Gears of War: Anvil Gate (27 page)

A hundred meters off the port bow, maybe less, something punched through a mat of white foam.

It was a fucking stalk, just like Dom had said. A gnarly, weird-looking
stalk
.

No, it made even less sense than that: it was a stalk stretching out like some big, brainless arm, and
things
were spewing out of it,
things
with six big, jointed, crablike legs, things about the size of a dog. One of the things at the tip of the tree paused like a diver waiting to launch from the top board.

It was luminous, and not in a good way.

Glowies. More glowies
. Different
glowies. Oh … shit
.

Baird ducked down into the sail. He didn’t think to jump below and shut the hatch. He yelled to the deck beneath.

“Hard to starboard.
Go on
. Do it!” He stuck his arm down into the well, hand outstretched. “And somebody hand me my frigging rifle.
Now.
”

“You know when I said nothing would surprise me?” Gill Gettner banked the Raven and dropped so low that Dom was sure she was going to tip everyone out of the crew bay. “Wrong. Wrong, wrong,
wrong.
”

Dom clung to the safety line.
Clement
was a lonely black shape in the sea below, trailing an arrow-shaped white wake. Something
was on an intercept course with her, but it was hard to work out what it was or even its size from this angle. It was only when the Raven leveled out five meters above the water and came up on
Clement
’s stern that Dom realized what it was.

Barber leaned out of the bay to get a better look. “Well,
there’s
something you don’t see every day.”

“No shit,” Marcus muttered.

Tree
had sounded almost funny when they salvaged the abandoned cruiser. Now it wasn’t funny at all.
Clement
turned in a shallow arc and the grotesque stalk missed her bow by a few meters. Dom could see things clambering over the stalk like swarming insects, but they must have been at least half a meter tall. One leapt for the boat’s casing. It landed on the sonar dome at the bow.

Shit. Am I hallucinating, or is that thing glowing?

Baird was in the foxholelike well of the submarine’s bridge, his Lancer braced on the rim. He opened fire as the thing—six legs, scuttling like a spider—charged down the length of the boat’s casing. The muzzle flash was suddenly overwhelmed by a ball of light and a loud explosion.

Gettner veered to port. “Shit!”

“He’s okay, he’s
okay.
” As the Raven swept past, Dom could see Baird reloading and then frantically rubbing something out of his hair one-handed. “That’s got to be Lambent. How many different models do those things come in?”

Baird pulled his goggles into place, looked up, and made a gesture that could have been anything from
get clear
to
don’t leave me here, assholes
. Gettner looped around and came back down the line of the boat’s course, bow on.

Submarines were blind.
Clement
’s eyes were now just Baird and Gettner. Marcus moved up to man the door gun.

“KR-Eight-Zero to
Clement
, any damage?” Gettner turned and kept pace with the boat, holding position aft of the sail. “I’m looking at one live Baird and the remains of a … an exploding giant crab.”

“Garcia here, Eight-Zero. We’re okay. Hull seems intact. What did we avoid?”

“A big stalk of something that just punched out of the water. I don’t know where the glowing crawlies came from—on it, in it, no idea.”

“Yeah, I’m fine, assholes.” Baird’s voice cut in, shaky and pissed off. He still had his Lancer ready as if he expected a second wave any second. Dom gave him a thumbs-up. “Thanks for asking. This is how I love to spend my day.”

“We see you, Baird,” Gettner said. “You want to give us a sitrep, or just bitch all day?”

“It must be like coral,” he said. “Rock hard and full of individual polyp things. Except it grows about a zillion times
faster
than coral. You want to fly over and take a look? They’re still all sitting on that thing like—”

Gettner cut him dead. “
Clement!
Steer one-eighty! Hard over!”

Dom saw it a heartbeat later. Something shot along under the water, broke the surface, and shaved across
Clement
’s bow. It was another stalk. He heard the shout—might have been Baird, might have been Garcia—and saw the boat roll. Whether she turned in time or was struck a glancing blow, Dom didn’t know. He heard Marcus suck in a breath.

