Gears of War: The Slab (Gears of War 5)

by Karen Traviss

“We’re losing him.”

  “You get him inboard, Fenix. Any way you can.”

  “Shaw, arms! Tight at your side!”

  “Don’t you think I frigging know that, Sergeant? Shit—”

  The orange plastic strop slid and Shaw’s arms flew up for a second, then he dropped like a stone into the concrete below. He didn’t even scream. It wasn’t like hitting water: he went in completely upright, straight up to his waist, then seemed to go down sharply, like he’d hit a pocket of water or air.

  “Lieutenant, we’ve lost him,” Marcus said. Shaw was up to his armpits now with one arm free, and Marcus started paying out the cable again. Rounds were now pinging off the Raven. If they hung around much longer, the grubs were going to bring the bird down in the crater. “Bring her down again. Fifteen meters.”

  “God Almighty, Fenix, you better get that strop on this time.”

  “Yeah. I know that.”

  It was unbearable. All Dom could do was watch. The strop hit the wet concrete again. Shaw struggled to reach it with his one free arm, but he was sinking faster as he struggled. Marcus leaned right over the side, as if that would make any damn difference. The engineers huddled in the crew bay said nothing. There wasn’t a damn thing they could do either.

  “Lower, Lieutenant,” Marcus said. “Come on.”

  Shaw was now up to his neck, then his chin, and Dom could see it was too damn late and that there was no way the guy was going to get a strop around his body again. Castilla was yelling for a fresh ammo belt. Dom waited for a grub round to finally puncture a fuel tank. They had seconds left but Marcus wasn’t giving up on Shaw any more than Rothesay was. He reached out and tried to flick the cable closer to Shaw. If he got one arm free, they might stand a chance.

  “Grab it!” Marcus yelled. Shit, Shaw’s head was going under. “Come on! Just get your arm up. The helmet’s going to keep your mouth and nose clear for long enough.”

  Shaw couldn’t hear him now. Marcus had to know that. But he kept trying, and suddenly all there was above the level of the concrete was Shaw’s right hand. The strop was maybe ten, fifteen centimeters from it.

  And then he was gone.

  “Lieutenant?” Marcus started winching in the line as fast as he could, eyes fixed on the point where Shaw had gone under, because the second he looked away he’d never be able to find the spot again. The motor squealed. “I’m going down to get him. Hang on.”

  No, Marcus. You’re not.

  Dom did what he’d had to do too many times with Marcus. He grabbed him by his belt and yanked him back. Marcus turned to push him off, but Rothesay began lifting clear and Dom shoved Marcus down onto the tilting deck. He landed with a thud. Dom sat on him for a few moments. He’d calm down sooner or later.

  “What the fuck, Dom, we can’t—”

  “Leave it, Marcus. Nothing you can do. You hear me? Leave it.”

  One day, Marcus was going to explode. He nailed down everything so hard and tight that even Dom was afraid of him finally letting rip. For a second their eyes locked. Anyone who thought Marcus was all ice-cold control had no idea, because they’d never seen that look, those few moments of complete anguish that exposed the raw core of loss and pain inside. Then it snapped off again like a light. He scrambled to his feet and the little girl-corporal grabbed his arm.

  “Sergeant—”

  “I’m sorry.” Marcus didn’t brush her off. “I am so damn sorry.”

  Nobody spoke all the way back to base. Marcus leaned against the bulkhead, looking out but obviously not seeing anything. Dom watched his jaw working, like he was arguing with himself, and from time to time he’d glance away and screw his eyes shut for a moment. He thought Dom couldn’t see. Oh, Dom could see, all right: he could imagine every thought going through Marcus’s mind, and they were all about what it must have been like to drown in concrete seconds from being rescued. In water, you stood a chance. In thick liquid cement—the reality seeped into Dom’s mind unbidden and it took all his effort to stop himself from dwelling on it.

  It was a fucking awful way to go.

  “Fenix,” Rothesay said quietly. “We’ve got to overfly your old man’s place anyway. Want me to drop you off? I’ll file the reports.”

  “No thanks, Lieutenant.”

