Beneath them was thick virgin forest. The heart of the island was an extinct volcano. There were probably fascinating creatures down there that had developed in isolation from the rest of Sera, but they were an uncurious lot, the COG. They must have had a presence here for centuries, and yet they’d left this place untouched and remained satisfied with an existence on the fertile coast and lowlands.
And this was where they developed chemical and biological weapons to use against us. Hard to imagine I’m helping them defend it now.
Fenix turned his head suddenly and pressed his finger to his earpiece. “Sorotki, look due east. Can you see a light patch in the trees?”
“Got it.” The Raven turned. “Come on, Mitchell. Turn over, rolling— action. Did I get that in the right order?”
Mitchell’s shoulders shook as if he was laughing. Trescu couldn’t hear him, but he saw him say something as he attached his safety line to the rail and braced himself against the frame to steady the camera.
The Raven dropped to twenty meters above the tree canopy, sending a flock of black-and-white birds wheeling from the branches. Trescu craned his neck as far as he could to catch a glimpse of whatever Fenix had spotted.
“It’s okay—it’s only a couple of dead trees. Normal ones.” Mitchell lowered his camera. “Keep going, Mel.”
“Okay, back on course,” Sorotki said. “So what’s Professor Baird’s theory, then? I do miss his informative yet abrasive commentary, don’t you?”
“Ingress via cave systems.” Marcus unbuckled and moved to the door gun. “Makes sense. We’ve seen them come up from the seabed.”
“So are they like fungi or something? You know, all the real activity goes on underground and all you see above the ground are the fruiting bodies and the spores.”
Dom stirred. “Wow, it’s just like having Baird right here with us.”
“He’s got a point,” said Fenix.
Sorotki sounded amused rather than offended. “Yes, chopper pukes have active intellects too, Dom. I still don’t see where the polyps fit in, though. One minute they’re on leviathans, then they’re on stalks.”
“Maybe they’re like ants.” Fenix had never seemed the kind for small talk. “They get everywhere.”
“What triggers them to detonate?” Trescu asked. “Do they wander around looking for a victim? Or do they combust anyway?”
“No idea,” Dom said.
“But why do they combust? Why does any organism self-destruct as a matter of routine? I can think of only one thing. Reproduction.”
Fenix made a noise that might have been a laugh if he’d given it a chance. “Goddamn. We never asked that.”
“I’m Gorasni,” Trescu said. “We’re a very pessimistic people. It saves time.”
“Doesn’t take us much further, though.” Hoffman adjusted his binoculars. “It probably doesn’t matter if that’s how the Lambent spread if the only way we know how to stop them is to blow them up. I think that’s known as lose-lose.”
Trescu had no answer to that. He spent the rest of the flight watching the body language of the Gears around him. It was as educational as interrogating them, even if it didn’t fill in the detail. Fenix looked at Hoffman as if he were a distant father he wished he could understand; Hoffman occasionally glanced at Fenix as if searching for the right moment to say something and never finding it. His interaction with Dom seemed much more relaxed and born of an old familiarity. Hoffman made direct eye contact with him, and when he wanted to get his attention to point out some feature in the landscape, he didn’t rely on the radio. He leaned across and tapped his knee. Those two knew each other well. There was genuine affection. Hoffman’s set jaw relaxed for a few moments before returning to grim contemplation of whatever haunted him.
And there was a strong bond between Fenix and Dom. Fenix kept looking at him, just a second’s pause in his regular sweep of the cabin, but dwelling on him long enough to show concern. When their eyes met, Dom nodded almost imperceptibly as if to reassure him he was okay.
Ah, yes. This is the man who had to put his wife down like a dog. This is the man who searched for her for ten years and found her far too late. But still he goes on. We all refuse to accept the inevitable end.
Trescu thought of all the species that had become extinct on Sera over the eons and wondered if any of them had been convinced that they would survive because they were somehow too special to die. He doubted it. Only humans could believe the world couldn’t exist if they weren’t around to validate it with their presence.
