The helmsman looked up from the yoke and gave Garcia an eloquent roll of the eyes. Teodor turned to his colleague and they exchanged a burst of Gorasni.
“Much as I hate to argue, we’re exactly in the square you designated,” Garcia said. “We can still triangulate off the Hammer satellites when we surface. We know where we are.”
But Teodor was distracted by whatever his buddy had said. He tapped on the side-scan sonar display and made a look-at-this gesture. The other guy quickly folded back the edges of his chart so he could lift it to show Teodor, managing to look both dumbfounded and angry at the same time. The chart was overwritten in thick black pencil.
“Janu knows where he was, too.” Teodor took the dog-eared, folded chart and thrust it at Garcia. “And that is where we find the new rocks. There.” He turned to the sonar screen. “And they are not there. Rocks don’t go home. They stay.”
“So explain why we find the right spot and the rocks are gone,” Teodor said. “Lava eruptions, quakes—all leave marks, yes?”
Baird thought the obvious answer was that a tired, panicky navigator had recorded the wrong position. Garcia had simply plotted the speed and time—assuming they’d given him the right numbers—and drawn an arc from Branascu, then looked at the broad corridor the Gorasni ships would have taken.
The search area didn’t look too far out to Baird. But even a frigate was a small object to find in an ocean.
Garcia looked frayed. “Look, let’s surface again and see if the Raven’s found anything useful.”
“Sir,” said the sonar operator, “the seabed here isn’t the same as on our charts, either. Look. That is not flat. It’s a convex mound. Lots of debris on it.”
“And where is this bulge?” Teodor asked. They all looked at the Gorasni chart. “Same as the place we marked rocks.”
“All stop,” Garcia said. “David? Plot me a square search out from that position. Chief—periscope depth.”
“’Course, that don’t explain where the rocks went,” Cole said to Baird. “We goin’ up top now? I’m just gonna find a sick bag. I’ll be layin’ down with the torps if you need me.”
“We’re just coming up far enough to raise the radio mast,” Garcia said. “Michaelson and Hoffman really need to hear this. Brace for a rerun of all the you-must-be-mistaken conversations.”
It took some believing, Baird had to admit. When Clement came up to mast depth, Gettner flashed the sub first. She must have been dunking her sonar buoy.
“KR-Eight-Zero to Clement. Problems? Result?”
“Here’s the edited highlights.” Garcia squeezed the mike handset so hard that his knuckles went white. Baird watched him de-focus for a couple of seconds as if he was rehearsing a form of words that didn’t make him sound like a total dick. “We found the location but the rock formation was gone. Moved. Collapsed. Whatever. We’re starting a square search for the wreck now. Here’s the start position.”
Gettner paused for a beat. “No shit.”
“Okay, sounds impossible, but Corporal Baird’s sonar confirms the seabed’s changed.”
“Fair enough. I’ve seen two cities sink into holes. Nothing surprises me now. Gettner out.”
Garcia shrugged. “She took that pretty well, all things considered. Now let’s talk to the boss fella.”
Michaelson took it without comment. Baird eavesdropped for a while as Garcia traded speculation with him about grubs collapsing bedrock underwater. The search resumed again, this time with some expectation of an answer. Baird went back to keep an eye on the sonar display.
“I’ll tell you when we find something,” the operator said, his eyes not moving from the grainy image forming by sections in front of him. “Why don’t you go look after Cole? I don’t know why you keep dragging the poor guy to sea. You know he chucks up all the time.”
“Because if you run into some serious shit out here, Cole’s the guy to get you out of it,” Baird said. Because we’re a team. Because he’s my buddy. “Sick or not.”
He almost hoped the sonar operator would need a break and leave the monitoring to him. But the guy was glued to the seat. Baird retreated to the tiny chart table and waited for Cole to come back to the control room. Teodor and Janu squeezed in next to him, resting their asses on a locker and keeping out of the way of moving traffic. Baird, a man who liked to maintain his personal boundaries, wondered if he’d really be cut out for submarine duties.
It was almost getting to the frustrating stage when the sonar guy twisted in his seat to call Garcia.
