“Steak.” Baird nodded to himself, evidently satisfied. “Cream. I’m in.”
“Farmers,” Bernie said pointedly. She couldn’t imagine them being keen to share this with a city-load of strangers. “If I had a place like this, living on what I could grow and raise, and interlopers showed up, I’d need some serious smoothing over.”
“We’ll be suitably nonthreatening,” Anya said.
“Well, at least we can bang out fast if it all goes wrong.”
“How many other human enclaves are there going to be in the rest of Sera, do you think? Not just Stranded.” Anya seemed to think of the Stranded as being voluntary outcasts, too, then. “People who couldn’t relocate.”
“There’ll always be some.”
And they’d all be small, all isolated, all running by their own rules. Bernie was prepared to hope that some would have retained a semblance of civilization, but so far she hadn’t seen much to encourage her.
“No radio response,” Gettner said. “Maybe they don’t have the tech.”
Baird shrugged. “Maybe they’re pretending they’re not in.”
This didn’t look like any Stranded settlement Bernie had ever passed through. Maybe the navy had never really left. Life in uniform meant accepting that you’d never be told the full story, even in the senior ranks, but Hoffman vented his frustration off duty with more foul language than Bernie had ever heard him use even in his NCO days. All she had to do was nod when he paused for breath. It seemed to do him some good.
Poor Vic. You used to be so much happier.
That was nearly forty years ago. A lot of shit had slid down the sewer since then.
What a nice, tidy little place …
The settlement beneath them now looked like a fishing port. Small boats bobbed inside a breakwater, riding a noticeable swell even in the sheltered harbor. The buildings nearest the shore were older and more haphazard, but the ones further back looked more carefully planned, newer, painted with chalk wash, more … civilized. People were visible—looking up, hands shielding their eyes against the sun, some running back toward the town, some with kids.
Stranded? Governance by the most violent, for the most violent. Can’t tell until you get down there.
“I’m setting down on that cliff,” Gettner said. There was a promontory north of the inlet, an inviting expanse of lush green turf. “High ground, good visibility, unimpeded takeoff. Okay, boys and girls, try not to found a cargo cult, will you? But I doubt they’ll think you’re visiting gods.”
“Ma’am,” Cole said, “just wait till they see my best moves.”
Bernie caught a glimpse of more people moving onto the shoreline. The town was turning out to watch the show. The Raven descended, flattening a circle of short grass with its downdraft, then settled on its wheels.
“I’ll go on ahead.” Marcus jumped out. “Delta—stay back, wedge contact formation, and low-key. Bernie, Anya—on me. Women can defuse situations. You look less threatening. Usually.”
They walked slowly down the slight incline, weapons conspicuously slung and hands well clear, but Bernie could imagine what the locals would notice first—not a gray-haired old woman and a slight blond girl, or the familiar and welcome uniform of a protection force, but a big, surly, scarred, heavily armed man who’d just jumped out of a helicopter gunship.
Gears would scare the shit out of anyone, whether their Lancers were aimed or not. They were physically incapable of looking like they’d dropped by to have a nice chat.
Had the locals even seen a chainsaw bayonet before? Not if they’d been cut off since E-Day. Somehow it looked a whole lot more menacing than the old Lancer she’d been used to.
A path of small rocks and pebbles crushed into the soil led down to the shorefront buildings. Ahead, two men with shotguns, backed up by a crowd of about thirty, had formed a roadblock of bodies.
“Easy, Delta,” Marcus said. “If we’re moving in, might as well show what good neighbors we can be.”
That was the way to do it. Even though they’d just stepped out of a long, dehumanizing war, Gears could snap straight back into being civilized, disciplined, law-abiding—everything the COG stood for, everything Bernie had come back to find again. She’d been like that once, and then—
Crack.
The shot was either very badly aimed or meant to go over Marcus’s head.
VECTES SHOREFRONT.
“Hold your fire—Delta, stand down!”
