Coalition's End

by Karen Traviss

  The bar was crowded and absolutely silent except for a crackling radio. The TV behind the bar was still on, still showing that emergency caption telling everyone to stay indoors and listen for instructions. There was no point running if you didn’t know where to run to.

  Dan was leaning on the bar, frowning. He hardly turned his head but he’d obviously seen her come in.

  “Well, who’s next, Bernie?” he said quietly. “How long before they get here?”

  “Maybe never.” She couldn’t see Neal. “Where is he? He said he’d be here.”

  Dan looked straight at her this time and didn’t need to ask who she meant. “He’s somewhere else, I think.”

  It took a couple of seconds to sink in. Actually, it took a bit longer than that. It was hard to process that many surprises in one night. She felt her scalp tighten and a wave of nausea rose in her throat.

  “I’m sorry, love,” Dan said. “I didn’t know if you knew or not.”

  “This somewhere else—has she got a fucking name?”

  Dan looked stricken in the way of all people who realized they’d said one word too many. “Bernie, I’m sorry, I—”

  “Forget it.” Fuck you, Neal. Fuck you. The world was going to hell one city at a time, and she didn’t have time for this shit, and all men were the bloody same in the end. “I’m going to call GHN and see what the situation is. Meantime, we activate the lookout roster, okay? Because we don’t know enough about those things to work out where they’ll come up next.”

  “Bernie—”

  “I said forget it, Dan. First things first. Lookout roster.”

  Bernie turned around and left, trying not to meet the eyes of any of her neighbors in case they had that look that told her she really was the last to know about her old man’s bit on the side. She couldn’t cope with defending a community where nobody she knew had the balls to be straight with her. Deliberate ignorance was the only way she’d get through this. She rode back home, totally numb, and tried to radio GH Noroa. The receiving station was busy. So she passed the time moving her clothes into the spare room and making up the bed.

  Fuck you, Neal.

  But the world was ending. The grubs were getting closer by the day. She had to get her priorities straight.

  Maybe Neal came in late, or maybe he didn’t come back that night at all. But he was in the kitchen making breakfast when she got up the next morning, and he didn’t try to explain or make excuses. He just looked at her.

  “You want me to move out?” he asked at last. Dan had probably warned him. “I’ll still work the farm.”

  “You do whatever you bloody want,” Bernie said. The urge to just pack her grip and ask one of the trawler skippers to drop her on Noroa was close to overwhelming. She’d find a way back to Ephyra if it killed her. “Do you realize what’s happening out there?”

  “I do.” He put a pile of bacon sandwiches in front of her, always his peace offering. It was probably just habit now, but if he was trying to placate her, it wasn’t going to work. “But there’s nowhere we can run and nothing we can do about it. Except get on with living until it finds us.”

  Neal moved out later that day. In the days that followed, it didn’t feel as bad as she’d thought it would. Moss seemed to miss him more than she did, and lay down in the hall staring at the door until he worked out that Dad wasn’t coming back each evening. Neal kept his word and turned up for work every day. But she found it hard being in that house alone, and she almost called Mick one night to say he could have his bloody inheritance.

  She didn’t. She could only do this one step at a time.

  Three weeks after Kaia had stopped broadcasting, Galangi was blind and almost alone, just like her. The loss of visual contact with the rest of Sera was new and terrifying. If there was any of her pioneering colonial ancestors’ blood left in her veins, it was hiding behind the sofa and praying for the monsters not to notice it. The indigenous warrior side of her bloodline wasn’t doing so well either. She parked the utility vehicle on the headland facing west, turned on the radio, and spread her map over the steering wheel.

  She’d been through this process a hundred times in the last few weeks, staring at that bloody sheet of paper as if it would change the future. Kaia was close to the shallow island chain branching north, so the grubs didn’t have to dig much deeper to reach it. But they still hadn’t breached the deep trenches or volcanic granite. The things probably just tunneled under the short stretches of shallow sea between the smaller islands. Bernie used her thumb to measure the relative distances to reassure herself—again—that they would have a much tougher job reaching Galangi. She traced the ocean contour lines with her fingernail, checking the depth of the trench between Port Slaughterhouse and the rest of the chain a few times to make sure. Yes, it could swallow the highest mountain ranges on Sera.

