There were an awful lot of emergence holes. The recon images were all of the area north of Tyro Station. The pictures reminded him of the aftermath of the Archipelago War, fifty years before the Pendulum Wars, with its images of whole landscapes left holed by artillery shells and every recognizable feature of the landscape from farmhouses to individual trees completely obliterated. Every trace of life seemed to have been swallowed by those holes. At least the Tyro images showed traces of where spur lines had branched off the main railway track, although the grubs had stripped all the rails and sleepers, leaving only an impression where the line to Tollen had been. As Nevil pored over one sequence of grainy pictures, he could almost put together a time lapse sequence over a period of three weeks, from ten hours after the first Locust emergence. E-holes appeared in ones and twos, then peppered the ground, then seemed to be filled in again—the abortive concrete-pouring effort that had lasted only two or three days—before springing up in even greater numbers. Seen from directly overhead, the terrain looked cratered.
Okay. Maybe the tunnel idea wasn’t so great after all. Bastards can come up pretty well anywhere.
How about flamethrowers again? No. We’d never have enough fuel for thousands of kilometers of tunnels, and we’d have to trap the things down there as well. And they’re on the surface now anyway.
Adam was still working on an energy weapon to deliver massive shockwaves underground. He was working on a lot of things. Nevil didn’t doubt his genius, but how could anyone plan when new tunnels were formed every day? How the hell could you calculate force accurately when the parameters changed by the hour? That didn’t stop Adam, though, and he was still churning out frenzied sketches and calculations right up to the moment he announced Marcus was coming home on leave and rushed out of the door.
Nevil emptied out another brown envelope secured with a twist of red twine and a metal pin. The issue list pinned to the front showed that nobody had booked it out of the archives since the day it was put into storage. Damn, it looked as if Adam had been working on that same idea for the past ten years. Here it was: scraps of squared paper covered in rough schematics, cross-sections of tunnels with numbers scrawled on them, more recon images taken from low altitude, and even pages torn out of a dog-eared technical journal. The pages intrigued Nevil. The date was ripped so he could only see the year—two years before the end of the Pendulum Wars, a calendar that had been wiped from history now—but the article was about the propagation of shockwaves in under-water explosions.
Can’t say the Director hasn’t considered all the angles.
Nevil sorted through the rest of pile, trying to put everything in strict chronological order. It was only then that he noticed that the recon images, the ones from a low angle, didn’t have a date stamp on them. The darkroom techies generated a date on the front of all photos, and the archivist stamped it on the back of each print, but there was nothing on these.
He studied the image, trying to work out where it had been taken, but it could have been anywhere between the Tyro parkway and the Hollow, and it was hard to see the e-hole at all. In fact, it looked more like a wild animal’s lair. The buildings in the distant background meant nothing to him. A few flakes of chocolate fell from his candy bar as he bent over the images, and he pressed his fingertip on them to pick them up, licking off the precious fragments. There was no knowing when chocolate would be on the menu again.
He’d come back to the picture later. It wasn’t important.
It was the next envelope that got his attention.
When he pulled it out, it felt unusually light. There should have been eleven items in there, as numbered and listed on the front, but when he tipped it upside down five photos fell out. Six documents were missing. He had no idea what they might be, only that the code indicated text documents with an unclassified rating, and nobody had signed to take them out.
Careless; but they weren’t top secret, so … no, he’d check. Incompleteness kept him awake at night. It meant hauling out the big index ledgers at the reception desk, but that would tell him what the documents were and if and when they’d been countersigned out. It was all from the first month after E-Day. He wouldn’t have many pages to look through.
It was only when he turned around that he realized how late it was and why his stomach felt hollow again. The sky graduated from purple to amber on the skyline, silhouetting the Octus Tower into a tourist’s postcard. Distant palls of smoke hung in the air and spoiled the illusion.
At least I won’t get locked in. Plenty of people working late. And I’ve got Adam’s keys.
