Coalition's End

by Karen Traviss

“No, you don’t,” she said. “You fucking love it. It’s your mission in life.”

  “… but I’ve got a theory.”

  “Oh God. Here we go again.”

  “Yeah, I’ve said it before. The glowies seem to be attracted by imulsion. They ended up at the drilling platform, and they ended up here. Both places are so far off the chart that it can’t be a coincidence. Oh, and the boats. They found teensy-weensy boats in the middle of a frigging big empty ocean.”

  “Maybe the imulsion’s bubbled up to the surface because the stalks opened a channel,” Barber said. “And the boats the glowies blew up weren’t all running on imulsion.”

  “Yeah, yeah… look, I never said I had all the answers. But it’s still too much of a pattern.”

  Gettner interrupted. “I just want fuel. I don’t care if I’ve got to arm-wrestle polyps personally to get it. As long as we can keep an eye on those things, we can survive.”

  “And the brown patches? It’s not like a dog pissing on your lawn. They’re killing the crops. Am I the only one who stayed conscious in math class or something?”

  Cole swiveled in his seat so that the wind was in his face. He was probably going to throw up, but he always had the sense to check the slipstream first. “Seems a bit premature to even be thinkin’ about runnin’ away yet. It’s a big island. We ain’t seen that many stalks so far.”

  “I’m up for going home.” Gettner said it in a weird confessional kind of way. “I really am.”

  But there was no home left. Jacinto—the proper one, not this shack city—was just an interesting reef now, submerged by fifty meters of ocean. Well, that killed conversation stone dead. It was a bit of a shock. Baird hadn’t realized that Gettner felt that bad about life.

  “Come on, folks.” Cole stepped in to try to jolly them up. “Watch me puke-bomb the next swarm of polyps. Hey, anyone interested in settin’ up a thrashball session for the kids? Like we did back in Port Farrall, remember?”

  “Yeah, and I froze my nuts off,” Barber muttered. “Okay, I’m in. Nothing too violent, though.”

  “That’s more like it.” Cole gave Baird a don’t-start-it look, eyebrows raised and chin down. “So are we doin’ Pelruan again today, ma’am?”

  “We’ll do a sweep of the fissure zone, and then I’ll land and pick up some admin stuff from Anya.” Gettner sounded back to normal again after that gut-spill about going home. “Then we’ll swing back via the existing stalks at the farm and grab some more images. Unless anyone wants to do a foot patrol, Baird.”

  “I can see just fine from here, thanks, Major.”

  Baird had made up his mind. The glowies probably followed the imulsion. It didn’t account for everything, but it did explain why they were here.

  But why now? Why didn’t they show up in imulsion fields before?

  Every day was like E-Day now. Everyone had asked the same questions about the grubs. But there was never an answer about where the Locust had come from. The question was forgotten in the end, because an answer didn’t seem to have much bearing on staying alive. Baird propped his Lancer on his knee and kept his eyes on the countryside below.

  And what frigging use were our scientists? No damn answers.

  Well, none of the assholes were around now. At least there was some poetic justice in that. He watched the tops of the trees blur beneath him and felt discreetly for Prescott’s data disc under his chest plate.

  What kind of encryption do the Indies use?

  No, that was one favor he couldn’t ask Yanik. He shook off the idea and kept his mind on the trees. The fissure ran for forty kilometers roughly east-west to the south of the town, a five-kilometer corridor mostly covered by woodland. Gettner took the Raven up the northern edge to the northeast coast and then looped back toward Pelruan. They were about ten kilometers east of the town when Barber spotted something.

  “Heads up, Gill,” he said. “Bear zero-four-five.”

  “Stalk?”

  “Brown. A lot of brown. Can’t see any stalks yet.”

  “Okay, let’s take a look.”

  Some trees had naturally copper foliage, but not these. Baird knew they were dead as soon as the Raven came within fifty meters of them. Gettner circled in a big arc while Barber took photographs.

  “I don’t see any stalks,” Cole said.

  Baird reached for the field glasses. There were no telltale twisted gray branches protruding through the leaves below. The dense foliage looked like a carpet of bark chippings, and there wasn’t a hint of anything green in the small gaps that gave a glimpse of the woodland floor.

