Gears of War: Anvil Gate (43 page)

Mathieson went off the channel for a moment. “Sir, he’s insistent.”

One last gloat about the end of the COG. They can never resist it
. “Very well. Patch him through.”

“Hoffman? Tell us where you need us,” Ollivar said.

“You arrange your own RV point, Ollivar.”

“No, we’re landing troops,” Ollivar said. “And don’t think this is some heart-of-gold moralizing shit where I do the heroic forgiveness thing because I don’t want to descend to your level. This is just survival. We’ll fight those things
with
you, because if we don’t, they’ll just come for us after they’ve wiped you off the map.”

Well, shit
. Hoffman would need every rifle, lookout, and pair of hands he could get. His honor didn’t feel compromised and he didn’t feel the need to consult Prescott.

I’m a warfighter. I’m here to win. What else is there to worry about except whether humankind is still here tomorrow, next week, next year?

The only thing he balked at was hearing these scum call themselves soldiers. But he’d swallow that for the time being.

Trescu shrugged. “About time they put something useful into the fight. Go on. Let them.”

Hoffman went as his gut guided him and pressed his earpiece to answer. “Okay, Ollivar, you might want to spread your vessels around,” he said. “In case we lose the docks. Other than that—disembark your men at the jetty next to the carriers, and Sergeant Fenix will meet you. We have a plan.”

Michaelson had plenty of free berths. He gave Hoffman a thumbs-up.

“Oh, good,” Ollivar said sourly. “All square-jawed noble infantry stuff.”

“No,” said Hoffman. “Dirty warfare. As dirty as it gets.”

The Lambent were the kind of enemy he preferred. There were no rules of engagement for absolute, literal monsters.

All he had to do was wipe them out and forget they ever existed. They would never nag at his conscience.

They needed anything that would burn.

In a world of desperate shortages, Dom had learned never to throw anything away. There was no garbage. There were only things that had to be reused, from fabric to old cooking oil to human waste for fertilizer. Food scraps went to the pigs and chickens; used paper was pulped and bleached repeatedly until the end product was useless for writing on. Then it would be shredded for insulation or made into ragged, uneven pieces of bathroom tissue. The idea of finding stuff specifically for burning was a whole new habit to learn.

Dom explored the warren of stores cut into the rock under the naval base, feeling vaguely uneasy in the way he did when he entered tunnels. At least he had a rational reason now. The grubs might have been gone, but a stalk that could come up in the middle of a new volcanic island could do exactly the same right here.

“Hey, Marcus? You down here?”

Dom’s voice echoed. The tunnels and chambers leading off them were built along the same lines as the ones under Port Farrall, probably because they dated from the same era. There were plenty of old ammo crates that would burn well with a little tar. There would probably be all kinds of stuff soaked in oils and lubricants, too. It would all go up in smoke easily enough.

“In here,” Marcus called. “End of the tunnel through the painted doors. Don’t go right.”

Dom found Marcus in a storeroom lined from floor to ceiling with shelves full of box folders with damp-faded labels on the
spine. Marcus was sitting on an upturned box, rifling through piles of papers.

“Archives,” he said. “Some of these date back centuries.”

Dom peered at the labels along the shelves. The ink on most of them had faded to gray and sepia, and the handwritten dates and titles were sloping and ornate, the formal penmanship of another era. The files were carefully arranged by year.

“Okay, this would burn great,” Dom said carefully. “But I’d feel really bad about it.”

“Me too. Shit. Imagine what’s in here.”

It was just as well Baird wasn’t down here. The archives were probably full of all kinds of engineering detail. He would have gone berserk at the idea of setting fire to it. Dom felt like a vandal for even thinking about it.

“We could leave it,” Dom said. “Loads of wood and other combustibles down here.”

Marcus didn’t answer. He’d picked up a bound book about fifty centimeters across—an old ledger with a leather cover and a gold-blocked title. When he balanced it on his knee to open it, Dom read
VISITOR SECURITY LOG
on the cover. Marcus leafed through the pages and then stopped for a moment.

“Shit,” he said.

