CHAPTER 15
Extent of contaminated zones and stalk ingress at 0001/G/12/15
NEW STALK INCURSIONS since 0001/G/11: 9
POLYPS: Not detected.
BEDROCK DISTRIBUTION: Sedimentary: 3. Metamorphic: 0. Igneous: 6
Current SOUTHERN extent of CZ: 12 km approx. northeast of New Jacinto, grids Delta 6/Echo 6. Other CZs by grid: see Appendix 5. Rate of spread: variable, slowing. Last 26 hours: 5cm approx. per hour.
Action: Four-hour monitoring to continue. Evacuation contingency team to remain on one-hour alert. (Prepared by: Major G. Gettner and R. Sharle, 12th day of Gale, 15 A.E.)
NEW JACINTO, VECTES: PRESENT DAY—GALE, 15 A.E.
“Boomer Lady, what you doin’?” Cole asked.
“It’s monster bait,” Baird said. “She’s been watching too many movies.”
Bernie was hammering a big wooden post with a tethering ring into the patch of grass between the Gorasni camp and the walls of the naval base. She straightened up and shielded her eyes against the sun to look at Baird. A large brown cow was chewing thoughtfully, watching Bernie.
“We’re going out to find Edlar’s missing livestock,” Bernie said. “We need every cow we can get. Can’t let him go looking for them with polyps about.”
A Packhorse was parked nearby. Mac the mutt had his head hanging over the tailgate, looking bored, and Alex Brand sat cross-legged on the hood, smoking. She waved to Baird with her free hand and slowly turned it to extend her middle finger.
“Yeah, cows, I can see that,” Baird said, turning to drop his pants and bend over in Alex’s direction.
Cole gave him a look as he straightened up. “Damon baby, you realize Anya’s sittin’ in the Pack, don’t ya?”
“Oh fuck…”
“And Sam’s there too.”
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
Bernie was laughing her ass off. “Blondie, you’re supposed to drop your boxers as well, you dickhead. Never mind. They’re clean, and that’s all that matters.”
“Interesting choice of fabric for a boy,” Sam called.
“Yeah, princess, very individual.” Alex swung her legs off the hood and leered at him before stubbing out her smoke and getting back in the Packhorse.
“Ladies’ only patrol, Bernie?” Cole asked. “Man, my momma warned me to stay away from girls in gangs.”
“Don’t worry, it’s not a feminist statement.” Bernie finished hammering in the stake and tied one end of the cow’s tether to it. “This is Rose, by the way. She’s a seismologist.”
“Oh, I get it.” Cole patted Rose warily. Baird kept well away from the animal’s rear, which struck him as both lethal and messy. “She goes crazy when she feels stalks comin’ up somewhere, yeah? A kind of early warning system with horns.”
“I could make you a seismometer, Granny,” Baird said. “All you had to do was ask.”
“Well, yes, but cows don’t need checking for readings.” Bernie climbed into the Packhorse and started it. “And you can’t milk a seismometer. Now you boys behave yourselves while we’re gone, okay? No fighting.”
“Yes, Granny. Interesting plaits, by the way. Looks classy with the dead cat boots.”
Bernie winked and the Packhorse rumbled off down the track. Baird watched it go. Mac gazed at him from the back of the vehicle with a mute plea to be saved from the tyranny of harpies.
“Can’t wait to see Bernie smack Alex frigging Brand into line,” Baird said, looking around for the Gorasni fuel tanker. “She won’t take any of that I’m-a-sergeant-too shit from her. Ah, here comes our ride.”
The tanker rumbled out of the Gorasni compound and slowed to a halt beside Baird. Eugen stuck his head out the driver’s door.
“Hey, Mr. Cole Train! You coming to teach our kids thrashball?”
Cole climbed up the metal ladder to the top of the tanker and gave Baird a hand up. “Yeah, lookin’ forward to it. ’Bout time I got back in the groove.”
“Trescu’s boy’s very excited. It’s good of you.”
“Hey, no problem, baby. I love doin’ it. Long as the little ones don’t show me up by runnin’ rings ’round me…”
“I take good care not to drop you when we go over bumps, hey? Then you’ll be fit to face them.”
The tanker set off with Baird and Cole riding shotgun on the top. It was a great view. For a few kilometers they could still see the Packhorse ahead of them, but then the tanker peeled off to the right and followed the road to the imulsion field, where the view went from picturesque to grim brown death.
Maybe it’d stop. And maybe it wouldn’t.
