“Prescott’s still set on trial or amnesty, applied across the board, sir.”
“Trials? We’re not going to get convictions if he plays by peacetime legal rules.” Hoffman decided it was simply a PR gesture on Prescott’s part that nobody was intended to take seriously. “Where’s the evidence? Who’s going to represent the parties? I’m not letting dangerous scum into this city because we can’t convict and deal with them.” Yes, he thought of this as a city. Until there was a civilian town out there for the remnant to go to, then VNB was New Jacinto. “Martial law’s there for a reason—when peacetime rules don’t work.”
Anya looked awkward for a moment. “You’ll have to argue that with him, sir.”
“Apologies, Anya. It just cramps my guts something fierce to have to do this.”
“I’ll make sure the registration team is ready to start,” she said, escaping.
Bernie went to follow. Hoffman stopped her with a well-timed bark. “Sergeant, wait up. I’d like you to do some personal checking.” He didn’t plan to spell it out in front of Michaelson, friend or not. Bernie deserved some privacy. “Certain elements of the Stranded are of particular interest to me.”
“Understood, sir.” She looked uneasy. “But I doubt if anyone would walk in and risk a good kicking.”
“Free food makes any wild animal take chances, Mataki. You should know that.”
“Indeed I should, sir.”
Bernie doubled back and began walking down the line of Stranded again. The crowd waiting to be processed at the security post was three or four deep, and past the metal scrollwork gates where they’d come in. The gates were two meters high, an ornate remnant of the pre-COG era with a wheel-like emblem in each center panel.
“Anything I can do, Victor?” Michaelson asked.
“All under control.”
“I’ve known you a long time, my friend, and it’s not—”
Bernie was in the press of bodies now, looking into every face. A movement caught Hoffman’s eye. In the section of crowd queuing in front of the gates, people were stepping aside and looking over their shoulders, as if a scuffle had broken out. Hoffman saw a head rise above the others, and realized a man was trying to climb the gates. Bernie turned to look at the same time. It was an odd moment to decide that he didn’t want the COG’s protection.
Oh, shit…
The guy could have been any criminal scumbag, but Hoffman guessed that he wasn’t.
He knew that he couldn’t sprint that distance and get to the man before Bernie did. He started to jog across the parade ground, trying to look casual, but Gears and civvies paused to stare, and he saw the top of Bernie’s head as she pushed through the crowd. People in front of the gate suddenly scattered and ducked. In that split-second’s clear view, Hoffman saw Bernie swing her Lancer hard into the man’s legs like an axe. He fell. Hoffman didn’t see anything else for a few seconds—there was yelling, plenty of yelling—until he pushed through the crowd and found Bernie kneeling on the man’s back, pushing his arm up between his shoulder blades.
Hoffman wasn’t the only one on the spot. Every Gear within fifty meters piled in too.
“There,” Bernie said. She reached for her rifle one-handed and slid the chainsaw against the man’s face. For a moment Hoffman thought she was going to switch it on. “Take a look around. How do you like the odds now, tosser?”
It has to be him. Suicidal asshole. Why the hell would he risk coming in here? Maybe he thought she wouldn’t recognize him. Maybe he didn’t realize she’d be down here.
Andresen, a couple of men from Bravo 6, and a Raven crew chief crowded around, all ready to dive in, all in a bar brawl mood that had sprung from nowhere. Hoffman was sure they didn’t know the details, but they’d certainly picked up on one thing: one of their own had a serious grievance with a Stranded.
Hoffman knew that if they found out exactly what the man had done, then things were going to get out of hand fast, discipline or no discipline. He moved in and shoved Bernie aside, pinning the man’s arms. Hoffman decided he was still fit enough to take him. If the bastard gave him an excuse to use his sidearm here and now, he’d take it. He didn’t care who was watching.
Jacinto folks will understand. The locals—they’ve got some learning to do.
“It’s okay, Mataki,” Hoffman said. “I’ll deal with this.”
“I don’t even know his name.” Bernie let go and stepped back. “But that’s him.”
