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

by Karen Traviss

  “I’ve been keeping a log of Corpser sizes for the last couple of years.”

  “Well, there’s not much entertainment where you are.”

  “You can tell by the size of Corpser what the geology’s like.” Pad managed to shift the Corpser about half a meter. A chunk of carapace and flesh fell away like a steel drum full of jelly. “The smaller the ones they deploy, the narrower the fissures in the granite. And it means they can get a lot further into the plateau than we thought. If they can’t get a grub through a hole, I bet they’ll send in Tickers now. Anywhere.”

  Hoffman walked back to the Packhorse. He felt better for having discharged his weapon, as if he had some control of the situation again. The reality was that he had no goddamn handle on it at all.

  “Well, shit, Pad,” he said. “We’re fresh out of good news, aren’t we?”

  Pad kicked the chunk of Corpser around like he was warming up for thrashball, apparently oblivious of the fact they were in grub territory, but then that was where he now lived his life, a hybrid of Stranded and Gear. “Hey, I ran into a Four-ELI patrol a couple of months ago. First time I’ve ever seen that Cole Train guy. Hell, he’s big. They’ve got this mouthy little gob-shite corporal called Baird, though. He needs a good kicking.”

  He walked back to the Packhorse, rolling another smoke, and flopped into the passenger seat.

  “Come on, Vic,” he said. “I’m ready to face people again. Let’s eat. And just accept there’s not much you could have done differently for Marcus.”

  COG RESEARCH STATION AZURA.

  William Alva was a really charming man. Out of his prison overalls, he looked like a kindly grocer on his day off, and he was clearly both stunned and happy to be on Azura.

  Nevil watched him strolling along the cliff pathway between the headlands as he paused to admire the bobbing lavender heads of wildflowers. It was like walking a potentially boisterous dog, keeping an eye on him in case he went off worrying sheep and upsetting the locals.

  “So we’re taking our pet nonce for a walk.” Dury ambled beside Nevil, one hand resting on the sidearm in his holster. “Aren’t you supposed to have vivisected him by now?”

  “No, I’m a physicist,” Nevil said. “We bang bits of metal together and do sums.”

  “I’m serious, Dr. Estrom. If he isn’t going to be kept locked up in the hospital, I’ve got a serious security problem. And a public confidence issue.”

  Azura had everything except a prison. Nevil wondered if that was sheer naivete about the capacity of people with high IQs to commit crime, but when the COG built this facility in the Pendulum Wars a prison was probably the last thing it thought it would need. One thing it did have was a school with nearly a hundred pupils, because this was where the COG planned to rebuild civilization. The chosen elite had families; at least one generation had already grown up on Azura.

  And word was now getting around that they not only had a convicted pedophile in their civilized paradise, but a homicidal one at that.

  “See Adam about it,” Nevil said. “He says he’s taken all the samples he needs for the time being. Can’t they lock the guy in the isolation ward?”

  “That’s not exactly secure. He’s not just a nonce, he’s a nonce who’s been in the Slab for twenty years and learned a lot of extra bad habits.”

  And that was where Adam’s son was right now. Nevil had met Marcus a few times and never known quite what to make of him, but he knew every damn thing about him—or at least as much as Adam did, and Nevil wasn’t convinced how much that actually was. The two of them didn’t seem to talk anywhere near enough. When they did, it wasn’t always frank. Nevil knew because Adam had the conversations with him that he should have had with Marcus.

  He told me he lied to Marcus as a kid, lied by omission about why Elain went missing. Didn’t tell him he found she was still going on expeditions to the Hollow. The whole Fenix family’s built on silence.

  Alva stopped at the cliff edge and gazed out to sea, probably marveling at the Maelstrom, the impossible artificial storm that should never have been there on such a lovely day. Dury ground to a halt with Nevil. It was as if they were maintaining a cordon sanitaire to avoid breathing anywhere near a pervert.

  “How’s the working relationship with Professor Fenix?” Dury asked, taking a twist of rag paper out of his pocket and flipping it into his mouth. It was a bag of nuts or something. “Can’t have been easy for you, putting the knife in him like that after all those years.”