Submarines weren’t built for surface stability.
Clement
heeled, then righted herself. But the polyps had a foothold on the hull. Its curve and the slick of seawater left them scrabbling for purchase, but they hung on, a carpet of the things, clinging to the sonar dome and the forward hydroplanes. They seemed to be timing their charge.

Baird opened fire again. “Close the hatch,” he yelled. “I said
close the frigging hatch!
Dive and drown these things. Otherwise they’ll blow like mines.”

Garcia cut in. “Get below.
Now.
”

“Yeah?” Baird emptied a clip into the first wave of polyps and detonated them. The boat shook. More swarmed up. “I turn my back—they’ll come straight down on top of me.”

“No heroics. Get off the bridge.”

“
What
fucking heroics?” Baird sounded enraged. “Tell Gettner to earn her pay and get me out of here.”

Gettner dropped closer. Dom kept an eye open for new stalks but held his aim. Marcus swung the gun, trying to get a clear shot, but he could only aim down at the hull.

“Shit.”

“Yeah, don’t be tempted to open up with the gun yet, Fenix,” Gettner said. “Heavy caliber—I don’t know if those boats can take sustained fire.”

“Understood.” Marcus still sighted up on the submarine. “Major, you up for a winch rescue?”

“You bet. Any polyps that climb up the cable—bat them out.” The Raven lifted a few meters. “Baird, you picked the right day to drop the armor. Ready when you are.”

Baird picked off a polyp trying to climb the sail. It blew out a chunk of the anechoic coating as it exploded. “Okay, shut the hatch and crash-dive, or whatever the order is. Garcia? Just do it.”

“Yeah, do it,” Gettner said.

“Dom, take the gun.” Marcus moved in and started prepping the sling and winch with Barber. “If we hang around, we’ll get one of those stalks up the ass.”

“I’m estimating they can reach at least fifteen meters out of the water,” Gettner said. “Trust me, I’m going to bang out fast.”

What if those polyps could swim? Dom watched them clinging to the submarine. They were pretty chunky. Maybe they’d sink.

As soon as
Clement
flooded her tanks and sank beneath the surface, they slipped off the casing and thrashed around in the sea. Dom trained the gun on them as Baird kicked free from the bridge and trod water for a moment. He was now ringed by a ragged fringe of floundering polyps, any one of which could have gone off like a depth charge.

“Remember—the downdraft could trigger them,” Gettner said. “I don’t want to scrape Baird-burger off my undercarriage.”

Barber kept his eyes on the water. “They aren’t mines.”

“Nat, they’re
Lambent
. They could do any damn thing.”

“Okay, right … right … overshot, move back … got it.”

Baird was now directly underneath the Raven, battered by the downdraft in the middle of a disk of foaming water. He raised one
arm with an OK gesture, diver-style. His left hand still gripped his Lancer, held above his head.

“Let’s go.” Marcus squatted on the edge of the deck with Barber, guiding the sling in one hand. “Yeah … steady, Major … steady … okay, he’s got it.”

Baird struggled to get the sling under his arms for a few seconds. He should have dropped the rifle. Dom was ready to tell him to jettison the thing, but Baird wouldn’t have listened anyway. The polyps swept closer to him on a wave, looking far from dead even if they weren’t efficient swimmers.

Everything blows up in our faces now. Used to be that everything burrowed underneath us, buried us, dragged us down. Now it’s all explosions
.

The cable went taut. The winch started whining. “Got him, Gill,” said Barber.

Dom had stopped thinking about the submarine. He was too busy watching the polyps thrashing toward Baird’s legs while he kept his peripheral vision tuned for movement under the surface, for signs of more stalks erupting. One of the polyps managed to slap its legs down on the water and jump a meter. It grabbed at Baird’s boot and hung on.

Baird yelled in pain. For a terrible moment, Dom expected the polyp to detonate and take Baird’s legs with it, and nobody could do a damn thing—not even shoot at it. Then Baird kicked, it dropped, and it exploded as it hit the surface. Baird was lost for a second in a column of water.

“Hey, you assholes trying to use me for frigging
bait?
” he yelled. “Winch me up!”

“He’s okay,” Marcus grunted. “Normal for Baird.”

Dom was itching to sink the polyps. “Can I fire now?”

“Knock yourself out.”