That could have meant anything from the end of the world to pleasant surprise. Dom guessed it wasn’t the latter.

“What is it?”

Marcus didn’t answer. He just moved on to the next pile of paper, leaving the visitor log open on the floor. Dom squatted to take a look.

It was about halfway down the list, a name written in careful block capitals and then followed by a signature in a different and more confident hand. The date beside it was more than twenty years old.

NAME: FENIX, DR. A
.

VISITING: MAJ. SHARMAN, COB
3. E
XT:
665.

Dom knew Marcus’s father had visited Vectes when it was a bioweapons research facility, and so did Marcus. The mayor of Pelruan had told them. But that wasn’t quite the same as seeing
your dead father’s handwriting, unexpected and out of context. That kind of reminder of the dead punched above its weight.

Adam Fenix’s life was a disjointed series of snapshots that Marcus still seemed to be putting together from things that popped up where he least expected them, from small personal stuff like this to finding those unexplained audio recordings in the Locust computer. Adam Fenix never told his son things, and even lied about others—by omission, yes, but that was still lying as far as Dom was concerned, and he knew Marcus felt the same. It was years before Marcus found out why his mother had gone missing. His father had kept it from him. Dom knew the Fenix family as well as anyone could, and it still shocked him that a man could hide so much from his son, his only child. Dom would never have done anything like that to Benedicto. He was damned sure of it.

“You okay, Marcus?” he said.

“Yeah.” It was a rasping sigh as much as anything. “Even when he’s dead, I still get surprises.”

Dom would have torn out the page and kept it if it had been his own father’s handwriting. It would have been the last precious link to the man himself, something he had touched and shaped. Marcus just picked up the book, closed it, and put it to one side.

“So what else have we got?” he said, as if nothing had happened. “Anyone collecting the wood shavings from the lumberyard?”

They’d been as close as brothers since childhood. Dom knew Marcus as well as he’d ever known anyone. But sometimes Dom still had to stop himself asking the one question he knew Marcus would never answer:
Do you want to talk about it?

Marcus never wanted to talk about anything. It would have been pointless to ask. If he needed to, he knew by now that Dom was always there.

“I’ll go see what we’re piling up,” Dom said. “Someone’s got to stop them burning the bathroom tissue. A guy has his limits.”

Marcus jogged down the passage ahead of him. “Got to brief Ollivar’s irregulars with Hoffman.”

He disappeared down the dimly lit tunnel. Dom heard his boots clatter up the stone steps to the ground floor.

Reminders of the dead were everywhere, even the ones that you were sure didn’t affect you any longer. In the locker room later that afternoon, Dom caught sight of his tattoo in the mirror—a heart with Maria’s name on it. Even if he could have had it removed, he wouldn’t have. But it felt all wrong now, as if he was still pretending she wasn’t dead, like the occasional days when he still felt the urge to do what he’d done for ten solid years—to take out her picture and show it to anyone who might recognize her and tell him that they’d seen her.

There was no single act of closure, he knew. He knew it from the deaths of his kids, and his parents, and pretty well everyone he’d grown up with. It was a gradual process for him. He had Maria’s necklace; now he needed to move on another step and deal with the tattoo.

He changed into his civvie clothes and went looking for Sam. She was taking a break in the mess, drinking with Dizzy. It was nice to see them getting on.

“I hear you’re pretty good with ink,” he said.

Sam gave him that sideways look. “Yes. You want something done?”

“I think so.”

“So—traditional Kashkuri stuff? South Islander?”

“Can you change an existing tattoo?”

Sam looked thoughtful. “Possibly. Depends.”

“You gonna need some of Doctor Wallin’s special anesthetic?” Dizzy held out a small bottle of moonshine. “Guarantee you won’t feel a thing if she saws your damn head off.”

“I’ll get numb later,” Dom said. “Thanks, Dizzy.”

“Okay.” Sam slid off the seat and beckoned Dom to follow. “Better do it now, before we both chicken out. I’ll get my stuff.”

Dom found a storeroom in the barracks. He didn’t want anyone watching, even by accident. He rolled his sleeve back as far as he could and offered his right biceps.

