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

by Karen Traviss

  Adam tried not to run down the passage. Marcus was in the hall, Lancer in one hand and looking uncomfortable. He was still in full armor, still wearing that damn do-rag instead of a proper helmet, and he smelled of smoke.

  “Didn’t have time to change, Dad,” he said. “One of the KR pilots dropped me off. Mind if I grab a shower first?”

  It was his home. He didn’t have to ask. “Go ahead, Marcus,” Adam said. “You want a drink standing by?”

  “Good idea,” Marcus muttered, and thudded up the stairs.

  There was still some of the decent brandy left in the cellar. It demanded the best crystal tumblers. Adam poured a decent shot into each under the reproachful gaze of his grandfather, Brigadier Roland Fenix, immortalized in full Royal Tyran Infantry dress uniform by the foremost artist of his day. Adam was still trying to avoid those eyes when Marcus came downstairs again.

  Young men usually looked even younger out of uniform. But not Marcus: he looked older than he deserved to be, exhausted, resigned. Adam could see more gray in his hair than he’d noticed before. Marcus rarely smiled, but today he looked absolutely stricken. His face betrayed nothing, but his eyes said it all.

  He’s thirty-two. He’s not a boy anymore. But I wanted better for him than this.

  “How’s it going, then?” Adam asked cautiously, handing him a glass.

  “Lost a guy today.”

  “Damn, I’m sorry.” Adam knew how that felt. But he hadn’t coped with it at all. It had driven him from the army on a crusade to build weapons that would end wars forever. He’d failed in that, too. “It’s not your fault. You know that.”

  “I had his hand. I should have saved him.”

  “Marcus, don’t do this to yourself.”

  Marcus drained the glass in two pulls without even blinking. He seemed to be focused on a point on the far wall behind Adam. “The grubs are going to break through any day now. I think you should get out, Dad. Seriously.”

  “I’ve got work to do.” And it’s all my fault. I have to stand and take it. “Where would I run to, anyway?”

  “There’s an evacuation plan. There always is.”

  “We’ll hold Ephyra.”

  “We’ll try.”

  Adam didn’t know how the hell he was going to break his news now. How many comrades had Marcus lost to the Locust? But it had to be done. He couldn’t leave it a moment longer, and perhaps if he showed Marcus how close he was to finding a way to stop the Locust, then his son might judge him a little less harshly.

  “Dinner’s going to be a while,” Adam said. Marcus was still looking at the wall behind him. “What is it?”

  Marcus pointed, still nursing his empty glass in one hand. “Why did you take it off the wall?”

  Adam glanced over his shoulder. There was an outline on the red brocade panel, a rectangle less faded than the rest. He’d finally taken down a picture that troubled him.

  “I got fed up seeing Dalyell every time I came in here.” The picture had been taken at the Octus Medal ceremony, the highest civilian honor the COG could bestow, a formal shot of the late Chairman Dalyell presenting the award for Adam’s services to humanity in ending the Pendulum Wars. Services to humanity? I invented a weapon of mass destruction. It killed as many of our own citizens as it did UIR ones. And then I went ahead and let something even worse happen. “Brought back too many memories.”

  “Dad, you need to stop beating yourself up about the Hammer strikes.”

  No, poor Marcus didn’t understand at all. When he did, though, Adam knew he would never forgive him. “It’s not that simple. There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

  “Let’s eat first.” Marcus wasn’t a talker, and Adam knew how hard he found it to discuss anything personal. He clutched at the first diversion he could find. “Then you can tell me.”

  It was sobering to realize how long an hour and a half at 180 degrees actually felt when it was spent in near silence, sitting at the kitchen table and trying to work out the best time to make a confession.

  “So. Anya.” Adam forced himself to look away from the oven’s glass door. “How are things with her? On? Off?”

  “The usual.”

  Adam wondered if Marcus was a different man with Anya and poured his heart out to her. He doubted it somehow. “And is Dom okay?”

  “Still searching every Stranded camp we come across.”

