Eventually the grub stopped struggling and slumped on the deck. The seats and bulkheads looked like someone had thrown raw hamburger around. It was a lot harder to pull the saw free than Cole expected.
“Shit,” Alonzo said quietly. “That’s some respray, Cole.”
Baird leaned out of the driver’s seat to look at the Lancer. “Y’know, there’s got to be a technique to that gizmo.” He flicked some spatter off his armor. “But I don’t think it should involve a mop and a bucket.”
Cole still had to check outside. This time he opened the nose hatch with Dickson covering him and jogged around the last places he’d seen the Stranded, just a few meters from where the Boomer had emerged. The Boomer was still there, pretty well sliced in half by the gunfire. But ten meters away, Cole found the rubble rat and his pellet rifle. He wasn’t going to be using that again.
“Goddamn.” Maybe his buddies would come back and retrieve the body. Cole couldn’t tell whose fire had killed the guy, but he assumed the worst. “Okay… let’s move.”
Alonzo took a look. “Come on, Cole, what else are we going to do, hold fire and let the grubs gut us? You told them to get clear.”
“I know. Yeah, I did. I did it by the book.”
Cole slammed the hatch and sat in silence all the way back to base, eyes shut. He was finding it harder each time to deal with the Stranded. Okay, so they had the choice of enlisting and living inside the wire like normal folks instead of looting and stoning patrols, but they were only out there because Prescott used the Hammer. Sure, he didn’t set out to kill COG citizens. Cole hadn’t set out to kill them either. They were just caught in the crossfire. But they were still dead, and blaming Stranded for being a pain in the ass was like stealing a guy’s wallet and then complaining because he couldn’t pay the rent.
“You okay, Cole?” Baird asked.
Cole sucked in a few deep breaths to steady himself and got a grip. “It’s a fucked-up world, baby.”
“I’ll hose down the ’Dill.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that.”
“Hey, someone had to be the first in the squad to try it. It’s got potential. Noisy, but promising.”
They rolled through the gates of the vehicle compound rehearsing their excuses for bringing the ’Dill back with a screwed engine and grub guts baked onto the electrics. The duty mechanics were usually waiting for each returning ’Dill like a pit-stop team, but the vehicle bay was weirdly deserted today. Cole dismounted and looked around.
“Anybody home?” he yelled. “Guy needs a car wash here.”
Baird sniffed the air theatrically. “Ooh, trouble. Smell it?”
Cole wandered into the workshop. The mechanics, all 3rd Ephyrans, were standing in a huddle and talking in hushed voices.
“Hey guys.” Cole had to get their attention. “You open for business? My ashtray’s full.”
The staff sergeant turned around as if Cole had interrupted a funeral. “It’s General Bardry,” he said. “You been listening to your radio?”
Bardry was Chief of the Defense Staff. What the hell was he doing out popping grubs? Cole knew they were running low on officers, but that was weird. “What about him?”
“He’s dead.” The sergeant put two fingers to the roof of his mouth, pistol fashion. “Blew his brains out this morning. Poor bastard. The Hammer strike really finished him off. Couldn’t live with turning that key.”
Baird made a puffing noise of disbelief. “Well, it doesn’t seem to have traumatized Prescott much. So who’s taking his place?”
“Hoffman.”
“Fucking Hoffman?” Baird rolled his eyes. “Man, he even let his wife fry. Well, at least we won’t get any angsty conscience shit from him.”
“Is he even a full colonel?” Cole asked. “What about the Supply and Logistics boss?”
“You want the cooks running the war? Nah, it’s the Two-Six RTI funny handshake again.” The sergeant obviously didn’t trust old regiments with lots of fancy silver in the mess. Everyone knew the Royal Tyrans got all the best posts and told the Defense Department how things were going to be. “And Hoff’s Director of Special Forces. Who else could Prescott pick?”
“We haven’t got any special forces,” Baird said. “Just that commando ad-qual shit from the last war that Two-Six RTI wanted to take over—oh, yeah. I see your point.”
