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

  In anyone else, that would be delusional behavior. A psychiatric problem. Truth—well, not lying—is the only sanity I can hold on to.

  Human memory was malleable. Sometimes, though, it wasn’t malleable enough. Prescott rehearsed his conversation with Adam Fenix, due to begin when the satellite window was available in fifteen minutes’ time. His father would have defined Adam as one of those hateful or inimical people who had to be embraced, or at least kept under close scrutiny, because they were of use.

  Prescott had evolved his own way of balancing those conflicting feelings. He willed himself to see Adam as a man whose genius he needed because the world depended on it, not a … a … actually, Prescott didn’t have a word for it. Traitor? No, Adam hadn’t backed Locust against humanity. He’d done something utterly inexplicable that transcended arrogance and shaded into destructive recklessness, and the dictionary had yet to catch up with the concept. But it was bad, and Prescott had found a way to put it to one side. It was simply too big to swallow. He could forget it for the time being.

  Timing transmissions to Azura was tricky. The Maelstrom barrier blocked signals and the choice was either to disable the barrier or use an adapted Raven flying at its maximum altitude as a relay. Prescott always opted for the relay.

  And now … how much can I withhold from Adam about his son and still feel comfortable with myself? How much is necessary?

  Prescott slid open the top drawer of his desk and took out the medical file on Marcus. This was his own record, the full one with all the unhappy detail, not the redacted copy that was kept for transmission to Azura. Sensibly, Adam asked for proof of Marcus’s health and welfare. He seemed to avoid the obvious issue—that such things were so easy to fake that Marcus could have been long dead anyway. Somehow he’d reached a tacit understanding with Prescott that they would behave like the gentlemen they were, leveling with one another as far as they could over a rather unpleasant business.

  How would I feel if this were my only child, and I saw images like this?

  Prescott tried to imagine. Sometimes he wondered how things might have turned out if he’d married a woman he cared about, instead of waiting for the right political wife who was the least risk to his career but who never came along. Power didn’t mean choice. He grasped that far too late. He untied the folder’s tag and took another look at the clinical photographs of the dog bite, the dispassionate record of the injury and the process of suturing it, and the progress of the scarring. No, he couldn’t possibly show that to Adam, not even now. It still looked terrible. It was too distressing for a father. But he couldn’t tell him that Marcus was enjoying the facilities of a country club, either. Nobody thrived in that prison. If Adam asked for photographic evidence of Marcus’s state of health, then some old ID photos would need to be adapted.

  The mental health assessment, though … Adam should see that. There was nothing in it that a scientifically literate man couldn’t have worked out for himself. The only other document was the simple physical exam—height, weight, blood count, the mechanical basics. Prescott selected the material he felt fulfilled the compromise between distracting Adam from his research and being frank with him about what life in the Slab was doing to his son. He switched on the scanner and fed the documents into the rollers. Then he sat back in front of the video camera, moved the mike stand across, and waited for Jillian to buzz him and tell him the link was live.

  “The Professor’s online, sir.”

  Nobody used the name Fenix. Apart from the Onyx Guard, Jillian was the only person in Jacinto who knew Adam was alive and where he was.

  “Thank you, Jillian.”

  The feed from Azura was always a little grainy. Adam suddenly appeared in frame, arms folded across his chest, seated in front of his desk in the penthouse suite. Prescott knew the backdrop all too well by now.

  “How are things going, Adam?”

  “How’s Marcus?”

  It was always the same opening exchange. Prescott reached across and pressed the transmit button on the scanner. “See for yourself.”

  This was what ate the time on the transmission. Adam would insist on waiting for the copies of the documents to crank out of the printer at his end of the link, and then he would read them. He did it fast and knew what he was looking for, but it still took time. Prescott waited patiently and drained the last of his coffee. It was cold.

  Adam was staring at one report, chewing his lip. “His … emotional state. Can I get him any help? Anything at all?”

