“There’s a balance to be struck between giving people adequate time to evacuate without giving the enemy time to react,” Prescott said. “I have to tell the people what the stakes are, but we want to catch the Locust on the wrong foot, too. That’s always an ethical dilemma in war. How many of our own people did we allow to die in the Pendulum Wars because alerting them to attacks would reveal too much about our latest intelligence?”
Fenix spread his hands. “Ethical? Good God, this is about a weapon of mass destruction, not a single conventional attack.”
“Don’t start on the old ethics shit again, Fenix,” Hoffman snapped. “You made the Hammer technology operational, so don’t tell me we can’t use it when we need it most. My men died to get it for you. It’s your fucking bomb. What did you think we’d use it for, a toaster? And just how bad did you think things would have to get before we’d need to use it?”
“It was intended as a deterrent.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. You didn’t realize it was loaded. It was just there to scare burglars.”
“This is precisely the kind of extreme scenario we envisaged using the Hammer for,” Prescott said, ignoring the spat. “If you can think of a more extreme one, Professor, do say.”
“This means destroying most of our civilization to save a fraction of it—if we save any of it at all.” Fenix started fiddling with his pen, turning it over between his fingers like he was tightening a bolt. “And what will we be left with? That level of destruction has two phases—what it kills immediately, and what it kills for months or years afterward by debris thrown into the atmosphere, by chemicals released by combustion into water tables and—”
“Professor, do you have an alternative? That’s not rhetorical. You’ve been a Gear. Do you disagree with the military assessment?”
“Not substantially.”
“Then is there anything we can do differently, other than wait to be picked off? If you have anything at all to suggest, any avenue we haven’t explored, then I urge you to say so now.”
The argument took Hoffman back three years, to when he’d clashed with Fenix over who needed to die to seize the Hammer technology from the Union of Independent Republics. Fenix couldn’t stomach the need to kill enemy weapons scientists. He was great at saying what was wrong, what was immoral, but he was shit at making the hard call between ugly and uglier. And those were usually the only choices in war.
Prescott was still waiting.
Fenix looked as if he was going to say something, then shook his head. It took a few more moments for him to answer. Prescott didn’t hurry him.
“I can’t think of anything else that will stop them in the time we have,” Fenix said eventually. “The incursions have gone too far. If we’d had more time … there could have been other ways we might have stopped them.”
“Let me be clear. There might be alternatives? Can you develop those in the weeks we have left?”
“No.” Fenix looked defocused again for a moment, anguished, probably crunching numbers in his head and unable to make them add up. “No. We’ve run out of time. It’s all too late.”
Prescott’s gaze flickered for a moment. “Thank you, Professor.”
“But we can’t accommodate everyone who wants to evacuate, even if they can reach Ephyra in time. The city can’t absorb the global population. Not even with millions already dead.”
“I know,” Prescott said. “It’s brutal. I accept that it’s the illusion of compassion. But either we save who we can, what we can, and preserve humankind, or we do the equitable thing and let everyone share extinction. It’s my call. We’re taking back Sera, starting now.”
“Kill it to save it.” Fenix shook his head. “And what the hell do you think our society will become?”
“A human society that’s fit to survive,” said Prescott. He walked over to the inlaid desk that had been used by every COG chairman for nearly eighty years and laid some sheets of paper on it as if he was going to make notes. “I’m taking full personal responsibility. You don’t need to. You’re only following orders. Milon, you don’t have to take any further part in this. Thank you for your counsel.”
The Attorney General rose slowly, as if his back hurt him, and walked to the door. He looked even older than he had when he’d come in. “I’ll prepare the legal instrument, sir. After all, what you’re doing is… constitutional, and I have no grounds to refuse.”
“This remains strictly confidential, Milon. Within this room.”
“I took that as a given, sir.”
The door closed behind Audley, and there was a moment’s silence punctuated by the distant whoomp-whoomp of artillery fire. Hoffman rarely noticed it. It was a permanent background noise now.
