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

by Karen Traviss

  “Well, there’s Ruskin, the guy who chopped up mailmen and ate bits.” Reeve recalled newspaper headlines. “Then there’s the serial rapists … Beresford, Tasman … the guy who went nuts with the automatic in the Tollen super-market … that arsonist they took years to catch … yeah, picking the most sociable out of that bunch is going to be tough. Are they going to let them out with us?”

  “It isn’t going to happen,” Merino growled. “Or if it does, it won’t be a situation that lasts more than a few hours.”

  “We’re kind of picky, considering, aren’t we?”

  “We’re the ones at risk here, buddy,” Merino said. “Not the public, and not the screws. If the nutters end up killing half of us, it’s a result for them.”

  It wasn’t as if any human rights do-gooders were going to rise up and object. Reeve wasn’t sure that there were any left. “Wouldn’t they have done it by now if that’s what they wanted?”

  “No prisoners, and the screws end up at the front.”

  “Yeah, but Campbell probably wants that.”

  “But some others don’t.” Merino didn’t so much shove Reeve in the chest as tap him in the sternum in a way that said he could have used a knife instead if he’d felt like it. “You’re the one who’s matey with Jarvi. Go sort it out. I’m going to make sure everyone else is prepped for a little self-defense.”

  Merino walked away, hands in his pockets, and disappeared into the kitchens, probably to secure blades and anything else that might come in useful, or at least to make sure the psych wing inmates couldn’t get their hands on them. Reeve felt threatened for the first time in years. The Slab wasn’t the nicest resort on Sera, but once the worst excesses had passed and folks had generally settled down it had been far safer to be inside its walls than out since E-Day. Now that was all starting to change again. He looked around to see if Jarvi had returned to the gantry, but Campbell was up there now, looking like a ghost next to Chalcross. Shit, so Chalcross was going to be handed a Lancer and told to do the business, was he? It was a shame the warders didn’t have a better working relationship with Marcus. He had to have a whole stack of tips on how not to end up dead.

  Campbell was looking down at the main floor. He didn’t seem to be focusing on anything at the moment. Reeve found it hard to think of him as a poor bastard because his arm was never going to be right again after the dog attack, and he had a chunk out of his calf big enough to put a fist in, but Campbell looked utterly fucked. Losing an only son had to be goddamn hard. So many folks couldn’t have kids at all. It made things that much harder.

  But Campbell wasn’t a bad guy. Funny, Marcus had just accepted that fear and eventually bereavement made Campbell take it out on him. He didn’t think it was sadistic at all, just desperate. Not that being understanding made a goddamn difference to Marcus. He still had a slice ripped out of his face that was going to give him trouble for years to come.

  “Hey, Marcus?” Reeve went back and stuck his head into the cell. Marcus was doing crunches on the floor now, boots up on the bunk. Reeve waited for him to finish. He took a damn long time. “You done? Tunnel time. We might need it sooner rather than later if we end up sharing the floor with our crazy colleagues.”

  Marcus got to his feet, picked up his prison-issue jacket, and strode after Reeve in the direction of the boiler room. “Maybe they’ll be really tolerant.”

  “Shit, it’s not funny.”

  “We’ll be okay with the rapists.”

  “They’re not all in for doing ladies, Marcus.”

  “Terrific.”

  “You still got your blade?”

  “Yeah. Hate messy cuticles.”

  “Wow, you’ve perked up some lately.”

  “Sooner we finish this tunnel, the sooner I get to kill grubs. Motivational.”

  “Not down to your girl, then. Has she got a name?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s Anya, isn’t it?”

  Marcus slowed and turned, all frozen menace. Reeve almost tripped over him. “I don’t want to see that name scrawled on the latrine wall with any interesting comments. I’m guessing you’ll keep it to yourself.”

  “Course I will.”

  Marcus picked up his pace again. “You know it’s going to take a year to dig beyond the walls, don’t you?”

  “What do you call her? Anya, I mean.”

  “Lieutenant.”

  “Oh, I get it.”