  “He won’t accept it. You’ve seen the report.”

  “God, he’s—” Adam let out an exasperated breath and looked down, rubbing his fingertips across his brow. “I know he can be resistant to suggestions. Please tell me he hasn’t been assaulted again.”

  “No, I believe not.” True. I’m not lying. And Marcus does tend to swing first, doesn’t he? “No more scraps with the laboring classes.”

  Adam struggled. Prescott watched him literally squirm, shuffling in his seat. “We all know what happens in men’s prisons, Richard.”

  Ah. I see. “If you’re asking if he’s been the unwilling subject of assertive male attention, I can assure you he hasn’t.”

  Adam looked as if he was trying not to blink. “I see you’re always sensitive to my parental anxieties, Richard.”

  “Don’t underestimate your son. He’s more than capable of defending himself. The main concern with the Slab is the conditions rather than the treatment, so I’ll see what I can do about enhanced rations and extra blankets.”

  Prescott didn’t actually intend that as a shake-down maneuver. He’d used it as a soothing concession to move Adam on to the more pressing business of the research program, but for once—and it was rare—he’d miscalculated the effect. Adam’s slightly open mouth suggested he hadn’t grasped some of the fine detail. Food worried him, yes, because he’d mentioned it: Marcus was used to maximum rations as a frontline Gear. But it seemed the simple mention of blankets, such a basic and invisible amenity, had shaken him. There he was, sitting in the balmy tropics, and Marcus was in a crumbling pre-Coalition ruin that was mostly unheated even in the harsh Tyran winter. Oddly, that seemed to bring Marcus’s predicament home to his father even more forcefully than reports of injury.

  “I don’t know how he’s going to last thirty-odd more years,” Adam said quietly.

  “I don’t see how Jacinto can, either.” Prescott had to move this on. Dury could do some diplomacy and hand-holding after the transmission. “Can you update me on your progress?”

  Adam seemed to rush to that for refuge. He straightened up in his chair. “I’m sending over the latest results, but to summarize quickly—the samples we’ve grown in the lab are mutating spontaneously. That’s making it very difficult to target the organism. In every batch, some cells—for want of a better word—survive, they mutate into a form that resists the current antigen, and then we have to start over.”

  “I’ve read the reports, Adam. I won’t pretend to be a biologist, and neither are you, but are we missing something here? Are we helping it evolve into something stronger?”

  “It’s always a risk. We see it with antibiotics. Resistant strains of bacteria emerge, partly due to our use of the drugs. But the alternative is to do nothing and we know we daren’t go down that path.” Adam must have interpreted Prescott’s silence as disbelief. “It’s not a bacteria, Richard. If you examine the current form of it under the microscope, it still doesn’t look like anything the biologists have seen before. That’s why nobody realized imulsion was an organism for so long—it had no response to stimuli, no apparent reproduction, and no metabolic processes. It’s changed. It seems to have a complex life cycle that spans decades, maybe even longer. All we have to go on is the data we’ve been gathering since it was discovered. We’re probably looking at the tip of an iceberg in developmental terms. It could have been here since the beginning of life on Sera. We have no idea.”

  It was a pity, Prescott thoug
ht, that he had Adam Fenix here and not Elain. That was the intellect he needed.

  “Well, at least we understand the scope of the problem.”

  “Biology might not solve it.”

  “The Hammer won’t, either. But you know that.” Prescott tried again. “The Locust must be pretty proficient at biotechnology in their own way, given the mutations they’ve bred for their own purposes. Is there nothing we can take from that?”