Machine-gunning the creatures in the water felt surreal. Dom had to give some of them a second pass to get them to detonate, but where they’d drifted into a mass, a single exploding polyp set off a chain reaction. It was like watching a pyrotechnics show.

Marcus hauled Baird inboard across the deck by his belt.

“Yeah, spread ’em around, Dom.” Baird rolled over on his back, gasping but not too exhausted to bitch. “I mean, they might have eggs or something, like coral polyps. Help ’em spread.”

“You’re welcome.”

“My frigging ankle hurts. It got me.”

Gettner’s voice rasped over the speaker. “Hey! I can throw you back
anytime
, motormouth. Fenix, radio ahead and warn Doc Hayman that Baird might have brain damage. Because I swear I just saw him risk his self-obsessed ass to save his buddies. That says frontal-lobe trauma to me.”

“It’s a nice boat,” Baird said defensively. Dom watched his embarrassment, the telltale roll of the head. “I want it in one piece.”

“Sure you do,” said Marcus.

Dom was pretty sure that the first non-Baird thing that went through Baird’s mind was saving Cole. If he thought any wider than that, then the man was changing. Or maybe Dom had read him all wrong. It was a crazily brave thing to do, whatever the motive.

“They’ll let you keep playing with the boat, I’m sure,” Dom said.

“Hey, I rebuilt their comms and towed array. They’d peel grapes for me if I wanted. If we
had
grapes.”

Gettner interrupted. “Serious moment, guys. Is he fit enough for me to hang around here? Because I can see something. Look at the water. Follow the line from the main stalk.”

Dom couldn’t see what she meant until the Raven gained altitude. A streak of shadow grew under the surface as the growth was continued underwater, heading southeast. While Dom watched, another stalk erupted from the sea a few hundred meters ahead of the last one.

“Wow, is that part of this one, or what?”

“If it isn’t,” Marcus said, “maybe they’re erupting all over the region.”

Barber marked it on the folded chart resting on his thigh. “Better put out a shipping warning.”

“Hey, Nat, we’ve got one ahead,” Gettner said. “Look.”

She turned the Raven so Barber could see from the crew bay. Dom watched his expression behind his goggles as he refolded the chart and looked at the next grid. His frown got deeper, he started licking his lips a lot, and then he sat back with his hands flat on the chart, staring into the mid-distance for a moment.

“If I draw the proverbial line through these points, you know what it intersects with?” he said at last.

Baird unstrapped his boot and nursed his injured ankle. “This isn’t going to be a fun quiz, is it?”

“No, it’s not,” Barber said. “The damn things are on course for the Emerald Spar field.”

Marcus pressed his earpiece. “Control? This is Fenix. We might need a hand at the imulsion rig.”

Dom had reached his crisis overload for the day. Whatever came down the pike next, however bad, however crazy—it wasn’t going to shift that needle beyond the end-stop.

The harder they fought, the worse things got.

Gettner touched down on the rig’s helipad, muttering to Barber about loads and return trips.

Baird could hear her. She was already planning for the worst—the evacuation of the platform. Judging by the welcoming committee that met the Raven, though, the rig crew weren’t planning on going without a serious fight. They were, as Bernie would have said, seriously
tooled up
.

“Is that hardware for the stalks, or us?” Baird asked.

Marcus shrugged. “It’s their home. How far would you go to defend yours?”

“Mine was demolished by grubs. Like yours.”

“Yeah. So it was.”

Gradin and six of his crew waited at the edge of the pad, armed with an array of weapons that Baird had to admire. It included a
grenade launcher, a flamethrower, a harpoon gun, and a Locust Hammerburst.

Grubs
. Baird almost felt nostalgic about them. Nice big targets, predictable things that he knew how to fight. Things that relied on dry land, just like he did. After fifteen years, he had the measure of them. Now he was dealing with glowing monster eels, ship-killing giant stalks, and dog-sized exploding polyps, all of which sounded like interesting novelty acts until he started adding up the casualty list.

His ankle was giving him hell. He was parked somewhere between angry lashing-out aggression and the shaky aftermath of being too scared to think straight. When he jumped out of the Raven after Dom, he realized—again—that his armor was still on board
Clement
.