“Look,” Fyne said. “Let’s start as we mean to go on. I’m a supply officer. I can’t fight a war, although I’d die trying. For the last fifteen years, we’ve kept a skeleton fleet operational. Maintained ships. Ferried supplies. Managed stockpiles. The COG gave up pretending to have a navy on E-Day, but the navy kept going. Now, I’m not claiming we’ve been through the hell that land forces have, but we were tasked to keep a core navy afloat, just in case, and that’s what we’ve done. You can understand my reluctance to compromise the people we’ve rescued.”
Anya felt bad for Fyne. Yes, she’d have done the same. Hayman went to answer, but Hoffman cut in.
“You did good, son,” he said. “Here’s the problem I’ve got, though—we’re less than a month out of Jacinto and we’re already splitting into haves and have-nots, along location lines. Now, I reckon your citizens put up with as much shit as the land-based ones, but the others won’t see it that way. They’re already asking for transfer.” Hoffman took his cap off and passed his palm over his shaven scalp. “And I’m saying no.”
“I understand your position. And you have complete authority to do whatever you want with these ships.”
“Okay, here’s a plan. We help each other out on the medical side, and I’ll divert more resources to fitting out one of the tankers as accommodation.”
Hayman gave the colonel a sharp look. It wasn’t in the script. Anya stood by for a diversion in case the dissent was visible.
“I’m very grateful, sir,” Fyne said.
“I owe the navy.” Hoffman put his cap back on and his eyes met Anya’s for a moment. She couldn’t imagine this man giving an order for Marcus to be left to die in prison. “Now, have you got any intel on this base? Old stuff, I mean. We’ve got plans going back to the last major construction here, but that’s only seventy years. My men think there’s a lot more underground storage here.”
“Like the imulsion tanks.”
“Merrenat’s been a dockyard since the Era of Silence. There must be a warren under the docks.”
Fyne seemed fully on-side now. A little stroking worked wonders. “Only people who might know would be some of the retired men.”
“The navy retires?”
“Only to run the merchant fleet.”
“Trawlers and tankers.”
“Not always. Counterpiracy patrol. You think all the Stranded are on land? Try Quentin Michaelson.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.” Hoffman lit up. He was in an exceptionally good mood today. Some Gears seemed lost without the routine of combat, but some were changing before Anya’s eyes. “Michaelson. I thought he’d be dead by now.”
“Old friend?”
“We go back some. Thank you, Commander.”
Michaelson was a name that also rang a bell for Anya, even though she couldn’t quite place it.
Fyne guided them back to the brow through narrow passages and watertight doors. Hoffman strode away down the quay with a definite spring in his step.
“I like that guy,” he said.
Hayman struggled to keep up. She wasn’t impressed. “I don’t know what kind of shit you’re up to, Colonel, but you’re at the age when you’ll have prostate trouble, and that’s no time to piss off your doctor.” She gestured to the waiting ’Dill to collect her. “Make sure Fyne does what he said, or I’ll get that tapeworm Prescott to make it happen.”
She stormed off. She hadn’t got what she’d wanted and needed, which was control of the naval medical facilities. Anya allowed herself a brutally pragmatic thought that it was better to end up with 50 percent mortality than 100 percent, and that she was glad that Fyne was an isolationist. Hoffman was now striding ahead of Anya and Marcus, swinging his arms and leaving a trail of vapor as he exhaled. It made him look steam-powered. It was the first thing that had struck Anya as funny since the evacuation.
“Michaelson must be special.” The intense cold burned her face. “The old man’s not normally like that.”
“Former CO, Pomeroy.” Marcus always did have a prodigious memory. “Amphib. Special forces.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah.”
Anya remembered now. Pomeroy was the support vessel for the assault on Aspho Point. She’d been duty control officer in Kalona when her mother was killed. It wasn’t a happy association for Marcus, either.
“I wouldn’t recognize him.”
“He was chummy with Hoffman.”