  “You think Maria’s still alive?”

  “He’s sure she is, and that’s good enough for me.” Marcus’s accent shifted a little. Sometimes he seemed almost bilingual, moving from sounding like any other regular working-class Gear to the educated, patrician tones of his childhood, depending on who he was addressing. He was what Dom called Posh Marcus now. He looked Adam right in the eye. “You wanted to tell me something. Looks like it’s bad news.”

  “Yes.” Oh God. Here we go. Don’t hate me, Marcus. Please don’t hate me. Try to understand. Try to forgive me. “There’s something … that I didn’t tell you. I’ve never told anybody.”

  Marcus just tilted his head back a fraction, that I-don’t-believe-you look just like Elain’s. “It’s about Mom, then.”

  It was the last thing Adam expected. But yes, in a way, it was: Elain had found the tunnels long before Adam had imagined what might be within them, and it had cost her her life. He couldn’t admit to Marcus that she’d even been down there until years later. And here he was again, doing the same thing, clutching information to himself because he didn’t have the guts to tell his son why she’d been down there.

  “Not entirely.” Damn, it was even harder than he’d expected. He thought it would come out in a cathartic rush, but guilt choked it all back. “I’m sorry. Do you think about her much?”

  Marcus looked away for a moment as if he was trying to remember. “No,” he said. “Sometimes I can’t even recall her face. Look, just tell me. Is it your project? You know I never ask about any of that. Classified means classified.”

  It was an opening of sorts. Adam tried to seize it, to make himself do the right thing and finally tell Marcus the whole shameful story, but he looked into his son’s face—battle-weary, old before his time, robbed of the life he could have had, robbed even of his closest friends—and simply couldn’t force the words out.

  Is it about burdening him? Or is it about me, because I can’t bear to lose his respect?

  If I tell anyone, I have to tell him first. And it’s getting so very, very hard to live with it.

  “Yes, it’s the project,” Adam said. He’d try to find his courage again later. “I thought I might be getting closer to a way of stopping the Locust.”

  Marcus defocused a little and glanced at the oven. He’d been told that so many times before. He might have been a relative stranger to his father these days, but Adam could still read him well enough to know when he was embarrassed.

  “That’s great, Dad,” Marcus said, slipping back into his ordinary Gear voice again. “You sure you should be telling me this?”

  Adam couldn’t blame him. But how did a man break this kind of news?

  How could he explain to Marcus that he’d known the Locust were massing underground, years before E-Day, but that he’d warned no one?

  How did he tell him that he’d actually been in contact with the Locust, pleaded with them, and knew what was driving them to colonize the surface?

  And still he’d warned no one, because he was sure he could build an alliance rather than create an extra enemy in a trigger-happy, warring world where nobody had yet learned to handle peace.

  After fifteen years of silence, it was impossible—just as it would be impossible to explain that the Locust weren’t now the biggest threat to all life on Sera.

  “You’re right, Marcus,” he said at last, understanding that he would never be the man his son thought he was. “Classified is classified.”

  SUIZA BLOCK, COG DEFENSE RESEARCH AGENCY (COGDRA), JACINTO.

  Nevil Estrom couldn’t remember the last tim
e he had two days to himself without Professor Fenix around, and he was determined to make the most of it.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t like the man. He’d worked for Adam for nearly fourteen years, and it was—well, it was more like having a second father. The poor guy had a very awkward relationship with his son, and Nevil was always willing to lend a sympathetic ear. It was a short step from that to being co-opted into the family dynamics.

  But now the Fenixes were spending some very rare quality time together, the first days off that Adam had taken since Nevil had joined the Project Hammer team during the Pendulum Wars, and that meant he had the archives to himself. There was work to do. And he could do it without Adam’s well-meaning interruption.

  “Stop whistling,” said a voice. “You’re too damned cheerful.”

  Nevil edged out from between the packed shelves to check who’d come in. It was one of the security guards, Gordie, standing in the doorway with one hairy hand gripping the brass handle.

