“That’s my point. If he returns …” Prescott was staring at something on the tiles just above eye level. He reached out and rubbed at the gleaming ceramics with his forefinger and then inspected whatever had come off on his fingertip. “If he returns, it causes offense to the comrades and families of the men who died. It signals a breakdown of discipline. It may even look as if we care more about the sons of the elite than about the average Gear.”
“So you’re actually telling me no change, then. Have I missed something?”
“No, I plan to reassure Fenix’s comrades that he isn’t being starved and violated in prison, which might be something of a compromise. He’s already getting into fights and he’s been beaten up by the warders. I’ve asked for a regular medical report on him with proof of current welfare.”
Goddamn. Does Anya know? Maybe Marcus had really cracked up after all, whatever the medics had said about his mental state. He had a hell of a temper. But it had always been channeled into the right places until now. “Is he okay?”
“He’s a tough man to kill.”
It wasn’t an answer. “Are you ordering me to release him or not, sir?” Ah, Hoffman finally got it, or so he thought. Prescott did want Marcus freed, but he didn’t want the responsibility if there was a backlash. “If so, you have to order the Judge Advocate’s office to do it under the Fortification Act. I don’t have authority over a civilian prison.”
Hoffman struggled to work out Prescott’s strategy. The JA’s office was a twenty-two-year-old asthmatic admin clerk with terminal acne who’d failed the fitness requirements to enlist frontline, so he wasn’t going to put up a fight, and the judiciary was reduced to magistrates’ courts that handed out fines for petty crime in the shape of reduced rations or a firing squad for the really serious offenses. A dying world didn’t have the resources to waste on trials, ordinary prisons, or appeals. So whatever Prescott wanted, Prescott could simply have. One Gear, even a guy like Marcus, couldn’t possibly have any political value for him. Adam Fenix had been a man Prescott liked to keep sweet, but he was dead. Nobody seemed to be running the technical side of the war effort now. For a moment, Hoffman tried to imagine what Adam’s reaction would have been to his son’s disgrace. It was painful.
“No,” Prescott said. “I’m just going to monitor the situation, and I want you to keep me apprised on general morale.”
Like I don’t do that every chance I get anyway. Hoffman was now too confused and busy to worry about Prescott’s agenda any longer. And he had to see Anya with the bad news. Great.
“Very good, sir,” he said flatly. “I’ll update you later.”
Hoffman escaped while he could and wove his way through the congestion in the corridor to the ops room. There were two captains ahead with their backs to him, lost in conversation as they ambled along. Regimental cap badges were now largely sentimental rather than organizational in an army shrunk to almost nothing by the war, and even rank didn’t work the way it used to, but Hoffman clocked the officers almost subconsciously as Sovereign’s Hussars.
Then he caught a waft of the conversation. “… makes a change for Two-Six to deal with their miscreants instead of pinning medals on them …” And that was it. That was just what he needed to press the button after weeks of two-hour naps instead of real sleep and with the weight of guilt crushing the breath out of him. He took four fast strides and almost tailgated the two Hussars.
“Yeah, Captain, but my miscreant gave every drop of goddamn sweat he had for fifteen years before he disobeyed me, so I’ll thank you to keep your fucking opinions about my boys to yourself,” Hoffman snarled. The two officers turned around, stunned by the outburst, and even took a few paces back. “You got somewhere else to be?”
“My apologies, sir,” one of them said, but it didn’t look like he meant it. “Won’t happen again.”
The busy corridor was completely silent for a few seconds too long as the officers walked off, double-time. Hoffman wanted to vanish into the carpet. But he would have felt far worse if he hadn’t spoken up. Okay, he knew 26 RTI’s reputation, earned over centuries: too much influence on policy, too much of the defense budget, too cocksure of itself, and he knew his own reputation, too, an over-promoted grunt who would never have an officer’s polish or judgment as long as he had a hole in his ass.
But I got the job done. Until now.
He strode into Ops with his head down, wondering how the hell he would get his Gears back on task if he couldn’t move on himself. Anya still smiled when she saw him, but it looked like an effort. Her face was a lot thinner. The gray shadows around her eyes said she’d spent last night either crying or lying awake in utter misery.