“You seem … to be on good terms with the colonel now, too.”
“He’s okay. For an asshole.”
Anya wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to keep up this front with her, but she suspected it was too much a part of him now to let it go. These days, she could hardly tell when he was in an approachable mood and when he wanted his space; every painful event in his life left him less communicative. She wanted to reach up and touch the puckered scars that ran across his right cheek and through his lip, but thought better of it. That wasn’t something she could ever do in public. She just gestured. He seemed to have collected more recent scars.
“So you got a few more in prison, then?”
Marcus closed his eyes, more a long blink than anything. “And I used to be so pretty.”
“It’s been six months. If you’re over it, then you’d mention it, at least. It’s as if it never happened.”
“Maybe that’s how I dealt with it.”
“I wrote.” Screw it, she finally had to get this out of her system, whether he liked it or not. He always seemed disturbed by open affection. It upset her to think that he might not have understood—even now, after all these years—that she still lost sleep over him. “I got your message not to visit. But I wrote. Twice a week for four years. I’d have written daily if I hadn’t thought you’d get pissed off with me.”
Marcus’s jaw muscles tended to betray how tight a rein he had on himself at any moment. “Dom said he wrote, too. Didn’t get more than a couple of letters. The Slab’s lousy at guest relations.”
Anya had always imagined Marcus reading the letters and throwing them away, embarrassed. Now she could see some prison warder sharing them with his buddies, laughing at this stupid girl who was pining for a man who’d die in prison. Life expectancy for an inmate was less than a year once that door slammed shut. She’d actually started grieving. She felt ashamed that she had.
“But you can guess what was in them,” she said.
Marcus’s jaw muscles twitched a few more times. “Yeah.”
“Well … that hasn’t changed.” She could see Hoffman already waiting at the next jetty. For once, he wasn’t pacing around in irritated impatience, and he just looked away from her as if he was intruding. “It never has, and it never will.”
Marcus made a faint sound in his throat, as if he was going to come out with one of his rumbling all-purpose avoidance comments, but he just cut it short and nodded a few times. If anything, he looked overwhelmed. It would have been easier if he’d told her to get lost, or had a string of other women; but he didn’t. She was competing with ghosts, and whatever padlock his family had put on dealing with emotions.
But it was early days—for everyone. Six months or six years wasn’t going to put Marcus right, whatever right meant for him. By the time they reached Hoffman, Anya had dragged her worries back to the slightly simpler task of dealing with a community still balanced on the edge of fragmentation.
“Now watch an old man make a total asshole of himself,” Hoffman muttered. He kept glancing up to the deck of the trawler, as if he was waiting to be invited on board. He was the head of the COG forces; the vessel was his, under martial law. But he seemed almost excited.
The bridge door swung open, and a gray-bearded man with sun-baked skin stepped out.
“Victor? Victor, you old bastard!”
“You lazy excuse for a maggot,” Hoffman growled, grinning like a kid. “Get your sorry ass off that pleasure boat and get used to driving a real ship again.”
“I thought you�
�d forgotten me.”
“Hell, no. I need a real sailor.”
“Spoken like an admiral.”
“Don’t tell me you were running counterpiracy in this piss-pot.”
“Best thing for the job on the coastal run.” Michaelson had the most beatific smile. He clearly loved his calling. “You drift along, distract the wrong sort from the freighters, and when they come alongside to relieve you of your catch—bang, and good night. So what can I do for you? Fish? Crabs? Clams? Dead bad guys?”
“Dockyard plans. My Gears want to explore. After the fuel find, they’re convinced there’s more storage down there that we don’t have blueprints for. We need to check out every possibility.” Hoffman gestured over his shoulder. “You remember these two? Lieutenant Stroud and Sergeant Fenix.”
Michaelson looked past Hoffman. “I don’t think I’ve met Miss Stroud before, which is my loss, but I do remember Sergeant Fenix.”
Marcus just nodded once. “Dominic Santiago’s here, too. He’ll want to say hello.”
