“If … then he’s gone to show it to someone. Not our pirate buddies, though.”
Marcus shrugged. “Some of them run drug operations.” He said it like he’d reached a conclusion. “They’ll have better labs than us. Maybe more know-how. And Ollivar’s the one who said the COG was dead and that they’d be the new world order.”
That sounded like Prescott, all right: opportunistic to the end. But for whose benefit? Whatever else was wrong with him, none of this seemed to be about saving his own skin. That was what made him so hard to fathom.
“I’d like to believe that,” Hoffman said. “But it doesn’t explain all the theatrics.”
“Okay, but if he finally comes back with the pirate king,” Dom said, “I’ll shoot the asshole myself.”
It was all too cheerful, that shaky relief after a near-miss. Anya didn’t seem to be joining in the display of bravado, though.
“You okay, Lieutenant?” he asked.
“Oh, emotional girly stuff,” she said, pushing her hair out of her eyes. She’d cut it to jaw length now, and it made her look even more like her mother. “I worked with the Chairman for years, and he leaves without a goodbye.”
No, Prescott wasn’t universally hated. Hoffman began to worry that he’d let his personal grievances cloud his judgment.
But there’s the disc. There’s all the things he never told me. There’s all the things he still wouldn’t tell me.
“I better get this broadcast sorted out before the gossip overtakes me,” he said. “Come on, Bernie, it’s stand-by-your-man time. Then I’ll have that goddamn drink.”
Who listened to the radio at this time of night? He’d have to get Major Reid to go see the delegates and make sure they all knew, just in case.
I didn’t sign up for this. But I pushed Prescott, or at least I was such a gullible prick that I opened all the doors he wanted open.
And if I don’t do it, who will?
The route to CIC from the gym was a maze of winding corridors lined with a mix of half-tiled walls and painted wooden paneling, all in the same utilitarian government green. Mac’s claws tapped on the floorboards as he trotted behind them. Hoffman realized he would have been happier if every second of slack water in his life, every moment when he had too much time to think, could simply be erased. He hadn’t learned the art of not thinking.
“Bernie, what if I’ve got this all wrong?” he asked. “What if Prescott really knew we were fucked but I wouldn’t listen?”
“Trust your own judgment. It’s kept us alive so far.”
“But will I know when it’s time to call it a day? Royal Tyrans never retreat. Will I realize when it’s time to run?”
“Oh, you’ll know,” Bernie said. “Believe me. You’ll know. And if you don’t—I will.”
CHAPTER 20
We’re not Stranded. We just lost radio contact.
(Corporal Hugo Muir, 5th Kaian Grenadiers)
NOROA, SOUTH ISLANDS: SUMMER, 9 A.E.— SIX YEARS EARLIER.
The grubs were on the move again, trying to push the wrecked truck down the road. It was a baker’s delivery van, not a military vehicle, but they’d scavenge anything they could find after they’d finished slaughtering humans.
Bernie could hear them. She braced her back against the trunk of the tree and steadied herself with her boot jammed into the fork of the branch. They’d have to come back this way if they wanted to get that thing down into their tunnel.
City boys. You strayed too far off your home turf, didn’t you, tossers? Bad call.
She looked around to check that Hugo and Darrel were in position. They were hard to spot in the foliage even for a sniper used to looking for people who didn’t want to be seen, but she couldn’t see Miku at all.
Bernie could wait all day if she had to. She had nothing better to do than kill grubs now. It was only a matter of time before humans had to abandon Noroa, but until that day came, she’d keep killing the bastards.
The first gray head presented itself about ten minutes later. She could see them below, six of them pushing the small truck, four at the back and one on each side trying to steady it. She couldn’t see if there was one inside at the wheel, but if there was then he’d written his last letter home to his grub bitch of a mother.
Do they have mothers? Families? I hope so. I want them to suffer and grieve like we have.
She sighted up on the grub on the left side and waited until he passed her. The back of the truck was now level with Hugo’s position, and that meant Darrel could take the one on the right. She didn’t even need to signal them to coordinate the ambush now. Everybody knew the drill. All she had to do was squeeze the Longshot’s trigger.