  “Maybe it’s short stalks,” Barber said. “That would mean they’ve changed again. That’ll get Prescott excited.”

  Baird lowered the glasses. “Yeah, that’s what worries me.”

  “You want us to take a look on the ground?” Cole asked. “We can rope down.”

  Baird was up for that. “Come on, Barber, give me the camera. We’ll grab some images.”

  “I’m going to hover,” Gettner said. “No messing around. You have a look and come straight back, okay?”

  “You care really, don’t you?”

  “Just do it, Baird.”

  Cole swung out on the winch and vanished beneath a mat of dead foliage. Baird watched his head disappear before following him. The branches snagged his pants and he held his breath, half expecting something unseen to sink its fangs into his leg, but his boots hit the ground. He was still in one piece, standing next to Cole in the deep shade.

  Woods were full of sound and movement. Baird wasn’t the outdoor type, but he knew that much, if only from hanging around with Bernie. They were quiet places; they weren’t silent. This one was.

  It was completely dead.

  There wasn’t anything green and alive anywhere—not on the bushes, not on the ground, not in the trees. There was no birdsong, and there were no insects. Baird was surprised just how obvious that complete absence of life now seemed to him.

  He did a slow 360 turn, scanning the ranks of tree trunks to look for stalks. They should have been visible—a different color, a distinctly different shape—but there was nothing.

  “Man,” Cole whispered. “I’m gonna have nightmares about this one day.”

  “It’s all fucking dead.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What the hell’s killed it if there’s no stalks?”

  “Damned if I know.” Cole pressed his earpiece. “Eight-zero, this is Cole. We’re gonna grab a few pictures for the album. Kinda hard to describe, ma’am.”

  There was a crackling pause. Then Gettner’s voice came over the radio. “What’s down there?”

  “Nothing,” Cole said. “Absolutely goddamn nothing.”

  PELRUAN, NORTHERN VECTES.

  There were fresh flowers on the town’s war memorial, a small bunch of something yellow and cultivated that Bernie couldn’t name. The blooms reminded her of pea flowers.

  But these weren’t edible and they weren’t medicinal. If a plant wasn’t in her bushcraft database, it didn’t make an impression on her.

  Old age. Or too long on the farm. Or no soul left. Never mind.

  She paused out of respect as she passed the modest granite pillar and noted that the flowers were tied with the same handmade ribbon as the dried-out wreath that had been placed there some weeks ago. It was navy blue with a narrow scarlet stripe, the colors of the Duke of Tollen’s Regiment.

  That was who she’d come to see. She had some fences to mend.

  Mac trotted ahead of her. This time he didn’t race off in search of familiar places or Will Berenz, so he seemed to have made his own choice about which human was going to get custody of him. He paused to pee up a dry stone wall and waited for her to catch up.

  “The bar,” she said. “Go on. Pub. Drinkies.”

  Mac looked as if he nodded in agreement, then headed toward Pelruan’s main bar. Will had trained him well. It was just a single-story wooden house like the rest of the homes, and Bernie
was sure there were other informal places where the locals gathered for social liver destruction, but the bar— did it even have a name?—was one of the four main places where people tended to congregate to gossip. If they weren’t in the bar, then the next place to try was the town hall, or the green outside, or the small crescent of cobbled road at the top of the harbor.

  The six Tollen veterans were in the bar as she expected, playing cards by the window. The youngest was in his late seventies but they could still handle firearms. They’d even done their bit in defending the town from the last polyp invasion. But Bernie wished she hadn’t made them fight alongside the Gorasni.

  The Duke of Tollen’s Regiment had the worst possible memories of Gorasnaya.

  Frederic Benten—still effectively the NCO after all these years—looked up as she came in. They acknowledged her as if she hadn’t yelled at them about duty when they objected to serving with Indies who’d beaten and worked their mates to death in the last war.

  “Anyone drinking?” she said. Mac flopped onto the rush mat in front of the empty fireplace and stretched out as if he was a regular. “I’ll get them in.”

  Benten laid down his cards. “We haven’t seen you around for a while, Sergeant. How are you?”

