Coalition's End

by Karen Traviss

  “Very nice.”

  “Look, we’re just trying to establish the extent of the stalks and if anywhere’s habitable.”

  The woman laughed. “Why, you thinking of coming back?”

  “One day, yes.”

  “Goddamn. You’re serious.”

  “What happened to Corren?”

  “Same as all the city camps. Stalks. There’s something those things like about cities. You’re talking on the radio to a camp one day, and the next—it’s gone.”

  “Gerrenhalt?”

  “Not a word for months.”

  “How about further afield—Bonbourg?”

  “No. Ogari was broadcasting up to three weeks ago, though.”

  Hoffman took a breath. “How about Anvil Gate … or Branascu?”

  “You’re into the history books now, Colonel. Nobody went near Anvil Gate, ever. Too many kill-crazy savages up there in the hills. And too damn far.” She paused. “And Branascu—never heard of it.”

  Dom wasn’t sure if that was a relief to Hoffman or not. Trescu didn’t say a word. He just stood there completely motionless, staring straight into the camp, not even blinking much. No, these folks didn’t know what a Gorasni was, which was just as well.

  “Are there any big camps other than yours?”

  “You’re racking up your fuel bill, soldier.”

  “Are there?”

  “Not many.”

  The woman stared past him at the Raven. Dom turned slowly to see what she was looking at. Gettner was now on the door gun and Barber was hauling a couple of ten-liter fuel cans out of the Raven.

  “You want my advice?” the woman asked. “Stay on your island. We’ve survived everything so far—your Hammer of Dawn, the grubs, the glowies—by being small.” So everyone called them glowies. Dom decided that was proof they were in contact with the seagoing gangs. “We’ve got just enough people to keep a tribe going, but not too many when we need to move fast. So if you come back here and try to set up a big-ass city again, you’re just going to be a sitting target for the stalks and the glowies with all the legs, and whatever else is coming.” She lowered her voice. “’Cause it is coming. Now give me my fuel and run on back to your nice little island.”

  Hoffman seemed to give in pretty fast, almost as if he wanted to get out and something had made up his mind that this was a waste of time. He touched his cap politely. “Much obliged, ma’am. Here’s your fuel. High-grade imulsion.”

  “Yeah, there’s a river of the stuff at Descano Hill now,” she said. “If you don’t mind the glowies.”

  But she walked up and took the cans like bags of groceries when Barber put them down. Dom was impressed by a woman who could lift two heavy cans that easily. Only the toughest lasted long as Stranded.

  Dom moved off cautiously, hoping that Gettner was as good a shot as Barber while they had their backs to the Stranded. But nobody put a round between their shoulder blades. They piled back into the Raven and lifted off.

  “Glowies and imulsion again,” Marcus said, looking down at the reservoir dwindling beneath them. “You know what Baird would say.”

  “What do you think, Royston?” Hoffman asked.

  “You know what I think,” Sharle said. “That woman nailed it. Stranded survive because they’re small, mobile, hard-to-hit targets. Low resource use, low profile.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That moving a whole population out here is going to be a lot harder than relocating to Vectes was.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “We won’t find an empty city capable of housing thousands ready for us to move into anyway. We could look at resettling Port Farrall, but that would mean preparing the place before we shifted the whole population, and that would take Gears and resources away from Vectes for months.”

  “Yeah, but we can’t split up into groups of a few thousand,” Marcus said. “People are used to a city with organization and specialist defense. They’d have a tough time fending for themselves. Defending a chain of villages would overstretch us.”

  Hoffman looked at Sharle, then Trescu. These were the guys who were going to make the call. It looked to Dom like they’d had this argument a lot in the last few weeks.

  “Then we have to find a way of staying put,” Hoffman said. “Because we can’t split up and maintain any semblance of a goddamn society.”

  Trescu just nodded. As the Raven tracked north, Dom could see more stalks inland and some shattered cities that almost looked as if they’d been impaled on them.

  The reality was dawning. They could either stay on Vectes and hope the stalks held off, or they could become like those desperate little camps struggling to eke out an existence here. Dom was suddenly scared that they were all talking themselves into it.