“I still don’t understand how we lost so many top brass.” The sergeant was muttering to himself now, like that bothered him more than poor old Bardry eating a pistol. “Hoffman’s the most senior officer left standing. What the hell happened?”
Cole chewed it over as he sat on the ’Dill’s front scoop. Everyone was taking the same shit these days, even the senior officers. Generals got killed—or topped themselves. And the civvies, too—they’d lost a lot of the top scientists and professors. There was no goddamn tenure now. It was like the grubs had wiped out the best brains in COG society all at once.
Cole thought that was unusual bad luck, but maybe it was a grub strategy to kill the elite. They were ugly, but they weren’t dumb.
Hell, nothing in this war had made sense anyway, not from the moment the first emergence hole opened up. He pulled out his pay book and started writing a letter to his dead momma on the blank pages at the back. It always made him feel better.
Maybe even Prescott didn’t know exactly what the hell was going on. Cole imagined him at his big polished desk, writing a letter that he’d never send to his long-dead daddy.
CHAPTER 18
MUST DO/PASS ON.
Cdr. Garcia reporting possible contacts off continental shelf. Not pursuing—range 100k at least. May be whale/other biologic not leviathan.
Pte. Iasso complaining again about Prescott’s Lambent specimens being stored in food freezer.
Talk to Lt. Stroud re Pelruan war memorial. Vets want to return to remove name plaque.
Irregular databurst activity. Tell Hoffman.
(Lieutenant Donneld Mathieson’s personal reminder list: present day, Gale, 15 A.E.)
VECTES NAVAL BASE, NEW JACINTO: ONE DAY AFTER THE STALK EMERGENCE AT THE RESERVOIR, GALE, 15 A.E.
The news was out, and Dom couldn’t tell if the crowds on the parade ground were a loitering mob or just a bunch of people with nowhere else to go.
He followed Marcus as he shouldered his way through the crowd to reach Admiralty House. Rumors about the stalks’ spread into the granite bedrock were doing the rounds, and that was the last thing people needed to hear when overcrowding was already making them short-tempered.
“I know a festering riot when I see one,” Dom said.
“They handled it okay in Jacinto.” Marcus sometimes had a lot more faith in people’s common sense than Dom. “They’ll handle it okay here.”
A group of about fifteen men and women were standing in front of the entrance to Admiralty House. Dom recognized one of them as Ingram, but the others were people whose names he’d either forgotten or never known. He did know who they were, though. They were the neighborhood delegates, the nearest New Jacinto had to proper councilmen in a COG where there hadn’t been elections of any kind since E-Day. Dom wondered why somebody hadn’t already moved them on. Civvies usually did what they were told in old Jacinto.
Ingram turned and spotted Marcus. “Sergeant?” he called. “Sergeant Fenix, can I have a word?”
“Sure.” Marcus ambled up to the delegates. “What can we do for you?”
“We’re waiting to see Prescott. Is he going to make an announcement on the stalk situation?”
“I don’t know,” Marcus said. “The engineers are still out checking the bedrock. We’ll go ask him.”
The delegates were regular family types who didn’t look like trouble. Dom found them the hardest to deal with. If he was facing a mob of big angry guys, he could go in hard to restore order, but it wasn’t so easy dealing with women and anyone half his size and twice his age. All his upbringing and instincts told him it was wrong to strong-arm them.
Dom climbed the stairs behind Marcus. “So what difference is an announcement going to make?”
“The more gaps you leave, the more folks fill them with their own nightmares,” Marcus said. He reached the top floor and turned right toward the main meeting room, where the door was ajar and the burble of voices was drifting out. “He’ll tell them everything that happened and we’ll have extra safety drills. It won’t stop a single damn stalk, but people will feel better.”
Rivera was standing outside the door. Dom wondered what Prescott had said to him and Lowe to make them keep themselves to themselves, or why he’d selected them at all. Rivera wasn’t a cheerful guy at the best of times but he looked even more subdued today.
