Pad only got as far as the Dill’s front scoop. He sat down again. Marcus waited, so Dom and Tai did as well.
“You want a beer?” Dom said. “Come on, Pad. Let’s get totally shit-faced for once.”
Padrick shut one eye, head slightly cocked to the side, and stared into the distance like he was sighting up. “It’s so easy.”
“What is?”
“Death. Done right.”
“What the fuck are you talking about, man?”
“I’ve seen it maybe three, four hundred times. Because I see it, right? I’m the only one who does, not even the guy I hit. Close up. Magnified. That’s what my job’s about. I pull the trigger, and the guy’s gone. One minute he’s having a smoke or thinking about home, and the next he doesn’t even know he’s dead. His brain’s liquefied like that.” Pad snapped his fingers. “In a fraction of a second, he’s got nothing left to feel pain or fear with. Good way to go, Dom. Few of us get that privilege.”
Marcus just stared at him. Dom was getting worried. Nothing that Pad had said was shocking or new, but his tone was scary: not depressed but wistful, as if he thought that instant nonexistence was something wonderful. Eventually he got up and ambled out of the hangar.
“Tai,” Marcus said, “you want to keep an eye on him? We can take shifts.”
“To prevent what?”
“Tai, he’s losing it. Guys do dumb things when they’re like that.”
“Once something is seen, it cannot be unseen,” Tai said. “Who are we to force him to live with what’s in his head when it’s not in ours?”
Tai almost smiled—he never seemed to let anything get to him—and then followed Padrick. He wasn’t being callous at all, just Tai, but Dom couldn’t imagine standing by and letting Marcus put a gun to his own head simply because he had a right to. There was nothing to say that Pad was planning to do that, of course. He just seemed to be making the point that he thought some ways to die were better than others, and being barbecued by the side of the road wasn’t one of them. Dom would have said that made sense, too. But the look on Pad’s face, that weird hopefulness, scared the shit out of him.
“Go home, Dom,” Marcus said.
“You staying here?”
Marcus didn’t quite shake his head. It was more a shrug. “I’d better go see Dad.”
Dom was relieved—again—that he wasn’t invited to supper at the Fenix estate.
KING RAVEN KR-42, FOUR HUNDRED KILOMETERS WEST OF EPHYRA ACROSS THE TYRAN BORDER, ONE WEEK LATER.
It was the most spectacular sunrise that Richard Prescott had ever seen.
He was so mesmerized by its intensity as the Raven banked that he forgot for a moment why the sky looked so breathtakingly beautiful, a wonderful streaked palette of coral, scarlet, and magenta. It was because millions of tons of fine debris had been kicked up into the atmosphere by the Hammer strikes.
For a few seconds, the open bay of the Raven framed only a brilliant sky unspoiled by anything else. Then it tilted down, and the landscape below was just stumps of buildings scattered across charred wasteland, unrecognizable as the industrial city it had once been.
So what did you expect, Professor?
Prescott watched Adam Fenix. He had a fixed safety line on his belt, but he stood confidently on the sill of the bay, hanging on to one of the overhead grab rails like the Gear he’d once been. Prescott expected to see shock on his face at the very least. No man could look at that scene below and not be unsettled in some way. But Fenix just closed his eyes for a moment.
“It’s certainly been effective,” he said. “In terms of asset denial, anyway. There’s little for the Locust to take now. But that’s a two-edged sword—we’re going to have to rely wholly on our protected reserves of fuel, food, and water for months. You’ve seen how much contamination’s blown across Ephyra.”
Prescott gave him points for not degenerating into emotion and regret. “Adam, we knew from the start of the Hammer program that the consequences of using it would be serious.”
“Yes, but even I can’t tell you what the full repercussions will be. Noticed how much cooler it is? That’s simply sunlight being blocked by the dust in the atmosphere. The climate effects are already here. The pollution—we’ll be living with the consequences of that for decades, perhaps centuries.”
