Gears of War: Anvil Gate (35 page)

At least she had the time and the reason now to take Mac out tracking on foot. As Baird put it, “asshole hunting” was best done quietly and without a vehicle anyway. As soon as they reached the exclusion zone roadblock, Mac bounded ahead. The Gear on the checkpoint paused to chat to her.

“What the hell else is out there?” he said. “How long do you think we’ve got before that stalk thing gets here?”

“No idea,” she said, realizing that she felt increasingly pissed off at being out of the loop. “No bastard tells me anything.”

Mac led her through the woods for a couple of hours, and if there hadn’t been that growing list of crises jostling for attention at the back of her mind, she would have been as near to contented as she’d been for a long time. It was even quieter than usual. Most of the Ravens were grounded today—at least Baird kept her informed, even if nobody else bothered—and she couldn’t even hear the occasional grinding sounds of Packhorses in the distance.

Well, Pelruan’s okay. They learned to live without imulsion years ago
.

And I suppose it means that the navy’s buggered. Can’t run a warship on vegetable oil
.

Mac came cantering back to her with his follow-me face on, tail thrashing. She put her finger to her lips.

“Sssh. Good boy. Show me.”

And Mac did exactly that. He trotted off, head down, and led her through undergrowth to a tree-covered, barely visible path crushed by recent and repeated foot traffic. The battered vegetation and the various stages of wilting told her that the route had been used over the course of a few days.

Still worth staking out, then
.

Bernie rubbed Mac’s head and gave him a snack of dried rabbit meat as a reward before finding a ledge further up a nearby bank to give her a better view of anyone moving along the path. Making a sniper hide was easy out here. She just eased herself into the bushes, made the ground comfortable with her jacket, and settled down prone with the Longshot propped on its bipod.

She could wait for days if she had to, but she didn’t expect it to take that long to get some trade. It was only a hundred meters to the path; a Longshot was overkill for that range. This wasn’t going to be the old Pendulum War days when she’d lay up for a week in a scrape to finally drop a target a thousand meters away. Mac flopped down beside her and rested his chin on his paws, occasionally looking up at her as if he was waiting for a sitrep.

It’s going to be hard to hand that dog back to Will. It really is
.

Mac just happened to be the one dog out of all Will Berenz’s animals who took a shine to her. He accepted her as his new pack leader and he did whatever she asked, sometimes working out what she wanted even when she forgot his special commands. She found herself rehearsing how she would ask Berenz what she would have to barter to keep him.

It was a few hours before she got the first indication that someone was coming. Mac, head still on his paws, pricked up his ears. She put her hand on his back to keep him down. Eventually she heard what the dog must have reacted to; the slow swishing sound of someone picking their way carefully through grass and bushes. It took a few moments of scoping up and down the path before she saw her target flash across her optics. At that moment, another Bernie took over.

She’d developed her own concentration technique during sniper training. She imagined what her target would go on to do next if she didn’t take him—or her—out with one shot. It always worked.

When she settled on the movement, it turned out to be a man of about forty with a rifle across his back, carrying a box with rope handles. He kept shifting it—holding it in both arms one moment, pausing to switch to the handles the next—and that told her it was heavy, possibly ammo. He couldn’t move fast and had to wade through the vegetation.

Swish … swish … swish …

Okay … is he alone?

If she’d interrupted a supply column, she couldn’t shoot and run from this position, so if there were others coming she’d have to leave it and just trail them at a safe distance to locate their camp. This wasn’t a great place to start a firefight.

I ought to let him pass and track them anyway
.

The man’s head was in her crosswires now. She had to make the call. This was a decision she’d made maybe hundreds of times in her service career, but it was still something of a gamble every time. And she very rarely thought about her target in human terms, but today—she did.

Okay. End it now. He’ll never know he’s dead. Not hours of bleeding out. Not running for his life. Just
gone,
just like that
.

Bernie exhaled, held that breath, and squeezed the trigger.
Crack
. She saw the spray of blood as the man dropped instantly. Relief flooded her gut. Mac flinched at the sudden noise but stayed put.