“I’m not just following orders, Chairman,” said Salaman. “Either I’m with you or I have to quit this post. What about you, Victor?”
“There’s nothing else I can offer, General.”
Hoffman tried to freeze the moment to examine why he was agreeing to it—not that opposing it would make any difference. It was lawful, and he had agreed to involvement. Was he being selfish? Ephyra first—we’re all right, screw the rest of you. Maybe he was just resigned to the inevitable. “Maybe we should have thought about concentrating on asset denial earlier, before the grubs got a foothold, and when we had more time to evacuate people.”
Hindsight was a wonderful thing. Fenix stared at him as if he was a pile of shit.
“We’d still have been killing people,” Fenix said quietly. He placed his briefcase on the table and unlocked it, rummaging around inside. “Our own people. And the numbers don’t change that.”
“Keys, gentlemen,” said Prescott. He opened a desk drawer and took out a small socket-shaped metal cap. “General?”
Salaman reached inside the collar of his shirt and eased out his COG-tag. His Hammer command key was on the same chain.
It was all very low-tech and banal, this global destruction business. Hoffman fished his key out of his pants pocket, unclipped the chain, and held it up. His front door keys were next to it.
“I never knew,” Fenix said, staring at Hoffman’s hand.
Hoffman hadn’t realized that Fenix didn’t know who held the third command key to activate the weapon. “It goes with the DSF job. Don’t take it personally.”
“Professor, do you understand now why I wanted to be reassured this was legal?” Prescott was still very calm, all business, not bad at all for a brand-new chairman whose first big headline was going to be WORLD ENDS TODAY. “I wouldn’t ask you to be complicit in an unlawful act. I now need your best estimate of how hard we can strike and how far. General Salaman will keep you apprised of Locust movement so that we make every Hammer strike count. Within the next three weeks, I want a window of three to four days when we have the Hammer ready to deploy, and when I can announce the recall to Ephyra. Of course, if you object, I’ll have to co-opt one of your staff.”
“The Hammer is my responsibility,” Fenix said. “I wouldn’t pass the buck to anyone else.”
Prescott sat down at his desk and began writing. “Thank you, gentlemen. I’ll inform the Cabinet of my decision a short time before I make the public announcement to invoke martial law and declare Ephyra a sanctuary zone. How short depends on how we assess the risk of information leaking and starting a panic. The evacuation period starts from then. I favor three days, unless anyone has a compelling practical argument otherwise. But this has to be fast.”
Three, five, ten—it didn’t make much difference. There wasn’t enough room for the whole world.
“Three it is, sir,” said Salaman.
“A panic,” Fenix repeated quietly. “What do you think we already have?”
“I don’t know quite how you work, Professor.” Prescott just kept going. “Can you keep this under wraps at your end, or will you have staff who need to be briefed?”
Fenix’s shoulders sagged. “I can do it on my own. Like I said—this is my responsibility.”
/> Fenix grabbed his briefcase and walked out. Hoffman headed for the side exit with Salaman, and found that his hands were shaking.
“Shit,” Salaman said. “I’m going to grab a drink.”
“I miss my NCO days,” said Hoffman. “See you in the morning.”
Hoffman walked back to the apartment, rehearsing how and when he would tell Margaret that he’d just put his name to the destruction of almost every city on Sera, and most of its citizens.
Yes, he missed being a sergeant.
CHAPTER 4
We only achieve unity through order.
(NASSAR EMBRY, ALLFATHER PRIME, FOUNDER OF THE COALITION OF ORDERED GOVERNMENTS.)
PORT FARRALL, TYRUS, ONE WEEK AFTER THE FLOODING OF JACINTO, 14 A.E.
“Your vehicle camo sucks,” Baird said, puffing clouds into the freezing air. “Saw you coming way off.”