“Ah, yes, the commando with all the kids and the lovely wife.”
“I’m afraid not,” Marcus said. “Not now.”
Michaelson looked away for a moment, then beckoned them aboard. “That was a bastard of a war.”
It was. But they were now using the past tense. Anya could only see that as a cause for hope.
MERRENAT, DRY DOCK C.
Cole thought dockyards were just holes in the coastline with a few fancy buildings, but Merrenat was an education.
No, it was a maze. There were tunnels and interconnecting shafts, even stone stairways that vanished under water. A lot of the metal that could be ripped out easily had gone, but the place was still usable. It even looked like people were having fun here.
If Cole turned his back on the broken skyline of Port Farrall and just stared out to sea, the world looked like nothing had ever gone wrong. He couldn’t even see snow. A flock of seabirds followed the trawlers like a noisy white cloud, and the wind slapped sails against masts. If he’d known what normal looked like, he’d have said it looked normal. The only normal he’d ever seen had been old paintings in the House of Sovereigns.
“Okay, this is good.” Baird knelt down on what looked like a solid bridge at the edge of a dry dock, and peered over the side. “Look at all these sluices in the caisson. That’s engineering.”
“Man, you need to get out more.”
“If we can get the pumps working, we can maintain hulls.”
“They ain’t gonna let you play with that submarine. How about a nice dinghy?”
With anyone else, Cole could have made a crack about the toys they must have wanted as kids and never got, but there was too much shit in Baird’s family history. When Baird mentioned his folks, and that wasn’t often, it was like he was quoting a history lesson; they did this, they did that, and he did something else. The word feel never came into it. Cole, who coped by imagining his folks being on some long overseas trip and still wrote his mother letters to get it out of his system, thought there was nothing worse than having no happy memories to keep you going in the shitty times.
Actually, that wasn’t completely true. Baird did have some happy memories. They all revolved around the cool things he’d built as a kid, which he seemed to miss more than his folks. No denying it—Baird was fixated when it came to machinery.
“You keep the yacht, Cole,” he said. “Me, I want torpedoes. Shit, where is everyone? I’m freezing.”
“Marcus is gettin’ some chart or something from a crazy old sea captain.”
“Man, the romance of the sea.”
Cole kept watch on the road, waiting for the rest of the squad. It was hard to think there was any stash of supplies that the Stranded hadn’t sniffed out, but there was a whole wrecked world, and maybe only one in a thousand folks had survived, so there had to be plenty of shit they hadn’t found yet.
“About time,” Baird said.
Cole turned around and saw Marcus, Dom, and Bernie approaching from the opposite direction. Road was an optimistic word for it; the concrete was broken up and saplings were growing through the cracks.
Just one little bit of road. How long before we get around to fixing that? Baby, it’s going to take forever to repair Sera.
“Dom looks like shit,” Baird said.
“He ain’t sleepin’.”
“Man always sounds normal to me. That’s what’s abnormal.”
“You want him to go crazy once a day, just so we’re sure he’s still hurtin’?”
“You know what I mean.”
“He’s hangin’ on best he can.”
Cole was sure he’d have wanted Baird to cap him if the Locust had messed him up that bad. Maybe it was better to tell folks that in advance. It saved them a lot of worrying afterward. But Dom’s lady probably never thought she’d end up that way.
You still gotta pull the trigger, though. Don’t feel any better, even if you got permission in writing …
Marcus walked up to Baird and Cole with a sheet of paper stuffed under his arm and some black cylindrical things dangling from straps in one hand.
“Okay, it took fifteen years.” Marcus held up five flashlights. “Maybe we can find a way of attaching these so we’re hands-free.”
Baird grabbed one and played with the buttons. “This is so what I wanted. A few frigging years ago.”
Marcus handed another flashlight to Cole. “Courtesy of NCOG.”
“We goin’ somewhere dark?”
“Tunnels.”
