Gears of War: Anvil Gate (18 page)

Trescu stared at Baird and Baird stared back.

“You Gears go out every day with the fishermen. Where is your new strategy here?”

Hoffman seemed to have had enough. “The trawlers can fish closer to the island until we get a handle on this, with a couple of Gears embarked on security detail,” he said. “
Inside
the maritime exclusion zone. I think we can trust En-COG to maintain that. And if you happen to remember any little details about your frigate’s demise, Commander, don’t forget to tell us, will you?”

Hoffman turned and strode for the doors. It was a pretty eloquent command to follow him and get on with something useful. Baird piled the pieces of hull back on the nearest pallet and left with the rest of the squad. Trescu headed off on his own toward the Indie submarine
Zephyr
, probably to polish his jackboots or something.

“If they had a submarine, we’d have detected it by now,” Dom said. “I mean, that’s the only thing that could take out
Levanto
without being seen, right?”

“Don’t believe all that submariner bullshit.” Baird liked tinkering with the systems in
Clement
, but he had no illusions. “They can’t find half as much as they let you think they can.”

“Yeah,” Dom said, “but they can blow stuff up okay. That’s how
this crap started, remember. If
Zephyr
hadn’t torpedoed Darrel Jacques, we’d have a treaty with the gangs now and
he’d
be keeping them in order.”

Baird decided that Dom had spent too much time wandering around Stranded camps looking for Maria. He’d picked up a bad dose of tolerance for them. Jacques would have turned out like all the rest, and nobody really knew how many Stranded were still scattered around Sera.

The COG was just a small city now. The last thing it needed was to make concessions to criminals.

“That’s
our
job,” said Baird.

Bernie’s heart sank as she picked her way down the slippery steps of the pier wall and looked at the trawlers bobbing beneath her on the swell.

She really didn’t feel up to being bounced around in a noisy tin box that stank of fish and fuel oil. She wished she’d let Hoffman reassign her. But that was more than an admission of defeat. It was a surrender to old age. The moment she accepted lighter duties, she would begin that slow—or not so slow—decline into frail senility. She didn’t want to hang around and fade.

“Where’s the puppy, Boomer Lady?” Cole leaned on
Montagnon
’s rail. “Thought you two was
inseparable
now.”

“Whining his head off in one of the old fuel compounds with half a sheep carcass until I get back.”

“You sure that ain’t Baird?”

“No, Mac’s the one with worms.” She saw Baird tinkering with the trawler’s winch mechanism. “A mother always knows.”

Baird straightened up and fixed her with his blank look. “Talking of parasites, has Trescu the Terrible beaten anything useful out of that Stranded brat yet?”

“Why ask me?”

“Hoffman tells you everything, Granny. I mean, I used to think
it was your joints creaking when I passed your quarters, until I realized it was mattress springs …”

There’s a lot Vic doesn’t tell me
. She let the jibe pass. “I suppose we’ll know when we stop finding bloody big craters in the roads.”

Bernie jumped down onto the concrete platform that ran just above the low watermark. Marcus stood with one boot on a bollard, looking like he was getting ready to slip the lines on
Coral Star
. Dom and Sam were rostered to go with the smallest boat, just known as M70. It needed a quainter name, Bernie decided.

Marcus gave her a glance, made no comment about being last to muster, and waited for her to negotiate the shifting gap between the boat’s ladder and the pier wall. She pulled herself up through the gap in the side rail and stepped straight into the wheelhouse.

Aylmer Gullie, the elderly skipper, sat in the cockpit seat with a mug of something steaming in his hand.

“Okay, Sergeant Fenix, slip the lines.” There was a loud thud as Marcus jumped across from the quay. Gullie pulled back the throttle. “You really think this is going to be any safer?”

“Maybe not,” Marcus said. “But at least we’ll know more if we’re here instead of watching you detonate from two klicks away.”

“Optimist.” Gullie winked. “Don’t worry, we’re staying inshore.”

