Gears of War: Anvil Gate

  “Don’t tell me, tea and jug of hot water,” the waiter said. “But you look like you need a plate of rice.”

  “I need a job more,” Bai said. “Anything going?”

  “Nah. I could use someone to wash the dishes when I close tonight, though.”

  “Okay. Can I sleep on the floor?”

  “If you sweep it first.”

  “Done.”

  It was a start. Bai hadn’t gone looking for work since he was a kid. He needed to get back in the habit, and this was as good a way as any. It didn’t bring him any closer to going back home tomorrow with good news for Harua, though. Somehow, he’d set himself a deadline and felt duty bound to stick to it. It was more for himself than for her, he suspected. He sipped his tea and paid no attention to the radio.

  He didn’t care much about politics, especially beyond Pesang, but the knot of men sitting around the ancient radio set was growing one by one, and they were frowning in concentration. Bai was curious. He listened to the broadcast. It was in Tyran—he could understand a lot of it, even if he found speaking the language hard—and it was talking about the situation in Vasgar.

  Vasgar was hundreds of kilometers away, but there was nothing between Vasgar and Pesang except mountains, so that made them neighbors.

  “The Indies are going to invade, mark my words,” one of the old gamblers muttered. He kept his eyes on the dice. “They’d better stop before they reach our border, though, if they want to hang on to their balls.”

  “And heads,” said another. “They wouldn’t get far without those.”

  Everyone laughed. No army had ever invaded Pesang. They said every foreigner was scared shitless at the prospect of encountering a Pesang hill-man with his machete, and believed they could never hear Pesangas coming until it was too late. Bai didn’t quite see himself as menacing, although he wasn’t afraid to use his knife.

  Did it really matter how tall he was?

  No, this was stupid. Harua would go mad if he so much as thought about it, but he did. He thought of that poster, and how the white-faced recruiting sergeant had measured him and told him he was just a bit too short, but he couldn’t stop thinking that it was worth one more try if the war was coming this close to home again. He’d been a little boy the last time anyone had talked this way.

  “Where’s the nearest recruiting office now?” he asked, knowing someone would answer.

  One of the men sitting by the radio slurped his tea from a saucer. “Paro,” he said. “Why, you getting all patriotic?”

  The words just fell out of Bai’s mouth. He didn’t even think about it. “I’m going to sign up.”

  There was a silence around the room. Bai could hear a dog yapping in the distance.

  “Me too,” said another man. “In case these Indies get ideas. Anyone know where we can get a ride?”

  “My brother drives a truck,” said another man. “I’ll go get him.”

  It was that simple, and that impulsive. An hour later, Bai found himself in the back of an open truck, bouncing down the potholed road to Paro with a dozen other men he’d only just met, not knowing if he’d be turned down again, or if he’d be a soldier this time next week, or if Harua would disown him when she found out.

  He liked the feeling. It was more than needing the money. He really wanted to serve. It was a matter of pride.

  When the truck reached the COG recruiting office, a soldier in armor stepped out onto the street to look them over. He was huge, a head taller than any of them, with very light hair and eyes.

  “So you want to be Gears,” he said. He spoke pretty good Pesan for a foreigner. “Can you all use that machete?”

  Every Pesang male carried one. Each man from the truck drew his from its sheath with a rasp of metal on leather.

  “Can you all speak some Tyran?”

  Bai plunged in with his best accent. “Sah, yes, we can.”

  “That’s what I like to hear. This way, gentlemen. First thing—I’m a sergeant. Sergeants aren’t sir. We’re Sergeant.”

  Bai decided it was now or never. He walked up to the sergeant and craned his neck to look him in the eye.

  “Sergeant,” he said. “I tried to join before. They said I was too short.”

  “That was then, son,” said the sergeant, ushering him into the office. “You’re just the right height now.”

  Harua would kill him. Bai reasoned that she would calm down when she received her first envelope full of banknotes.

  It wasn’t going to be forever, after all.