Steady…
Her optics framed the grub’s face in profile. When she had a target in her scope, she wasn’t worried about their wife and kids or if they didn’t want to be fighting a war at all. They were just a threat to be eliminated before they could kill her mates.
Exhale…
It was even easier to detach when she saw that scaly gray skin and those weirdly inhuman eyes. She could look into the eyes of a cow or a dog and recognize the common thread of all life, but not these things. They didn’t deserve to live.
Hold it…
The Longshot would take off the top of his head. His little gray chums would shit their pants and realize that humans wouldn’t go down without a fight.
… and squeeze.
The grub’s head snapped back as if he’d been punched, spraying blood right across the side of the truck. Bernie shoved her Longshot over her shoulder and switched rifles. The grubs at the back dropped for cover, looking around frantically as fire started on three sides of them. One stood up to return fire and took a chestful of rounds, but still aimed up into the trees for a few seconds before he fell. Bernie made that two down and four to go, at least from what she could see on this side. One rolled under the truck. He stuck his head out too far and there was another rattle of fire. The forest track fell silent.
She tried her radio. “Darrel, can you see them?”
“Yeah, three at the front.”
“I’ve got ’em.” That was Miku, at last. “When I take one the others are going to bolt, so get ready. Both sides.”
He must have moved all the way around through the tree canopy. The kid was amazingly agile. Bernie felt the strain of being in her mid-fifties but then remembered she wasn’t up for that kind of acrobatics even thirty years ago.
She aimed. “Go!”
A whiffling noise like an arrow broke the silence, followed by an agonized roar. A grub ran out in her direction and she hit him in the chest before Hugo put a couple of bursts into him. She didn’t see where the third one went. A couple of shots rang out.
“Clear,” Hugo said. “That’s all of them.”
“I can still hear one moaning. He must be next to the vehicle.”
“I’ll finish him.”
“No, I’m heading down,” Bernie said. “Then grab what you can and get out.”
It was harder coming down a tree than climbing it. Bernie had to drop the last two meters. She walked around to the front of the truck to find a grub impaled against the grille like an oversized radiator mascot. That explained the whiffling noise; Miku had fired a crossbow quarrel on a line like a harpoon, and the noise had been the line paying out.
The grub was still breathing, still struggling weakly as if he couldn’t work out why he couldn’t get away from the truck. She looked into his face for a moment, saw nothing there that she could pity or regret, and reloaded the Longshot.
Too good for the bastard. But it’ll take me hours to saw through his fucking throat.
Bernie settled for making sure no grub medic could patch him up and send him back to kill more humans. She rarely used the Longshot at close range. It made a hell of a mess.
Miku walked up and pulled the quarrel out of the grub’s chest with some effort. “I was trying to save you ammo, Sarge,” he said. “And there you go wa
sting another round.”
She picked up the grub’s weapon and took the ammo from his belt. “It’s not some cultural statement, then.”
“You’re taking the piss again.”
“Come on, we’re all Islanders here, son.” Bernie tapped her arm to indicate her tribal tattoos. “Don’t play the race card with me.”
“You pass for white. You don’t even have bakuaia.” He indicated his own facial tattoos, intricate dark blue swirls like fractals. “You Galangi like tattoos you can cover up so the COG can pretend you’re their own.”
“Didn’t make any difference in Two-Six RTI. And I am bloody part-white anyway.” Here we go again. Bit late for tribal differences now, kid. “We had a couple of other Islanders with full-face ink. Pad Salton, for a start. And a guy from your neck of the woods. Tai Kaliso. Yeah, he was from Arohma too.”
Actually, Pad was white, very white indeed with bright red hair and freckles. Bernie wondered where all her old mates were now. The thought crossed her mind at least once a day and she wasn’t sure if it kept her going or just prolonged a pointless nostalgia she’d be better off without. They were probably dead.
