Coalition's End

by Karen Traviss

  “I still say it’s going to miss the town,” Rossi said.

  “But it’s going to cut it off from the rest of the island.”

  “Come on, it’s just dead vegetation. Not a mountain range.”

  “Shit, what if they don’t volunteer to leave?”

  Rossi slapped him on the back. “Dom, they know the score. They can stay if they want, but we can’t promise to defend them. Their call.”

  Dom wasn’t sure that civvies under pressure could actually make that decision. That was what Gears were for, to decide how big the risk was and take it for them—however painful—for their own good. He’d watched shocked, scared civvies stream out of burning cities carrying fancy drapes but no water bottles or blankets. They needed to be told what to do.

  But would I have been any different? How can I say what really matters to someone?

  The short, spongy turf felt like carpet under Dom’s boots and the sea air was so clean he could taste it at the back of his throat. A black-and-white COG standard billowed in the breeze and fell back against the flagpole in a lazy rhythm. This was the way the world should have been, not broken and crowded and filthy like Jacinto had been in its final years.

  This would still have happened if we hadn’t come to Vectes… wouldn’t it? These folks wouldn’t stand a chance without us.

  He’d keep telling himself that. He didn’t buy Baird’s theory that the glowies followed the imulsion trail. The Stranded said they’d seen stalks on the mainland, so the things were spreading everywhere.

  Rossi overtook him and walked into town with the air of a man who belonged here now and enjoyed it. His platoon was garrisoned in town and seemed perfectly happy to stay.

  “So who are you seeing?” Dom asked, keeping a careful eye on the reactions of the locals. When Delta arrived, everyone knew they weren’t on a day trip to buy postcards. “Because you’ve got that look, Drew.”

  “Ah, the math’s on our side up here.” Rossi winked. “More women than men. They love a uniform.”

  Dom found he could talk about other people’s relationships now without becoming paralyzed by agonizing memories. Rossi’s girlfriend had been killed in a grub attack five or six years ago, so he was proof that life could go on eventually if you wanted it to. Dom almost asked him how he managed it—if something had kicked him out of it, or if he’d forced himself to move on, or if he just reached the stage where his need for someone was harder to endure than remembering what he’d lost. But he didn’t know Rossi well enough for that.

  “You be careful of those jealous local lads,” Dom said. “Remember they know how to castrate cattle.”

  He passed one of the small shops on the harbor road, not so much a store as a place where people bartered their surplus produce. The woman who’d once reminded him so much of Maria was outside stacking red plastic milk crates so old that they’d turned to powdery white on the edges.

  But she didn’t look like Maria at all. He had no idea why he’d ever thought she did. She nodded at him and he nodded back.

  “I’ve got your cheese, Sergeant,” she said to Rossi. “Hang on a minute.”

  She disappeared into the shop and came out with a parcel wrapped in very old, creased brown paper. Rossi accepted it with a big grin. “Why, thank you, Mrs. Daws.”

  “Services rendered?” Dom asked when she was out of earshot. “That’s a lot of cheese.”

  “I just fixed the store’s generator, that’s all,” Rossi said. “Her old man’s built like a brick shithouse, and a bad-tempered brick shithouse at that. They’re just clearing their stores.”

  Dom knew most folks here wouldn’t be as relaxed as Mrs. Daws about being asked to abandon their homes on a maybe. Outside the town hall, Marcus and Anya stood by a Packhorse at the side of the road, talking to a group of townspeople. They looked cornered. Marcus was a hard man to corner.

  “Can’t say I blame them,” Rossi said. “What if they evacuate and the brown stuff doesn’t get here?”

  “And who do you think they’ll expect to save them if it does?”

  “They didn’t ask us to come here, Dom.”

  Yeah, Rossi was going native. It happened.

  There was no chance of Marcus doing that. He could play the diplomat on the strength of his reputation for plain speaking and common sense, but he never looked comfortable about it. Dom could see his distinctive black do-rag above the heads of the crowd.

  “Nobody’s going to force you,” he was saying. “We’re just here to help you move out if you want to go.”

  “No, we just can’t live in tents.” One of the older women began walking away in evident disgust. “We just can’t. We’ll take our chances here, thanks.”