  But have the bastards got ships?

  Sooner or later, she’d have to find out. She fiddled with the radio tuner and strained to catch words in the crackle of static.

  So… back on patrol again.

  She’d make her daily call to GH Noroa in an hour, not that they had much more information than she did. They depended on the comms networks based on Kaia as well.

  Maybe I’ll see if I can get hold of Mick after all. But not yet.

  She leaned back in the seat and accepted she was just wasting fuel patrolling the coastline. If the grubs came, the chances of seeing them in time to do anything about it was close to zero. She’d done all she could do: crunched numbers, worked out that there weren’t enough ships and boats to evacuate the island in one go, and realized that there was nowhere to move fifteen hundred people except Noroa, and by the time Galangi was in trouble, then Noroa would already be charcoal.

  There was one more thing she tried not to think about. If armored divisions on the mainland couldn’t stop grubs, then a few shotguns and pitchforks weren’t going to save Galangi.

  But what else can I do? Give up?

  The sun glittered on the water. She’d have to face up to that, too. Sooner or later the ferry would stop running and she’d need to get to Noroa, which meant climbing in a boat and heading out into open sea, a prospect she really didn’t relish.

  It’s just like driving a pickup. It’s—

  The noise that suddenly jerked her out of her thoughts was one she hadn’t heard since she was a kid. It was the air horn on the old lifeboat station. It wasn’t the alarm signal she was expecting—a maroon—but nobody hit that thing for fun. She was already heading downhill to the gravel coast road by the time her walkie-talkie buzzed into life. It was Dan Barrett.

  “Bernie, where the hell are you?”

  She grabbed the walkie-talkie from the dashboard. “Okay, I’m heading for town. I heard it.”

  “It’s a bloody boat,” he said. “It’s heading for the port.”

  “What kind of boat?” She was used to people who stuck to RT procedure and could accurately describe what they were seeing. He could have meant anything from a warship to a fishing smack. “Big gray one with guns? Little white one?”

  “A yacht. Yeah. Sorry. Gabby was trawling whitefish when he spotted them.”

  “On my way. Have they got a radio? Radar?”

  “If they have, they’re not using it.”

  On the way into town, she found herself wargaming some awful scenarios. What if this was the start of some huge exodus from other islands? One thing she knew all too well from the last war was how fast disease could spread when bombed cities lost sanitation and the dead went unburied. After that, lawlessness set in. She never wanted to see that kind of thing again.

  By the time she reached the port, there was a small crowd on the jetty with Dan at the center of it. Bernie fished out the binoculars from the back of the utility and took a look for herself. It was a big flashy motor yacht, a real gin palace, and it was following Gabby’s puttering trawler with an escort of seabirds.

  She took her Longshot from the cab and checked t
he chamber before slinging it over her shoulder. Dan gave her an odd look.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You bloody scare me sometimes, Bernie.” The trawler came alongside and tied up. The yacht took its time mooring at the end of the jetty. “Come on, try and look welcoming.”

  They walked down the wooden pier, knowing that what was coming couldn’t be good news. Gabby jumped ashore from the trawler and stopped them.

  “They’ve come from Kaia,” he said. “His name’s Garyth. An accountant. He never takes it outside the marina usually, he says. And he hasn’t got a bloody clue how to read a chart. It’s a miracle they got this far.”

  Garyth had a straggly beard and an expression that said he couldn’t go on much longer. He didn’t step off the yacht. He just stood there, clinging to a rail. A woman and a couple of terrified-looking kids huddled together on the foredeck.

  “This isn’t Noroa, is it?” Garyth said.

  “Galangi,” Dan said. “You missed it by a long chalk, if that was where you were heading.”

  Bernie tried to be diplomatic. “What was it like when you left?”

