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

  “I don’t care if I’ve got to paint him green and tell everyone he thinks he’s a goddamn tree,” Dom said. “We get him out, then we worry about what to do next.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “What?”

  “We can’t make contact with him. No visits, and we don’t know if he’s getting letters or just ignoring them.”

  “So I’ll get Hoffman to talk to Prescott. He’ll get things moving. Then we hire a proper lawyer, not some clerk from the JA’s office.” He must have seen the expression on her face change. “Hey, Hoffman’s wife was a lawyer. He said she was a frigging demon with judges. Damn shame she’s not still around.” He took a swig of beer. “He’ll put some pressure on ’em. The old man feels bad about Marcus, Anya. You know that. We’ll sort it, okay?”

  Dom said it all with confidence. Any man who could spend so many years looking for his wife in the wastelands outside the wire wasn’t going to be daunted by a prison system or red tape. Anya felt he wouldn’t even be put off by a whole Locust army if it meant saving Marcus.

  Be alive for him, Maria. Please. I want to see Dom happy again. He deserves it.

  “So, what do you want to do tonight?” she asked. It wasn’t a matter of taking in a movie or a meal, even if such civilized refinements still existed. There were only two things on their agendas, either worrying about Marcus or worrying about Maria. “Patrols said some new Stranded moved in to Lower Jacinto. I’ll drive.”

  Dom drained his beer. “No, bike,” he said. “Less fuel, less hassle.” He ran his hand over his Maria tattoo again, a desperately sad caress. “You and me, Anya, we’re both in the same boat. They’re out there, Marcus and Maria, and we have to bring them home. No matter how long it takes.”

  Yes, it was we. It was very much we. She had a brother by default, and that made things a little easier to take.

  “I always said you were one in a million.” She patted his back. For a moment he felt like Marcus, the T-shirt warm and slightly damp down his spine, and that comfortingly solid feel of muscle and bone. “Better make that one in a billion.”

  THE SLAB, SOUTHWEST JACINTO CITY LIMITS.

  Dury brought the car to a halt twenty meters from the entrance and stared up at the prison’s granite facade. It looked like a lonely fort set on a finger of rock that jutted out from the core of the plateau, separated from the nearest buildings by a broad no-man’s land of scrubby heath that had been the Wenlau Heath park when there were staff still around to maintain it.

  The gold lettering on the peeling board mounted to the side of the gate said CPSE HESKETH. Dury appeared to be troubled by it. He frowned.

  “I never knew it was called that,” he said, ducking his head back inside the car. “I thought it was just Jacinto Maximum Security Prison.”

  “There was more than one in my father’s day.” Prescott gathered his thoughts. He had never needed to visit Coalition Prison Service Establishment Hesketh on any fact-finding missions in his early career, and he had certainly never expected to be personally acquainted with anyone serving time in there. “Expensive things, prisons. They divert our resources simply to keep men idle. Not a luxury we can afford, although in this case it’s probably a necessity.”

  “Are you ready, then, sir?”

  “I think so.”

  “Permission to speak freely?”

  “As always.”

  “They’re going to shit themselves when they see you. They’re only expecting me and a minion.”

  “Yes, I imagine it’ll have a laxative effect.” Prescott’s father had taught him that the best fertilizer for a farm was the master’s boot on the soil, although David Prescott had never actually farmed. He’d simply owned a number of them. “They’ll never know if the next inspection will be a personal one, so a very cost-effective long-term deterrent.”

  Dury got out and opened the rear passenger door of the staff car. Prescott stepped out into an overcast day to feel the spittle of light rain on his face. It was going to turn into a downpour soon. At this moment, as he strode up the short path with Dury beside him in anonymous COG armor—just a cavalry unit insignia stenciled on his plates, no indication of which guards regiment that was—he knew someone inside the prison had spotted them. They’d have to be monitoring the exterior.

  Dury rapped on the small door set in the huge twin gates, once painted gloss black and now simply faded and matte. It took some time for it to open. Prescott wondered if he was wrong about monitoring. The uniformed warder who appeared at the door looked at Dury, then at Prescott, and the show started.