  “Let me put it another way. I’m going to land there and shove you out the frigging door. I’m the officer and I can do that shit. Got it, Sergeant? Go have a stiff drink with your old man.”

  “Sir,” Marcus grunted. It was his way of saying fuck you. Rothesay had the measure of him, though, that he needed a break whether he wanted it or not, and especially now. But he won’t talk it over with his dad. He’ll never talk it over with anyone, not even Anya. Dom watched Marcus edge into the comms compartment in the Raven’s tail section and pretended he wasn’t keeping an eye on him. A few minutes later, he heard a thud that was all but drowned out by the Raven’s noise. Marcus emerged from the compartment and took a few steps across the deck, making a pretty convincing attempt to look deep in thought about anything other than the man they’d just lost, but flexing his right fist slowly.

  He’d punched the shit out of the bulkhead. He did that sometimes when he saw one death too many. Dom never mentioned it when he did, but they both knew, just as Dom knew exactly what was playing out in his mind at that moment.

  Marcus was watching a Gear’s hand being swallowed into a slow-churning sea of cement, blaming himself for not being able to save the world.

  HALDANE HALL, EAST BARRICADE, JACINTO—THE FENIX ESTATE.

  Fifteen years was a long silence, and the longer it went on, the harder it was to break.

  Adam Fenix rehearsed his confession again as he stepped out of the car and stood at the doors of the mansion. The maintenance company had been tidying up the grounds, war or no war; the smell of cut grass and fresh creosote wafted on the breeze. It was the perfume of carefree childhood summers that he would never know again.

  “You okay, sir?” The driver lowered the staff car’s window and leaned out. “Lost your keys?”

  Adam wasn’t sure how to tell him he was afraid to walk into his own house and face his son. He made a show of casually inspecting the doors. The deep green gloss paint hadn’t been manufactured for centuries, and had to be mixed specially for the estate by restoration experts from the National Museum of Ephyra. Countless layers applied like geological strata over the ages gave the wood the slightly rippled appearance of old glass.

  This is what the Fenixes are. History. A museum curiosity. The pretense of stable continuity in a world that’s falling apart.

  “Could do with a coat of paint,” Adam said. “See you next week, Hendry.”

  “Have a good break, sir.”

  The tires spat gravel as the car turned around the fountain in the courtyard and headed out of the gates. Adam found himself still plucking up courage to push open the doors. They were never locked. A few billion dollars’ worth of art treasures inside, with the enemy nearly at the gates, and still he couldn’t find it in himself to give a damn about objects. Who would venture in here? Who would risk scaling the walls?

  Locust don’t loot. Not art, anyway. Got to admire their pragmatism.

  He took a breath, lowered his head, and pushed the door. Marcus should have been home by now. He was such a rare visitor to the house these days that Adam could tell if he was here just by inhaling. It was that once-familiar blend of army soap and rifle lubricant, something he’d once been so steeped in himself that he hadn’t noticed it until Elain pointed it out. Now Elain was long dead, his son was a stranger, and the nostalgic scent of army life was more painful than bittersweet.

  But Adam couldn’t smell anything now except coffee. The noises echoing down the hall were coming from the kitchen. “Mrs. Ross?” He laid his briefcase on the priceless Furlin lacquer table in the hall. “I wasn’t expecting you to stay this late.”

  The housekeeper stuck her head out of the kitchen door. The corridor was so long that Ada
m felt like a locomotive approaching a station, boots clattering on the inlaid floor like wheels rattling over rails. The light slanted from the open door behind her, catching a fragment of goldstone set in the marble.

  “I wanted to make sure you didn’t have to cook for yourself, Professor.” She stood back and ushered him into her territory. The two of them had rules; one was that he never entered the kitchen without her permission while she was working, just as she never entered his study or the laboratory in the cellars. It was hardly a crowded environment, but somehow the sheer emptiness of the mansion seemed to demand territorial agreements. “Marcus is doing an extra patrol and he’ll be late. Lieutenant Stroud called.”

  She didn’t even raise an eyebrow. A lesser woman would have asked for the hundredth time—quite reasonably—when Marcus was going to settle down, and comment on the extraordinary patience of Anya Stroud. Mrs. Ross just paused.

