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

by Karen Traviss

  “Well, nobody else is showing actual signs of infection,” she said. “Although everyone shows low levels of imulsion and chemical contamination, but that’s par for the course with urban populations. Sorry—former urban populations.”

  Bakos leaned against the edge of the filing cabinet and leafed through the latest screening results. The whole population of Azura had routine blood and urine tests once a month and never asked why, but a community of scientists was well aware they were sharing an island with a dangerous pathogen. They didn’t need to be told that the man who now spent a little more time in the public areas was a live host. Bakos was sure that transmission was via body fluids or ingestion because that was the only way she’d managed to infect any laboratory animals. Adam doubted it would make anyone keen to shake his hand if they knew what he carried, though. Scientists could sometimes be as irrationally scared as laymen.

  Adam lifted the cotton wool to check whether the bleeding had stopped. Bakos took off her mask and gloves and dropped them in a flip-top bin marked MEDICAL WASTE—DISPOSAL BY INCINERATION ONLY.

  “You think I’m mad, don’t you?” he said.

  “I’ve given up trying to work that out, Adam. I do think you take too much responsibility on yourself, though, to the point of messianism.”

  “I prefer to think that I played a part in failing to avert this war so I’m obliged to pay the price to end it.”

  “Yes. Sorry. It’s the other M-word. Martyrdom.”

  “Look, are my tissues any use to you or not?”

  “You know they are.”

  “Then, Esther, if I might borrow a phrase from one of my old platoon sergeants—button it.”

  Bakos didn’t bristle. She gave him a smirk—there was no other word for it—and raised the internal blinds that obscured the window between her office and the main laboratory. It wasn’t necessary. Nobody would have thought it odd that Adam was giving samples like everyone else. He hadn’t actually injected any pathogen for a long time: the organism was surviving efficiently on its own. He just needed to inject the antigens as and when they were developed, and without anyone except Bakos and Nevil knowing.

  If they ever found another source of the pathogen with different characteristics, though, he’d definitely inject that. He was committed now, unable to turn back. No avenue could be left unexplored. So far, they still didn’t know what Lambency did in the human body, if anything, and they also didn’t know how to permanently destroy it. It just kept bouncing back, a new mutation each time. But as the biologists said—they had no idea what its life cycle and reproductive strategy might be. Adam still thought of it in military terms: until he knew what the enemy wanted and how it planned to get it, then defeating it would be a crude and potentially wasteful process of simple overkill.

  Would Prescott really care if he knew I’d infected myself?

  Bakos took the bagged, sealed sample and left. Adam didn’t feel comfortable sitting in her office on his own and went back to his own desk to check out the transmissions from Jacinto—God, was Payne still dithering around over the resonator imaging equipment?—and try to think laterally about destroying Lambent cells, if cell was the right word for such a strange organism.

  They used to irradiate biohazard containment areas at La Croix University. Elain had told him so. She didn’t trust the technicians to run the machinery safely, she said, and always cited every case of radio oncologists who got therapeutic doses wrong at JMC. That was her bête noire.

  But it was a solution that a weapons physicist could understand. Adam pondered on how he could irradiate the organism without killing the patient if the thing was in every cell. He’d give that thought more time once the Lightmass debacle was resolved. Prescott had added a little handwritten note on the print-outs from the DRA:

  “Remember that Hoffman says Payne is no Adam Fenix. Ha. Thought that would amuse you. RP.”

  Better a compliment when officially dead than none at all, Adam decided.

  And Esther wonders why I feel the need to do everything myself. No, I don’t delegate well.

  Adam wasn’t sure how long his secret would hold out in this small, increasingly bitchy village, or even if it mattered, but he was locked again into the downward spiral where each day of not admitting the truth made it harder to come clean.

  I should have told Prescott right away that I was self-experimenting. A fait accompli, not asking permission.

