Gears of War: Anvil Gate (22 page)

“Goddamn it, can’t we concentrate on the urgent issues?” Hoffman interrupted. “
Lambent
. We have Lambent in the middle of the ocean. Not back on the mainland,
on our doorstep
. I can put Stranded bombs on hold for a while, and even Trescu, but we have to pay attention to what we’ve found.”

“I’m more interested in what sank Trescu’s frigate,” Michaelson said. “Because exploding luminous eels don’t quite answer the question.”

“You get the intel,” said Prescott, “and come to me with a threat evaluation. By the way, I want a personal security detail—I need to be able to walk around New Jacinto without dodging stones from malcontents. I refuse to give in to hooliganism.”

The floorboards creaked as someone walked toward the door. Bernie pressed herself flat in the alcove and held her breath, feeling a complete fool and wishing she’d just knocked, embarrassed herself for two seconds, and walked away. But she hadn’t.

The door swung open and Prescott breezed past, heading for the stairs. He didn’t see her. Now she had to wait for Michaelson to leave, and he could stay chewing the fat with Hoffman for hours. The door was slightly ajar and the voices clearer.

“Asshole,” Hoffman muttered.

“Don’t worry, we’ll handle him. Give him his personal protection Gears and let him play statesman with Trescu. Keep him busy.”

“Why the hell isn’t he more focused on the Lambent?”

“Politicians. Short-term thinking and feuding tribes—
that’s
his stuff. Once he smells intrigue and horse-trading, he’s hard and blind. Can’t see anything else.”

“I’m going to waste a shitload of energy butting heads with him. I plan to do as I see fit until he shoots me.”

“Get some sleep.”

“Don’t tell me it’ll all look better in the morning.”

“In the morning,” Michaelson said, “I’ll get Garcia to take
Clement
out to mooch around. That’s what submarines are for.”

Bernie thought Michaelson would never go, but he swung the door open and trotted down the stairs, whistling. She gave it a few moments before knocking on the open door and walking in.

“Good timing,” Hoffman said. He locked his papers in the ancient safe set in the wall before switching off the desk lamp. Then he reached into the desk drawer and took out an unlabeled bottle of clear, straw-colored liquid. “Wallin’s special vintage. I don’t know who needs a drink more, you or me.”

“I was eavesdropping,” Bernie said. “I thought you ought to know.”

Hoffman steered her back toward the door. “That saves some time.”

“I
saw
the bloody thing, Vic. Remember the horror movie where the shape-shifting fungus took over Ephyra? Well, it was like that.”

“Think I’m overreacting?”

“No, you’re reacting like Marcus.”

“Being an uncommunicative asshole and neglecting my woman?”

“Very funny.” Now she
knew
Hoffman was shitting bricks. He never joked. “Look, I don’t know how many billion cubic meters of ocean there are out there, but it’s a lot, and the last place we saw Lambent was under Jacinto, so even I can do the sums. Either
they’re on the move and they know where they’re going, or they’ve always been around here. Neither answer cheers me up much.”

“Me too,” he said. “That’s my conclusion. But what’s really keeping me awake is that frigate. And knowing Trescu is a secretive bastard with an agenda just makes me wonder what he’s not telling me.”

They climbed the brick steps to the sentry post on the top of the naval base walls, a sheltered spot built into the stone when the base was constructed centuries before, and settled down for a quiet drink. The post had a great panoramic view of the ocean. It was also impossible to walk past by accident.

Hoffman handed her the bottle for the first swig. “You’re confined to base, by the way. Sorry, Bernie.”

Her gut churned. She took a mouthful of the moonshine and gulped it down. It had a faint hint of aniseed. “How long?”

“Until Doc Hayman passes you combat fit.” He took the bottle back. “Two close calls in a week. They say it comes in threes.”

“Okay.”

“You’re taking it better than I expected.”

“I did a few years in support before they let me serve frontline. I didn’t enjoy it much.” She was on her second gulp of Dizzy’s moonshine now. No, she wasn’t taking it well. She just hadn’t started arguing yet. “I won’t enjoy this, either. But I can always go walkabout again if I get bored.”

“The hell you will.” Hoffman grabbed her arm a little too hard. That wasn’t like him. “You’ll stay put. Shit, woman, you know what happened with Margaret. I can’t go through that again. You’ll damn well stay where I can keep an eye on you.”

“You could have said something like that forty years ago.”

“Okay, I
didn’t.
” He lowered his head for a second, as if it hurt to be reminded that he’d run out on her. It was water so far under the bridge that she’d all but forgotten it herself. “But I’m saying it now.”

Bernie suddenly found it all very funny, and it wasn’t down to Dizzy’s moonshine. She went to wipe the neck of the bottle on
her sleeve before taking her turn with it, and then decided no bacteria could survive that stuff. She’d probably caught every bug that Hoffman had by now.

She wiped the bottle anyway. “As Baird would say, this is so classy.”

“I misplaced the mess crystal.” Hoffman folded his arms and stared out to sea. Like Marcus, he had two accents—his natural one, and the one he’d learned in uniform. Marcus switched from posh kid to grunt. Hoffman went from NCO to officer. “You want to see the wine list?”

The bottle went back and forth a few times in silence. The night was pitch-black, so clear and moonless that Bernie could pick out the navigation lights of the radar picket ship about fifteen kilometers away.

So I’m grounded. But it’s because he cares. Can’t have it both ways. It’s not forever, is it?