  Dom and Rossi ambled over and tried to look helpful and non-threatening.

  “There’s plenty of room down south, Miriam,” Rossi said to the woman. He seemed to know her pretty well. “Len Parry thinks we can dismantle a lot of the buildings and move them. They’re just wooden frames, right?”

  “And how long is that going to take?” she asked. “If you’ve got enough time to do that, then why ask us to evacuate?”

  Anya looked as if she’d been up all night, a little gray under the eyes. “Like I said, we’re not going to force you. But we just don’t know what this contamination is going to do next.”

  “Well, okay.” Miriam started walking away too. “I’m staying put. That damn stuff might even reach the naval base before it touches us.”

  The impromptu meeting seemed to break up fast once a couple of people walked away. Anya watched them disperse with weary resignation, hands on hips and her Lancer slung across her back as if it had always been there. Maybe it was Dom’s imagination, but she seemed to be putting on some muscle.

  I remember Anya when she was this tiny little thing who wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Now look at her.

  “You can’t save everybody,” Dom said. “The CZ’s slowed down again. They don’t believe us.”

  “Well, four hundred people have said they want out, so I’ve got to get some trucks loaded.” Anya strode away. She was even walking differently these days. Maybe it was the effect of wearing heavy armor.

  Marcus opened the Packhorse’s door. “Come on, Dom. Time to sweet-talk the farmers.”

  There were a couple of farms in the path of the CZ, a small chicken unit and a beef herd. Dom stared out the window, comforting himself with the idea that there was still an awful lot of island that was stalk-free. As the Packhorse headed inland, Dom picked up the odor of manure. The countryside didn’t always smell fresh and invigorating.

  “Where are we going to put the cattle?” he asked.

  “Jonty’s farm, for the time being.”

  “Poor bastard. I wish we’d got the Stranded assholes who did that to him.”

  “Yeah. Rotten way to go.” Marcus turned off the gravel road and cut down a narrow strip of bare ground along the edge of a field. “Now let’s see if this one’s decided to leave. Edlar. Seb Edlar and his son, Howell.”

  They bounced down the rutted track and through a gate that opened onto a farmyard full of outbuildings and machinery. Vegetable beds striped with tidy green rows like bristles on a brush stretched off to one side. A couple of guys were standing by the tail ramp of a cattle truck that didn’t look as if it had moved in fifty years, trying to persuade a vast white pile of muscle with monstrous horns to walk up the slope.

  “We should’ve brought Bernie,” Dom said.

  Marcus grunted. It was rueful rather than amused. “Her special skills are in demand.”

  “Yeah, like the engineers. Nobody needs soldiering.”

  “Don’t tempt fate.” Marcus stopped the Packhorse a cautious distance from the truck. Maybe he didn’t like the look of those horns either. “I don’t think we’re going to be out of a job anytime soon.”

  The older man left the other to handle the loading and waded through the long grass toward the Packhorse.

  “So you’re leaving, t
hen, Seb,” Marcus said, stepping out of the cab.

  The farmer shook his head. For a moment Dom thought he’d changed his mind about going. “I’ve spent thirty years building this herd,” he said. “I can’t lose these animals now. Look at ’em. Quality. Unique breed.”

  “Do you need any help?”

  “They’re pretty skittish today. God knows what they can sense out there. Can you cover the gate?”

  Marcus shrugged. “How hard can it be?”

  “They weigh up to a thousand kilos. That’s how hard.”

  There were a lot of cattle milling around now, all cows. Damn, they must have been pretty well the same weight as the Packhorse. Some were lining up like impatient shoppers waiting for a store to open while others ambled around, ignoring a couple of dogs watching them from a safe distance.

  One cow began wandering toward Marcus as if she wanted a word with him.

  “I really miss Berserkers,” he muttered, walking slowly across the cow’s path. “Bernie said to move in just forward of their shoulders and they’ll turn away.”

  “Yeah, she also told me to stroke them under the chin, but she must have left something out.”

  Marcus took a cautious step toward the cow, following Bernie’s instructions, and the animal veered off just like she said it would. It ended up doing a U-turn. It was weirdly magical to see that stuff work.

