Coalition's End Read online

  (Major Gill Gettner, Raven pilot, seeing the first Lambent stalks emerge on Vectes)

  KING RAVEN KR-80 ON PATROL OVER NORTHERN VECTES; TEN DAYS AFTER THE INITIAL LAMBENT LANDING, STORM, 15 A.E.

  Damon Baird tried to recall exactly how he’d felt on E-Day when he saw his first grub.

  He remembered the detail but not much of the emotion that went with it. But he guessed it had been pretty much like he felt now; a churning gut, a tight scalp, and a hardwired animal reflex to run or fight. He didn’t know why these stalks looked different from the others, or what those big red blisters were doing on their trunks, but he knew at an instinctive level that he either had to blow the shit out of them or run like hell.

  Being twenty meters off the ground in a hovering Raven ruled out making a run for it. He sighted up on the nearest blister instead.

  “Control, this is KR-Eight-Zero, contact in grid echo-five,” Gettner repeated, like she was explaining it to the thickest kid in the class. “Major stalk incursion. Three of the bastards have just erupted. I know Delta Squad’s a regular mini-army, but we could still do with some help.”

  Mathieson’s voice never rose above flat calm, no matter how much shit hit the fan. “I heard you, Eight-Zero, but echo-five is inland. Please confirm your position.”

  “I know it’s damn well inland, Mathieson. That’s why it’s significant and why we’d like a little backup. They shouldn’t be here.”

  “How many polyps?”

  “None. Yet.”

  “Understood, Major. Stand by.”

  Baird adjusted his aim again. Gettner was a charmlessly acid bitch, but she was right. The stalks, the monstrous tree-like growths they’d first encountered only weeks ago, should have been a long way out to sea.

  No. We got that wrong. They’re here, and that means they’ve found a way to come up through granite. This place was supposed to be safe.

  Yeah, like Ephyra. Like Jacinto. Why do I always believe that crap?

  The stalks had already sunk a warship, an imulsion drilling platform, and any number of small boats. Maybe busting up through igneous rock was all in a day’s work for them.

  “Fenix, I can’t hold this bird here all day,” Gettner said. “Those things had better shit or get off the pot.”

  “Yeah, I’ll pass that on, Major.” Marcus stared down the sights of the door gun while Nat Barber, Gettner’s crew chief, took recon images. “How long has it been now?”

  “Two minutes,” she said.

  “Give ’em ten.”

  “Okay, talk among yourselves, kids. I’ll just waste some more of our extremely limited fuel.”

  This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. Stalks erupted in seconds, and then the polyps—evil little shits, all legs and fangs—poured off them like giant homicidal crabs and blew up in your damn face. But there was no sign of them. The stalks just stood there, glowing and waiting.

  I’ve never seen blisters on stalks before.

  The more Baird looked, the more he could see a cross on the membrane, almost dividing it into quadrants.

  “Okay, what the fuck are those things?” he asked, more for the comfort of hearing his own voice than to get an answer. “The blisters, I mean. Answers on a postcard, please.”

  Dom Santiago shrugged. “Seed pods.”

  “That makes me feel so much better.”

  “Well, you asked.” Dom looked over his shoulder. “Hey, Cole Train? That remind you of anything?”

  “Yeah,” Cole said. Everyone—six Gears and a dog—was jostling for position on the edge of the crew bay, trying to get a clear shot for when the inevitable polyp spatterfest kicked off. “Those weeds you get on old construction sites. The ones with those big seed heads that go off with a bang. Man, I used to laugh my ass off playing with those as a kid.”

  “Me too,” Dom said. “Don’t tell me you never popped them to see how far the seeds would shoot, Baird.”

  Baird was reminded of his solitary, miserable childhood again. He was a rich kid from a founding family. He didn’t have adventures in forbidden places. He had extra lessons.

  “I never played on construction sites,” he said, feigning disdain but wishing he’d climbed over a keep out sign just once in his youth. “Dear Mama would send the butler to do that shit for me. The bitch…”

  Dom turned to Bernie Mataki. “What about you, Sarge?”

  “We didn’t have them on the South Islands.”

  “Construction sites?”

  “No, that kind of plant.”