It was all about timing, Baird decided. If they were ever going to evacuate, they had to reach their destination in the summer to stand a chance of preparing for a shitty winter. Baird couldn’t think of anywhere he particularly wanted to go as long as it wasn’t as eye-wateringly cold as Port Farrall had been. If he had to starve to death, he’d do it somewhere warm.
“Ooh, that don’t look good.” Cole pointed left. The regular skyline of trees in full leaf was interrupted by a bald patch and the twisted shapes of new stalks. “Cole to Control… yeah, we’re on the drill site road, ’bout seven klicks southwest of the site. I can see a couple of stalks west of here… No, they must be five klicks away. You might wanna get a Raven to take a look at that. Cole out.” He hung on to the walkway rails as the tanker bounced a few times over ruts in the road. “Damn, all them stalks poppin’ up, and only one imulsion site.”
“Perverse bastards,” Baird said. “And they’re messing up my tidy theories.”
The contamination had created its own weirdly alien landscape. If you drove far enough into it, there was no sign that there was a green and living world beyond. It looked like the entire island was dead and brown. The smell of imulsion and a flat, bitter scent that Baird couldn’t identify just added to the feeling that this wasn’t Sera. The only reassurance that he was still in the world he knew was the sound of the imulsion drilling machinery drifting on the air.
For a few minutes the tanker trundled along hard-packed soil interspersed with stretches of rubble and trackway. Sitting on top of the vehicle’s walkway suddenly felt exposed and scary rather than bracing. Baird was relieved to see flashes of bright yellow through the dead trees before the tanker pulled into a clearing full of human beings and nodding derricks.
The site was operating twenty-six hours a day. The more imulsion they could extract, the more options they had. Without a stockpile, they’d be stuck here, and stuck on the ground.
Rossi and Lang passed Baird in their Packhorse as the patrols handed over. “It’s all quiet,” Rossi said. “Just a couple of glowies overnight. I hope you brought your knitting.” Then they were gone, a pair of fading taillights in the shade of the dead branches.
Baird climbed down from the top of the vehicle and watched Eugen couple the pipe from the reservoir tank. Stefan wandered over.
“What’s it like out here at night?” Baird asked. “Must be pretty scary.”
“Ah, we have lights, and so do the polyps, which is very considerate of them,” Stefan said dismissively. He took something out of his pocket and chewed on it. It looked like it was putting up a manly fight. “And we can run away when the polyps come back. Which was pretty damn hard to do on Emerald Spar, yes?”
“That was a great piece of engineering.” Baird still felt depressed when he thought about the platform crashing into the sea. They’d never be able to build anything like that again. “Glowie assholes.”
“You take care of our assholes for us, Baird. You are the champion asshole-slayer.” Stefan rummaged in the pocket of his imulsion-smeared overall and held out a chunk of whatever the hell he was eating. “You want some?”
It looked like jerky. The one food on the island that was instantly available in large quantities was the local wildlife. Like Bernie, the Gorasni shot anything that moved and then ate it, and that worried Baird.
“Tell me it’s not cat,” he said. “I’ve only just come to terms with Bernie and her many uses for domestic pets.”
Stefan roared with laughter. “It’s only seabird.”
“Thanks,” Baird said, appalled, and took it.
He did it because he didn’t want to offend Stefan. It was a watershed in his life. He hadn’t even been that bothered about offending Cole before he got to know him. Now he was about to eat something disgusting that would probably give him a tapeworm or liver flukes, just because he didn’t want to hurt someone’s feelings.
The Gorasni only knew him as the guy who could fix anything, the guy who’d been the first to fight off polyps and nearly got killed doing it. They didn’t know him as Baird the mouthy asshole and social misfit. Even Baird wasn’t sure which Baird he actually was these days.
He took a cautious bite out of the jerky. It was beyond awful. It tasted like a decomposing corpse that had been soaked in fish oil. Even as he chewed, he was keeping an eye out for somewhere he could hide and spit it out. Shit, he’d need to gargle with imulsion to get the taste of this out of his mouth. Stefan slapped him on the shoulder and went back to the derricks.
“What you eatin’?” Cole asked. “’Cause you look like you’re gonna chuck it up any minute.”
Baird tried to amble casually into the trees. His mouth was filling with saliva. “Don’t ask.”
I’m fucking insane. I’m poisoning myself to get approval. I never used to give a shit.
Baird managed to get about five trees deep in the woods before he was satisfied nobody could see him. For some reason he recalled the moment when the burning wreckage of Emerald Spar sank into the sea. That was when the war against the glowies really became personal for him. He’d thought it was all about the fantastic, impossible, brilliant structure lost to civilization forever, but now he accepted it was more about the men and women who’d lived a lonely and dangerous existence taking care of it.