Eventually the pinprick red and green lights in the distance swapped sides, and Bernie thought she could see the mast light. Whichever ship was out there had turned 180 degrees. Then her perspective shifted, and she realized she was looking at something else entirely; it was two ships a long way apart, but almost aligned. The mast light belonged to something else. She couldn’t tell if it was background or foreground.

“Vic, can you see that?”

He squinted. “Don’t worry. It’s a ship.”

“I know that. Don’t ours always run with nav lights?”

Hoffman grunted and fumbled in his pocket for his earpiece. “Control? Hoffman here. Who’s monitoring inshore traffic? I want to know what’s under way due south of the channel buoy.”

The pleasant haze from the moonshine evaporated from Bernie’s head as fast as it had settled. She snapped back to full alert and put in her earpiece.

“The radar picket’s diverted to intercept an unidentified craft, sir. Unarmed cabin cruiser, thirty meters, not responding to challenges. Do you want me to patch you through to the ship? It’s
Scepter
.”

“Yeah, and check that Captain Michaelson’s aware.” Hoffman grumbled under his breath. “We’re not exactly on a shipping lane here.”

“Refugees?” Bernie asked. She put the stopper back in the bottle. “People do pass by here from time to time even if they don’t land.”

“That’s another complication we don’t need.” Hoffman looked away for a moment. “Control? Thanks … put him through … Lieutenant, what’s that vessel doing?”

Bernie eavesdropped on the channel again. The voice sounded very young. “Sir, we’re coming alongside now. She appears to be drifting. I can hear her engines on idle, but there’s nobody on the bridge. Wait one while we get a searchlight on her.”

“You make damn sure she’s not booby-trapped with a few tonnes of explosive,” Hoffman said. “This isn’t a good week for maritime safety.” He turned to Bernie. “Don’t we
ever
learn anything about Stranded?”

The CO of
Scepter
came back on the radio. “Colonel, the vessel’s holed above the waterline—there’s a four-meter chunk out of her bow. The deck’s buckled, too. Can’t see much else until it gets light, but she’s taken a pounding. No visible charring or smoke damage yet.”

Bernie found herself going through a checklist of trouble. Pirate attack? No, they’d take the ship too, if only for scrap and cannibalization. Collision? It was a big, empty ocean, but then people did stupid things in ships. Maybe the screw had fished up another Lambent life-form and blown a hole in their cargo hold. They’d have abandoned ship in a hurry, just like she had. Nobody stopped to shut down the engines when they were trying to get away.

“I think it’s deserted, sir.”

The radio popped slightly as another call sign joined the net. “Michaelson here. We’re scrambling a couple of Ravens—don’t board until they’re on station. Like the Colonel says, it might be another Stranded surprise party.”

“I’m going to armor up,” Bernie said. She could hear the
Ravens starting their engines. If there was going to be trouble, there was always the chance that there’d be coordinated attacks from the land side. “We’re never going to have that chat about Anvegad, are we?”

“Oh, we will.” Hoffman got to his feet and dusted down the seat of his pants. “Let’s get this squared away first. I’ll be in CIC.”

By the time Bernie had done the round-trip back to the sergeants’ quarters and put her armor on, more Gears and sailors had emerged from the messes to watch from the jetty, although what the hell they thought they could see in the middle of the night was anyone’s guess. One of the Gorasni men was talking to Baird as if they were old buddies. Bernie headed for the CIC building for no better reason than wanting to know what was going on, and found Hoffman talking via the loudspeaker to Michaelson in
Sovereign
. He had both hands flat on the chart table and he didn’t look up.

“Might have been caught by the current, of course,” Michaelson said. “It probably wasn’t heading this way.”

“Got light from the Raven, sir.” That was the CO of
Scepter
. “We’re boarding now.”

Scepter
went quiet for a long time. All Bernie could hear was the occasional aside from Michaelson to one of his crew, and the intermittent chatter of helicopters as someone at the incident location switched a mike on and off. CIC was silent. The three junior officers on the night watch sat listening, and that ten minutes—Bernie checked the rusting metal face of the wall clock—felt like it dragged on for days.

When
Scepter
’s CO suddenly came back on the radio and broke the silence, everyone flinched.

“Sir, there’s nobody on board,” he said. “There’s stuff scattered everywhere, and what looks like blood on the bulkheads, but no bodies. No obvious signs of firearms being used, either. I’m not sure what to make of this, but—well, the rummage team says there’s a tree trunk rammed through one of the transverse bulkheads, at an angle from the main damage.”

“Say again?” Hoffman said.

“A tree.”

“Damn, we should have sent a bot to relay images. What do you mean, a
tree?
”

“I haven’t seen it, sir, but PO Hollaster says it’s like a gnarled trunk of a creeper, only much thicker, and it’s splintered at the bottom like it was torn off. No roots. And the hole in the bow is caved in, suggesting a shaft punched through it and up through the deck.”

Bernie could see that everyone else was just as bewildered as she was. She couldn’t even begin to imagine a logical explanation for that. She waited for one of the NCOG people to suggest something technical known only to seagoing types that would clear up the whole thing for the landlubbers, but they said nothing.

“Well, we’re rather short of wooden warships these days,” Michaelson said at last. “So there goes the only possible theory for a freak collision. I’m damned if I can explain this at the moment, gentlemen, so let’s get off that ship, tow her to the two-kilometer anchorage, and have another look when it’s light.”

Hoffman scratched his scalp with both hands.

“A goddamn
tree?
” he said again. “A wooden beam? A battering ram?”

“Am I the only one worrying about the blood and absence of bodies?” Bernie asked.

“A tree,”
Scepter
’s CO said. “Really. It’s some kind of weird tree.”

CHAPTER 8