“Modern life’s always a trade-off between the easy life we want and the poisons it creates.” Prescott tried to work out if his own numbness was normal human shock at the scale of the horror he’d been forced to unleash, or fear that he might have made the wrong decision. No; terrible as it was, there was nothing else anyone could have done. “Better that we live to find a solution than letting the enemy slaughter us.”
We’ve been through all this. God, how many times did we argue about this over the last three years?
But that was before anyone had thought of deploying the entire orbital network at once.
Yes, that was me. That was my decision.
It was simply a chain of intense fires raging across the planet. Who needed chemical weapons when you could just set fire to Sera and release the toxins already in factories, refineries, and homes? Prescott sometimes let himself be shocked by the complexity of the world he tried to manage, and how little control he found he had over it. But then he shook it off and did what he could. Nobody could ever have all the answers.
“Why do we keep having this conversation?” Fenix asked.
“Perhaps we’re rehearsing our excuses for posterity,” said Prescott. “How’s your son?”
“I’m not really sure.” Fenix stepped back from the sill and sat down, buckling himself into his seat again. “He said it was like walking through dark gray snow. The first patrol, I mean. His squad did the first patrol after the strikes.”
The Raven looped around and headed back to Ephyra. Beneath it, the landscape developed more detail as the blast radius expanded, showing how the destructive force had diminished with distance. Rain had washed a lot of the airborne pollution into the rivers. The dark snow was now more like slicks of oil, wet and shiny where the water had pooled, and Prescott began to believe that he had only to wait a few more weeks for nature to begin its own cleanup, and things would look more encouraging.
No, that was wishful thinking. He’d just be able to see more of the consequences of his decision.
The closer they got to Ephyra, the more black dots Prescott could see in the sky—other Ravens mapping the blocked roads and directing engineer detachments to where they were needed. The most they could do would be to clear a route to hell. He wondered what the rest of Sera looked like, but much of it was beyond the range of a Raven, and he would simply have to guess that whatever he’d seen in the last few hundred kilometers was a sample of the rest of the planet.
“Still no Locust,” he said.
Fenix shook his head. Something below had caught his eye, and when Prescott leaned to look, it was an APC picking its way along the remains of a road that had buckled in the heat. “But we can’t possibly have wiped them out. They’re underground. Even if we killed all those on the surface, there’ll be more of them deep in the tunnels.”
“The pollution runoff should kill a good few of them, too, then?”
“Perhaps.” Fenix watched the APC with intense interest until the Raven left it behind. “It’ll poison the water table in places, and they must be making use of that, too.”
“You always sound bewildered rather than hostile when you talk about the Locust, Professor.”
Fenix paused for a moment. “I am,” he said. “I don’t know how to deal with them now, other than destruction. But I’m not someone who has the energy to hate anything, I’m afraid. Call it sorrow.”
Prescott imagined Fenix having been one of those boys who kept scorpions and venomous spiders as pets, and found them appealing. It was the scientist in him. What would he do now? He was a weapons man. If the Locust were crushed, he’d have to find something else to occupy him.
Well, there was Sera. I
t would need the best minds left alive to heal the planet again. Fenix could make a start on that.
Back at the House of Sovereigns, Prescott passed cleaning crews hosing down the headstones next to the Tomb of the Unknowns. The neat, austere gardens looked almost back to normal, on the surface at least. Ephyra was an orderly city where citizens knew their place and purpose, and now they were doing what they did best: getting on with life and doing their civic duty.
Jillian, his secretary, greeted him with a folder of reports and a cup of coffee when he reached his office. Yes, life did go on.
“Sir, the catering manager is worrying that we might run short of coffee,” she said. “I mean, they’re not going to be harvesting this year, are they? Shall I start putting some aside?”
“I can live with herb tea,” Prescott said. He loathed it, but it didn’t hurt to be seen to make small sacrifices. “If I have to.”
He sat down at his desk and let the chair tip backward as far as it would go on its tilt mechanism. As he leaned back, he looked at the two phones on his desk: one for routine calls, the other a dedicated line that was used only by ministers and other COG heads of state. Normally that line would be moderately busy, but it hadn’t rung in nearly two weeks.
