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

by Karen Traviss

  They’re my friends. They’re the people who’ll look out for me so I don’t get hurt. We take care of one another.

  Adam would never forget the rapt look on Marcus’s face when he told him that, and how this small child had declared that he was going to be a Gear too. He never wavered from that day onward. He kept his word, even at five years old.

  And I wondered why he defied me to enlist, did I? I made it sound worth leaving your family for, so much loyalty and love and devotion in it. I never gave him enough of that at home. He had to find it somewhere. He found it with the Santiago family and 26 RTI.

  Adam held two pictures of Marcus side by side, the one taken in his Olafson school uniform and the one in Royal Tyran Infantry number two service dress on the day of his passing out parade, and was struck yet again by how old and serious Marcus looked in both. Yes. I remember how he got that black eye. Defending Carlos Santiago when he hardly knew him. Even then, instantly loyal, willing to do anything for his comrades. Adam ran his thumb gently over the parade photo, wondering if it would fade in the bright tropical sun slanting through the window, and decided not to risk it. He’d have nothing left of his son if he lost those pictures. He paused and touched the photo to his lips, so proud of Marcus that it hurt.

  I wasted all those years. And now I’ll probably never see him again. My boy. My wonderful boy.

  Did I ever tell him that I loved him?

  “Sir?”

  The voice made him jump. It was Captain Dury. Adam turned around, embarrassed, and slid the photos into his inside jacket pocket. “I’m sorry, I was miles away.”

  “We found it.” Dury held out a perfume bottle with amber liquid slopping around in it. “I found it when we offloaded today. It must have fallen down a gap in the Raven’s deck when we transferred your effects.”

  It was a nice euphemism for kidnap, but what else did Adam deserve? This was a kindness he hadn’t earned. The bottle was the last remnant of Elain’s perfume. He folded his fingers around it and almost let tears overtake him, and wondered what kind of man went to all that trouble to find something so apparently trivial for a traitor, for someone who’d failed to warn humanity of approaching genocide. Dury was a battle-hardened veteran with something of the look of Hoffman about him, not so much his actual appearance but the clenched jaw and visible disapproval of old money and ancestry. Adam tried not to mistake Prescott’s orders to placate him for actual sympathy.

  “Thank you, Captain,” he said, pocketing the bottle. “This means a great deal to me.”

  Dury pulled up a chair and sat opposite Adam with his elbows braced on his knees and fingers meshed as if he had a pep talk to give him. Adam was getting used to the Onyx Guard wandering around Azura as casually as infantry. He used to think that 26 RTI, his own regiment, was the sole elite that defended the heart of Tyrus, but how wrong he’d been. The guardsmen were now the defense force for Azura as well as personal security for the Chairman, complete with artillery and an air wing. They weren’t ceremonial and they weren’t just black ops.

  This was where all the senior command and best scientific minds had been relocated after being declared dead or MIA. Adam was struggling to get used to this parallel world, this afterlife of elite souls in their well-fed, well-equipped, hidden heaven.

  No, not souls. Ghosts. I am, anyway. A ghost. I’m truly dead.

  And he’d caught sight of Julian Bissell: Bissell, whose memorial service he’d attended, Bissell the Octus Medal pharmacologist, Bissell who hadn’t been missing presumed dead at all, but was strolling around the grounds with his wife. His wife was alive. Elain was not. Adam found himself still looking, still hoping that he’d been wrong about the remains he’d found in the Hollow and that this was another one of Prescott’s elaborate cover stories, but it wasn’t. Elain was gone forever.

  “The Chairman’s going to call you later,” Dury said, jolting him out of his fermenting anger. “I don’t want you to worry, because everything’s all right now, but your son had a spot of trouble at—”

  “Oh God.” Adam’s stomach plummeted. “No.”

  Dury raised a forefinger without unmeshing his hands. “Hear me out. He’s okay. He got in a fight, and one of the guards assaulted him.”

  “Assaulted him?” Adam’s worst expectations rocketed from idling to overdrive. “What the hell do you mean?”

