Coalition's End

by Karen Traviss

  “We’ll have to keep them out of trouble, then,” Trescu said. However justified his prejudices were, the world wasn’t a clear-cut place. “Just so they don’t drag us down with them.”

  “Of course, sir,” Teo said. “Very wise.”

  CHAPTER 6

  My father warned me that a politician couldn’t be a hero until he was dead and history put him in context. I have no ambition to be a hero, but I would like to be understood one day. Our job is the necessary dirty work that nobody else wants. Hoffman would understand that. A soldier’s job is much the same. But would Marcus Fenix believe my reasons for acting as I did? And does it matter as long as Serans survive to have the luxury of debating whether I was a coward or a traitor? Part of me thinks it does. This is why politicians write memoirs—it’s our plea in mitigation.

  (Chairman Richard Prescott, son of former Chairman David Prescott, from his unpublished memoirs)

  KR-239, ON PATROL OVER NORTH VECTES.

  “My mom used to do this,” Sorotki said.

  Dom had his gaze fixed on the landscape beneath, scanning the woods for trees that didn’t belong there. “What, she strafed armored columns?”

  Marcus watched from the other door. It was oddly quiet without Baird and Cole. Even Mitchell, manning the door gun, hadn’t said much that morning.

  “I mean on long car journeys,” Sorotki said. “Count the red trucks. Or cows. Or twenty-meter-high invasive life-forms.”

  Dom recalled doing much the same with his kids, Bennie and Sylvie. His breath jammed in his throat for a second. “What keeps you cheerful, Lieutenant?”

  “Okay, I’ll shut up.”

  “No, I mean it. I’ve never seen you in a shitty mood. Ever.”

  There was a sudden silence, or at least the radio conversation stalled. It was turning into one of those accidentally serious conversations that Dom tried to avoid in case he found himself talking about Maria or the kids and making everyone squirm. He caught himself thinking about them a lot less now. He wasn’t sure if that meant he was successfully shutting out the pain, or just coming to terms with his loss.

  Acceptance.

  Maybe you do get there in the end somehow, just like the bereavement counselor said.

  “I just program myself,” Sorotki said at last.

  “What?”

  “Go through the physical motions often enough and the feeling becomes real. It’s a feedback thing. I read it somewhere. Force a smile often enough and eventually your brain registers happy. Signal in becomes signal out.”

  This was the point at which Baird would have bitched about crackpot pseudo-science and popped the bubble of a promising discussion. Dom glanced across the crew cabin and caught Marcus’s eye. For a moment, he seemed distracted from the job in hand and looked as if he was listening intently for the next tip. Everybody wanted to know how to make the pain go away, even Marcus.

  “I’ll try it,” Dom said.

  “Gettner’s switch got stuck the other way, I think.”

  “Yeah, is she all right? She’s not herself lately.”

  “Fatigue, I reckon. Can’t talk yourself out of that.”

  By the time Dom looked around, Marcus was focused on the terrain again. They hadn’t clocked any new stalks today. Dom caught himself falling into a familiar bargaining loop; if he suppressed any hopeful thoughts that the stalks might be thinning out, then he wouldn’t have to face the plummeting disappointment when they popped up again. Like all persistent things, though, trying to unthink them just made them impossible to shut out.

  He understood all too well now why Dizzy relied on alcohol. It was a tool. It was no different from Sorotki’s feedback trick, just tougher on the liver and less respectable in a society that prided itself on stoic discipline and clean living.

  “Contact,” Marcus said. “Port side, range about five hundred meters. Just above the top of the trees.”

  Sorotki turned the Raven. “Oh … yes. Nice healthy crop.”

  Dom had to lean out of the crew bay to see the stalks. Twisted charcoal-gray branches poked above the tops of the trees. There was still plenty of green foliage around them, so these had only just erupted.

  He caught a strong whiff of fuel on the air. “Shit, have you serviced this bird recently, Sorotki?” he asked. “Smells like you’re leaking juice.”

  “Preflight checks. We do them, Dom.”

  “It still stinks.”

  The Raven was about a hundred meters from the stalks now. Dom couldn’t see any movement, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any polyps.