Whoa, steady on. People? Me? Fuck that. No. Okay, maybe. Maybe I admire these guys. And that’s why I volunteered for the rig patrol here, then. Never realized that before. What’s happening to me?
Baird spat as quietly as he could. The lump of mummified seagull, barely changed by chewing, hit the trunk of a dead tree and slid down it. He could still taste it. He spat a few more times, but there wasn’t enough spit in his whole body to get rid of that and he found himself gagging. His radio crackled.
“Baird, where are ya?”
Cole was on the far side of the drilling compound, pacing the perimeter with his back to the row of derricks. Baird found himself doing a creep line search vertically, looking up into the branches then running his eyes down the trunks, scanning a section along the ground, then scanning up again. The one good thing about polyps, other than the satisfying way the fuckers exploded when you shot them, was their lights. In the gloom, they lit up like a fairground ride.
“I’m puking my ring,” he said. “No cracks in front of the Gorasni, okay? They mean well.”
“Goddamn, you’re growin’ a heart. Better go see Doc Hayman ’bout that.”
“Yeah, that sounds malignant to me.”
Baird bent over and braced his hands on his knees to try to work up more spit without throwing up and getting the dry heaves. He almost took a swig from his water bottle, but he was convinced that the oily dead-fish taste on his lips would contaminate it. Then movement caught his eye. He looked up slowly.
“Cole?”
“You hear anything, Baird?” he whispered.
“I don’t feel anything.” Baird shifted his weight from one foot to the other a few times to test for tremors. No; nothing, nothing at all. “You see anything?”
Cole was level with him now, a few meters away. He held up his hand for silence as he walked slowly between the trees with his Lancer raised. The sawing rhythm of the derricks and the steady putter of the generators didn’t stop, but the Gorasni chatter died away a voice at a time until nobody was talking. Baird followed Cole, going wide so they’d have overlapping arcs if they had to open fire.
Whatever it was, they’d have to take it down before it got near the drilling area. It was peppered with imulsion seeps, a bomb waiting to go off. They’d already had to fight a fire here once.
“I hear it,” Cole said. “But it sounds a hell of a lot bigger than polyps…”
He was about fifty meters into the woods now. Baird could hear it. Something big was crushing twigs, moving at a lumbering pace.
“Baird, what is it?” Stefan called.
“No idea. But stay back.”
“Eugen’s going to move the tanker, just in case.”
“Yeah. Great. Good idea. Do that.”
It sounded like a single creature. Baird made sure he could still see Cole and kept walking, casting around for movement. What the hell would be that big, out here?
Oh great. If the stalks made it here, maybe the grubs did too. We’ve got a Berserker on a day trip. Or a Brumak.
“Left,” Cole said suddenly. “Left, one hundred meters.”
Baird looked around, lost for a moment, but then he saw it: a white shape moving slowly between the dark trunks, something big and heavy. It wasn’t a Berserker.
“Okay, everybody relax,” Baird called, almost giddy with relief. “It’s the frigging prize bull that went AWOL when we evacuated the farm. He probably wants his dinner.”
Cole was still stalking it carefully. “Baby, you saw the horns on that sucker, didn’t ya? Well, I ain’t relaxing just yet. He’s a bad-tempered meat tank and he can stomp us into shit if we piss him off.”
“Well then, we can shoot the thing and claim self-defense,” Baird said. “I think we should do that anyway. I’ll have the rib eye.”
The animal wandered to the edge of the clearing. There was nothing for the bull to graze on, so maybe he’d heard humans and decided that they usually meant food was nearby. Baird could see the sweep of his horns now.
He was huge. Scary huge. He was panting like a steam engine.
“Baird, you know anything about cows and stuff?” Cole asked quietly.
“No, that’d be Bernie. Not me.”
“I mean, do they usually look like that? Like they got rabies?”
Baird suddenly saw what Cole meant and almost shat himself. The bull was drooling. Animals always seemed to be leaking something messy from one orifice or another, but this just wasn’t right. It had a faint yellow glow to it. The bull lowered his head and stared swinging it from side to side, making a mournful groaning sound.
“What’s the luminous stuff?” Stefan said. He was right behind Baird now with his shotgun aimed at the bull. “What is it, Baird? Is it what I think it is?”
No, the bull didn’t look well at all. He took a few steps forward. Now that he’d emerged from the trees, Baird could see his flanks heaving. There were reddish patches on his ass, suddenly conspicuous on that white hide.
