Gears of War: Anvil Gate

by Karen Traviss

  “No, you stay here,” he said. He pushed in front of Cole and barred the way. “Too rusty. And you—too heavy.”

  Cole was a big guy even by Gears’ standards, still built like the pro thrashball player he’d once been. He gave Eugen a broad grin. “Thanks for lookin’ out for my safety.”

  He might have meant it, of course. Cole was like that.

  Eugen, stony faced, beckoned them to follow and walked away toward the crew accommodation section. These Indies really were paranoid. As Dom picked his way down metal stairs wet with salt spray—not easy in bulky boots—he passed a roaring air-con vent and heard female voices drifting up from somewhere, but the words meant nothing. The vented air smelled temptingly of fried onions. It was one of the most delicious scents Dom could imagine. It smelled of home—the home he grew up in.

  Eugen shook his head. “My wife,” he said, suddenly and unexpectedly frank with them. “Still damn angry with me.”

  So one of the voices was hers, then. The Gorasni guys had their families with them. Or maybe they’d just paired up with coworkers because this was a lonely and scary place. Dom was finding it less sharply painful now to think about other folks’ families; Maria was gone, and at least now he knew she was gone for good, not just missing and suffering in ways he could only imagine. He hated himself for sometimes feeling relieved by that.

  These days, it was his kids he felt worst about. He felt he hadn’t mourned them enough.

  “Okay, we’re done here.” Marcus hauled himself over the edge of the deck by a grab rail and stood up. “We’ll ship out as much equipment as we can on the next inbound tanker.”

  “And when will you send Gears to bravely defend us poor ignorant Gorasni?” Gradin asked, straight-faced.

  “Soon as I radio back to Vectes,” Marcus said, equally expressionless. “And they’ll bring their own supplies.”

  Dom couldn’t work out if Gradin had finally decided the COG wasn’t the worst that could happen to him or if his war still wasn’t over yet. The whine of the Raven’s engine starting up cut through all the sea and machinery noises like someone calling Dom’s name in a crowded room, and he found his legs making for the helipad a few seconds before his brain engaged.

  Gettner was in more of a hurry than usual to get airborne. She lifted clear before everyone had strapped in. Barber had his head down, hand pressed to his right ear as he listened to voice traffic.

  “Never mind us,” Baird said. “We’re just ballast. Dump us overboard anytime, Major.”

  The cockpit door was dogged open. Gettner seemed preoccupied, because she didn’t tell Baird to go fuck himself like she usually did.

  “Going back via the scenic route,” she said. “Just to check what’s getting our new friends so excited. I don’t suppose you asked them about their missing frigate.”

  Marcus grunted. “They weren’t in a chatty mood.”

  “Well, their CIC’s crapping themselves about that ship. What are you getting now, Barber?”

  Barber didn’t answer for a few seconds. He was staring straight ahead with his palm resting against his right ear, listening intently to his radio.

  “Wreckage,” he said at last. He must have been listening on a Gorasni ship-to-ship channel. Dom wondered what language they were speaking if Barber could follow the chatter. “They’ve found a couple of buoys and some polyprop line. Nothing else. They’re discussing how fast she went down. I’m missing a lot, but that’s the gist of it.”

  “Shit.”

  Marcus did a slow head-shake. “It was broad daylight. Even without radar—you can navigate by sight and charts. You sure they said grounded?”

  “That’s another weird thing,” Barber said. “The ship was nowhere near any hazard. Sandbanks can shift over a few years and catch you out if you don’t keep charting them, but rocks can’t. And we have to be talking about a big, rigid obstruction here.”

  Dom could guess what everyone was really thinking. The Stranded pirate fleet could have raised its game. He couldn’t imagine how patrol boats could take out a frigate, though, not even with a belt-fed grenade gun, but he said it anyway.

  “Shit, you think the Stranded got lucky with a missile system?” No, that was dumb. He tried to think of the ways he’d been trained to sabotage a warship as a commando. They were all beyond the scope of the average Stranded. “Or was the frigate a wreck waiting to sink?”