  “They trashed Autrin and Jasper,” Garyth said. “Everybody was evacuated north by the army. But nowhere’s safe from those things.”

  Bernie was aware of Dan staring hard at her as if she was going to say the wrong thing. But she had to know. “Anyone else trying to make it down here?”

  Garyth shook his head. “No idea. We just got out and didn’t look back. The army didn’t stand a chance. I saw them. I saw them from my office window. These huge things like spiders burst out of the ground and just rolled right over the armored vehicles. They can’t save us—we had to save ourselves.”

  Dan put his hand on her shoulder. She thought he was going to say something reassuring about dead Gears. But he didn’t.

  “It’s okay, Bernie,” he said. “We’re not going to be overrun with refugees.”

  But it wasn’t okay. It just confirmed what she dreaded. The COG army, the community she put her faith in, was collapsing. Somewhere far to the north, people she trusted with her life, in a way that she trusted nobody else, were almost certainly dead or wounded.

  “Come on, Garyth,” Dan said, holding out his hand to the bewildered weekend yachtie who’d somehow managed not to drown his family. If that amateur could do it, Bernie thought, she didn’t have an excuse left. “Make yourselves at home. You’re stranded here now, mate. Stranded.”

  CHAPTER 12

  All food supplies will be managed centrally while we establish new crop production areas. Residents of New Jacinto are already used to this system, but we know this will be unfamiliar and even alarming for the Pelruan community. We ask you to cooperate and hand over all stores to COG Emergency Management to ensure fair distribution of food and to deter hoarding or profiteering. The same has been asked of the Gorasni enclave, so everyone is being treated equally.

  (Notice to Pelruan Town Council from Royston Sharle, Head of Emergency Management, New Jacinto: 15 A.E., present day)

  IMULSION DRILLING SITE, 18 KILOMETERS SOUTH OF PELRUAN: ONE WEEK INTO THE PELRUAN EVACUATION, GALE, 15 A.E.

  The rhythmic donkey-braying of a rusty hinge carried a long way in the dead, silent woodland. Trescu parked the pickup at the end of the trackway and looked at Yanik.

  “You coming or not?”

  “I need to keep an ear on the radio, sir,” Yanik said, one hand on the dashboard as if the receiver was going to make a run for it. “The ghost. He’s been transmitting on and off this morning.”

  Trescu stepped down from the cab. Not knowing if the databurst source was the COG or the seagoing Stranded gangs was starting to eat at him, because he was now sitting on a commodity that was definitely worth killing for: an apparently limitless supply of fuel. He had no idea how many Stranded were holed up elsewhere on Sera, but if they had somehow all managed to unite, then they probably outnumbered the COG. It was an unhappy prospect. The Stranded had their own scores to settle, and they were… patient.

  He followed the sound of the imulsion pumps, pausing to check the spread of the contamination on either side of the trackway. It looked as if it was slowing down. The engineers had hammered colored pegs into the ground every twenty-six hours to mark its progress, and the pattern of threads strung between the pegs now looked like the contour lines of a steep hill, closer together as they radiated further from the center of the site.

  There was a time when Trescu might have thought that was a hopeful sign. But he knew this was just a temporary reprieve, buying time to extract as much imulsion as they could.

  If I have to do the unthinkable, then I have to make my first move now. This is going to take preparation. I can’t move the entire camp on a whim.

  A row of primitive derricks was pumping crude imulsion into tanks. If the workers hadn’t been wearing lightweight summer clothing, it could have been any small-scale imulsion facility in the cold north of Gorasnaya. Trescu walked between the derricks, nodding acknowledgment at the Gorasni workers.

  A squad of Gears and a few COG staff from Royston Sharle’s office were wandering around the site too. Everybody seemed to be quite chummy, as Michaelson liked to call it.

  Well, Papa, you wouldn’t have believed it possible anyway. You can take it up with me in the next life.