“Good boy,” she whispered. “You’re the best spotter I ever had.”

She got to a kneeling position and waited a few moments to be sure there was nobody right behind the guy. Then Mac jumped up and stood staring down the slope to the left, hyperalert. He was a great spotter, all right; there
was
someone else out there. And they couldn’t have failed to hear that shot.

Shit. Bang out, engage, or lie low?

Bernie reloaded the Longshot just in case, then took up the Lancer. Two younger men were moving at a crouch along the path, pausing to check around them every few meters. One had a handgun and the other a hunting rifle. They moved right up to within a few meters of the other man’s body, and Bernie braced for the reaction when they finally fell over him. They’d freeze. They’d look. And that was the window she had to drop both of them.

Now they were almost in front of her. They still hadn’t spotted her. They still hadn’t found the body, either, but there was no way they could miss it if they carried on. She exhaled slowly.

Wait. Wait
.

But something subconscious took the decision, not the sniper part of her brain at all.
Them or me. Simple
. Bernie opened up with the Lancer from the cover of the bushes and put five or six short bursts through the two men at chest level. Then she hunched down as flat on her knees as she could, waiting again, listening to crows squawking high in the canopy, wondering if a small army was now heading her way.

But nothing came. Eventually she got up, legs shaking, searched the bodies—definitely dead, no awkward coup de grâce needed—and took their weapons.

The box was full of ammo, but it was too heavy to carry with all the extra firearms. She dragged it into a well-hidden spot she could find again for recovery later. Every round that she could scavenge counted.

That’s drill for you. That’s years on the clock. I evaluate the risks, take what’s useful, cache the ammo. But I never used to think about the who and the why of dead men
.

“Home, Mac.” She could hear her own voice shaking and made an effort to steady it before she pressed her earpiece. “Mataki to Control—enemy contact in grid. Charlie Seven, three hostiles, all dead. I’m on my way back in.”

Mathieson responded. “Roger that, Mataki. You just doing a little opportunistic hunting?”

“You could say that.”

“Byrne says she can swing by with the bike and RV with you.”

What am I, the charity case now?
“I’ve got the dog with me.”

“Can he ride a bike?”

Mac looked up at her with sad brown eyes:
Don’t do that to me, Ma
. “It’s okay, Control, I’m making my way to the main road. I’ll be a couple of hours at least.”

“Leave your channel open in case we need to locate you. Everyone’s
jumpy
at the moment. Don’t want any friendly fire on my watch.”

Bernie didn’t think any Gear had reached that level of
jumpy
on Vectes. “Got it, Control. Tell everyone not to open fire on the harmless old bag lady and her mongrel. Mataki out.”

Bernie picked her way through the woods, putting her trust in Mac’s ears and nose. Yes, you really
could
trust a dog. Mac would go all out to defend his pack—her—and it probably never crossed his mind that a human might not put everything on the line for him. She decided to spoil him rotten when they got back to base. He could sleep on her bed and eat her dinner, and maybe Baird’s, too. The dog deserved it.

And I shot those guys
.

The two extra rifles weighed heavily on her. She longed for a hot bath and a longer sleep. At least there was plenty of water and
electricity thanks to the river, even if the COG was now reduced to running vehicles on cooking oil.

What was the point of capping them?

I mean, beyond orders, why? They’re a minor irritation compared to what’s waiting out there. Did I do it for Rory Andresen? For me? What?

Mac stopped and waited for her to catch up, tongue lolling. He seemed relaxed. As long as he stayed like that, she was sure she wasn’t about to run into any more Stranded. But she kept her Lancer powered up and a round chambered in her Longshot, just in case.

I don’t know how many people I’ve killed in my time. I actually can’t count them. And that’s never bothered me until now
.

Bernie gave up trying to work out why—not guilt, not pity, nothing obvious like that—and wondered if it was just some primal realization that she was helping the world run out of humans, even if they were the worst specimens of the species.

