Gears of War: Anvil Gate (42 page)

Dizzy ran his hands over the steering wheel as if he was soothing it. “Mornin’, sweetie,” he said to the rig. “Did you have a restful night? You ready to do a little work for Dizzy? That’s my girl.” He rested his elbow on the cab door. “You gotta treat the ladies right, Colonel. Show you appreciate ’em.”

Hoffman was pretty sure that Dizzy really was just referring to the derrick, and not taking a poke at his guilty conscience. All the drivers recruited via Operation Lifeboat—Prescott’s coyly named project for conscripting Stranded with the promise of aid for their families—had this fixation with their vehicles. Maybe creating a crazy game was the only thing that made the job bearable; that, and drinking, which Dizzy did plenty of.

So what? He gets the job done. Poor bastard. How he kills his liver is his business
.

“They’re all ill-tempered when they first wake up,” Hoffman said. “Best to give them a wide berth until they’ve had a coffee and put their lipstick on.”

Dizzy roared with laughter. “Ain’t that the truth. Look, how do you know this trap is gonna work, sir? Maybe them polyp things is just too dumb to follow a trail o’ crumbs.”

“They’ll come at us, Wallin. We’re the crumbs.”
I’ve done this before. I’ve presented my throat to the enemy. And then, when he’s come within reach—I’ve killed him
. “Then we make sure we get them where we want them. We lure them. We herd them. Damn it, we even bulldoze them with Betty. But we get them in a killing zone, and we finish them.”

“Betty ain’t gonna like that much, sir.”

“She’s a tough old bird. Most women are. Don’t you worry about her.”

But even the tough ones sometimes don’t make it
.

The whole site came to life as drivers, engineers, and laborers showed up to get on with the digging and leveling. Staff Sergeant Parry, the most experienced engineer left in the corps, scrambled up a bank of earth with Royston Sharle to pore over a map.

They knew what they were doing. They didn’t need Hoffman around. But he wanted to watch them for a while, just to be reassured that this wasn’t an insane waste of fuel and manpower when there was transport to maintain, houses to build, and crops to grow.

If they thought it was crazy, they’d tell him, one way or another. He was sure of that.

“Did you like digging holes in the garden as a boy, Victor?” Michaelson walked along the top of the hard-packed ramp. “I did. Buried my mother’s best porcelain teapot as pirate treasure once. She wasn’t delighted.”

“If you tell me that made you want to join the navy,” Hoffman said, “I might have to punch you.”

“Have you come clean with Prescott about how much fuel this is going to take?”

“He knows all the numbers. He also knows that if push comes to shove and we
don’t
use the fuel—the imulsion reserves won’t matter a damn.”

“So this is what you did at Anvil Gate.”

“It was. Except I didn’t dig any holes.”

“Somehow the words
booby traps
in the official reports didn’t quite give me the full picture.”

“I didn’t write it. COG Command didn’t like my version, for some reason.”

Yes, this was one of the ways that Hoffman had defended Anvil Gate. It was more the principle than the exact method, but it was age-old wisdom; if you feared you might be overrun and your outer defenses breached, you needed a way to make sure that the enemy regretted it. Entering your citadel had to mean death.

It was surprisingly easy to fight that way when the time came.

There was a territorial animal inside every human being—sometimes hardly hidden, sometimes so buried that even the individual
didn’t know it was there—that would turn to blind savagery in defense of its home soil. Hoffman knew it was simply a matter of releasing it. Enemies pouring over your ramparts was a pretty good trigger.

“What if the stalks don’t show?” Michaelson asked.

“Then we’ve still got good fortifications,” Hoffman said. “Which won’t eat or drink anything, as Sergeant Mataki is fond of saying.”

“Is she talking to you yet?”

“Mataki?” Hoffman was all too aware that Bernie wasn’t happy. He’d have preferred a good bust-up to clear the air, but she seemed to be at loggerheads with something else, something internal; age, and her denial of it. If he hadn’t known her better he would have said she was suddenly scared of dying, which was an odd thing for a Gear who faced it every moment in her job. “She prefers the company of that goddamn dog. She even lets it sleep on her bed now. Damn thing growls at me.”

Michaelson gave him that indulgent look, an amused kind of sympathy. “It’s tempting to think we know what’s best for people.”

