And yet we fried Sera to stop the Locust. We sank Jacinto. Where do we draw the line? Who’s worth sacrificing, and why? Why only good people, or the anonymous innocent ones? Why not those shit-bags?
She didn’t have an answer.
“See, there’s the sheep farm,” Jonty said. It was all bucolic peace down there, green and white and leafy, a world away from Jacinto and what was in her mind right then. “Up in town, they do like their meat.”
“Shit,” Marcus said to himself.
The comment was too quiet for the mike, but Bernie could lip-read that easily enough. The thought of lavish portions of roast meat was almost shocking. Rationing might finally be over before too long. Bernie let herself feel a little excited.
“So what do you take as barter?” she asked.
“Labor. Entertainment. Beer. Food I don’t grow or raise.”
She could see why people on Vectes had no idea how desperate the rest of humanity had become. Is that their fault or ours? Could we have shipped out here sooner? It was all too easy to tie yourself in knots with the if-only and what-if. Everyone did the best they could with the situation they were saddled with on the day.
“Sorotki, can you take us over the Stranded?” Marcus said. “Come in from the highland side if you can.”
“Ah, the old gunship-rising-over-the-horizon trick,” Sorotki said. “Always a good laxative. And are you sure you want to do it with a civilian passenger embarked?”
Marcus turned to Jonty. “Promise me you won’t use that shotgun, whatever happens.”
“Not if it’s my life on the line.”
Marcus shifted the Lancer on his lap. “It won’t come to that.”
“Leave it to us, Jonty,” Bernie said.
“No us, Mataki.” Marcus checked his watch. “You stay well back this time. I’m giving them Prescott’s amnesty offer and telling them where to pick up their dead. After that, they can go to hell. Jonty, if there’s any asshole you can ID as a serious criminal, other than just antisocial, you let me know.”
Jonty didn’t look too pleased with that. “What goddamn amnesty?”
“Standard procedure,” Marcus said. “Chairman’s orders. We remind them they can join the human race, ask them to hand over their criminals, and the rest is up to them. We’re short of humans these days.”
“You won’t find any down there.”
“They never accept anyway.”
“And then what? You kick ’em off the island? You don’t know, do you?”
“Not my call,” Marcus said.
Mitchell manned the gun as Sorotki took the Raven over the cliffs to set down a hundred meters from the Stranded camp. Bernie knew the Stranded here were afraid, all right. It wasn’t just the COG showing up in force and ruining their arrangement. It was the first time they’d realized she was a Gear. They knew retribution was coming—and if not from her, then from the COG itself.
“You wait here until I call you,” Marcus told Jonty, and jumped out.
“What makes you think they won’t kill you?” Jonty called.
“They’ve seen what one squad can do. So they can work out how a whole army would ruin their day.”
“Leave your mike on,” Bernie said. “I want to hear.”
She couldn’t see enough from this distance. Marcus walked slowly to the beachfront shacks and stood there waiting. Eventually a couple of men came out cradling rifles and walked toward him, stopping about five meters away.
“Where’s Massy?” Marcus asked.
“Not here. But you’d know that, seeing as you killed him.”
“Got a message for you from Chairman Prescott, then. If you haven’t committed a capital crime, then he’s offering you amnesty. Citizenship. Just front up at the gates of the naval base a week from today, oh-nine-hundred hours.”
“Asshole,” said the taller man of the two. “Don’t try to play fucking civilized with us.”
Marcus had a habit of saying what he had to say regardless of the responses he was getting. It made him seem robotic and implacable. The overall effect was unsettling. “And the locals get to look you over and identify the criminal element.”
“Followed by a fair trial, yeah?”
“You get the same treatment as a citizen. If any of them commit capital crimes, they’re in deep shit, too. Fair’s fair.”
“And how are you planning to enforce this crap?”
“The navy, a couple of brigades of Gears, and the civilian population of Jacinto are going to be here in a couple of days,” Marcus said. He seemed to be working through a list, not really expecting any dialogue, but determined to do it by the book anyway. “Whatever you’ve got going here is over. How you deal with that is your problem. You can collect your casualties from last night’s shit on the southern approach road, about two klicks out. Now, anything you want to say to me?”