  “Awesome!” Dom said, caught up in the moment and forgetting just why they were doing this. “Damn, who’d have thought it?”

  Then the cow threw up her head, wheeled around to Dom’s right, and broke into an ungainly canter. The two guys loading the truck stopped. The other cows started backing away.

  “Damn, what’s got into them now?” Seb managed to dodge a cow as she changed her mind about climbing the ramp and shaved past him. “Whatever that stuff is, they can smell it.”

  Dom looked down at his boots. It was an instinct, just like the cow’s. He did it before he even noticed what had grabbed his attention. It was a horribly familiar sensation from a world that was now an ocean away. The cattle scattered.

  Oh God. I can feel it.

  “Marcus…”

  Marcus was looking down too. Every Gear did it. Everyone who’d spent years with grubs tunneling beneath them and bursting out of the ground was hypersensitive about vibrations. It was the first warning anyone got. Sometimes it ended up being their last.

  “Everybody take it easy.” Marcus checked his rifle and cast around. “Feel it?”

  “Yeah,” said Seb. The two dogs started barking their heads off. “What is that, a tremor?”

  Marcus got on the radio. “Fenix to all callsigns—we’re getting tremors five kilometers southeast of Pelruan. Nothing visible yet.”

  Click. Someone responded. “On our way to check it out, Marcus.” It was Sorotki. “Eight minutes.”

  “Stroud to Fenix, we’re getting it here too.”

  “We’re going to do a search,” Marcus said. “Too big for stalks. It feels like a quake.”

  A cow went careering past Dom but he forgot about being trampled by a tonne of beef because the vibrations underneath him were a lot scarier. He aimed his Lancer, looking down for ground deformation just as he’d done back on the mainland when he was trying to work out where an e-hole would rip the pavement apart and spew out grubs.

  No grubs here. There can’t be. But there is a dead volcano.

  Things had been going from bad to worse, so an eruption wouldn’t have surprised him that much. He forced himself to look up. It was such a powerful instinct now that he didn’t trust the ground and it was all he could do to keep his eyes on the horizon. Even Marcus kept checking out the ground as he looked around for the source of the vibrations.

  They were getting stronger. It was going on for a hell of a long time for a minor quake.

  “Seb, get ready to run,” Marcus called. “We’ll worry about the herd later.”

  Dom couldn’t see a damn thing happening. The cattle were still charging around in a panic on the far side of the field and the dogs were barking furiously. The vibration was building into a definite rolling shudder, like an engine misfire.

  Then Marcus just said “Trees…”

  Dom looked across the pasture at the woodland on the edge, about three hundred meters away. The trees were swaying wildly. It looked like they were being battered by a gale, but it was just a breezy day.

  He started running. Polyps could climb now, the little assholes. They had to be in the trees. The mismatched scale of it didn’t make sense, but he just saw trouble coming and tried to close the gap. The ground started shuddering.

  Marcus overtook him. “Dom, what the hell do you—oh shit!”

  Dom’s legs kept going but his brain was already trying to slam on the brakes. He could see it, but it was too much to take in. The trees were pitching forward. They toppled over like an uprooted picket fence, root balls flinging soil into the air catapult-style, and behind them—

  Rossi was wrong. It was a goddamn mountain range. And it wasn’t polyps shaking the branches.

  A row of stalks ripped up through the ground from one edge of Dom’s horizon to the other, a dense forest of gray, twisted trunks taller than ever before. The landscape changed before his eyes in a matter of seconds.

  “Now that’s a fucking problem,” Marcus said.

  CHAPTER 10

  Of course we have a nickname for you too—we call you Cogs, like you call yourselves. Why waste time inventing new words when the old one is good? There is a Gorasni word that sounds very similar, but it is probably better you don’t learn what it is. Yes, “Cogs” was a very good nickname.

  (Yanik Laas, partially explaining to Baird what the Gorasni “Indies” called their old enemy)

  RAVEN KR-239, SOUTHEAST OF PELRUAN, VECTES: PRESENT DAY, 15 A.E.