  Marcus was hunched over the door gun, scowling at the stalks. “Ephyran balsam,” he said. Oh, so he knew what Dom meant, too. “Gunweed. Glandulifera ephyrica.”

  Marcus Fenix had never played on any damn building site, Baird was sure of that. His family—no, his dynasty— was even richer than Baird’s. The Bairds had a few nice paintings and a gated mansion: the Fenixes had a walled estate and more priceless art treasures than the frigging National Museum of Ephyra.

  And now nobody had anything. The grubs believed in equality, at least.

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot,” Baird said. “You and Dom, carefree childhood buddies, yadda yadda yadda…”

  “My mom,” Marcus growled, “used to take me for walks around the Hollow. My mom the biologist.”

  Dom gave Baird a discreet jab with his elbow. “Just zip it, Baird.”

  He said it in a weary voice, barely audible over the noise of the Raven even on the radio link. So Marcus had lost his folks; big deal. Everyone else had, too, and Baird didn’t think the how and the when of it made much difference now. But he shut up anyway. He kept his eyes on the blisters as the Raven hovered level with the tops of the branches, feeling the air buffeting and drying his eyes. He didn’t dare look away to put on his goggles. Mac the asshole-hound squeezed his head between Baird’s leg and Dom as if he was keeping an eye on the stalks too.

  Five minutes… six… and still nobody said a word.

  Then the blister that Baird was focused on suddenly stopped throbbing.

  “Whoa, heads up. Here it comes.” Baird’s finger tightened on the Lancer’s trigger. “Any second now.”

  “Steady, people,” Marcus said. “Make every round count.”

  Then the blisters stopped pulsing, all of them, all at once. The red glowing patches dimmed like cooling embers and turned a dull gray. It was hard to define, but Baird felt he was watching something set hard like concrete, all the life draining out of it.

  “I think the show’s over, baby,” Cole said. “Hell, I want my money back. I paid to see glowie crabs.”

  Gettner backed the Raven away from the stalks, climbing ten meters to do a slow loop above the branches.

  “Okay, I’m setting down,” she said. “They look dead to me.”

  “You sure?” Baird asked.

  “You’re the glowie expert. You’ve sawed up a dead stalk. Can’t you tell?”

  Baird shrugged. Nobody knew enough about the Lambent yet, not even him. “I have trust issues. Especially when it comes to glowies.”

  So where were the polyps? His best guess was that they didn’t emerge from stalks but with them, just like they turned up with Lambent leviathans. It wasn’t a comforting thought either way. It was just a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle, and Baird didn’t like uncertainty.

  Gettner landed in the open field a good fifty meters away from the stalks, so maybe she was having second thoughts. “Okay. Let’s get this over with.”

  Mac rumbled deep in his throat, eyes fixed on the gnarled trunks. Bernie bent down to talk to him. The mutt was nearly hip-height, a leggy, scruffy deerhound thing with a gray wiry coat and a mournful thousand-yard stare. He was still peppered with small burns from his last skirmish with the polyps.

  “No glowies, sweetie,” Bernie said. “It’s okay. No nasty polyps.”

  “He’s got some scores to settle,” Baird said.

  “Haven’t we all.” She jumped down and wound Mac’s leash tight around her hand. “Well, a
t least we get to examine the things properly now.”

  Marcus led the slow walk across to the stalks with the caution usually reserved for an unexploded bomb.

  “I’m counting on the dog,” he said. “Animals sense all this shit long before we do.”

  Baird gave Mac a wide berth. He might have looked lovable and slobbery now, but Baird had seen him nearly rip a guy’s scalp off. The locals trained their dogs to run loose and attack Stranded raiding parties. Baird didn’t have a problem with that, seeing as most of the Stranded gangs were vermin who only came to Vectes for a spot of rape and pillage. He just didn’t want to test how good the dog’s asshole recognition skills were.

  Dom walked up to the first stalk and rapped his knuckles against the rock-hard trunk. “They look like weathered stone.”

  “Yeah.” If Baird hadn’t seen the stalks erupt from the soil he’d have been willing to believe they’d been there for centuries. There was no sign that they’d ever been alive. “Or petrified wood.”

  Marcus looked down the trunk. “Wonder what it uses for roots?”