  “No. You don’t.” They were in the boiler room corridor now. Marcus seemed not to understand that a bunch of people stuck in jail, with their contacts outside either dead or keen to forget them, found his personal soap opera enormously interesting. “I said a year.”

  “We better dig faster than the grubs, then.”

  Reeve looked over Leuchars’s head and peered down into the hole. He couldn’t see anyone down there now, so they’d turned a corner. All he could hear was quiet scraping and the occasional rainfall sounds of soil falling. Edouain hauled soil across the floor on an old sack and began piling it into buckets.

  “You know you’re going to hit granite any minute now,” Marcus said. He got on his knees and stuck his head down the hole. “If you carry on digging a shallow shaft, you won’t get under the walls. You’re going to have to dig down first.”

  “Exactly,” Edouain said. “That’s why we’re going for the utility conduit.”

  “That’s not a good idea.”

  “You got a better one?”

  “No.”

  “So I suggest you follow orders, then, COG.”

  Marcus stood with his hands on his hips, feet apart, and just stared at Edouain without blinking. Edouain didn’t look away. Reeve began to worry that this might go on for hours.

  “Give it a rest, Indie, will you?” Reeve said. “Just let the guy dig.”

  Edouain took it with a raised eyebrow. “Get Vance out.”

  Marcus called Vance and the guy eventually shuffled out of the hole, holding a small trowel. No wonder it was taking forever. But there was no point using the shovel when there was so little soft soil to excavate anyway. Vance handed Marcus the trowel and clambered out.

  “I think I’ve found it,” he said. “I can’t tell how big it is from the exposed section, but it’s that rigid plastic they used to use.”

  The grubs had made Marcus the buried infrastructure expert, Reeve reckoned. He must have seen more ripped-up foundations, smashed pipes, and soil than anyone in here.

  “I’ll check it out,” he said. “If it’s the composite I think it is, then we’ll need to shatter it to get in. We’ll need a hammer. Not a cutting tool. Where are you planning on coming up, anyway?”

  Edouain took a folded sheet of rag paper out of his back pocket and unfurled it in front of Marcus, standing over him. “Here,” he said. “About seven hundred meters out. There should be an inspection hatch. Or at least there was one when I was first briefed.”

  “What do you mean, briefed?”

  “Back in the war both you and I remember, COG. A hundred useful facts for a saboteur about the enemy and its heartland. Your electricity company built inspection plates every kilometer inside the borough limits.”

  Marcus looked up for a moment, shoved the trowel in the waistband of his pants, then swung his legs into the hole and lowered himself in. Reeve heard him slither around the curve of the tunnel. There was no headroom to stand up, and he’d have to turn himself around in the shaft to go head first along the opening to dig flat on his stomach or side. It wasn’t a job for the claustrophobic, and it wasn’t easy for a guy as tall and broad as Marcus. He was just determined to do it. Reeve wondered how the hell they’d pull him out if he got stuck down there. It got hotter than a steam bath after a few minutes’ sweaty work even in this freezing weather, and passing out from dehydration was a real danger. Short sessions were the only way.

  “You still think we’re going to be safer outside than in?” Vance asked, wiping his face on his sleeve.

  “If they
open up the psych wing—for sure,” Reeve said. He stuck his head down the hole. “Ten minutes, Marcus, then we swap, okay?”

  He heard a growl that might have been agreement and turned to keep an eye on the old tin-face clock behind a locked glass scuttle high on the wall. Eight … nine … ten … eleven minutes passed. There were still chunking, scraping sounds coming from the hole.

  “Hey, Marcus, come on, time’s up,” Reeve called.

  “Found something,” Marcus said.

  It was another couple of minutes before the digging noises stopped and were replaced by shuffling and heavy breathing. Marcus squeezed his upper body out of the hole, glazed with sweat and looking even more pissed off with life than normal, and folded his arms on the edge.

  “What is it, then?” Edouain asked.

  “I’ve exposed the conduit.”

  “So now we can start making an opening into it. It’s going more smoothly than I expected.”