  CHAPTER 6

  He wants to be an engineer? A damned mechanic? I’m glad that my poor father isn’t alive to see this. After all the education that Damon’s had, all the privileges we’ve given him—he’s a Baird, for God’s sake. And a Lytton, too. He has duties. Now go and be a man for once, and tell him that either he joins the army, or he loses his inheritance.

  (ELINOR LYTTON BAIRD, WIFE OF MAGISTRATE JOCELIN BAIRD, EXPRESSING HER DISAPPOINTMENT AT THEIR SON’S AMBITION TO STUDY MECHANICAL ENGINEERING)

  PATROL VESSEL AMIRALE ENKA, PRESENT DAY, 15 A.E.

  Muller stuck his head out of the wheelhouse. “Dom? Old Misery Guts is on the blower. Talk to him, will you?”

  Dom was leaning on the rail, keeping an eye on the trawlers following line astern in the patrol boat’s wake like ducklings. If there was anything in the water to hit, Amirale Enka would hit it first. There was a kind of logic to it.

  “Okay. Is he mad?”

  “Hard to tell. He always sounds pissed off.”

  Baird was on the foredeck, squatting over a small pile of debris he’d spread on a piece of canvas. He really did look like he was doing a jigsaw puzzle. Sam, still manning the gun, glanced over her shoulder to watch. Dom stepped into the wheelhouse and took the mike from Muller. Yanik the Disemboweler still leaned on the wheel, silent and unconcerned.

  “Santiago here, sir.”

  “Can we rule out a Stranded attack yet?” Hoffman asked. “Folks believe what they want to believe, but it might calm things down here if I could look them in the eye and say it wasn’t.”

  “What, civilian trouble?”

  “Yes. What’s your ETA?”

  “About half an hour. Sorry, sir, the best we can do is guess. Baird says he can’t see how the Stranded could pull off an attack like that, no matter how much hardware they’ve collected. Sam—well, she knows her ordnance, and she says it must have been huge. Mines are a really long shot, but the least unlikely.”

  Hoffman went quiet for a moment. “It wouldn’t convince me. Sure as hell won’t convince anyone else.”

  “Sir, it’d be better if we could prove it was Stranded,” Dom said. “Because if it’s not, it’s something we don’t know how to deal with.”

  “We’re going to have to limit where these people fish.” Hoffman had heard him, all right. He just didn’t want to talk about it on an open channel. “Give them some reassurance. Okay, get your ass back here and brace for diplomacy.”

  Yanik stirred. “This is what happened to our frigate. Collision—torpedo—grounding—pah. Whatever. Ships are not so unlucky all at once, eh?”

  Muller rolled the stub of his cigar between thumb and forefinger. He seemed to use it as worry beads more often than he smoked it. “We could always rig a couple of vessels to do a wire sweep,” he said. “But yeah, I’d rather find out what we’re dealing with first.”

  Baird got up from his jigsaw of destruction and swaggered into the wheelhouse.

  “I found a tooth,” he said. “Human molar.”

  Dom waited for him to make some crack about putting it under his pillow. He didn’t. He seemed really puzzled, and that rare condition shut him up in a way nothing else could. It was as if he just couldn’t believe that he didn’t have an answer.

  “No similarity between the two attacks, then.” Dom kept thinking about the families who would be back in Pelruan now, numb with shock, sobbing their hearts out or refusing to believe their men had gone. He r
emembered every time he’d felt that way, but he couldn’t re-create the sensation, and he wasn’t sure if that troubled him or relieved him. “We found big chunks of hull and other debris where Harvest went down.”

  “Did we keep all that?”

  Muller nodded. “It’s on a trailer in one of the boat sheds.”

  “Okay, I’m going to take another look at it. The answer’s staring us in the face.”

  Whatever that answer turned out to be, it wasn’t going to be good news. Dom could see that even before Amirale Enka passed the channel marker buoy. When he checked out the jetty through his binoculars, he could see a mob of civilians milling around Michaelson, and at least two squads of Gears who looked like they’d formed a cordon. He expected to see Marcus, too, but he didn’t. As the vessel slowed to enter the small ships’ basin, Dom picked out Cole in the growing crowd. Cole—good-humored, funny, but very, very big—was good at calming folks down just by standing there.