“Oh, terrific.” The realization hit Baird more slowly than he expected. “He’s gone glowie. Look.”
“Come on, Baird. Do we shoot it now?”
“Stefan—listen to me. It’s fucking Lambent. I was right. I was goddamn right. This stuff is catching.”
“Yeah, you get a gold star for that, baby,” Cole said, circling around to the other side of the bull. “But we better persuade him to move along, ’cause if he’s a glowie, he’s a thousand-kilo bomb.”
Bulls chased things. Baird knew that much. Stefan and the other rig workers started backing away and Baird saw some of them pick up buckets and firefighting equipment. He had to get this thing away from the imulsion before he shot it.
“Okay,” Cole said. “I reckon I might be able to outrun him.”
“You’re insane. It’s a bull.”
“Somebody’s gotta move him.” Cole stepped in front of the bull and got his attention. Baird watched the animal’s eyes follow Cole, white-rimmed and panicky. “C’mon, fella. Come and see what the Cole Train got for ya.” Cole walked right across the bull’s eyeline. “See, he ain’t charging or anything. Polyps want to kill you as soon as they see you.”
“Great,” Baird said. “He’s a big friendly thousand-kilo bomb.”
The bull looked pretty sick, head down and panting, but as Cole walked into the trees and away from the clearing, he followed. Cole broke into a jog. The bull started to trot. Then Cole picked up speed. Yeah, bulls chased things. That much Baird knew.
“Whoo! Come on, let’s play chase!” Cole waved his arms. “Baird, you better be right behind ready to shoot this asshole…”
If it had been an open field, Cole wouldn’t have stood a chance. But he could zigzag between trunks and the huge bull wasn’t so good at that. Baird sprinted after them, trying to pick the moment when they were both far enough from the imulsion—and Cole had opened up enough of a gap— for him to open fire.
“Somebody follow me with a bucket,” Baird yelled. “Because there’ll be a fire to put out.”
Baird couldn’t keep an eye on everything. He was too busy looking for his shot, the one chance he might get to kill that thing before it got Cole. He heard people running behind him and the metallic clank of buckets. The crazy bull hunt was more than two hundred meters into the trees now, maybe a safe distance to drop the animal without the blast igniting the imulsion. He raised his Lancer.
Shit, either I stop and aim, or I spray the thing.
Cole was whooping but sounding less confident each time.
“Baird, you ready?”
“Ready.”
“I mean seriously ready?”
Baird had to fire now. He almost put a burst through the animal, but the bull suddenly changed direction and Cole was in Baird’s line of fire. He couldn’t do a damn thing.
“Do it, Baird!”
“Not yet—”
Then the bull wheeled right. Baird didn’t know what had distracted it, but it might have been the noise of the buckets. Eugen was running along with a couple of tin pails. Baird saw him hesitate and stumble a couple of paces over the tree roots. The bull stopped, swung around, and started trotting toward him.
“Shit, Eugen—get away!” Baird raised his rifle. “Just drop the buckets.”
Baird didn’t think an animal that big could accelerate so fast. It shaved past him and charged Eugen. Before Baird could open fire, the bull rammed into the Gorasni, head down, and caught him full in the chest.
The explosion wasn’t the Brumak-sized detonation Baird had expected but it blew Eugen meters into the air like a land mine. Cole and Baird ran forward into a rain of debris. It was already too late but Baird’s legs kept moving anyway. It was the dumbest thing; he could see the guy was fragged, completely fragged, but he still sprinted over to him and dropped onto his knees to try to stop the bleeding. Cole did, too. It took a couple of silent seconds before they looked at one another and the reality hit them. There was nowhere to even begin. Baird stared, trying to recognize what he was looking at. He’d seen this kind of shit a hundred times but now it felt like the first.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Oh, man…” Cole said.
Suddenly Stefan was a few meters away and Baird got to his feet. He tried to stop Stefan going to Eugen’s body but the man shoved him aside. Fire licked up one of the tree trunks.
“Oh God I’m sorry.” Baird couldn’t put this right. It upended him. “I’m sorry.”
“Somebody get a tarpaulin,” Stefan said. “Do it.”
They put out the fire with buckets of soil and then recovered Eugen. Baird’s lasting memory of that day would be that they did it in total silence; no yelling, no crying, nothing. They just carried him away, stony-faced, and set him down in the clearing. Baird looked at Cole.
“Goddamn,” Cole said. “Goddamn, that just ain’t fair.”
“I fucked up. It’s my fault.”