  “Fenix to all callsigns. We’ve got stalks. About twenty, twenty-five—at least.”

  Baird leaned as far as he dared out of the crew bay but he still couldn’t see anything. The curve of the wooded hill meant his line of sight was the north coast of Vectes. And that looked just fine.

  Then the Raven skimmed over the crest of the hill, and it was pretty clear that everything was definitely as un-fine as it could get.

  “Man … just look at those motherfuckers.” Cole sounded stunned. “Baird, it’s okay to piss your pants. Hell, I’ll join you.”

  An avenue of stalks now stretched right across the landscape. Trees lay at all angles around them like a tornado had zipped along in a near-straight line and torn them out by the roots. Baird scanned the line of trunks and his gut knotted. Even from this height, he could see the movement in the grass.

  “Why is it all the big ugly assholes that turn glowie?” Cole asked. “I mean, why ain’t we seen glowie mice? Glowie butterflies?”

  “Maybe that’s what polyps were,” Mitchell said. “Count the legs.”

  Baird snorted. “Oh, good to see you’re buying my mutagenic Lambency theory.”

  “If I knew what that meant, I’d only offer you a tenner for it.”

  “Come on, Mitchell. Cannon up. It’s pop-a-polyp time.” Sorotki reached the avenue of stalks and turned along their length at maximum speed. “Two-Three-Nine to Fenix, I see the stalks. Where are you?”

  The radio was overwhelmed for a moment with the chatter of Lancer fire. “Two hundred meters the north side. Line up with the farm gate.”

  The Raven looped again. “Okay, we’ve got you. I just need to separate you from the psycho crabs.”

  Baird clipped two safety lines to his belt. “Better drop me and Cole down there. They’re way too close for you to get clear shots.”

  “You can’t outrun polyps, Baird.”

  “Look, I held the things off on a frigging submarine.”

  “Here we go again. My hero.”

  “I found ’em first. Me.”

  “We’ll name them after you.”

  “Okay, if Lambency’s an infection that causes muta
tions— one minute you’re a nice, normal, psychotic leviathan, the next you’re a piece of seagoing ordnance that’s lit up like Allfathers Day. So if we could work out what these things started life as, we could—”

  “Corporal Baird?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant Sorotki?”

  “Shut the fuck up and shoot.”

  Baird squeezed off another clip as the Raven banked. When the horizon leveled again, he could see Marcus and Dom almost back to back, holding off what looked for a moment like an angry, gray-green, crescent-shaped hedge. Baird saw Marcus put his hand to his earpiece, firing one-handed. A line of explosions fountained up from the mass of polyps. Sorotki held the Raven at a hover directly above the seething wave pouring away from the stalks while Cole and Mitchell laid down fire from both doors.

  “Two-Three-Nine, we can’t stop ’em all,” Marcus said. “They’re spreading out into the field.”

  “Where are the other birds?” Sorotki asked. “Two-Three-Nine to Eight-Zero, One-Five—what’s your ETA?”

  “Eight-Zero here—two minutes, Mel.”

  “One-Five here, I have a visual on you.” That was some pilot called Kenyon. Baird knew he didn’t get out often, and there was probably a good reason for that. “I want to test my new polyp surprise.”

  “Oh, the flamethrower.” Mitchell nodded and squeezed his trigger enthusiastically. “Yeah, that’s going to make you lots of friends in the farming community.”

  “Burn some grass or lose some inbred yokels,” Kenyon said. Wow, he was all charm, that one. “I’m easy.”

  “Okay, let’s make some space for Marcus and Dom to get clear before we start toasting anything.”

  Sorotki headed for open ground just behind Marcus and brought the Raven down low enough for Cole and Baird to jump out. “Get them away from those things and then get clear.”

  Baird didn’t need telling twice. He checked the potential escape routes as soon as his boots hit the ground. He didn’t want an Embry Star. He just wanted his full complement of unperforated and unburned body parts at the end of the day. But Cole raced for the polyps with a degree of enthusiasm that Baird could only describe as worrying. That was Cole all over. He dealt with every bit of crap that life threw at him by running full-tilt at it and knocking it over before it got the chance to bite him in the ass.