  “Shit, I hope they don’t think we’re landing bodies,” Dom said.

  Baird shrugged. “Soup, more like.”

  “Ever consider social work as a career?”

  “Yeah, it was that or the diplomatic service.” Baird gave Dom one of his wary looks. “You got to stop imagining how bad other people feel, Dom. Look after Santiago, Private D. You’ve got enough shit on your plate.”

  Okay, that’s the Baird version of sympathy. He does try. He fails, but he tries.

  The crowd stayed on the other side of a chain safety barrier as Amirale Enka came alongside and Gorasni seamen jumped onto the quay to secure her lines. Michaelson stood by one of the bollards with his arms folded, looking up at the boat. He was waiting for Muller to report, Dom realized. He didn’t address the Gears at all.

  “Well, this is all going swimmingly,” Michaelson said, watching the crew drop the brow onto the quay. “But at least we didn’t misplace a frigate.”

  “Damned if I can tell you what happened, sir.” Muller cocked his head in Baird’s direction. “But maybe he can.”

  Baird was already halfway down the brow in his rush to get on with solving the problem. For a moment, Dom envied him; he was totally self-contained, immune to grief, and satisfied by making broken things work. He was perfectly evolved for this bleak postwar world. Now that Dom thought about it, he could never recall Baird having a nightmare. Most guys had them, some frequently, some not, and in crowded barracks it wasn’t something you could hide; but Baird always seemed to sleep soundly.

  “Let me take a look at what’s left of Harvest,” he said. “In case we’re blaming our nice Stranded neighbors unfairly.”

  Michaelson watched him go. “He doesn’t think it’s Locust, does he?”

  Dom shrugged. “I don’t want to say it. But the grubs had barges, remember. And that leviathan thing. We found them in the underground rivers.”

  Sam walked up to Dom. “You can’t cross an ocean in a barge. And from what you told me, you’d see them coming anyway.”

  “Excellent point, Private Byrne.” Michaelson was quite the charmer. Even Sam didn’t take offense when he checked her out. “But I’m not ruling out anything. If you’ll excuse me, I’d better go and see just how far out of favor the navy is with the Chairman now.”

  Lewis Gavriel pushed through the line of Gears and caught Dom’s arm. The poor bastard was mayor of Pelruan, a COG civil servant marooned here since the Hammer strike fourteen years ago, and he’d never even seen a grub. Now he was watching his quiet island bombed, colonized, and generally fucked up by his own species. Irony probably didn’t cover it.

  “Dom, can you tell me anything?” He was a nice guy. Dom wanted to help. “Casualties in double figures probably doesn’t look as bad to you, but we’re a small town. A few thousand people. We all knew those men well. Folks are angry.”

  Dom wasn’t sure that he would have given Lewis someone to blame even if he’d known the answer, much as he wanted to. It would just cause too much trouble.

  “I saw it,” he said, “and I still don’t know what happened. I’m really sorry.”

  Fate saved him, or so he thought. Marcus’s voice interrupted over the radio.

  “Dom, Sam—on me. Get over to the main gate for some assertive community mediation.”

  Sam swiped Dom’s shoulder as she passed him. “Come on, Dom, it’s kicking off.”

  He shrugged helplessly at Gavriel. “Got to go.” As he turned, he caught sight of Marcus at the far end of the jetty. That explained his great timing. “If I hear anything, I’ll tell you. I swear.”

  The collective mood of a mass of human beings was a weird thing. It made Dom edgy. On their own, people were generally reasonable, open to suggestions to move along or calm down. But in groups, they seemed to forget they ever evolved speech or opposable thumbs, and turned into one single dumb, bad-tempered, irrational animal. By the time Dom caught up with Marcus and Sam, the number of civilians milling around seemed to be growing, and there was a real smell of aggression.

  Dom had policed food riots in Jacinto. He knew that smell of mob. And he never wanted to face down civvies again. Almost all the folks here were from Jacinto, though, the old Jacinto, so why the trawler incident had riled them was anyone’s guess.

  “Not a good day to be Stranded,” Marcus said. “And they’re not too crazy about us, either, thanks to Trescu.”