He was about thirty, pretty damn solid, with curly dark hair and an expression on his face that said he really didn’t believe anyone could touch him, not even here. That pissed off Hoffman massively in its own right. This was COG turf, his turf. And he answered only to Prescott.
“I don’t give a damn what this animal’s called,” Hoffman snarled, nose to nose with the man. “But it’s committed a capital crime, and it’s going to pay for it. What’s your name? I can’t just call you asshole, because then all the other assholes like you would think I was addressing them.”
“You got some fucking funny double standards, man.”
Hoffman drew his sidearm. “Name.”
“Jonn,” he said. “Massy.”
The parade ground was a perfect amphitheater. Hoffman was aware that he had a much bigger audience now. There were civvies—real civvies, Jacinto citizens, even visiting Pelruan people—who’d come out from an accommodation block to get a better look. The Hoffman they’d known was formal, businesslike. Now they were seeing the man he’d been when he had to get results fast. He hadn’t needed to be that Hoffman for a long time.
“I assume you’re a relative of the shitbag who raided Pelruan, then.”
“Brother. He’s dead, asshole. You fascists killed him.”
“So file a complaint. In the meantime, you’re detained.”
Jonn Massy—if that was his name at all—also realized he had an audience, although Hoffman didn’t know why the hell he thought anyone other than his own kind would give a shit what happened to him now.
“That bitch killed my buddies,” he yelled. “She cut them up, man. She took her time doing it. So where’s your fucking amnesty now? Where’s your justice? Why isn’t she in jail? Because it sure as shit wasn’t self-defense, not coming back to slit them up weeks later.”
Hoffman wanted this over and done with. He didn’t want to broadcast the details. Bernie had taken enough humiliation already.
“Maybe they asked for it,” Hoffman said, and hauled him off toward the guard room. “And you did, too.”
Andresen came after him. “What did the bastard do, sir? Tell me.”
Massy was yelling now. “I want a trial—I want a fucking trial!” Hoffman kept walking. “The bitch is a murderer!”
“Sir?” Andresen didn’t give up. “Come on, sir, it’s Mataki—” And they’re imagining the worst anyway. “You’ll find out when you need to, Sergeant,” Hoffman said, and slammed the door.
NCOG PATROL BOAT CHANCELLOR, FIFTY KILOMETERS OFF THE COAST.
Dom had forgotten just how terrifyingly big the ocean was.
The haze on the water still hadn’t lifted, and he couldn’t even see the trawlers. They were somewhere out there on an expanding square search pattern, working from where the Harvest’s floats had been found.
He hadn’t been in a small boat like this for a long, long time. The steady vibration from the engines and the sound of the churning water brought back faces and voices he’d almost forgotten, bittersweet, right on the limit of the painful memories he could handle these days. Overhead, a Raven tracked east to west.
And even with a bird up there, it’s still a damn big ocean to cover.
“I can’t see the submarine,” Marcus said.
“That’s the whole point, baby.” Cole was way too close to the rail of the patrol boat for Dom’s liking. “Y’know, I think I prefer flyin’. It’s over faster.”
“Don’t lean on the guard rail if you’ve got to chuck up,” Dom warned. “I’ve seen ex
perienced guys fall in. Kneel down, all fours.”
“Shit, this thing ain’t got much deck space for a growin’ boy.”
“Okay, go lean on the gun.” The machine gun was mounted forward on a sturdy housing. If Cole puked on the deck, a quick hose-down was a lot easier than recovering a man overboard. “We’ve got to be close. The debris couldn’t have drifted that far.”
Marcus stood in the open wheelhouse door, scanning the horizon. “Dom, remember that leviathan thing? The one that hauled the grub boats in the underground lake?”
“Do I have to?”
“If there were others, flooding the tunnels wouldn’t have drowned them. It might have let them escape into open water.”
“Shit. You think something like that attacked the boat?”
“I told ’em, man.” Cole perked up, vindicated. “The fishermen trawled up this big ugly eel, and I swore it was from the grub menagerie.”
Muller, the NCOG coxswain, peered from the open bridge up top. “You want to share that intel with Clement, Sergeant? If there’s anything on the loose, the CO needs to know.”