“Sir? Look at this. This has to be Nezark. Looks like a hull to me.”
Teodor shot off the locker as if he was spring-loaded. There were so many bodies crowded around the screen now that Baird couldn’t get a look in.
“Very clear,” Teodor said. “Is a Gelen. Look at profile. Very easy to identify. Hey, there are holes in the hull! I can see holes.”
“There you go,” said Garcia. Everyone stood back and Baird finally got a look at the elusive display. Even if he said so himself, it was pretty damn good. The frigate looked like a detailed brass rubbing, heeled over to one side, with two massive puncturelike gashes in her port side below the waterline. “Better call in.”
The sonar guy still had his gaze fixed to the screen. “Sir …”
“What is it?”
“Sir, weird shit. There’s something moving.”
Baird thought he meant marine animals. There was a lot of stuff swimming around out there, as noisy as a tropical jungle over the hydrophones. Baird had never seen a biologic on this sonar so he got up and took a look.
Okay, so the imaging wasn’t as great with a moving object in real time. But he could see that the disjointed outline wasn’t a whale. And it sure as shit wasn’t a shoal of fish. It took him a moment to make sense of what he was seeing, but it looked like an invisible hand was filleting the seabed, ripping its backbone out like a zip. Beneath the boat, something was erupting out of the mud and rock, leaving long spines behind it.
Garcia grabbed the mike. “Emergency surface.” He seemed remarkably calm given what Baird could see. “Surface, surface, surface. Blow tanks.”
Someone hit the alarm. It sounded three times, and suddenly the boat was filled with the noise of compressed air purging the ballast tanks. The deck tilted under Baird’s boots like a surfboard at forty-five degrees. He grabbed the nearest solid object that wasn’t a handle or a valve. Pencils and other loose objects skidded off the chart table and bounced along the deck.
Cole was probably washing down the torpedo compartment decks with puke by now. It was a white-knuckle ride.
The surge to the surface felt like it was never going to stop. Baird’s gut floated, gravity free, and then came crashing down through his pelvis as Clement breached like a dolphin doing tricks and smacked down hard into the sea again.
“Helm, full ahead, flank.” That was Garcia-speak for get the fuck out of here. He looked at Baird as if he expected him to shed some light on the completely unbelievable. That was what happened when you acted like you knew it all. “Seismic. Has to be. Lava. Fault line.”
“That’s biologic,” Baird said, not sure if he was going to wet his pants or ask Garcia if they could do it all again. “It’s alive.”
“I go look,” Teodor said. “You open the sail? Yes?”
“I’ll go look.”
Baird headed for the hatch. He’d climbed up to the small open bridge enough times to know the drill, but never after surfacing when the sea had drained out of it. It was cold, wet, and slippery; even without his armor, it was a tight fit. He got a foothold on two metal ledges that folded down on either side, and braced his elbows on the top edge.
Was there anything out there?
It wasn’t easy to spot things on the surface unless the sea was like a millpond. Today it wasn’t. But that wasn’t going to be a problem.
A hundred meters off the port bow, maybe less, something punched through a mat of white foam.
; It was a fucking stalk, just like Dom had said. A gnarly, weird-looking stalk.
No, it made even less sense than that: it was a stalk stretching out like some big, brainless arm, and things were spewing out of it, things with six big, jointed, crablike legs, things about the size of a dog. One of the things at the tip of the tree paused like a diver waiting to launch from the top board.
It was luminous, and not in a good way.
Glowies. More glowies. Different glowies. Oh … shit.
Baird ducked down into the sail. He didn’t think to jump below and shut the hatch. He yelled to the deck beneath.
“Hard to starboard. Go on. Do it!” He stuck his arm down into the well, hand outstretched. “And somebody hand me my frigging rifle. Now.”
KR-80, ON PATROL, NEZARK SEARCH AREA.
“You know when I said nothing would surprise me?” Gill Gettner banked the Raven and dropped so low that Dom was sure she was going to tip everyone out of the crew bay. “Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.”
Dom clung to the safety line. Clement was a lonely black shape in the sea below, trailing an arrow-shaped white wake. Something was on an intercept course with her, but it was hard to work out what it was or even its size from this angle. It was only when the Raven leveled out five meters above the water and came up on Clement’s stern that Dom realized what it was.
