Hoffman turned. Slader still had his flashlight on the water and Marcus was peering over the edge. Hoffman couldn’t work out what had grabbed his attention until he saw something small and brown bouncing up and down and realized it was the whiskered nose of a rat that couldn’t get out of the water. It was struggling to climb up the slippery stonework. Marcus dangled his boot over the edge to let the creature scramble aboard, then drew it in so the rat could jump to safety on the ledge. It raced away to catch up with its buddies.
“Guess what’s spooked them,” Marcus said. From time to time Hoffman got a rare glimpse of a kindlier Marcus under that unsmiling veneer and piratical do-rag. It always surprised him. Few men would stop to resue a rat. “Got to be grubs.”
“They react to vibrations,” Slader said. “Might be tunneling further down the line.”
“Okay, you keep an eye on the network and flash me or Parry as soon as you spot anything,” Hoffman said. “We better get back up top. I’ve been out of radio contact for too long.” Hoffman could see the shaft of sunlight long before he reached the metal ladder and looked up. It was like gazing on the constellations when lost at sea: salvation beckoned. He climbed the rungs and heaved himself out the manhole on his hands, reassured at nearly sixty that he could still lift his own weight. The sky was dotted with white cloud and dispersing balls of black smoke that could have been from downed Reavers or Ravens. He needed to catch up with that fast.
“You stink, sir.” Corporal Aigle, the radio operator, was waiting with a stirrup pump full of disinfectant. He hosed down Hoffman’s boots without asking permission and moved on to Marcus and Rossi. “Wipe your feet before you go into CIC.”
Hoffman knew he’d shower and scrub himself raw tonight and still not feel clean. He shook off the water and started heading up the road toward the old Bank of Tyrus headquarters, now commandeered as the COG area command center. “Fenix, you and Rossi take your squads and do another sweep for refugees south of La Croix Boulevard. They keep creeping back in and I don’t want anything inhibiting our ability to fight, understand? Clear them out.”
“Understood, Colonel.”
Marcus jogged off with Rossi. Hoffman watched him go and wished he had a whole damn brigade of Fenixes. He could always rely on the man to deliver. Maybe he didn’t deliver for Anya Stroud, but Hoffman decided that wasn’t any of his business and she was old enough—and tough enough, despite appearances—to look after herself on that front.
Entering the command center was surreal. Hoffman walked past the sentry and a wall of sandbags that looked more like bricks. Out of curiosity, he picked one up and hefted it.
“Fifties, sir,” the Gear said. “Best fit. Nice color, too.”
Hoffman pulled the drawstring. The rough hessian bag was stuffed with fifty-dollar bills. That was Gears for you: pragmatic and resourceful, and left to their own devices in a bank, they made the most of it. Currency was no use for spending in a world surviving on barter. But bills still made good kindling and wadding.
“Tell me you’ve done something creative with the bullion bars,” Hoffman said.
“Better see Lieutenant Stroud about that, sir. Comes under designer accessories.”
Hoffman took familiar comfort from the fact that even staring a grub assault in the face, Gears still had a sense of humor. He made his way up the stairs from the lobby and into the maze of offices on the mezzanine floor above.
There weren’t as many personnel about this time. Everyone who could fight and wasn’t critically essential in support roles was on the front line now. If anyone got killed in here, then there was nobody to take their place.
We’re running on empty. But this place isn’t going to be an easy nut to crack.
The bank was as safe a bet as any building in Ephyra. It was designed to be criminal-proof, and that meant it was almost as secure as a military bunker. It had to withstand tunneling, frontal assault, and incursions via the roof. Its windows were toughened glass and the basement was two floors of steel vaults. The layout wasn’t ideal for a headquarters, but beggars couldn’t be choosers these days. Hoffman pushed open a door with FOREIGN HOLDINGS painted out and COMMCEN stenciled over the raised letters to find Anya Stroud hunched over a leather-topped mahogany desk, one radio headset pressed to her left ear while she listened to another on her right. Somehow none of the frantic activity had mussed her neatly pinned blonde hair.