“It was at least the length of a grub gunboat and it had scales,” Marcus said. “We didn’t ask if it was an only child. We just killed it.”
“Yeah, very helpful. Next time Clement makes contact, I’ll tell them there might be some seriously big trouble out there.”
“Can’t you radio him?”
“He’s got to come up to periscope depth to get a comms link in seawater,” Muller said. “His trailing wire’s screwed at the moment. We don’t have a single vessel that’s one hundred percent functional, remember.”
Dom reminded himself that this was just planning for the worst, nothing definite. Until they found identifiable parts of the boat, then the trawler could just have been drifting without radio comms after losing some floats. But everyone was unusually quiet until the voice of Clement’s CO came over the radio.
“Clement to Chancellor, negative so far. The deep trench starts around here. If anything’s gone to the bottom, we’re out of luck.”
“Roger that, Clement,” Muller said. “And if you get any big sonar pings, it might be a grub monster fish that’s bigger than you. Very late intel report from our sergeant here.”
“Might be a whale, of course. Okay, if we don’t recognize the acoustics, then we’ll worry.”
Dom wondered what sailors considered a reasonable period to search for survivors before giving up. That was a strange question from a man who’d spent ten years looking for his own wife. He realized he’d already written the crew off as dead. It was easy to do that with strangers, and impossible to do it with your own.
“KR-Six-Seven to Chancellor.” Dom listened to the radio traffic between the Raven and the patrol boat. “I’m seeing a white object five klicks west of your current search boundary. Might be an upturned hull—or could be a decomposing whale. I’ve seen foam from something breaching the surface about twenty klicks from here. I’m going in for a closer look.”
“Shit,” said Cole. “That don’t sound encouraging.”
“KR-Six-Seven to Chancellor, confirmed, it’s an upturned hull. Looks damaged. Want to follow me up and get a line on it?”
“Roger that, Six-Seven.” Muller opened up Chancellor’s throttle and headed west. “On our way.”
“KR-Six-Seven, how damaged?” Marcus asked.
“Splintered and holed, from what I can see. Collision with something big, or else it’s been shot up.”
“Not much it can collide with out here.”
Muller called down from the bridge. “Not with one of ours, definitely. Other fishing boats—unlikely. Crazed killer grub fish—who knows?”
Even with the Raven overhead directing them, it took a while to get a visual on the hull. Muller brought the patrol boat alongside. It bobbed at an angle in the water, as if it was weighted at one end. The smooth composite was punched with small, splintered holes, and that meant only one thing.
“So I’m guessing it’s Stranded,” Muller said. “Unless your leviathan was packing a cannon.”
Shit, whoever opened fire kept firing when the boat overturned. Bastards.
“Okay, Muller, let the fishermen know,” Marcus said. The other boats were still converging on the position, but their top speed was a fraction of a patrol boat’s. “Better check in case someone’s trapped in an air pocket. I’ll dive under there if—”
“No.” Muller came down from the bridge and surveyed the hull from the port side. “We don’t need extra casualties. Wait one.”
He grabbed the boathook and squatted down to prod the hull. Dom wondered if he was tapping to get a response—damn, someone was going to have to get on that hull to actually listen for signs of life, whatever Muller said—but then the hull flipped over.
“Shit.” Muller almost lost his footing. “Wasn’t expecting that.”
It was just a small splintered section of the boat’s outer skin, smeared with black streaks that could have been charring. Dom would have suspected a fuel fire if it hadn’t been for the peppering of holes. He couldn’t tell if the black smears on the debris were oil or burns.
“Well, the rest of it isn’t going to be floating anywhere,” Muller said. “Unless those poor bastards were exceptionally lucky and went over the side with life jackets before they got hit, then they’re gone.”
“Okay, if they did get out, what are our chances of finding them?”
“Close to zero,” Muller said.
The Raven carried on the search for a while, and Chancellor hung around more out of courtesy than in any hope of being useful. Clement eventually surfaced a few hundred meters away. Muller went into the wheelhouse for a few minutes, then stuck his head out the door.