The ledgers were stacked on heavyweight teak carousels behind the front desk, an eloquent embodiment of everything the COG stood for. When they said Coalition of Ordered Governments, they meant it. Order was everything in Tyrus, even before the Coalition. Every act was recorded. The archive manager said there were five hundred years’ worth of records stored in a vault below the city, but the library of ledgers from the past eleven years was enough of a library to daunt Nevil. He found the massive leather-bound book covering all documents entered in the first six months after E-Day and heaved it onto the counter. The thud conveyed the weight of history. He was almost afraid to get greasy fingerprints on the pages.
Okay. E-Day … here we go.
He wiped his hand on his pants before running his finger down the long list of dates, document titles, and signatures. The missing documents were right there—six postmortem reports on Locust drones. Nobody knew what these damn things were when they burst out of the ground that day: nobody even knew they were there. Recovering grub cadavers was the only way to work out who and what this enemy was, even though knowing more about them proved to be useless when it came to stopping them. Humans had some DNA in common with just about every form of life on Sera to a greater or lesser extent, too, so their origins remained a mystery as well. Nevil couldn’t see a note pinned to the page to indicate the reports had been booked out. That meant they’d been taken and never returned.
“Asshole,” Nevil muttered. Rules were there for a reason. He looked back up the list and turned the pages back to the start, to material generated on E-Day itself. Raven pilots had been meticulous about logging recon images, and the very first image was noted as being taken within forty-five minutes of the first emergence. It was now archived in box 1–15-A, aisle 12C, shelf A.
That was when Nevil started to realize something was amiss.
He walked back to the chart table and checked the dates. Then he climbed the ladder and looked along the shelf—shelf A. The filing boxes started at 1–15-B. The first box was missing.
“Goddamn,” he said aloud. “What the hell do we pay these archivists for?”
He’d talk to the manager in the morning. This was unacceptable. He wondered whether to call it a day and grab some dinner, or just carry on through the night, but his eye was now drawn to those photos that didn’t have any ID or date stamp at all. Yes, E-Day had been pure chaos, and nobody could expect a government department to worry about bureaucratic detail when millions of citizens were being slaughtered by an unknown enemy, but it had—it really had kept meticulous notes of the events, typically Tyran, typically COG. They clung to order like salvation. Why not with these images, though?
Nevil studied the animal lair photo again and decided to find out what the building was in the background. Gordie was nearly seventy and knew every district in Ephyra like the back of his hairy, gnarled hand. He’d know what it was. He was still upstairs somewhere, doing his thirteen-hour shift before handing over to the night guy, and Nevil went in search of him.
“I thought you’d left,” Gordie said, looking up from the security monitors on the front desk. “What can I do for you?”
Nevil held the photo in front of him. “Can you tell me where this is? No damn ident on the image.”
Gordie squinted slightly and picked up his glasses for a closer look.
“It’s somewhere near the old bronze foundry,” he said
. “Wow, that takes me back. My uncle worked there for years. See?” He indicated the tallest building in the backdrop with a crooked pinkie. “They had to pull it down because of subsidence.”
“What, because of grub incursions?”
“No.” Gordie shook his head. “Long before then. This was before the end of the Pendulum Wars. Maybe four years before we knew those ugly bastards were even there.”
CHAPTER 2
We have no communication with the Locust whatsoever. How can I possibly give them an ultimatum?
(Chairman Richard Prescott to Professor Adam Fenix, two hours before the Hammer of Dawn strikes: 1 A.E., nine years earlier.)
SOUTHERN OUTFALL SEWER #2, EPHYRA: LATE FALL, 10 A.E.
“Fenix? Is that you?”
The approaching light wobbled in the darkness, approximately head high, then resolved into two faint patches of blue. The longer Victor Hoffman stared into the pitch-black tunnel, the more tricks his eyes played on him, but he could hear the splash and gurgle of water now as boots waded through it. He kept watching, finger inside the trigger guard of his Lancer just in case. There were two pairs of blue lights heading his way now. It wasn’t a Corpser.
“Ain’t nobody here but us rats.” The echoing voice was Rossi’s. The damn radios didn’t work down here. “You okay, Colonel?”