He gave her a hands-up gesture to indicate he’d wait for her to finish. A pile of papers on the desk was weighted down against the fierce draft of a fan by a single gold bullion bar.
“You need a couple of hours sleep, Lieutenant,” he said as she put down the headset. “Nice paperweight.”
“You can club drones with it, too, sir.”
“I’d rather you had a sidearm.”
“I haven’t requalified with a pistol for a couple of years.”
“You’re Helena Stroud’s daughter. That competency’s genetic.”
Anya managed a smile. She was a good-looking girl, just like her mother had been, and yes, at his age, he still reserved the right to call a thirty-something woman a girl.
“Do you want a sitrep now?” she asked. “I’ve got some gaps, though. Radios are down in one sector and we’re waiting for someone to get a message back.”
“Give me what you’ve got.”
Anya pushed herself back from the desk and went over to the map tacked to the wall. The colored pins on it looked new, probably another unexpected treasure looted from the bank’s stores. Hoffman could see the situation for himself, but Anya was always meticulous about briefings.
“We’ve got all the potential ingress points covered,” she said, “but we’ve had Reavers targeting the Hammer and artillery positions, so Major McLintock deployed another squadron of Ravens while you were out of contact.” She looked as if she was taking a breath to allow him ranting space, but for once McLintock had done what Hoffman would have done himself and he said nothing. “No emergence reports yet.”
Hoffman leaned closer and traced his forefinger along the river, reminded how much he was depending on holding the main bridge—Chancery. His forces needed them in one piece to be able to move south quickly rather than detouring more than a hundred klicks north, or else he would have blown them up by now to stop the grubs using them to penetrate West Ephyra. He dragged his finger along the map to Correll Road, the wide street that led into Correll Square and the center of the financial district.
“My money’s still on a major emergence here,” he said. “All the utility tunnels and the shortest distance to key targets. As long as we can hold the bridges, we can use Correll as a choke point.”
“Got you, sir. Major Tomas has Chancery Bridge buttoned down tight.”
“He’s going to need to keep it that way.”
“And you’re going to stay at the command post, sir?”
Anya was asking if he planned to do the sensible thing as the Chief of Defense Staff and stay in CIC. She had to know him better than that.
“Until I’m too senile to fight, Lieutenant. Besides, I’ve got to keep an eye on Fenix.”
“Thanks, sir,” she said. He could have sworn she blushed. “And you’re going to stay in radio range now, aren’t you?”
“I’ll take that as an order.” Hoffman touched the peak of his cap. Marcus really needed to get his shit together where that girl was concerned. “Keep your head down, Anya.”
Hoffman walked back to the command post at the junction of Almar and Correll, not only because it was quicker to walk than find a Packhorse, but because his Gears needed to see him out there with them. The post looked more like an oversized stall at a country fair, no real fortification except a sangar made of sandbags and concrete blocks. Aigle had set up a radio desk and a solid fuel stove. Well, there was water, there was ammo, there was space to curl up and get a few minutes’ sleep, and there was an empty tin to take a leak in. Hoffman could live here until the grubs came.
“Don’t
mind me, Corporal,” he said, and pulled up an empty ammo crate to sit and stare down Correll Road, waiting for the inevitable.
HALDANE HALL, EAST BARRICADE, JACINTO.
It was too late to make excuses, and too late to talk to Myrrah again.
Adam had to use a smaller-scale map to chart the forward edge of the Locust advance. It was the one centimeter to one kilometer TGS chart that showed street detail, its glazed paper covered in pencil notes and cracked from years of folding and unfolding.
He would never discard it even if it fell to pieces. It had been Elain’s. She’d marked all her field surveys on it, every spot she’d visited to take samples and the date she’d collected them.
You knew. You understood, long before I had any idea. You were always smarter than me. More intellectually rigorous.
Just one more minute. Just one more chance to talk to you again. I’d give anything for that.