  “Last radio message said they’d struck something beneath the hull,” Gettner said. “They must have based that on instruments, ship handling, noise, whatever. They’d know if they’d been hit by anything explosive … Wait one, I’ll try offering assistance again. Because those paranoid assholes aren’t going to volunteer anything.”

  Gettner switched to the shared emergency channel. Dom had to retune to eavesdrop. He caught Marcus’s eye, then Baird’s, but neither was offering theories.

  “COG KR-Eight-Zero calling Branascu Control, do you require search assistance?” Gettner asked. “We’re two hours from Nezark’s last position.”

  Branascu Control—which was probably now on board a warship heading for Vectes—took a few moments to respond.

  “We are grateful, KR-Eight-Zero,” said a female voice. “But we have ships in the area already. We are … revising our charts to take account of seismic activity.”

  “Say again, Branascu?”

  Baird perked up. “Whoa, shit …”

  “Seismic activity,” Branascu Control repeated. “Sonar is detecting uncharted solid formations just beneath the surface. Perhaps this is connected to the geological disturbances when you sank Jacinto.”

  Even Gettner didn’t snap back an answer to that.

  “We’ll warn off our vessels, then,” she said at last. “Flash us if we can assist. KR-Eight-Zero out.”

  Baird curled his lip, evidently not impressed by the cover story. “I call bullshit,” he said. “Collapsing the bedrock under Jacinto couldn’t cause seabed shifts like that more than a thousand klicks away.”

  “Yeah, and if we told them we did it by blowing up a lambent Brumak, they’d call bullshit too,” Marcus said. “I bet Prescott left out that detail.”

  So Gorasnaya wasn’t leveling with the COG, and the COG wasn’t sharing everything with Gorasnaya. It was a shitty start to a relationship. Dom focused on the view of the ocean from the Raven’s open door and reminded himself how much cleaner and better this was than dying, besieged Jacinto.

  “Fuck it, we’ll find out soon enough,” Gettner muttered. “Worst-case scenario—piracy. Most likely—floating death traps crewed by morons.”

  Ships went down all the time, Dom told himself. The ocean was a dangerous place, as unknowable and deadly as anything the grubs had cooked up underground. That meant he didn’t have to worry about pirates armed with antiship missiles—just the natural hazards of a world that was always trying to kill you.

  That, at least, was something to be grateful for. As far as the sea was concerned, death was nothing personal.

  CHAPTER 2

  Power is about perception. The COG thinks it’s still got it. It hasn’t—it’s just a town with a few ships and a fraction of its old army. But it can’t think small when it needs to. That’s our advantage. You want to go back to the status quo, where the COG runs Sera? Where it can wipe out the rest of the world just to save its own ass? Now’s the best time for the whole disenfranchised community to unite and deal with the COG—the seagoing trading communities, the enclaves ashore, and our associates on Vectes. They call us pirates. But our time has come.

  (LYLE OLLIVAR, HEAD OF THE LESSER ISLANDS FREE TRADE

  ASSOCIATION, SUCCESSOR TO THE LATE DARREL JACQUES,

  PREPARING FOR A NEW WORLD ORDER)

  TWO KILOMETERS NORTH OF NEW JACINTO, VECTES: EXCLUSION ZONE PATROL, TWO DAYS LATER.

  The Gorasni refugee camp had sprung out of nowhere like some kids’ pop-up book, orderly rows of identical but threadbare tents hugging the outer wall of the naval base. Bernie had to gi
ve the Indies full marks for rolling up their sleeves and getting on with it.

  “They’ve posted their own guards,” Anya said, elbow resting on the vehicle’s open window. “Look. Do you think that’s to keep something out, or something in?”

  Bernie drove around the perimeter more to show the Gorasni that the COG was on the case than in any expectation of trouble. The security fence—erected by the refugees, no help requested and none given—was a mix of razor-wire and chain-link fencing. In a world of shortages and make-do, it was a weird thing to bring along for the trip.

  But then fences were a fact of life now. They kept things out—and they kept things in.