  “Why?”

  “He shot a prisoner.”

  “Dead?”

  “That’s the usual outcome.”

  It was going to turn into a cage fight. Two tribes of people with grievances against each other, crammed into the same space; Dom’s stomach knotted. The grubs had always been outside the gates. There’d always been a line between sanctuary and battlefield before.

  By the time they reached the main gates, Dom could already tell that things were getting out of control. The line of trucks, junkers, and farm vehicles stretched far enough up the approach road for him to see it even over the sea of heads and helmets. At the front, behind the ironwork gates, Hoffman and Prescott were talking to the civilians outside. They were from Pelruan. Dom recognized them.

  “Shit,” Marcus muttered.

  Dom’s autopilot sent him hurrying to back up his old CO. It was a reflex now. “Blockade or lynch mob?”

  “Shit either way.” He checked his Lancer. “Dom, you sure that boat didn’t get blown up by Stranded?”

  “Sure as I can be. How the hell would they manage it? Even we can’t mince a vessel into small pieces like that.”

  “Just checking.”

  They got to within a few meters of the gates. Hoffman had never been to charm school, but that probably worked better with the locals than Prescott’s silky line of patter. At least the colonel sounded like he meant every word. And he did.

  “You’re not coming in,” he said to the farmer at the front of the angry crowd. “And you’re not going to block this access. Goddamn it, I’d put a round through any of those bastards as soon as look at them, but that’s not how we do things. Wait for one of our route-proving APCs to deploy, then turn your vehicles around and follow the ’Dill back home. You hear me? Go home.”

  Prescott opened his mouth to speak but he was drowned out by the shouting from the convoy.

  “We didn’t invite you here,” someone yelled. “And we didn’t invite the scum you’ve given houseroom to.”

  Other voices joined in. “We don’t give a shit who you are. You’ve screwed this place in a matter of months. Months.”

  The Vectes locals had never encountered a grub, and that gave them a different take on threats. Dom just prayed that nobody started shooting. The press of bodies on both sides of the gates was increasing and if things got uglier, people would get hurt. Sam was maneuvering herself into a position where she could get a clear shot. He didn’t know whether to block her or not.

  “Don’t start that shit again,” Hoffman snarled. “The whole world’s screwed, and a lot worse than this. Go home. I know you’re mad. I
’m mad. But leave it to us to deal with it.”

  Marcus sighed and shouldered his way through the other Gears to step in front of Hoffman. Dom saw them exchange a glance. For a moment Dom thought Marcus had just decided to shield Prescott or something, but then Marcus hauled himself up and stood on one of the buttresses to get his head above the crowd. He held up his hand. He didn’t do that very often.

  “Hey!” he called. “Just listen. You know me. I’m telling you that trawler wasn’t sunk by Stranded. We don’t know what the hell did it. That’s a good reason for going home and locking your doors right now.”

  There was a silence that lasted maybe five seconds, an eternity in this situation, broken only by muffled barking from inside the vehicles. They’d brought their dogs along too. Dom saw Prescott twitch as if he was going to dive in and fill the gap with some bullshit. Marcus just looked at him, that look, the one that shut anyone up, and Prescott seemed to change his mind.

  Nobody moved. But somebody in the line of vehicles spoke.

  “You wouldn’t lie to us, Fenix?”

  Marcus had a way of getting everyone to listen. They probably had to strain to hear him. He just dropped his voice way down.

  “No,” he said. “You need to know the truth. We might have bigger problems than just a few assholes. Go home, and let us do our jobs.”

  It took a few more seconds, but the silence became more ragged, and people started shuffling and generally calming down. There were no more shouts. Dom heard engines starting somewhere down the line.

  “Wait for the Armadillo escort,” Hoffman called. “I don’t want any more casualties, you hear me?”

  Everyone started moving away from the gates. Prescott caught Marcus by the arm, and for a moment Dom thought Marcus was going to deck him. Prescott, as cocksure of himself as any man could be, stopped in his tracks.

  “Are you insane?” he demanded. “You could have started a panic. Why tell them there’s an unknown threat out there?”