Gears of War: Anvil Gate (47 page)

“Yes, it’s back.” Sam lowered the binoculars and handed them to Anya. “I swear it’s learned already. Look.”

Bernie divided up the ammo between the squads with Rossi. Rifles were all they had except for the guns on the garrison’s two
’Dills, and those weren’t much use against small, fast targets on the ground. She wanted to save those for the leviathan if it got within range. Right now, it was being a sensible monster and keeping its distance.

“That’s what freaks me more than anything,” Rossi said. “Grubs—you
knew
they could think. But these things—they’re just animals. Or
plants
, even, like the damn stalks. What’s driving them? What do they want? They’re not even eating us.”

Anya squatted next to Bernie. “You think we should evacuate the town?”

She should have been asking Rossi. Bernie tried to be diplomatic.

“I don’t know what Drew thinks,” she said, “but we need to stop those things coming ashore in the first place, or else it won’t matter where we run. They’ll just spread through the island. Eh, Drew?”

Rossi didn’t look up from the piles of clips. “We should at least ask the civvies if they want to leave. I guarantee they won’t, but we ought to.”

The townsfolk were watching. Only a few of them had firearms, but all those who did seemed to be standing around waiting for orders. They’d been used to taking care of themselves, and however ill prepared they were for the world of grubs and Lambent, they were still willing to have a go.

Among them were the old boys from the Duke of Tollen’s Regiment. Bernie knew she was in no position to tell them they were too old. They were in their seventies and eighties; they might not have been fit and athletic, but they still knew how to use a rifle. They probably thought the same about her.

I think they call that irony. I tell this bunch of vets that they’re no use now. I hope Vic sees the joke
.

And I hope he’s alive to hear it
.

“You heard who Mathieson’s sending us, didn’t you?” Anya said. “Gorasni troops.”

“Shit.” Rossi shook his head slowly. “Well, ma’am, you wanted to hone your frontline command skills. This is going do it.”

“I’ll handle it.” Bernie felt Anya had enough on her plate. Being smart and gutsy wasn’t going to be enough to get her through this alone, not even if she could suddenly sprout a dose of her mother’s killing aggression. “I get on okay with the Gorasni. It’s probably because I know how to castrate farm animals. Always builds bridges, that.”

“I can hear a Raven,” Anya said.

Mac trotted over to Bernie and stuck his nose in her face. Will Berenz had either let him out on his own, or else he’d been wandering around nearby.

“Hey, sweetie, go home. You can’t tackle polyps. Or go sit in the Packhorse.” Mac just looked at her with those sad, baffled eyes as if he was waiting for orders in a language he understood. Bernie beckoned to one of the townspeople. “Take him back and lock him up somewhere safe, will you?”

The Raven appeared as a black flickering shape approaching down the coastline. Mel Sorotki’s voice came over the radio net.

“KR-Two-Three-Nine inbound, three minutes—Mataki, just tell me you don’t have a recipe for these things.”

Anya had her intense and slightly defocused look on, as if she was running through the academy theory classes in her head. “Roger that, Two-Three-Nine. Just you?”

“Stroud, we’re a one-bird army up here. These Gorasni are hard-core.”

“That’s what worries me.”

“First wars first. Kill the current enemy before the previous ones. That’s what I hear.”

One of the Tollen vets walked over to Anya and Drew. He wasn’t fast off the mark, but he still had that upright bearing and he carried an old rifle like it was still part of him.

“Ma’am.” He didn’t salute. He came from the era when you didn’t salute or return one if you weren’t wearing your cap. “Corporal Frederic Benten. We still know how to follow orders.”

“And are you still good shots?” Anya asked.

“Yes, and we stand our ground. Partly because we’re not so good at the running-away bit these days.”

“Good.” There wasn’t a trace of condescension in Anya’s voice. “I want you to form a rank behind the Gorasni, so that if anything gets past them, you pick it off.” She gestured. “Three of you on that headland, the rest of you in front of the cottages at the top of the slope.”

“Ma’am,
Gorasni?
”

“If they’re prepared to get killed defending this town, they’re under my command like everyone else,” she said.

Benten took it with a grim nod. He went back to his friends, and Bernie watched the news spread among them.

“Shit,” Sam said. “Let’s hope the old discipline kicks in.”

Sorotki landed the Raven and the guy they called Yanik jumped out. He trotted up to Sam and bowed extravagantly.

“My life is yours,
duchashka
. Let us hope it doesn’t come to that, though.”

Sam gave him her half-smile, the one where her eyes didn’t even flicker. “I always wanted a meat shield. Is that it?
Eight
of you?”

“Eight Gorasni equals twenty COG equals fifty trained Stranded. We are
economical
people. Value for money.”

“Bullshit,” Sam said. “But thanks. And the old boys with the trident badges, the ones giving you the hairy eyeball—they hate your fucking guts. Your guys put their guys in death camps. Be tactful.”

Sam could always cut to the chase. Yanik seemed to appreciate it. Sorotki and Mitchell joined the huddle to discuss tactics.

“The leviathan’s cruising out there,” Mitchell said. “It keeps diving when we get close, but we’re up for a strafing run if you
77
are.”

“Remember those things can rear a long way out of the water.” Anya signaled to the Pelruan locals to move into position. They had no personal radios, so it was back to last-century soldiering. “Don’t take chances. Pull back and give us air support here if you don’t sink the thing.”

“It’ll provoke it into shaking off polyps, probably,” Sorotki said. “At least that gives us a chance to choose when the attack starts.”

