Gears of War: Anvil Gate (14 page)

He’d still rather have been on the western border at that moment. Sitting on his ass like this would drive him crazy. He took his seat again, and realized the only man not reading a message from home was Sam Byrne, his platoon sergeant.

Byrne’s sense of home looked more centered on Anvegad every day. He’d acquired a local girlfriend, an interpreter who did the routine liaison for the army. She was a good-looking woman, typically Kashkuri with her dark eyes and olive skin. Soraya? Sheraya? Hoffman couldn’t recall the name, but Byrne was a single man, and Hoffman wasn’t about to warn him off. He was damned if he could think of any regulation barring a Gear from making friends with the local civilians.

There wasn’t much else to do here except maintain the guns, after all.

“More eggs, anyone?” Pad asked.

Adam Fenix had always tried to do his packing in private to avoid upsetting Elain.

It wasn’t as if she didn’t understand his job; she just seemed to find the sight of him preparing to ship out a bit too much to bear. She wasn’t a demonstrative woman, so there were no tears or histrionics. She’d just get that
look
, that way of turning her head very slowly as if she was imagining the worst that could happen to him and was dragging her eyes away from the awful scene.

And now he had to lock the bedroom door, because his son was old enough to understand where Daddy was going, and he’d get upset too. Marcus was nearly five. He’d learned to knock on the door and wait a few moments, but then he’d open it anyway.

It was time for Marcus to get used to partings. He had to start
school in a few weeks, and that was going to be a bigger wrench than watching his father get ready to go back to the front. Adam folded his last pair of socks, forced them into the remaining gap in his kitbag, and secured the outer zip. There was a science to packing. He’d mastered it. He had everything he needed and nothing that he didn’t, every item in that bag tested for necessity, and there were no bulges or edges straining against the canvas fabric to fray on hard surfaces.

Elain had a point. It did feel final. It always did.

He unlocked the door and went downstairs, one hand skimming the long, polished banister, conscious of the gaze of previous generations of Fenixes from the ancestral paintings that lined the walls. If anyone thought that long familiarity stopped him noticing them—it didn’t. Too many of them had that implacable blue stare. Adam had been told he had it, too, but that didn’t make it an easier gauntlet to run. The portraits had expectations of heroism.

I could donate them to the Tyran National Gallery, I suppose. Dad’s not here to stop me now
.

Adam walked from room to room, looking for Elain. Finding anyone in a house of this size always took some time. Calling for her always felt vulgar; he could almost hear his father’s voice telling him that only the laboring classes and clerks yelled, and that the one fitting place for a man to raise his voice was on the battlefield.

It’s my house now. But he’s still here, dead or not
.

He found Elain sitting at her desk, scribbling furiously. She didn’t even look up. “Two minutes, darling …”

And there was I thinking my packing upset her …

Adam had never been sure if that cool distance was her coping mechanism or if she really did forget everything around her while she was working. She was a single-minded woman.

“Where’s Marcus?” he asked.

“In the library.”

“He’s four. It’s a lovely day. Whatever happened to playing in the gardens?”

Elain paused for a moment, looking as if she was checking the last line she’d written. “He’s fine. The maintenance people are doing the lawns, anyway. Too dangerous with all that machinery about.”

“I better go make my peace with him,” Adam said. “By the time I finish this tour of duty, he’ll be at school, and … well, everyone says kids change fast after that.”

“Good idea.” Elain swiveled her seat around and looked at him as if she’d noticed him for the first time. “Aren’t you going to ask me what’s so important?”

“Do you want me to?”

She indicated the computer screen, tracing her finger around the outline of an X-ray image. “Does this ring any bells, Doctor Fenix?”

Elain was a developmental biologist. Adam prided himself on a broad-based science education that went further than engineering, but she left him in the dust on morphology. He studied the ghostly outlines. It was a leg, that was all he could say. A hind leg. He could guess that from the way the joints articulated, because form and function spoke to the mechanical engineer in him.