“Goddamn it,” Hoffman muttered. He pressed his field glasses to his face. “Sorotki, I don’t like what I’m seeing. Forty-five degrees to your port side, range about two klicks.”
“Roger that.” The Raven looped left. “Yeah … I see it now.”
Trescu turned in his seat to look. In the ocean of green, he could see a dark patch. For a moment he thought it was another variety of stalk and slipped his rifle off his lap, ready to open fire if the branches turned out to be swarming with polyps, but it was clear when the Raven got within a few hundred meters that it was a stand of dead trees. These weren’t bleached ash-gray with age. The trunks were covered in normal bark, but every leaf was brown and withered.
“Test a theory for me,” Fenix said. “See what’s in the center of that.”
“I can guess,” Sorotki said. “Come on, Mitchell, it’s photo opportunity time.”
Sorotki brought the Raven down to fifty meters above the dead area. It was wider than Trescu had first thought, a good hundred meters across. And at the heart of the destruction were a couple of stalks, now just spent husks like some abstract piece of sculpture.
Everyone looked down as the Raven circled. Trescu caught the expressions, the same tight-lipped realization that wherever the stalks emerged, the vegetation around them died. Hoffman glanced at Marcus as if he wanted confirmation of something that Trescu could only guess at.
“That’s what’s going to kill us if the glowies don’t get us first,” Marcus said. “Loss of workable land. Crop shortages.”
“Mitchell, get me a picture with some scale in it.” Hoffman marked something on his map. “Then we come back and check the spread every twenty-six hours.”
Mitchell leaned out and ran the camera in short bursts. “Maybe we’ll work out a formula. Like one stalk puts out enough shit to kill however many square meters of land.”
It was fascinating to watch a communal theory form. Trescu agreed with their unspoken assessment, but he didn’t join in.
This was an island, and an island that relied wholly on its agriculture. There was nowhere left to import food from. Vectes might as well have been the entire world.
And this island used to be the COG’s biological research center before they decommissioned it. Such elegant irony. They keep forgetting that. We don’t.
“Okay, Sorotki, move on.” Hoffman sat back and took off his cap to run his hand over his shaven scalp. “If we’re lucky, the stalks won’t spread far beyond the fissures, and the contaminated zones will have a limit. We can work around that.”
“And if we’re not lucky?” Trescu asked, knowing the answer. He just wanted to hear Hoffman’s strategy for survival.
“Then we might end up teetering on the ledge,” Hoffman said. “And we’ll have to decide when to jump.”
CNV SOVEREIGN, DEEPWATER BERTH, VECTES NAVAL BASE: ONE WEEK LATER.
“I hope you brought a mop,” said Michaelson.
The captain stood with his back to Hoffman, shuffling irritably through piles of papers on his desk. The day cabin looked like a grenade had hit it. Paper was stacked on every surface and inspection hatches hung open with their wiring looms spilling out like entrails. Hoffman could have sworn his boots squelched as he trod on the rug. The warship, the last Raven’s Nest carrier still operational, was starting to show her age.
“Spring cleaning, Quentin?”
“Damn leak,” Michaelson said. “They’re still trying to track it. You know h
ow leaks are—they can show up a long way from where they started. I’m rescuing my paperwork.”
Hoffman checked out the big blue leather chair on the far side of the cabin before he risked planting his ass in it. He picked up the sheaf of papers stacked on the cushion before he sat down, and tidied them into a pile on his lap.
“Beats a leak that starts from the bottom up, I suppose,” he said, glancing up at the deckhand for telltale droplets.
“Ah, Victor, you’re getting the hang of the navy at last.”
“What are you looking for?”
“A list of Pendulum War fuel caches.”
“Damn, you keep filing that far back?” Hoffman looked through the papers on his lap. They were detailed logs, at least on the side he was looking at. When he flipped one over he found the reverse had been used for something else entirely, a penciled diagram of some collision damage. Some of the pages had that velvety texture that came from being repeatedly erased and reused. “I never realized how many records you saved. We jettisoned decades’ worth at HQ when we banged out of Jacinto.”