  “Just fulfilled in my vocation.”

  “I wasn’t expecting anyone to be in, Doctor Estrom.”

  “It’s a weekday.”

  “Yeah, but the Director’s not in, so I thought you’d be taking a couple of days off, too.”

  “In a way, I am.” Nevil indicated neat stacks of documents on the floor, each with DO NOT MOVE notes taped to them. “I hate the way he gets behind with the archiving. Don’t get me wrong, I’d die in a ditch for him, but we need to have this stuff ready to ship out at short notice if we have to evacuate. I can clear this backlog before he returns.”

  Gordie chuckled to himself as he backed out, closing the door. “Make the most of it. It’ll be another ten years before he takes a day off again.”

  If we have ten years left.

  Nevil paused to watch the dust wheeling in a shaft of sunlight like birds riding a thermal. Even in the muffled silence of the archive rooms, he could hear—and sometimes feel—the whomp-whomp-whomp of artillery getting closer. He didn’t need to read the daily updates that passed across Adam’s desk to know that the grubs were massing south and west of Ephyra. It had the feel of a final push. Sitting on a granite island only bought you so much time, because the grubs weren’t confined to tunneling. They were moving on the surface now, and they had squadrons of Reavers that pushed the Ravens to the limit. Nevil had no intention of running anywhere; if his brother had been willing to die as a Gear, then he’d stand his ground too.

  “Come on, get on with it,” he said to himself. He picked up the next folder in the pile and worked his way along the shelves, looking for the right place to put it in the row of anonymous brown and red cardboard sleeves. The red ones contained classified material, anything from restricted to top secret. This was the COG’s most sensitive archived material: every single paper document generated in the DRA was filed here, right down to the scruffiest handwritten note scribbled on the back of an envelope, and even the unclassified stuff wouldn’t be released for public inspection for at least fifty years, if ever. Nothing was thrown away, nothing was shredded, and nothing—absolutely nothing—left the building. Nevil opened one of the folders. A cash register receipt fluttered to the floor. When he picked it up and examined it, it turned out to be from a grocery store, forty years old and with prices that seemed almost amusing now, but penciled on the back of it was a long and complicated equation on focal lengths. That was how seriously the DRA took its security. There was also always a possibility that the material would be needed again one day.

  Nevil marveled at the idea of a kilo of shrimp for a few cents—or any shrimp at all with rationing getting tighter every week—and worked his way through the stack of folders. He’d cleared two and was about to start on the third when his stomach started growling and reminded him that lunch was overdue. Settling down with a sandwich was still one of life’s little pleasures. He pulled up one of the battered leather chairs that still had a pre-Coalition Tyran coat of arms on it and positioned it in front of the window to bask in what sun was available.

  The bread was a bit soggy. Rebecca had always made great sandwiches for him, but she was gone now, and that was his own fault. He chewed and wondered if she was happier these days.

  So once I’ve finished that stack … well, it’s not going to take me two days.

  There seemed to be little research work to do now. He thought about the heady days of the Hammer of Dawn project, when resources were unlimited and there was a clear, definable, tantalizing objective—to get a laser accurate and powerful enough to target assets and even cities from planetary orbit. And they’d done it, even if Adam hadn’t seemed overjoyed with the achievement even then. Now they were running out of resources, and not entirely sure what would kill the Locust. The global Hammer strikes had just slowed them down for a few years.

  Maybe I’m expecting too much of Adam. We’re physicists. Nukes and lasers are as far as we can go. We need biologists. Chemists. Where the hell did all those guys go? How unlucky can we get, losing so many researchers?

  They’d lost a lot of the senior army command, too. The Chief of Defense Staff was just a colonel, so maybe it was fitting that a physicist was trying to cover all the scientific and technical bases single-handed. Nevil liked the idea of just flooding the grubs’ tunnels and drowning the bastards, just like Adam had once said, but it would have meant flooding half of Ephyra too. Just a crazy thought, Adam had said, born of too much coffee and too little sleep. They’d never be able to do it: the COG no longer had the infrastructure to manufacture what was needed, anyway.