  “Why do you think they wanted me? They were losing the battle long before us.” Adam reached to one side of his screen and picked up another sheet of paper. “What we can’t judge yet is whether this is a pathogen or actually a parasite.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Parasites generally evolve to preserve the life of the host. Pathogens have other reproductive strategies. We still don’t know what Lambency’s reproduction strategy is because we can’t even tell what its final form might be, or even if it has one. We don’t even know if every Lambent form self-detonates. This is going to be a case of observation—keeping an eye out for signs of Lambency in other life-forms.” Now he wagged that piece of paper at the camera. “One interesting thing, though. Esther’s got some striking results she wasn’t expecting. Not good, but significant in the wider sense. The mice she’s been using—when they’re injected with Lambent cells, their fertility drops rapidly. Litter size fell to two or three pups and thirty percent of those offspring are sterile.”

  Prescott knew that imulsion, like so many other substances that Seran industry had depended on, caused its fair share of health problems, including birth deformities. Previous governments and imulsion producers had spent a lot of time and legal effort suppressing those findings. It was all slotting together like a horrific jigsaw puzzle.

  “What are you suggesting?” he asked. “We know it’s toxic one way or another. So are half the metals we mined.”

  “Esther says look at the declining family size in southern Tyrus alone. High proportion of only children and childless couples. Siblings aren’t the norm. We don’t have the data because we didn’t investigate the motives, whether couples wanted fewer children or just didn’t conceive and never sought medical help for it. We just recorded the numbers and assumed it was just increasing affluence reducing family size.”

  “So … she thinks Lambency might already have jumped the species barrier to humans.”

  “Hard to tell without testing whole populations, and most people will show traces of industrial contaminants in their tissues anyway. We might not be able to tell the difference between the pathogen and inert imulsion. But it’s an area we have to consider. The priority is to kill it.”

  “Will that kill infected people as well?”

  Adam blinked a few times, suddenly very still. “Let’s hope not. We’re still thinking in terms of pathogens.”

  “You can test it on Mr. Alva.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “Really?”

  “We have all the tissue samples we need to carry out tests. We know what the problem is—fast mutation.”

  Prescott couldn’t get any more out of this conversation without a Ph.D. of his own. “Well, Mr. Alva can’t come back here, so what do we want to do with him?”

  “I didn’t ask for him, and that’s not my decision,” Adam said stiffly.

  Moralizing bastard. No, don’t get diverted. These are the people you must work with, the ones who have what you need.

  “Very well, I’ll consult Captain Dury, because your patient is now a security problem. How badly infected is he? Is he a biohazard?”

  Adam always seemed to stop and chew things over as if there was a catch to the question. Part of that was simply the lag in the satellite signal, but Prescott had seen Adam dodging issues before—nine years ago, debating the options for stopping the Locust—and now he knew what he’d been avoiding. The signs were all there again. There was something he was holding back now.

  “No, he’s not,” Adam said.

  “So you’ve killed all the Lambent cells in him, or whatever the technical phrase is. If you can do it with him, why not everything?”

  “I simply meant he can’t transmit the pathogen. Things aren’t that simple.”

  Adam might just have been a professionally vain man unable to simply shrug and say he didn’t really know what these biologists were actually talking about. Prescott noted it as something else for Dury to keep an eye on.

  “I’m sure they’re not,” Prescott said. A crumb needed to be tossed now, a little hope to keep Adam on his toes. “I’ll see that Marcus gets some extras whenever it’s practical. We’ll talk again soon. Goodbye, Adam.”

  Prescott switched off the camera at his end and pushed the mike aside. The office door opened almost immediately and Jillian came in with another cup of coffee and a couple of cookies, probably cued by the line shutting down on her intercom. It was always the little things that made life bearable.

  “You’re a mind reader, Jillian.”

  “You haven’t stopped for lunch, sir. Can’t bear men fainting on me.”

  “Where did you get the cookies?”

  “Oh, I’m resourceful …”

  “Would it be presumptuous of me to ask if I might have a few extras to oil the wheels of diplomacy?”

  “I think Sergeant Fenix is going to need more than a few cookies, sir.” Yes, she had that special secretarial sixth sense, unnerving yet reassuring. And she still gave Marcus his old rank. “But yes, I’ll see what I can acquire.”