“When did you last eat, Lieutenant?” he asked quietly.
“I’ll get something later, sir.”
“I’ll make sure you do.” Hoffman should have done this over a coffee, but he hated keeping anything from her. He just had to package it right. “Prescott’s decided to keep more of an eye on Marcus’s welfare. Seems he got in a scrap or two, but he’s okay now. Has he written back?”
Anya tried to put on her coping face but she wasn’t doing a very good job of disguising that fear in her eyes. “No. Dom’s still trying to get a visit arranged. Everything takes so damn long.”
“Is the goddamn prison dicking with him?”
“No. I think Marcus is refusing to see him. Dom thought he might.” Anya suddenly looked down and took an unnaturally keen interest in the papers on her desk. “Wants us to forget him.”
Shit, that was something Hoffman should have seen coming. Marcus always got unswerving loyalty without even trying but he didn’t want it. Maybe I should have handled him. Sat on it. Dealt with it inside the tent. But it was way beyond too late now, and veering between remorse and justification wasn’t going to resurrect the Gears who died at Chancery.
“I’ll see what I can find out,” Hoffman said.
“Anyway, sir.” Anya looked up again, freshly composed. Aigle walked by just behind her and glanced at Hoffman with that look that said bastard. “Guess who showed up? Private Salton’s back. Do you want to see him?”
“Pad? Where is he?” The sniper hardly ever came back to base, living like a feral cat far outside the wire for months at a time, watching and waiting, just a voice on the radio. The Stranded didn’t come in to volunteer intel. Pad went out and got it. “I’d better debrief him.”
“Gone out to the Unknowns for a smoke.”
“Okay, Lieutenant, keep me in the loop. I’ll be on the radio.”
Hoffman went out the back entrance to the vehicle compound, an open space that had once been rose gardens but had been leveled to create space for the draw-down from Ephyra. Some things were sacred, though, and nobody was going to dig up the gardens that continued beyond the retaining wall—the Tomb of the Unknowns, the cemetery for the COG’s fallen war heroes. The gravestones mostly had names, except for the one genuinely unknown with the eternal flame set in a plain black marble chalice on the chipped gravel surface.
Hoffman wouldn’t allow so much as a single pebble to be touched. But then nobody had asked. He made sure he walked through the cemetery at least once a week to pay his respects. As soon as he turned left at the end of the wall and walked through the archway, he could see Pad’s red hair like a beacon, albeit a fading one now. He was looking down at one of the headstones with his Longshot sniper rifle and a couple of Locust weapons slung across his back. Judging by his position, he was at Carlos Santiago’s plot. Okay, fine: Hoffman could guess how today was going to go.
He walked slowly up to Pad and stood beside him. The man’s hair was now streaked with white, lightening into a sandy orange in that way that redheads often did as they aged, but the South Islander facial tattoos on his pale skin were as intensely dark blue as ever. He’d shaved. Sometimes he’d come back unexpectedly from some godforsaken shithole and the mix of stubble and tattoos made him look like a scarecrow whose stuffing had burst out, his COG-issue che
st plate and boots the only indication that he was a Gear and not some Stranded hermit.
Hoffman waited for him to turn his head. He never expected Pad to snap to attention when he was lost in thought—or maybe prayer—at a graveside. Eventually, Pad let out a breath and his shoulders relaxed.
Prayer, then. Say one for me.
“Sir,” Pad said quietly.
“Good to see you, Pad.” Hoffman would normally have slapped him on the shoulder but these weren’t normal times. Instead he leaned over and placed a fragment of dark green granite on the headstone. All he could see at that moment was a twenty-year-old Marcus Fenix digging a small hole in the chippings on that grave with his knife and burying his Embry Star within an hour of receiving it from Chairman Dalyell. “Damn, you’re looking thin. What the hell are you living on out there?”
Pad fumbled in his belt pouch and took out some tissue paper and what looked like tobacco, then began rolling a smoke. “You know us Islanders. We can always live off the land. Found something else to smoke, too. The grubs can’t detect this stuff as easily, either.”