“Hoffman called us,” Marcus said. “Okay if we go in?”
Rivera nodded and held the door open. “It’s a full house today.”
Dom didn’t know what he meant until he saw who was at Prescott’s meeting, and that described the scale of the problem. It wasn’t just Hoffman, Trescu, and Michaelson: Sharle, Parry, Baird, and even Bernie were sitting around the table too.
“Come in, gentlemen,” Prescott said. “We’re just scoping out a new worst case scenario. Carry on, Sergeant Mataki.”
Bernie looked uncomfortable. She wasn’t a meetings kind of woman. Dom automatically thought she was there because of her bushcraft and survival expertise, but it turned out to be a lot more grim than that.
“Okay, we select the breeding stock and animals for immediate food production,” she said. “Pigs are the best option—they’ll eat anything. Chickens— compact, but a big grain requirement, and we’ll need that for human consumption. Sheep, goats, and cattle—big space requirements on board ship, plus feed issues, but we have to take a viable breeding population with us. So it’s going to be mainly cattle and sheep that we cull, and that needs resources for preserving carcasses. Freezing’s most palatable, but drying and salting will last a lot longer, and pemmican will keep for years. It’s a big, messy job that’s going to tie up a lot of people, sir. We’re back to old technology now.”
So she was there as a farmer, and one working out how to strip Vectes of food. It was depressing stuff. Dom reminded himself that this was all what-if planning, the very worst that could happen. But it was clear that Prescott was talking about an early evacuation. It was the first time he’d felt that sense of urgency about the man.
“But we’ve got to be able to sustain animals at sea indefinitely,” Parry said. “There’s no guarantee of finding grazing.”
“The old navy took food animals on long deployments,” Michaelson said. “And if we have to, so can we. But remember the Silver Era sailor didn’t have quite the same attitude to hygiene that we do.”
Sharle didn’t look up from a pile of paper in front of him. “Like Bernie said earlier, we’re probably looking at a big dietary change. Fish and grain, and quick-maturing container-grown vegetables initially. Which means that I want the Pelruan trawler crews to teach more people to fish.”
“Are you getting some idea of the scale of the problem, Chairman?” Hoffman turned in his seat and fixed Prescott with one of his stares. “We escaped from Jacinto with almost nothing. We’d have been in big trouble if we hadn’t come to an island with a decent food supply. Moving out with a comparable supply is a massive, long-term undertaking. By all means start it now, but I strongly advise against evacuation for at least a year.”
There were a few nods and murmurs around the table. Baird caught Dom’s eye and just raised an eyebrow, but it was hard to tell if he was bored shitless or appalled.
“We might not have a year,” Prescott said at last.
“Then we do what we can,” Hoffman said, “but we don’t bolt until we absolutely have to. We’re running out of human beings, Chairman. Let’s not finish the job the grubs started.”
“Yeah, what is the rush?” Baird was in full argumentative mode, chairman or no chairman. Nobody could accuse him of ever being awed by rank. “So the stalks can spread further than we thought. But most of the island still isn’t covered in them, and most of the land still isn’t dead.”
Prescott paused. He always seemed to think longer before he spoke now. Dom wondered if he was just imagining it. In the silence, he could hear the background noise from the crowds in the parade ground like a distant rumble of traffic.
“The nature of the threat has changed,” Prescott said. “We can’t lock it out. And it appears to be able to do more than just spread between species. It’s generating new life-forms.”
“But how do we know if that means we should risk evacuating the whole island?” Marcus asked. “We don’t know enough about the life cycles of these things.”
Maybe it was that voice, or his service record, but Marcus could always silence a room on the rare occasions when he had something to say. He could certainly stop Prescott in his tracks. Dom watched the Chairman staring at his hands, carefully folded on the table in front of him.
“You’re right,” Prescott said. “We still don’t know enough about the Lambent. But Colonel Hoffman rightly points out that we can’t defend a string of villages on the mainland, so we need to re-establish a single settlement. Port Farrall is still the best option. We have to arrive during the summer months to prepare for the winter there, which means we go now, or we go this time next year. And we can’t predict what this island will look like in a year’s time.”