Prescott tried to remember the last conversation conducted on it, and he thought it might have been Deschenko calling him from Pelles—overrun by Locust, close to collapse—to tell him what an evil, murdering, genocidal bastard he was, and how he would surely rot in hell before too long.
Hell was a little too far in the future for Prescott at the moment. He had only to look outside the window to get his priorities in order, and hell had to wait its turn.
He stared at the phone a little longer, but it still didn’t ring. He knew it would never ring again.
CORREN-KINNERLAKE HIGHWAY, SIX DAYS LATER.
Private Padrick Salton now sported a ripe black eye, and seemed reluctant to share the story of how he acquired it.
He walked beside Hoffman on a stretch of what had once been road. The bulldozers had driven through for the first time the day before, shoving aside debris so that Ephyra now had a clear route to the sea. Why the hell it needed one at the moment, Hoffman had no idea. There was no sea freight in or out because there was nowhere left to ship it from any longer. The NCOG—what little was left of it after E-Day—was crammed into ports along the Ephyran coast and at Merrenat to the northeast. The route clearance was a monumental waste of frigging time and fuel.
But he was here, walking that road, because he needed to. For some reason, Salton needed to do it as well. The paving and substrate was crazed with deep, narrow fissures down to half a meter where the temperatures had fired it like ceramics.
Shit, Margaret was probably nowhere near here. I just don’t know. That’s what I hate. Imagining.
“No word from the Islands yet,” he said.
“I know, sir.” Salton’s buddies called him Pad, and sometimes Hoffman did, too. He’d been one of the most successful snipers in the Pendulum Wars. “But there were islands we never heard from after E-Day, too, and they turned out to be okay. Just no comms.”
Hope was evil. It seduced you, then dumped you on your ass so hard and so fast that you were worse off than when you started. Hoffman ignored it. “Kaliso hasn’t mentioned his.”
“Well, he’s got this mystic fate and eternity shit going on, but me, I think that when you’re dead, you’re dead, and that’s the way it should be, so you finally get some peace.”
“You ever going to tell me how you got that black eye? I’m not going to stick you on a charge.”
Hoffman tried to walk the fine line between cutting his Gears some slack and letting discipline collapse. In the lunatic asylum that was post-strike Ephyra, knowing how to hang on to civilized conduct was what mattered. People were shocked and grieving. The curfew didn’t stop anyone having arguments over a drink at other times of the day.
“I got totally rat-arsed in a bar last night, sir, and one thing led to another,” Pad said at last. “Someone mouthed off about Sergeant Fenix’s father. So I got regimental on him. I’m still Two-Six RTI.”
Hoffman nodded, searching for the right response. “Okay, Private, we’ve all done it. Just don’t let it become a habit.”
Loyalty was an astonishing thing. Hoffman accepted it like faith. It didn’t have to make sense, and it almost certainly didn’t, but the things it could inspire men to do were extraordinary. Coupled with the stress and nightmares, though, it made for flash points.
And I’m a fool. Why am I here now?
He walked down one road out of thousands in the blast radius in the hope of closure. If he had his wish and Margaret’s death had been instant, then there’d be nothing left of her or the car. If he found anything—and where the hell did anyone start looking?—then he’d agonize over how long it took her to die.
“I’m sorry about your wife, sir.”
“Thanks, Pad. I’m not unique, though.” God, Anya probably told Dom Santiago, and now every bastard knows what went on. “It’s a shitty broken world.”
“Do you know where she was? Sorry to ask, but that’s why you came out on patrol, isn’t it?”
“You don’t know, then.”
“All Dom said was that she didn’t make it back to Ephyra.”
Hoffman felt a pang of guilt for even thinking Anya had done anything more than warn people off asking him painful questions. The kid was incredibly loyal. There it was again: loyalty. Hoffman would take loyalty over genius anytime, not that Anya Stroud wasn’t a smart girl.