Bernie brought the battered ’Dill to a halt at the outer checkpoint. “Aren’t you going to ask me how I got them on the roof?” She jumped out to admire the haul of deer carcasses strapped to the hatch surfaces and panniers of the APC. “Four. That’s a lot of meat, Blondie. And leather. If you’re a good boy, I’ll teach you how to dress it.”
“You’re loving this, aren’t you?”
“You want to live on dry rations and a roast rat for special occasions? Come on, mount up.”
Bernie drove into the reclaimed city with mixed feelings. Her whole reason for struggling across Sera to reach Jacinto was to get rid of the grubs, to get her world back before she was too old or too dead to do it. Now that the grubs were mostly gone, she wasn’t sure what would fill that space.
For the meantime, being uniquely useful would do. She could survive off the land in any terrain, any climate, and teach others to do the same. That knowledge was now vital in the literal sense of the word. It was central to staying alive.
But one week after the destruction of Jacinto, the reality of what they’d left behind—squalid as it was—was really starting to bite hard.
“How many dead today?” she asked.
“You got some recipes?”
“Don’t even joke about that, Blondie.”
“Forty-three,” Baird said. “Hypothermia. Elderly. Make sure you wear your cat-fur booties, Granny.”
Dr. Hayman posted the list at CIC daily. The winter was bitter and the accommodations grim, despite the engineers doing their best to bring the most habitable part of Port Farrall back to life. It was all about timing. A different season and this would have been a little easier. They could have grown crops. But at this time of year, all they had was the emergency rations shipped out with the convoy and whatever they could forage.
As Bernie drove slowly through the streets, she spotted four civilians carrying a plastic sheet between them like a battlefield litter. Another dead body? No, whatever was in it was throwing reflections onto the walls. When the ’Dill passed, she could see it was bulging with fish, so brilliantly silver that they sparkled in the sun.
“The boom-and-bust cycle of nature,” she said.
“You Islanders talk some mystic shit.”
“Not mystic, Blondie. Humans die off, so other animal populations boom. Especially marine life.”
“Handy.”
“In a pie. Lovely.” At least there’d be a reliable source of fat and protein around, even if the diet got monotonous. “You know, I’d rather be on the ships. Got to be warmer and more comfortable.”
“Put me down for that yacht Cole spotted.”
Gears patrolled the streets. Civilians were combing the place looking for missing friends and relatives. They’d reached the stage where the shock of displacement was beginning to wear off and they were working out just how wrecked their lives were. People with nothing to do but wait for food and watch others die were a recipe for unrest.
Even Jacinto’s citizens had limits to their stoicism. “Do we even have a head count yet?”
Baird shrugged. “No, stragglers are still arriving. Cole says some civvies have left to see if the local Stranded settlements will take them in.”
“Ungrateful tossers. Anyway, shouldn’t we be assimilating the Stranded if this is all that’s left of us?”
“Stranded aren’t us, Granny.”
They were the savages beyond the wire, and it had nothing to do with hygiene. “Hang on, what about the Operation Lifeboat guys?”
“Come on. You don’t like Stranded either.” Baird paused a beat. “You’re lost, aren’t you?”
“I know where I am, dickhead.”
Everything bounced off Baird. He took it in the same way that he dished it out. “I meant that now the fighting’s stopped, you don’t know what to do except harass the local wildlife.”
“Haven’t noticed you happily taking up knitting, either.”
“I haven’t gone this long without a firefight in fifteen years. I don’t know what comes next.”
When Baird wasn’t being mouthy or smug, he could say things that brought her up short. Life had changed out of all recognition again, just as it did on E-Day, but the COG had been at war—one way or another—for the best part of ninety years. Peace was unknown territory.
Bernie inhaled discreetly. Baird smelled faintly of phenol. “You going on a date? Where’d you get the disinfectant?”
“Dr. Hayman’s having the whole place sprayed. Infection control.”
Gears had banged out of Jacinto in just the armor and kit they stood up in, no personal effects, or even a change of pants for some. “I’ll go scavenging later.”
“You mean robbing civvies.”
