Gears of War: Anvil Gate (55 page)

Baird could hear rumbling like an avalanche gathering speed. Then the naval base alarm drowned it out. He hauled himself upright on the nearest desk, skidding on shards of glass and papers. Hoffman pushed him out the door.

By the time the fresh air hit him, his adrenaline was the only thing keeping him moving. Gears sprinted for the west wall of the base. He reached for the Gnasher shotgun slung on his back and went forward automatically toward the sound of Lancer fire.

“Where’s the wall?” he asked. He was staring at open sea. Little clusters of wobbling white light scuttled from the horizon toward him. “There was a wall there.”

“Shit,” Hoffman said. “It took the cliff out. It took the goddamn
cliff
out, Corporal.”

“Hey, don’t dock my wages. I just killed a frigging whale-sized glowie. There’s bound to be some cleanup.”

At night, the scale of the damage didn’t really sink in. Baird couldn’t see enough to be shocked by the instant change in the landscape. He could see the polyps charging at him, though, and that was a lot more urgent. He aimed at the bioluminescence and found he could hit them better with the Gnasher, especially if he let them get dangerously close. They splattered his boots. He started to feel personal scores had been settled every time one of the ugly little assholes burst in front of him.

Most of the Ravens seemed to be airborne, playing their searchlights on the parts of the base where the fixed lighting had
failed. Baird ran out of polyps and turned around to find Hoffman had gone.

“Hey, Colonel, you taking a break or something?”

He looked around. There was sporadic gunfire everywhere, but he couldn’t see any more glowies.
Shit, where’s Hoffman? And what’s happened to
Falconer? Baird started backing away, reloading his Gnasher. He tried the radio.

“Baird to
Falconer
, tell me you didn’t sink.”

It took a while for Marcus to answer. “Nice. Destructive, but nice.”

Baird fought down a dumb surge of pride.
Hey, I’m not after his approval, am I? Get a grip
. “Still got polyps.”

“Baby, you need some ointment for that,” Cole said.

“How many?” Marcus asked.

“Couple of hundred got ashore.”

“And?”

“I think we got them all.” Cole was okay, so Baird could get back to worrying about his own ass again without feeling bad about it. “Got to find Hoffman. I’m standing here on my own like everyone else knows where the party is except me.”

Baird had been caught too close to too many explosions. He knew they were taking their toll. But as usual, he felt almost back to normal again all too fast, a weird kind of peacefulness that he knew was something connected to the shock. It was almost like having a local anesthetic and watching Doc Hayman slice you up; you could see the damage was being done, but it was all a long way away for the time being.

He moved forward past the barracks block, expecting to hear
Falconer
or even Mathieson on the radio saying that there was now a whole pod of pissed-off leviathans steaming toward the base. But all he could hear was the crackling of a fire. Yellow light flickered on a wall. One of the polyps must have detonated near something flammable.

Hey, I got the thing before it spewed even more of them. I didn’t fail
.

It wasn’t until Baird turned the next corner that he felt the heat
on his face and stopped in his tracks. He was used to stumbling into firefights and seeing some weird and desperate shit, but it took him a few moments to work out what was really going on here.

It looked like a camp bonfire. A moving carpet of embers sizzled, wheezed, and popped. From time to time something exploded like an aerosol can. Gears, Stranded, and Gorasni stood around it, most of them holding their weapons in the safety position or even slung over their shoulders. Three of them were hosing the pile with flamethrowers.

Hoffman held out his hand to one of the Gorasni and the guy passed him his flamethrower. The colonel stood in grim silence and laid down a stream of flame like it was some kind of ritual. Baird wanted to back away quietly and hope nobody had seen him.

The bonfire was actually a heap of dead and dying polyps. There hadn’t been that many disgorged this time, but this response to them was the kind of overkill Baird had seen when Locust stragglers had caught up with the population escaping Jacinto. There hadn’t been many grubs left, but every Gear and every unit charged in to slice them up, desperate to put the boot in one last time after so many years of taking shit from the things.

Baird had joined in then, too. A Stranded guy turned down his flamethrower’s jet and stepped back to pass it to him.