“Hey, this wanker’s got one of our radios.” Hugo held up a COG-issue receiver and earpiece. “A bloody new one. You think we can get a signal out at last?”
“Look at it later,” Bernie said. “Come on, we can’t hang around here.”
They set off back to the camp, weaving through the trees. As far as she knew there were just fifteen civilians left on Noroa now, and if anyone else was still out there, they were better at hiding than she was. The grubs came back a couple of times a month to scavenge and sweep what used to be the inhabited areas. Nobody tried to go back to the towns any longer, not even the occasional Stranded who passed through on their endless voyages around the islands. The Noroa camp was hidden in the eastern cliffs overlooking the ocean, its boats tucked in a narrow inlet waiting for the moment they might have to put to sea for the last time. Even Bernie knew they couldn’t hold the place forever. It was time to start packing up.
We might even be the last Gears left on Sera. And Miku— well, he’s a Gear whether there’s an adjutant here to stamp his bloody papers or not.
When the patrol reached the outskirts of the camp—an invisible boundary, but there nonetheless—one of the sentries jumped out from the bushes with a Boomshot. He was sixteen and very enthusiastic. Nobody could accuse the civvies of not getting stuck in.
“Glad to see you’re alert, Jake.” Darrel flinched and turned the muzzle away with a careful hand. “Don’t ask me for a password, will you?”
“Did you kill any?”
Miku held up a couple of scavenged Locust weapons. “Well, we didn’t get this lot free with a box of cereal.”
“Nice one.” Jake let them pass. “We saw a boat earlier. We didn’t radio you because it didn’t look like an emergency.”
“Where is it?” Bernie asked.
“Can’t see it now. Passed by.”
It could only be Stranded, so if they decided to come ashore they’d get a Boomshot welcome. Bernie wandered through the camouflaged huts and sat down by the observation post with the others to examine their haul. Every round counted.
“We’ve really got to think about going, Bernie,” Hugo said. He peered at the radio he’d taken off the grub. “We’ve had a good innings. Eight years. I bet there were whole regiments that didn’t hold out that long.”
“It’s got to be Galangi, then.”
“It’s too close to here. I mean go out and find a Stranded colony. Hook up with a bigger group.”
“A bigger group of what? They’re all shithouses.”
“What do you think the civvies here are, if they’re not Stranded?”
“You know what I mean.” Fucking Stranded. She didn’t have any time for them. The few that had landed on Noroa had just come to loot. “Look, the grubs don’t have a navy. They’re still tunneling after nine years. That means they can probably only move within the continental shelf because it’s comparatively shallow. Galangi’s on a volcanic ridge with a bloody great abyss in the way.”
She sat cleaning her Indie sniper rifle, the semi-automatic that Major Stroud had given her way back when the CO was just a lieutenant. It grew more important to Bernie with each year that passed, although she wasn’t actually sure of the date any longer. The rifle had come from a UIR sniper who had pinned down a company of 26 RTI in Shavad, and Major Stroud had killed the sniper up close and personal herself. Stroud was that kind of officer.
It was a lovely piece. Bernie treasured it, not least because it was a personal gift from Stroud. The woman was a legend. And like all Stroud’s Gears, Bernie had a strong personal loyalty to her.
But Helena Stroud was long dead. Bernie wondered if her daughter Anya was still alive somewhere.
Hugo shoved the radio under her nose, almost excited. “You know what this means.”
“What?”
“It’s definitely COG. See the letters on it? But this is recent. I mean it’s a new model, and that means they’re still manufacturing on the mainland somewhere.”
That was a big assumption. She hated scraps of hope because they evaporated all too fast. But it got her attention, and Miku’s and Darrel’s too.
“It just means they were still making military radios after you left Kaia, that’s all,” she said. If Hugo could get it working, who would they call? Who was left to answer? “Even if it was last year, they could all be dead now.”
“Well, either way, they’re not going to pop down here to see if we’re doing okay without them,” Darrel said. “So that changes fuck all, doesn’t it?”
