didn’t get on. It wouldn’t even make the grade as gossip.
He forced himself to focus on the immediate problems—of settling the civvies into even more temporary accommodation and making sure Michaelson had some kind of working fleet. He had to catch up with Bernie, too. She was the only friend he had, the only person who could and would hear him out. She’d put things in perspective. She’d make him feel that he wasn’t the most useless asshole in the world.
So what do I do with this disk now? And how can I get through two, three wars and still have to go running to Bernie to ask if I’m right or not?
He decided not to tell Michaelson about the disk yet, just in case it dropped the man in the shit. Michaelson had enough on his plate. He was also a political animal who actually enjoyed playing these goddamn balls-aching spy games with Prescott. It was going to be interesting to see if Prescott tried to recruit him.
Michaelson took Hoffman for an inspection tour of Dalyell. The carrier was still taking on water, and the crew—a maintenance team, nothing remotely like a full ship’s complement—was struggling to locate all the leaks.
“Save her, or save her spare parts?” Michaelson said sadly, splashing through knee-deep water. “Breaks my heart.”
“She’s worth saving as living quarters even if we can’t fuel her.”
“You look like you’ve had a fight, Victor.”
“Stop changing the subject.”
“I know you too well. It’s the flushing around the neck
.” Michaelson gave him a sly wink. “Let me guess. Prescott? Because it’s not Trescu.”
Hoffman struggled to find a response he could live with. If he lied to Michaelson, then another relationship would be tainted.
“Very perceptive,” he said. “But what you don’t know can’t hurt you. Plausible deniability and all that bullshit. Let’s just say I’ve got some research to do first.”
“Just remember he’s a politician, Victor. They’re not like us little people.”
“Why do you hate his guts?”
Michaelson took a sudden interest in a run of pipework that was sagging from the deckhead. “Can’t pin it down, really. Not sure I hate him so much as don’t trust him. I just don’t like the cut of his jib.” He shrugged. “I prefer the ones whose disastrous lack of judgment I can see and point at. It’s his clinging to secrecy when there shouldn’t be anything left to conceal.”
Hoffman realized that Michaelson was right on just about every point, as he usually was. Hoffman didn’t find Trescu’s reticence anywhere near as threatening as Prescott’s. Trescu was an Indie, and an Indie who’d seen his entire nation reduced to a few thousand people. He was bound to be wary of telling his old enemy everything. It wasn’t the same as someone on your own team shutting you out of everything.
“I’m glad it’s not just me,” Hoffman said.
“But who’s actually running the COG now, Victor? We are. Nothing can happen without En-COG or Gears. We don’t have a confident, assertive civilian society—we haven’t had one since E-Day, maybe even earlier. Now we have these dangerous, uppity, foreign ideas seeping in from Trescu and even the Stranded. Prescott knows that like he knows his own name.”
“Your point?”
“He’s probably afraid. Scared politicians usually get very punchy and posture a lot.” Michaelson climbed the ladder to the next deck and tapped the heel of his hand against the bulkhead, listening as if he expected something to knock back. “Here’s the question. Does he govern? Is he fit to govern? And if he isn’t, who decides who is? Our only legal framework now is the Fortification Act. People are starting to talk about elections again.”