  But then what would have happened to Alva? It was already too late. Adam fretted about Marcus for a while and decided that he’d demand a photograph with some proof of date on it next time. He wondered if Marcus was keeping any record of his time in prison, any kind of journal, but then he’d never kept one as a boy as far as Adam knew, never confided in a diary. Everything that went on in Marcus’s head stayed there to ferment. Adam, a man required to keep notes of every thought, idea, and action as part of his profession, understood the absence of personal material because Fenix men had been forbidden to wear hearts on sleeves, but he now worried about the absence of any kind of tangible evidence of his son’s existence and career. Apart from the impressions he’d left on those around him, there was almost nothing to show that Marcus had ever existed, except his army record. For all Adam knew, that could have been ash by now if any of Jacinto’s government archives had been hit.

  It was time to go and see Nevil to evaluate the Lightmass data. There was no point in Bakos coming up with an antigen for Lambency if Jacinto fell to a much more definable and killable enemy like the Locust. Time had to be bought. There was never enough of it for Adam, though, and the price kept going up. He diverted via the men’s bathroom, where the mirrors were brutal and unforgiving witnesses, not the gently silvered antiques in his apartment that flattered with their imprecision. God, he didn’t like what he saw these days—balding, the surviving hair more gray than ever, and the flesh beginning to melt from his shoulders. Age was cruel. He’d always had a good head of hair, thick and black like Marcus’s, and broad shoulders. Now the distinctive slope of his trapezius muscles was flattening into a sharper angle like a bank clerk’s. Academic or not, he’d been a Gear, athletic, proud of his physique, certain that he’d always look that way however many lines etched themselves into his face, but it simply wasn’t to be.

  I’m not even sixty yet. That’s what comes of a sedentary lifestyle. He turned away, stood at the urinals, and unzipped. Elain would have aged more gracefully.

  He was lost in thought, wondering whether his prostate was making emptying his bladder a slower process, when one of the stall doors opened. Out of habit, he kept his eyes on the tiles in front of him. But the sound of heels forced him to look around, and the last person he expected to see was Louise Settile. He found himself hunching up in embarrassment and focusing on the tiles again.

  “Sorry.” She washed her hands in the basin, lathering the soap with enthusiasm. “I never can remember where the ladies’ is. It’s all this shuttling back and forth with Dury. Don’t worry, Professor, you’ve got nothing that could shock Intel.”

  Adam tried to zip up as fast as possible and it was only when he was washing his hands and she was walking out of the door that he saw all the meanings in that apparently harmless comment. He waited a few minutes until he couldn’t hear her heels any longer and went in search of Nevil.

  Nevil was usually in the physics lab because fewer people used it and nobody minded his leaving snacks and coffee on the work surfaces. He was engrossed in his computer screen with a pencil clamped between his teeth and needed interrupting.

  “Have you seen the Lightmass data?” Adam asked.

  “Yes, Payne’s a dick, isn’t he? We did all the number crunching for him and the optics guy here even slipped in a few fixes.” Nevil shoved the pencil behind his ear. “And have you seen Settile? First thing she did when the Raven dropped her this time was make a beeline for me.”

  “You’ve pulled, as Dom used to say.”

  “No, no, she’s Prescott’s
squeeze.”

  “Oh God. Really?” Adam hadn’t noticed. He really was getting old, damn it. But then Prescott was a single man, so … he just seemed to be above all that kind of thing, that was all. “Makes sense, I suppose.”

  “Must be a shark breeding program. But seriously, she’s rather interested in what we’re doing, not surprisingly, but she does still seem focused on you.”

  Adam’s heart sank a little further. “I’m something of a known security risk, I suppose. She probably thinks I’m calling Myrrah for chats.”

  Nevil gave him a slightly odd look, tinged with a little of that disbelief and suspicion that had hurt so much when he first confronted Adam. Does he think I’m still hiding things from him? Well, what would I think if I were him? Then he shrugged.

  “She seems to be more interested in why a physicist is involved with biological research, so I tried to steer her off the subject by talking about the Lightmass systems.” Nevil retrieved his pencil from behind his ear. “But I think you should brace for scrutiny.”