“I saved some rum, too. Help yourself. Under the bridge repeater. But I need that list.”
“Proper rum? Not moonshine?” Hoffman ducked down and rummaged in the cubbyhole. He pulled out a five-liter steel canister that could have held anything from acid to fuel. “I’ll take a rain check. Thought you’d run out of the good stuff.”
“The day we run out of rum is the day En-COG ceases to exist, Victor. Rum. Not distilled beet alcohol with caramel, or however Dizzy makes his brew. No disrespect to Private Wallin, but I like my paralyzing agents to have a little subtlety. Ah—got it!” Michaelson flicked through a dog-eared manual with a brown cloth cover. “There must be some caches nobody’s found.”
“Optimist.”
“Not necessarily. When you reduce the population of a planet by ninety-nine percent in the space of a few years, fuel reserves don’t get used.”
“New fuel doesn’t get refined, either.”
“It’s still worth investigating. We don’t yet know how Ollivar’s damned pirate fleet stays fueled, do we? And they’re still out there, Victor. We pick up the odd radio transmission.”
Hoffman shrugged. “Good luck to ’em. If the assholes try to come back, we can commandeer their vessels and drain the tanks.”
“Royston’s been bending my ear about the rate we’re using fuel.”
“And mine. But I need to keep my birds in the air right now.”
“You diverted all the way down here to say that?”
“No, I just wanted a word with you in private before the meeting.”
Hoffman wanted to clear his yardarm, as Michaelson was fond of saying, before he got down to discussing encroaching stalks or fuel crises. He hadn’t told Michaelson that he’d stolen Prescott’s encrypted data. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust him; he did. But he was an old friend, an ally, and a decent man didn’t burden his friends with information that would compromise them.
And how would I feel if he’d had the disk and didn’t tell me?
Hoffman would have felt betrayed. So he had to level with Michaelson. If he didn’t, he was as bad as Prescott, withholding information from his own people when it might actually make a difference.
If we even knew what the hell it was.
He put the pile of papers on the nearest dry surface. The cabin smelled of disinfectant and damp wool. Every sound including his heartbeat became unnaturally magnified.
“Quentin, you know I told you there’s something you’d be better off not knowing?”
“Oh dear …” Michaelson raised his finger for silence and dogged the door shut. “Go ahead. I’m all grown up now. I can take it.”
“I’ve got a data disc that troubles me.”
Michaelson raised an eyebrow. He put his hand flat on the steel door as if he was monitoring vibrations. Maybe he was. “What’s on it?”
“No goddamn idea. I’ve got Baird trying to decrypt it. I stole it.”
“Good grief… from Prescott?”
So much for my discretion. “That’s quite an inspired guess.”
Michaelson shrugged. “Well, who else is likely to be clinging to classified information when we’re going to hell in a handbasket? He’s done it before. Do you think he knows it’s missing yet?”
Hoffman sometimes had out-of-body moments when he could see and hear himself as a stranger might. The stranger who studied him at that moment found it faintly ludicrous that a veteran Gear whose decisions had shaped an entire war could be reduced to playing stupid motherfucking games with the head of state while the world was circling the drain.
“Oh, he knows I took it.” Maybe Prescott wanted him to take it. No, this was getting too layered and complicated. He could hear Bernie scolding him for wasting energy on endless what-ifs. “We had harsh words about it.”
Michaelson, still leaning on the door, blinked a few times as if he was busy thinking. “It’s chaff,” he said flatly. “A diversionary tactic. You think he’d keep anything that sensitive on a disk?”
“Yeah, I’ve had that discussion with Baird. But even Prescott can’t retain high volumes of complicated data in his brain.”
“He can wind you up like a clockwork toy, Victor. It’s a decoy.”
“But what would he try to divert me from?” Hoffman wasn’t offended by the observation. Prescott was manipulative; that was part of the job description for a politician, and Hoffman knew his own buttons were obvious and easy to press. Yeah, but he’s still got to deal with me. “I’m damned if I can think of anything a sane person would need to conceal at this stage of the game.”