  “Look, this is a volcanic island,” Baird said. “We should be safe here. If this place is grub-proof, why isn’t it glowie-proof?”

  “Yeah, good point.” To Baird’s ears, that was as good as a medal. Marcus wasn’t big on praise. “At least we can find out more about these things now they’re not growing in a hundred meters of water.”

  Marcus paused and pressed his finger to his earpiece, listening to some incoming message. He shut his eyes for a couple of seconds, a sure sign that the news pissed him off.

  “Yeah, I hear you, Colonel,” he said. “No, we found the dog… yeah, Bernie’s fine… what is he now, a goddamn geologist? Okay, we’ll secure the area and wait until you show. Fenix out.”

  Bernie looked at Marcus, jaw clenched, doing that sergeant-to-sergeant telepathy thing. Baird watched, fascinated.

  “Oh,” she said ominously.

  Marcus pulled off his do-rag for a moment and scratched his scalp, showing a lot more gray in his black hair than Baird remembered. It was rare—and weird—to see him bareheaded. Somehow just removing a scrap of faded black cloth made him look human and vulnerable, not a hairy-assed war hero at all.

  “Hoffman’s bitching that you didn’t tell him you were off-camp,” Marcus said, retying the do-rag. “And the Chairman’s coming to take a look for himself.”

  That was all they needed—a royal visit from Prescott. “Is he bored or something?” Baird said. “’Cause if he is, there’s got to be some latrine that needs digging.”

  “Just humor him, Baird.” Marcus might have meant Hoffman, come to that. “He’s sending Dizzy to uproot one of these things for analysis, wherever the hell he thinks we’re going to get that.”

  Bernie slipped off Mac’s leash and let him sniff around. “That’ll be you, Blondie. You’re the nearest thing we’ve got to a scientist these days.” She tapped Baird’s chest plate. “Just don’t lose that bloody disc. It’s all Hoffman goes on about.”

  Baird never forgot about the data disc. He kept it tucked inside his armor. He slept with it under his mattress. He even kept it within arm’s reach when he took a shower. Hoffman was counting on him to decrypt the thing and his technical honor depended on it.

  “Wow, you two have some really boring pillow talk, Granny,” he said, pulling it out to waft it under her nose. “But it’s kind of hard to look Prescott in the eye. I think he knows I’ve got it.”

  Mac barked a couple of times. Bernie turned to see where he was. “And what’s he going to do about it? Wrestle you to the ground and take it off you?” She set off to see what the dog was yapping about. “Actually, I’d pay good money to see that.”

  Cole ambled over to Baird and gave the stalk an experimental prod with his boot. “Weird shit, baby.”

  “Yeah, the whole frigging world’s made of weird these days.”

  Mac kept barking. Cole looked past Baird and frowned into the distance. “I ain’t a dog expert,” he said, “but Mac’s the silent and deadly kind of puppy. He don’t usually bark.”

  Marcus and Dom turned around at the same time. Bernie had caught up with Mac and was watching him cast around with his nose buried in the grass as if he was picking up a scent. Bernie slipped her rifle off her back and gestured to Marcus to come over.

  “I don’t think he’s found a bone,” Baird said.

  A herd of cows was watching from the next field, heads poking over the low hedge. Then they all wheeled around and cantered away as if something had spooked them. Mac started growling, eyes fixed on a spot on the ground.

  Baird braced for the worst. Mac pawed the grass, still growling, then began digging frantically, but Bernie yanked him back by his collar.

  “I think we should get airborne again,” Marcus said.

  But Baird couldn’t feel any vibration under his boots. Back in old Jacinto, that was the first warning of a grub emergence hole opening up. He was about to point that out to Marcus when Mac broke free of Bernie’s grip, the pasture around them heaved and cracked open like an earthquake, and Baird realized they were further from the waiting Raven than he’d first thought.

  A huge charcoal-gray trunk erupted ten meters away, speckled with red luminescence. Baird caught a faceful of wet soil flung out by the sheer force of the emergence. He ducked his head, pure reflex, and that was when he saw the flurry of legs coming up over the edge of a crater like a spider crawling out of a plughole.

  “Polyps!” Dom yelled.

  Yeah, the little assholes had finally decided to show up. But at least Baird had answered one question now.

