Gears of War: Anvil Gate (26 page)

“Relax, they’re bringing the whole boat back,” Dom said. “It looked like it was running arms and ammo for the Stranded, so they must have been landing it here in inflatables or something.”

“Whoa, retribution. That gives me a warm glow. So
is
it a tree?”

“Maybe. Weirdest tree I ever saw, if it is. More like a giant vine—a stalk.”

“So we’re four vessels down in freaky circumstances in a couple of months.” Baird nodded, looking satisfied. “I say it’s glowies. Can’t all be down to shitty seamanship.”

Marcus didn’t look convinced. “But the last boat didn’t blow up. What’s the tree got to do with it?”

Baird shoved his goggles farther back on his head with that know-all expression. “I’ll work it out.”

It took Michaelson’s salvage team an hour to bring
Steady Eddie
into the naval base and berth her securely. By that time, Michaelson was pacing around waiting to board her. Trescu stood farther along the quay, talking to one of his submarine crew. Maybe he was getting edgy because
Clement
had gone out to do some active pinging and she hadn’t reported in yet.

Baird headed straight for the hole in the deck with a handsaw and came out five minutes later with a small chunk of the unidentified stalk. He held up the saw in disgust.

“That stuff’s like heavy-gauge steel,” he said. “Look what it’s done to my saw.” He jumped back onto the quay and handed the chunk to Trescu. “Sure you didn’t find any of this when your frigate went down? Or are you still too shy to talk about that?”

Trescu didn’t seem offended by Baird’s tone. Either he cut Baird a lot of slack for being useful, or he regarded him as an insect hardly worth reacting to.

“We found very little debris apart from what would have been on deck,” Trescu said.

“Are you sure you gave us the right search area?” Michaelson asked.

“Why would we lie to you?”

“Probably the same reason that we tend to assume we control everything. Unconscious cultural habit.” Only Michaelson could get away with saying that. It took a bit of charm. “
Clement’s
taking a look along this boat’s likely course, but it would be
very
helpful if we could pin down the last location for
Nezark
. Because Commander Garcia hasn’t found that geological formation your people reported.”

Trescu spread his arms. He really did look surprised and indignant. Dom believed him.

“Why would we invent such an insane excuse?” Trescu asked. “You don’t believe me? Very well. Take
Zephyr
. Take the crew who did the sonar search. Check for yourself. The best location we have is that sector we gave you.” He took a step toward Michaelson. “I have no explanation. I
want
one.
Nezark
wasn’t a disposable wreck, and her crew were not faceless strangers. We grieve too, Captain. The COG has no monopoly on civilized sentiment.”

Michaelson nodded politely. “Let’s look again, then,” he said. “Full sonar and aerial sweep of that whole section of the grid. With our best teams.”

“Do I get to go with
Clement?
” Baird asked. “Ravens—been there, done that.”

Dom took it as read that Baird was automatically included in
best
, and so did he. Michaelson slapped his shoulder.

“Of course, Corporal. I’m counting on you to find out what’s sinking these vessels before I lose my whole damn fleet.”

Baird had been allowed to tinker with
Clement
’s systems—encouraged to, even
bribed
to—but this was the first time he’d been out on a patrol.

He’d earned the right as far as he was concerned. He’d built a towed side-scan sonar for
Clement
by cannibalizing a fish-finder taken off one of the trawlers. If there was anything worth seeing down there, this baby could image it clearly enough to see the frigging whiskers on barnacles.

But he didn’t want to look too excited. A guy needed to preserve some dignity. He squeezed into the torpedo compartment and listened to the rumbling, humming, and whining all around him. She was running on batteries now, two hundred meters below the surface. It was the most perfect machine he could imagine.

“Baby, you’re lookin’
radiant,
” Cole said. He kept hitting his head on the deckhead pipework. He wasn’t a submarine-sized guy. “That imulsion rig’s gonna know you’ve been cheatin’ on her with a sub.”

“You know me. I’m shallow. I go for looks every time.”

“Well, now it’s dived, it don’t make me puke like most ships do, but I ain’t gonna get serious with this lady anytime soon.”