  “I’m not going to bullshit you, sir. One of the guards has a son at the front and he laid into Marcus with his baton. Put him in hospital, basically. But he’s up and about now.”

  Adam felt physically sick. All he could think of was Marcus, utterly alone, utterly without hope, being brutalized by thugs and perverts in that stinking hole. He’d fight back and get himself killed. Would they even tell him if Marcus was dead? Adam had no way of verifying anything. He wanted to run to Marcus and get him out of there. But he was on the other side of Sera, a prisoner himself.

  “Why are you telling me this?” he asked. He caught a movement in his peripheral vision. He must have raised his voice, because some of the technicians had turned around to see what the commotion was. He lowered his voice to a hiss. “Is this the game you’re playing? You let my boy be abused and tortured, and then tell me all about it to ensure I behave? Because if you think that’s an effective way to motivate me, you’ve failed.” Adam leaned as close to Dury as he dared without letting his own rage tip him into grabbing the man’s collar. “Do not touch my son. Don’t even think about it. Do you understand? If I save Sera, then I do it solely for him. For the day he’s released. This is all about him.”

  Adam realized he’d said much the same to Myrrah and that he meant it. Sera was worth nothing if he lost Marcus. It was just a ball of rock and assorted organisms without him, not a living world. No wonder Marcus had dropped everything to try to save him. This was the example he set his son—to abandon duty for family, perhaps set too late but better than not at all.

  And that’s how it should be. I see that now. I should have seen it long ago.

  Dury didn’t even blink. “I was just telling you everything, sir. If I was threatening you, you’d know all about it.”

  “Prove to me that he’s alive.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” Dury leaned back in the seat, hands on his knees now. “Look, the Chairman rarely gives his word. But in my experience, when he does, he keeps it. And you and your son aren’t exactly blameless, are you? So I think we’re all going to have to learn to trust one another.”

  “Marcus served frontline for nearly fifteen years. He’s not a coward. You know he’s not a coward.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt your son’s got guts, sir. He’s probably just like too many other poor bastards—he’s finally succumbed to the stress. But as things stand, he’s escaped a firing squad and you should be grateful for Prescott’s intervention.”

  Adam found himself sliding down into the abyss, searching for a deal, a bargain, a threat, anything to get Marcus out of there before it was too late. The prospect of his getting killed in combat was a nightmare enough. But that prison would be a slow, agonizing torment that would be far worse.

  “You could bring him here,” Adam said. “If he’s going to be in his seventies before he’s released—if he lives that long—then he could serve his sentence here. I’d be a damn sight more motivated.”

  Dury gave him a long look, and then stood up. Adam knew they had an audience but he didn’t care now. He had no dignity left.

  “When you talk to the Chairman, you can raise that,” Dury said. Now he looked awkward, folding his arms as if he didn’t know what to do with them when he wasn’t holding a rifle, just like Marcus. “We have a new resident. Might be of interest to you. They’ve just flown him in from the Slab.”

  For one blissful moment, the crushing tension in Adam’s chest relaxed and he expected the next word to be Marcus. The relief perished instantly because he could see from Dury’s grim expression that it wasn’t, and he hated him for getting his hopes up and the
n dashing them even though the man hadn’t said a word or even implied it. It was delusion born of futile fear, grief, and self-loathing.

  “Who is it?” Adam asked.

  “A prisoner. William Alva. A volunteer.”

  “A volunteer for what?”

  Dury shrugged. “I’m not a doctor, sir. That’s up to you and Dr. Bakos. Anyway, I imagine anything beats getting glass and turds in your food and a broom handle up your ass. He’s a pedophile, sir. Three murders. Little boys.”

  The captain was a strange blend of the erudite and the profane, and seemed to know how to balance the mix for maximum impact. He gave Adam a polite nod and walked out of the lab, boots clicking on the polished cream terrazzo floor.

  Something had now numbed Adam. He tried to work out if it was what happened to pedophiles, or what might be done to Marcus, or what this Alva thought he’d volunteered for. He turned around in his chair to see where Jerome—one of the senior geneticists—had gone.