  Ouch. But Dury was right, if brutal. “Don’t you already know the answer?”

  “Look, I’m special forces, not the intelligence services. Which we haven’t got now, and they were useless farts anyway. It’s a genuine question.”

  “Well, we’re certainly not as close as we used to be,” Nevil said sourly. “And I don’t want to be here anyway.”

  “Well, you’re stuck, Doctor Estrom. Your brother was Duke of Tollen’s, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know you kept trying to enlist. I respect that.” Dury, chewing thoughtfully, watched Alva, eyes scanning without moving his head. “Now, I’ve got to try to rub along with you brainiacs and boffins on a day-to-day basis, and I can’t always tell if you’re bullshitting me about what needs doing or not. If you say something has to happen, and from a security point of view I don’t agree, then I have to make the call. In this case, you’ve got a nonce to do experiments on, but he’s swanning around doing nothing. I was expecting him to be shot full of pathogens and too buggered to be a danger to anyone.”

  “You watch too many movies.”

  “Prescott had him brought here, and that’s one guy who definitely knows the difference between reality and fiction, so what’s going on?”

  “I honestly don’t know, Captain. I’m not a biologist.” Nevil realized Dury had a point. “I know biologists do some research on tissue samples, but for other things they need to observe the results in a whole organism.”

  “Well, let me put it this way.” Dury shoved the paper bag back in his pocket and started walking again. Alva had moved off. “If that whole organism up ahead ends up raping or killing a kid here, I’m not going to be amused. So I’m going to have to lock him up somewhere, and preferably not one of the hospital wards.”

  “Okay,” Nevil said. It didn’t seem unreasonable; why did he need to ask? Maybe he was more worried about upsetting the scientific community here than he let on. “Go ahead.”

  “Is he a biohazard?”

  Nevil had the feeling they didn’t even know yet. “If Dr. Bakos hasn’t quarantined him, he has to be safe to handle. In a manner of speaking.”

  Dury seemed to be considering that. Then he frowned, dropped his shoulders, and let out a parade ground yell that made Nevil’s spine stiffen. “Mr. Alva! Time’s up. Let’s get you back to your presidential suite, shall we?”

  Alva turned around like a man used to being told where to go and what to do. He walked back toward them, frighteningly normal and pleasant. Nevil found himself backing off, more because he was repelled by the idea of the man than by the chance of being contaminated by him—if he was infected, anyway.

  “This is really, really nice,” Alva said, all smiles. “What a lovely place.”

  “And how are you feeling?” Dury asked. “What have they done to you so far?”

  “Oh, just blood tests and skin samples.” Alva patted Nevil on the arm as he passed him to walk ahead of Dury. It made his flesh crawl for no sensible reason. “Small price to pay for being out of that place.”

  Nevil had to ask. He knew damn well that Adam would have already. “Did you see Marcus Fenix?”

  Alva nodded. “The Gear? Oh yes.”

  “How is he?”

  “How do you expect him to be? It’s a vile place. Do you know him?”

  It would be old information anyway. Nevil found himself peeling back onion layers of motive and double-dealing, and just gave up. Maybe it was simply just as it looked—B
akos had wanted a live human subject, and nobody would miss a pedophile or shed a tear for him if it ended badly.

  “Sort of,” Nevil said.

  “Not very nice to tell him his dad’s dead, though, is it? I mean, that poor professor. But I understand. And it’s not as if I can ever go back, is it?”

  “Very true.” Dury motioned Alva to move on. “You certainly won’t be leaving Azura for the foreseeable future.”

  “Suits me,” said Alva. “Thank you.”

  Dury took a few paces and then turned to look back at Nevil as he unslung his Lancer. “You going to see the Prof?”

  “Yes.” Nevil’s eyes were suddenly on the rifle. It wasn’t so much that Dury looked as if he was worried that Alva would slip away to prey on some kid. It was the rifle itself. Nevil had seen Lancers hundreds, thousands of times, so much part of the Gears around him in Jacinto that sometimes he didn’t even notice them. But now he did, and there was something he needed to do. “Captain, can I ask a favor of you?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Would you train me to use a Lancer, please? For whatever favor you want in return.”