  “You might want to revise that. What size aperture did you think it was?”

  Edouain shrugged. “Two and a half meters. That’s standard.”

  Marcus heaved himself out of the hole and stood up. “Make that a shade under one meter,” he said. “I can see the degree of curve. We’re going to have to crawl out of here like cavers, single file. Not walk.”

  “We can do that,” Edouain said, not missing a beat. “Any other little downbeat messages for us?”

  “Yeah,” Marcus said. “Did I ever tell you how the grubs got into the center of Ephyra?”

  STAFF ADMIN OFFICE, THE SLAB.

  “Fuck him,” Campbell said, squatting in front of the wood-burning stove in the staff room. He opened the glass-fronted metal door and threw something in, making the flames lick up the front. “Fuck him.”

  The flames roared and then died down while Campbell stared into them. Niko only half-glanced his way to see what had caused the surge of heat in the small room. He was lost in accounts paperwork for the meager supplies from Jacinto and waiting for a phone call back from the Health Department.

  “Fuck who?” he asked.

  “Oh, forget it.”

  Niko never pushed Campbell lately. In a world where everyone was bereaved, he was handling his son’s death worse than average. He hardly spoke and when he did he was a negative, quarrelsome guy Niko didn’t recognize. But he’d backed off Marcus Fenix after setting the dogs on him, and that was all that mattered. For some reason, he’d expected to be conscripted into the army with the others and seemed upset that he hadn’t. Niko was still trying to work out if that was part of Chairman Prescott fulfilling his promise to punish them if Marcus was mistreated again, or something else entirely.

  “What’re you burning?” Niko asked.

  “Paper. I’m damn well freezing.”

  “Yeah, well, you know we can’t turn the heating on yet, so don’t blow all our combustible waste at once, will you?”

  Campbell went on tidying up the office. Niko bent back over the paperwork. He had no idea which prisoners were safe to move out of the secure unit or what to do with the ones who weren’t. He was waiting for a call back from a psychiatrist with guidance on who was most dangerous, as if any shrink still working there had any goddamn idea about that, and the call still hadn’t come.

  When did the ones who need medicating last get their drugs? I can’t even remember. We haven’t had any psych drugs for years.

  “We could just leave them in there,” Campbell said. “Okay, they don’t get any exercise. They have to wash in the basin in their cell. So frigging what? We’ve got the death sentence for any number of crimes now, but we’re wasting time and resources on prisoners who’d be shot today.”

  “Well, there’s your answer,” Niko said. “There was no martial law in force when they were sentenced.”

  “We’re still pretending the world’s nice and normal out there. Laws and regulations, my ass.”

  “Yeah, because the more we cut corners on this stuff, the less civilized we let ourselves become.”

  “Where do you pick up this bullshit?”

  Niko wasn’t sure. Something at the back of his mind said that he had to hang on to some rules, however pointless they seemed, because they were all that was left of normal COG life as he knew it. If they tossed everything over the side, things would descend into anarchy. Even the Stranded had rules.

  Campbell mooched around the office, lifting stacks of paper and dusting under them with a cloth that might once have been white. He moved Niko’s half-full coffee cup complete with the spoon resting in it and wiped under that, too, then put it back down again on the ring-stained desk. The spoon tinkled gently against the porcelain.

  He walked away and it tinkled again. Niko’s first thought was floorboards, but it went on tinkling when Campbell stood still. Niko stared at it. The spoon shivered for about fifteen seconds before it stopped.

  “Grubs,” he said.

  Campbell stared at the cup for a few moments. “How much digging are they doing if they can shake a building on granite bedrock?”

  “Who knows?”

  “We should shut this place down.”

  Everyone said it, and it always begged the question—why a government that could and would take the most extreme steps to survive the grub onslaught would draw the line at wiping out a handful of pariahs. Perhaps the only reason was the same as Niko’s own, that throwing all the laws and rules to the wind brought the world too close to a place they wouldn’t recognize and wouldn’t be worth saving any longer. They always said terrible things crept up on you a slice at a time, but even when moral corruption approached by slow stealth, a man could sometimes still see the line in the sand. Maybe Prescott did.