  A couple of men wandered along the other side of the Gorasni wire with rifles over their shoulders, passing a smoke back and forth. Bernie gave them a perfunctory wave and drove on. Everyone was used to patrolling to keep an eye out for grubs, so it wasn’t a habit anyone was going to abandon overnight—with or without Stranded gangs around.

  “It might be for us, ma’am,” she said. “Maybe they think we had something to do with sinking their frigate.”

  “That was weird. I hate mysteries.”

  “Did we?”

  “What, sink it? No, Michaelson wants every hull he can grab.” Anya made a little puffing noise as if something had occurred to her. “Prescott wouldn’t tell me anyway.”

  “You wouldn’t think he still gave a damn about secrets, would you?”

  “Do you think people change? The Gorasni, I mean.”

  Or Prescott. Or Marcus. “No. We haven’t, have we?”

  “Good point.”

  Bernie wasn’t too worried about the Gorasni. If they’d been Indies from Pelles or Ostri, that would have been another matter. That had been her war, her mates killed, her knee-jerk hatred. But it was the Stranded who were uppermost in her mind now. Somehow the bastards just melted into the countryside.

  We’ve forgotten how to fight our own kind. Gone soft. Out of practice.

  A wet nose caught her ear from behind and smeared dog snot on her face. Mac, confined to the back seat, wanted to see what was going on. He thrust his head forward, tongue lolling. Anya leaned away a little.

  “He won’t bite, ma’am.” Bernie revved the Packhorse to climb out of a shallow ditch and rejoin the paved road. “Not unless you ask him to. Mac? You want a nice juicy bad guy? Seek!”

  Mac barked once. He didn’t bark much, and in the small cab it was loud enough to make Anya flinch. Bernie translated it as What the fuck? Here he was, being told to seek when he was stuck in this tin box with nothing to scent or see. She could see the disdain on his face. He thought humans were wasting his time.

  Anya rubbed Mac’s head warily. He yawned, displaying an impressive set of teeth. “It just feels too much like sport.”

  “Vermin control,” Bernie said. “Someone’s got to do it.”

  People could be squeamish about strange things, Bernie decided. Anya slipped into a combat role pretty easily for an officer who’d spent her entire career in Ops, but using dogs to chase down other humans seemed a step too far for her. Hosing them with heavy-caliber rounds from an Armadillo’s gun turret obviously wasn’t. Anya had done that without blinking. She had a lot of her mother in her.

  “I’m not criticizing,” Anya said at last. “They had the same offer of amnesty as their families.”

  “Another brilliant Prescott idea. Every Stranded male we kill—one more woman inside our walls with a death to avenge. We can’t trust them.”

  “Not really an amnesty, then, is it?”

  “No, ma’am. It’s politics. Although it’s not like he needs their votes, is it?”

  “So what would you do?”

  Bernie tried to keep her mind on the route ahead. These Stranded bastards had already booby-trapped a construction site up by the reservoir, and raids were a constant threat. Either they had a huge arms cache or they were getting resupplied somehow. Either way they didn’t seem to be running out of ordnance.

  “Ma’am,” Bernie said, “are you asking what I want to do, what I know I ought to do, or what the rules of engagement say we can do?”

  “I’m just asking a friend who also happened to be my mom’s friend what she thinks is right.”

  Bernie had never thought of herself as Helena Stroud’s friend. The major had been her commander. There’d been mutual respect and equally mutual loyalty, but friendship was for equals.

  “There’s no right answer,” Bernie said.

  “Any answer would do.”

  Gears had this kind of conversation about grubs without batting an eye. In fact, it rarely even warranted discussion; every grub had to die. It was a fact of life. There was no truce to be had, no peace to negotiate. But there’d probably be no cease-fire with these gangs, either. The solution was inevitable, even though that didn’t make it any easier to say.

  “You really want to put an end to it?” Bernie said. “Then wipe them all out. Leave nobody to bear a grudge. It only takes a few survivors to keep a blood feud going.” She realized how bad that sounded, but she meant it. “Give it a century or two, and we’ll evolve into two separate factions at war again. It’s our national sport.”

  “But would you do it?”

