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

by Karen Traviss

  He opened the driver’s door and put the bundle on the seat, then untied it to reveal a shiny brown loaf. The heady aroma of freshly baked bread filled the compartment as he tore the bread into chunks. “Okay, who’s up for a nice bit of sourdough?” he asked. “I had to trade my virginity for this again, so I hope you assholes are grateful.”

  “Baby, you’re supposed to pay her,” Jace laughed.

  “She’s not like that. Is it my fault that women always want to exploit my affectionate and trusting nature?” Rossi chewed contentedly. “Now, Dom, are you going to tell me what the problem is, or do I have to beat it out of you?”

  “What problem?”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit. I’m a sergeant. I’ve got eyes in my ass. I know your every thought. Look at you.”

  I just have to brazen this out. “I’m okay,” Dom said.

  “Yeah, and you’ve stopped at every working public phone we’ve passed for the last month or two, so I’m guessing you’ve got trouble.” Rossi licked his fingers and wiped them on his pants before brushing the crumbs off the seat. “Which means it’s a lead on Maria, or it’s about Marcus. Am I right?”

  Dom just sat staring at the back of Jace’s head. Rossi started the engine and took the radio handset off the dash, thumb resting on the button.

  “Okay, that’s three-stripes-right, then,” he said. “Maria? Is there money involved? I can always get intel out of Stranded, Dom. For free.”

  Dom found himself shaking his head purely out of reflex. “Look …”

  “It’s Marcus, then. Smuggling stuff into jail for him?”

  Rossi never gave up. A couple of Reavers streaked overhead, pursued by a Raven, and he didn’t move a muscle. The explosion and fall of debris was so close that small fragments rattled on the Packhorse’s roof. Jace and Tai said nothing. It was a long, awkward moment.

  “Getting him out,” Dom said at last. “Which is why I never said.”

  “I’m not going to stop you.”

  “No, but if you know, then—”

  “I’m just pissed off that you didn’t ask me if I wanted in.” Rossi slipped the gear lever and pulled out from the curb. “So, while we’re on our way, you can bring me up to speed.”

  They were heading for the Andius highway. Nobody except Gears patrols ever ventured past the wire to Andius these days, but the road was a handy defensive position to set up mobile artillery and air defenses on the western side of the city. Now the grubs had taken a kilometer of road and a corridor of the suburbs next to it.

  They’d been sitting there for days, just blocking the road and driving off counterattacks.

  Dom tried to work out what they were stalling for. Were they waiting for reinforcements? Did they know something else was coming, and just wanted to stop the COG moving heavy armor for a while?

  Nobody could afford to wait and find out. The grubs had to be beaten back. They’d almost reached West Barricade to the south of the highway, and they were already in control of East Barricade. There was now just a strip between the two districts that the COG still held.

  And that was why the Slab was cut off on its isolated spur of granite. Dom was clear what he was fighting for today.

  “Okay, I paid a guy to spring Marcus, but it depends on a supply truck making a drop to the Slab,” he said at last.

  Rossi didn’t bat an eye. “And what are you going to do with him when you get him out? Hide him in someone’s attic? Yeah, he’ll love that. He’ll just wait it out, good as gold.”

  “I’ll worry about that when I have to.” Dom knew that was going to be tough, but it’d be far easier to think of something when he was face to face with Marcus and could talk some sense into him. “All that matters is I get him out of that shithole.”

  “Is he still refusing to take phone calls?”

  “Yeah. He’s working hard on not existing.”

  “And someone’s going to stroll in and kidnap him. Because that’s what it’s going to take.”

  “Yeah.”

  Rossi turned the corner past a temporary soup kitchen, where families driven out of the suburbs during the last grub assault were having lunch doled out to them. Dom found it easy not to worry about where they slept and how they got through the day. But then he’d wonder where Maria was right now, and who was making sure she got fed, and seeing the displaced folks suddenly became too much for him. Maria had hardly been able to put a meal on the table before she walked out of the house and never came back.