  “Good morning, Commander.” Stefan sweated over a wrench, trying to loosen a nut on one of the pumps. He said it in Tyran rather than Gorasnayan, a rather diplomatic act. There was nothing quite like hearing foreigners muttering in their heathen languages to make the COG suspect they were up to no good. “Just like the good old days. Imulsion everywhere. It’s a very rich field.”

  “A pleasant change to have some good news.”

  “What brings you here? Checking I’m not smoking near hazardous materials?”

  “Ah, I like to deliver my congratulations in person.” Trescu didn’t trust the radio for anything remotely sensitive these days. “Is everyone well? No ill effects?”

  “I’ve been soaked in imulsion all my working life,” Stefan said. “Brushed my teeth in it, you might say. A little more isn’t going to make matters any worse. If it makes them worse at all.”

  One of the nodding derricks was irritatingly noisy and set Trescu’s teeth on edge. “Are you going to oil that hinge?”

  “Oh, that’s a bearing. It’s fine.” He winked at Trescu. “We’ll all be just fine. The sound of full tanks is a wonderful medicine. We won’t go short, if you see what I mean.”

  For a moment, Trescu didn’t get it. Then he looked where Stefan was looking, and realized it was something to do with the tangled nest of flexible piping feeding into the storage tanks. So he’d found a way of diverting some of the imulsion for their own cache. Trescu couldn’t work out how, but that didn’t matter.

  He didn’t like being that underhanded, but there was no guarantee that Prescott would be reasonable about sharing fuel if the Gorasni fleet decided to leave on its own, even if he depended on Trescu’s team to extract and process the imulsion. But there was plenty to go around. Nobody would suffer if Stefan put a little aside for a rainy day.

  And it’s Prescott I’m dealing with. I’m not betraying Hoffman’s trust. There’s no need to feel dishonorable about this.

  He did, but that was soft sentimentality. Hoffman and Michaelson were pretty decent men, all things considered, but the policy decisions were Prescott’s.

  Including the Hammer of Dawn.

  Trescu walked back to the pickup with the confident authority that his father had taught him to feign even when he was terrified, wondering where they would go next if they had to abandon Vectes without the COG. He had no idea. He didn’t know what state the mainland was in—these stalks could take over an area in days—and he had no way of finding out fast. The COG controlled the air assets. It was a long flight back and that required a Raven with extra fuel tanks.

  Which, in my case, I do not have…

  It was a damn shame that
he couldn’t exploit the seafaring Stranded, but the scum couldn’t be trusted for honest information anyway. He would have to find out for himself. Using Zephyr for coastal reconnaissance was a possibility, but even a submarine was a slow option, and everyone would notice eventually that she was missing.

  Hoffman has to be thinking along the same lines. I should simply ask him. He’s not a fool, and he won’t waste time in a pissing contest.

  When Trescu opened the driver’s door, Yanik was cradling the portable radio in his lap. He didn’t look up. A wire dangled from his ear and led to a jack-plug in the radio. Trescu leaned his folded arms on the roof of the pickup and waited. Yanik gave it a few more minutes and then unplugged.

  “Nothing at the moment,” he said. “But he’ll start again soon.”

  Trescu started the pickup and set off across country to rejoin the paved road. “It has to be a reaction to what’s going on here. But we know that. The range indicates the transmitter is local. So?”

  “It’s the COG. If it wasn’t, Hoffman would try to find out if you knew anything about it.”

  “Not if he thinks it’s us.”

  “Well, that would make him very unhappy.”

  Trescu reached the paved road and began pulling out when a blaring truck horn made him slam on the brakes.

  Damn it, that was embarrassing. He just wasn’t used to so many vehicles on this road. The evacuation of Pelruan was still in progress, an endless shuttle of small vehicles moving people, possessions, stores, food, and animals. It looked like the evacuations on the mainland after E-Day.

  “I don’t want an ironic death, sir,” Yanik said. “Nobody should survive two wars to die in a car crash because their boss didn’t yield at a junction.”

  “Point taken.”

  “When do we welcome our first COG guests?”

  “Maybe never. Nobody’s taken up our offer of hospitality yet.”