“Yeah. Fuck off.”
“Fair enough.” Marcus took a couple of steps backward. “And the guy who recognized Sergeant Mataki better have a good explanation for why and how next time I see him.”
“Oh, there’s going to be a next time?”
“Believe it. Where’s the blue boat?”
“Why can’t you bastards just let us live?”
“Living’s fine. It’s looting and violence we don’t like.”
“Where the hell are we going to go? There’s nowhere left.”
“Yeah, we found that out, too.” Marcus shrugged and turned to walk back to the Raven. “Try the other islands.”
Sorotki turned over the Raven’s engine. “That was a waste of fuel. Home, Jonty?”
“Only if you’re not going to let me shoot those two.”
Marcus repeated the litany. “Can you identify them as murderers, rapists, traitors, arsonists, looters, profiteers, or sex offenders?”
“You missed theft of war materiel,” Sorotki said.
Jonty pondered a mental list of crimes, frowning. “I don’t think so.”
“Then I’m not,” Marcus said. He turned to Bernie. “I suppose you’ve identified a good observation point.”
She had. It was habit. She couldn’t look at a situation without working out the best place to keep watch and get the drop on someone. “Nice OP on the ridge as we flew in.”
“Okay, we wait there and see who we can see. Give Jonty the binoculars, and he can ID some of them. Take us out of hearing range, Sorotki.”
Sorotki took the Raven a kilometer inland and left them to walk back on the observation point. By the time they reached the ridge, life in the Stranded settlement had reverted to normal and the residents were wandering around outside. Bernie settled down to scope through the faces.
“Damn.” Jonty lowered the binoculars. “There’s one I shot. I thought he was dead when they carried him off.”
“You need a Longshot,” Bernie said. “Reloading’s a pain in the arse, but it’ll stop a truck.”
She thought she recognized some faces. The Stranded were a small community anyway, but in the islands, the toughest individuals were the most mobile, island-hopping in small boats, keeping some sort of loose organization going like landed gentry visiting the peasants’ farms. Some folks turned up everywhere, not that there was much of anywhere left—
Yes. They did.
Her scalp tightened as realization dawned. It took her a while to be certain, and in the end it was the tosser’s walk that confirmed it. Gait was one of the things you couldn’t cover up with a beard or change of hair color—not that this one appeared to feel he even needed to.
It was him. The one that got away. Until now.
He was younger than she’d remembered, but she did remember. Some things were hard to forget. But however hard she’d tried to put it to one side of her mind so that she could go on living, she knew she didn’t want to forget enough to forgo revenge.
“Well, fuck,” she said, surprised that she found herself smiling instead of throwing up. “Now I’ve got the full set.”
Marc
us put his hand out and pressed down slowly on the barrel of her Longshot.
“Let’s talk,” he said.
PELRUAN, LATE AFTERNOON.
Dom knew it would happen sooner or later, but it still hurt when it did.
As he walked through the streets toward the bar, he saw Maria.
She was in a group of men and women clustered around a small truck, checking off wooden crates of something that might have been food—butter, cheese, whatever, but something in identical glass pots. For two seconds, she was solid and vivid enough to stop him in his tracks and make his stomach flip over. Every detail froze sharply for a moment, just to hurt him more; he could even see her necklace and her checked skirt.
It isn’t real. This kind of shit happens.
Was it really her that I shot? Couldn’t it have been someone else?
But he had her necklace, and she’d been wearing the skirt when he found her. The more he stared in that slow-motion moment, the less she was there, and he found himself looking at a dark-haired woman who was actually nothing like her.
Bereaved people saw the dead, and they weren’t ghosts. Dr. Hayman had told him it would probably happen to him, too, and then it would stop after a while. For a woman who spat acid, she’d been almost patient when he wanted to ask her questions about Maria. He described what Maria had been like when he found her; Doc Hayman had nodded and said words like ataxia, dystonia, nystagmus, bradykinesia, ocular toxin deposition, and by the way, did he realize what those scars on her scalp were? Dom didn’t have the technical words, but yes, he knew all too fucking well that Maria was already long dead when she stumbled toward him. Doc Hayman said that she couldn’t cure any of those things, and what was left of Maria would have been a long time dying if she’d tried.
