Coalition's End

by Karen Traviss

  “You haven’t fought polyps up close yet, have you, Alex?” Bernie asked.

  “Why, do I need a permit to kill the fuckers?”

  “Just treat them like tickers. Only worse.”

  Mac started snarling. Everybody aimed at the imaginary point in the grass about thirty meters away where he’d been pawing. The taller grasses began shaking and the ground bulged slowly upward for a moment before a split cracked it open.

  “Stay, Mac.” Bernie gave his collar a jerk. “Stay.”

  A single stalk erupted, punching four meters into the air. Its trunk was dotted with pulsing blisters. Bernie held her breath, waiting for the polyps to surge out of the ground with it, but the blisters started to part along the cross-shaped indentations like seed pods struggling to open. Fluid sprayed out.

  “Do they always do that?” Alex asked.

  “It’s a new one on me,” said Sam.

  Was that the stuff that killed the vegetation? Bernie had no idea until the blister she was aiming at burst open and something large, wet, and black was thrown out of it. It fell to the ground like a newborn calf and found its feet instantly.

  “Now that’s not a bloody polyp,” Sam said.

  It had four legs and a pointed snout. Then it parted its lips and snarled.

  Bernie aimed. “Shit. It’s a dog.”

  The thing was dog-sized, dog-shaped, and when it ran at her it even moved like a dog. She put a burst of Lancer fire through it and it blew up in a sheet of flame, scattering debris that looked like burnt paper. Then the rest of the blisters split open. More dog-things spewed out and rushed at them, meeting a wall of automatic fire.

  Nobody said a word. Bernie was in that familiar tunnel again, everything in her immediate path so clear and sharp that it looked luminous, the colors far brighter than anything she saw day-to-day, and everything outside it—her comrades, the muzzle flash—was a distant and muffled blur. It was one recurring second, the same shot at the same glowie and the same detonation over and over again. She ran out of ammo and only reloading snapped her out of the trance. She was just obeying her reflexes. The only conscious thought in her head was why this bunch of Lambent looked like dogs.

  There seemed to be dozens of them. And being doglike, they had the anatomy to leap. One broke through the wall of fire while she was reloading and she raised her Lancer a fraction of a second too late. One moment the dog-thing was coming at her in midair and the next Mac cannoned into it and the two animals went cartwheeling across the grass to Bernie’s left. The explosion sent charred fragments high in the air.

  “Mac! Mac!” People did the weirdest things under fire. She’d hauled friends to safety, gone to retrieve weapons that could have managed just fine on their own, and now she was risking her life going after a dog. “Mac!”

  Astonishingly, he was still alive. He staggered to his feet and shoved in front of her, snarling at the glowies and ready to tear into them again. She pulled him down by his collar and held him there, firing one-handed. Rounds zipped past her. Eventually the explosions thinned out and stopped.

  The air stank of smoke and burned hair. “Well,” Anya said, voice shaking. “There’s something you don’t see every day.”

  Bernie was suddenly back in the real world with a 360-degree awareness. Alex stood poking the debris with her boot. Sam came over and gave Bernie a hand up, and nobody asked why the fuck she’d risked her life for a dog.

  “Is he okay?” Sam asked.

  Bernie dusted Mac down and checked him for injuries. His fur was singed and he was trembling, but he looked up into her eyes and gave her a messy, wet lick across the face.

  “Yeah, he’s my little hero.” Bernie cuddled him, all too aware how close she’d come to having a glowie detonate in her face. “Did you see that? Did those things come out of the pods?”

  “That’s what I saw,” Anya said. “Anyone got a different theory?”

  Sam joined Alex, who was searching through the grass. “Maybe it’s connected to the two farm dogs. Although god knows how we get from two dogs being fragged by polyps to dozens of those things spawning from the pods.”

  “Whatever it is, the Lambent keep changing and they’re doing it faster each time,” Bernie said.

  Alex picked up a few fragments of charred tissue that could have been anything. “We better find a recognizable lump. Nobody’s going to believe us and I’m not in the mood to take any shit from Baird about it. That was damn close.”