  “Rex, was this Esther’s idea?” It wasn’t what Adam was thinking at all. Marcus, what the hell have they done to you? “Did she ask for volunteers?”

  Jerome stepped out of the alcove where he was prepping slides. “No idea, Professor.”

  “Well, he can’t possibly know what he’s volunteered for, so I’ll be damned if I’ll take advantage of him.”

  “Who?”

  Adam couldn’t tell if Jerome was playing dumb or genuinely so absorbed in his work that he hadn’t heard the conversation. It was hard to ignore an Onyx Guardsman and an angry discussion in a quiet lab, but Jerome might well have been the man to manage it. He gave Adam a baffled frown as he walked out and went in search of isolation.

  Ironically, Adam felt physically better than he had in a long time. His ribs weren’t fully healed, but he was getting more exercise simply walking from office to office around the Azura complex, and the food was better. Back home he’d been able to get hold of the best that Jacinto had to offer, even when supplies were running low, but the menu in the island’s many facilities brought home to him just how desperate things really were back on the mainland and how low his expectations had sunk. And they say they’re having to make cutbacks. The tower where his quarters were located rivaled the best hotels he’d known before Sera had been ripped apart and burned.

  By me. I made the burning possible. Didn’t I?

  And the Maelstrom. Damn, they even used my power generation research. I’m complicit in everything, whether I realize it or not.

  He walked through the plush lobby, all mahogany and jacquard hangings, and thought he recognized the figures in a few of the niches. Yes: it was from the Ushayev collection that his father had given to the National Museum on permanent loan. Adam thought of the ancient silver Kashkuri horse figurine he’d found himself in the looted ruins of Shavad’s museum, and finally put to rest the regret about lost art just as Helena Stroud had told him to.

  Marcus. Adam stepped onto the elevator, an open platform that allowed residents to take in the full majesty of the vast, vaulted lobby with its glass dome and slanted sunlight playing on ceramic containers of rare plants. Oh God, Marcus, what have I done? He took a slow step to the edge of the platform and looked down. Various people milled around with no apparent sense of urgency, and apart from the housekeeping staff who moved unnoticed in the shadows, not one of them was an ordinary human being. Elain, can you forgive me? I’ve let you down. I didn’t look after Marcus.

  He had to stop this. He had to focus. He was no use to Marcus in this state. He strode down the wide carpeted corridor, boots almost silent on the thick pile, and shut himself in his apartment to sit at his desk with his head in his hands, just trying to center himself enough to come up with a plan.

  He’d had what felt like five minutes’ peace when there was a tap at the door. He could release the lock from his desk. There was no point pretending he was out of town, after all.

  “Come in,” he said, pressing the release button.

  Esther Bakos stood in the doorway, looking irritated. “You know you’ve switched your phone off, don’t you, Professor?”

  Adam didn’t. He looked at the buttons on the handset and tried to work out when he’d pressed the wrong one. “I’m sorry. It’s not been a good day.”

  “I need to talk to you. Rex said you were concerned about something.”

  I don’t have time for this. Go away. “Apart from what’s happening to my son?” Adam knew the gossip would be circulating faster than a particle accelerator. He allowed himself a little display of acid. “Yes, I’m told we’ve brought in a volunteer for tests.”

  “I find myself in the position of having to come to a physicist to ask for permission to make a clinical decision.” Bakos made it sound like consulting a leper on manicure techniques. “We know this organism jumps the species barrier somehow. We absolutely have to do human tests as soon as possible.”

  “He’s a prisoner, and he can’t possibly give informed consent for something like this. We don’t have the information to advise him. We’re floundering ourselves.”

  “He rapes and kills children.”

  “Is this some kind of high school ethics debate?”

  “He’s not being forced. He might not be harmed at all.” Bakos looked like a perfectly pleasant, reasonable woman. She wasn’t a monster. “He can repay his debt to society.”

  “This isn’t ethical.”