“Treasure hunt, baby!” Nobody said that they’d had enough of going underground. Cole knew everyone felt the same way, but this was probably one of the last times they’d ever have to do that shit. And there was a chance there’d be something worth finding down there other than grubs and trouble. “You got the map? Has it got a little picture of one of them brass-bound chests with loot spilling out of it?”
Marcus didn’t smile, but at least the line of his mouth relaxed a bit. “Michaelson says there was always talk of an old armory and magazine somewhere between here and the airstrip. He remembers a drain cover in line with the barracks entrance.”
“Navy life must have been really boring,” Baird said.
“He got busted as a cadet for getting drunk and going down there.”
Bernie scanned the derelict skyline. “There’s got to be another access. They’d have to be able to get supplies down there.”
“Find the drain,” Dom said, “then work our way out. Let’s hope it hasn’t flooded.”
It took a damn long time. The barracks entrance was intact, but the grounds in between were overgrown, and it was hard to even find concrete in the rubble, trees, and undergrowth. Cole walked along an imaginary path from the front doors—just the stone frame, because the wood had already been ripped out—and kept his eyes down.
The squad ended up doing a line search like a bunch of cops at a crime scene. Eventually Dom squatted down and started scraping away debris with his fingers.
“Here we go.” He jammed his knife under the edge of the cover plate. “Give me a hand. Mind your fingers.”
“Who’s going down first?” Baird asked, peering into the hole. “Thinnest?”
Bernie gave him her shark look. “How about biggest tosser?”
“Let’s try the rock test first.” Marcus looked around for a chunk of stone, then lobbed it into the shaft. There was a small thud almost right away. “Sounds dry and shallow. Let’s get a safety line down there. Hey, Control? Mathieson, we’re investigating a possible underground store on the jetty side of the barracks. If we’re late reporting in, panic.”
The opening was wide enough to take a Gear in armor, and when Cole shone his flashlight inside, he could see brickwork and flagstones. There were footholds in the sides of the shaft, but the metal ladder had rusted through, leaving stumps where the rails had hung. Baird secured a line to the nearest tree.
“Ah, shit…” Marcus sat on the edge of th
e shaft, legs dangling, palms flat on either side. “I’ve done worse.”
He dropped. Cole heard a grunt as he winded himself landing.
“Baird? Stay up top, just in case. Everyone else, down here.”
Cole took the rope route. He hit the flagstones just after Bernie, and the place lit up with pools of white light as they shone flashlights around. The first thing that struck him wasn’t that it was musty and dark, but that it was warm—warmer than the surface, anyway. They were in a small lobby with a couple of vaulted passages leading off it.
“It’s all arches,” Dom said. He moved his beam along the walls. “I can see doors in them. Well, it’s storage, all right. Let’s start here.”
Marcus seemed wary, checking the low ceilings, but Bernie didn’t look bothered. She went exploring further up the passage. “I’ll find the main access,” she said. “Don’t walk off and leave me down here, okay?”
Her boots echoed on the stone and faded. Cole and Marcus squared up to the first set of doors and forced them open.
“Should have brought Jack,” Marcus said.
“Yeah, the bot would have cracked the doors right away.” Dom walked in and checked inside. “I hope this isn’t eighty-year-old beans.”
Cole followed the narrow white beam that was bouncing over wood-lined walls—no, stacks of crates on racks, loads of them. Dom heaved one of the boxes onto the floor and took out his knife.
“Place your bets,” he said.
The three of them trained their flashlights on the box as Dom levered the lid free. The wood splintered; there was a layer of wadding underneath. When Dom peeled it back, Cole could see small metal containers.
“We couldn’t be that lucky,” Dom said.
Cole grabbed a container and pulled off the lid. It was neatly packed with rounds. They looked in good condition.
“Oh man …” Lancer rifles hadn’t changed much in fifty years, except for the chainsaw. They used the same caliber now as they did during the Pendulum Wars. Cole tossed another container to Marcus. “Now, long as this ain’t the only full crate … and it’s all in this condition …”
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