  “Contrite.” She went behind the bar and poured the beer herself. The woman who ran the place was out, so patrons were expected to help themselves and leave payment. The coins and fragile, dog-eared banknotes in a wooden tray under the counter were just barter tokens for odd jobs, clothing, or preserves. Bernie paid with a bag of brass screws. Baird wouldn’t miss them. “We haven’t had a chance to talk since the leviathan came ashore. I thought it was time I showed my face.”

  “How’s the lad with the leg injury?”

  “Oh, he’s improving, thanks.” Benten meant Anton Silber. A polyp had detonated under him during the battle and shredded him from the left knee down. “Doc Hayman saved his leg. Natural healing. She just glares at bacteria until they commit suicide.”

  It got a laugh and the old men took their beer. There didn’t seem to be any hard feelings.

  “This is by way of apology,” she said. “I’m sorry I made you fight alongside the Gorasni. I’ve got no right to lecture you about duty. I’ll never know what you went through in their prison camps.”

  Benten contemplated the foam on his beer. The man sitting next to him, Chalky, reached out and patted her hand.

  “You got us to fight, Sarge, and we all survived,” he said. “And you were right. It’s not like you’re some civilian talking through your ass about forgiveness and how we ought to put history behind us. It was your war too.”

  “Is it true what you did to those Stranded?” Benten asked. He looked down as if he was embarrassed to ask a woman that kind of question. The Stranded were loathed and feared on Vectes, so dispensing very rough justice had made Bernie into something of a celebrity here. “Did you really chop off their…?”

  Bernie nodded. “Yeah. And I shoved ’em down their throats. But I couldn’t tell if they bled to death or choked.” She waited for the reaction. She wasn’t ashamed, not in the least, but she wasn’t sure if they’d already heard all the grisly detail. Judging by their expressions, they hadn’t. “There are some scores you’ve got to settle before you can move on with your life.”

  “We never settled ours,” Chalky said.

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “The Colonel told us to think of the Indie imulsion as war reparation. Now we haven’t even got that.”

  Bernie had to ask. “How are you going to handle it if we need to move everyone south to the base?”

  “Can we keep away from them?”

  “Yes. They generally stick to their own camp.”

  “Then we’ll stick to ours, too,” Benten said. “If it comes to that.”

  Bernie joined in their card game and kept them topped up with beer for a while, reminding herself that she was only twenty years or so behind them, and this was how the younger Gears saw her: old, full of wild stories they’d never hear, but not completely useless yet. She treated the old boys as she hoped the youngsters would treat her.

  But she couldn’t sit here all day, even though her joints told her she was due a nice long rest. She’d give it a couple of hours and then find Anya. Life felt like a round of honoring old promises. She had her duty to veterans, and her duty to the dead, to Major Helena Stroud—her old CO—in particular. The Major had planned to prepare her daughter for a frontline role but she got herself killed too soon, so now it fell to Bernie to make sure Anya didn’t die too young like her mother had.

  I promised, Major. Anya’s shaping up fine. I really wish you could see her now.

  Bernie had just laid down a disastrous hand when her radio buzzed. It was Anya.

  “Pelruan Control to Mataki, come in.”

  Bernie pressed her earpiece. “Mataki here, ma’am. Go ahead.”

  “Bernie, have you heard? We’ve found imulsion.”

  “Say again, ma’am?”

  “Imulsion. I’ve only got sketchy details at the moment. They’re waiting for the Gorasni rig team to assess it.”

  The old boys couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation. “Glad to hear they’re being useful, ma’am,” she said, not quite taking it all in. “I’m on my way to the signals office. Five minutes. Mataki out.”

  She stood up. Mac snapped to attention from an apparently dead sleep. “You’ll have to excuse me. Looks like we’ve found an imulsion supply. I’m going to check in with Lieutenant Stroud.”

  Benten raised his beer glass. “Well, that’ll please the Chairman, but how does it change things?” he asked. “The stalks and the polyps are still here. The land’s still dying off.”

  Bernie had to agree. “But it’s probably better to be in the shit with fuel than without it. At least we’ve got the option of making a run for it.”

  “Where are you going to run? You only ended up here as a last resort.”