  Dury took a few seconds to nod. “Certainly. Every man should know how to handle a firearm these days.”

  Civilians in Tyrus weren’t routinely armed. That was how much faith the citizens put in their Gears. “And—well, think of something by way of payment.”

  “Reach Gear proficiency,” Dury said, almost smiling. “That’ll be my reward.”

  Nevil pondered that as he watched him walk away, then carried on up the cliff path to the observation point. He cut through the water gardens with their tinkling streams trickling over gold stone and headed back to the Landa Tower. He tried hard to care about Alva, but he was still tormented by the what-ifs of alerting the world to the existence of the Locust before E-Day. The platform elevator to the top floor rose at a leisurely pace, giving him time to marshal his thoughts.

  I need to thrash this out with Adam. I can’t spend the rest of my life being cooked by my own anger.

  It was surprisingly hard to stay angry. Nevil knew people who kept grudges for years, polishing them to a perfect hateful brightness, but he didn’t have the stamina for that. Anger was an animal, he decided. At some point it became detached from its source, a creature in its own right that needed care and feeding, and then it became like a pet that had outlived the first few days of novelty for a spoiled child. It was a source of guilt. You had to take it for walks, while all the time you wished someone would take it off your hands. Nevil felt he had to be outraged by Adam’s arrogant irresponsibility because the man had done some appalling things, but what he’d done was so vast that it was impossible to connect to the human scale of it.

  Like the Hammer of Dawn. I suppose I killed millions too. Billions, maybe. My calculations. My work. Yet I never so much as threw a punch at another human being.

  If he had to work on being outraged, then it probably wasn’t the feeling that was tearing him apart. Maybe it was being excluded. Adam had been a mentor, a friend, almost a father for fifteen or sixteen years, and that had to count for something.

  But he confided in me. It was years too late, yes, but he told me. He couldn’t tell Marcus. He couldn’t tell his own son. Either he thought I’d understand better, or my anger and disappointment was easier to take than Marcus’s.

  Only the people you truly cared about had the power to hurt you.

  The Landa Tower became more of a maze on the top floors. Nevil left the main lift and worked his way up smaller elevators to the penthouse suite. No wonder Esther Bakos was so pissed off about Adam’s arrival. He hadn’t even been on the must-take personnel list, but he ended up with the best apartment and effective control of the Lambency project. A damn physicist, too. Feathers were ruffled, and there was no terror and destruction outside to focus minds on the real issue as there was in Jacinto.

  Nevil walked down the corridor and rapped on the door of the penthouse. It opened remotely, because when it slid back, Adam was sitting at his antique mahogany desk shuffling papers. Nevil had never been up here before.

  “Hi, Adam.” It was easier to plunge in on an impersonal note. “Why the sealed door?”

  “I have a small lab up here,” Adam said. “It’s all designed for containment of some kind. I don’t think it was meant for a physicist.” He managed a sad smile, then stood up. “Come in, Nevil. Coffee machine’s working. Just like the DRA, isn’t it?”

  Nevil sat down on one of the sumptuous leather sofas. The suite of rooms reminded him more of Haldane Hall than the office, and he wondered if Prescott had moved Adam here like a kindly zookeeper because it was similar to his natural environment, or if it was simply the easiest place to keep an eye on him. “Are they keeping you up to speed about Marcus?”

  Adam disappeared into another room and came out with a silver coffee pot and two porcelain cups. “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “He’s not thriving. He ended up … well, getting a thrashing.”

  Nevil had already heard the gossip but it didn’t make that any easier to hear straight from Adam. It was hard to express his genuine sympathy without making Adam feel even worse. “They’re taking it out on him, are they?” Nevil said. “I’m really sorry. Honestly.”

  “Should be me in there, shouldn’t it?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No. I did. Look, proper brown sugar lumps. No saccharine.” Adam plopped the sugar into the cups. “I can’t complain about being confined here when he’s going through that. So, are we talking again?”