“I mean seeking redistribution of assets for the good of the wider community.”
“Yeah. Right.”
Civvies had been given enough warning of the evacuation to take grab bags. They’d been drilled to keep a bag of essentials by the door, ready to run, because they’d been used to moving from one part of Ephyra to another each time the grubs infiltrated. So now civvies had stuff, and Gears mostly didn’t. It was something of a role reversal.
“I meant bartering a few steaks for clothing, razors, whatever,” Bernie said.
“Prescott says we’ll get the basics we need.”
“Yeah, but he can’t pull supplies out of his arse, and that means taking stuff off civvies. They used to resent us for getting bigger food rations. We don’t need all that aggro fermenting again now. Hearts-and-minds works wonders, Blondie.”
As the ’Dill wound its way through the streets, Gears stood out like a separate species even in borrowed overalls—tall, muscular, well fed. The civvies were stick-thin. Anyone between the two extremes was probably in a noncombat role, like the sappers and drivers, fed a little less generously than the frontline.
We’re getting just like the frigging grubs. Splitting into different types.
“You’re going to butcher all this shit in the open, right?” Baird said. “Entrails. Gross.”
“See it as sausages. Nothing gets wasted.”
Hoffman had set up the new HQ and barracks in an abandoned boarding school, confined to the ground floor until the engineers could carry out repairs to the upper floors. Bernie drove the ’Dill into what had once been the staff car park and jumped out to unload with Baird. Gears wandered out to watch as she managed to drape the smallest animal across her shoulders and tottered toward the entrance with it. She could hear Cole’s bellowing laugh even before he burst through the main doors.
“Shit, baby, you never gonna get that through the cat flap.” He held out his arms. “Let the Cole Train take your burden.”
“You think it’s too dressy as a collar? Maybe if I took off the hooves.”
Cole lifted the carcass as if it was weightless. “I’m glad you’re givin’ up eating kitties, Boomer Lady. They got worms.”
Dom stood outside the entrance, leaning on a shovel where he’d been clearing snow. The poor little bastard was trying hard to look as if nothing in particular had happened to him. Bernie was still trying to gaug
e the right time to get him to talk, but Dom would probably pick his own moment. He certainly had over Carlos’s death.
“I’ll give you a hand, Cole,” Dom said. “I’ve never had venison. What’s it like?”
Baird lowered another carcass from the ’Dill’s roof, letting Dom take up the slack. “You’ll hate it. I’ll have your share. Hey, I want the antlers for the mess wall.”
They were all trying hard—even Baird. Delta had closed ranks around Dom, looking out for him and making sure he wasn’t left on his own. Bernie didn’t think that a man who could live with losing his kids and parents was a suicide risk now, but then he hadn’t had to blow their brains out himself, so maybe caution was a good idea. She left them to unload and headed for CIC—an old laundry—to clear things with Hoffman, finding herself stepping over Gears dismantling their armor plates down to the components to scrub them. Some were boiling shirts and pants in an open vat of soapy water, standing around in an assortment of borrowed work clothes.
Combat was a smelly business. This was the first real break they’d had to get the stench of grubs, blood, and sweat out of their kit. The scent of damp decay—wood, brick, mold—still lingered under the assault of newer, cleaner odors.
And shit, it was cold in here.
Hoffman was leaning over a paper chart with Anya and the EM chief when Bernie walked in. They seemed to be checking routes between the docks and the inhabited part of the city. Nobody had debarked from the larger vessels in the evacuation fleet yet. Bernie wasn’t the only one who thought they were a better place to be.
“Mataki,” Hoffman said, glancing up for a moment, “I want you to set up daily bushcraft classes for the civvies. Is there anything practical they can do in the field?”
“Berries and traps, sir. I don’t recommend the river. Civvies and thin ice don’t mix.”
“And see Parry about supply recon teams. One of his men says there’s a lot of recoverables on the south side of the city—machinery, raw materials.”
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