“Baird, I didn’t manage to get a shot in either. Nobody did.”
Baird went over to Stefan. The derricks were still pumping but nobody was keeping an eye on them. The dozen or so Gorasni stared at Eugen, now covered by someone’s coat, and still said nothing.
“We better shut down the pumps,” Baird said. He could hear Cole on the radio to Control. “Let’s move out.”
Stefan finally looked away from his friend’s body, tears streaming down his face. “I’ll take him back to his wife. But we carry on, or else it’s all for nothing.”
“You can’t. It’s getting too dangerous.”
“We will carry on.” Stefan grabbed Baird’s shoulder and almost shook him. “We carry on pumping imulsion because without it we will all die here.”
Cole walked up and gave Stefan a crushing hug, because Cole could do that kind of thing as easily as breathing. But Baird had no idea what to say. He longed for that same effortless way with people in trouble. No, he wasn’t a people person; he made damn sure he kept his distance from almost everyone. But he felt terrible about Eugen, and even worse watching the man’s buddies go back to the derricks in tears to carry on working because a bunch of strangers—a bunch of old enemies—needed them to.
As he waited for the Raven, he tried to remember when he’d last used the word Indies. Whenever it was, he knew he’d never use it again.
FIVE KILOMETERS SOUTH OF EDLAR FARM, NORTHERN VECTES.
Alex Brand sat down on a stile and watched Mac sniffing around in the grass, evidently unimpressed by his detective skills.
“Does he know what he’s looking for?” she asked.
Bernie stopped to inhale. On the other side of the pasture, Sam and Anya were kicking around in the grass, eyes down. At least those two seemed to be getting on well.
“Yeah,” Bernie said. “Shit. Fresh shit.”
“I hope he doesn’t roll in it, not if he’s coming back in the Packhorse.” Alex got up and ambled over to a cowpat. “This is the wrong vintage, is it?”
“It’s an old one.”
“So you had a ranch.” Alex took the remains of her cigar out of her sleeve and rummaged for her lighter. “Must have been nice. Can’t have been easy leaving that.”
“Easier than you think.” Bernie walked up and plucked the cigar out of Alex’s mouth before she could light it. “Sweetheart, it’s not just because I fucking hate seeing anyone smoking in uniform. It’s because I need to use my sense of smell when I’m tracking. Save it for later.”
She handed the stub back to Alex, who looked more surprised than annoyed. Bernie had always sworn she would never exploit the authority of age, but she did, and she also exploited all the stories that she knew had circulated about her since she’d rejoined the army. It just saved a lot of time. She was tired of explaining herself to strangers.
“Well, you learn something every day, Mataki,” Alex said, and parked the cigar in her sleeve again.
Mac came loping back to Bernie, wagging his tail and wearing his I’ve-been-a-clever-boy face. “You found something, Mac?” she asked. “Come on. Show Mum. What is it?”
He trotted off, pausing every few meters to make sure she was still behind him. She wondered just how docile that bull would be now that he was on the loose with his cows and probably remembering what his natural role in life was— defending his females. It’d be embarrassing if she couldn’t handle the animal when everyone expected her to work miracles with anything on four legs. The bag of cattle nuts rattled on her belt. Bribery would do the trick.
The radio interrupted her thoughts. “Baird to Mataki— you there, Grannie?”
“Mataki here.” Baird didn’t sound quite right. “Everything okay, my precious little ray of sunshine?”
“You need to watch your ass. We found the bull.”
“In fragments?”
“Intact and psychotic. He turned Lambent.”
It took a couple of seconds to sink in. “What do you mean, turned Lambent?”
“What does it sound like? He looked kind of rabid, his drool was luminous, and he exploded. Meets my criteria.”
“So we could be tracking glowie cows.” Bernie heard Alex sigh behind her. “Thanks for the heads-up. Now, what else is wrong?”
It came out in a small voice, not the cocky Baird at all. “Eugen’s dead. It got him.”
Baird was new to caring about people. He didn’t have anything to fall back on for strength except his indifference, and he didn’t sound as if it was working right then. She felt for him.
“I’m really sorry, Blondie. He was a good bloke. Are you and Cole okay?”
“No injuries.”
“You come down to the sergeant’s mess when I get back,” she said. It was easier to tell him than ask him, given his social skills. “We’ll have a beer. Talk it over. Mataki out.” She changed channels. “Mataki to Stroud. Ma’am, they’ve found the bull. It was Lambent, so we better assume the cows are too. One Gorasni’s been killed already.”
The conversation was on the open network now. Anya took a few seconds to come back to her. “Any reason why we shouldn’t go on?”