  “I suppose we are. Look, you’re in trouble, and you probably spent more time and effort on me than you did on Marcus, and I can’t just forget all that.” Nevil said it sincerely, but he saw Adam wince. “I’m not going to pretend I’m not … well, disgusted. Hurt. Shocked. I’ve still not worked it all out. I still can’t believe you did it. But we’re both prisoners, and we can do more to solve problems if we’re not embroiled in some feud.”

  The silence hung there. Adam probably needed to feel he wasn’t alone, and this was maybe the first time that his self-sufficiency had buckled in his adult life. Nevil felt for him. It was impossible not to. He wasn’t malicious, just surprisingly naive for a man with such a prodigious intellect and real combat experience.

  “The interesting thing about being a traitor among scientists,” Adam said, “is that they don’t resort to a lynch mob. We’re all so very civilized. Sometimes I wish people would just punch me and get it over with.”

  “Sometimes I feel like I could oblige you.”

  “I have no defense other than naive overconfidence.”

  “You know how hard I’m trying to come to terms with what you did?” Nevil asked. “I started thinking that if you’d sounded the alarm as soon as you knew about the Locust, then perhaps we’d have launched an early strike and actually wiped them out before they emerged. But then we wouldn’t have found out about the Lambent. So there might have been purpose to this.”

  “Or we might have cooperated with the Locust on research and found a solution.”

  “If you’d believed that was possible, you’d have done it.”

  “I would.”

  “Is there anything you’re still not telling me about this? Like the Sires?”

  “I knew nothing about that. I know almost nothing now.”

  Nevil realized he was grasping at anything that might vindicate Adam. He’d heard the gossip about the Sires. The COG had its own mucky research. That might have been enough to justify keeping the existence of the Locust—and the Lambent—from Adam’s political masters. But life wasn’t that simple, and Nevil accepted that there would never be a neat, clear-cut answer that would put things right for him again.

  “I just ran into our resident pervert,” he said, forcing himself to change the subject. They both knew where they stood now. “Alva. Seriously, Adam, are you really using him for research?”

  Adam sipped
his coffee in silence for a while, glasses sliding down to the tip of his nose. The gilt clock on the mantelpiece clicked with a slow, steady heartbeat.

  “No,” he said at last. “I’m not. Enough secrets, Nevil. I’ve told Esther this, and I’m telling you, but I’d rather that was as far as it went. Prescott mustn’t know.”

  “Know what?”

  “I’ve done enough morally dubious things in my life and I don’t need any more on my conscience. I’ve forbidden Esther to use the prisoner. I’m inoculating myself with the Lambent pathogen—”

  “No, no. Hold it.” Nevil’s scalp tightened. “Stop right there. I’m not a biologist, but I know that’s not inoculation. That’s infection. Are you insane? You don’t know a damn thing about this organism.”

  “I need to provide Esther with data on how it reproduces in a whole organism. We can’t do this with tissue samples alone. We have to know what this thing does before it jumps the species barrier to us.”

  “You have no idea what it’ll do to you. No goddamn idea at all. And you’re just helping it jump, haven’t you? What the hell are you thinking?”

  Adam held up his hand for silence, doing that little dismissive head shake that he always used to trash a suggestion. “There’s a long tradition in medicine of self-experimentation among doctors. We wouldn’t have a cure for gastric ulcers or half of our anesthetics without their taking that risk.”

  “Doctors, Adam. Not people with doctorates. Medical doctors. Men and women who knew what they were doing.”

  “But they didn’t. That’s what experimentation is.”

  “You’ve already done it, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh my God …”

  Nevil found himself looking into Adam’s face for signs of symptoms. He had no idea what form Lambency might take in a human, but Adam looked worried and tired, nothing more than that. He’d been looking that way for a long time, so he was fine by Adam Fenix standards.

  “It’s a wonderful incentive for finding a cure, anyway,” Adam said.

  “That’s not funny.” Nevil gestured to his coffee cup. What if this is airborne, or spread by contact? He tried hard to stay rational, but the primal fear of contagion was hard to keep in check. “How the hell do you know you’re not going to transmit this to everyone else?”