Gears of War: Anvil Gate

BY KAREN TRAVISS

S
TAR
W
ARS:
Republic Commando
Hard Contact
Triple Zero
True Colors
Order 66
Imperial Commando: 501st

S
TAR
W
ARS:
L
EGACY OF THE
F
ORCE
Bloodlines
Sacrifice
Revelation

S
TAR
W
ARS
:
T
HE
C
LONE
W
ARS

S
TAR
W
ARS:
N
O
P
RISONERS

G
EARS OF
W
AR
Aspho Fields
Jacinto’s Remnant
Anvil Gate

W
ESS’HAR
W
ARS
City of Pearl
Crossing the Line
The World Before
Matriarch
Ally
Judge

My sincere thanks go to Mike Capps, Rod Fergusson, and Cliff Bleszinski at Epic Games, Allfathers of the best damn universe ever; Epic’s artists, directors, and animators—the new Old Masters—for inspirational art; Dawn Woodring, protection dog trainer, for advice; and “Raven Maven” Wade Scrogham, USAF historian, for rotary aviation support.

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

About the Author

Copyright

PROLOGUE

I’m not a people person. But you probably guessed that already. And no, I don’t want you to buy me a beer.

If you think there’s some nice guy inside me trying to get out if only someone would give me a chance—forget it. But then you’re dumb, like 99 percent of human beings. You can’t help it.

“Come on, Baird. Don’t be an antisocial dick all your life. Take a day off.” Her name’s Sam Byrne; all mouth, leather, and tattoos, and about my age—so she’s old enough to know better. She slams a brimming shot glass on the bar and shoves it at me. “Muller’s teaching us to play navy chess.”

“Oh, that’s so exciting. I think I just wet my pants.”

Sam waits a beat and then snatches the glass away. If it’s Dizzy’s moonshine, she’s doing me a favor. “Fuck you, then,” she says, and stalks off.

I need to cultivate that Marcus Fenix thing. He can sit at a bar on his own all night and no asshole goes near him. But then he’s Fenix. It’s not just the Embry Star war-hero vibe. It’s something
else. It’s like the guy’s got warning buoys around him, even though nobody’s ever seen him really lose his shit with anything except grubs.

Even morons still have some survival instincts, I suppose.

Shit, I wish someone would turn off that frigging TV behind the bar. Listen to that asshole yakking on about the future and the chance to build something better.
What
fucking future? We haven’t got homes or running water for most of the refugees yet, but whoopee, we got a TV channel on air. Actually, it’s just radio with still shots. Everyone’s got a radio. There’s a few TVs in the communal areas, and the civvies here think that’s terrific. A boon. An improvement. Well, hoo-fucking-rah.

Dumb people are lucky. I envy them.

I mean it. Ignorance really is bliss. The problem with being in the top 1 percent—yeah, I am, does it make you squirm because I say it?—is that you understand just how badly fucked the world is. And it’s not getting any better. It’s just
changing
. But any shit looks better to most folk as long as it’s
different
.

Nice new media channel for the people. You think? Well, Chairman Prescott needs a way to feed all the dumb bastards his propaganda. And keep the frigging journos busy so they don’t actually do any real reporting, of course. And you think we should celebrate because the grubs are gone and we can start over? No, we just replaced the Locust with a new kind of two-legged vermin—Stranded crime gangs. We’ve bombed the world back to the last century and sunk our own damn city, so now we’ve got no manufacturing, no infrastructure, and no way to rebuild the rest of Sera.

But Prescott says it’s all going to be fine because we’ve got shitloads of fuel thanks to Gorasnaya. Flip that coin, though, and the other side is taking in four thousand ungrateful Indie bastards who were still technically at war with us until a couple of months ago.

Look, I could go on forever. But even a dumbass like you gets the idea by now. Right?

A big, heavy hand slaps me on the shoulder and grips it like a
vise. It’s Cole. Most people would be more use as pet food, but Cole’s not one of them. I just don’t get why such a smart guy is so happy all the time.

“Baby, you want a Cole Train charm lesson?” He leans over and whispers loudly in my ear. “You’re
never
gonna get any action if you treat the ladies like that. Not even
sheep
ladies.”