I’m not allowed to shoot patients. I’d be a better doctor if I did.
Yeah, Hayman was a tough bitch. But she was honest, and that sometimes did folks more favors than kindness. Dom found himself hearing her voice whenever he started to waver and berate himself.
“What are you staring at?” the not-Maria woman demanded.
“Sorry.” Dom didn’t actually feel embarrassed at all. “You reminded me of my dead wife.”
Yeah, honesty really worked best, most of the time.
He found Marcus and Bernie sitting in the bar with Hoffman, spaced around a circular table like they were waiting to start a seance. Dom could smell the residue of an argument. Of all of them, Hoffman looked the most pissed off.
“Hey, I bartered cleaning the kitchen for some beers on the tab.” Dom tried hard to lighten the mood. “Anyone drinking?”
“I’ll take a rain check,” Hoffman said. “I intend to claim it, Santiago. But it’s time I prepared the goddamn carpet of strewn rose petals for the Chairman’s arrival.” He stood and picked up his cap. “I want to talk to you before I head back, Mataki.”
Dom collected beers from the wooden trestle counter and tried to work out what had gone on. Back at the table, Marcus and Bernie looked grim.
She raised her glass. “The Unvanquished.”
Dom followed suit. “You think they’ll reinstate the old regiments one day?”
“Whether they do or not, I’ll always be Two-Six RTI, and that’s all there is to it.”
Marcus stared at his beer for a while and didn’t join in the sentimentality. After a few moments, though, he lifted the glass, focused on it for far longer than it took to line it up, and took a pull.
“We found our third rapist,” he said.
Dom assumed the obvious. Hoffman was edgy because Bernie had done something that he now had to smooth over. “Oh. With the scumbags here, yeah?”
“It’s a shrinking pond.”
Dom waited, but no explanation followed. “Are you going to tell me?”
“We’re debating whether me slicing his balls off and feeding them to him would bring about the final collapse of human civilization,” Bernie said. “Eh, Marcus?”
Dom didn’t get it. “What’s the problem?” The guy had committed a crime that carried the death penalty in Jacinto, and Bernie could ID him. Maybe she didn’t want a trial. She seemed more embarrassed than traumatized about the whole thing, for whatever reason. “Haul the asshole in. Shit, do we even need a trial?”
Marcus just deepened his frown. “Let’s save this for later.”
“You still believe in legal systems after what happened to you?” Dom asked. Marcus was still a Fenix, all let’s-not-talk-about-it and heavy silences. “Death sentence? Remember that?”
“I was guilty,” Marcus said.
Dom would have carried on, but he could see Bernie squirming. He didn’t want to make things any worse for her. The past was going to take a long time to shut up and leave them alone, all of them.
“You want to talk about a nice roast leg of lamb?” she asked. “We made friends with a farmer today.”
Food was always a good topic for distraction. Nobody could possibly get upset about it. Dom couldn’t recall the last time he ate lamb, and was debating the merits of a proper steak when the door opened and every head in the bar turned.
Dizzy Wallin walked in with his daughters, and—automatically, not really thinking too hard about it—Dom greeted them with a nod. So did Marcus and Bernie.
“Well, ain’t this nice,” Dizzy said, ushering his daughters to the table. “Can’t remember the last time I saw anywhere peaceful.”
Dizzy wasn’t the most fastidious of men—he usually stank of sweat and booze—but he’d done his best to tidy up today, beard combed and nonregulation hat brushed clean. Dom wondered how long he’d keep that up. Being back with his kids seemed to have made a new man of him for the time being, but he still had that distinctive odor of a heavy drinker, a faint methanol smell that soap didn’t remove. And no amount of armor would make him look like a military man.
Marcus looked him over and nodded. “So you’re the advance party?”