  “I’d bet that if you asked any pilot to do an extraction, they’d have said yes,” Rossi said. “You’ve had years to ask us. We could have come up with a scam to walk Marcus out of there with forged papers or some admin shit that Anya could—”

  “No, there’s no Anya in this,” Dom said. “She doesn’t know. Keep her out of it.”

  Rossi shrugged. “Okay, but if this doesn’t work, I reserve the right to come up with a better idea. Like when they have to evacuate the prison. Because they will, sooner or later. You ever think of that?”

  The Packhorse rolled past the old city walls that ran parallel to the north of East Barricade, passing a column of ’Dills heading the other way. Rossi switched radio channels so they could hear the voice traffic on the open net.

  “KR-Six-One to Control, we’ve got eyes on six or seven Brumaks in position.”

  “Roger that, Six-One. Any movement?”

  “Breaking off, Control, Reavers on my six.”

  “How’s Mathieson doing?” Jace asked, as if none of that was happening.

  “Having physio now,” Rossi said. “Hoffman’s promised him a job in Ops or CIC once they get him a wheelchair.”

  “Can’t keep that guy down.” Jace shoved a few more clips into his belt. “So, we still goin’ into the sewer?”

  “That’s the idea. If that’s how they’re moving around between East Barricade and the road, we burn ’em out.”

  “Without blowing up the city.”

  “They’ve trashed the whole sector anyway,” Rossi said. “Worst we can do is blow up grub-held areas.”

  Dom started thinking about accessing the Slab through the sewer system and made a mental note to ask Staff Sergeant Parry for a look at the utility company’s plans. They’d had a thousand prisoners inside at one time, so there still had to be a fair-sized sewerage network under there.

  No, that’s never going to work. Forget the commando stuff. You’re ignoring the big problem. Marcus isn’t going to cooperate with any of this unless he absolutely has to. Rossi was right.

  Maybe Verdier would have somewhere outside the wire where he could stash Marcus for a while. The guy did business with everyone. Dom would check that out as soon as he got back.

  If I get back.

  “Okay, pegs on noses, lads,” Rossi said. “It’s shit-kicking time.”

  He brought the Packhorse to a halt on the embankment opposite East Barricade, where the sappers were drilling test bores. The terraces, redoubts, and sloping banks were the remnants of Jacinto’s ancient fortifications from an era when Tyrus had a monarchy and the COG was still centuries away. There’d always been a Haldane Hall here. Sometimes Dom thought about just how long the Fenix family had lived there, and reminded himself that the guy he thought of as an older brother was actually part of the history of the state, with all kinds of responsibilities and expectations that Dom couldn’t really begin to imagine. He looked down at the ruined mansion half a kilometer away and found it hard to make the connection. Lennard Parry wandered up to Rossi and held up a tattered blueprint.

  “Change of plan,” Parry said. He indicated a route on the plan with his finger. “I think they’re getting in through the western outfall sewer and tunneling across into the next one. But we’ve sampled the air down there and it’s not just sewer gas. It’s full of manufactured methane too.”

  “What, they’ve ruptured some gas pipes?”

  “Got it in one. They’re pretty careless diggers, Corpsers.”

&nb
sp; “So we can’t operate down there.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend starting a firefight unless you want to be the first man in space.”

  “Okay, so we just lay some charges and press the button.”

  “I’ve spoken to Hoffman. He says if it stops them bringing up reinforcements for a few weeks, then he’ll live with the damage. It’s not like we can use the sewer now anyway. The utility company won’t shut off the gas until we ask them to. They’ve accepted we’re going to shove a nice big fireball through the system.”

  “We’ll take care of that for you, then. Might as well, seeing as we’re here.”

  “Very decent of you, Drew. I’d love to spend an hour not up to my knees in other people’s crap for a change.”

  “Okay, start clearing your guys out and get the utility company to shut down at their end.” Rossi beckoned to Dom and the others. “My lovely commando-trained assistant here will rig some charges. Jace, you ever done this? Watch Dom and learn.”

  “This really is blowing shit up, right?” Jace said.

