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

by Karen Traviss

  “By the way,” Dury said. “If either of you have anything useful to contribute on the Lightmass bomb and the resonator, the DRA team would be really grateful.”

  “And I’m supposed to be dead, so how are you going to give them the information?” Adam asked. “Say you had a wonderful idea over coffee and would they mind checking your calculations?”

  Dury looked back over his shoulder, faintly amused. Nevil gave Adam a discreet elbow in the ribs.

  “I’m just an ignorant grunt, Professor,” Dury said, smiling. “I’m expecting someone with your crackerjack IQ to come up with a brilliant plan. Would you like to see their latest efforts?”

  “I suppose Prescott’s asking for full reports from them and they’ve absolutely no idea why a layman would want all that detail.”

  “They think he’s an interfering pain in the ass, yes. But he’s willing to live with that to get you the data you need.”

  “Why do they tell you what they think of him?”

  “They don’t. I find out.”

  Adam followed him down the path in silence, sobered. Dury never made threats. He was obviously a hard man and unafraid of violence, but he never needed to throw his weight around. Adam understood perfectly what he was capable of from his few plain, undecorated words. How long was I under surveillance myself? Was his phone tapped or his mail intercepted? How much had the Onyx Guard now recovered from his home?

  “I’ll certainly take a look,” Adam said. He might have been an annoying hobbyist to the biology team, but nobody could touch him on weapons physics. He needed to feel positive about his skills again, and Nevil probably did too. “But they’ll need better mapping of the tunnels before they deploy it. There may well still be some data in my archives at Haldane Hall.”

  “Yes, we’re recovering what we can. Good of you to leave that for the grubs.”

  “They don’t need to be told what their own tunnels look like, Captain. And they’ll have excavated many more since then.”

  “You still feel sorry for them, don’t you?”

  “No, but I do respect the extraordinary understanding of genetics it takes to create living weapons that bring global powers to their knees.”

  “Not extraordinary enough to sort out the Lambent, though.”

  “Unfortunately not.”

  “But if they did get lucky without your help, then we’d still be exterminated, wouldn’t we?”

  Adam gave up and conceded defeat. He found himself almost liking Dury. It was that inexorable logic, that ability to come back instantly with an argument that put Adam on the spot. Prescott actually seemed fond of him. It must have been a comfort to have the company of a competent, loyal aide who was also smart. Adam suspected that Prescott not only missed the cut and thrust of politics, but also felt increasingly lonely and starved of decent conversation. It was the curse of the intellectually able.

  They were back in the main complex now, strolling through well-tended borders and catching the light spray of water as the breeze whipped through the fountains. It was going to be another balmy day. That was the only kind that Azura had. Dury peeled off to the right to head for the admin center, turning to give them a nod. Adam and Nevil carried on toward the labs.

  “I’ll do the number crunching if you like, Adam,” Nevil said. He still had his Lancer slung over his shoulder, which was getting a few odd looks from passing residents, but he carried it as if it was a seamless part of him just as any Gear did. “I need to polish my self-respect. Make myself useful for a change.”

  “At least you’re young enough to be post-apocalyptic breeding stock.”

  “God, tell me it won’t be with Erica Marling. I’m looking for a girl with a healthy dose of guilt.”

  “I’m glad you’ve still got your sense of humor.”

  “I wasn’t joking, actually.”

  “I don’t want to sound avuncular, Nevil, but don’t make my mistakes. Have a family if you can, a big one.”

  “But you’ve got a family. You’ve still got Marcus. He’s going to be released, trust me on that.”

  “But he’s the last of the Fenix line,” Adam said.

  If only we’d had a brother or sister for him. All those awkward talks he’d had with a teenaged Marcus, all the times he’d told him to be careful with girls because he was wealthy and privileged and had to make the right marriage, not accidentally impregnate some gold-digger and ruin his life. Adam had never imagined that Marcus would take that advice so literally and then devote himself faithfully to an infertile woman like Anya. Was that why he hadn’t married her, because Adam had made him believe that continuing the Fenix line was more important than his happiness? Or had Elain’s distance and disappearance dented his attitude toward women, his willingness to trust them?