“Flown in special to get them old rigs in the dockyard going,” Dizzy said. “I got the magic touch. Betty’s gonna be jealous.”
Betty was his battered grindlift rig. “She’ll understand,” Dom said. “A rig in every port, right?”
Bernie moved chairs around so that the two girls—Teresa and Maralin—could sit down. They were twins, maybe sixteen at most, with that numb, scared look that said they’d been bounced from place to place and didn’t know what safe meant. Dom could imagine the kind of life they led in the Stranded shanties after their dad was conscripted. It brought home to Dom how damned hungry they must have been for Dizzy to enlist just to guarantee food for them. They looked like nice kids—clean and tidy, their long reddish hair pulled back tight in ponytails. At least they could make a new start now.
“I’ll get the beer,” Dom said. “Juice for the ladies.”
Ellen, the woman who ran the bar—and who’d been sweetness and light to Dom earlier—just lowered her chin and looked torn between annoyance and embarrassment.
“Another beer, please,” Dom said. “And have you got anything without alcohol?”
“You can’t bring them in here, Dom.”
He thought she meant Dizzy’s daughters. They were too young to buy a beer in Jacinto, that was for sure, but he didn’t think folks would be that strict out here. “Hey, I’m sorry, I forgot the age thing.”
“It’s not that. You know the rules for their kind.”
“What kind?” Dom felt his throat tighten. “Gears?”
“You know what I mean. Stranded.” She lowered her voice. “Look, I know he’s in uniform, but… we can see what he is. They’re going to have to leave, him and the girls, before we get trouble. He’s lucky nobody shot him as soon as he got into town.”
The bar was one single low-ceilinged space, more like a sprawling living room than a bar, without one glass or chair that matched another. Dom realized he wasn’t having a private conversation. The whole bar was watching and listening.
“He’s not Stranded,” Dom
said. “He’s a Gear, just like me. And if he’s a Gear, then his kids are Gear’s kids.”
Silence was a strange thing. It wasn’t just an absence of noise. It was unnatural and frozen—tensed muscles, held breaths, spit unswallowed. Dom turned to check what was going to come crashing down on him. The room just had that feeling. It wasn’t exactly an ugly crowd, not like some of the bars he’d ended up in and wished he hadn’t, but it reeked of hatred.
But it’s only Dizzy. He’s a great guy. He’s one of us. What the hell’s going on?
Dizzy bowed his head for a moment. “We didn’t plan on staying. Come on, sweeties, let’s go. Got work to do.”
“This man saved my ass.” Marcus put his hand on Dizzy’s forearm and pinned him where he sat. “If you’re attacked by Stranded again, he’ll save yours.”
Bernie leaned back in her seat. “Yeah, we’re all Gears. If he’s not welcome, we’re not welcome.”
Dom waited for someone to make a move. Nobody did. In a way, he would have felt better if they’d just thrown a few chairs and swung punches, because that was easy, honest, simple. Instead, they just looked, and the looks on their faces said that they didn’t like Gears much, either. Great idea to remind them, Bernie. This was their island. They hadn’t a clue what had gone on over on the mainland, but whatever it was, they didn’t want any of that shit messing up their nice tidy lives. It was like they couldn’t connect the pieces of the world and understand that they couldn’t opt out of it.
A few grubs would have straightened you out, assholes. You really need to understand what it’s been like out there.
“Okay, that was a beer and two juices, yeah?” Dom abandoned the goodwill of barter and slapped his remaining bills on the counter. “That’s still legal tender. It’ll buy you something useful at any COG base.”
Ellen didn’t say anything more, but she got him his drinks and took the money. Regimental honor had been satisfied. It probably didn’t make Dizzy and his daughters feel any better, but Dom knew. He met Marcus’s eyes, then Bernie’s, and it was what Baird called a primal moment. The Gears bond was unbreakable. And that included Dizzy. It was the indefinable tribalism that held an army together under fire when any sane man would have been running for his life, and it was as powerful as any emotion Dom had ever known. His heart had been broken so often by now that he wasn’t sure what it felt like to be his old self, but he knew that heady bond, and it gave him hope.
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