As soon as the first shot cracked and the insect whine of a round passed over their heads, Dom knew that diplomacy here was going to be basic. His automatic reaction to coming under fire was to drop down and return it. It was hard to override something that had been so hard-drilled in him for nearly twenty years that it was now instinct.
“Delta, maybe you should withdraw.” Gettner’s voice didn’t sound agitated, but Dom could understand why a pilot sitting in a Raven with extra fuel tanks was a little nervous around weapons discharged by strangers. “Barber’s covering you.”
“Stand by, Major,” Marcus said. “They just don’t know how lovable we are yet.”
Baird muttered something under his breath and pulled his goggles over his eyes. Dom took a few cautious steps forward so he could see better. Marcus seemed to put an awful lot of faith in psychology, but all Dom could think was that even a Stranded asshole who couldn’t shoot straight was capable of a head shot at that range, and Marcus never wore a helmet. That do-rag wasn’t going to save him.
Dom had to strain to hear what the civvies were saying, but everyone else was loud and clear on the radio.
“Hey, I’m not shooting, citizen,” Marcus said.
The man out front—forty-five, fifty, sandy hair—still had his shotgun leveled. “Who the hell are you?”
“Sergeant Marcus Fenix, Coalition of Ordered Governments. Why don’t we put down the weapons and talk?”
“All kinds of vermin can get hold of COG armor these days. Prove who you are.”
He definitely had Marcus there. A COG-tag wouldn’t prove a thing. The crowd was getting bigger.
“If I give you my earpiece,” Marcus said carefully, “I can probably get Chairman Prescott himself to talk to you.”
That usually didn’t cut much ice with Stranded. Dom prepared to open fire if anyone’s finger so much as moved on the trigger again, and waited for the frozen pause to turn into the usual abuse about fascist assholes. But the guy with the shotgun seemed taken aback.
“Damn, after all these years…”
“I’m Marcus.” Yeah, he had this crowd control thing down pat. No ranks now, just people. “And this is Anya Stroud, and Bernadette Mataki. You want to catch up on the news?”
The guy lowered his shotgun, although the other man just angled his down forty-five degrees.
“Gavriel,” he said. “Lewis Gavriel. Head of maintenance at the naval base. Been here since before the COG decommissioned it. More than twenty years.”
Marcus held out his hand for shaking. It always surprised Dom that he could switch back instantly to the well-mannered heir to a big estate, who knew the right titles to call people and how to read a wine list.
“Nice place you got here,” Marcus said. “We used to call it Toxin Town”
“And we knew how to keep the lids sealed.” Gavriel motioned to the other guy to lower his weapon. “That’s all gone now. Are you planning to bring the rest of your men?”
Marcus turned to wave the squad forward. Baird trotted down the slope, but Marcus held out his arm to halt him.
“Goggles off.” He only had to give Baird the two-second ice-cold stare these days to get him to do as he was told. “Easier to communicate when the other guy can see your eyes.”
Well, it always worked for Marcus. Baird parked his goggles on his head again without a word.
Gettner’s voice filled Dom’s earpiece. “We’ll sit this out—call if you run into problems. Sorotki and Mitchell are going to prep the ’Dill.”
D
om took the eye contact thing seriously. The growing crowd was made up of all kinds of healthy-looking people, including a lot of kids. Many people here—maybe most—hadn’t seen a Gear in full rig before, that was clear. One small boy, seven or eight, trotted alongside Dom, staring at his boots. They seem to fascinate the kid more than the Lancer.
“Why d’you need those big boots?” the kid asked.
Dom missed being a dad. He hadn’t been a dad often enough, not when he added up all the days he’d actually been home with his kids. “To stomp big grubs.”
“I never seen one.”
“You keep it that way. You wouldn’t like ’em.”
A man’s voice from behind him made him look over his shoulder.
“Hey, don’t I know you?” The guy was talking to Cole, keeping pace and craning his neck to look him in the eye. “Yeah, you’re Augustus Cole! Damn it, you’re the Cole Train! What are you doing in uniform?”
Shit, have they been totally cut off from the war? How much are we going to have to tell them?