  Yes, officer. I’m Chairman Richard Prescott.

  “Oh … sir?”

  Prescott just inclined his head politely and let Dury do the introductions, now clearly unnecessary. “Chairman Richard Prescott to see prisoner Fenix,” Dury said. He held his helmet tucked under one arm, the better to look the crew-cut, hard-faced bastard who got results. “He’s a busy man, so can we crack on with this, please?”

  Prescott stifled a smile. It was good to see someone with a talent for political theater. Dury was naturally easy-going, except when he needed to be otherwise, and had he come from the right family and gone to the right school, then he would have had a fine career: perhaps he might even have been a political rival. For a moment Prescott felt that thrill, that beginning of an adrenaline rush, at the thought that Dury might have given him a run for his money or even trounced him.

  We find what pleasure we can in the jobs we do. That’s the secret to doing them well. Especially the more unlovely work.

  “Sorry, sir, come in,” the warder said. “We weren’t expecting you, or else we’d have had someone here to meet you.” Prescott followed Dury through the inset door, ducking his head slightly to step in, and the warder walked ahead while talking to someone on his radio in an anxious whisper. “Niko … no, it’s the Chairman, as in Prescott … yes, Prescott … how the hell should I know? … okay … yeah.”

  The place was typical of the institutions built before the Coalition of Ordered Governments had been formed, classic Tyran architecture, military and utilitarian—high walls, an open courtyard for vehicles just inside the double gates, with the accommodation and office floors looking down onto a central parade ground that housed a statue of Nassar Embry in armor, with the uplifting inscription: I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR MYSELF AND MY ACTIONS. It was the opening line of the Octus Canon, the affirmation of citizenship sworn by every man and woman in the COG.

  Yes, Embry. I fully understand my responsibilities. Were things simpler in your day? More black and white?

  The windows—ceiling height, arched at the top, mullioned—were falling apart and one on the east wing was minus most of its leading, but the overall grandeur hadn’t been diminished. Prescott caught a glimpse of solid, square archways leading off like undercrofts in the buildings with smaller courtyards beyond. The granite paved path, setts missing and grass growing in the cracks, led up to main entrance doors that had seen better days. When he looked right, he could see greenery, and realized the complex actually had gardens.

  “What’s that?” he asked, pointing.

  The warder followed his finger. “That’s where we grow food, sir. We’re pretty self-sufficient. We have to be.”

  Dury caught Prescott’s eye accidentally as they waited for the doors to be unlocked. The captain was looking up at the impossibly high, slippery walls made of solid granite blocks. Prescott could read the man easily. No, nobody was going to escape from this place anytime soon. Then the doors swung open, and Prescott felt he had walked into the underworld.

  It was hard to say which hit him first, the darkness or the smell. A ceiling of skylights, many of them cracked or broken, cast pools in the gloom and old tungsten lightbulbs struggled to illuminate the hallway ahead. The smell hit him in waves: first mold, decay, and damp, and then the inhabitants. He’d expected the institutional aromas—stale cooking fat, urine, disinfectant—and the sheer maleness of it, more so even than i
n an army barracks, where some of the residents were still women. But there was also a bitter smell of feces, not the usual drains smell that pervaded a shattered city, but something else. It was different. He assumed it was poor cleaning or broken plumbing until he heard the dogs barking.

  Of course: they had guard dogs here. The smell was their waste. By the sound of it, there was a good-sized pack of them. Then a siren started up, a single, steady note every few seconds, and a countdown began on the public address system: “One minute to lockdown …”

  It was almost a dark parody of the ever-present public address system on Azura, not the soothing tones of long-dead Niles Samson but a gruff, bored voice of someone who didn’t much like his job.

  “Just getting the prisoners back in their cells, sir,” the warder said. “Officer Jarvi will be with you soon. He’s … well, he’s the senior officer. We don’t have a governor. Just a dozen of us, and we run the place ourselves.”