“Be my guest,” the man said. “You might not get the chance next time.”

It was pointless, but Baird did it anyway, if only for the experience of opening up that jet and seeing how far he could shoot it. He wasn’t sure if the ritual purged anything in him or not.

The naval base siren came to life moments later and sounded the all-clear. Hoffman walked up to Baird and slapped him on the back. He had that look that said his mind was on something even worse than a collapsing naval base and a whole new kind of enemy.

“You’re a bastard, Baird,” he said. “But you’re
our
bastard.”

It was one of the nicest compliments Baird could remember getting. He didn’t get many.

“Somebody fetch the COG boys a broom,” one of the Stranded guys yelled. “They’re going to be sweeping this place clean for a year, if they live that long. So long, assholes.”

They were all walking away. The Gorasni stood and watched them sullenly; maybe they thought the all-clear meant it was time to start the feuding again.

“You leaving?” Baird said. “And we had so much to talk about.”

“Yeah, this is the last place we want to be.” The guy had a handheld radio, the kind that civilian security guards used to use in the days before the world went to shit. “You’re finished, COG. We’re getting clear of you while we still can.”

He walked away, talking to someone on the radio. Baird heard him say something about 1800, sunset tomorrow, and to get everyone together for the fleet.

They were leaving, then. That was something. Baird thought that was worth changing the map of the island to achieve.

He’d check what that actually looked like in the morning.

One day, he’d be dead, and then all this crap would be over. That was something to look forward to, Hoffman decided.

He leaned out of the Raven’s crew bay and surveyed the changed landscape as best a man could when he hadn’t the slightest idea what he was looking at. The granite cliffs that formed the western limit of the naval base had fallen into the sea, exposing tunnels like a broken beehive and leaving walls trying to bridge thin air.

And the ancient cannons were gone. They lay somewhere below in the pounding waves. Hoffman thought of Anvegad for a moment and wondered if the Anvil Gate gun battery was still in one piece. He suspected it was.

But here, he’d lost a third of the base. At least most of the ships—were still afloat on the eastern side.

If we ever need to run again—can we?

One of the Raven’s Nest carriers,
Dalyell
, looked as dead as the former Chairman she had been named for. She was listing to one side and down at the bows. Hoffman watched the activity on her decks as teams of Gears and seamen tried to repair her, an emergency pump at her stern spewing water over the side.

It was the hectares of tents and wooden huts that made him privately despair, though. Where there had been a growing city, temporary accommodation gradually turning into solid, permanent buildings a road at a time, the ground now looked like the aftermath of a Hammer strike.

I’ve seen this all before. I don’t think I can stomach seeing this again. And again …

The road layout was still visible, a neat grid spreading out from the walls of the naval base into what had been open countryside and fields when they’d landed here. Nearly half the new homes had gone. Where there had been roofs, there were now piles of charred wood and ash.

But the people survived this time. This isn’t Ephyra. You can always rebuild the bricks and mortar
.

“Shit, sir.” Mitchell stared down from the crew bay with him. “How much more of this can they take?”

Hoffman was trained to say uplifting things and crack down hard on the easily daunted. Morale mattered. It wasn’t an illusion. Losing the will to go on was the difference between life and death in extreme crisis. But he just couldn’t spout the required lines any longer because he didn’t believe them himself.

Admiralty House was a wreck. It hadn’t burned, but the roof and windows had been blown out. Paper was still drifting everywhere on the wind. And still people got on with the task at hand. It should have made Hoffman proud to see orderly lines of Gears and civilians moving equipment and supplies out of the main building to safe cover. Instead, it just broke his heart.

He reminded himself that he was entitled to just five minutes of negativity and despair per conflict, and then he had get back out there and do the job. He had to be seen to be holding it all together.

“Got to walk the course,” he said. “Set me down there, Sorotki.”

“What happened to the kid and his dad?” Mitchell asked. “You know. The bombers.”

There was nothing like a brand-new monster to take your mind off the old ones. “Last time I checked,” Hoffman said, “they were in the detention block.”