  We made him what he is.

  The officer-enlisted barrier could have been made to go away, but Marcus had never been willing to discuss his private life with his father. It was something far more fundamental that held him back. Either way, the Fenix name would die with him.

  “And I’ll be the last of the Estrom line,” Nevil said.

  “You might need to learn to look for Erica’s better points.”

  “I better see the ophthalmologist, then.”

  Esther Bakos was already at her desk when Adam and Nevil stepped out of the elevator. She looked at Adam over her glasses and indicated his desk with a slow nod.

  “You’ve got a visitor,” she said.

  Adam couldn’t see the far side of his desk from there, and Bakos obviously wasn’t going to volunteer a name. Yet again, as foolishly optimistic as a child believing in magic, Adam’s thoughts jumped straight to Marcus even though he knew damn well that Prescott wouldn’t and couldn’t have had him released. Perhaps it was Salaman Bardry. Adam found it hard to talk to him, knowing how everyone had pitied him for blowing his own brains out after deploying the Hammer strikes, as if he was the only one with the decency to do it when Adam, Prescott, and Hoffman had the affront to go on breathing as if nothing had happened. Sometimes Adam wondered how Hoffman—completely charmless, but straight as a die—would react if he heard Bardry was alive and well, living in a lovely apartment with his wife.

  I was with Hoffman. I was with him when he turned the key, knowing his own wife was out there in the strike zone. He did his duty. No wonder he couldn’t cut Marcus any slack.

  It wasn’t Bardry sitting opposite Adam’s desk, though. It was a woman in a navy blue business suit. She had her back to him, reading something, and then she turned: late thirties, perhaps forty, very well groomed but not glamorous, a no-nonsense kind of woman. He knew her from somewhere. He couldn’t recall where, though.

  “Professor Fenix,” she said, getting up to hold out her hand. “It’s been a long time. Interesting here, isn’t it?”

  There was a distinctive bulge under her jacket, and that was what prodded his memory, not her jaw-length brown bob or those sharp features he couldn’t quite place, but the fact she had a pistol in a shoulder holster under her jacket.

  She was a COGIntel agent. She’d been in all the meetings to plan the raid on the UIR facility at Aspho Point, but the name eluded him. He recalled her being rather terse with him when he’d tried to split ethical hairs over the fate of the UIR scientists.

  “I’m very bad with names at my age,” he said, shaking her hand. “My apologies.”

  “Louise Settile,” she said. “COG Intelligence. Aspho. Remember?”

  “Oh, yes, I do.” He found it hard to let go of her hand, as if it had been a happy memory. It hadn’t. If nothing else, it had marked the time when Marcus had retreated behind his defenses for good, devastated by Carlos Santiago’s death. “You look very well indeed, Agent Settile. Have they given you coffee?”

  “Yes, I’m fully caffeinated, thanks, Professor. How are you?”

  “I have been better.” God, did she know what he was doing with the pathogen? No. She was just being polite. And here I am, embroiled in yet an
other deceit. I don’t like myself at all. “Do call me Adam, please. What can I do for you?”

  “Nothing specific. I just wanted to say hello.”

  “You’re rather polite for an intelligence agent who must know why I was brought here.”

  “I know you’ve been a very naughty boy, Adam, but my job’s prevention, not punishment. You’re cooperating on the Lightmass and resonator, aren’t you?”

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I have to be sure. I don’t want to send men into Haldane Hall to risk being killed if you’re not leveling with me.”

  “Dr. Estrom and I will give you every cooperation. How are you going to present our work to the DRA, though?”

  “I’m going to say we’ve recovered discs from your home and we’re gradually reconstructing the data. They’re still having problems processing the resonator imaging.”

  “Yes, that was as far as we’d got when I was detained.”

  “This won’t take you away from your Lambency research, will it?”

  I only need to stand here and metabolize to do that.

