“Not really!”
“Fine,” Marcus said to cut them off. “We’ll check it out.”
“Thanks, team. Baird out.”
Up ahead the road forked. The original path, which they’d taken to reach Pasco’s Village, veered off to the left, going around the Rend. Another road went right, toward the nearest of the ravines that descended into the basin.
Cole went right. Lovings followed without question.
Kait tapped her comm. “How much time is this going to add to our return, Baird? We’ve got civilians with us, remember.” Technically she was a civilian, too, but she decided not to go into that.
“Theoretically it’s a shortcut,” Baird answered.
“Theoretically?”
“Depends on the state of the basin. Varies between dry and flat—best road you’ve ever been on—to wet and muddy, like a foot-thick layer of pudding.”
She considered that, and decided it was worth the gamble.
“What was the aircraft’s cargo?”
“A squad of Tri-Shot DR-1s, plus support.”
Combat-ready robots. Great. It took effort for Kait not to swear.
“Got a bad feeling about this,” she said, more to herself, but the comm was still on.
“Orders are orders,” Cole said. “Let’s get it done so we can go home. Besides, it’s a shortcut, isn’t it?”
“Theoretically,” Lovings repeated.
3: SHORTCUT
Kait renewed her grip on the steering wheel. “As if this wasn’t hard enough already,” she said to the empty cabin, and focused on the back of Del’s Minotaur as they began the descent into the ravine.
Taking this road, into this specific ravine, soon made sense. It was a modest incline, and relatively straight. Kait had expected switchbacks and steep areas full of loose rock, but years of travel through this pass had compacted the ground.
In no time at all they exited the narrow canyon and drove out into the basin. Kait peered at the landscape. Behind them, stretching in each direction as far as she could see, was the wall pierced by thousands of perpendicular ravines like the one they’d just traversed. Viewed from here, it was like a jagged wall of teeth a hundred feet high, with most of the entrances camouflaged by the sheer scale of the whole thing.
The basin itself, though, was featureless and perfectly flat. The ground beneath her Minotaur’s tires was of the hard-as-concrete variety, dry as bone.
“That’s a relief,” Cole said over the comm, testing the Mega Mech’s footing. He stomped several times. “Let’s pick up the pace a bit, eh?”
On this surface Kait didn’t so much need to steer as correct. On such an even landscape they moved in a perfectly straight line. Only the subtle differences between the alignment on Del’s suspension and her own would cause her to drift off course. The tiniest over-correction on his part, though, and she’d go wrong the opposite way. It was like she was the tail of a snake, slithering behind the determined head that forged her path. The one problem was the dust kicked up by the vehicles in front, magnified by the glare of the sun.
Her vision was near zero.
“Should be just ahead of you…” Baird said.
“Ah, there we go,” Lovings replied. “I see it.”
Kait couldn’t see anything. The dust plume clouded everything, filling the cabin around her. Digging around, she found a pair of sunglasses in the storage bin between the seats, and an oil-stained shop towel which she wrapped around her nose and mouth. It smelled like an old engine doused with gasoline and mold, but it beat the chalk-like powder pouring into her cab.
Del started to slow down.
“What’s going on?” Kait asked. “I can’t see anything.”
The dust cleared, and he let the view answer her question. The entire caravan had stopped, with Del pulling up between the other two Minotaurs, and Cole standing about twenty yards ahead. In the distance, about a quarter-mile away, was the crashed Condor.
She climbed out of the Minotaur to get a better view.
The aircraft lay on its side, one wing poking high into the air, the other looking to have been sheared off entirely. The impact had left a scorch-marked groove across the hard ground, and debris lay everywhere. The back half of the craft lay about a hundred feet behind the front half. The other wing lay near it, flat on the ground and facing the wrong direction. From the swirl patterns in the dust, it must have spun as it slid across the flat basin.
“Damn,” Del said, as Kait walked up beside him.
“Good thing the crew got out.”