  “Very witty.” Parry handed out flashlights and a hand-drawn map that looked like the Jacinto metro. “Crack on with it. Because once we do this, we’ve got to run like hell.”

  Dom took the canvas rucksack of charges and wires and lowered himself through the manhole to climb down the metal ladder. The sewer was one of the grand old Age of Silence wonders, an amazing construction project for its time, but it was showing its age. The brick lining of the vaulted ceiling had crumbled away in various places. At times like this, Dom regretted not wearing a helmet. He stepped down into the water—calf-high, nothing too deep—and switched on the flashlight.

  “Wow.” Jace dropped down after him, followed by Tai and Rossi. “Look at all that damn carving. Why’d they bother, when there’s only turds and rats gonna see it?”

  The pillars and walkways along the length of the sewer were beautifully decorated with stylized flowers and rope-edged borders. It did seem a waste of effort. “Because they could,” Dom said. “Kind of proving how rich and sophisticated they were.”

  “And we’re gonna blow it up.”

  “Don’t get all cultural on me,” said Rossi. “Just think of the plastic pipe guys and all the paying work they’ll have one day.”

  The air smelled like the city after a grub strike—the strong sulfur odor that the utility company added to gas so they could detect leaks. That got Dom’s attention much more than the sewage smells. He listened for grubs, hearing only trickling water.

  “Okay, lay charges every ten meters,” he said. “Mount ’em on the walls with a thirty-second delay, because if we can’t get a radio signal down here, then we need to detonate before we climb out. Should be easy to jam a spike in the pointing and keep them clear of the water.”

  “How far are we gonna go in?” Jace asked.

  “We’ve got enough charges for five hundred meters. That’s more than enough to collapse the sewer, let alone ignite the methane.”

  Tai and Rossi went ahead to check out the tunnels, flashlight beams bouncing off the walls and the surface of the water. That meant using their Lancers one-handed or dropping the flashlights. Parry wouldn’t thank them for that. Dom stopped a couple of times to make sure Jace was wiring the dets properly as they waded further down the tunnel.

  Splashing made Dom look up. Tai was jogging toward him. Rossi appeared a few seconds later.

  “We hear them,” Tai whispered. He put his finger to his lips. “The grubs are down here.”

  “How close?”

  Rossi aimed his flashlight at a point on the map. “Hundred, two hundred meters from about here, possibly. Hard to tell with the acoustics.”

  “You want us to keep laying more dets?”

  “Another fifty meters, then we get out and blow the place. Can’t risk a firefight down here.”

  “Unless we have to.”

  “Dom, suicide missions make terrific movies, but I’d rather keep trained guys for another day. Let’s do it.”

  They waded on and placed more charges at the next ten-meter interval, and the next three, and then waited for a moment in silence. Dom was unsettled both by what he could see and not see. As he shone his light on the water, he watched it shiver like a cup of coffee on an unsteady table. And there were no rats. He’d expected the sewer to be full of them, but they’d gone a long way into the sewer and seen nothing at all. The grubs were excavating somewhere. The rats were too smart to hang around.

  “I think we’d better go now,” he said.

  Rossi edged up to a junction with another tunnel and peered around the corner. “Yeah,” he said. “Good time to clock off, I reckon. I can hear splashing.”

  If the grubs were coming their way and wading through the water, then they probably wouldn’t hear over the sound of their own splashing if anyone broke into a run. Dom was willing to risk slipping on some shit and falling in. They’d have thirty seconds to get out of the manhole and put as much distance as they could between them and the sewer. It seemed to take forever to get back to the ladder and for a moment Dom thought they’d taken the wrong turn. Then the light levels rose and he spotted the shaft of light that marked the open manhole. The sound of grubs somewhere behind them—grumbling animal sounds and steady splashing—meant they had even less time than they’d planned.

  “Okay,” Rossi said. “Everybody out.”

  Dom waited for Tai and Jace to clear the opening, then shoved Rossi. “You first. I’ll detonate when I’m halfway up the ladder, okay?”

  “Don’t piss around.”