Did you meet Myrrah? She never said.
Elain had been gone nearly twenty years now. He hoped she’d been dead for all that time, because the thought of her held underground by the Locust was more than he could face. He’d found some of her remains in the tunnels—arm bones and scraps of fabric he recognized all too well. He’d kept what he’d found out about her disappearance from Marcus, at first because it begged too many questions about why she’d gone into the tunnels at all, and then it became a habit because he just didn’t have the courage to tell his son. It was a repeating pattern, and Adam accepted that. He’d kept the Locust secret from everyone until it had all blown up in his face.
I thought I was an honest man. A decent man. But I lie by omission. And they’re big, big lies.
Marcus never asked questions. Even as a grown man, he seemed to accept that one of Elain’s forays into the caverns around Ephyra had ended in disaster because the Locust were waiting down there and nobody knew.
Rock shrews. It had all started with damned rock shrews.
Adam refolded the map for a moment to clear some space on his desk. He needed to look at the creatures again. Elain had been collecting specimens while he was still serving in the Pendulum Wars, and hadn’t said a word until she presented him with the evidence—a small, velvet-furred creature preserved in formaldehyde, nothing special until she X-rayed and dissected it, and found the mutations. Like most of the other shrews she’d analyzed, it had an extra pair of vestigial legs concealed under its skin.
We always had secrets. She had hers, and I have mine. What kind of a family are we? No wonder Marcus doesn’t talk much.
Adam opened the cupboard and carefully removed the stacks of filing boxes that hid the specimen jars from casual view. He took out a couple and held them up to the light. The sight of the specimens always made him feel sick and breathless, as if they were eternally drowning in the straw-yellow fluid and he was drowning with them. One was the rock shrew that Elain had showed him so proudly before he deployed to the Kashkur front nearly thirty years ago. The other was something else entirely.
It still seemed to be alive.
He set both jars down on the table and let the liquid settle for a moment. The rock shrew rolled slowly and settled on the bottom, a sailor lost to the deep. The other specimen—four legs and two vestigial stumps now clearly visible through its fur—floated before sinking, then flipped over. It twitched a few times. The longer Adam looked, the more he could see the faint yellow luminescence that wasn’t a trick of the light. It was real. The mutated shrew was long dead, but the bioluminescent parasite within it was still biding its time, just as Myrrah had said.
It’s odd to be on first-name terms with the Locust Queen. Clever woman, Myrrah. Not as clever as you, Elain, but a fine mind nonetheless.
Myrrah was the first to call this organism Lambent.
And the name had spread through Adam, just as the glowing material was spreading itself, infecting more Locust drones, and Gears were now reporting seeing them on the surface.
The phone rang. This time he had only to reach across his desk to grab it, afraid to miss a call in case it was bad news about Marcus. He almost knocked over the jars in his haste, steadying them one-handed as he shoved the receiver between ear and shoulder.
It was Nevil. “Just checking you’re okay, Adam,” he said. “You’re normally in early.”
Adam glanced up at the clock. Damn, he was over an hour late. “Sorry. I got caught up in some paperwork.” Elain’s notes: all we’ve got that can save us now. “I’ll be in at lunchtime.”
“I need to show you something. We’re missing some files.”
“Oh?”
“Old stuff. I decided to catch up on archiving while you were away, and—well, long story short, we’re missing some grub autopsy reports. I know it’s not our department, but I’m the monitor-evaluator type, as you know.”
Damn. Damn, damn, damn. “They’ll turn up.” Adam knew he should have copied them and brought them back. It was all so long ago. He hadn’t thought anyone would go looking that far back. “It’s not as if it’s information the Locust can exploit.”
“And I found a really odd image. I need to show it to you.”
“When was it taken?” Adam was expecting something new, something from the Locust advance. He reached into the cupboard and fumbled for a sealed box of glass vials, phone still wedged under his ear. “What kind of image? Diagnostic?”