“Yeah.” He shifted, uneasy. “Sucks to be a DeeBee, though.”
“Better them than us.”
“For once I agree.”
Kait glanced at him, surprised. Ever since Baird had given Del and JD the use of the support robot Dave, and later the upgraded version called Jack, his attitude had changed when it came to robotic help.
Marcus came up beside Kait, shielding his eyes against the oppressive glare thrown off by the white, baked ground.
“Looks like a monument to itself,” he said. There was a hint of concern in his voice that she didn’t like. He had terrific instincts, something she’d witnessed at Tollen Dam and then become reliant on during their night-long siege inside the caves of South Village.
“Cole?” Marcus called out.
The mech turned, responding to its pilot’s every movement. An uncanny thing, Kait thought, given its size.
“Want me to take a look?” he replied.
“Unless you’ve got better things to do.”
Cole saluted—via the mech—turned, and walked forward. He kept its massive chain gun ready, pointing at the ground in front of him. The weapon was a serious upgrade from the industrial staple gun the mech had originally carried, which hadn’t been a weapon at all but a tool for construction duties.
They all watched in silence as the huge walking vehicle made a wide circuit of the crash site. For a time he disappeared into the hazy distance, hidden partly by the dusty air and partly by the tail section of the plane. Then he emerged a few seconds later, still walking casually, and completed the loop.
“All quiet,” he said.
“Any sign of the DeeBees?” she asked.
“Saw some of them in the wreck, still hanging from their hooks or folded up.”
“Okay,” Marcus said. “What now?”
Lovings stepped forward. “Baird wants the flight recorder. That’s the ‘bare minimum’ according to him, but if any of the robots are intact, he’d like us to bring one of them back, too.”
“An entire DeeBee?”
Lovings shrugged.
“Find out,” Marcus said. “Hell, better yet, let me talk to the old fart.” Without waiting for an answer he walked a short distance away, speaking into his comm.
“Baird, this is Fenix. Need some specifics…”
Kait tuned out the conversation. Her gaze was on the wreck, and a brief vision of a Scion standing in its midst, grinning at her. A wave of pain hit her at the same moment, causing her to double over, one hand at her temple, fingertips trying to push the agony back in.
“You okay?” Del asked.
The words took a moment to register. She couldn’t answer until the pain receded.
“Yeah. Fine. I’m always fine, remember?”
“Funny, no, I don’t remember. I worry about you, Kait.”
“Save the worry for JD.” She nudged him with her elbow. “Let’s go take a closer look while Marcus sorts things out with Baird.” Del gave a reluctant nod. He didn’t seem entirely convinced by her assurances.
Sooner or later she’d have to tell him. She’d have to tell all of them. As she’d done for the last several weeks, though, she decided on “later,” still holding onto the hope that these headaches, nightmares, and visions would go away.
“Cole, want to shadow us?” Del asked.
“Happy to!”
Pasco, who’d been standing by silently until that moment, stepped forwa
rd and cleared his throat. When Kait turned to him, she saw his villagers all watching the scene from the backs of the Minotaurs, their heads poking out around the edges of the canopy. There was real fear there.
“What can we do to help?” the village leader asked.
“Just stay put for the moment, Sal,” Kait said. “We’ll handle this.”
“Me and my people don’t like standing around,” he replied. “Prefer to be useful.”
Del shook his head. “The most useful thing you can do right now is be ready to leave the instant we say so. Keep everyone in the trucks. Okay? There’s food—”
“We’ve eaten it all.”
Del sighed. “Of course you have.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” Del replied. “Forget it. I wouldn’t have minded a bite to eat, too, but that’s alright. Just… stay with the trucks. Please.”
Pasco seemed to juggle several replies to this, physically biting each back before he finally dipped his chin in assent. He shot a frustrated glare at Kait before returning to his people.
Del waited until Pasco was most of the way back before turning toward the aircraft again.
“Ready?” he asked her.
She nodded.
