Gears of War: Anvil Gate (56 page)

“Victor.” Prescott looked up, just a little too slowly to be natural. “So we lick our wounds and return to the fray. It could have been much worse.”

“That’s the spirit, sir.” Anything less than a growl was sarcasm, and most people knew that about him by now. “Keep calm and carry on.”

“Corporal, would you and Lowe excuse us for a few minutes?” Prescott knew Hoffman’s tone only too well. “Take a meal break while things are quiet.”

Hoffman waited for the two Gears’ footsteps to fade on the stairs.

“That sounds as if you’re expecting trouble,” he said. “People are pretty shaken up, but they haven’t started lynching COG officials yet.”

Prescott was still a model of leisurely calm. “We stand at a difficult crossroads. There’ll be many questioning my judgment and fitness to lead, for bringing them all this way to face more hardship.”

“Is there something you want to share with me, Chairman?”

“Are you one of them, Victor?”

Okay, let’s get down to it
. “I’m the one who thought we’d be better off on an island in a more temperate climate. Not you.”

“Ah, still taking sole responsibility for our joint decisions. Do you want to be a martyr, Colonel? Or a politician?”

“Cut the bullshit.”

“I get a very strong feeling that you no longer have confidence in me.”

Hoffman folded his arms. He had no idea why he made sure his hand was tucked loosely under his left elbow so that he could draw his sidearm instantly, but it was. Prescott had a pistol. Hoffman had never known him even to look as if he might use it under any circumstances. But now wasn’t the time to test that impression.

“I wish it was an easy yes or no,” Hoffman said. “There’s not one major decision you’ve made that I would have done differently. I never saw you do anything dumb. I’ve never known you to even get drunk or screw a woman. But you’re a liar, Chairman, and that makes my job too hard. There’s no possible reason left for keeping information from your defense staff.”

Prescott was still salvaging the contents of his office. He didn’t even seem to be doing it as distraction. He walked around to his chair and rattled the desk drawer.

“This is really rather juvenile, Victor. You feel slighted because I didn’t tell you every detail?”

“Like the existence of classified research facilities, like New Hope? That kind of shit isn’t
detail
. It’s what I
need to know.
”

“The army is the servant of the state. It’s not the government, and that’s who decides what needs to be known.”

“True. But you’re still a goddamn liar.”

“So why did you do it, Victor?”

Prescott could have been fishing for information himself, of course. He had a talent for that. He homed in on faint guilt like a shark following a molecule of blood in the water. Hoffman didn’t care what Prescott found out now, but he couldn’t stomach the idea of being played again.

“Mistrust corrodes,” Hoffman said. “Rots the whole working relationship. And this isn’t any old job—it’s about you and me keeping the human race from extinction.”
What the hell. Say it. What can he do to you? What’s left to break?
“I want to think that it’s just some compromising pictures of you and a sheep. Just sleaze. Dumb, petty shit. I really do.”

But Prescott wasn’t sleazy or greedy or conventionally corrupt. Hoffman knew it, and for a moment that almost made him cave in. Prescott’s motive was just salvation. It wasn’t malice.

No. This shit stops right here. His motive doesn’t make any difference to the consequences. I need to know. I need to know all the things he still won’t tell me
.

Hidden things, buried things, encrypted things, things lurking under the surface waiting to drag him down—grubs, monsters, secrets, it didn’t matter which. Hoffman had had a gutful of them all. He wanted everything out in the open. He wanted to shine the light in its face and see it for what it really was.

Prescott’s expression didn’t change. Hoffman wanted a fight, an air-clearing showdown. He wasn’t going to get one. He knew it. The Chairman tried the key in the lock, jiggled it around, and eventually got the drawer open. He looked inside but didn’t actually touch the data disk.

“You didn’t really intend to cover your tracks,” Prescott said. The wind whipped through the gap in the roof and scattered odd papers around. “That’s far too sly for you. But seeing as you want to be told things—whatever information you have is also stored somewhere else.”

“Very wise precaution.”

“So what have you done with the disk?”

“Kiss my ass, Chairman. I’ll tell you when you tell me.”

“So you haven’t managed to break the encryption.”

You crafty asshole. I walked right into that. Shit, I must be getting senile
.

Prescott could have done plenty to Hoffman right then. He would have been within his rights under the Fortification Act to draw his pistol and shoot Hoffman on the spot. Part of Hoffman
thought he should have done just that, because he’d made that call himself in the past.

But maybe Prescott knew that calling in Gears to arrest the Chief of Staff—not just any old brass, a real Gear like them, one of their own—was going to unleash a shitload of trouble in its own right.

And maybe Prescott wasn’t sure they wouldn’t turn on him instead. He’d been prodding around that issue for weeks.

Hoffman now had no idea where to go next. He couldn’t argue about what he couldn’t decipher, he was pretty sure he couldn’t beat it out of the man, and the animal reflex—to punch him right in that smug, fucking
patronizing
face—wasn’t going to feel satisfying for more than a few seconds.

The only option left was to stop trying to guess what he was doing. It was letting him set the agenda. Hoffman simply had to ignore him. If that wasn’t a bloodless military coup, he wasn’t sure what was. The test would be which Gears followed him when the time came that his orders didn’t match Prescott’s.

Prescott just carried on gathering his stuff. Hoffman had to walk away and resist the temptation to pick up the ball left lying in his court.

He walked down the stairs, feeling like a complete asshole for not ripping the man a new one, but he knew that he didn’t have anything concrete to object to except never knowing what resources Prescott had kept hidden.