  Bernie didn’t know. She was sure she’d do it in the heat of the moment, provoked or under fire, because she’d already done a lot worse. Cold policy was another matter, though. She still wasn’t sure why. Maybe Anya was just testing to see how close she was to whipping out her knife again and settling scores the personal way.

  “I’d probably need an excuse,” Bernie said. The countryside changed from scattered building sites to newly plowed fields awaiting sowing, furrows so straight and even that they looked like a landscape of brown corduroy. “Or a reason. Same thing.”

  Anya didn’t sound shocked. “Prescott says pragmatic politics means accepting that the right outcome often comes from the wrong methods.”

  “Yeah, he’d slot every last one of them if he thought he’d get away with it.” Bernie cut Prescott some slack for being willing to get his hands dirty. “At least he’s not some fancy academic moralist.”

  Maybe we’d all do it. Maybe even the best of us would do one shitty thing if we thought it would do some good. Nobody knows for sure until they have to make the choice.

  “Okay,” Anya said, “At least I’m not missing an easy answer.”

  Bernie changed gear as the Packhorse groaned its way up the hill. She made sure the subject was closed by giving Anya something more immediate to worry about. “Keep your eyes open, ma’am. Remember how different things look from ground level.”

  Anya was used to seeing the battlefield through an airborne bot’s camera. But bots like Jack were in short supply now, and that meant keeping them in reserve for critical jobs. Patrolling the thousands of square kilometers between the naval base and New Jacinto in the south and Pelruan on the north coast had to be done by Gears. Anyone who didn’t have authority to be off-camp—everyone except farmers, work parties, and their protection squads—was a legitimate target. The exclusion zone meant what it said.

  We didn’t protect Jonty, though, did we? Poor bastard.

  She still didn’t know which of the Stranded had murdered the old farmer. That was a pretty good reason for slotting all of them as far as she was concerned, just to make sure.

  The dash-mounted radio crackled. “Byrne to P-Twelve, over.”

  Anya took the mike one-handed, still cradling her Lancer. “Stroud here. Go ahead, Sam.”

  “I’m ten klicks south of the hydro plant. Recent enemy activity—I’m looking at a lot of disturbed soil on the main road. Grid six-echo, five-nine-zero by two-eight-eight.”

  “Explosives?”

  “A remote device,” Sam said. “I can’t see if there’s a wire. But it’s too far off the track to drive over it, so it’s not a mine. Someone’s got to be watching the road with a trigger in their hand.”

  Anya hesitated for a moment. Bernie didn�
��t see her reaction because Mac shoved his head forward again.

  Come on. You could do it in Ops. You can do it now.

  Bernie waited agonizingly long seconds, giving Anya a chance to make the decision before she intervened. She had to learn to make the call herself.

  “You can’t deal with this on your own,” Anya said. “Stand by for backup.”

  That probably sounded like fighting talk to Sam. “Look, I can work out where they are, okay?” Her accent made her sound even more aggressive than she was. “They need line of sight. They need to bury the det wire. So the only vantage point is a wood five hundred meters from the road. The rest of this place is open fields.”

  Bernie checked the terrain on the map. It was open country, the road overlooked by a tree-covered hill, the kind of location you could slip into at night but couldn’t approach unseen by day. If there was a Stranded unit there, the best option was an air strike, but they’d hear the Raven coming half an island away.

  And here I am, calling them units like they’re real troops …

  Anya flicked the mute button on the mike. “You think we could ambush them instead, Sergeant?”

  “Overland?” Bernie visualized the location as best she could and began estimating where they’d have to leave the Packhorse to make an approach on foot. “It’ll take an hour or so to get in position, if we’re the closest unit.”

  “Okay.” Anya frowned to herself, then opened the mike again. “Sam? Sit tight … Control, this is P-Twelve. Contact in grid six-echo, five-nine-zero by two-eight-eight—Byrne’s located a roadside device and thinks enemy personnel are still in the area. We’re going in. Any other units nearby?”

  “Control to P-Twelve,” said Mathieson. “Are you asking for air support?”