  They came with the stalks. Not out of them.

  POLYP EMERGENCE HOLE, NORTHERN VECTES.

  It was tough to say which kind of Lambent or Locust was the worst. But Dom had his personal freak-out league table, and polyps had taken the top slot from Locust tickers.

  They were landmines—walking, running, hunting landmines.

  They were small fry compared to a Berserker, but they swarmed. They scuttled. And that hit a primal nerve deep within him. All those fast-moving legs and the sea of fanged mouths were an unstoppable tide of destruction sweeping in to devour him. It was hard to hold his ground and fight the urge to run.

  But if he turned, they’d overwhelm him, and he’d be dead. Some days he wasn’t sure if that mattered, not now that Maria and the kids were gone, but today it felt like it mattered a lot.

  The creatures surged up from the gaping pit around the stalk, rushing out in all directions like milk boiling over the sides of a pan. All Dom could take in was the mass of dark gray legs. The first polyp he hit detonated in a spray of greasy guts and took out a couple of its buddies as well, but the others kept coming as if nothing had happened. Maybe they were buoyed up on adrenaline and instinct, just like him. The only thing he could focus on was a ninety-degree cone of the wave coming straight at him so that was where he emptied his clip, sweeping left to right and back again, ears ringing from explosions and automatic fire. Then the deafening noise of a Raven drowned out everything. Its downdraft threw leaves and grit in his face.

  Gettner yelled over the radio even though she didn’t need to. “Get out of there! Delta! Just get the hell out and let Barber hose them!”

  “Can’t,” Marcus panted. “Try not to hit us.”

  “Shit, Marcus, there’s maybe a hundred of—” Gettner’s voice was silenced for a moment by the rattle of the Raven’s door gun right over Dom’s head. Polyp spatter and mud rained on him, peppering his face with sharp fragments. “They’re splitting up. They’re breaking away.”

  “Track them,” Marcus snapped. “Go on, get after them.”

  Gettner ignored him. “You sergeant. Me major. I’m staying.”

  Dom reloaded without looking. If he glanced away from the front rank of polyps, they’d be on him and he’d lose his legs or worse. He just had to keep firing. He was aware of Baird and Cole just in front of him to the right, but beyo
nd that everything was a blur with only the jagged legs and fanged mouths of the polyps in ultrasharp focus. So he aimed, and he fired, and kept firing until he emptied the clip. He could hear his own ragged breaths. It felt like the oncoming wave was never going to end. Every time he hit a polyp, two more popped up.

  “How many?” he yelled to Baird. “How many did she say?”

  “I estimate a metric fuck-ton.” Baird swapped out an ammo clip. “Stop me if I’m getting too technical.”

  “From one stalk?”

  “Don’t worry about the math, Dom.” Cole pulled out a grenade and drew back his arm, ready to swing it. “Just frag the bitches.”

  Dom saw the grenade arc out into the polyps and sink in the sea of thrashing legs. There was no sound, just a blinding white light that engulfed him and left a neon afterimage on the sky. It took him a few seconds to realize he was flat on his back under a rain of mud, winded and gasping, still firing his Lancer into the air.

  Gotta get up. Polyps. Gotta get up. Once I’m down, I’m dead. Oh shit…

  Dom scrambled to his knees and spat out soil. For a moment there was nothing—no noise, no movement, no pain, just an awareness that he was caked in mud and not able to stand. Is it over? Is it? Then someone grabbed the back of his collar and hauled him up.

  “Whoa, maybe I didn’t judge that right,” Cole said in his ear. He sounded like he was underwater. “Sorry, baby. You okay? ’Cause the crab-fuckers ain’t.”

  Baird appeared from nowhere and stared into Dom’s face, frowning. “Yeah, Cole throws like a girl these days. How many geniuses can you see?”

  “None,” Dom said. It wasn’t the first blast he’d been too close to. Now he knew it wasn’t going to be his last, a kind of shaky anger took over. “Just one asshole.”

  “That’s terrific. Two would mean concussion. Which would be bad.”

  Dom managed to look up and make some sense of what was happening. He couldn’t see any polyps now, and judging by the way Marcus was searching from side to side in the grass, he’d lost sight of them too. The field was churned up. A trail of craters led into the long grass.