“That was
Sam.
” The bitch always wants to arm-wrestle, out-drink you, or out-swear the boys. “Not
ladies.
”

“Come on. You know Bernie wants you to spawn plenty of blond surly know-all grandkids for her.”

Cole can get away with that. For some reason, he never pisses me off. “Yeah? She better place her bets on Dom, then.”

He sighs under his breath, for real, not his Cole Train act. “I think she’s gonna have a long wait.”

Dom’s a mess. I don’t expect a guy to shrug off having to blow his wife’s brains out, but he started mourning and making her into a saint ten years ago when she first went missing. If he didn’t move on then, what’s going to shift him now? Look, he’s not stupid. I stick with Delta Squad because they’ve all got opposable thumbs and IQs in the three-figure range. But that doesn’t mean they’re all
sane
.

So me and Cole sit at the bar and drink in silence. Sam’s enjoying her navy chess at full volume. I don’t want to spend too long looking in case they think I give a shit, but if I just turn a little I can see full shot glasses on the board instead of chessmen—moonshine for the white pieces, rum for the black ones. Oh, I get it. There—Muller’s taken one of Sam’s pieces, so he downs the shot in one. So how do they know what kind of piece it is?

See, this is what I mean about dumb people. That’s not chess. It’s checkers. But they’ll be too shit-faced to care by the time they’ve finished.

The mess doors open. Someone cheers. The barracking starts. “It’s a dog!”

Another smart-ass chimes in. “Don’t talk about Sergeant Mataki like that. The word’s
bitch.
”

That’s as far as the jeering goes. Bernie Mataki just gives
them that look, like she thinks they’re cute little boys of no real importance, which always works better than Sam’s shot-slamming. Don’t think I’ve changed my views on letting women serve frontline—bad idea, bad,
bad
idea—but Bernie can shut the guys up. Maybe it’s because she’s old and eats cats. Maybe it’s her service record. And it just might be because everyone knows she cut off some guy’s balls. But she really does have a dog on a leash, a big, wild-looking thing with a wiry gray coat, thirty kilos at least.

“Isn’t he a beaut?” She rubs his ears and he looks up at her with big brown puppy eyes, just like frigging Hoffman. The whole bar stops to
ooh
and
ahh
like they’ve never seen a dog before. “Meet Mac. He hunts Stranded. I’ve borrowed him for a while.”

“Does he do tricks?” Cole asks.

Bernie walks the mutt over to me. This thing’s head is level with her hip. It looks like a wolf that’s had a bad hair day. “Mac, this is Blondie. No humping his leg, okay? No, I’m talking to
you
, Baird.”

If I react I’ll only encourage her. “Does your pedigree asshole-hound know you eat pets, Granny?”

“Just cats. He’s fine with that. Aren’t you, fella?”

“Nice doggie,” Cole says. “You’re gonna save us a lot of time.”

“Come on. Let’s go walkies.” Bernie could put a saddle on that damn dog and ride it. I hope it’s okay around helicopters. “If
we
can’t flush out those Stranded bastards, let’s see what dogs can do. Time we found out where these tossers are holed up.”

“Can we call ’em
gangs
or somethin’, Boomer Lady?” Cole asks. “On account of most Stranded bein’ like Dizzy. Harmless. Nice, even.”

Navy chess doesn’t do a thing for me. But hunting assholes … now that’s a sport a guy can take some pride in. Yeah, Cole’s got a point. This is a whole new species of Stranded. Not the parasitic bum variety—this is organized crime, piracy, rape, murder. Don’t give me any of that bleeding-heart crap about how we’ve all got to stick together now that we’re trying to rebuild human civilization. There’s never been a better time than this to put out the trash.

“Okay, call ’em vermin,” I say. “And I vote that Mac gets to keep the chewy bits.”

Anyone outside the curfew zones with no business being there is fair game. Right?

Don’t look at me like that. You don’t know what it’s been like for the last fifteen years. I don’t regret a damn thing, except not doing some of it sooner. What are you—my frigging mother?

CHAPTER 1