Inshore for Vectes meant twenty kilometers, the limit of the island’s volcanic shelf. The three trawlers chugged out at near their top speed, a modest eighteen kph, and there wasn’t a lot for Bernie to do except walk around the limited deck space and keep a lookout. The four crewmen were busy below. She sat forward of the brightly painted derrick that made the trawler look like it would capsize at any time, and regretted having so much time to think.

What the hell is so bad that Vic’s taking this long to tell me about Anvil Gate?

The worst thing was that she’d started imagining just what he’d have to do to make her despise him. She’d killed two men the
hard way in absolute cold blood. Her threshold of unforgivable was set generously high.

Not violence, then. Something small. Something cowardly. No, that’s not Vic. Foul temper. Thoughtless, sometimes. But cowardly? No
.

Marcus wandered out and looped an arm around one of the derrick supports. He stood there for a full fifteen minutes, staring out across the waves in total silence.

Eventually he murmured, “Shit.” But he said it to himself, not as a cue for her to ask what was bothering him. There were moments when she wanted to ask him how he handled what Hoffman had done to him—utterly out of character, unthinkably callous—but she knew Marcus too well to have any hope of an answer.

He stood there for another fifteen minutes, still silent, then turned and went aft.

What the hell do he and Anya say to each other?

Bernie forced herself to change the subject. It was nearly two hours into the trip before she heard enthusiastic chatter behind her and saw one of the crew training his field glasses on a flock of seabirds diving and dipping into a patch of water.

“More oilfish, I’ll bet,” he called to her. “Look out for bubbles over the side.”

The hunt for the shoals did a good job of distracting her. Ten minutes later,
Montagnon
shot her nets and dropped to a sedate trawling speed. They were in business.
Coral Star
’s crew came up on deck and Bernie had to move back to the wheelhouse.

Cole flashed her on the radio. He didn’t travel well. “Can I throw up now, please, Momma?”

“Try to miss the fish,” Bernie said.

There was still no sign of trouble. There hadn’t been any signs that
Levanto
was heading into danger, either, but the trawlers were inside the MEZ and that meant they had the comfort of a Raven patrol with a working sonar buoy, and CNV
Falconer
doing the rounds. This was as safe as it got in a job that was risky at the best of times.

At least Gullie was good company for a man who really did know far too much about fish.

“You any good at salting fish?” he asked her.

“Not two tonnes of it.”

“I think it’s going to be more like twenty. I can feel it in my water.”

He probably could. When
Coral Star
drew her nets an hour later, Bernie went outside to see how good his guess was. A straining net emerged on the end of the cables as the winch whined, a bulging ball of glittering scales and draining foam.

For once, no gulls hovered around shrieking and trying to grab their share. They’d shifted their attention to the other trawlers.

Odd. Really odd
.

“See?” Gullie said. “Chock full.”

“The birds don’t seem impressed.”

“Ingrates.”

The catch was mostly small, iridescent oilfish. Bernie wasn’t squeamish about killing what she ate, but watching the squirming mass of fish, eels, and slimy things she didn’t even have a name for suddenly made her feel sick. They were struggling to breathe, suffocating in air, flapping around in their death throes. When she killed an animal, she made sure it was
fast
. It was the only decent thing to do. Marcus watched, frowning, but that was no guide to what he was thinking.

“You okay, Bernie?” Marcus asked.

“I’ll have the beef today,” she said, turning to the rail to look away at the horizon. There wasn’t a lot of room to avoid the bloodless carnage. “
Really
well done.”

It was just as well Dom wasn’t standing next to her. She’d showed him how to wring a chicken’s neck when he’d been in her survival class during commando training. God, he was a kid then.
Seventeen
. The poor little sod had looked at that chicken with such horror that she’d been sure he’d pass out. He carried that big fuck-off commando knife that he didn’t think twice about using in combat, but there he was feeling guilty about a chicken. He did it, though, and he ate it. He did it because he had to.

Poor old Dom. We never know what’s going to be one step too far for us. We balk at the damndest things
.

Maybe Hoffman’s memory of Anvil Gate was something small but unerasable like the damn chicken, a substitute for something far darker.

He’ll tell me. Got to be patient
.