“Okay, you’re going to have to talk me through this,” Sam said, opening a small bag like a cosmetic case. “What exactly do you want done?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But she’s gone, and I need to mark that somehow.”

Dom knew that Sam’s up-yours attitude wasn’t the whole woman. Somebody named after a dead-hero father they’d never known would understand all the confusing, painful feelings that Dom still carried around with him. Sam studied the stylized heart and then nodded.

“You ready to trust me on this, Dom?”

“Go ahead.”

It took a long time without a powered needle and it hurt more than he remembered. He didn’t want to watch her do it, either. When he finally looked, not knowing what effect it would have on him but knowing he wanted
something
to change, it made his throat tighten.

Sam really was good at this kind of thing. Gifted, in fact.

The tattoo and all it stood for had been transformed. If Dom hadn’t known it had once been a heart, he would only have seen the angel cradling Maria’s name, wings folded, eyes raised toward something infinite and certain.

He couldn’t have told Sam what he wanted. But somehow it felt like he’d seen it that way from the start. He’d wear his sleeves rolled down for a couple of days to hide the dressing, not that anyone would have pestered him with questions about it.

“I owe you,” he said.

Sam turned in the doorway. “No, you don’t,” she said. “That’s for making my day.”

The base was now settling into a quiet waiting game. The sound of vehicle motors and grinding gearboxes continued late into the evening, throwing up a halo of hazy light beyond the ancient walls as the diggers raced to complete the network of pits and trenches. The only ships moving were the NCOG patrols. Even the Ravens were few and far between. Dom sat on a bollard by the jetty, watching navigation lights pass overhead and the black patch of helicopter-shaped nothing as one of the birds blotted out the stars.

“We love this, don’t we, baby?” Cole walked up and stood contemplating
the docks with him. “At our best when we’re waitin’ for the shit to start. All match-fit and ready to go.”

“Wonder when we’ll ever shake that off.”

“Wonder when we’re ever gonna get the
chance.
”

“Where’s Baird?”

“Weldin’ shit. Pipes. So they can flood the pits with fuel and bake some glowie crab. Man, that boy’s creative in all the
wrong
ways. But I ain’t complainin’.”

“What are the civvies going to do if it all kicks off? We haven’t got enough spare rifles to arm one percent of them, even if they knew how to use them.”

“Then we better make sure we stop the glowies. That’s all we got.”

No point evacuating the civvies inland, because the stalks can come up any damn place. No point making them rough it in the woods, because they’ll be even more afraid and disoriented. No point doing anything except wait—because we just don’t know what’s coming around the corner, or even if it’s coming at all
.

The next day was quiet, too, and the next, and the day after that. Dom did perimeter patrols as normal, and rode with the twice-daily Raven recon flight.
Clement
and
Zephyr
were paired up now, doing a sonar sweep around the island.

There was no sign of stalks or polyps. It was almost as if they’d tested out the COG, found they got a kicking, and moved on elsewhere.

But Dom didn’t believe that a life-form that could give the grubs nightmares would quit that easily. The most he could hope for was that if they were as dumb and instinct-driven as some thought, then they’d latched on to some other scent. But it would just be a temporary respite, like all the other quiet moments in the war.

The bastards were just getting their breath back.

Meanwhile, the coastline to the west was crawling with extra Stranded. Bernie walked the perimeter with Mac most of the day, Lancer slung across her chest and her Longshot on her back, making it clear that it wasn’t polyps she was keeping an eye open
for. Dom waved to her from the ’Dill’s hatch as it headed back through the main camp. She gave him a meaningful nod.

“I just hope she doesn’t cap anyone,” Dom said to Baird.

“What?”

Dom dipped down inside the cabin. Baird was driving, listening to two radio channels at once.

“I said, I hope Bernie doesn’t shoot any more Stranded and start a riot.”

“Killjoy. What else has she got left at her time of life, except mutilating assholes and giving Hoffman a gruesome time?”

“Baird, shut up, will you?”

“Hey, want to listen to the submarine net? I rigged my radio so I can hear their transmissions.”

“Damn, you’re
stalking
those boats.”