Cole chuckled. “Got to spread the pain to a different game, baby.”
“I saw you play in the final for the Eagles. The last season before you joined the Cougars. Man, you were good.”
“I know,” Cole said, grinning. “But that was just trainin’ for the really big game, know what I mean? Hey, you guys play thrashball here? Want a game? I promise I’ll be gentle.”
By the time the weird procession reached the center of the town, Cole had fallen back a long way, surrounded by people who remembered him when he was a thrashball star, signing autographs. Dom had almost forgotten that world existed. It must have been strange for Cole, too; he looked happy enough—he almost always did—but it had to feel weird to be reminded of the life he once had.
Bernie, standing off to one side, watched the crowd with an expression that wasn’t curiosity or wonder but suspicion. She was shadowing Anya, close enough to be a bodyguard. She was also trying to keep an eye on Cole, and she couldn’t do both.
Shit, she really didn’t trust anyone who wasn’t a Gear. But this place could have been a small town in southern Tyrus decades ago, and the people in it didn’t seem like Stranded. It felt more like a COG outpost that had been waiting for the government to finally show up and tell them what was going on.
Dom scanned each street and checked each roofline as he passed, more out of habit ground in by urban patrols than fear. That was when he saw it: a frayed and much-repaired banner fluttering from a polished brass pole, the white cog-shaped symbol still clear on a black background that had faded to charcoal gray.
Hell, that was exactly what this place was. Not an abandoned site colonized by passing Stranded, but a community that was still part of the Coalition of Ordered Governments.
It was probably going to take a while for Bernie to realize that.
“Where are we, anyway?” Dom asked. “Does this place have a name?”
Baird nodded silently in the direction of a painted sign on a nearby wall. It read PELRUAN TOWN HALL.
Dom was sure that was where they were heading, but Gavriel went into what looked like the local bar instead. He seemed to be pretty friendly, warning shots aside. Whether he’d still be so sociable when he heard what Marcus had to say was another matter. He stopped everyone at the door, including the guy who was reluctant to lower his weapon.
“Come on, Will, you can see who they are.” Gavriel sounded placatory. “We don’t need protection from our own people.”
“Hey, Dom, company man,” Baird whispered. “We lucked out. Finally.”
“Check out the banner, Baird. It’s home.”
Home turf or not, it was pretty hard to sit around in a deserted bar looking casual in armor. Dom tried. He shook hands the way his father had always insisted—just hard enough to make an honest impression, not break anything—and watched Marcus and Anya sit down opposite Gavriel at a small table. Dom felt a vague and nagging sense of guilt that he couldn’t place. He was one big tangled ball of guilt now, and working out the particular thing that triggered it each time was getting harder.
“Fenix,” Gavriel said, still on the small talk. “I don’t suppose you’re related to Adam Fenix, are you? He came here a few times. Always a big VIP visit when he showed up.”
“My father.” Marcus’s jaw muscles twitched. “And he died a few years ago.”
“Oh … I’m sorry.”
Anya cut in. She could always time it right. “How long since you had news of the mainland, Lewis? You know about the Locust.”
Shit, if they don’t…
“We had long-range comms until the Hammer strike. After that, we lost day-to-day contact, but we know that it’s bad out there. We hear things occasionally.”
“But you’ve survived okay since then.”
“We’ve always had to be a self-sufficient community. The town was here for the naval base—mutual dependence. The town might as well be the base.”
“Couldn’t you get to Ephyra? You heard about the recall.”
“Yes, but how could you relocate a town in the middle of the ocean in three days, or even three months? And I thought the government would need to reactivate the base sooner or later, so … well, my team decided that if the locals stayed, we all stayed. Then, as time went on, we’d get short-range radio contact from passing boats, or an island, or the occasional refugee would show up, and we pieced the news together.”
“Did the government realize you were still out here?” Marcus asked.