Barber leaned out of the bay to get a better look. “Well, there’s something you don’t see every day.”
“No shit,” Marcus muttered.
Tree had sounded almost funny when they salvaged the abandoned cruiser. Now it wasn’t funny at all. Clement turned in a shallow arc and the grotesque stalk missed her bow by a few meters. Dom could see things clambering over the stalk like swarming insects, but they must have been at least half a meter tall. One leapt for the boat’s casing. It landed on the sonar dome at the bow.
Shit. Am I hallucinating, or is that thing glowing?
Baird was in the foxholelike well of the submarine’s bridge, his Lancer braced on the rim. He opened fire as the thing—six legs, scuttling like a spider—charged down the length of the boat’s casing. The muzzle flash was suddenly overwhelmed by a ball of light and a loud explosion.
Gettner veered to port. “Shit!”
“He’s okay, he’s okay.” As the Raven swept past, Dom could see Baird reloading and then frantically rubbing something out of his hair one-handed. “That’s got to be Lambent. How many different models do those things come in?”
Baird pulled his goggles into place, looked up, and made a gesture that could have been anything from get clear to don’t leave me here, assholes. Gettner looped around and came back down the line of the boat’s course, bow on.
Submarines were blind. Clement’s eyes were now just Baird and Gettner. Marcus moved up to man the door gun.
“KR-Eight-Zero to Clement, any damage?” Gettner turned and kept pace with the boat, holding position aft of the sail. “I’m looking at one live Baird and the remains of a … an exploding giant crab.”
“Garcia here, Eight-Zero. We’re okay. Hull seems intact. What did we avoid?”
“A big stalk of something that just punched out of the water. I don’t know where the glowing crawlies came from—on it, in it, no idea.”
“Yeah, I’m fine, assholes.” Baird’s voice cut in, shaky and pissed off. He still had his Lancer ready as if he expected a second wave any second. Dom gave him a thumbs-up. “Thanks for asking. This is how I love to spend my day.”
“We see you, Baird,” Gettner said. “You want to give us a sitrep, or just bitch all day?”
“It must be like coral,” he said. “Rock hard and full of individual polyp things. Except it grows about a zillion times faster than coral. You want to fly over and take a look? They’re still all sitting on that thing like—”
Gettner cut him dead. “Clement! Steer one-eighty! Hard over!”
Dom saw it a heartbeat later. Something shot along under the water, broke the surface, and shaved across Clement’s bow. It was another stalk. He heard the shout—might have been Baird, might have been Garcia—and saw the boat roll. Whether she turned in time or was struck a glancing blow, Dom didn’t know. He heard Marcus suck in a breath.
Submarines weren’t built for surface stability. Clement heeled, then righted herself. But the polyps had a foothold on the hull. Its curve and the slick of seawater left them scrabbling for purchase, but they hung on, a carpet of the things, clinging to the sonar dome and the forward hydroplanes. They seemed to be timing their charge.
Baird opened fire again. “Close the hatch,” he yelled. “I said close the frigging hatch! Dive and drown these things. Otherwise they’ll blow like mines.”
Garcia cut in. “Get below. Now.”
“Yeah?” Baird emptied a clip into the first wave of polyps and detonated them. The boat shook. More swarmed up. “I turn my back—they’ll come straight down on top of me.”
“No heroics. Get off the bridge.”
“What fucking heroics?” Baird sounded enraged. “Tell Gettner to earn her pay and get me out of here.”
Gettner dropped closer. Dom kept an eye open for new stalks but held his aim. Marcus swung the gun, trying to get a clear shot, but he could only aim down at the hull.
“Shit.”
“Yeah, don’t be tempted to open up with the gun yet, Fenix,” Gettner said. “Heavy caliber—I don’t know if those boats can take sustained fire.”
“Understood.” Marcus still sighted up on the submarine. “Major, you up for a winch rescue?”
“You bet. Any polyps that climb up the cable—bat them out.” The Raven lifted a few meters. “Baird, you picked the right day to drop the armor. Ready when you are.”