“Hey, look—
road,
” she said. They’d come out of the woodland on a slope above the main route to Pelruan. Mac stared up into her face, all unquestioning devotion. “You’re a great guide dog, too. Who’s a clever boy? Yeah,
you
are. Come on. Dinner.”

She could hear a Raven in the distance as she kept to the cover of the hedgerows. Her reaction was to look up from time to time just to see where the helicopter was heading, but as this one got closer, she could see it was covering a narrow search pattern. Her radio clicked.

“Hey, Mataki, where are you?” It was Gill Gettner. “I’ve got a rough fix on you from the transmitters, but for fuck’s sake come out in the open so I can see you.”

There’s a surprise
. “Roger that, Major.”

Bernie wasn’t expecting to be extracted. She broke cover cautiously and dropped to one knee while she waited, just in case some arsehole was out there waiting just as patiently as she had to claw back a little revenge. The Raven landed close enough to sandblast her face. Mel Barber beckoned from the crew bay.

“Is this a lift home?” Bernie ducked her head and ran to the
chopper. Mac slunk behind, not used to those rotors and smells and terrible noises. “What a kind and well-brought-up young man you are.”

“Shit, Bernie, look at all that firepower on your back. Someone piss you off?”

Bernie picked up a hesitant Mac and shoved him bodily onto the Raven. “Yeah, my estrogen flatlined. Come on, help me stow this stuff. I had to cache the ammo.”

“Did you get their gold fillings as well?”

“Bugger. Knew I forgot something.” She fastened her restraints, clipped Mac’s collar to a safety line, and sat him between her knees. “So what brings you out this way at a time of fuel crises?” A thought crossed her mind, and she wasn’t amused. “Hoffman?”

“No. Fenix requested we haul your ass back to base after we dropped off supplies for Anya.” Barber always was an open and honest soul. “He says to save your ammo for the glowies.”

“
Shinies,
” Gettner said. The Raven lifted and banked steeply, making Mac scrabble for a grip on the deck. “I prefer
shinies
. And don’t let that dog pee in my bird.”

Gettner and Barber were usually a double act of vitriolic commentary, but they were definitely forcing the banter today. Bernie wondered how bad it had been out on that rig.

“Too late,” Bernie said.

“The piss?”

“Too late to save the ammo.”

It was probably too late for a whole lot of things now, but all Bernie could focus on was the next twenty-six hours. Anything after that was a renewable daily bonus.

Hoffman had already seen how Prescott conducted himself at the end of the world—twice.

The man had held his nerve through the Hammer of Dawn
strike, and he hadn’t batted an eyelid when Jacinto was sunk. Hoffman wondered what it was going to take to make the sweat bead on that aristocratic top lip.

He couldn’t decide if Prescott didn’t know enough to be scared, if he knew something nobody else did, or if he was just missing a pair of adrenal glands. Whatever it was, he sat at the long meeting table in the sail loft as if it was another emergency management meeting of the kind they used to hold weekly in Jacinto to measure just how deep the shit was getting.

Trescu, not one of life’s nervous types, looked a lot closer to the edge than Prescott ever had. Despite himself, Hoffman found something to admire in the guy’s willingness to roll up his sleeves and do the tough jobs. One moment, he’d blown a prisoner’s brains out; the next, he’d turned around and calmly faced an all-too-possible death to save the team on that rig. The only thing that seemed to scare him was losing his people. Gorasnaya, a proud nation for a thousand years, was now a dwindling village. Hoffman realized that was worse than galling for the Gorasni; it was a collective death, an extinction, a reflection of what now faced all of humanity.

I know how it feels, Trescu. You wake up sweating because you might screw up and the human race goes extinct on your watch. Now place your bets on the odds of Prescott putting his ass on the line for us
.

“Losing the supply is a major blow,” Prescott said. “I admit that. But it’s something we can deal with in time. What will it take to restore the wells?”

Trescu’s face was covered in small marks as if he’d taken a shrapnel blast. He nursed a badly burned hand under the table and probably thought Hoffman hadn’t noticed.