“None, ma’am. I’d rather kill every Lambent than take the risk of it spreading.”
“Agreed. Stroud out.”
Alex matched pace with Bernie, looking anxious. “Who bought it this time? Tell me it’s not Cole.”
“A Gorasni bloke,” Bernie said. “One of Baird’s mates.”
“Goddamn. You really are chummy with the little princess, then.”
Bernie bristled. She’d punched out Baird and said some pretty spiteful things to him in the past, but that was her privilege and they’d reached an understanding. Nobody outside the squad could say a word against him.
“I judge him by what he does, not what he says,” Bernie said stiffly. “You leave my boy alone.”
“No problem,” said Alex. “You’re more tolerant of dumb animals than I am.”
There was no love lost between her and Baird, then. Fine: she didn’t have to work with him these days. Bernie caught up with Mac next to a fine crop of cow dung still busy with flies. He looked up at her as if to swear blind that he wasn’t even thinking of rolling in the stuff.
“You’re a gentleman,” she said, slipping him more rabbit jerky before putting the leash back on him. “Okay, find ’em. Seek.”
Anya paused to peer at the dung before moving on. “Does that mean they’re not Lambent?”
“No idea,” Bernie said. “But Baird’s theory that it jumps the species barrier looks more plausible every time we meet a new glowie variety.”
“I’m not taking any chances, no matter how badly we need the meat and milk.”
“Fair enough.” Priorities had suddenly changed. It was more Lambent hunting than recovering livestock. “I still want to find out how cattle get infected. It can’t be simple contact, or else Mac would be Lambent by now.”
“And Prescott’s going to want samples. He can’t do a damn thing with them, but it’s easier than arguing that point with him.”
Bernie didn’t want to get sucked into the guessing games of what Prescott was up to. It was bad enough waking up in the night to find Hoffman pacing around and fretting about that bloody data disc. But it was hard not to ask more questions each day and become consumed by them.
“Did anyone know Eugen?” Bernie asked, remembering something that actually mattered.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “Was it him?”
“Sorry.”
“His poor bloody wife.”
No, the Gorasni really weren’t the enemy now, no matter how much history said they were. They’d fallen into that broad, borderless, vague nation called Us. Mac dragged Bernie for a kilometer through lush grass and nobody spoke for a long time.
“Over there.” Anya stopped and took out her field glasses. Bernie brought Mac to a halt. “Look.”
A few sheep that had evaded the roundup were grazing on the short grass along the banks of a stream. But when Bernie looked harder, there was something else with them: a pure white cow. For a moment she was more worried about failing eyesight than Lambent.
“Please God, no exploding sheep,” Alex said. “I don’t want a surreal death.”
“I’m not planning on any kind of death.” Bernie found it revealing that Gears would happily take on grubs and glowies but were wary of farm animals. That was city kids for you. She thought again of a seventeen-year-old Dom and the look on his face when he had to kill a chicken in survival training. “Ma’am, I’ll go and check them first. You wait here in case too many strange humans spook them. We don’t want to end up chasing them all over the island.”
“Isn’t Mac going to scare them?” Sam asked.
“He’s a local dog. He’s used to livestock and they’re probably used to him.”
Anya tapped her on the arm. “Bernie, any risk—any doubt at all—and you get out of there, okay?”
“I’ve got plenty of practice at dodging cows, ma’am,” she said, slipping the Longshot off her shoulder. “And two rifles. Don’t worry.”
Bernie took the bag of feed nuts off her belt and shook it as she walked toward the animals. The sheep raised their heads but didn’t come rushing at her. Mac padded calmly beside her. The cow looked up and stared.
Cows were curious animals. They were used to humans, too, and humans meant feeding and milking to them, especially when the human was carrying a bag of recognizable food. Bernie expected the cow to amble over to check her out, and that was what it did.
“Don’t let me down, Mac,” Bernie said. “Not now I’ve told everyone what a good boy you are.”
Bernie slowed to a stop, still shaking the bag, and waited for the cow. When the old girl got close enough and was busy with the cattle nuts, Bernie could put a rope on her. The animal definitely looked in calf.
But where were the others? They’d stay together as a herd, so it didn’t bode well.
And where were the dogs?
If Mac was any guide, they’d have gone hunting polyps. They might not have been as smart or as lucky as him.
“Never mind, Mac,” Bernie said. “Seb’s got another bull. And we’ve got other herds. Beef’s going to stay on the menu.”