Baird picked off a polyp trying to climb the sail. It blew out a chunk of the anechoic coating as it exploded. “Okay, shut the hatch and crash-dive, or whatever the order is. Garcia? Just do it.”
“Yeah, do it,” Gettner said.
“Dom, take the gun.” Marcus moved in and started prepping the sling and winch with Barber. “If we hang around, we’ll get one of those stalks up the ass.”
“I’m estimating they can reach at least fifteen meters out of the water,” Gettner said. “Trust me, I’m going to bang out fast.”
What if those polyps could swim? Dom watched them clinging to the submarine. They were pretty chunky. Maybe they’d sink.
As soon as Clement flooded her tanks and sank beneath the surface, they slipped off the casing and thrashed around in the sea. Dom trained the gun on them as Baird kicked free from the bridge and trod water for a moment. He was now ringed by a ragged fringe of floundering polyps, any one of which could have gone off like a depth charge.
“Remember—the downdraft could trigger them,” Gettner said. “I don’t want to scrape Baird-burger off my undercarriage.”
Barber kept his eyes on the water. “They aren’t mines.”
“Nat, they’re Lambent. They could do any damn thing.”
“Okay, right … right … overshot, move back … got it.”
Baird was now directly underneath the Raven, battered by the downdraft in the middle of a disk of foaming water. He raised one arm with an OK gesture, diver-style. His left hand still gripped his Lancer, held above his head.
“Let’s go.” Marcus squatted on the edge of the deck with Barber, guiding the sling in one hand. “Yeah … steady, Major … steady … okay, he’s got it.”
Baird struggled to get the sling under his arms for a few seconds. He should have dropped the rifle. Dom was ready to tell him to jettison the thing, but Baird wouldn’t have listened anyway. The polyps swept closer to him on a wave, looking far from dead even if they weren’t efficient swimmers.
Everything blows up in our faces now. Used to be that everything burrowed underneath us, buried us, dragged us down. Now it’s all explosions.
The cable went taut. The winch started whining. “Got him, Gill,” said Barber.
Dom had stopped thinkin
g about the submarine. He was too busy watching the polyps thrashing toward Baird’s legs while he kept his peripheral vision tuned for movement under the surface, for signs of more stalks erupting. One of the polyps managed to slap its legs down on the water and jump a meter. It grabbed at Baird’s boot and hung on.
Baird yelled in pain. For a terrible moment, Dom expected the polyp to detonate and take Baird’s legs with it, and nobody could do a damn thing—not even shoot at it. Then Baird kicked, it dropped, and it exploded as it hit the surface. Baird was lost for a second in a column of water.
“Hey, you assholes trying to use me for frigging bait?” he yelled. “Winch me up!”
“He’s okay,” Marcus grunted. “Normal for Baird.”
Dom was itching to sink the polyps. “Can I fire now?”
“Knock yourself out.”
Machine-gunning the creatures in the water felt surreal. Dom had to give some of them a second pass to get them to detonate, but where they’d drifted into a mass, a single exploding polyp set off a chain reaction. It was like watching a pyrotechnics show.
Marcus hauled Baird inboard across the deck by his belt.
“Yeah, spread ’em around, Dom.” Baird rolled over on his back, gasping but not too exhausted to bitch. “I mean, they might have eggs or something, like coral polyps. Help ’em spread.”
“You’re welcome.”
“My frigging ankle hurts. It got me.”
Gettner’s voice rasped over the speaker. “Hey! I can throw you back anytime, motormouth. Fenix, radio ahead and warn Doc Hayman that Baird might have brain damage. Because I swear I just saw him risk his self-obsessed ass to save his buddies. That says frontal-lobe trauma to me.”
“It’s a nice boat,” Baird said defensively. Dom watched his embarrassment, the telltale roll of the head. “I want it in one piece.”
“Sure you do,” said Marcus.
Dom was pretty sure that the first non-Baird thing that went through Baird’s mind was saving Cole. If he thought any wider than that, then the man was changing. Or maybe Dom had read him all wrong. It was a crazily brave thing to do, whatever the motive.
Gears of War: Anvil Gate Page 20