Bernie put her hand on Anya’s shoulder to get her attention. “I’ll go with the locals, ma’am,” she said. “That way one at least of us has a radio link to you.”

“Good idea, Bernie. And I think they’ll listen to you more than me.”

It was a shame. Anya was a good Gear. She had all the right instincts, but she was a small, pretty, blond girlie who looked a lot younger than she was, and the old men clearly didn’t give a damn that she came from war-hero stock, even if they knew that her mother had won the Embry Star. The doubt was all over their faces.

“Okay, Mel, poke the beehive,” she said.

Sorotki had a tough job on his hands. Mitchell was a pretty good door gunner, but they had no idea if a stalk was going to punch out of the water if they ventured too low, or if the leviathan was going to swat them out of the air with a massive tentacle. The Raven circled over the shallows. All Bernie and the others could do was watch. Mitchell was a small silhouette in the open door. Then he opened fire, raking the water below.

The rounds raised a curtain of spray. A few seconds later, a paddle-shaped tentacle like a squid’s unfurled from the surface and missed the Raven by three meters. Sorotki banked sharply and gained height, coming back to let Mitchell piss the leviathan off more. Mitchell emptied two belts of ammo into the thing, and it did the job. It did the job really well. The next thing Bernie saw was the tentacle vanish as the Raven shot off toward the beach.

“Incoming!” Sorotki said. “One huge mad thing heading your way, on a line with the slipway.”

One of Rossi’s squad was on lookout up on the high ground on the other side of the harbor. “No, it’s passed the slipway. It’s going to hit this side.”

“Get out of there,” Rossi yelled. “Get back down here.”

Being shelled was bowel-loosening, Bernie recalled, but when the shells that landed had minds of their own and charged after you, it was a whole new level of fear. The leviathan crashed down onto the shore. Polyps poured ashore in a weird beachhead landing.
Bernie still couldn’t tell where the polyps came from—from inside the leviathan, off its back, even out of its arse—but there were a lot of them. She shifted to stand behind the Gorasni positions and signaled to the Tollen vets to stand by. The firing started.

But the Gorasni boys didn’t hold a line—they
advanced
.

“I can’t do this,” Benten said suddenly. “I can’t stand with these men.”

He raised his rifle. He was definitely aiming at the polyps, but it was clear he wasn’t going to back up the Gorasni. The old soldiers were watching him, and they weren’t going where Bernie had directed them. For a second she had to look away from the Gears and other men in front of her.

“You’ll go where I tell you, Corporal,” she yelled. “
Now.
”

“We won’t fight alongside them.” Benten started backing off to the road to bypass the eight Gorasni. “I mean it. They can die. We’ll do this alone.”

It was the worst time to lose discipline. “We’ve got a bunch of Stranded defending the Gorasni camp,” Bernie yelled. “That’s
after
the Gorasni killed some of them and dumped their bodies in the camp. If that feud’s on hold until we stop the polyps, then so’s yours. That’s an order.”

Some of the polyps had broken through. Bernie had no choice. She grabbed Benten and shoved him bodily into line. The Gorasni had turned and were moving back now, drawing the polyps into the more confined space of the street.

“Kill those fucking things.” Bernie knew she had to make this stick. “Back up those bloody Gorasni or get out of the way.
Now
. Or I’ll slot you myself.”

“Then go ahead, Sergeant.”

These men were Gears like her. She could only guess what they’d been through at the hands of the enemy. She knew what vengeance and loathing felt like; for one act of violation she’d butchered two men, and done things way beyond a just execution. They’d deserved it. But she scaled that up to spending weeks, months,
years
in a Gorasni labor camp watching your mates
worked and starved to death, and probably hoping you wouldn’t be far behind them. She had no idea how she could ask these old soldiers to forget that.

But she had to. “You’ll do it,” she said, “because you’re still a Gear.”

Benten looked at her with a mixture of real pain and absolute disgust. Bernie was sure she’d have told the Gorasni to go fuck themselves, too. But he stopped, moved back to the Gorasni line, and opened fire.

Bernie felt like shit. But, like the feuds, atonement would have to wait for later.

CHAPTER 16

“You can use one of these, I assume?”

Hoffman handed Prescott a Lancer and watched him carefully. He took it two-handed and tilted the rifle to inspect it, safety catch uppermost, as if he knew what he was doing.

“I was a Gear,” he said. “But Lancers didn’t have chainsaws in my day.”

Prescott rarely pulled the veteran card, which was just as well. Every one of Hoffman’s generation had done their compulsory military service unless they were medically unfit. But the Chairman was one of those privileged kids who did the two-year commission so that he didn’t look too much like a parasite before
his dad whisked him off to groom him for the family firm, the business of politics.

“If you need to use the chainsaw,” Hoffman said, “the power switch is
here
. Status indicator—
here
. But I wouldn’t recommend getting that close to those things.”

“I have my security team. Don’t worry.”

Hoffman wasn’t about to. If anything happened to Prescott, he had a team in mind to run the COG, and it didn’t include himself. He wondered if Prescott could grasp the idea of someone who didn’t want his job.

“Casualty update?” Prescott asked.

“KIA—ten Gears, fourteen Stranded, five Gorasni. Civilian fatalities—eleven reported, but most civvies are either locked down or they’ve gone off camp. Wounded—no total yet, but forty combatants have been through ER.”

“That’s not as bad as I’d expected.”

“That’s not counting the naval personnel missing from
Fenmont
. Those things aren’t done with us yet, Chairman. They’ve come back for a second bite at Pelruan, and they’ll do the same here.”