  Anya fiddled with a thick strand of hair that had fallen out of its pleat on one side. It was blackened at the ends. She tried to pin it back again and then sniffed her fingers.

  “They’ve burned my goddamn hair,” she said indignantly. “I’m going to have to cut it now.” She sounded just like her mother at that moment, outraged by the insolence of a near miss rather than shaken by it. “I say we call off the search, Bernie. We’ve got a whole new problem.”

  “Permission to retrieve the cattle carcasses, ma’am?” God, am I really asking that? Yes, I am. “ We just can’t waste that much meat.”

  “I’ll call in a Raven for that. Everybody—back in the Packhorse.”

  “Ma’am, I’m still looking for chunks,” Alex said. “Wait one.”

  The dog-things had almost completely vaporized on detonation. The grass was scattered with thin, curled scraps that crumbled into soot when Bernie tried to pick them up, so maybe there was nothing left to prove what they’d just seen. But there was no point working with a dog if you didn’t take advantage of his skills.

  “Seek, Mac,” she said. She held her ash-stained fingers under his nose so he knew what she was asking him to sniff out. “Find some dead glowies. Good boy.”

  “They can only do that in the movies,” Alex said.

  Bernie watched him limp away into the grass, head down. “You’ve never kept a working dog, have you?”

  Mac sniffed around for a while and disappeared for a few minutes in the ruts of churned soil around the stalk. When his head bobbed up again, he had something in his mouth.

  “That’s my boy,” Bernie said. “Clever Mac.”

  Mac trotted back and dropped a charred lump at her feet. It looked like a roast leg of lamb that had been left too long in the oven. The knee joint in the bone was visible and it was clearly a hind leg, a very doglike one.

  “That’ll do fine,” Anya said. “Now let’s go.”

  Mac wouldn’t get in the back of the Packhorse on his own. Bernie managed to lift him in, but he whined pitifully when she tried to walk away. Anya got into the driving seat.

  “You better sit with him,” she said. “He’s earned it.”

  Everything was starting to hurt now that the adrenaline had ebbed. Bernie could feel pulled muscles, bruises, and scraped skin. Mac didn’t seem content to lie beside her in the back of the vehicle. He draped himself across her lap and shoved his head under her arm as if he was trying to hide. He smelled of singed fur.

  “If Vic tries to kick you off the bed tonight,” she whispered, “I’ll bite him for you. Okay?”

  Mac made a strange sobbing sound deep in his throat, distressingly like a child. Sometimes she was convinced he had a far better understanding of what she said than just a regular intelligent dog.

  She just didn’t understand his replies.

  ADMIRALTY HOUSE, VECTES NAVAL BASE.

  “Where’s Prescott?” Hoffman demanded. “Does he know about this incident with the bull yet? Why the hell can’t he wear a radio like everyone else?”

  Rivera looked trapped and helpless like a kid caught between two squabbling parents. Lowe wasn’t around. Michaelson and Trescu stood back and let Hoffman handle it.

  “Oh, he knows, sir,” Rivera said. “He’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  The door of Prescott’s office was open. Hoffman motioned Michaelson and Trescu inside and didn’t ask if Lowe had gone with Prescott.

  “I’m not going to go through his desk again, Rivera.” Hoffman was almost nose to nose w
ith him. He’d been a solid frontline Gear, and it wasn’t his fault that his boss was a secretive asshole. “But if you know where he is, tell him we need to talk right now.”

  Rivera nodded and disappeared down the stairs. Coming so soon after the mainland recon, the new Lambent form would only stoke speculation that evacuation was an imminent prospect. Hoffman wanted Prescott to get out there and do what he did best—reassure the civilians.

  Hoffman also wanted to confront him. He’d had enough of the guessing game, and he needed to ask him a simple question and see his reaction. Was this a COG bioweapon gone haywire?

  “I don’t expect either of you to get involved in this,” he said to Michaelson and Trescu. “But if I don’t thrash it out right now with that bastard, I can’t work alongside him another damn day. Enough.”

  Michaelson gave him a slow pat on the back. “Come on. I’m involved, and I’m sure Miran is too.”