Bernie wasn’t paying much attention to what was happening behind her. She could hear the trawler crew chatting, and the wet slapping noises as they sorted the catch into different buckets. Five or six hundred meters to starboard, she could see Cole leaning over the rail of
Montagnon
as if he was going to throw up again. Baird was scanning the sea through binoculars.

Well, back to canine patrol tomorrow …

“Hey,” said one of the fishermen, the kid they called Crabfat. “You think this is what Cole got excited about when we caught that shale eel? Remember how he told us not to touch it?”

“Shit,” Marcus said. “
Shit.
”

The hair on Bernie’s nape rose instantly.

“Not you as well.” Gullie laughed. “Plenty of sea life glows. It’s dark down there, and they—”

“Get clear. I said
get clear.
”

“God … what the hell’s
that?
”

Bernie swung around and saw what Marcus and Gullie were looking at. In the mound of fish, she could see a misshapen coil of scaly flesh that she would have taken for some kind of eel if it hadn’t been rippling with blue light.

It wasn’t the lights that scared the living shit out of her. It was the fact that the thing was changing shape as she watched it.

It sprouted a distorted limb, then another. Her eyes met Marcus’s for an awful second.

The gulls spotted it. They bloody well knew
.

“Get off the damn boat.” Marcus grabbed Gullie by the collar and shoved him toward the stern. “All of you—get off the fucking boat—
jump!
” He opened the radio channel. “Dom, Baird—steer clear. We’ve trawled up a frigging Lambent.”

They were in the middle of the ocean. The only place to run
was over the side. Gullie scrambled over the gunwale and his three crew didn’t even stop to argue. They dropped into the water. Bernie did what she was trained to do—she stayed put. How big was this bastard? Could they save the boat? Did it have a blast radius?

“Bernie—get out. Go on.” Marcus caught hold of one of the net lines and hitched it to the winch. “I’ll try to dump it overboard again.”

The Lambent eel was thrashing around now, shooting out tentacles and wrapping them around anything it could grab. One just missed her and whipped around one of the derrick’s stanchions.

“Yeah, I don’t think it’s going without a fight.” She revved her Lancer’s chainsaw. “Is it killable?”

“Don’t.” Marcus ducked as a tentacle lashed past his head. “They explode.”

“Shit. You’ll never dump it.”

“Just
go.
”

“Set the bloody throttle to full speed and jump. Sod the boat.”

Everyone came on the radio at once. The Lambent eel seemed to be growing by the second. It was thrashing so violently that it was scattering dead fish everywhere, carpeting the deck. Marcus vaulted over the tool locker and disappeared into the wheelhouse, and a few seconds later
Coral Star
’s engines roared into life. The boat shot forward, but trawlers weren’t built for fast getaways.

“Marcus?” He hadn’t come back out. She edged past the eel with her back to the rail, feeling her way along with both hands. “No heroics. I mean it.”

She got to the wheelhouse door just as Marcus burst out of it. He crashed into her like a thrashball player and sent them both over the port-side rail into the water. For a moment, she was floundering in the muffled green gloom, propeller noises burbling in her ears, and then something jerked her head above the water and she took a gasping breath. The explosion shook her right through to her gut.

“Shit—” Marcus said.

The last thing that crossed her mind before the sky fell on her was that the trawler wasn’t nearly as far away as she’d hoped it would be.

The column of water crashed down like a collapsing wall. She didn’t know if she went under for seconds or minutes, only that when she bobbed up again, Marcus still had a grip on her webbing. Her hand felt instinctively for her rifle. It was still on its sling. If she’d been wearing full armor and not just torso plates, she’d have gone down like a stone.

“Everyone okay?” Marcus yelled. “I said,
is everyone okay?
”

“We see you, baby,” Cole said. “Swinging by to pick up passengers.”

Bernie trod water, looking around for the trawler. She couldn’t see a damn thing except the bobbing heads of the trawler crew and
Montagnon
bearing down on her.
Coral Star
had vanished along with the Lambent eel.

Gullie swam over to Marcus. “Is that it? Is that a Locust?”