“Up to my ass in shit, Sergeant. Never better.”
Hoffman waited at the junction of the sewer pipes, trying not to look down at what was flowing slowly around him. The shock of the smell had worn off, but he didn’t want to catch a glimpse of anything that would tip his gag reflex over the edge. Drew Rossi emerged from the tunnel a little ahead of Marcus and squinted as his eyes adjusted to the faint light from a line of grimy electric bulbs spaced at fifteen-meter intervals in the vaulted brick ceiling.
“Is this stuff backing up?” Rossi asked.
Marcus looked down at the tide of effluent around him and frowned as if he was checking the tide on a nice sandy beach. “Looks like it’s still flowing out. It’s on a gradient.”
The raw sewage was up to Hoffman’s calves and he found himself praying that his boots were waterproof. Further up the main sewer, voices echoed. The manager from Tyran National Utilities was talking to Lennard Parry, the staff sergeant whose miserable task it was to keep basic services running in Ephyra. It was like trying to bail out a sinking ship with a teacup. Parry never complained, though. He just got thinner and more harassed-looking each time the grubs trashed a pipeline or an aqueduct and he had to find a workaround or send repair teams into grub-ridden territory.
Hoffman walked with slow care, anxious to avoid splashes or—worse—slipping and falling in it.
Dear God, Margaret. I’m glad you can’t see me now. Wading through shit.
Hoffman found he spoke to her a lot more these days. It was all in his head. They were conversations he’d never have, but he missed her like never before. He wished that he’d kept something of the burned-out car that one of the reclamation teams had finally identified on that terrible road of destruction leading out of Corren six years after the Hammer strikes had burned the coastal cities to a cinder, but he hadn’t. He didn’t even have her wedding ring. They never found it—just enough of a charred jawbone to do a dental ID.
Maybe I’ll be dead in twenty-six hours, Margaret. And I won’t mind. I just want to rest. I just want it to be over.
Damn, that was defeatist talk. He was Royal Tyran Infantry, for fuck’s sake, the 26th, the Unvanquished, a regiment whose battle honors dated back more than five centuries before the COG had even existed. And he was de facto Chief of the Defense Staff. That was only because he was the last senior officer left standing, though, just a goddamn colonel with a few battalions and a handful of ships and helicopters. Grubs didn’t give a shit about regimental pride. They rolled over everything.
But if they wanted to try rolling over him, he was ready for them now. He plowed on toward the sound of the voices like an ice-breaker. Marcus walked behind him with Rossi, creating a wake that lapped against the brick-lined walls on either side.
“You okay, Fenix?”
Hoffman had heard about the incident out at Shenko Falls. Marcus didn’t talk much, but Hoffman knew him well enough by now to guess what would eat at him and what he’d bottle up: hard to read, maybe, but not a poker player. Shaw’s death had hit him hard and it showed. It was in his eyes: that unblinking, slightly defocused, bloodless blue stare.
“Fine, Colonel.”
“You’re due a couple more days’ leave. Go see your dad.” His father was an arrogant asshole. Another useless scientist. All talk. Royal Tyran officer, my ass. Hoffman worked hard at not telling Marcus that. “Might be a long time before you get another chance.”
“He’s a bit busy, Colonel.”
There was no way of interpreting that. Hoffman could guess that the gulf between father and son was a goddamn ocean. Rich kid, happy to give it all up to be a grunt and shovel the shit with the rest of the Gears, and an Embry Star for gallantry, real gallantry: a father who left the army for a nice office job in weapons research and got the Octus Medal, the gong that the rich aristocratic bastards gave one another for being a member of the old boys’ club. The two Fenixes looked alike, but that was all there was as far as Hoffman could see.
“So what can you tell us, Mr. Slader?” Hoffman called, slopping along as carefully as he could.
Parry and the utilities guy turned round at the same time.