  “How? You have some very dangerous men in here.”

  “Oh, we found a way, sir. We’re locked off from the inmates. They have to run their own daily routine, cook, and clean the place, and if we need access to them, then we’ve got secure separation zones. And the dogs.” The man nodded as if he was talking about a much-loved elderly gun-dog rather than what the frantic barking and snarling suggested to Prescott. “They’re really scared of the dogs, sir. Cheap and effective.”

  Other than the dilapidation, the smell of dog feces, and the sliding metal bars across every door, this place could have been Prescott’s old preparatory school as it might have looked after decades of neglect. The ornately carved moldings, wooden paneling, and tiled floors reminded him of the alien place where he’d found himself one day just after his fifth birthday, clutching a small suitcase and ready to be turned into a little gentleman. He cried himself to sleep every night in the dormitory for weeks, until he accepted that his life wasn’t going to be like that of little boys whose daddies were ordinary men. His duty would be the service of the nation. He would learn his father’s trade and become a statesman.

  And so I did.

  Prescott followed the warder up creaking metal stairs, Dury close on his heels, to an office that seemed more like a store cupboard. It was probably easier to keep the smaller rooms heated. He accepted a seat and the offer of a cup of coffee, and the door closed. Dury pulled out a chair and sat down. The dark walls were depressing and a threadbare oriental rug dotted with dark stains did nothing to soften the impression of a decaying mausoleum.

  “I’d top myself if I was stuck here, for sure, sir,” Dury murmured.

  “Yes. Mr. Alva must be relieved to be out of it.”

  Dury was about to reply when the door opened again and a different warder appeared, a slight man in his forties who looked as if he hadn’t slept in a long time. No, he wasn’t actually slight. He was just average, a normal man on normal civilian food rations, not a frontline Gear. Prescott adjusted his mental scale accordingly.

  “Mr. Chairman, sir,” the man said, taking off his dark blue cap. “Officer Niko Jarvi. I’m sorry. We were expecting a clerk to visit Fenix. You want to see him yourself, yes?”

  Prescott made a snap judgment on Jarvi. A regular man who does what’s asked. Tries to be fair. Struggles to make ends meet with rations. Dury’s background check said Jarvi’s wife was an ER nurse, and like too many couples on Sera they’d never had children. “Yes, thank you, I would,” Prescott said. “I know Fenix socially. I knew his father very well.” The past tense wasn’t a clever act, because the Adam Fenix that Prescott had discovered this year was one he really hadn’t known at all. “May I see him here?”

  “Of course, sir. We’re fetching him now.”

  “No handcuffs, by the way. I find that distasteful, and as you can see, I do have my close protection officer.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  Jarvi darted away. Dury sat watching the door like a cat staking out a mouse-hole. Yes, Prescott did know Marcus socially: not well, of course, but he’d met the tall, awkward, painfully skinny nine-year-old Adam had introduced at the opening of the Allfathers Library extension that the Fenixes had funded, and later the young Gear who’d enlisted rather than accept the vast privilege and automatic army commission that men of Prescott’s and Adam Fenix’s class were born into. He’d shed his well-spoken, well-heeled, well-connected upbringing and taken on the mantle of an ordinary working-class Gear.

  Prescott expected to see Marcus a little the worse for his time in prison, but he wasn’t prepared for what walked through the door.

  Marcus came to a halt in at-ease position, hands clasped behind his back and boots apart, as Jarvi stepped to one side and tried to disappear. Prescott had only ever seen Marcus in armor and that black bandanna headgear he seemed to prefer to a helmet. Without those trappings, in just pants and singlet, he was a different creature.

  “Marcus.” Prescott stood up. The display of courtesy and the familiarity had its calculated purpose, including stopping short of holding out his hand for shaking, but he was genuinely shocked by the state of the man. Marcus was powerfully built and it would take a prison years to erode that frame. But there wasn’t a scrap of fat visible on his arms or face, and his skin looked wasted and dry. He seemed to have lost at least ten kilos. Prescott was sure it wasn’t just an illusion from seeing him out of armor. “Before we start, may I say how sorry I am about your father.”

