Gears of War: The Slab (Gears of War 5)

by Karen Traviss

  The plateau wasn’t airtight. Tyran engineers had excavated sewers, installed underground cable conduits, and built subways. Any one of those was now a back door for the grub army to exploit.

  And if we can tunnel through granite … maybe the grubs will learn to as well.

  The 3rd Ephyran Engineers—3EE—and what was left of the civilian construction industry were now trying to infill what they could to barricade the plateau. A loud, rumbling explosion shook the air, followed by two more in quick succession. It wasn’t artillery and it didn’t sound like Locust. It had to be the engineers out there, blowing up bridges and cratering roads to block the grubs’ route.

  “That’s the sappers,” Marcus said. “They’re cutting it fine. There’ll be scouts ahead of the main grub force.”

  Even from this distance, Dom could see the forward edge of the grub advance. South of the plateau, the vast granite plug that made Ephyra an island in the sandstone and clay sea of central Tyrus, the terrain was a mix of city and forest. Or at least it had been: a swathe of conifers and Tyre oaks had been mowed down like a lawn along with the high-rise buildings. Dom had a clear view—one that hadn’t been there before—right down the river.

  3EE were out there somewhere, digging and laying charges. Crazy bastards. Fucking heroes. They didn’t just dig ditches and drive trucks. Rothesay said some of them were undermining the grub positions, actually tunneling under the grubs’ own tunnels, which struck Dom as the most insane thing he’d ever heard, and he was commando-trained. He knew what impossible looked like.

  “Better check on them,” Rothesay said. “I make that grub line about twenty klicks from the edge of the plateau. Anyone mind if we’re late back? I know you’ve got a weekend pass, Fenix.”

  “Let’s get it done,” Marcus said. “It’s not like I’ve booked a table at the Segarra.”

  The Segarra had been a pile of rubble for years, not that Dom had ever earned the kind of salary to eat there. It had become a watchword for all the nice civilized things the Locust had destroyed, all those comforts Sera had lost and might never have again. Marcus was supposed to be spending a couple of days with his father, though, and Dom got the feeling he was looking for an excuse to make the visit even shorter. It wasn’t a hostile relationship. It was just an awkward, silent one.

  Rothesay took the Raven down again, dropping below the tree line. There was no flurry of birds disturbed by the deafening noise this time. Everything in the path of the grubs that could make a run for it had already left town. Branches whipped in the rotor wash, scattering a blizzard of leaves.

  “See anything?” Rothesay’s voice dropped off the intercom for a couple of seconds as he switched to the open channel. “KR-Nine-Six to Red-Three—I need a position check, people. I hear you but I don’t see you.”

  Right on cue, another explosion shook the air. Dom caught a glimpse of dust billowing up from the highway like smoke.

  “Red-Three to Nine-Six, we’re at grid zero-seven-eight-three-three-five.” Dom could hear a grinding noise in the background. “You getting anxious?”

  “Yes, and so should you.”

  “We’ve still got a lot of concrete to pour.”

  Marcus leaned out of the crew bay, holding on to the rail one-handed to check below. “Not before the grubs get here.”

  “And it ain’t gonna set in time anyway,” Jace said.

  Castilla stopped chewing. “So much for the granite keeping the assholes at bay. They’re doing just fine on the surface. Anyway, they can tunnel through bedrock, so how much is concrete going to slow them down?”

  “Yeah, I give it a week before they’re in Ephyra,” Jace said.

  “Like I said, we’ve been here before, people.” Marcus looked as if he was going to turn and give Jace one of his don’t-even-think-about-it stares, but he seemed to change his mind. Maybe he agreed with the estimate. Dom certainly did. “We stopped them then, and we’ll stop them now.”

  “It’s gonna take more than blocking the john to do it, Marcus.”

  Dom decided to put a stop to the defeatist talk, even if Jace was damn right. “They’re collapsing and infilling sewers.” He shot Jace a glance. Don’t. Don’t mention the fucking Hammer. He knew the kid was going to say that it was the Hammer of Dawn that stopped the Locust advance last time. Nobody needed reminding, least of all Marcus. “No point leaving ready-made tunnels for them.”