  “Fuck that, sir,” he said. “If we come back we’ll end up like the Stranded, so what’s it all been for? We could have done that years ago. We needn’t have fought to defend anywhere. We could have just run and stayed out of the grubs’ way. Maybe a lot more folks would still be alive now.”

  “I know, Dom.” Hoffman took off his cap and rubbed his scalp one-handed. “You think I don’t lie awake at night wondering if I’ve ballsed the whole thing up and wasted lives?”

  “Sorry, sir. Yeah. Just frustrated.”

  The last thing Dom wanted was to make Hoffman feel bad about things that had never been under his control in the first place. He leaned across and patted the old bastard’s knee.

  If it was a choice between the COG and losing the last few people he cared about, the COG could go screw itself.

  COLONEL HOFFMAN’S QUARTERS, VECTES NAVAL BASE: GALE, 15 A.E.

  Mac was drinking from the toilet bowl again. Bernie watched him lapping for a while and decided it wouldn’t do him any harm as long as Hoffman didn’t catch him doing it.

  “Where’s your table manners?” She rubbed his ears when he came up for air. “Yeah, you’re taking advantage of your old mum, aren’t you? You’re not an invalid anymore. Buck up, soldier.”

  He looked at her with pitifully sad brown eyes, but then that was how deerhound crosses always looked. It got him a handful of rabbit jerky every time. He chewed it as if he was humoring her and trotted across the room to flop onto Hoffman’s bed as if his long legs had finally given way under him.

  “I know the feeling, sweetie,” she said. “Come on, you can’t sleep there. You know Vic goes ballistic. Especially when he’s had a bad week.”

  Mac just stretched out the full length of the mattress and shut his eyes. Bernie went back to the mirror over the washbasin and carried on braiding her hair into rows, but she was so engrossed in the fiddly job of tying them off that she didn’t hear Hoffman coming this time, not until he let rip at Mac. He stood in the doorway like he was doing an unannounced kit inspection.

  “Come on, off!” He snapped his fingers at Mac, but the dog just opened one eye and decided he didn’t really mean it. “Frigging dog hairs all over the place. Bernie, can’t you keep this animal off the furniture?”

  “He’s convalescing.”

  “My ass. I could get over a heart bypass faster. What are you doing?”

  “Plaiting my hair. Keeps it tidy.”

  “Not a problem I have to wrestle with.” Hoffman reached across the basin to inspect his personal bar of soap, a precious commodity in a world without shops. Taken-for-granted groceries had become handmade luxuries. “Goddamn… there’s dog hairs all over this.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And you’ve been using my razor again.”

  “Yeah. Sorry, love.” It wasn’t really about the razor. He’d been ranting ever since he came back from the mainland. He didn’t normally hold anything back from her, so she was getting worried. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  He picked the dog hairs off the soap with just a little too much concentration. “What, hair? I gave up that stuff a long time ago.”

  “Come on, Vic. We’ve both been through a lot worse tha
n this. There’s always a fix.”

  Hoffman put the soap back on the side of the basin and sat down on the bed, ignoring Mac’s attempt to slobber over him.

  “I like clarity,” he said. “It’s never been this hard before. Even the Hammer strikes. We were pretty sure what the options were.”

  “We’ll know when to run. You can’t make a decision yet. It’s probably not even yours to make.”

  Hoffman smiled ruefully. “See, you always nail it.”

  “We’ve had a lot of practice at running, Vic.”

  “It’s different this time.”

  “Yeah, we’re stuck on an island.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant.” He braced his elbows on his knees, head bowed. “Sharle’s right. If we have to evacuate, then our only chance on the mainland is dispersing in small groups. We’d be spread over a hell of a big area.”

  “Beats keeping all your eggs in one basket.”

  “But how do we defend the settlements? How do we stay organized as a state? Who gets the doctors, the Gears, the Ravens? Do we abandon the imulsion field here, or try to keep drilling and shipping the stuff back to the mainland?”

  “That’s routine stuff, Vic.”