  “Glad we can rely on CIC to keep us updated on his movements,” Adam said. “Shouldn’t you be home by now? Your grandson’s on leave too.”

  “I have my professional pride, sir …” She opened the fridge to reveal rows of wrapped, labelled packages laid out with military precision. Cold air rolled out into Adam’s face like a frosty morning. “I’ve prepared the ingredients and all you have to do is follow the instructions. And I got steak. I know you don’t like me using your influence to bypass rationing, but … well, how often does Marcus make it home?”

  It was only a fifty-two-hour pass but the brief visit had taken on the magnitude of a triumphal homecoming. Mrs. Ross, patient and non-judgmental, had laid on a spread fit for a prodigal son. Adam inspected the packs of meat and prepared vegetables. He’d never needed to cook in his life, not with his wealth and privilege, not with his rank, but it was a matter of pride that he could. When he’d finally accepted that Elain was dead and that he had to bring up a thirteen-year-old boy on his own, he’d taken to cooking Marcus’s meals as an act of paternal devotion, nourishing him with food as a proxy for the affection that Marcus already seemed to shrink from. Now, nearly twenty years on, he found himself driven to do it again.

  It’s contrition. Apology. Except this time, I really do have something to apologize for.

  Mrs. Ross was staring into his face. He must have looked like a terrified rabbit.

  “It’s no trouble for me to stay,” she said. No, he couldn’t do that to her. She was an employee, not a servant. And with the war almost at the Ephyran boundary, there was always the chance that this would be the last time she ever saw her grandson alive. “Just say the word.”

  “Go home to your family,” Adam said quietly. “If I incinerate this, I can take him out for dinner instead.”

  “Of course you can,” she said. “You’re Professor Fenix.”

  There were few restaurants left in Ephyra ten years after the Locust invasion. A man needed some pull to get a table, and Adam had that in spades. He’d never felt less deserving of it than now.

  “Take the steak for your grandson.”

  “Professor—”

  “Please. We won’t starve.” Adam pulled a cold, heavy packet from the fridge. The steaks must have been six or seven centimeters thick. “And take a couple of the bottles of the vintage Ostri red. Make an occasion of it.”

  Mrs. Ross paused, expression fixed, then nodded. “Thank you. You’ve always been very good to me and my family, sir.”

  “You’ve stood by us during some very tough times.” I might have avoided those, too. “It’s the least I can do. I’ll get you a pool car. No point waiting for public transport.”

  Adam wanted her to go. He would have welcomed the company at any other time, but not now. He had to prepare for the hardest conversation of his life, harder even than telling Marcus that his mother wasn’t coming home. He called the office and ordered a car before taking refuge in his study.

  He’d grown up in this mansion, Haldane Hall, like generations of Fenix men before him, but he’d never truly grown used to it. It had always felt empty even when Elain was around. When Marcus left home to join the army, it had become an echoing void. The study was as near to a comforting space as he had these days, a smaller room than most of the others in the house, free of the accusing gaze of ancestral portraits that reminded him he’d fallen far, far short of the standards set for Fenix men, and that not even the Octus Medal and lavish donations to the Royal Tyran Infantry Benevolent Fund would atone for that now. His forefathers had been infantry officers to a man. They wouldn’t have understood why he’d resigned his commission, and they certainly wouldn’t have understood any of his decisions over the years.

  And I’m not sure that I understand them myself now.

  Adam leaned against the wood paneling, tracing his fingertip over the map of Sera that covered almost an entire wall, waiting for the sound of the car. Gravel rumbled somewhere in the muffled distance, followed by the faintest clonk of the heavy front doors closing. Adam was alone now: alone with his guilt, and alone with his research—the project he couldn’t pursue at the Defense Research Agency, director or not. He straightened up and took out a pencil to update the extent of the latest Locust incursions on the map.

  They were awfully close now.

  And I’ve looked them in the eye. Can I do that with Marcus?