  “But even if they get into the main sewer, they’ll have to dig through ten klicks of backed-up human shit,” Rothesay said. “Which is kind of satisfying.”

  “I’ll do an extra dump for them, then,” Castilla said. “Maybe two.”

  “Yeah, crap for victory, Charlie. The COG expects every Gear to do his lavatorial duty. Or hers. Don’t take hours about it, though. Why the hell do women take so long in the bathroom anyway?”

  “We meditate,” she said. “Or do calculus. Are you meditating, Tai?”

  The South Islander was just gazing out of the door with that look on his face, that weird half-smile. Serenity. That was it. Dom envied him. How did anyone find serenity in a world that was going to hell in a handbasket? But none of it seemed to touch him. He turned his head slowly.

  “I was communing with my ancestors,” he said.

  “Bit premature.”

  “We may draw on their wisdom without joining them.”

  “Glad to hear it. Did they have any suggestions?”

  Tai cocked his head to one side. Dom was never sure if he was having a joke at their expense—taking the piss, as Pad Salton used to say—or not. He seemed to have taken a shine to Castilla, though. The smile broadened a little.

  “They taught me that the best weapon is the will to survive.”

  “No, that’d be a door gun with a nine-meter ammo belt,” Rothesay said. He changed course and Dom’s view of the world was suddenly wide-open sky, a rare patch of blue that made the world look normal and unspoiled for a few moments. “Get on it, Charlie.”

  Castilla went back to chewing again. Maybe it was jerky, not gum. As the Raven zigzagged to evade targeting, the black silhouette of another Raven tracked across the smoke-filled skyline.

  “KR-Eight-Zero to all call signs, grubs on the move.” That was Gill Gettner. She’d clocked more flying hours than any other chopper puke and spent most of her free time tinkering with her Raven, as if she couldn’t bear to be parted from the thing. “Column of about forty drones heading northeast—about five klicks from the escarpment.”

  “Nine-Six here, Gettner. We’re south of Shenko Falls, hanging around for the sappers. And how are you today, my divine flower?”

  “Need some help, Nine-Six, or can you manage it without Mom’s assistance?”

  “We’ll keep an eye on them. I’ll flash you if we hit problems. Nine-Six out.” Rothesay turned back toward the Falls. “Think I’m in with a chance there, Charlie?”

  “She’ll tear you up for ass-paper, Lieutenant.”

  “I like ’em sassy.”

  “Yeah, but not homicidal.”

  “Ah, just semantics.” Rothesay’s whole conversation went on over the radio, piped down Dom’s earpiece whether he wanted to listen or not. “Okay … Nine-Six to Red-Three, we’ve got grubs heading your way. Time to down tools and move out, people.”

  The radio crackled in Dom’s earpiece. “Red-Three to Nine-Six, we didn’t come down here for a picnic. Got a job to finish.”

  Marcus’s attention was still fixed on the ground as the Raven circled over the escarpment that marked the boundary between life and death. The plateau had been the only place to escape incineration when Prescott turned the Hammer of Dawn on Sera’s own cities. Dom relived the day in occasional nightmares, wading through the frantic rush of refugees trying to get to this one safe haven when Prescott had given the rest of Sera three days to get to the granite high ground or kiss its ass goodbye. Over the years, Dom had swung between horror and relief—the billions dead, humanity split into those who unleashed the Hammer and th
ose poor bastards who were the collateral damage—but now he understood that Prescott had succeeded in a situation where the choice was between bad and worse. He’d bought a handful of people nine more years. The grubs had been weeks away from over-running the COG, and nobody would have been around now to argue if Prescott hadn’t made one of those brutal decisions he was so good at.

  He saved his own. The granite barrier that had been his convenient excuse had held out for far longer than Dom had expected. But he had the feeling they’d now come full circle. The grubs were still there, armies of them, Ephyra was under siege again, and there was still nowhere to run.

  “Red-Three, the grubs are only a few klicks from you, so better make your way to the fire exits,” Rothesay said. “Not a suggestion. An order.”

  “KR-Nine-Six, this is Captain Shaw, and you’re not hearing me, Lieutenant. Two more detonations and a couple of pours to go. We’re not done.”

