Gears of War: Coalition's End by Karen Traviss;

Author:Karen Traviss;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

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 deer-hound 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 than 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.

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