  And neither was the Hammer of Dawn. Go on, say it. Go on, let’s tie ourselves in knots again. Just because I did one terrible thing it doesn’t mean I can breeze straight into another.

  Bakos looked fed up with him, arms folded. “This world will die of ethics, Professor. I don’t like decent but dead. I prefer alive and remorseful. As do you, obviously.”

  This was the thin end of the wedge, easy to embark on when the victim was stereotypically repellent, but Adam feared the slide along the continuum to the moderately antisocial through the undesirable and disenfranchised and ultimately to the helpless who simply couldn’t defend themselves.

  But the world’s being poisoned. Not just humanity. Everything. The situation’s different.

  No, this is exactly what ethics were designed for. The tough times. The extreme times.

  Adam sat back in his chair, scarcely able to believe he was taking this stand for the lowest form of human life when his own son was suffering and the entire world was under threat. It was the right thing to do. But he didn’t trust his motives, and he struggled to work out whether he just wanted to persuade himself he was a good man who’d made some bad choices. In the end, it made no difference to William Alva.

  “You will not use that prisoner,” Adam said quietly. “But I’ll find you a human tissue alternative.”

  “Oh, it’s a case of teach yourself molecular biology in a weekend, is it?”

  Some things became very clear, very fast. The lightning bolt of clarity over big issues had hit Adam more than once in his career, simpler than choosing between tea or coffee, instant in the panoramic and perfect view of the crisis that it gave him.

  “I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll be the test subject. Use me.”

  HOUSE OF THE SOVEREIGNS, EPHYRA.

  “Colonel? I’d like five minutes.”

  Prescott’s voice cut through the hubbub of conversation in the crowded corridor outside CIC. There wasn’t really enough room for HQ personnel in the building, but all Hoffman had to do was to wait a few more months and the grubs would grind the COG down to the right size to fit. He debated whether to pretend he hadn’t heard and just stride out the door. But the corridor was now lined with trestle tables for relocated personnel who didn’t have workstations, and it was a classic choke point for an ambush. He was stuck in the kill zone. At least Prescott had learned something in his brief time as a Gear officer, then.

  “Chairman,” Hoffman said, turning. “Here or in your office?”

  Prescott beckoned to him to follow and headed for the men’s bathroom. Great, a pisspo
t parliament. Maybe he thinks I’ll respond better to the common touch. But it was closer than walking back to Prescott’s office. Hoffman followed him in, cast a wary eye around for boots under the stall doors, and leaned against the green and gold tube-lined tiling with his Lancer over his shoulder. Saw-teeth clinked against the ceramic.

  “I can’t help but notice a general depression settling in HQ,” Prescott said. “I need to know if it’s about the situation generally or a reaction to Fenix’s sentence that’s lingering rather too long.”

  Hoffman held Prescott’s gaze for a few beats while he worked out what the hell the man was actually driving at. Prescott knew damn well what the state of play was. He had that politician’s radar, that ability to taste the air like a cobra and work out where the despair, weakness, and hope was trying to hide before he uncoiled and sank his fangs in it.

  “You want me to order them all to cheer the fuck up, then, Chairman?” Hoffman hurt. As the weeks went on, he felt worse about Marcus and less able to understand either his own reactions or Marcus’s behavior. Dom and Anya weren’t exactly ignoring him—nothing so hostile—but the looks on their faces said he’d cut their hearts out and that nothing would ever be the same again. A desperate thought went through his mind. “Look, if you said the word, Fenix could be out of there tomorrow. Call it what you like—stick him in a penal battalion, a suicide squad, however you want to dress it up, but he could be back on the front line in twenty-six hours.”

  “And what message does that send to the other Gears?”

  “That we need every man we can get?” Hoffman had once thought he could guess where Prescott was heading but he’d been left in his dust for the last few years. “I did it by the book, Chairman, because that’s exactly what Sovereign’s Regulations are for. They save us from not knowing what to do when guys we like and admire break the rules. No favor, no prejudice, no argument. Fenix did it. I wish to God he hadn’t. We miss him—hell, I miss him. But what do I do?”