“Not many,
Mrs
. Doctor Fenix.” Elain had a doctorate too. Adam leaned over her and put his finger on the screen. “It’s not human, and I think that bit
there
is the knee.”

“Very good, dear. But didn’t you read
Romily
as a child? The monster under her bed?”

“Oh, girls’ stuff …”

“Don’t mock, darling. How’s the monster always shown? That story goes back centuries, and the monster always has the same features—long front fangs and six legs.”

Tyran culture was rich in myth and fairy tales, but Adam was a scientist, a rational man, and even as a boy he’d recognized that monsters were invented to keep the curious and argumentative in line. If he’d been a psychologist, he might have gone as far as to identify the fairy-tale monsters as the darker urges of humankind, but he looked for the most obvious first and worked from there.
There were always monsters waiting in forbidden places to trap the disobedient and unwary.

He’d never believed in them.

He remembered crawling under his bed every night for a whole week with a flashlight and a camera, defying the monsters to appear so he could get a good look and prove or disprove their existence. But they never came, and he knew his father had been lying all along.

Monsters don’t exist. But if they do—they’re within all of us
.

“Elain, are you telling me that’s a sixth leg from a mammal?” he said at last.

“It is.” She lit up. It troubled him that she only hit that visible peak when she was engrossed in her research. Sometimes he felt that neither marriage nor motherhood ever fulfilled her that much. “Adam, all monsters come from some reality. The six legs are a folk memory. Something like that once existed on Sera, and we reduced it to a fairy tale in the end, but now—I think I’ve found its nearest living relative.”

“Just tell me you didn’t find it under the bed.”

“You want to see it?”

“You’ve got it, and you never told me?”

Elain laughed and pushed back her chair. “I shouldn’t have given it such a buildup. You’ll be disappointed. Just remember that things don’t have to be on a planetary scale to change the world.”

She went to the bookcase that filled the entire wall and moved a few volumes to pull out a glass jar hidden behind them. Adam hadn’t realized that she kept specimens in the house; it seemed oddly old-fashioned, considering that she still had access to La Croix University’s modern laboratories. But she’d insisted on being at home for Marcus until he was old enough to start school—no child-minders or nannies for her. She never trusted anyone else with the complicated jobs in life.

“There.” She handed him the specimen jar. A tiny rodent floated in formaldehyde, perhaps seven centimeters long. “I kept it out of sight in case Marcus saw it. I think he finds that kind of thing upsetting.”

Adam wasn’t fond of things floating dead in jars of formaldehyde either. He felt slightly nauseous at the sight of the animal drifting like a drowned man. He imagined it alive, busy among leaves and grass, all twitching movement. Then he tried to imagine it as the subterranean monster from
Romily
, with six legs, claws, and fangs, and failed to make the phylogenetic connection.

“Now, I’m just a simple engineer,” he said. “But I can count enough to see four legs. Not six.”

“Okay, darling, I’ll put you out of your misery. The legs are vestigial. You remember I did my master’s thesis on rock shrew cell differentiation? Well, I found a dead one when I was out walking a couple of years ago, or at least I thought I had. But it wasn’t a rock shrew. And I could feel these small symmetrical lumps along the pelvis.”

“My wife spends her leisure time fondling decomposing vermin.”

“
Examine
, darling. Not fondle. And
vermin
is an emotional classification, not a biological one.” Elain gazed at the creature with a childlike expression of wonder. “Anyway, I found more of them over the last year, all with the same feature. When I dissected them, they all had the extra pair of vestigial legs.”

“Good grief—are you telling me you discovered a new species? Are you sure it’s not just a mutation?”

“Remember who’s the embryologist here. Yes, that’s entirely possible, but it seems widespread, and there are other variations that suggest they might be a different species. Genetic variations.” She dropped her voice. “I think these shrews may be the remains of a genus that once included much larger tunnel-dwelling creatures.”

Adam was genuinely taken aback, not because she’d made such an intriguing discovery but because she’d kept it from him until now. Years.
Years
. His hurt must have shown on his face, because she took the specimen from him and clasped both his hands in hers.