  “Well, if she works out what we’re doing, it’s not a disaster, is it?”

  “You hid an invasion force from the most advanced state on Sera for fifteen years,” Nevil said. “That’s got to worry her and make her wonder what else you haven’t come clean about.”

  And you? Does it make you wonder too? “I’ll have to deal with it as it comes,” Adam said.

  At least Dr. Payne’s inability to get the Lightmass imaging adjusted correctly with the manufactured parts drove every other anxiety out of Adam’s mind for a few hours. He sat down with Nevil, studied the equipment that Payne had to work with, and came up with new figures. Adam wasn’t even going to worry about how Prescott would inject those into Payne’s consciousness as long as he managed it.

  It was late afternoon before Adam decided to go for a walk and stretch his legs, leaving Nevil to do some research into irradiation techniques. He was standing in the gardens, watching the hummingbirds busy in the trumpet-shaped blooms of a vine he couldn’t name, when Paul Dury ambled up to him.

  “Professor,” he said, “would you mind coming with me? Agent Settile’s a bit worried about William Alva, and she wants you to explain something to her.”

  Ah well. Prescott would give him the icy stare, and Settile would dog his every call and step or at least get one of the Onyx Guard to do it for her, but it was a minor transgression compared to his previous one. He really could rely on the moral high ground. This was his body to poison or cure as he chose. It did nobody any harm.

  “You will let Nevil know where I am, won’t you?” Adam said. “I think I’m entitled to one phone call.”

  Perhaps that wasn’t the best joke to make, given the situation.

  CHAPTER 16

  Santiago, you’re a pain in the ass. I’m going to keep trying, but every asshole knows we’ve got a deal to spring Fenix now. Like that’s going to work. My guy inside, you see, he mouthed off. He’s still mouthing off because now he’s a Gear stuck with your guys, the ones who feel sorry for your buddy. He’s trying to buy some slack so they don’t break his legs or happen to accidentally frag him. But that’s the least of his problems, believe me. And you better hope your boss doesn’t hear about it, too, or you’ll be seeing Fenix in person sooner than you think.

  (Piet Verdier, explaining the difficulties of continuing with the attempt to extract Marcus Fenix under current conditions.)

  THE SLAB: GALE, 14 A.E.

  “That’s not going to hold,” Reeve said. The water boiler had been leaking for a week, and Edouain’s attempts to patch it up with some automotive body filler that Jarvi had scavenged weren’t working. “It needs welding. Or brazing. Or whatever it’s called.”

  “Soldering,” Marcus said. “It’s the copper pipe.”

  “Well, whatever your butler told you it was, it’s not going to hold out much longer.”

  Marcus, Edouain, and Vance were lying on the floor, heads under the boiler, which was a big cylinder sitting on half-meter concrete blocks. The air reeked with that pungent chemical smell of the filler, so overpowering that Reeve could taste it in his mouth.

  “It’s slowed it down, anyway,” Marcus said. “We can still heat the water. It’s leaking out more slowly than it refills.”

  “All the plumbing’s breaking down.” Edouain got up and paced around a bit, rubbing his leg as if he had cramps. “Don’t expect the Justice Department to do any repairs. We may find ourselves using wood fires to heat tin baths before too long.”

  Every time Edouain stepped on the rusted piece of car door covering the tunnel they’d tried to dig a couple of years back, it clanged like a loose manhole cover, a noisy reminder of failure. Reeve wondered what would have happened if they’d pulled it off and managed to escape. Would they be invisible now in the mass of refugees in the city, or out among the Stranded, or long dead after running into their first grubs? Maybe all this delay was meant to be.

  “Jarvi says the water’s getting deeper in the psych wing,” Vance said. “I mean, we’ve got to be on a spring or a leaky water main or something. That place has been flooded like forever now.”

  “Is there any pipework down there?” Edouain asked. “Can we get down there?”