  “We’ll think of somewhere,” she said. ”Even if it’s bloody Galangi.”

  Bernie drained her beer and shook the old boys’ hands before washing up the glass behind the bar. It was very much a make-yourself-at-home place. Galangi. Would the island still be okay? Would any of her neighbors still be there? She thought that over as she made her way up the path to the signals office. Anya was outside with Drew Rossi, poring over a map spread on the hood of the Packhorse.

  “Would you believe it?” Rossi said. He tapped the map. “Great timing. A damn lake of juice right here.”

  Bernie could hear a Raven engine droning somewhere in the distance. She peered at the map over Anya’s shoulder. “Were we drilling for it? Hoffman never said a word.”

  “It was a lucky accident. Marcus fell over it.”

  “How lucky?”

  Anya didn’t look as pleased as Rossi. “He found more stalks. Then he found the imulsion they were standing in. That kind of lucky.”

  “Well, we just pump it out, then,” Bernie said. The Raven noise was getting louder. It was coming in to land. “Once the stalks are up and we’ve cleared out the polyps, they’re dead, and—”

  “KR-Eight-Zero to Pelruan, we’ve got a situation twenty klicks east of you.” It was Gettner. Raven pilots never seemed to break a sweat but there was definitely a hint of tension in her voice. “Stand by to transmit recon images back to VNB.”

  “She’s in a hell of a hurry,” Rossi said. “Landing here only saves her fifteen or twenty minutes, tops.”

  The helicopter swept overhead, low enough for Bernie to see the scuffs and repairs to its underside before it dipped out of sight behind the houses. Gettner wasn’t heading for the usual landing area a kilometer away, either.

  Anya refolded the map. “Okay, let’s go see what the problem is.”

  They didn’t wait. Running to meet the Raven didn’t make things happen any faster, but somehow standing there while the crew rushed to find them felt wrong. They jogged down the alley betwee
n the houses and intercepted Barber and Cole running toward them. Barber had the recon camera clutched under his arm. Mac loped around, tail thrashing as if he expected a chase.

  “Ma’am, we’ve got a contaminated zone without stalks,” Barber said. “Just dead land. I don’t know what help the images are going to be, but I’m transmitting then back to base anyway.”

  “But it’s still centered on the fissures, isn’t it?” Anya said.

  “Looks like it. But if this stuff is happening randomly, then we’ve got another new problem.”

  Rossi shook his head slowly. “It never rains but it fucks. When are we going to get a break?”

  Nobody had an answer, least of all Bernie, although she realized she must have thought one was possible to even bother carrying on. Barber rushed into the signals office with Anya. Cole hung back with Baird and put his hand on Bernie’s shoulder.

  “Boomer Lady, you never seen anything like this,” he said. “It’s all dead. Everything. No polyps. No stalks. Just dead.”

  “So how the hell are we supposed to track it if we can’t see the stalks?”

  “It’s a small island until you try to patrol every square meter,” Rossi said. “Then it’s big.”

  Cole shook his head. “Patrollin’ ain’t gonna stop this. You want to take a look for yourself?”

  Bernie didn’t think she had any more answers than Cole did, but she wanted to see it anyway. Then Anya came back out of the signals office in a hurry.

  “Prescott wants soil samples,” she said. “Let’s go check this out.”

  “What’s wrong with that tosser?” Bernie stopped herself. Voicing dissent wasn’t good for morale. “Sorry, ma’am. But we don’t have the technology or the experts to analyze this stuff anymore.”

  “Never mind me,” Baird said.

  “Yeah, okay, Blondie, you work miracles. But you’ve said it yourself—you’re not a biologist. Anyway, why’s he so obsessed with samples?”

  Anya shrugged. “Well, there’s Doc Hayman, I suppose.”

  “She’s a doctor,” Rossi said. “A scab lifter. She’s not a biologist either.”

  “Okay, so we all know what we can’t do.” Anya suddenly snapped into officer mode. “Now let’s concentrate on what we can do. Rossi, plot the contaminated zones on the map and work out who we need to evacuate first if it keeps expanding at the same rate. I’m going back with Gettner to take a look. Come on, Bernie. Bring the dog. He’s our radar.”