  “I’m just a physicist, as Dr. Bakos keeps telling me.” He sat down at his desk and logged into the computer system. A new folder had appeared on his drive, the Lightmass project data. “So you’ve known about Azura for years, I assume.”

  “Yes, since I joined the service nineteen years ago.”

  “Am I the only one who didn’t know? A little surprising to keep this from the Director of the DRA.”

  “Nothing personal, sir, but you’d been identified as a potential risk while you were still a serving Gear.”

  “Too argumentative with the top brass.”

  “Too vocal about defense policy. And your wife was, too.”

  Adam had never realized how observed he’d been for his whole adult life. But then given his line of work, he could hardly object. “Well concealed, though. This is an awfully big project to make invisible.”

  “It’s been a long, slow process. But in a war like this, removing people is much easier than in the Pendulum Wars. By the way, you don’t mind us taking away your pet pedophile, do you? I understand there have been objections from the residents to having him here with so many unsupervised children around.”

  “He’s part of a research project.”

  “I spoke to him yesterday when I flew in. He says he hasn’t given tissue samples for a year, at least.”

  William Alva was Adam’s cover. The samples could have been from any man, and Bakos made sure she was the only person who dealt with him: but if Alva was removed, then the obvious question would be to ask who was providing them now. “Well, that doesn’t mean anything.” Would Settile know he was bluffing? “Who else do you suggest we inject with a live pathogen?”

  “I must admit I’m surprised that you’d tolerate experimentation on human beings, Adam.” Settile smiled. “You gave us hell about neutralizing UIR weapons scientists because they were civilians. It’s much easier for me. I have no moral line except ensuring the survival of the maximum number of COG citizens by any means necessary.”

  Adam tried to feign interest in the file on his screen. It really was quite absorbing. The Lightmass team, or what now passed for it, had gone down a complete dead end in the imaging trials. It was blindingly obvious to him, a correction that would take him and Nevil a week at most with the processing power of the Azura mainframe.

  She knows. Or at least she knows how to make me think she does and start me sweating. That’s her job.

  “I’m afraid I must insist on keeping Alva,” he said at last. “Even if he’s getting undeservedly fat for contributing little to society. You can have him when we’re done with him.”

  “I admire a realist, Adam,” she said. “The stakes are too high, after all.” She got up to go. “I’ll be around pretty frequently if you need anything. If I get the chance when I’m in Jacinto, I’ll look in on your son.”

  There was nothing that COGIntel didn’t know about Adam. They also had access to Marcus any time and could do with him as they pleased. Settile—very competent, very forthright as he recalled—might have been making that point, or simply being kind to a man who was worried about the nightmarish existence his son was enduring. Adam couldn’t decide on her motives, though, and cursed himself for falling into the game of doubt and self-doubt so far and so fast.

  No, she wouldn’t lay a finger on Marcus, if that was what she meant. Prescott needed his cooperation. Sera needed it. The price of that was Marcus’s life and welfare.

  Like Settile said, everyone had their line, their non-negotiable limit. And Adam’s was Marcus.

  THE SLAB: EARLY RISE, 13 A.E.

  “For fuck’s sake,” Ospen said. “I’ve been drafted.”

  He tried to put the phone down but the handset missed the cradle, and it took him a couple of fumbling attempts before he managed it. Yeah, Niko could understand that reaction. Nobody in their right mind would expect a jail to run on a handful of staff. And things weren’t pretty outside the prison walls lately.

  “Sorry,” Niko said. In the background, all he could hear was muffled yapping. Those goddamn dogs just wouldn’t stop barking. “You, Chalcross, and Ling.”

  Ospen rounded on him. He was young enough to be useful at the front, pretty fit even if he wasn’t built like a Gear really needed to be to lug all that armor. It had to happen sooner or later. The grubs were moving further across the plateau every day.

  “You knew?”

  Here we go. “Yesterday. They told me I was going to get cut to half staff. I told them what a bad idea that was, but it was like pissing in the wind, as always.”

  “Why don’t you send Parmenter?”