  Rothesay didn’t back down. “Sir, just leave the machine and get to the extraction point.”

  “If we don’t block that sewer, half of Ephyra’s wide open. Red-Three out.”

  The radio went dead. Dom heard Rothesay shut his mike for a couple of seconds, probably effing and blinding about dumb engineers with a death wish. Marcus moved to the cockpit hatch and stuck his head through the opening.

  “Get us down there and we’ll drag them out if we have to.” He sounded more weary than anything. “That goddamn cement won’t even set in time anyway.”

  “You got it, Sergeant.”

  Rothesay swung the Raven south again. Another couple of explosions boomed. It was hard to hear what the ambient noise levels were like from inside a Raven with its doors open, but Dom got a sense of a silent landscape, all the birds and animals long gone. Castilla leaned back from the door gun and pulled out her field glasses.

  “Brumaks,” she said. “Moving up fast.”

  “Okay, captain or no captain, we’re getting them out.” Rothesay circled. “I don’t know if those concrete trucks can outrun Brumaks.”

  Dom craned his neck to check out what Rothesay could see. A couple of camo-painted trucks were parked under the trees a few meters away from a crater like an emergence hole. It was only when the Raven hovered almost overhead that Dom could see a churn of bricks, the bright terracotta edges of broken pipes, and the glitter of water. Six sappers in a weird mix of hard hats, helmets, armor, and overalls were guiding a massive chute into the hole while two others jogged around with reels of cable, apparently laying more charges.

  “I see them,” Jace said. “Wow, that’s one big fuck-off hole.”

  “Nine-Six, you’re stopping us blasting.” Captain Shaw sounded breathless over the radio. “I heard you. Brumaks.

  So what’s new?”

  “Just listen, sir. You’ve got to get everyone out now.”

  “Nearly done.”

  “Good. Because I’m coming in.”

  Rothesay hadn’t even set down fully in the clearing when Marcus jumped down from the crew bay and started jogging toward the hole. Dom chased after him with Jace. The sappers looked up, two of them wrestling with the chute that was spewing concrete into the hole, one of them a big scruffy guy with a captain’s rank tab on the front of his filthy overalls. Shaw was definitely a hands-on kind of officer.

  Marcus gestured toward the Raven. “Come on, sir, you’re not going to make it. All aboard.”

  “Can’t leave it now, Sergeant,” said Shaw. “We’ve collapsed the sewer in three places and now we’re sealing it with a special mix. That’ll give them a few thousand cubic meters of trouble to chew through.”

  The concrete glittered. Dom thought it was just the larger pieces of gravel catching the light until he ventured in for a closer look and realized it was small chunks of jagged metal. “What’s that for?”

  “Corpsers don’t like digging through it,” Shaw said. “Too sharp for the poor little assholes. It won’t stop them, but it’ll slow them down.”

  The Corpsers were big bastards, spider-like animals up to five or six meters tall that the grubs used for excavation, but maybe they weren’t as tough as they looked. “You can leave this truck to pour the rest, can’t you?”

  “And leave it for the grubs? We’re short enough of kit as it is.”

  “We’re short of Gears, too, sir,” Marcus said. “Let’s go.”

  “Ahhh, shit.” Shaw paused for a second and looked around. It was just two massive concrete trucks that had seen better days, but they were like priceless limos in a world where almost everything had been destroyed and wasn’t going to be replaced anytime soon. “Okay, everybody bang out. You heard the man.”

  They didn’t exactly jump to it. The engineers paused for a full five seconds before following orders, really reluctant to go, and Dom found himself chivvying one of the corporals to get her to move. She was only a little scrap of a kid, no more than eighteen. He jerked his head in the direction of the helicopter and herded her.

  “Is that stuff going to set?” he asked.

  “Well, they’re not going to dig it out in time to stop it, are they?” She ducked under the rotors and climbed into the crew bay. “We’ve got to buy whatever time we can.”

  “Hey, Captain.” Marcus turned and called out to Shaw. “Come on, sir. Move it.”