  “Don’t waste ammo,” Marcus said. “Shoot ’em if they’re a direct threat, but we can’t pick them all off every damn time.”

  “Is there anything we’re not running out of?”

  Marcus grunted. “Yeah. We’ve got hydroelectricity.”

  “Great, we can run this bird on batteries, then,” Sorotki said. “I’m going in to get a closer look. Mitchell? Time to get snapping. Prescott wants to see every poxy freckle on these things.”

  “Yeah, shame he hasn’t got a PhD in biology,” Dom said. “Why the sudden interest? Is he a stalk spotter now or something?”

  “No idea. Desperation, maybe.”

  The Raven tracked slowly along the line of the stalks. Dom studied his map—hand-drawn by Mathieson—and it looked like the stalks were behaving as expected. They were following the fissure, pushing up through the softer bedrock and soil that filled the gap in the granite.

  “Whoa, hold position for a moment, Mel,” Mitchell said. “I’ve got to line up the images with the grids.”

  “Any particular height, your majesty?”

  “No, I can adjust for that, thanks.”

  “Oh good.”

  Marcus gripped the safety rail above his head and leaned out of the door as far as he could. It looked so risky that Dom was about to step across and grab him, or at least snap a line on his belt. He was staring at something. His whole body suddenly tensed.

  “Sorotki, come around again.” Whatever he’d spotted had rattled him. That wasn’t like Marcus at all. “There’s something on the ground.”

  “How many legs?”

  “Not a glowie. I just saw a flash when the downdraft hit the leaves.”

  “A flash of what? You want to winch down? I don’t recommend that.”

  Dom cut in. “Land somewhere sensible and we’ll track back on foot,” he said. “Mitchell’s got a fix on it, right?”

  “I saw a reflection,” Marcus said. “And there’s no watercourse on the map.”

  “Ponds come and go without ever being mapped,” Mitchell said. “One of the thrills of navigating visually.”

  “Oh, I loved exploring ponds when I was a kid.” Sorotki was in full nostalgia mode today. “Frog spawn. Diving beetles. Dragonflies. Haven’t seen any of them for years, though. Everything’s disappearing.”

  “I’m glad Baird’s not here,” Mitchell murmured.

  The Raven looped away and headed for the nearest open ground. Dom knew he had to be Marcus’s common sense when it came to personal safety. It was Marcus’s only routine lapse of sanity. He was as rational and smart as his father, but when he ran into a risk, he had to be the first one to take it. Dom had worked out over the years that it wasn’t the dumb ignorance of underestimating danger, or even that it-can’t-happen-to-me cockiness he saw in the youngest Gears, but a compulsion to save, to rescue, to put himself in harm’s way for others.

  Sacrificial. That’s the word. Sacrifices appease. Who’s he appeasing now?

  Plenty of things could make a kid grow up into a man who needed to be the one who took care of everyone else; fear of losing them, guilt at having lost them, or even to make up for not being looked after himself. Dom watched Marcus’s jaw twitching as he waited for Sorotki to fly low enough for him to jump out. Maybe it was all three.

  “What’s so important about water?” Dom asked. “The one thing we’ve got plenty of here is rivers.”

  “Liqu
id,” Marcus said. “Reflections off liquid.”

  He jumped down through the whirling storm of dust and leaves and ran clear of the rotors. Dom was still chewing on the word liquid as the Raven lifted and left them standing in the clearing. They had two hundred meters to walk to find the target.

  The stench of fuel was still overwhelming. Now that Dom was used to clean country air, he noticed the background urban smells that his nose had learned to ignore in the city. Everything in the army had reeked of imulsion or lube oil, and so had Jacinto.

  “He’s got a leaking fuel line, for sure.” Dom was annoyed that Sorotki wasn’t taking his warning seriously. “I tell you, we’re not getting back in that death-trap until I’ve checked it myself.”

  “Liquid,” Marcus said again. “Come on.”

  “What?” Dom could see the tops of the stalks anyway. He didn’t need the compass. “If this is a quiz, you win.”