  “We’ll shut it down when we’re told to,” Niko said, and checked his watch. If the shrink didn’t ring back in an hour, he’d have to leave the call to Parmenter, who couldn’t take an accurate note of a phone call to save his life. “Until then, we do the business. Okay? Come on, there’s a supply drop later today. Canned meat, possibly.”

  “Any ammo? We’re almost out.”

  “Don’t think so.” They had a couple of rifles and four boxes of ammo, and each warder had a sidearm with enough for one reload each. So far they hadn’t needed to use it except to shoot pigeons for the pot and it was hoarded like the imperial jewels of Kashkur, just in case. “We never get ammo. Powdered milk, though. They promised.”

  “Better keep Ospen out of that. He had the last consignment.”

  “You know what? I’ll unload it myself and hand it to Merino. That’s the only way the goddamn inmates stand a chance of getting any of it.”

  “Why does that matter to you if you think they’re all scum?”

  “Because it’s my job to ensure they’re treated humanely. Doing the right thing when I don’t want to is called being a fucking adult, okay?”

  Niko wished he hadn’t snarled at the guy, but then reminded himself what he’d done to Marcus, who still worried him. The man wasn’t moping around waiting to die these days, but he still wasn’t the full buck. He’d switched into a grim, obsessed, focused state as if he knew something the rest of them didn’t and was waiting for an order.

  “Are those bastards up to something down there?” Campbell asked. “It’s all a bit too quiet.”

  “Keep your fingers crossed that they’re trying to escape.”

  Campbell seemed to find some more waste paper to burn. Niko glanced at him, distracted from the phone for a moment, just to check that there wasn’t any space left on the back of any of it that could be written on. It looked heavy with ink, airmail paper or something flimsy. It occurred to him that it might have been letters from his son. He didn’t dare ask. There was no telling why a bereaved father might do that, and why he might do it here rather than at home.

  “You should send that stuff for repulping,” Niko said carefully.

  Campbell tossed the last of the pile into the stove. It flared again. “I can’t be assed. Just burn it. Use
the ash on the gardens.”

  The phone rang and the wisdom of recycling was forgotten. If it wasn’t the Department of Health, then it would be the Justice Department or Prescott’s office, and neither was going to have anything uplifting to say. Niko picked up the handset.

  “CPSE Hesketh, Officer Jarvi speaking.”

  “Dr. Wilsen here. You wanted a risk assessment on your psychiatric inmates.”

  Niko fumbled for a pencil and flipped over the pad of requisition forms to use the blank backs. There was nothing much to requisition now. “That’s it. I need to know who the risks are if I transfer them into the main cell wing. We’re down to fifty percent staffing levels. I’m worried about whether they can be let out to mix with the regular inmates.”

  “Well, you say they’re not medicated. So your big risk is Ruskin, because we’ve got him down as a schizophrenic as well as his other issues. But then you probably already know that if he hasn’t been on his tabs for a while.”

  “I just need information. I have to clear the wing and shut it down.”

  “There’s no guarantee they won’t harm each other or themselves.”

  “I don’t think any of their families are going to sue us somehow.”

  “Okay, keep Ruskin on his own, and if you can keep him locked up all day, that’s good. The rest—the arsonist will probably be worth keeping an eye on. The others are probably more danger to themselves.”

  I waited hours for that professional opinion?

  Would anyone notice or even care if we shot them? Not that we’ve got enough ammo to spare for that. If they knew … ah, we lost control of this place years ago.

  “Terrific,” Niko said. “Thanks, Doc.”

  He put the phone down, resigned to leaving Merino to sort out the mess. Campbell looked at him expectantly. “So?”

  “Ah, total waste of time. Come on, let’s go prep Ruskin to move.” It was a baton and handcuffs job. It was bad enough taking him out of the cell to let him use the showers, because that meant shutting off the main floor to stop him getting access to the regular inmates and taking him down there personally. That wouldn’t get done now. “Might as well get it over with.”