  Dom looked back. Shaw was still messing around with the concrete chute, reluctant to leave the truck until the very last minute. Captain or not, he wasn’t going to get much patient deference from Marcus.

  “Two seconds,” Shaw called. The crater was ragged, and soil and bricks were crumbling into it under the weight of the truck’s rear wheels. Shaw was balanced right on the edge as the thick, gravelly gray mass bulged out of the pipe and pumped slowly into the hole. “Where are they now?”

  “I think we’ve got a hundred meters on them.” Marcus started walking back to him, shaking his head slowly. “You’ve really got to shift your ass now.”

  Dom wondered whether to go back him up. Marcus wasn’t above physically dragging an officer out of a tight spot if the guy didn’t cooperate without him, and Dom could already hear the grubs crashing through the woods. Rothesay wound up the throttle. Castilla aimed the door gun into the trees, ready to suppress ground fire. Marcus started jogging.

  “Down!” Castilla yelled. “Everybody down!”

  She opened up on the trees with the door gun, sending wood splinters flying everywhere. Dom’s first thought was to give Marcus and Shaw some covering fire. He jumped down and ducked under the rotors and Marcus went to grab Shaw, but then the edge of the crater collapsed. Shaw fell, sliding a couple of meters at first and grabbing for the concrete pipe. But there was nothing to grab hold of and his helmet vanished below the edge. Marcus dropped down onto his belly and held out his arm, yelling.

  “Captain, come on—I got you. Come on. Grab my hand.”

  Dom couldn’t see how far Shaw had fallen. He ran for the crater as Castilla squeezed off a few more bursts into the trees. The grubs couldn’t have been far away now. Shit, this was cutting it fine. Dom reached the edge of the crater expecting to see Shaw standing on a pile of debris and just needing a hand out, but when he got his first look down there, the poor bastard was in real trouble. Shaw was up to his waist in concrete, struggling to get any purchase on whatever was holding him up. There was no way Marcus was going to reach him from the edge.

  And the grubs were now right on top of them. Shots ricocheted off the trucks.

  Dom crouched on one knee and returned fire. He could see the gray shapes about fifty meters away now. “Marcus, you can’t reach him.”

  “We need a damn rope. He can’t pull free on his own.”

  “Just get out,” Shaw yelled. “Go on, get out.”

  Rothesay cut in on the radio. “Winch,” he said. “The only way you’re going to get him out is with the damn winch. Fenix, get over here!”

  “I’ll cover him,” Dom said. “Get it.”

  “No, come on.” Marcus grabbe
d his shoulder. “We need to lift. The goddamn cable’s only seventy meters. Captain? You hang on. We’ll get the Raven to winch you out.”

  Marcus got up and ran for the Raven, shoving Dom ahead of him as the door gun hammered sporadically. Once they scrambled into the crew bay, Rothesay lifted and positioned the Raven at a hover over the crater. They were taking fire and there wasn’t a worse possible situation in which to extract someone. All Dom could do was hose the approaching grubs while Castilla burned through belt after belt of ammo. It was about more than covering the extraction. It was about protecting the Raven from ground fire. Marcus grabbed the lifting strop and paid out the cable on the winch. It hit the surface of the concrete a little way from Shaw but he grabbed it and managed to get it around his neck and then slip one arm through it.

  “Both arms,” Marcus yelled. “Come on, Captain. Under your arms, okay? You know the drill.”

  Dom broke off from the defense and slid across the deck to give Marcus a hand. Shaw was chest deep in the mix now, the rotor wash plastering his overall sleeves to his arms. He was covered in the concrete but he managed to get the strop under both arms.

  “Okay, bring him up,” Marcus said.

  Dom hit the winch control and the cable started cranking in. It was only fifteen meters, no height at all, but the guy was completely helpless on a winch with rounds flying past him. It seemed to take forever. Dom was expecting Shaw to be hit by grub fire any second despite Castilla’s efforts on the door gun. Marcus reached down just as Shaw came up to the two-meter mark, fingers almost touching, and then the nightmarish worst happened.

  Shaw started to slip. “Hey—”

  “Hang on, Shaw, hang on!”

  Rothesay cut in. “Fenix, what’s happening?”