  How desperate do we have to get before we have to try, though? Nevil’s thoughts wandered along two tracks, one focused on some new way to kill grubs that they’d overlooked, the other on what he’d put in his sandwiches tomorrow. He was out of pickles. We’re in a worse position now than we were when we had to deploy the Hammer.

  Gas. Water. Chemicals. If the grubs lived in tunnels, that had to be the best place to tackle them, to trap them and poison them like the vermin they were. Smart vermin, though: look at all the creatures they’ve bred. Organic weapons, more or less. Letting them reach the surface and fighting them seemed an insane waste of men and equipment, but the Lightmass bomb was still on the drawing board. It was the only device they had for underground deployment, and the sonic resonator needed to map the Locust tunnels was still in development. Nevil put his physicist mentality to one side for a moment and got up to look for the geological survey section. He just needed ideas. He needed to look at something that would spark some off-the-wall thought and let him see the problem in a different light.

  But it’s probably already too late. They’re on the surface.

  The muffled thump of artillery a few kilometers away shook the floorboards under his feet. The front line was getting closer. Nevil knew he was probably wasting his time because experts in fields outside his own had already tried every solution and failed, but he had to lay this anxiety to rest. Ideas born of desperation were sometimes inspired.

  Adam’s key gave him the run of the archives, the entire floor. Nobody was going to disturb him. He locked the door, shoved the last piece of sandwich in his mouth, and worked his way room by room along the unbroken walls of shelving mounted on runners until he found the ones that housed the geological surveys.

  The hand-wheel on the first row was stiff from lack of use. He wound it back until the shelves parted, then edged gingerly between the aisles of tight-packed filing boxes. The air smelled musty and unbreathed.

  Shit, I hope these are stacked safely. If all this falls on me …

  The obvious place to start was at the beginning. The labels on the filing boxes didn’t tell him much, so he pulled out the first box in front of him at eye height to get a feel for the contents. It was an envelope stuffed with photographs. When he pulled them out, a musty smell hit him. The images were aerial reconnaissance photos with grid references and the date stamped on the back—Thaw 15, 5 A.E. He stuffed them back in the envelope and moved to the s
helf below: more images and rolls of seismic data, this time dated through 6 A.E. So the earliest stuff was at the top. This was going to take a ladder.

  Gordie will find my desiccated remains a year from now, squashed flat like a pressed flower under a metric fuck-ton of paper.

  This was why you were always supposed to tell a colleague where you were or even have someone accompany you when you ventured in here. It was only filing, but accidents happened. Nevil could have trotted back up to the main building and found one of the technicians, but everyone was always busy, and he was enjoying the solitude. He dragged the integral ladder out on its runners as far as he could and rattled it a little to make sure it was secure, then began climbing.

  The rungs seemed to give a little as he put his weight on them. He could have sworn the whole contraption was starting to lean away from the cliff face of boxes.

  Come on, don’t be a girl. Just take it slowly, pull out the first box, and climb down again … one-handed.

  There really should have been a pulley basket on this goddamn thing. He tucked the box under one arm. His glasses slipped down his nose as he descended but he couldn’t reach up to move them. This was going to be a long, sweaty job.

  And I don’t really know what I’m looking for. But that means an open mind.

  Nevil worked through the first ten boxes, extracting their contents and laying them out on the big chart table in the next room. He checked recon image dates and tried to get a time sequence for each location. The seismic traces didn’t give him enough data on their own, and he wasn’t qualified to interpret them anyway, so he put those back in their respective boxes and concentrated on photos and reports. When he ran out of room on the table—and he could have landed a Raven on that damn thing—he stopped to evaluate what he had so far. It was going to take a hell of a lot longer than two days to check the whole year. And there were ten of those.

  Got to start somewhere. He had nothing to go home for now. He pulled a candy bar out of his back pocket and settled down to stare at the information in front of him and let it speak to him.