  “We’ve always been concentrated in one defensible area before.”

  He didn’t say the word Stranded. But that was probably what was getting to him. She understood his fears only too well because she’d been there too. It wasn’t just the animosity between the COG and the Hammer strike survivors who felt betrayed and abandoned by it. It was about somehow becoming less than human.

  “I survived the worst of it out there on my own,” Bernie said. “All I had was a couple of rifles and a knife. A COG made up of villages can make it too.”

  Hoffman took off his armor and stacked it by the bed. Then he pulled something out of his shirt pocket and handed it to her.

  “Sharle’s drawn up a list of plans. Everything from staying put here to returning to Port Farrall, to breaking up into five groups or ten or fifty, to living at sea on the ships indefinitely. Lots of options, and none of them good.”

  Bernie took the folded sheets of paper, still trying to work out why this was hitting him harder than she expected. Perhaps it was cumulative—that he’d had to do so much shit, year upon year, crisis after crisis, and now it had finally reached critical mass and felled him.

  “Doesn’t that reassure you?” she asked. Her mind was now on the small detail that she understood all too well: food production. How would they divide up the livestock? How would they farm on the mainland?

  And how are we going to deploy Gears if we’re hundreds of kilometers apart and we don’t have enough fuel?

  It was starting to sink in. It wasn’t the scale of the logistics that was getting to Hoffman. It was people. It was the possibility of a tight-knit family being broken up.

  But that wouldn’t affect us.

  Bernie realized she’d assumed that the important people, the people she liked and cared about, would always be together at the heart of this. Delta Squad would always be there, as would Dizzy. Hoffman, Michaelson, Trescu … and even Prescott would still be running the show. It was just the civilians who would be affected.

  But it wouldn’t be that way, and now she knew it. The settlements would need to run themselves and that meant the command would need to be divided too.

  “Got any places in mind?” She unfolded the handwritten papers and leafed through them. Sharle’s neat draftsman’s lettering listed names of places that meant little to her until she saw one out of alphabetical order.

  Anvil Gate.

  Bernie couldn’t imagine many people who wanted to end up there. She wasn’t sure if it was possible to know a man too well, but she could certainly think like Hoffman. He’d say it was a pragmatic choice, a place he didn’t just know like the back of his hand but that he’d also held under siege, and he would have been right.

  And he couldn’t get the place out of his system.

  She grabbed him in a playful headlock and rubbed her knuckles vigorously on his scalp. She could feel the slight drag of stubble. He didn’t even protest.

  “You daft old sod,” she said. “This is the worst-scenario plan. We could still be here in ten years.”

  “I prefer to think the worst and get a nice surprise. But I’m still waiting for one of those.”

  “Well, there’s me. You weren’t expecting to see me alive again.”

  “That’s true.” He nodded, staring past her at nothing in particular. “You’d come to Anvil Gate with me, right? Even if it meant losing contact with your buddies?”

  She hadn’t really thought that through, but the answer was automatic. “Goes without saying.”

  “I thought it was best to check.”

  “But I keep the dog.”

  “Sure. I know where I fit in the pecking order.” He was trying to make a joke of it all but he’d never been much good at that. He took off his holster belt, draped it over a chair, and vanished into the cramped bathroom to run the shower. “Shit. I’m sorry, Bernie. Just venting. It might never come to that, but you have to think the unthinkable.”

  She went on braiding her hair. Mac scrambled off the bed and sat by the door, looking at it expectantly. “I know. Look, I’m taking a patrol out to see if we can find Seb Edlar’s animals. We’re going to need them. Promise me you won’t have hysterics if I’m late back.”

  She heard the soap drop on the shower tray, then nothing except for the hammering water.

  “Vic?” The water stopped and he was so quiet that she wondered if he’d collapsed. He was a heart attack kind of bloke. “Vic? You okay?”

  “Goddamn, just like the old days. Just remembering the last time I stood in a shower telling someone… telling Margaret that the world was going to rat-shit, that’s all.”

  Bernie could gauge where he’d reached on the despair scale now—the final days before Prescott decided to deploy the Hammer. He hadn’t even told his wife the strikes were coming until he was allowed to. She knew he despised himself for that.