  Trescu stood staring out of the office window, one arm folded across his chest as he stroked his beard. Hoffman didn’t know how close he’d been to Eugen, but the man always took every death personally, whether it was a friend or not. There just weren’t that many Gorasni left for their leader not to care about individuals.

  “Do you need to get to the site, Commander?” Hoffman asked. “I realize this is hard for you. You can go if you want.”

  “I’ll go as soon as we hear what the Chairman has to say for himself.” Trescu snapped his focus back to them. “But for the moment—I am, as you say, in.”

  They waited. Hoffman didn’t want any more games. He especially didn’t want to play them with Trescu.

  “You had pretty good spies in the UIR,” he said. “Did you ever investigate what kind of weapons we were working on?”

  “Why ask me?”

  “I’m the last asshole to get told anything,” Hoffman said. “The COG’s as secretive as any damn Indie state, believe me. I was Director of Special Forces but I got told sweet fuck all.”

  “We knew you had a chemical and biological weapons program. Everyone had one. As to what it was—your guess would be as good as mine.”

  The view from the window seemed to be distracting Trescu. Michaelson took a look, and Hoffman had no choice but to watch as well. He’d been used to an orderly scene in the basins and jetties, but the Pelruan evacuees had spilled over into the working areas. Some of them had to live on board the ships.

  “It’ll be easier when we get the work party rosters organized,” Michaelson said. “They’ll be working on the farms and the building sites. But for the time being, I do worry about the odd ship going AWOL.”

  “Zephyr will keep a watchful eye open if you wish, Quentin,” Trescu said. “But do you want her to stop anyone leaving, or do you prefer to sink your own vessels?”

  “We’ll be happy to take tip-offs,” Michaelson said. “We’d better do the beastly stuff ourselves. No Pendulum Wars reenactments.”

  Trescu seemed to take that sort of thing from Michaelson without turning a hair. They really did get along, personally and politically, but then Michaelson had always been a political animal. Hoffman felt further out of his depth with the situation every day and longed even more to be back fighting an honest war with a definable enemy.

  “Control to Hoffman.” It was Mathieson. “Sir, Lieutenant Stroud’s on her way back with the patrol. Sergeant Mataki’s got something weird to show you.”

  Hoffman marveled at Mathieson’s deft touch. He knew exactly how to avoid hiking Hoffman’s blood pressure. Something had obviously gone wrong, but Mathieson had managed to say in one breath that not only was it over, but also that Bernie was okay.

  I have good people. That’s everything.

  “Did she say what it was, Mathieson?”

  “A new kind of glowie, sir.”

  “Not the cows.”

  “No. A really new kind, sir. She’s got a fragment.”

  “Have you told Prescott yet?”

  “Oh, I can never get hold of him, sir. I’ll leave that to you, if that’s okay.”

  “Good man. Hoffman out.”

  Michaelson looked around. “More thrills?”

  “Yeah.” Hoffman sat down at the table. He could hear the distant sound of boots at the bottom of the stairs. “Mataki’s bringing us a nasty surprise. Another new glowie.”

  “I don’t like the way the pace of change is picking up,” Michaelson said. “I really don’t.”

  It was definitely Prescott coming up the stairs. Hoffman knew his footsteps too well by now. He watched the door and Prescott appeared.

  The Chairman gave them a nod and wandered in, taking off his jacket. “Apologies, gentlemen. I’ve just taken a walk through the base to see how things are settling down.”

  “You’ve heard about the Lambent bull,” Hoffman said.

  “Well, we’ve been aware for a while that Lambency occurs in different species, so perhaps we’re now closer to finding out how it happens.”

  It could have been a neutral and literal observation, but Hoffman heard it as a challenge. “People are going to assume the worst, though, Chairman, and right now we need order and discipline. I’m looking to you to say the right words to them.”

  “I think I can manage that. But you haven’t come here just to ask me to make a speech, have you?”

  Hoffman suddenly felt very alone. He ran on anger and indignation, and if he lost any of that momentum then he began to worry that he really was just the boorish, overpromoted infantry grunt that they’d once said he was, a man lucky to find himself in 26 RTI, a regiment with a long history of dominating army politics.