“Cole, you know what this is? Forget the water. This is as near as we get to a
spaceship
. The most complicated weapons platform ever built. Even counting the Hammer of Dawn. Operating under the sea is harsher than orbit, man.”

Cole just looked at him straight-faced for a moment, then burst into raucous laughter. “When they gonna make a full-size one?”

Baird didn’t find submarines claustrophobic. They were just
cramped, no worse than some of the spaces ashore that he’d had to live in. Everything was made to fit. Things stowed away or folded back into bulkheads or doubled up as something else. It was like heavily weaponized camping. Yes, he loved it. He even loved that weird smell.

In the control room, things were even more cozy. Garcia stood hunched over the sonar operator, studying the screen with one of the Gorasni crew, Teodor, while another Gorasni stared at the charts with apparent disbelief. They were doing a parallel search of the seabed in a fifteen-kilometer square from the position in
Nezark
’s last radio message.

“You sure?” Garcia asked Teodor.

“Sure. Your chart is wrong. Your position is wrong.
Crappy.
”

The helmsman looked up from the yoke and gave Garcia an eloquent roll of the eyes. Teodor turned to his colleague and they exchanged a burst of Gorasni.

“Much as I hate to argue, we’re exactly in the square you designated,” Garcia said. “We can still triangulate off the Hammer satellites when we surface. We know where we are.”

But Teodor was distracted by whatever his buddy had said. He tapped on the side-scan sonar display and made a look-at-this gesture. The other guy quickly folded back the edges of his chart so he could lift it to show Teodor, managing to look both dumbfounded and angry at the same time. The chart was overwritten in thick black pencil.

“Janu knows where he was, too.” Teodor took the dog-eared, folded chart and thrust it at Garcia. “And
that
is where we find the new rocks.
There.
” He turned to the sonar screen. “And they are not
there
. Rocks don’t go home. They stay.”

“So explain why we find the right spot and the rocks are
gone,
” Teodor said. “Lava eruptions, quakes—all leave marks, yes?”

Baird thought the obvious answer was that a tired, panicky navigator had recorded the wrong position. Garcia had simply plotted the speed and time—assuming they’d given him the right numbers—and drawn an arc from Branascu, then looked at the broad corridor the Gorasni ships would have taken.

The search area didn’t look too far out to Baird. But even a frigate was a small object to find in an ocean.

Garcia looked frayed. “Look, let’s surface again and see if the Raven’s found anything useful.”

“Sir,” said the sonar operator, “the seabed here isn’t the same as on
our
charts, either. Look. That is
not
flat. It’s a convex mound. Lots of debris on it.”

“And where is this bulge?” Teodor asked. They all looked at the Gorasni chart. “Same as the place we marked
rocks.
”

“All stop,” Garcia said. “David? Plot me a square search out from that position. Chief—periscope depth.”

“’Course, that don’t explain where the rocks
went,
” Cole said to Baird. “We goin’ up top now? I’m just gonna find a sick bag. I’ll be layin’ down with the torps if you need me.”

“We’re just coming up far enough to raise the radio mast,” Garcia said. “Michaelson and Hoffman really need to hear this. Brace for a rerun of all the you-must-be-mistaken conversations.”

It took some believing, Baird had to admit. When
Clement
came up to mast depth, Gettner flashed the sub first. She must have been dunking her sonar buoy.

“KR-Eight-Zero to
Clement
. Problems? Result?”

“Here’s the edited highlights.” Garcia squeezed the mike handset so hard that his knuckles went white. Baird watched him de-focus for a couple of seconds as if he was rehearsing a form of words that didn’t make him sound like a total dick. “We found the location but the rock formation was gone. Moved. Collapsed. Whatever. We’re starting a square search for the wreck now. Here’s the start position.”

Gettner paused for a beat. “No shit.”

“Okay, sounds impossible, but Corporal Baird’s sonar confirms the seabed’s changed.”

“Fair enough. I’ve seen two cities sink into holes. Nothing surprises me now. Gettner out.”

Garcia shrugged. “She took that pretty well, all things considered. Now let’s talk to the boss fella.”