  They all looked at Marcus. Merino still had the internal keys, but nobody had wanted or needed access to the solitary cells since the psychos had been moved out. Jarvi would probably hand them over to Marcus if he asked nicely. It wasn’t like anyone was planning a breakout.

  “Okay,” Marcus muttered, and got up. “But we’ve still got to cut any pipe we find, and make it watertight somehow.”

  “Yeah, well, you find some pipe, and we’ll see what we can do about the rest.”

  Marcus went back to the main floor and Vance watched him go. “Chunky’s finally made him a mat,” he said. “It’s taken him so long that Marcus probably forgot why he’s done it.”

  “What, when he first came in here?” Reeve remembered that, all right. “When he had that run-in with Merino?”

  “That was it.”

  “That’s kinda nice. It’s the thought that counts, not the delivery date.”

  Every tiny comfort counted. Reeve wondered when the next box of treacle cookies was going to show up, but he could wait. He went out to the main floor to see how Marcus was getting on scoring the psych wing keys. He couldn’t see him anywhere, so he assumed he’d either gone out to the gardens to see if Niko was hanging around having his smoke with the window open, or Jarvi had already thrown the keys to him from the gallery and he’d gone down into the basement.

  He knew his way, after all.

  Someone called out from the other end of the floor. It was Van Lees. “Hey, Reeve, this is getting beyond a joke. What the hell’s happening with the crappers?”

  “What am I, the frigging emergency plumber?”

  “They’re blocked.”

  “Yeah, so try dumping less down ’em.”

  “No, I mean they’re all backing up.”

  “Terrific. This is connected to the flooding, I’ll bet.”

  Reeve had a hunch and went back to the old tunnel in the utility area to check the water level down there. When he dragged the cover plate off, he could see the muddy water lapping a few centimeters below the surface. Yeah, the whole place was flooding. Jarvi would have to do something about it now, maybe finally evacuate to another building or something.

  Dream on. We’re here because they didn’t have any other garbage bin to throw us in. Remember?

  He was walking back to the wing with the intention of yelling for Jarvi to come take a look when Van Lees came running after him, this time with Vance.

  “It’s spiders, man,” he yelled. “The toilets. Full of frigging spiders.”

  “Ahhh, you big girl,” Reeve sneered. “Stamp on ’em. They’re more frightened of you than you are of them.”

  “Not these,” Van Lees said. “I’m not joking. I’ve never seen these before. They’re fucking huge.”
>
  Vance nodded. “They’re gross.”

  Reeve didn’t mind spiders. They didn’t get that many in here, probably because spiders were as smart as rats when it came to knowing where not to waste their time. But Van Lees wasn’t usually excitable about bugs, and Vance never turned a hair at anything. Reeve followed them into the toilet block and looked up at the walls and ceiling, expecting to see something dangling from a web.

  “No, down there,” Vance said. “Behind the toilet.”

  Reeve had his smartass lines ready. No spider could be that bad. The really deadly venomous ones were small, as far as he remembered, and anything big was just scary-looking. He followed Vance’s finger, starting to laugh, and squatted to take a look behind the U-bend.

  Oh shit …

  It was charcoal gray, with big knuckles on its jointed legs, and it was twenty centimeters across.

  It also had a mouth. Swear to god, the thing had a mouth and fangs.

  “Holy fuck.” Reeve jumped back. “What the hell is that?”

  “I don’t know, but they’re coming up through the toilet bowls,” Vance said. He looked around and grabbed the near-bald mop that was propped against the tiles. “Look.”

  Reeve pushed the next stall door open with his boot. One of the things was scrambling over the broken seat. In the next toilet, another was scrabbling around behind the pipework, flinging small chunks of broken concrete over the floor like it was digging for a bone.

  “You better get Merino,” Reeve said. Vance fended off one of the spiders with the mop. It went for the mop-head like a snappy little dog. “Tell you what, get Marcus. And Jarvi. Hell, just get someone to take a look.”

  The lavatory door swung wide open and Marcus walked in clutching a couple of short lengths of copper pipe, pants wet up to his knees. “Take a look at—shit.”