  The heavy paper was covered in scribbled notes, some on scraps of paper tacked to it, some written on the surface itself, many of them decades old, an untidy history of a military career and a war that had claimed the lives of billions. On every city that had been targeted by the Hammer of Dawn, Adam had drawn a red circle. Millions had died in each. He never wanted to lose sight of that.

  I made that possible. My vision. My work. My responsibility.

  If he stood close enough to the map, he couldn’t see the scale of it. Sometimes, though, when he reached the door and turned to look back, the enormity of it caught him off guard. The whole map, the whole world, was a mass of red circles.

  I might have stopped it if I hadn’t been such a naive bastard. I should have told Dalyell what I knew.

  He’d lived with this knowledge for fifteen years and now it was starting to choke the life out of him. Even when he was working on the Hammer in the closing years of the Pendulum Wars, it had played on his mind, and now he wondered why the hell he hadn’t just come clean with Chairman Dalyell and told him that the Indies, the UIR, were the very least of the Coalition’s worries.

  And if I’d told him … he would have thought I was insane. No. That’s an excuse. He trusted me. He believed me. I just thought I could handle it myself, but God, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Adam couldn’t look at the accusing map with its indelible record of his failure and slaughter any longer. He turned his back on it and walked out along the balustraded landing, heading for the stairs. He still had a couple of hours.

  The basement laboratory was kept locked, but the cleaning company would never have ventured in there anyway, not with Mrs. Ross on duty. She never asked why. She seemed to take it as read, as everyone did, that whatever he worked on was classified. It was, but what went on in here was a secret even from Chairman Prescott; Adam could honestly say that no other human being knew anything about his work down here. He booted up the computer and sat staring at the screen, wondering if he should simply bring Marcus down here, sit him at the terminal, and show him.

  Marcus would ask why and what, as he always did, and that would invite the more important questions: how and when.

  The screen began building a three-dimensional model like a structure made of irregular pipes. It could have been anything. A geologist might have seen it as voids left by lava. A mining engineer might have seen it as the shafts and galleries of a pit. A biologist might have thought it was a nest, a warren of some kind.

  It was all those things, perhaps, and Adam realized there was no easy way to deal with the most difficult detail of all—not what it was, but when he’d discovered that it existed, and how much it had told him ab
out how little he understood about his wife.

  Marcus will despise me. How can he possibly respect me again after what I’ve got to tell him? What kind of relationship can I have with him after he knows what I really am?

  Adam rehearsed every possible outcome, every question and answer, every reaction that he might get from his son, but in the end he knew his only option was to look him in the eye and blurt it out. He stared at the screen for far too long. The shapes began to dance in front of his eyes and he thought he could hear the phone ringing a long way away. Damn it: he could. He realized that he’d unplugged the extension in the laboratory, and scrambled to reach the socket before the caller rang off. By the time he shoved the plug in and picked up the receiver, though, it was too late.

  Damn. Well, if it was important, they’d call back. He switched off the computer, locked the laboratory, and climbed the stairs back to the ground floor. There was plenty of time to prepare the meal—to heat it, anyway—but he decided to leave nothing to chance that might interrupt a difficult conversation, and put a prepared casserole in the oven on the temperature setting that Mrs. Ross had written on the wrapping.

  Marcus, there’s no easy way to tell you this, but …

  Adam sat at the kitchen table, reading a rare item of mail that had been delivered that morning, a handwritten message scribbled on the back of an old tax demand. There was nobody left to write to him at home now except Marcus and the The Engineering Digest, and both happened once in a blue moon. A charity—a private effort by some citizens, nothing to do with the refugee administration—was asking him to donate blankets for the Stranded. Adam’s urge these days was to give until he bled, but it still wouldn’t have been enough to scour his conscience clean.

  The sound of a helicopter made him look out the window. King Ravens were an almost unnoticed part of the city’s background noise now, but to Adam they still sounded of rescue and triggered a reflex of relief. This one had to be flying very low indeed for him to hear it inside the fortress-thick walls at all. He craned his neck, but he couldn’t see the Raven and for a moment he couldn’t hear it. It was only when the front doors slammed and he heard heavy boots that he realized Marcus had arrived.