Then Nevil said something that made his stomach flip over. “Photo. I think it’s an emergence hole that predates E-Day. In fact, I know it is.”
Adam struggled for words. “Where did it come from?”
“No idea yet. I’ll work it out.”
“You always were meticulous, Nevil.” From the day he’d joined Adam as a shy, awkward research assistant, Nevil had been the one who checked and rechecked every line, every detail, every calculation, the human safety net who caught the errors and spotted the inconsistencies. Without him, the Hammer might have taken even longer to develop. He was exemplary; Adam had been fiercely proud of him when he’d been awarded his own doctorate. Now he was becoming a nemesis. “I’ll see you later.”
Adam put the phone down. Everything was starting to unravel.
His heart was pounding. He wasn’t sure if it was because signs of his deceit were surfacing, or because he knew he had very little time to prepare to move his research to a safer place.
If the Locust penetrated further into Ephyra, they’d destroy everything in their path. His history with them would probably count for nothing now.
“Time’s up,” he muttered. “You knew this would happen one day.”
Adam put the specimen jars and the sealed vials into his briefcase with Elain’s notes. She’d been a developmental biologist, and rock shrew cell differentiation had been her specialist area. She’d thought the six-legged shrew was the descendant of a much bigger and extinct animal that had lived on in folk memory as monster myths. She couldn’t have known then that it was a much more recent mutation. She simply recorded the cell changes.
This is what Lambency does.
This is all I have to work with.
He was a physicist by training, and a competent engineer. He’d always tried to keep abreast of other disciplines. But now he was trying to be a biologist without any possibility of conferring with scientists in that field. There were no experienced biologists left, and even if there had been, how could he explain to them why he was pursuing this line of research?
I met the Locust Queen, you see, and she told me her species was fighting for survival against a parasitic organism in their tunnels. I promised I’d help her destroy it if she kept her people underground and left humanity alone … but I failed. So can you help me out?
Adam tried to imagine the reaction, like he’d tried to imagine Marcus’s. Now he tried to imagine Nevil’s. Everyone he respected and cared about would spit in his face. He knew it, and he knew he deserved it.
It took him fifteen minutes to pack the rest of the specimens. The tissue samples that Myrrah ha
d given him still showed some bioluminescence after all these years and were sealed as biohazards. He had no idea what to do with them. He couldn’t just stroll into La Croix University and ask to borrow their glove box. But he was out of his depth now, and the time had come to share what he knew regardless of the personal consequences.
They’ll jail me. Or shoot me.
He realized he was thinking in terms of having to abandon the house, getting ready to withdraw to the center of Jacinto at short notice. The briefcase and folders stacked on his study floor said it for him. What would he do about the art and historical artifacts? Haldane Hall was more a collection than a home. He remembered stumbling over a priceless silver horse statuette in the rubble of a bombed museum in Shavad, and Lieutenant Helena Stroud’s reaction to his sorrow at seeing such a rare and ancient treasures waiting to be looted and melted down in a desperate, war-torn world.
Paintings. Statues. Things. Not people.
Adam walked along the landing, gazing at the art on the walls and wandering in and out of the bedrooms while he plucked up courage to do what had to be done. They were snapshots of lives lived. Marcus’s room was much as he’d left it—neat, sparsely furnished, impersonal, a few half-read books lined up on the shelf with neatly torn strips of plain paper as bookmarks, pants and shirts arranged by color in the closet. Marcus had never needed to be told to tidy his room. In the bedroom Adam had shared with Elain, perfume and brushes still sat on the exquisite Silent Era dressing table on a glass tray. Adam picked up the bottle to spray a mist on the air and inhale it. It was a carefully rationed act of remembrance. The scent was no longer made and now it was changing, oxidizing slowly year by year, but it was still close enough to the original fragrance to trigger poignant memories that brought the pressure of tears to the back of his palate.
He put the cap back on the crystal bottle, made himself forget again, and went downstairs to the laboratory.
Gears of War: The Slab (Gears of War 5) Page 6