“Only reason for asking, sir, is that the detention block’s now forming a rather decorative breakwater down there.”

Hoffman had another torn moment like so many; a burst of
serves you right, you bastards
, followed almost immediately by imagining what it was like to be locked in a cell and unable to escape as disaster struck.
Is that concern for those assholes?
He had his doubts. He suspected he was simply reliving his guilt and bewilderment that he had once left Marcus to the grubs as they overran the prison in Ephyra.

“Better check,” Hoffman said. “But it’s not a priority.”

It was, of course. He wanted as many seeds of future guilt swept out of the way as he could. But it wasn’t Mitchell’s job to do that. He jumped down from the Raven and made his way from the main gate, through the barracks blocks, and out onto the parade ground. Deep fissures had opened up in the concrete. He expected the paving to subside under him at any moment.

New Jacinto had escaped the fate of the old city, though. It got an earthquake-sized shock, but it hadn’t sunk.

Lucky. Or maybe fate’s keeping us around to punish us
.

No;
lucky
, definitely lucky. He
had
to think that. And thinking it made it so, because a man could choose to feel joy or misery by selecting the things he compared his plight with. It was all relative—pain, hunger, loneliness, joy. The trick was finding the comparator. By the time he got halfway across the open square, he was in a bullish mood again and ready to start over.

I survive. We all survive. And those who don’t are out of it anyway, free, oblivious. Margaret, Samuel Byrne, every Gear I lost, every Kashkuri who died in Anvegad—and everyone on this planet
who died when I turned that command key to launch the Hammer of Dawn
.

Hoffman had never discussed that night with Prescott. It was the kind of soul-searching intimacy and admission of ghosts that you could manage only with the people you trusted, sometimes not even with the ones you loved. But at that moment he was in the right frame of mind to ask Prescott questions that had nothing to do with trusting the man.

The Chairman should have been back by now. Half the civilians had come back to New Jacinto even if their homes had gone. Hoffman was surprised by how easy they found it to move, but then they still had very few possessions that couldn’t be bundled into a bag. It was the administration that was now weighed down by its attachment to material things.

“Is this damn building structurally sound, Lennard?”

Hoffman stood outside the main entrance to Admiralty House and looked up at the frontage. Staff Sergeant Parry was wearing a helmet, which was unusual for him.

“Can’t guarantee it, Colonel,” Parry said. “But I’ve been up to the top floor and I’m still in one piece, so if you need to go in, feel free. I shut off the power, though. The radio net’s been transferred back to the emergency management response truck. I told the Chairman to mind where he steps.”

“He’s back, then?”
Asshole. Never told me
. “Up top?”

“Sifting through his office.”

Fine. Let’s lance that boil, shall we?

“I’ll go up and see him.” Hoffman found himself rehearsing his excuses for breaking into the desk, and despising himself at the same time for even feeling a need to. “Sitrep meeting at eighteen hundred today with Sharle and his team, in—hell, where’s a safe, dry place to meet now?”

“I’ll radio you when I find somewhere, sir. But we’ll have a better picture of the habitability of the site by then. We’ve got water and generators, we’ve got food, the field latrines are intact, and the weather’s good. All in all, it beats having grubs smashing through the sewers and water mains all the time.”

Hoffman was going to make sure that Parry got a medal. Sappers had kept Old Jacinto running for all those impossible, terrible years, and now they were doing the same for the new city. Their never-ending job was slightly easier here. Parry had chosen to be a satisfied man, if not a happy one, living proof of Hoffman’s theory.

But was Prescott going to be happy? It was time to find out. Hoffman climbed the stairs slowly, crunching on broken glass in the stairwell, partly out of caution and partly to give Prescott warning that he had company. When he got to the top floor, he could feel the breeze coming through the old sail loft. The roof had been ripped up.

Prescott was rolling charts and stacking them carefully in a cardboard box. His two close protection Gears, Rivera and Lowe, stood at the broken windows watching the cleanup. Hoffman wondered what Prescott felt he needed protection from at that moment, other than falling plasterboard.