  These were the people he did business with and placed his trust in. The people with the most power to make or break weren’t always the ones with the conspicuous authority. Prescott reached into his tray, picked up the latest aerial recon images of Locust activity around Jacinto, and began calculating how long the city had to live.

  JACINTO FERRY TERMINAL: REAP, 12 A.E.

  “You sure you want to drop off here?” Jace asked. He nodded in the direction of the Fusilier bar with its partially boarded windows and flickering green neon sign behind flyblown, grimy glass. It was early evening, already getting dark. “Man, that place is rougher than a dog’s ass. You ain’t gonna get any leads on Maria there.”

  He slowed the Packhorse to a stop and turned around in the driver’s seat to give Dom a you-must-be-crazy look. Tai, sitting in the front passenger seat, said nothing. Dom could feel his mouth going dry and his pulse beginning to speed up. He wasn’t afraid of walking into a rough bar, but he was terrified of blowing what might end up being his last chance to get Marcus out of jail.

  He put his hand on the door handle. “It’s not about Maria. I’ll be okay, Jace.”

  “Well, you ain’t here for their elegant champagne cocktails. You wanna explain?”

  Here we go. Dom didn’t want to drag anyone else down into his deepening mire. Just knowing what he was up to put them in a difficult position, and it was bad enough compromising Anya by telling her about the illegal ration books. “It’s for Marcus. I’m doing something iffy, and I don’t want you involved.”

  Jace just hit the gas and drove off. “Okay.”

  “Hey, let me out.” The Pack screeched around the corner, shaving past a couple of junkers and a dodgy-looking group of guys hanging around outside another bar. The place also seemed to be full of the roughest hookers Dom had ever seen. “Come on, Jace, quit pissing about.”

  “You go in there, whatever shit you’re gonna pull, and we go in as backup. Right, Tai?”

  Tai nodded, his crest of hair bobbing. “We share a path.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Dom, I ain’t lettin’ you out until you level with us.”

  “Okay, we’ve run out of legal appeals. Now I’m down to paying a guy to spring him.”

  “Holy fuck.”

  “See? Now you’re in the shit too because you know. Just drop me off and leave me to it.”

  “Dom, we were on that bird with you when Marcus went to get his dad. If that ain’t involved, I don’t know wha
t is.”

  “You didn’t know what he’d done.”

  “Neither did you. But we know now, and we’re in. I told you we’d do whatever it took. Look, they might slit your goddamn throat in there, man. You need us there.”

  Dom now understood what people meant when they said events developed a life of their own. He couldn’t step back. He couldn’t rewind to the point where Jace and Tai knew nothing about this. But he couldn’t suddenly decide that paying some guy to spring Marcus was a bad idea; he’d considered it, there was a chance it might work, and he’d made a promise to do whatever it took to get Marcus out. If he didn’t go through with it, he’d always feel that he hadn’t pulled out all the stops for him.

  And he’d do it for me. He’d take a bullet for me without thinking, and I’d do the same for him. I know that for sure. I know what he tried to do for Carlos. He’s family, and you don’t give up on your brother while you’ve still got breath in your body.

  “You realize how much shit you could be in if this goes wrong?” Dom asked.

  Jace turned around the block and headed back to the Fusilier. “Compared to the shit we’re all in generally? Maybe we all need a few more grubs up our ass to get our priorities straight.”

  Tai reached behind his seat and picked up his sidearm from the floor well. “We are off duty, yes?”

  Dom nodded and checked his own pistol. This wasn’t army business and they needed to keep the regiment’s name out of this. The fact they had a COG Packhorse was an awkward detail, but this wouldn’t take long, and it would be back in the vehicle pool before anyone started asking questions. Jace pulled up at a sensible distance from the bar and they shoved their sidearms under their jackets. Tai had his big fuck-off hunting knife too.