  I should not be here. I should not be running this.

  But he was, so he fronted up and earned it.

  “Well go ahead, then, Colonel.” Prescott glanced at Michaelson and Trescu. “What’s the problem?”

  It was still hard to say it. Even after fifteen years, with no UIR left to fear, Hoffman hesitated before talking about a classified facility. Habit was very hard to break. And damn it, he realized he was going to have to mention the data disc in front of Trescu without the courtesy of breaking it to the man privately. But that was just too bad.

  “Lambency,” Hoffman said at last. “Is that what the goddamn disc is all about?”

  He was too focused on Prescott’s face to watch how Trescu reacted. He was searching for any twitch or blink he could lean on and use. Prescott looked as if he’d taken a slow, discreet breath.

  “You don’t expect me to respond to such an open question, surely?” he said.

  Prescott looked vaguely uncomfortable, but no more than any man would when faced with crisis after crisis. Hoffman wondered if he was looking too hard for reactions that just weren’t there. The trouble with having others at the table was that he couldn’t harangue him. Humiliating him—if Prescott could be humiliated, given his messianic detachment—wouldn’t get any usable information out of him, not now and not later.

  Trescu butted in. He wasn’t used to answering to anybody. “If you have information, Chairman, then I expect you to share it with us.” Us might have meant the three of them, but he might have meant only the Gorasni. “Sera is a wasteland and there’s no harm we can do to you. If you have information that can help us survive, give it to us.”

  “I’m not sure that I do, gentlemen,” Prescott said. He leaned forward as if he was going to stand up and leave again. “Right now, I’m as desperate to find a solution as you are, and just as afraid of what will happen if I don’t.”

  Hoffman decided to drop the full payload. “Mataki’s on her way back with another new glowie. You sure there’s nothing you want to tell us?”

  “What’s she found?” Prescott was suddenly interested, totally focused on the news. “What is it?”

  “I don’t even know yet.”

  “I do need a sample, Victor.”

  Prescott wasn’t dismissive, but definitely impatient, as if he had something much more important to do than listen to their petty co
ncerns about his secrecy.

  “Don’t bullshit me,” Hoffman snarled. “I’m immune. We’ve been doing this far too long.”

  Prescott didn’t blink. “I should get on with addressing the civilians, gentlemen, and we can reschedule this.”

  “Why, Chairman? What’s more pressing than why our last refuge is being overrun by this goddamn Lambent menagerie and our entire food supply poisoned by it?”

  Prescott parted his lips a little as if he was about to say something but had thought better of it. He leaned back in his seat.

  “I do think we should discuss this at another time, Victor.”

  “I’ll ask you again. Why won’t you tell us?”

  Michaelson finally spoke, doing his soothing voice-of-reason act. “It’s hard for us to understand what you could possibly want to withhold from your defense staff at this stage of the game, Chairman.” He could make fuck off and die sound like a friendly greeting. “We really would function better if you leveled with us.”

  “Is this all about the disc?” Prescott asked.

  “Well, that’s for you to tell us, sir,” Michaelson said. “What are we to think? More to the point, what are we to tell the civilians? And our Gears? There’s only so long any of us can keep a lid on this, isn’t there?”

  Prescott frowned a little as if he was trying to work out what Michaelson meant. Hoffman could hear Margaret’s voice in his head, as he sometimes did. Even dead, she put him on the spot like the trial lawyer she’d been. He never forgot her last words as she stormed out the door.

  Fuck you, Victor. Fuck you and all your secret little cabals… and you kept it from me. How in the name of God did you think I’d react?

  Hoffman struggled to shut her out. He focused on the Chairman and let rip. He had nothing more to lose. “For once in your goddamn two-faced fucking life, Prescott, tell me the truth. It’s the Lambent, isn’t it? You knew.”

  Every drop of blood drained from Prescott’s face. His voice was still very controlled, but Hoffman was shocked to see any reaction, let alone one like that. The man hadn’t even broken a sweat when he deployed the Hammer. This was the closest Hoffman had ever come to cracking that facade.