“Sane,” Michaelson said. “That raises a question we haven’t really factored into the equation yet.”
“Goddamn, don’t even start me thinking that he might be mentally unfit for office. Where the hell would that leave us?”
“Without a deputy to replace him, or a court system to challenge his fitness.”
Hoffman didn’t like where this was going. There was an inevitability to it. The last thing he’d ever thought would go wrong was Prescott’s mind. No, the crafty bastard wasn’t crazy. This was business as usual for him. He’d held back crucial information so many times before that it was a reliable sign of normality—for Prescott.
“Look, if I see him talking to any trees,” Hoffman said, “I promise I’ll take him out back and shoot him myself. Out of kindness.”
Michaelson pocketed the radio handbook. “You’ll let me know if I can do anything on the encryption front, won’t you?”
“You got anything better than Baird?”
“On software? Alas, no, but the offer stands. Who else knows about this?”
“Delta Squad. Bernie.”
“Naturally.”
“But I haven’t told Anya yet.”
“Does she need to know?”
“I’ve never kept anything from her. I need my inner circle.”
“Okay. Put on your loyal face and let’s go see the boss fella.”
Bernie had taken to calling Hoffman, Michaelson and Trescu the Triumvirate, as if they were a power bloc of some kind. She had a point, because that was how things were starting to shake out. They met Prescott a couple of times a week in Admiralty House for a sitrep, sometimes with civilian representatives present, sometimes not. Today was a not day. Hoffman had never been a meetings kind of man, but these sessions mattered. It was more than a chance to pool information and plan. It was an opportunity to sniff the pheromones and work out who was up to what.
And Prescott had to look him in the eye. He had to sit across the table from Hoffman knowing that his most senior officer had his precious disc and was working on cracking it.
And don’t think I’m not looking at every other damn thing you’re doing, asshole.
When Hoffman opened the door, Prescott was studying some charts pinned on the wall, a pencil in one hand. Trescu, arms folded across his chest, sat at the far end of the table wa
tching him in silence as if he was working out the best angle for a head shot. At least there wasn’t much chance of him ganging up with the Chairman. But then Trescu always looked like an utter bastard. It was the combination of the immaculately trimmed black beard and that dark, dead, intense stare that did it.
And the fact that he blew a prisoner’s brains out in front of me. That as well. But at least you know where you stand with him.
“Sorotki just dropped off the latest aerial recon images, gentlemen,” Prescott said, not looking away from the wall. The chart was a map of Vectes peppered with flagged pins. He marked something on it. “Main item on today’s agenda—the contaminated zones are still spreading. So far, we appear to have lost fifty hectares of crops and pasture. Worst scenario plan, please.”
Trescu looked at Hoffman and nodded toward the other end of the table. The reconnaisance images were fanned out in a sequence. Hoffman and Michaelson sat down to leaf through them.
“Royston’s already got that in hand,” Hoffman said. “He’s our end-of-the-world guy. Where is he, by the way?”
Prescott still didn’t look at Hoffman. “He’s gone to revise his worst-case scenario.”
“Up or down?” Sharle normally told Hoffman everything. “Is this about fuel?”
“Well, the less fuel we have, the more creative we’ll need to be about where to relocate.”
Ah, screw him. I’ll ask Sharle myself. Hoffman dropped the subject and noted the time between images. He was looking down almost vertically on the suddenly familiar crown of a stalk with a patch spreading out from its trunk like a shadow. The dead area wasn’t uniform—more a ragged ink blot in most shots—but he could still see that the zones were expanding more slowly as the hours and days went on.
Maybe it’ll stop. Maybe things can improve.
“The math would take me hours,” Michaelson said. “So, broad brushstrokes. Five thousand square kilometers of island, mostly virgin forest or mountain, and we can’t see much of what’s going on in there. We live on the cultivated margins and depend wholly on what we can grow and graze. How many stalks is it going to take to destroy enough arable land to starve us out?”
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