The two of them marched forward, Lancers at the ready. Cole shadowed them, staying about fifty feet off to Kait’s left. For all his charm and colorful character, the veteran soldier knew exactly where to be and what to do. As she watched him, he guided the Mega Mech in closer to the plane, keeping pace with Kait and Del as they approached. His gaze—along with the rotary barrel of his chain gun—swept the horizon as often as it looked in on their target.
All of a sudden, Del stopped. Kait took two more steps before she realized what he’d done, and halted her own progress.
“What is it?” she asked him, her eyes still forward on the ruins of the aircraft.
He hesitated. “Thought I saw something move in there. Did you see it?”
“No,” Kait said, aware of how unsure she sounded. She had seen something, but it was one of her damned visions. “What was it? Swarm?”
“Never mind. Nothing. Just the heat playing tricks on me.”
The last thing she needed in the midst of her own waking dreams was for someone else to start hallucinating. Kait renewed her grip on the Lancer and continued forward. Del did too, but notably still two steps behind her. About thirty feet from the wreck, Kait stopped and let her companion catch up. They stood there for a moment, just looking.
“What’s the holdup?” Lovings asked over the comm.
In reply, Del lifted a hand and flipped him off.
The Corporal got the message.
A breeze started to kick up, stirring dust around them. It caused a thin moaning sound to drift out of the Condor’s fuselage, too. Kait shivered, in spite of herself.
“Kinda wish we had Jack with us right now,” Del said. “Or even Dave.”
“Well, we don’t. Let’s just get this over with. Start with the flight recorder.”
“Sure. Anything but going inside that.” He nodded toward the dark, empty cavern that was the broken front half of the cargo cabin. It was almost entirely hidden in shadow. All Kait could make out was the vague shape of several DR-1 model DeeBees, still hanging from their ceiling hooks. So much inert metal, now—just how she liked them.
Del took the lead again, and she followed as he went to the cockpit. The nose of the aircraft lay in the dirt. Landing gear had failed to deploy, so the hull bore the brunt of the crash, burrowing into the hard earth as it skidded to a stop. It had come to rest at a forty-five-degree angle.
There was a hatch on the bottom where the seats would fall during an ejection, but this portion was buried a foot deep in the rock-hard ground. Half the windows were blocked by the ground as well, but on the other side, the side tilted up toward the sky, one of the windows had blown out during the crash. Reaching up high over his head with both hands, Del used the butt of his rifle to smash out the rest of the glass and make it more or less safe to enter.
“Give you a boost up?” he asked her.
“How about I give you a boost up?”
He grinned, sheepishly. “Alright, alright, I’ll go. Hold my Lancer, and don’t say ‘famous last words.’”
“I won’t.” Though she’d been about to. Kait took the offered weapon and slung it over her left shoulder, then put her own over her right so she could stoop and lift him up to the window. Del put his foot into her cupped hands.
“On three?”
“Just go,” Kait said, and she heaved.
Del yelped in surprise, but still managed to lever himself into the opening. She watched as he slithered into the cockpit, his feet last to disappear inside.
“What a mess,” he called down, after a moment. “It’ll take a minute just to get to the compartment, much less open it.”
Kait took a few steps away from the wreck, watching Cole as he walked over to the tail section, knelt down, and peered inside.
Suddenly the Mega Mech lurched backward, Cole stumbling as he recoiled from whatever he’d seen within. The mech fell onto its butt with a loud thump. Kait moved a step in that direction.
“What is it?” she asked. “What’d you see?”
“Shit,” Cole said. “Shit. Sorry. Got a little freaked out over here is all. There’s a dead Leech inside. Damn.”
A Leech. Kait glanced around at the sky. The damn things were never alone, always moving in a flock that resembled a flying school of fish. Slimy leech-shaped fish with lots of razor-sharp teeth. She shuddered, remembering the first time she’d seen them, at Settlement 2.
“Sure it’s dead?”
“I think so!” He found his footing and stood back up. Then he laughed. “In the moment I forgot I was in this walking tank. Hah! Feel like an idiot now.”