  “I won’t. Go on, get going.”

  Thirty seconds. How far he could run in that time? It wasn’t a bad head start. He positioned the det in one hand so that he could operate it with his thumb and climbed nine rungs up the ladder, still beneath the level of the roof and metal reinforcement. Another three would take him to the top. Rossi peered down the hole.

  “Ready?”

  “In three …”

  Two.

  One.

  Dom pressed the button and threw the detonator up to Rossi to leave both hands free to scramble out of the hole. He found himself sprinting across the short turf and wondering who’d mowed it. Then he realized there must have been loads of grazing rabbits around, the dumbest and most irrelevant thing he’d ever thought when he was seconds from being minced to hamburger.

  “Move it move it move it!” Rossi yelled.

  Dom found himself thinking fifteen seconds, like he’d counted or anything. The engineers were nowhere to be seen. He kept going, neck and neck with Rossi, wondering why the hell the charges hadn’t blown yet and thinking he’d screwed it and they’d wasted their time. Then the ground shook. A few seconds later, a loud explosion split the air a long way behind him. He turned—something he’d been warned never to do—and saw the weirdest sight imaginable. A disc was spinning in the air like a coin, falling toward land. Another loud boom sent something arcing high into the air. It wasn’t until the disc hit the paving with a loud metallic clunk and shattered the concrete that he realized it was a manhole cover blown out by the detonating gases. The damn manholes were blowing all along the line of the sewer. It was almost comic.

  “Well, that did the trick,” Rossi panted, hands braced on his knees. “Bye-bye, grub boys.”

  The ground was still trembling. Dom didn’t like the feel of it. He could see the line of a wall and some trees that ran along the earthworks between the redoubts, and the wall was starting to sag in the middle.

  “Oh shit,” he said. “There goes the sewer.”

  The trees tipped slowly at a crazy angle. Yeah, he was right about the rabbits: they appeared from nowhere, racing around in a panic and looking for cover. All Dom could focus on was the landscape changing as half a kilometer of ancient tunnels and brickwork caved in and dragged the landscape of the old barricades down with it. The rumbling, groaning noises went on for minutes like a slow earthquake. Birds abandoned trees that weren’t even
close to the blast zone.

  Rossi got on the radio. Dom could hear the conversation in his earpiece. “Bravo to Three-E-E, over. Parry? Dom’s made a dirty great hole in Jacinto.”

  “Parry here. Tell him he’s an honorary sapper. Hope it damn well works.”

  Dom could still feel movement under his boots. Every Gear was hypersensitive to vibrations, the only early warning they usually got of a grub emergence. He couldn’t move until it stopped. He kept his rifle trained on the ground, even though he knew what was causing the tremors.

  “Come on, Dom,” Rossi said. “Damage done. Grubs fucked. Rinse your boots off and let’s go.”

  Dom had more personal problems on his mind now than how many grubs he’d chargrilled or buried in the sewer. Marcus was still stuck in the Slab, the grubs still held the Andius highway, and somewhere out there, way beyond the wire, Maria needed him.

  Does she think about me? Does she wonder why I haven’t come for her? Does she even remember me?

  He had to believe she did. He jogged back to the Packhorse and looked over his shoulder at the dent he’d put in the map of Tyrus.

  “Way to go, Dom,” Jace said. “Damn, you’re gonna sink the whole city one day.”

  CHAPTER 14

  You have no understanding yet of the things that we in power must do to ensure the survival and welfare of the state. When you realize what you have to do, your life will change forever, and you can never be like other men again. This is a one-way journey.

  (Chairman David Prescott, to his young son Richard.)

  THE SLAB: FIRST WEEK OF BLOOM, 13 A.E.

  It was a shitty situation, but it had its moments.

  The Slab had now been cut off by the grub incursion for more than a month. Reeve had learned all the right words for it because he’d spent years learning Gearspeak from Marcus, not that the guy had been the most talkative of buddies. For the prisoners, a few weeks without supplies was business as usual, but for the two warders stuck here with them—well, role reversal was a beautiful thing.