That hinted at times when they’d spotted him. Hoffman would enquire later. “Come on, let’s go to the mess. Fill your boots. Proper food, not dead rats.”
“Later, sir.” Pad lit up and inhaled. He was right. Whatever he’d dried for that smoke smelled faintly like silage, nothing pungent at all. “I need to ease myself back to being around people again.”
He jerked his head at Hoffman to follow and they walked off in the direction of the vehicle compound. Pad was now probably his oldest friend, his last buddy from the old days, the only one left from the men who had served with him at Anvil Gate. It was easy to tell him things. Pad had his own troubles, of course. He’d never been the same since his spotter, Baz, had been killed, and then he slid a little more after the Hammer strikes, but when everyone expected him to do a Bardry and blow his brains out, he just slogged on. Eventually he’d found some sort of peace alone out there on long-range surveillance duties in the wastelands.
Islanders were quietly tough, both the tribal guys like Tai and the white colonial stock like Pad. Hoffman had never known any of them to give in to the shit life dealt them.
Pad motioned Hoffman into the Packhorse, a smoke dangling from his lip. “Okay, tell me what I’ve missed while I was off camp, sir.”
“It’s Vic.” Nobody else was left to call him Vic anymore. He needed to hear his own name. “Vic who used to be a regular Gear like you. Not the CDS.”
The Packhorse was a little haven of sanity once Hoffman shut the driver’s door and turned the key. Pad rested his Longshot on the open window as they rumbled over the carpet of debris that was now the highway into the southern boroughs of Ephyra. For Hoffman, it was almost like old times, long before the grubs emerged, a precious connection to the sergeant he’d once been, blissfully uncomplicated days when all he had to do was survive a contact, make sure the enemy didn’t survive his, and RTB with all his platoon intact.
“I suppose this is about Marcus,” Pad said at last.
“Just talk some sense to me.”
“I haven’t had a conversation for months. Don’t even talk to myself much now. You forget how to, eventually.”
“So consider this avoidance of skills fade.” Hoffman scanned for movement in the rubble. “No other officer loses this much sleep over busting one single Gear.”
“Well, there you have it.” Pad leaned on the passenger door and tried to brace his elbow to scope through with the Longshot. “You’re not an Academy boy. You never started out seeing Gears from the other end of the telescope. It’s the sergeant in you. Paternal. You know?”
“Yeah.”
“And tribal. Two-Six. We Unvanquished don’t do that kind of shit. That’s for other regiments.” Pad lowered his Longshot and leaned back a little. “Blimey fucking O’Reilly, Vic, if Anya hadn’t been the one to tell me, I’d never have believed Marcus would do that. He must have cracked. Poor sod. Never thought he would, but there but for the grace of God and all that.”
“Medics say not.”
“They would,” Pad said. “Nobody wants to admit everyone’s getting totally fucked up. Bad for morale.” He held the smoke out to Hoffman. Hoffman took a deep drag for the first time in many years, a habit he’d given up to keep Margaret happy. “But if he is, what do you do with him? Have we got any psychiatric hospitals left that aren’t worse than the Slab? No. Does he need to be in one? Probably not. What if you put him back on the front line and he does something even worse? See, this is what you forget, Vic, all those other scenarios besides the should-I-or-shouldn’t-I-have-busted-him. There’s no good outcome whichever way you cut it. He did it, and everything flowed from that.”
“I don’t want to, but I think I’m in danger of focusing on his bad side to make me believe I was justified.”
“Yeah, but you’ll never be able to hate him. He’s a bloody good bloke. Never gives a shit about himself. Part of you won’t forget that.”
“I wish I could.”
“Anyway, you realize this is all academic, don’t you? Because he’ll never serve ten years, let alone forty.”
“Life expectancy in there is about two years. Best average I’ve ever heard is five.”
“I meant the grubs are going to be all over the plateau long before then. He’s tough enough to survive in the Slab, so he’ll still have to get out years before his sentence is finished. Have you thought about that?”