She was still watching the cow heading her way at a leisurely pace when something caught her eye. A streak of white shot behind some trees along the bank, moving faster than she expected. She dropped the bag and reached for her Longshot instinctively.
“Bernie?” Anya’s voice in her earpiece sounded worried. “Bernie, what is it?”
“Another cow,” she said. “Just being cautious.”
The animal came cantering out of the tree cover. The cow that had been ambling over to Bernie suddenly bolted, the sheep scattered, and Mac started barking. Both cows were now cantering toward her. She sighted up without a conscious thought and aimed at the first animal between its shoulder and throat.
The first shot dropped the cow on the spot. Bernie didn’t have time to reload the Longshot. She dropped it and unslung her Lancer to open fire on the second animal. The cow swung wide and stumbled for a few meters before collapsing, bellowing loudly.
But they didn’t detonate. Neither cow had detonated. The fact struck Bernie only after she’d dropped both of them. She’d shot two normal, healthy animals.
She ran over to the cow that was still bellowing and tried to get close enough to see how badly hurt it was. By now, Anya, Sam, and Alex had sprinted across the pasture to catch up with her. Mac kept barking. “Steady, girl. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“They’re not Lambent,” Anya said, breathless.
The cow was still thrashing around, trying to stand up. “Yeah, I know that now, ma’am,” Bernie snapped. She was appalled. Her first reaction had been a soldier’s, not a farmer’s. Drill kept you alive but it also meant that it rewired you to shoot without having a debate first. “Shit. Shit.”
A single Longshot round could stop a truck, but the Lancer needed a bit more effort. Bernie had just left the poor animal badly wounded. There was nothing she could do for it now except put it out of its misery. She rested the rifle’s muzzle on the cross point between its eyes and horns and squeezed the trigger. The loud crack took a long time to die away on the air.
Bernie stood contemplating what she’d done. Anya put her hand on her back and said nothing.
“Well, they were coming at you, Bernie,” Sam said. “I’d have done the same. What started them off?”
Mac’s reaction should have clued them in. He was still barking, and Bernie finally got the message when she saw the trees a hundred meters away suddenly empty of birds.
“Stalks!” Anya yelled. “We’ve got stalks, people!”
“Where?” Alex swung around, rifle ready. “I can’t feel any tremors.”
Bernie started jogging toward the trees. Mac overtook her at full pelt. He stopped just short of the stream and began pawing at the grass.
“Mac, get away from there!” Bernie yelled. “We can see where it is. Mac! Come back here.”
“That’s a handy trick,” Alex said. Mac raced back to Bernie’s side, still barking. “Now what are we going to do?”
“Kill whatever comes out,” said Anya. “Spread out, people.”
They stood back, staring at the spot Mac had picked. Bernie could feel a tremor, but nothing like as strong as the previous ones she’d experienced.
“It’ll be a small one, Bernie,” Sam said.
“God, we’re getting blasé about these things.”
Anya moved further right. “Everybody ready?”
“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 with 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 concerns 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.
“If I had,” Prescott said carefully, “would it have made any difference? And if I had known, do you seriously think I’d have stood by and watch it consume us and not try to find a solution?”
That was pretty well what Hoffman had said to Margaret. He thought of her raging at him for not telling her the Hammer strikes were coming. And what would you have done if I’d told you? Yes, he’d said that to her. This was his punishment. He wasn’t a man who believed in divine interference, but he accepted that fate and his own hypocrisy were forcing him to relive Margaret’s viewpoint on that terrible day. Maybe there was such a thing as hell after all. Maybe this was it, and he was already dead.
But he clung to his anger and let it carry him along. He couldn’t stop now.
“How the fuck could you hide it?” he demanded. “How you could not tell us that we did it to ourselves again? Was that it? Couldn’t you face admitting that another of our god-almighty weapons came back to bite us in the ass?”
Prescott blinked a couple of times, staring into Hoffman’s face. His focus flickered as if he suddenly didn’t know what Hoffman was going on about. “I’m sorry?”
“Lambency. It’s a COG bioweapon, am I right? We cooked it up right here during the Pendulum Wars, didn’t we? And then we deployed it to kill the grubs, just like the Hammer, and now it’s killing us too. Our own shit’s killing us again. And that means you must have known the grubs were coming long before E-Day.”
Hoffman felt his throat tightening as if his anger was finally going to choke the life out of him. His heart was racing. He felt as close to a stroke as he’d ever been, too drained and betrayed to summon up the energy to punch that bastard in the face.