  Sorry. Yes, I am: but not in the way you think, of course. On the other hand, I’m not going to lie to you. I’ve never actively lied in my career. I’ve just omitted details. Every word I say is technically true.

  And you’re not a player in this, are you? You’re collateral damage. Just a Gear, an unlucky Gear, the poor damned infantry. I’m not going to add to your misery.

  “Chairman,” Marcus rasped. He looked Prescott straight in the eye. He had that permanent look of weary disbelief, as if he didn’t believe a damn word anyone told him, and that it saddened rather than angered him. He had his father’s eyes, but what dwelt behind them seemed very different. One thing was clear: he’d finally given up. “What do you want?”

  Prescott glanced past him at Jarvi. “You don’t have to feel inhibited by the staff. Are you being treated well now?”

  Marcus blinked. “They haven’t ruptured any of my internal organs this week, if that’s what you mean, Chairman.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry about that incident.” Prescott could see a few old, yellowing bruises on Marcus’s shoulder, but that could have been anything. “That’s why I’m here personally, to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

  He got the silent response. It didn’t look like insolence and if anything Marcus seemed baffled. Then he morphed into the Marcus that Prescott always suspected was still there, the son of the Fenix dynasty. His voice took on its patrician vowels again.

  “Tell Hoffman,” he said, “to stop atoning. I did it. It doesn’t even matter why. I deserve my sentence. It’s not his problem anymore.”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this has nothing to do with the Colonel.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Like it or not, Marcus, your service record means your sentence was commuted for a reason.” Not that I can tell you the primary one, of course. “It was better for troop morale that you weren’t executed, and one day the COG may have need of you again. You know the situation out there better than anyone.”

  Prescott thought it was worth dropping that lure in front of him. It happened to be true: there would inevitably come a time when a Gear with his exceptional skills was needed for a suicide mission, and Prescott could keep him alive in here awaiting that day rather than risk him dying on the front line, but he skipped that detail. The effect of those few words was fascinating. Marcus’s eyes changed immediately. The light came on again. His blink rate increased and he seemed to have some color back in his face. In any other man, Prescott thought, it would have been the prospect of release, but this was Marcus Fe
nix, and his motives were very different.

  He wanted to atone. He wanted to sacrifice himself, to die for the COG—no, for his comrades, more likely, penance for all the men who’d died because of him. That was why he thought Hoffman was atoning. That was why he chose that emotional, almost religious word, because that would have been his response had he been Hoffman. It was pitifully innocent. Prescott squirmed behind his facade of concerned calm.

  “I do,” Marcus said at last. He switched back again to the voice he’d adopted, rough and uncultured, matching the tattoos and stubble that seemed to be a defensive facade of his own. “Will you do something for me, Chairman?”

  “If I can.” It would soothe Adam. Adam needed to focus on his research. “What is it?”

  “Tell Private Santiago and Lieutenant Stroud to get on with their lives and forget that I exist. If they see me like this, it’ll just …”

  He trailed off. Prescott nodded. “Very well. But I suspect they won’t listen.”

  Marcus nodded as if a spell had been broken, then turned his head slowly and looked pointedly at Jarvi. He wanted to go. Prescott wasn’t used to being dismissed, but he was too unsettled by the meeting to take offense, and Marcus was just an unlucky bystander caught in the blast, of no individual political importance beyond securing Adam’s cooperation. Jarvi looked to Prescott, and Prescott nodded. Marcus walked out. Prescott could have sworn his spine was a little straighter than when he’d walked in.

  “Officer Jarvi,” Prescott said, “I’ll be going now, but can you assemble your colleagues at the exit, please?”

  Timing was everything. Word would go around this small community in minutes, and now was the time to reinforce the message. By the time Prescott had taken a slow walk down the stairs with Dury, four warders were lined up by the door, and Dury had already ensured that this shift contained two of the men who’d assaulted Marcus.