“No idea. Obviously, we didn’t get a Hammer strike, but whether anyone realized we hadn’t evacuated …” Gavriel changed tack. Dom felt pissed off on his behalf. “The Locust are destroying everything, aren’t they? Well, they haven’t reached us yet. Is that why you’re here? Is the COG starting up the biochem programs again?”
Anya was good at breaking awkward news. Marcus seemed to have taken an invisible step back, arms folded, to let her tackle it.
“The war’s all but over,” she said. “We finally wiped them out. Most of them, anyway. We still get stragglers, and that’s a problem, but we need to consolidate what we have left before we deal with that once and for all.”
Gavriel’s lips parted for a moment as if he had a million questions and they were all jamming the exit trying to get out.
“It’s … pretty damn strange to know there’s been something terrible going on for so long, and we’ve known next to nothing about it. Except from the Stranded.” He didn’t sound as if he was about to celebrate. Dom supposed that it was all just too weird, sudden, and disorienting for anyone to take in. “So what happens now?”
“Lewis, everything’s gone. Even Ephyra.”
He blinked a few times. “What do you mean, gone?”
“We even had to destroy Jacinto to stop the Locust. We flooded the whole city to drown them in their tunnels.” Anya’s shoulders rose a little, as if she’d taken a deep breath to blurt it out all in one go. “That was the last place we held, so we had to evacuate the survivors to Port Farrall—and that’s been derelict for years. The majority of the human race is now in a single refugee camp. At least ninety-nine percent of the population of Sera died in the years after E-Day.”
Gavriel seemed like a calm sort of guy. Dom thought that was probably an essential quality for a man whose job once had been to look after some of the most lethal weapons in the COG. But there was calm quiet and there was paralyzed by shock quiet, and this was the latter variety.
“Oh … my God …”
Anya nodded, as if she was reassured that he’d started to understand just how serious the crisis was. “We have to rebuild Sera from scratch. We’re starting over with the few we saved.”
Shit, the scale of destruction was too much even for most Gears to grasp. How could Dom expect people like this to take in a fifteen-year war, with no TV or radio from Jacinto, just occasional Stranded passing through? Even Bernie said she hadn’t ventured this far.
Dom could hear ever
yone’s breath, each tense swallow. That was how quiet things were right then.
“I suppose you want us to come back, then,” Gavriel said at last. “I can see why. Some won’t want to go, I can tell you that now, but… well, this is desperate.” He shrugged. “I rather like it here.”
Here it comes.
Oh boy, this is going to sting …
“Lewis.” Anya leaned in a little and put her hand on top of his. Only Anya could have done that right then. She was just the person to tell you the very worst and make it hurt less, because she had that calming CIC voice honed by years of talking Gears through tight situations. “Nobody’s asking you to leave. The mainland’s going to be no place for anyone for a while. We want to bring what’s left of Jacinto here before we lose everybody.”
Gavriel definitely wasn’t taking it in now. Dom could see that he wasn’t focusing on Anya, and his lips kept moving as if he was trying to spit out an insect he’d inhaled.
But he pulled himself back on track. “Sorry … how can we … how can we feed a city? I mean … this is thousands of people we’re talking about, isn’t it? We’re a small community. About three thousand here, and then there’s the other settlement, anywhere up to a thousand Stranded. We avoid them for the most part.”
There was a definite dividing line, then, just like Baird’s: regular humans and Stranded.
“We’ve got our own supplies,” Anya said. Well, not quite, but some. But Dom understood why she said that. The locals would be worried that the newcomers were going to leave them starving. “It was a managed evacuation. If we can set down here, we can rebuild our own camp. Look, you know the Vectes base better than anyone. Is it habitable? Can we make use of it?”
“Mothballed,” he said. “Hydroelectric power, run-of-river. One of the reasons this site was chosen was sustainability. We had to be able to keep going if the worst happened … well, that definitely came to pass, didn’t it?”
“That sounds like a plan.”
“I’m only the mayor here,” Gavriel said. “I have to put it to the vote.”
Marcus just gave her a slow, careful look. Dom wasn’t sure if she saw it, or if she was even meant to, but she paused for a moment.
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