“That’s the nature of command, Quentin.”

“As long as we’re sure we’re not just doing what’s best for us. I wonder how you’ll take it when Prescott retires you. In the not-too-distant future, as well.”

“I haven’t
retired
Mataki. I’ve taken her off frontline duties while she’s recovering.” Hoffman was still trying to think of a way to climb down from his position without putting Bernie back in a job for which she was no longer fully fit. It didn’t preoccupy him as much as he felt it should have. It had become a worry he fitted in around the main business of the day, and he almost heard Margaret’s voice asking him when he planned to divorce her and marry the army. “If and when we face an attack, I’ll deploy her to Pelruan to support Lieutenant Stroud.”

Hoffman braced for a lecture on sending the womenfolk to safety, but Michaelson said nothing. He knew all the various histories and complications by now. Hoffman grabbed the opportunity for a change of topic.

“Baird thinks polyps won’t climb vertical walls well. So we get them in the pits and we blow the crap out of them. Or we burn them. Either way—they do
not
come out again.”

“But we don’t know where the stalks will emerge.”

“No, but we know the last place we want the polyps to go—toward humans.” Hoffman tapped Michaelson’s chest with his forefinger. The captain had taken to wearing the lighter naval armor, which somehow changed him from raffish to quietly menacing. The man had commanded amphibious special forces and it suddenly showed. “You just keep them away from the shore side.”

“Okay, you’ve convinced me utterly.”

“What else am I going to do, sit on my ass and do nothing because I can’t predict what’s going to happen?”

“No, I mean it.” Michaelson caught his shoulder and turned him around to walk back to the gates of the naval base. “I
haven’t
got a better idea. I’m falling back on what I know, just like you. Shore battery. Big guns. Torpedoes. Depth charges. Because nobody’s ever had to fight something that can appear pretty well anywhere and dump troops in your lap. It’s like fighting ghosts.”

It was absolutely the right word, and yet Hoffman found himself hunching his shoulders as if hearing it physically hurt.

Sometimes Hoffman saw the naval base’s gun battery as an historic but effective piece of artillery, but sometimes it was a reminder that Anvil Gate had to be faced and put to rest. There was only so long a man could obsess over his past. Everyone here had sleep-wrecking memories that would never leave them, and maybe his would look nothing special if he could experience the traumas of others.

I’m just an ordinary man. I’m not a saint, but I’m not a monster. This is where I stop beating myself up
.

If he was going to be doomed to relive the siege of Anvil Gate, then he would make it work for him, not against him. He chose to see it as a training run for an even more critical battle. He would make himself think differently.

Doesn’t that make a mockery of all the lives lost? Does anyone
deserve to burn to death? Does anyone deserve to be shot for trying to save their loved ones?

Hoffman decided that ends did justify means, and it was a decision he’d taken unconsciously when he enlisted more than forty years ago. The essence of soldiering was doing something bad to stop something even worse. This time, the end was saving what little was left of his world, and Anvil Gate was helping him do it.

“Yeah, ghosts, Quentin. Goddamn ghosts.”

Prescott was holding a public meeting over in the main housing zone. He expected his minions to show solidarity, even Trescu, and Hoffman was prepared to indulge him if it meant a quiet life. He was still the lawful chairman under the Fortification Act, which had never been repealed. And he still believed utterly in his right and capacity to govern. Hoffman could see it in every jut of the chin and squaring of the shoulders. The man wasn’t floundering, and he wasn’t out of ideas. He wasn’t hapless; he wasn’t a clueless bureaucrat. He just seemed to have his mind on something even more pressing. Sometimes Prescott reminded Hoffman of a man who knew he was going to fire his staff, but still made an effort to behave impeccably right up to the moment he showed them the door.

He was also a goddamn liar. He lied the regular way, and he lied by omission. Hoffman still wondered how much classified material Prescott kept from him. Prescott fed him information that he desperately needed a crumb at a time even when Jacinto was facing its final attack, even after the damn city had been sunk.

He’s a politician. He’s a politician who still isn’t scared enough to tell me the truth and ask for help
.