But Prescott could always surprise him. For a moment, the man’s expression became absolute despair before the mask snapped back into place and his real feelings were buried forever. It was so fleeting that Hoffman wondered if he’d imagined it out of sheer hope that he’d finally broken Prescott’s silence.
“You have no idea,” Prescott said softly. “Victor, you could not be more wrong. You really couldn’t.” He paused, stopped himself saying something—no, not an act, definitely not an act—and shook his head. “I’m sorry. It’s not of our making. If it were, we might stand a better chance. And I had no warning whatsoever—no idea that the Locust were coming. No damn idea at all.”
Prescott was telling some kind of truth. Hoffman felt devastated and angry. He’d wanted that truth so badly. Or at least he thought he did; what he wanted, he realized, was for Prescott to know what this thing was and reveal that he’d found a way to deal with it before the last humans on Sera were picked off. He really wanted the man to know best. He wanted a grown-up to put things right.
But Prescott didn’t have a solution. That was clear. Hoffman’s whole neat theory about Lambency, so plausible and such a perfect fit to events, was completely wrong. Hoffman was on his own again, orphaned.
“Goddamn,” he said quietly, completely deflated. “I’ll leave you to write your speech, then, Chairman. Good day.”
Hoffman managed to get up and walk out. He didn’t storm off. He couldn’t manage it. Michaelson and Trescu followed him down the stairs in silence, already in the habit of waiting until they were out of earshot to react to events. They stood on the steps of Admiralty House, now an island refuge in its own right. The parade ground in front of them had become a crowded town square.
“I told you he was afraid of something,” Trescu said at last.
“Well, well.” Michaelson raised his eyebrows. “At least I lived long enough to see a miracle. Prescott, coming clean. The apocalypse must be due any minute.”
Hoffman felt shaky now. He needed to see what Bernie had found. And he needed to lean on her for a little moral support.
“If I’d known what an honest Prescott reaction looked like,” he said, “I might have saved myself a lot of time over the years.”
“Have we ever actually caught him lying to us at all?” Michaelson asked. “No. He’s just withheld information. Which is bad enough, but more confusing. I can’t read him at all now.”
“So what is on this disc you neglected to tell me about?” Trescu said quietly.
It was inevitable. Hoffman had to salvage the relationship. “I haven’t even told most of my own men, so I didn’t put you on the circulation list either. I stole it from the asshole. Other than that—it’s as much goddamn use as a drinks coaster. We can’t decrypt it.”
“It’s nothing personal, Miran,” Michaelson said. “He didn’t even tell me until a little while ago. Didn’t want to drop me in the dwang.”
“At the risk of sounding like an echo, is there anything you’re withholding from me?” Trescu asked. He wasn’t hard to read. He looked massively pissed off, a man who didn’t feel any need to play diplomacy games with the COG. “Seeing as we’re all being so trusting.”
“No.” Hoffman felt ashamed. “You’ve plumbed the depth of my ignorance now.”
“Then you won’t mind if we retain enough imulsion to enable us to leave independently if Prescott lets us down in any way.”
Eugen was dead. It would have been churlish to respond any other way. “You’re putting lives on the line for us,” Hoffman said. “You’ve got a right to an insurance policy. Keep whatever you need, Commander.”
Trescu nodded and looked down at his boots as if the comment embarrassed him. “I would prefer everyone to stick together, but the wild card, as you put it, is your Chairman. So we carry on. We plan for every eventuality, and we see what happens next.”
“He obviously thinks he can find a solution faster on his own or else he’d be spending all his time demanding one from us,” Michaelson said. “And that’s starting to worry me.”
They walked slowly across the parade ground, normally a good place to have unheard conversations, but it was too busy today.
“Maybe he just doesn’t trust us,” Hoffman said. “But that’s a given. His kind trust nobody.”
“Neither do I,” Trescu said. “But I especially wouldn’t trust a subordinate who stole information from me.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Commander.”
“We’re on our own, Hoffman. Actually, I do trust you. You’re scared of lying. You blurt out the truth. That’s why nobody tells you anything and you have to shake it out of them.”
“I used to think it was a virtue.”
“It may come to be one again. By the way—if you want encrypted COG data decoded, you had only to ask. We used to be very good at that. The offer stands.”
Goddamn. What harm could it do now? “I’ll probably take you up on that.”
He left Trescu with Michaelson, knowing that any damage he’d done would be smoothed over by Michaelson’s wardroom charm. He was adrift again. He thought he’d been putting the pieces together in a logical way, and now he was back to square one.
His day couldn’t get any worse. He was sure of it. Then he thought of Borusc Eugen’s wife, and decided he’d gotten off lightly today.