“We’ve still got monitoring equipment in some of the pipe runs, but keeping an eye on this is going to mean sending men to walk the course, I’m afraid,” Slader said. “The concrete pours won’t stop them forever. They might even come up the metro, or tunnel along gas mains.”
“Well, that still gives me a map,” Hoffman said. “And it gives me choke points.”
It was a matter of geology. The Ephyran plateau was granite, but volcanic plugs had fissures full of softer deposits that those bastard grubs could dig through like sand. The tough bedrock wasn’t completely grub-proof. It just slowed them down.
But it also funneled them into choke points, and that meant Hoffman could concentrate his fire. They either had to launch a surface assault, in which case the artillery around the city would blow the ugly gray assholes into the middle of next week, or they’d have to dig their goddamn e-holes where his map said they could. He just hoped the geologists were right.
Scientists. Neither use nor fucking ornament, Margaret. No answers.
“You’re a glass-half-full man, Colonel,” Slader said. Hoffman felt something tap gentle against his boot. “Full of what, that’s what worries me.”
He looked down against his will and common sense. But it wasn’t a turd. It was a rat, paddling valiantly with its chin just above the surface and dragging a bow wave like an arrowhead. Hoffman watched it scramble up onto a narrow ledge and begin scaling a cable conduit to the surface. The rat had the right idea. It wanted to get out of this sewage as soon as it could. Hoffman had never realized how squeamish he was about shit until now, but it was all the memories that the stench brought back, everything from the siege at Anvil Gate to that terrible smell when some poor bastard took a shell fragment in the guts.
“C’mon.” Hoffman beckoned to them and started wading back the way he’d come. There was a ledge further down the tunnel like a canal towpath. “Rats generally know what they’re doing.”
The sewers had metal notices bolted to the walls like street signs, indicating the distance to the next junction or manhole and the location above them at street level. ALMAR-CORRELL—50M, the sign said, with a helpful arrow for the hard of understanding. They were heading back to the Almar Street intersection, sunlight, and fresh air.
“I do not want to fight down here,” he said, catching an echo. “They’ll have the advantage.”
“Not if we use flamethrowers,” Rossi said. “That’ll stop a few grubs. Until we run out of fuel, at least.”
“Sewer gas
,” Slader said. “Methane and hydrogen sulfide. Flammable and explosive. It’ll launch the manhole covers into the next block.”
“So it’ll stop a lot of grubs,” Rossi said. “It could collapse the whole system.”
“Mr. Slader, you’re talking to a government that fried half of Sera to stop the Locust,” Hoffman said quietly. Me. I did that. Me and Prescott and Bardry and Adam goddamn Fenix. “Destroying a sewer system to defend our last goddamned city is small change after that.”
Slader’s voice hardened a little. “Let’s hear you say that when the civilians have to dig latrines to get rid of their own waste.”
They walked on in silence, now on the towpath that was punctuated by dim pools of light from the overhead lamps. Hoffman was sure he could see movement ahead. For him—for any Gear—things that lurked in the dark were always the same real-life monster, usually Locust drones but sometimes other equally foul things from the grub menagerie. Someone had taught him to look slightly to one side in semi-darkness to see more detail. All he could recall now was that stuff about rod cells in the eye seeing better than cone cells, and not who’d taught him that, but it always worked. There was definitely something moving. But it was small-scale and it wasn’t lit up or glowing, so he guessed rats again.
Yes, it was definitely rats. He could see them now, huddled on the ledge, reaching up the walls or sniffing around for a way out. The closer he got, the more he could see. Faint splashing and the occasional glop of water made him look around.
“Wow, it’s the whole ratty navy,” Rossi said. “Do they usually hang around in gangs like that?”
Slader grunted. “Hang on.”
Suddenly a beam of white light shot out ahead of Hoffman and he was looking at more rats than he’d ever seen in his life. They were like a moving carpet on every surface, in the water and on the ledge. He stood still, more out of bewilderment than curiosity, and they simply swarmed over his boots or jumped into the water to get past him. Nobody said a word until the rats had moved on.
Gears of War: The Slab (Gears of War 5) Page 5