“Yeah, well, you scared the hell out of me.”
“Kait, don’t tell anyone I fell, okay?”
“We all saw,” Marcus replied on the comm.
Cole wisely ignored this. He leaned back into the broken section of aircraft, reached inside, and plucked the Leech out. Unlike the ones Kait had seen and fought, which were slimy and writhing monstrosities half as big as she was, this one was stiff and bone dry.
“Maybe we just need to starve the bastards,” Cole was saying, “looks like they can’t handle a dry heat!”
Suddenly she saw…
“Cole! Down!”
Kait took off, sprinting toward him.
The veteran didn’t need to be told twice. He hit the dirt again, this time on purpose, as Kait lifted her Lancer and opened fire. Her bullets were aimed at a vague impression of a shape inside the darkness of the tail section. Something had moved in there, something small and shiny, and all she knew was it couldn’t be anything good. Not after what Cole had just found.
His mech lay in the dust, its hands over its head, mimicking its controller’s motions. When she stopped shooting he pushed himself up with one arm and twisted around to see what her target had been.
For a sickening second, Kait feared there’d be nothing there. That it would have been another trick of her imagination. Another nightmare somehow bleeding into reality. Then a small object rolled out of the tail section and lazily traced a circular path across the dusty floor of the basin.
It was a Tracker, Kait realized. One of DB Industries’ nastier little creations, like rolling intelligent landmines, supporting their DeeBee squads. This one was still rolled into a ball, and from the way it moved she guessed it had little or no power. It rolled like a marble dropped from a table onto a hard floor. Just following the surface.
Cole watched it, frozen in his prone position, mesmerized by the object until it finally came to a stop.
“Jeez, Kait, scared the hell out of me! All for that little guy?” He laughed again. “Maybe keep your finger off the trigger, huh?” He started to maneuver the Mega Mech back to a standing position. The Tracker was maybe ten feet
away.
Something about it was wrong, though. Kait squinted against the glare. Its surface, usually a metallic blue, was mottled, with great patches of greenish-gray. She opened her mouth to ask about the coloration when the little robot suddenly popped open. This time there was no chance to shout an alarm.
It exploded.
She’d been near Trackers when they went off before. Dove out of the way of their insidious explosive behavior. As bombs went, they were about as dangerous as a frag grenade. Lethal, but not impossible to avoid. Thanks to their size you could shoot them on approach, and because of the delay after they popped open, hitting the deck was a passable last resort.
This one, though, had no such delay.
It popped open and went off, all in one fluid sequence. If Cole hadn’t been in that mech suit, he would have been torn to shreds.
Yet this wasn’t the usual explosion, either. As Cole instinctively turned away from the blast, Kait saw the side of his Mega Mech. It was covered in green goop—and that goop was on fire. The greenish-blue flames licked and sputtered against the mech’s armor. Huge drops of it fell to the ground and started to steam against the dirt.
“Shit!” Cole shouted, staggering backward, trying to wipe the stuff off with his suit’s right hand, but all he succeeded in doing was smearing it onto the mech’s palm. When the hand came away, it too was on fire. Cole waved it, causing the flames to grow.
“Get out of the suit!” Kait shouted, running again, but Cole wasn’t listening. He tried to wipe the hand on his mech’s leg, set it on fire, then finally seemed to understand the nature of the slimy stuff.
More of which now rained down all around the area, creating dozens of little fires in a circle around the source of the blast.
“What the hell’s going on out there?” Del said on the comm.
“Just get the transponder and get out of there, we need to leave!” Kait continued toward Cole, trying to think how she could climb the back of the mech, rip open the pilot’s harness, and haul him out of there. Suddenly Marcus was beside her, running as well. Lovings was right behind him.
“Cole!” Marcus shouted, forgoing the comm. “Drop and roll!” His voice had a quality to it that seemed to cut through everything, Kait thought, and it was just what Augustus needed right now.
Gears of War Page 25