Michaelson took it without comment. Baird eavesdropped for
a while as Garcia traded speculation with him about grubs collapsing bedrock underwater. The search resumed again, this time with some expectation of an answer. Baird went back to keep an eye on the sonar display.

“I’ll tell you when we find something,” the operator said, his eyes not moving from the grainy image forming by sections in front of him. “Why don’t you go look after Cole? I don’t know why you keep dragging the poor guy to sea. You know he chucks up all the time.”

“Because if you run into some serious shit out here, Cole’s the guy to get you out of it,” Baird said.
Because we’re a team. Because he’s my buddy
. “Sick or not.”

He almost hoped the sonar operator would need a break and leave the monitoring to him. But the guy was glued to the seat. Baird retreated to the tiny chart table and waited for Cole to come back to the control room. Teodor and Janu squeezed in next to him, resting their asses on a locker and keeping out of the way of moving traffic. Baird, a man who liked to maintain his personal boundaries, wondered if he’d really be cut out for submarine duties.

It was almost getting to the frustrating stage when the sonar guy twisted in his seat to call Garcia.

“Sir? Look at this. This has to be
Nezark
. Looks like a hull to me.”

Teodor shot off the locker as if he was spring-loaded. There were so many bodies crowded around the screen now that Baird couldn’t get a look in.

“Very clear,” Teodor said. “Is a Gelen. Look at profile. Very easy to identify. Hey, there are holes in the hull! I can see
holes.
”

“There you go,” said Garcia. Everyone stood back and Baird finally got a look at the elusive display. Even if he said so himself, it was pretty damn good. The frigate looked like a detailed brass rubbing, heeled over to one side, with two massive puncturelike gashes in her port side below the waterline. “Better call in.”

The sonar guy still had his gaze fixed to the screen. “Sir …”

“What is it?”

“Sir, weird shit. There’s something moving.”

Baird thought he meant marine animals. There was a lot of stuff swimming around out there, as noisy as a tropical jungle over the hydrophones. Baird had never seen a biologic on this sonar so he got up and took a look.

Okay, so the imaging wasn’t as great with a moving object in real time. But he could see that the disjointed outline wasn’t a whale. And it sure as shit wasn’t a shoal of fish. It took him a moment to make sense of what he was seeing, but it looked like an invisible hand was filleting the seabed, ripping its backbone out like a zip. Beneath the boat, something was erupting out of the mud and rock, leaving long spines behind it.

Garcia grabbed the mike. “
Emergency surface.
” He seemed remarkably calm given what Baird could see. “Surface, surface, surface. Blow tanks.”

Someone hit the alarm. It sounded three times, and suddenly the boat was filled with the noise of compressed air purging the ballast tanks. The deck tilted under Baird’s boots like a surfboard at forty-five degrees. He grabbed the nearest solid object that wasn’t a handle or a valve. Pencils and other loose objects skidded off the chart table and bounced along the deck.

Cole was probably washing down the torpedo compartment decks with puke by now. It was a white-knuckle ride.

The surge to the surface felt like it was never going to stop. Baird’s gut floated, gravity free, and then came crashing down through his pelvis as
Clement
breached like a dolphin doing tricks and smacked down hard into the sea again.

“Helm, full ahead, flank.” That was Garcia-speak for
get the fuck out of here
. He looked at Baird as if he expected him to shed some light on the completely unbelievable. That was what happened when you acted like you knew it all. “Seismic. Has to be. Lava. Fault line.”

“That’s
biologic,
” Baird said, not sure if he was going to wet his pants or ask Garcia if they could do it all again. “It’s alive.”

“I go look,” Teodor said. “You open the sail? Yes?”

“
I’ll
go look.”

Baird headed for the hatch. He’d climbed up to the small open bridge enough times to know the drill, but never after surfacing when the sea had drained out of it. It was cold, wet, and slippery; even without his armor, it was a tight fit. He got a foothold on two metal ledges that folded down on either side, and braced his elbows on the top edge.

Was there anything out there?

It wasn’t easy to spot things on the surface unless the sea was like a millpond. Today it wasn’t. But that wasn’t going to be a problem.