“Clement’s CO says there’s a lot of debris on the slope of the ocean shelf, Sergeant,” he said. “But finding recognizable bits of boat down there … not a hope in hell.”
“Any big fish?”
“Whales. You can hear them right across the other side of the ocean if you get in the right density layer. And some distant engine noise. But no rampant leviathans.”
“Okay.” Marcus took a breath. Dom could see him wrestling with the decision, and knew what he was imagining: some guys bobbing in the water, impossible to spot in a vast ocean, waiting for help that would never come. “We can’t do much down here. KR-Six-Seven, want to call it off?”
“We’re okay,” said the Raven pilot. “We’ll carry on for a while with the other boats. We’ve narrowed the search area, anyway. Go home, guys.”
Chancellor headed back to VNB at maximum throttle. Cole seemed to find that less puke-inducing, and he definitely perked up as the fortress-like walls of VNB got closer.
“Dom, why the hell would Stranded bother to sink a little boat?” he said. “They steal shit. They need boats. Hell, they probably want the catch too. Why trash it?”
“Maybe the fishermen fought back,” Marcus said. “I want to know what brought Stranded in so close to Vectes. Not an easy journey.”
“Easy pickings, maybe.”
“What, they failed to spot the whole damn COG navy steaming in?”
Dom thought of the raid on Pelruan. Some collective craziness had seized the Stranded, and they didn’t seem to care how big or dangerous their prey was now. Desperation? Maybe. Ignorance? They didn’t seem to know the size of the COG forces they’d be taking on. Perhaps they were so used to being the top of the food chain out here that they’d overdosed on arrogance. The COG was tiny, a medium-sized city and a worn-down army rather than an empire now, but compared to a few pirate vessels it was still the world superpower.
He thought it was, anyway. Dom had a moment of doubt.
Maybe it’s more than a few pirates. Maybe we’re the ones who haven’t got the math right.
“Friggin’ sad, man,” Cole said. “Survive the end of the world, and the first thing us humans do is start fightin’ among ourselves again.”
Marcus grunted.
“We can quit anytime. If we want to.”
Dom wondered if anyone ever did. The COG couldn’t quit now, that was certain. It now had a new enemy to tackle. The almost-peace had lasted nine weeks.
CHAPTER 15
Understand what a world had to do to survive.
(CHAIRMAN RICHARD PRESCOTT, MEMOIRS, OPENING LINE, UNPUBLISHED DRAFT.)
THE SANTIAGO HOUSE, EPHYRA, FIVE DAYS AFTER THE HAMMER OF DAWN STRIKE ACROSS SERA, 1 A.E.
The sky was charcoal gray, a kind of stormy dusk, but it was mid-morning. That was a big improvement; the airborne debris was starting to settle.
“Baby, remember to keep the windows shut,” Dom said. “I don’t want you inhaling this shit. Okay? Stay indoors. Promise me.”
Maria handed him a scarf, the camo pattern one he’d picked up in his commando training days. “At least put this on.”
“I said, promise me.”
She didn’t seem to hear him. “You ought to wear your helmet this time. I know you don’t like it, but it’ll keep you safe.”
“Maria, please. Don’t go out today.” Dom didn’t know if he’d do more harm than good by spelling it out to her. But he knew that going outside to look for something she’d never find was dangerous. “Bennie and Sylvie aren’t out there, baby. They’re gone. I know folks think they see people they’ve lost, but it’s all imagination. I promise I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
She didn’t meet his eyes. It wasn’t avoidance. She seemed to blank him out, then carry on again as if nothing had been said.
“You sure you won’t wear your helmet?”
Dom gave up for the time being. He wasn’t going to hear what he needed to. “No, the air filters just clog up. Why do you think they’re not flying Raven sorties? That stuff gets into the air intakes and engines.” He wrapped the scarf around his neck and pulled the folds up over his nose. “Look, I don’t know how long we’re going to be out there, but don’t get worried. Everything’s going to take longer than usual. Just stay inside. I’ll try to call you when I can.”
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