“Pad, I know I’m not going to find her alive. She’s gone.” Hoffman surprised himself every time he said that. He hadn’t even cried yet. Part of him was an old hand at grief and could stand back and watch the other Hoffman going through the same stages without trying to hurry it along. “I think I just needed to see where. Why the hell are you here, anyway? You’re rostered off today.”
“I lost it walking down a road some days ago. I need to be able to patrol again without seeing bodies under my feet.” Pad stopped dead. “Got a last reported location? I’m up for it if you are, sir.”
“It’ll be a waste of resources.” All Hoffman needed to do was put out the word to patrols that if they found anything in the months to come, anything at all, to let him know. “Pad, I’m grateful for your support. But there’s not enough intel or reason to do this. I think I needed to walk this road to convince myself of that.”
They walked on another two or three hundred meters to a mound of rubble the height of a two-story house. The highway was straight at this point; if Hoffman stood dead center, the debris pushed aside almost looked like monuments, a conquering army’s triumphal route into an ancient city.
Am I letting you down by not searching, Margaret? Shit, it’s too late to bust my ass for you now. I despise people who show more love at funerals than they ever did in someone’s lifetime. Including me.
Pad moved around the mound cautiously, checking. It was still a dangerous job. Fires had raged underground, too, burning through ruptured pipelines and sewers, and subsidence was always a threat. There were probably forests and open land where the fires were still burning deep in the soil and would smolder for years.
And they couldn’t burn those bastard grubs underground?
Hoffman was about to call Pad back—there was no reason to do this, no urgency—when he lost sight of him. His earpiece crackled.
“Contact, sir,” Pad said. “Movement, over there. Left of… shit, left of what?”
“I hear you, Pad.” It was time to alert CIC. “Control, this is Hoffman, possible grub contact, approximately one klick inland from Corren coast, just off Kinnerlake highway. Stand by.”
There weren’t enough landmark features to get bearings. Hoffman checked his rifle and went after Pad. The rubble was about knee high, so it shouldn’t have been hard to spot anything, but Hoffman couldn’t see what had grabbed Pad’s attention until something moved and he turned
in time to catch a glimpse of something gray.
“It’s an e-hole,” Pad whispered. He indicated a line at shoulder height. “Grub breaking cover.”
Hoffman didn’t see enough to make the call on what it was—drone, Boomer, whatever. Did it matter? Bastard. He moved in with Pad. They were about ten meters away before they could even see the hole in the ground, a sharp-edged pit that might have been a swimming pool or even a basement before the fires scoured the place.
Neither of them knew if they were chasing a single grub or if they were about to engage a whole platoon of the things. It was a dumb position to get in when there were just two of them with the nearest backup being a Raven that was at least ten minutes away.
They edged up to the pit and looked down, Lancers aimed. It was a big rectangular hollow with arches at chest height that looked like tunnels or very deep recesses. There was so much scattered debris that it was hard to work it out.
“It’s a cellar,” said Pad. “And that’s either a tunnel or a sewer down there. But that doesn’t mean it’s not an e-hole, too.”
“Shouldn’t we be more worried about this?”
“Only if a few dozen of them rush us.”
Pad jumped down, boots crunching the black wood to dust, and squatted to peer into the sewer. He sighted up.
“Whoa!” He jerked the Lancer’s muzzle to one side. “Human. It’s human. Shit, someone’s alive. How the hell did they live through this?”
A stupid, desperate thought went through Hoffman’s mind. No, it couldn’t possibly be Margaret. He was furious with himself for even thinking it.
“Hey, come out,” Pad called. “Are you hurt? COG forces here—we’re on your side. Come on out.”
Hoffman could hear sounds of rubble moving. Eventually someone crawled out on all fours like an animal. It was probably a woman. He decided that from the long mud-caked hair, but it wasn’t until she knelt back on her heels that he could tell. She was completely covered in gray ash, wearing a rucksack back-to-front on her chest.
“Are you hurt?” Hoffman said. “How did you get here? How did you survive the fires, let alone the strike?”
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