There was quite a crowd at the fire muster point. The open space had become the informal town square in this section. Prescott walked casually into the crowd, his close protection Gears a little way behind him, and dominated the gathering just by the way he stood. The crowd was mainly Old Jacinto citizens, but there were also quite a few ex-Stranded—what a goddamn joke—and Gorasni. Trescu arrived late.

“I often wonder who the Chairman feels his security detail
needs to protect him from most.” Michaelson feigned a turn to look toward Trescu, but whispered in Hoffman’s ear. “The Jacinto mob, the assorted riffraff, or us.”

I wish I could find a crass motive. Money. Power. Greatness. Whatever. But he’s got absolute power, money means damn all now, and there’s nobody left to parade his status to. He really believes it all. He really does think he’s been chosen by fate to save humanity
.

That was what made a politician really dangerous. There was no common animal motive for the likes of Hoffman or any other man to understand.

“We’ve faced the unknown before,” Prescott said to the crowd. “
Many
times. Things we couldn’t even begin to imagine existed. But we survived it all. We’ve seen nightmarish things, we’ve come through a terrible war—”

“Ephyra might have come through it,” a Gorasni voice yelled. “But the rest of the planet—we
burned
, thanks to you, Mister Chairman Prescott. Even your allies.”

“Ahhh,” Michaelson said. “I wondered how long it would take for someone to point that out. They did awfully well to ignore that elephant for so long, didn’t they?”

Trescu piled straight in. He was just a few strides from the heckler, and he simply walked over and cuffed him hard across the back of the head.

“I don’t ask you to forgive, and I don’t ask you to forget.” Trescu turned to the Gorasni crowd. “But I demand that you focus on what will save our lives. We have a new war coming. You don’t need to resurrect another old one.”

Hoffman caught yet another glimpse of what made Gorasnaya willing to follow Trescu into a deal few of them seemed to want. Damn it, he
admired
the man. Disliking him was a totally separate issue.

Prescott seemed unruffled by the interruption. “I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t had to do terrible things. And I won’t lie to you and tell you we’ll defeat the Lambent. I don’t know if we can, any more than I knew if we could beat the Locust. All I can
do is point to the fact that we’re still thriving in the face of overwhelming odds. We can do the impossible.”

A handful of people clapped. Then the smattering of applause picked up pace, and within seconds Prescott was being cheered by most of the crowd. The bastard had the touch, he definitely did.

Ends justify means. I shoot people: he lies
.

But he hadn’t. Prescott had actually leveled with the civvies.

“I’ve had it with moral relativity,” Hoffman said. “Come on, Quentin. Let’s get back to CIC.” He beckoned to Trescu as he passed. “You too, Commander.”

One of the windows of the main CIC room looked out over the sea. Hoffman could see lookouts with their field glasses trained on the horizon, and two radar picket boats dragging white wakes as they patrolled the inshore limits. A Raven hovered low over the water about five klicks out to dunk its sonar buoy. If anything was heading this way through the water, they’d probably detect it.

Probably
.

“No movement with Ollivar’s flotilla, then?” Michaelson asked. “And do you ever leave this office?”

“No to both questions, sir.” Mathieson pushed his chair away from the desk for a moment to grab a pencil from another one. “I like it here.”

“They’re waiting for something,” Trescu said. “I cannot imagine why.”

“I take it you’re handing back Nial and his father.”

Trescu shrugged. “Not my prisoners. Your call, Colonel.”

It was suddenly a tough decision. The Stranded were leaving. From a security point of view, the bombers would no longer be a threat, but they were responsible—perhaps personally, individually—for the deaths of both Gears and Gorasni. Hoffman’s sense of justice demanded that they didn’t walk away free men. And yet it seemed pointless to hold prisoners right now.

He found himself almost wishing that Trescu had solved the problem the 9 mm way and not told him until afterward. And he wasn’t proud that he could even think it.

“Sir?” Mathieson, listening on his headset, beckoned to Hoffman. “Ollivar’s vessels are moving into the MEZ. Quite a few more hulls than we’d imagined—the Stranded contingent here must be bigger than we thought. He wants to talk to you.”

“Tell him to cut the crap and get his people out. That was the deal.” Hoffman dreaded having to let the two surviving bombers go and then explaining that to Bernie, or any other Gear for that matter. “Tell him no torpedoes up the ass this time, if that’s what he’s worried about.”