Darrel was a practical man. Bernie had to agree with him. “Yeah. Better get the others used to the idea that we’ll have to bang out of here soon.”
Hugo fiddled with the radio and sighed. “It’s not working anyway,” he said. “See? Nothing changes with the bloody COG. We should have let the grub fix it before we killed him.”
There seemed to be a communal relief about having to leave for Galangi, even if Bernie wasn’t looking forward to seeing her neighbors again. She’d cut off mentally the moment she got on that trawler. But it was probably the safest place to be right now, and it had all the things that Noroa didn’t—piped water, food, and somewhere you could sleep for the night without having to worry that every noise was a grub emergence hole forming under your bed.
It was a rough journey ahead at this time of year, but Bernie’s definition of what was tolerable had changed an awful lot since she’d left Galangi. The last humans on Noroa began packing up what little they had left to load everything onto the largest fishing boat ready for the trip.
What the hell am I going to say to Neal? It’s been a long time.
She was filling water cans a few days later when the small boat came back, the one that had passed by while she’d been out on patrol. Jake spotted it first. She grabbed her rifle and ran down to the headland.
Hugo was already there, lying prone with his rifle trained on the boat.
“Well, it’s not a grub,” he said. “What if it’s someone looking for sanctuary? Another boat might be handy.”
“We’ve got as many boats as we can sail. He can piss off.”
The boat headed for the inlet, a little red and white thing with a mast and a motor. Bernie kept her Longshot trained on it all the way in and made sure she was the first down there to check it out, just in case Hugo was going soft out of desperation. It puttered into the inlet and slowed to a stop, bobbing on the water. Bernie and Hugo stood on the shore and aimed at the wheelhouse.
“We haven’t got anything for you to take, so you can sling your hook,” Bernie called. “Stranded aren’t welcome here.”
A bearded man in his thirties stepped out of the tiny wheelhouse. “Whoa, I’m not a pirate,” he said. “I’m just looking for fresh water to top up my tanks.”
“Well, you’ve got a choice of rivers inland,” Hugo said. “
And grubs. Help yourself, but—ah, sod it. If your mates are all out there waiting to come ashore, you must be pretty dim even for Stranded. There’s nothing left to steal.”
“Are you Gears?” the man asked. “Shit, I thought you lot had all gone back to Ephyra when Prescott issued the recall.”
Bernie wore salvaged chest plates and Hugo still had full armor and a Lancer rifle complete with bayonet. It was clear who they were. But Bernie heard the word recall and her stomach knotted.
“What fucking recall?” she asked.
“You’ve been out of the loop for a long time, haven’t you? Three days before they launched the Hammer strikes. Prescott said everyone had to evacuate to Jacinto Plateau because the grubs couldn’t tunnel there. Yeah, big frigging gesture, because most people couldn’t even get within a hundred klicks of Jacinto before he pressed the button, even if there’d been room for us. So that’s the COG for you, the murdering assholes.”
Bernie hadn’t known about the recall. Nobody down here had. She risked taking her eyes off the Stranded to look at Hugo for his reaction.
“They recalled us,” she said. “Three days? Three days?”
“Don’t think about it, Bernie.”
“We were recalled.”
“It was years ago. Doesn’t matter a damn now.”
But it did. It mattered to her. It meant that Jacinto might still be holding out. And if Jacinto was still functioning, then the Royal Tyran Infantry would be there.
“Any recent news?” she asked, trying not to look too interested. Stranded always wanted something in exchange for information. Her heart was pounding. She tried not to let that stupid hope take her over again, but there was no controlling it. “Who’s still in Jacinto?”
The man shrugged. “Oh, it was a year ago now. Last I heard, Prescott was still holed up in his nice office, surrounded by his infantry in the middle of a damn wasteland. That might be really old news, of course. Can’t remember the last time I met anybody dumb enough to go back and find out. All the smart folks stick to the islands.”
Bernie didn’t have an impulsive streak. She did things the army way, assessing information before making a decision. She didn’t have much information this time but the decision had been made in a heartbeat. She’d already made it on E-Day.
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