  “You can talk about her, Vic,” Bernie said. “You can say her name. Don’t shut out the dead, or else you erase them.”

  “Okay. I won’t have hysterics.” He was still sidestepping the issue. “Who are you taking?”

  “Girls’ day out,” she said. “Anya and Sam. And Alex Brand. She says she’s getting skills fade.”

  “Two sergeants on one patrol.” Hoffman emerged, toweling his back. “Two women in a kitchen.”

  “Marcus and I manage it.”

  “Yeah. But he’s Marcus.” He tried to ruffle her hair, thwarted by the unfamiliar braids, and settled for a peck on the cheek instead. “See you later, babe. Don’t take any stupid risks for a few cows.”

  She picked up her Longshot. “We’re just doing girls’ stuff. Bringing back the groceries.”

  Mac perked up and trotted after her. He wasn’t terrific on steep stairs. Here was a dog that would fight polyps and take down armed Stranded, but needed a bit of encouragement to walk down flights of steps. No, that was unfair. He actually seemed to be limping this time. When they got to the ground floor, Bernie examined his paws. He flinched and whimpered.

  “Okay, maybe you’re not swinging the lead,” she said. “You want to stay behind and take a nap? Vic won’t mind. Then I’ll get Doc Hayman to take a look at you when I get back.”

  She gestured up the stairs, but he sat gazing at her, looking a little martyred. He wanted to stick with his mum. She gave him a piece of rabbit and he trotted after her across the parade ground.

  Sam was loading the Packhorse with Alex Brand while Anya sat on the tailgate, poring over recon images. Mac snuffled on the photographs and then squeezed past her to jump into the back.

  “Ooh, like the hair, Sarge,” Sam said. Alex looked up and frowned. “Very South Islands.”

  Bernie did a twirl. “Everybody ready for the roundup?”

  “Shouldn’t we take the farmer along? D
on’t cows recognize people?”

  “They do. But I don’t want to take a skittish civvie back into the contaminated zone.” Bernie reached into the Packhorse and pulled out a small sack of cattle nuts. “This is doggie treats for cows. Shake this bag at them and you’re their friend for life.”

  “I’m not going to pretend I’m confident about this. Goats—fine. Cows—scary. And there’s a bull, too.”

  “We might just find chunks if they’ve run into polyps.” Bernie opened the driver’s door. “And don’t forget we’ve got two missing dogs as well. Now, I’ve got to move one of the herd before we go, so let’s familiarize ourselves with basic cow recognition. Everyone knows what a cow looks like, don’t they?”

  Alex climbed into the back seat with Sam. “I think so, Mataki,” she said. She had a half-smoked cigar tucked in the rolled cuff of her sleeve and her hair was dyed a vivid red. Bernie wasn’t sure what she used to keep it that color but it had to be a wild plant dye. If she’d found it herself, that was a survival skill of sorts. There was hope for the girl yet. “I’d better get a steak out of this.”

  Bernie didn’t know Alex well, but she knew that Baird hated her guts, and that was enough to make her wary. For a moment, Bernie felt a pang of uneasiness at being among strangers. She was used to deploying with certain people, Gears she staked her life on, and all she could think about was how hard it would be to be separated from them even if Hoffman was with her.

  For fuck’s sake. After all this, after all I’ve survived, and I’m scared of change that’ll save my life.

  Bernie had survived two wars. She’d fought the grubs back in the Islands, she’d sailed halfway around Sera, she’d been raped, she’d nearly starved to death, and she’d killed Stranded out of revenge. It was hard to believe that there was anything left to scare her at this stage of her life, but she was back where she belonged and she didn’t want to leave. Place had nothing to do with it. It was all about people.

  The Packhorse wove through a crowded naval base that now reminded Bernie far too much of a Stranded encampment. An overwhelming need to rejoin the COG army had sent her on a terrible journey across Sera, and fear of descending into savagery like the Stranded she encountered along the way had kept her going, even when it would have been so easy to just lay down and die.