  “I didn’t get a choice, and anyway, I need someone to look after the dogs.”

  Ospen stood staring at him as if that would change everything. Chalcross had taken it a lot better; he let life bounce off him and got on with things. Now that the Slab was starting to seem less of a safe haven every day, getting a Lancer and the chance to run for it was starting to look like a better bet. Ospen obviously didn’t think so. Ling hadn’t been told yet. He wouldn’t know until he came on shift tonight.

  “I’ve still got stuff to do here,” Ospen said.

  “Oh, I’ll just let the Chairman know you’re declining the invitation, shall I?”

  “I mean it. I’m going to get killed out there.”

  “Gears survive. Talk to Fenix. He’ll tell you how it’s done.”

  “No, I mean I’m going to get killed for sure.” Ospen sort of shook his head, looking past Niko at the wall like he was imagining something terrible being drawn on it, and pinched the tip of his nose. “I mean I took a payment from a guy outside to do him a favor and I haven’t had the chance to do it yet.”

  Niko was almost afraid to ask. Ospen liberated a fair few supplies meant for the inmates and sold them on the black market, but the supply drops were so few and far between that the impact on the general shortages here was academic. Now it had come back to bite him in the ass. Too bad: he’d have to sort out his own shit now.

  “What, exactly?” Niko asked.

  “You don’t want to know. But when this guy finds me, I’m dead. I mean he’s going to have me fucking killed.”

  “What the hell have you done?”

  “I can’t possibly be in deeper shit than I already am, can I?”

  “No. I think that’s a fair assessment. Other than me calling the JD and turning you in, and then they’ll probably shoot you anyway.”

  “Okay, I said I could get a guy out.”

  “Who?” Ah, it had to be Merino. He was smart, a survivor. He always knew when trouble was coming. Niko wondered whether that was a sign to ask the JD to shut down the prison altogether. The inmates had been okay with staying in what seemed to be one of the few safe places left in Jacinto, but now they looked like they were having doubts. “Let me guess. Merino.”

  “No. Fenix.”

  “Wow.�
� Niko wasn’t expecting that at all. A guy like Marcus had friends with titles and ranks who could corner the Chairman at lunch. If they were going to pull Marcus out to do a suicide mission or something, they had a dozen other discreet ways to do it. “Who’s behind that? Do you know?”

  “One of his buddies.”

  “Shit, you’ve taken a bribe from a Gear to spring him?” he asked. “No wonder you don’t want to play soldiers. They’ll skin you alive when they find out.”

  “It’s worse than that. I took the payment from Piet Verdier.”

  The name rang a bell, all right. Niko took a few seconds to dredge up the memory and Ospen’s fear started to make perfect sense. Verdier had been running rackets for years before E-Day, and just like Merino, he was unforgiving in a lose-your-fingers-or-worse kind of way.

  “You really picked the wrong guy to piss off,” he said.

  “Is that all you’ve got to say?”

  “I reckon.”

  “I thought you were Fenix’s guardian angel.”

  “I was told to make sure he survived,” Niko said. What would Fenix do outside? How would Prescott react if he went over the wall? “If the Chairman wanted him out, they’d tell me. Just give the guy his bribe back. Coupons again, was it?”

  “I can’t. I exchanged it all for food.”

  “Well, then you’re really in the shit.” Niko got up from the desk and prepared to do the unthinkable because that was very nearly the last option he had left. Ospen was the least of his problems. “You’d better think of something before you have to hand in your keys.”

  He walked along the gallery, rehearsing his lines. He’d have two officers now to keep a lid on fifty high-risk inmates in a prison that was perched on the edge of disaster, and it just wasn’t going to work without taking extreme measures.

  What the hell do I do?

  How long do I try to hold this together? When do I cut and run?

  Niko had never wanted to be a prison officer, but once he became one he decided that he’d do his best. He couldn’t look Maura in the eye if he didn’t take his job as seriously as she took hers, and the poor woman came home shattered most days. That was when their shifts coincided. He didn’t see her for a week at a time.