  Marcus strode ahead through the undergrowth. Dom followed, scanning from side to side for polyps. He wouldn’t be able to hear them rustling in the bushes with the noise that Marcus was making. It was only when he noticed that the fuel smell was stronger than ever that realization dawned on him.

  “Marcus, are we talking about imulsion? Is that it? Goddamn imulsion?”

  Marcus glanced over his shoulder. He was as near to pleased as Dom had seen him in a long time—pleased for Marcus, anyway. The frown had vanished for a while.

  “Yeah, and how was it first discovered?” he asked.

  “Oozing out of the ground. Pooling on the surface.”

  “Yeah. Exactly.”

  Dom wasn’t too breathless about the prospect of a new fuel supply to keep his mind on the forest around him. He looked for damage to tree trunks and charred vegetation, straining to tune into the background clicks and rustles. Polyps would be hard to spot with all this cover. They could be up your ass before you knew it.

  Now I know why Bernie prefers to patrol with a dog.

  Marcus was fifty meters away from him by now, zigzagging from one side of their path to the other with his eyes on the ground.

  “Remember that stuff’s combustible,” Dom called. “Did you hear me, Marcus? Combustible!”

  That was what made imulsion such a valuable fuel. It didn’t need much refining and it released a lot of energy. If push came to shove, the crude could even be pumped straight into a vehicle as long as you didn’t mind replacing the cylinder heads five times a year. Dom tried not to get his hopes up.

  How do I know all that?

  Dom remembered with another pang of loss that caught him off guard. His dad had told him. Eduardo Santiago had been a mechanic. He’d taught Dom how to strip down an engine before he was ten. Dom had forgotten most of it, but he hadn’t forgotten how much he cherished those weekends spent tinkering with wrecks in the workshop with his father and his brother Carlos, while his mother kept fetching trays of snacks.

  We were happy. It was easy to be happy.

  God… what I wouldn’t give for one more hour with them all.

  “Marcus?” Dom couldn’t see him. Shit. He was gone. “Hey, Marcus? Marcus! Where the hell are you?”

  He whipped around but all he could see was a palisade of tree trunks. His stomach knotted. He pressed his earpiece to try the radio, pulse pounding and his mouth suddenly dry.

  “Marcus, come in—”

  Something moved. Marcus suddenly rose from the undergrowth as if he’d stood up from a squat. He had his arms at his sides, Lancer slung across his shoulder, and his head was tilted back as if he was looking up at the sky. But his eyes were shut. He didn’t move a muscle. Dom wasn’t sure what he was doing but he decided not to interrupt.

  Eventually Marcus opened his eyes and turned to look at Dom. He did that little triumphant nod that he reserved for special occasions.

  “Imulsion.” He pointed down at his boots. Dom could only see him from knees up. “The stalks are growing through a pool of goddamn imulsion. Sorotki, did you get that? No frogs. Imulsion.”

  Sorotki’s whoop over the radio nearly deafened Dom.

  “Fuck the frogs, Marcus. Fill her up!”

  Yes, he’d definitely got it.

  VECTES NAVAL BASE, NEW JACINTO.

  Gossip spread fast in a community like the naval base. It was a strange creature known as buzz, and on a good day it could overtake radio comms faster than a greased weasel.

  Baird realized today was a good day when Royston Sharle caught him rummaging through the waste metal skip behind the workshops again and didn’t threaten to shoot him. It was an act of unashamed theft of precious recyclables, but for once Sharle just laughed his ass off.

  Baird straightened up indignantly and peered at Sharle over the skip’s side.

  “It’s for Mathieson.” He blurted out his excuse before Sharle could open his mouth. Nobody would dare bust him for helping a Gear in a wheelchair. “Me and some Gorasni guys. We’re making prosthetic legs for him. We need some metal blocks to machine.”

  “Y’know, I really ought to put down rat poison for you,” Sharle said. He was a big, cheerful guy who’d somehow stayed that way despite years of doing a job that was all about misery, death, and shortages. Maybe you had to be unhealthily optimistic to be an emergency manager. “Go on, take it and sod off. You’re worse than the Stranded. And I’m going to change the lock on the gate this time.”

  “Gee, thanks. You’re all heart.”