“Darling, you know what happens to scientists who speak too soon—they’re made to look like fools,” she said. “If I’d started talking about identifying a new species and then it was shown to be
environmental mutation, my reputation would be ruined. And I
do
want to return to work ….”

But you could have mentioned it to me. I wouldn’t have judged you
. “So where did you find them?”

“Near the Hollow. I like walking up there. I used to take Marcus with me.”

“That’s a restricted area! What were you
thinking?
”

“Look, I
know
the ground’s prone to subsidence. I don’t go beyond the warning notices. It’s not as if I go caving down there.”

Marcus
. Adam realized they’d been so caught up in this debate about morphology and new species that they’d forgotten him.

“Come on,” he said. “The monster shrew from the pit of hell can wait—this is my last day at home for a few months. Let’s spend it as a family.”

“If you knew what aggressive, sex-crazed little beasts shrews were,” Elain said, “you wouldn’t think a two-meter one with six legs was a joke.”

Adam found Marcus still sitting in the library, just as he’d been told to. He was perched on a chair that wasn’t high enough for him, trying to read a book, with his chin about level with the surface of the table. Adam could see him swinging his legs, heels occasionally hitting the chair. He wasn’t engrossed. He was just behaving, waiting as patiently as a small child could.

“How’s my clever boy?” Adam said, standing behind him to see what he’d chosen. It was a book of maps. “Come on. Let’s go for a walk. It’s stuffy in here.”

Marcus scrambled down from the chair and looked up at his father. He had a way of slowly turning his head to one side that made him look as if he never believed a word anyone said to him. Adam wondered if it was a gesture his son had picked up from him. No, it was very Elain. It was definitely Elain’s look.

“You’re going away.”

“Not until tomorrow, Marcus.”

“Why do you have to go?”

“It’s my duty. I’m a soldier. A Gear. Soldiers have to go where they’re sent, to protect everyone.”

“But
why?
”

It was sobering to meet Marcus’s fixed gaze. He definitely had the Fenix eyes, very pale blue just like Adam’s own, and even in a child’s face they looked more accusing than innocent. Adam was suddenly aware of Elain standing behind him. The answer was going to be as much for her as for his son.

“Because all the other Gears go when they’re ordered to, and if I don’t, I’m letting them down,” Adam said. “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.”

Marcus blinked as if that had struck a chord in him, then looked away. “
I’ll
be a Gear, too, then.”

“Ah, not my clever boy.” Adam went to pick him up—something he rarely did—but Marcus looked startled, and he thought better of it. “You’ll be a scientist. You won’t need to be a Gear. And the war will be over by the time you grow up, anyway.”

Marcus frowned. That obviously wasn’t what he wanted to hear. Adam had the feeling that whatever he said would do nothing to erase the impression that being a Gear was somehow so wonderful that he preferred to go to war rather than stay home with his son.

He could have stayed, of course. The post at the COG Defense Research Agency was still waiting for him. So was the standing offer to teach at the university. He could do both, in fact. He could have unpacked that bag right now, this very moment, and picked up the phone to accept the job, and the Kashkur border would have been another place he’d never visit.

But Adam Fenix couldn’t live with himself if he did. The rest of the 26th Royal Tyran Infantry didn’t have those choices, and neither did their families. It was best that Elain didn’t know it was even possible.

Yes, maybe I’ve given Marcus the true picture after all. It’s about loyalty. It’s about comrades. But I still don’t want him to follow me
.

“Come on, Marcus,” he said. “Let’s have some fun. Did you know your mom’s found a monster? It’s got six legs.”

Marcus still had that accusing ice-blue stare. “There aren’t any
monsters,” he said gravely. “But if there are, you can shoot them. You can make them go away.”

“Quite right,” Adam said, laughing, but his heart broke to see Marcus’s absolute faith in his ability to put the world right. He almost dreaded the day when Marcus was old enough to understand that the real world wasn’t like that at all. “That’s my clever boy.”