But in a world of shortages, just hiding resources was a life-threatening crime.

Yes. It is. Look at me, what I did at Anvil Gate. I’d still do it again. You don’t hold out on your neighbor when it’s life or death
.

Hoffman passed Lowe and Rivera on the way out. They’d put their helmets on a windowsill while they stood around in the lobby eating a snack, and they looked at Hoffman as if they were embarrassed. Fine; it was no secret that Hoffman and the Chairman didn’t get on. It wouldn’t even make the grade as gossip.

He forced himself to focus on the immediate problems—of settling the civvies into even more temporary accommodation and
making sure Michaelson had some kind of working fleet. He had to catch up with Bernie, too. She was the only friend he had, the only person who could and would hear him out. She’d put things in perspective. She’d make him feel that he wasn’t the most useless asshole in the world.

So what do I do with this disk now? And how can I get through two, three wars and still have to go running to Bernie to ask if I’m right or not?

He decided not to tell Michaelson about the disk yet, just in case it dropped the man in the shit. Michaelson had enough on his plate. He was also a political animal who actually enjoyed playing these goddamn balls-aching spy games with Prescott. It was going to be interesting to see if Prescott tried to recruit him.

Michaelson took Hoffman for an inspection tour of
Dalyell
. The carrier was still taking on water, and the crew—a maintenance team, nothing remotely like a full ship’s complement—was struggling to locate all the leaks.

“Save her, or save her spare parts?” Michaelson said sadly, splashing through knee-deep water. “Breaks my heart.”

“She’s worth saving as living quarters even if we can’t fuel her.”

“You look like you’ve had a fight, Victor.”

“Stop changing the subject.”

“I know you too well. It’s the flushing around the neck.” Michaelson gave him a sly wink. “Let me guess. Prescott? Because it’s not Trescu.”

Hoffman struggled to find a response he could live with. If he lied to Michaelson, then another relationship would be tainted.

“Very perceptive,” he said. “But what you don’t know can’t hurt you. Plausible deniability and all that bullshit. Let’s just say I’ve got some research to do first.”

“Just remember he’s a politician, Victor. They’re not like us little people.”

“Why do
you
hate his guts?”

Michaelson took a sudden interest in a run of pipework that was sagging from the deckhead. “Can’t pin it down, really. Not sure I
hate
him so much as don’t
trust
him. I just don’t like the cut
of his jib.” He shrugged. “I prefer the ones whose disastrous lack of judgment I can see and point at. It’s his clinging to secrecy when there shouldn’t be anything left to conceal.”

Hoffman realized that Michaelson was right on just about every point, as he usually was. Hoffman didn’t find Trescu’s reticence anywhere near as threatening as Prescott’s. Trescu was an Indie, and an Indie who’d seen his entire nation reduced to a few thousand people. He was bound to be wary of telling his old enemy everything. It wasn’t the same as someone on your own team shutting you out of everything.

“I’m glad it’s not just me,” Hoffman said.

“But who’s actually running the COG now, Victor?
We
are. Nothing can happen without En-COG or Gears. We don’t have a confident, assertive civilian society—we haven’t had one since E-Day, maybe even earlier. Now we have these dangerous, uppity, foreign ideas seeping in from Trescu and even the Stranded. Prescott knows that like he knows his own name.”

“Your point?”

“He’s probably afraid. Scared politicians usually get very punchy and posture a lot.” Michaelson climbed the ladder to the next deck and tapped the heel of his hand against the bulkhead, listening as if he expected something to knock back. “Here’s the question. Does he govern? Is he fit to govern? And if he isn’t, who decides who is? Our only legal framework now is the Fortification Act. People are starting to talk about elections again.”

“I just shoot bad bastards. Was that a question?”

“Only if you have an answer.”

Hoffman had to think about that one. It was what Margaret would have called … 
elegant
. “You love all this intrigue shit, don’t you?”

Michaelson smiled. He could give as good as he got with Prescott. Hoffman couldn’t. In that lonely desperation that usually tormented him when he was lumbered with a secret he didn’t want to have, he almost took the encrypted disk out of his pocket to show him. Maybe Michaelson even had some encryption key that would open it.

But it felt like too much too soon. These were dangerous times. He’d talk to Bernie first.

“I don’t love it,” Michaelson said. “I just accept it’s another warfighting skill I have to have.”

“Yeah,” Hoffman said. “Me, I prefer a chainsaw.”

CHAPTER 19

“I think you must surrender, Lieutenant,” Casani said. “We can’t go on.”

It was exceptionally hot in the council chamber that afternoon. The stench of the city was sometimes relegated to the background because hunger took priority, but at other times it was hard for Hoffman to ignore. The smell of smoke from burning garbage and bodies was almost a relief.

Hoffman had lost twenty kilos; he was one of the luckier ones. And while he sympathized with Casani and the thousand or so citizens who’d died of dysentery, starvation, or simply taken their chances and fled over the walls, he had less intention of surrendering now than he’d ever had.

Anvil Gate had gone past the point of compromise. They said that throwing good money after bad was the hallmark of a fool. Hoffman’s defense of the fort had cost lives, but deciding now that it had all been a mistake simply pissed on their graves. If it had been worth
any
of their lives, then he’d die before he opened those gates to the UIR.

His orders were still to defend the fort. Nothing had changed. If he’d been told to hand it over, he suspected he would have stayed there alone, even though he now missed Margaret so much that he’d almost cried himself to sleep some nights. He could think of little else beyond ending—winning—the siege now.