Hoffman hadn’t. It bothered him that such a simple, logical thing hadn’t occurred to him. Yeah, that would be a great comfort for poor Anya.
Don’t worry, sweetheart. Your man’s going to endure years of total animal degradation, then the grubs will invade, and he’ll end up in a penal squad. It’ll all work out fine. Go right ahead and plan for a happy ever after.
The conversation was distracting Hoffman but he still had his subconscious tuned to the road. The Packhorse vibrated slightly every few seconds. It might have been the effect of the shifting rubble beneath the tires, or even a resonance from a misfire or something. But ten years of surviving Locust attacks told him to assume the worst first.
“What are those assholes excavating out there, Pad?”
“Well, without the utility guys’ seismometer network, I’m guessing, but they’re definitely busy. Lots of spoil heaps. Suggests small pockets of soft material being dug out because they’ve hit so much granite. That’s slowed ’em down a lot.” The Packhorse was five or six kilometers outside the wire now. If Hoffman had swung right, he would have been able to see the forbidding outline of the Slab perched on the top of the granite cliff. “How the hell did you evacuate all the civvies?”
“We didn’t. We lost a lot. Still doing the head count.”
“Bugger.” Pad suddenly slapped the dashboard like a driving instructor making a pupil do an emergency stop. “Whoa, stop.”
Hoffman slammed on the brakes. Pad was out of the Pack in a second and crouching by the door, Longshot aimed to the left. Hoffman grabbed his Lancer from the back seat and worked his way around to Pad.
“What is it?”
Pad held his breath for a few moments, pointing slowly into the rubble. “Thirty meters,” he whispered. “Practically right on top of it.”
Hoffman suddenly caught the slightest movement, something small and close to the ground like a rat, and then he realized he was looking at the tips of a Corpser’s legs as it tried to emerge from a hole almost dead ahead. Like a spider making its way out of a plug-hole, it felt around gingerly for a while, blindly tapping and probing. It was impossible to tell how big the thing was until more leg appeared. Stones and dirt kicked up as it shoved more debris out of its way, and then the first joints of two of the legs became visible. Hoffman guessed it was much smaller than he’d expected, maybe two or three meters tall. They were normally huge bastards, bigger than a Centaur.
Pad sighted up. “Ever used one of those mini excavators in the garden?”
<
br /> “I never had a garden,” Hoffman whispered, raising his Lancer. “Why?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Pad dropped slowly onto his right knee and braced his left elbow on the other to steady his aim. “Leave this one to me.”
It was a very close shot for a sniper, ludicrously easy. At this range, though, it was just a case of hitting the thing before it burst out and jumped. They could cover a lot of ground before they dropped.
More legs unfurled from the hole, six tapping feet scrabbling for purchase. The second joints were visible. Yes, a small one, relatively. Hoffman prepared to empty a clip into it whether Pad stopped it dead or not. The thing almost bounced for a moment like a swimmer trying to get a bit of momentum going to heave himself out of a swimming pool. Then it lunged.
Crack.
Hoffman saw the carapace shatter and fluid jet into the air almost before he realized Pad had squeezed one off. The single Longshot round could stop a truck and it had to, because the chamber only held one bullet. The Corpser managed to heave itself clear but then flopped down onto the hole again, legs sticking out at bizarre angles. Hoffman laid down a few short bursts to make sure it wasn’t getting up again, but by then Pad had reloaded and put a second round into it. It crumpled in slow motion like a collapsing building.
They waited, listening. Corpsers were usually the path-finders for grub insertions, tunneling through the ground ahead of the drones. After a long minute it didn’t sound as if it had company.
“Okay, let’s test a theory,” Pad said.
He stood up and trotted over to the dead Corpser. Hoffman covered him, still not convinced that he wasn’t going to find himself on top of another e-hole. Pad prodded the body with his boot.
“There you go,” he said. He squatted and tried to get a grip on the body, but there was nothing to grab hold of. He gave up and pulled out his fighting knife to poke at the soil around it. “Bloody hell, imagine finding this in your bathtub.”
“Just tell me, Pad.”