  “Beat it before I spread a rumor that you’re not a completely selfish dick.” Sharle grinned. “You heard, then? You monitor the comms net. I know you do.”

  “What?”

  Sharle’s grin spread further. “Imulsion.”

  “Yeah, we’re going to run out soon, and you want me to convert the Ravens to run on Dizzy’s moonshine. Or coal. I’m all over it. Really, I am.”

  “No, Fenix found some.”

  Baird’s first thought was that the locals at Pelruan had been hoarding a few hundred liters in a cowshed, but then he decided it had to be something the Stranded had left behind. Those assholes had caches of stuff laid up everywhere. But every little helped.

  “Wow, so we can run Sovereign for a few hundred meters?” Baird stuffed his belt pouches full of scrap and started to clamber out of the skip. “That’s just terrific.”

  “Baird, you’re out of the loop. Fenix landed slap bang in an imulsion field. Parry’s on his way up there with the Indie rig guys to check it out.”

  Baird paused with one knee on the steel ledge. No, that couldn’t be right. Vectes didn’t have imulsion reserves. The geological survey didn’t say anything about imulsion. The naval base had been built in the days of sailing ships, long before imulsion had even been discovered, so it wasn’t as if the place was chosen because it had its own supply. And once everyone started using the stuff, the COG would have searched damned hard for a local source rather than ship it by tanker halfway across Sera.

  He hoped nobody remembered his confident prediction that there was no fuel to drill for here. Barber would never let him forget it.

  “Okay.” There had to be an explanation for this. Baird’s world just wasn’t that randomly lucky. The natural progression of things in life was to get worse, and the last fifteen years were living proof. “I know Marcus is Mr. Perfect and everything he touches shits candy, but how the hell did he happen to find imulsion in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Stalk patrol,” said Sharle. “The stuff’s oozing up all around the damn stalks.”

  “Whoa, I heard the S-word there.” A theory was crystallizing. “What are the odds of that?”

  “Look, I don’t care if the stuff has to be pumped out of Prescott’s ass. We’re going to extract as much as we can and be thankful.”

  Sharle disappeared into the workshops, whistling happily as if a new source of fuel made everything all right. Well, it meant they could fly more sorties, watch the stalks popping up everywhere, and maybe set fire to some more polyps. They’d have a stockpile to leave t
he island if they needed to. But it didn’t change much else as far as Baird was concerned.

  He remembered what the world they’d fled looked like. It wasn’t worth going back anytime soon.

  He scrambled out of the skip and set off for his workshop to unload his haul, jangling and rattling as he walked. He’d take it over to Yanik the Disemboweler after he finished his recon duty. It was handy to have something else to keep him occupied when he needed a break from that frigging computer screen telling him DECRYPTION FAILED or FOLDER CONTAINS NO DATA. It contained data, all right. He could see that much.

  Cole, waiting at the helicopter pad, looked him up and down as he approached. “Hey baby, you been rootin’ in the trash again?”

  Baird looked down at his armor. “Why?”

  “You’re covered in all kinds of shit.”

  “Yeah, I needed some parts.” He mimed a hinge action with his wrist. “Mathieson.”

  “That’s a real nice thing to do,” Cole said, climbing into the Raven. Barber stuck his head out of the cockpit door and nodded at them. “And we got juice again! You heard what Marcus found?”

  “Yeah, I heard.”

  “You ain’t exactly thrilled, are ya?”

  “I hide my giddy excitement well, don’t I?”

  The Raven lifted off. Baird belted himself in and Barber leaned over him, smirking.

  “Imulsion,” Barber said slowly. Yeah, he remembered, all right. And he was never going to shut up about it. “What was it you said? If there was imulsion here, you’d devote your life to charitable work, if it was okay with the tooth fairy. Yeah, you did say that. You so did.”

  “Well, he’s doin’ somethin’ kind for Mathieson,” Cole said. “Don’t that count?”

  Baird heard Gettner laughing over the radio. That meant she’d hit the transmit button just to let him hear how hilarious she thought it was. She wasn’t the laughing kind, so that hurt.

  “Glad I could inject some happiness into your empty life, Major,” Baird said. “Now, I hate to be a killjoy…”