Dom couldn’t argue with that. He didn’t think Prescott had an easy job, and he didn’t have an opinion of his own because every option was a shitty one. He watched Marcus nod and fold his arms, leaning against the wall.
The door opened again and Rivera stuck his head in. “Sir, Sergeant Rossi says it’s getting a bit tense out front.”
“Yeah, Ingram and the delegates want to talk to you, Chairman,” Marcus said.
Prescott pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. “Why not?”
He walked out. Hoffman stood up and indicated to Marcus and Dom to follow him. It was a real shame the building didn’t have a balcony, because Prescott was going to get swamped in that crowd. But he was a big guy with quite a presence, so maybe all he needed was Lowe and Rivera making sure nobody threw a punch.
Why am I even thinking that? Things never got that bad in Jacinto. But then Prescott never had citizens living right next door to him.
By the time Dom and Marcus got down to the doors, Prescott was already on the steps with Rivera, facing the bunch of delegates with a general crowd growing behind them. There was no sign of Lowe. The noise that greeted Prescott was weird, a mix of murmurs, cheers, and even some folks chanting “Tell us the truth! Tell us the truth!”
“Dom, Baird, Bernie—get out front and stop anyone pushing his luck,” Marcus said. “Prescott might not give a rat’s ass if someone slugs him, but it won’t help the general mood here.”
Prescott didn’t just stand there. He moved out into the crowd, the crazy bastard. Some people patted him on the back or reached out to shake his hand, and he stopped for every one of them. Dom once thought it was just politician’s bullshit, but there was a real and necessary act of reassurance going on here, the man in charge knowing he had to give these people an answer.
“Just tell me what you want from me,” Prescott said.
The silence spread outward from the people immediately in front of him and soon the crowd was listening intently. He didn’t even need to shout or hold up his hand to get their attention. He was a lot taller than most of them anyway.
“Asshole,” Hoffman muttered. Dom hadn’t realized the colonel was standing next to him. “Goddamn theater.”
“That’s all we’ve got, sir,”
Dom whispered.
Everybody seemed to be looking at Keir Ingram to say something. Dom could have sworn one of the delegates shoved him in the back.
“We want you to give it to us straight, Chairman,” he said. “How bad is this new threat, and is it true we’ll be evacuated again?”
“The stalks could come up anywhere.” Prescott didn’t even try to dress it up in rhetoric. “It seems we can’t rely on shutting them out. We’re still deciding whether an immediate evacuation is advisable or not. There are risks in any option.”
“Don’t we get a say?” That was a woman lost somewhere in the crowd. “Don’t we get a say in what happens to us? Okay, we didn’t have time in Jacinto, but this is different.”
“I say we get the hell out now!” a man yelled.
That started everyone off for a few moments, but it was just noise. Dom kept an eye on the body language. He could see Marcus checking it out too, just that little turn of the head and that slow sweep.
“Tell us what’s happening on the mainland!”
“Yeah, what did you find on that recon? Why didn’t you tell us about it?”
“We want a say in this! It’s our asses!”
Prescott didn’t even blink. Dom wondered what kind of Gear he’d been under fire, however short his time in the army had been.
“I’ve got an idea,” Prescott said. Dom heard Hoffman groan. “I’ll give everybody a vote on it. We’ll show you the recon images and reports, just as we’ve seen them. They’re not always easy to understand, but you can have free access to them. I’ll tell you now that even Colonel Hoffman and I don’t agree on the solution. But you can judge for yourselves, and we’ll have a referendum.”
“Fucking idiot,” Hoffman whispered.
“Fucking clever, sir.” Dom leaned closer to Hoffman. “He’s always got a plan, remember.”
Ingram didn’t look overjoyed at the idea of instant unvarnished democracy. “But we don’t have any electoral structure,” he said.
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