Gears of War: Anvil Gate (6 page)

Bernie found herself hoping it was bigger quarry.

The Packhorse lay belly-up like a dead animal. The dog was sniffing around in the grass at the side of the road, but Baird couldn’t see Bernie or Anya yet.

They were here, though. They were still in radio contact, but that didn’t seem to make Marcus any less agitated. The warning signs were no more than a fixed stare and a twitch of jaw muscles, but Baird knew him well enough by now to see when the guy was wound up. He really didn’t like Anya doing any hairy-assed stuff. Baird wondered if they argued about it in private.

They occasionally disappeared at the same time. Baird noted things like that.

“Well, at least I know where to set down safely,” Sorotki said. “Seeing as Mataki’s been kind enough to do the route-proving and trigger the device … I’ll land on the road.” The Raven banked in a loop, coming up on the other side of the overturned vehicle. Bernie and Anya were crouched in its cover with their rifles ready. Bernie shielded her eyes from the grit whipped up by the chopper’s downdraft. “Stick to the paved surface, boys and girls. No telling what those bastards have planted either side.”

Bernie’s voice came on the radio. “You can set off mines with downdraft, you know.”

“Stand by, kitten-killer …”

Baird leaned back into the crew bay to talk to the crew chief. Mitchell was huddled over the Raven’s door gun like he was trying to hatch it. “Hey, the Pack’s in one piece,” Baird said. “We can lift it underslung.”

Mitchell didn’t take his eyes off the ground below. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re just too caring?”

“I never leave a wounded machine behind.”

“Dizzy can swing by with the salvage rig later and haul it back. Casevac first.”

“It’ll be picked clean the minute we leave. You think these assholes don’t stake out their devices or know when they catch something?”

“Too bad.” Marcus did his slow head turn, the one that said he was seriously pissed off, and fixed Baird with a cold blue stare. “We’ll just have to reclaim the shit when we catch up with them.”

Baird wasn’t scared of Marcus, but he knew when to back off. The man wasn’t
knowable
. Although Baird knew what Marcus would do in a given situation, he didn’t know how his mind worked, and that bothered him. Any mechanism—human, animal, machine—could be analyzed, its component parts evaluated, and its workings and functions understood. Not understanding Marcus was the most unsettling thing about him.

Yeah, but you’re not immune to all this shit, are you, Marcus? Look at you sweating over Anya. Caring screws you up, man. Just switch it off. Life gets a lot easier then
.

Sorotki set the Raven down on the road. Bernie and Anya emerged from behind the Packhorse, tottering under the weight of an ammo box and two fuel cans.

“Can’t leave it here,” Bernie said. She had maps stuffed under one arm. “Got to clear the vehicle.”

Baird blocked Bernie’s path and tried to take the crate from her. “Women drivers. You must have inherited extra lives from all those cats you ate, Granny.”

She hung on to the crate, but he could see she was struggling. “Thanks, I can manage this.”

“Sure you can.” He wrestled the box from her arms. He wasn’t sure if he was embarrassed for her, or just trying to avoid looking
as if he gave a shit. “And then you’ll have a stroke, and I’ll have Hoffman on my back for letting you.”

Marcus relieved Anya of the fuel cans and steered her toward the Raven. Bernie shrugged wearily. “We’re going to need some mine-clearance kit, Blondie. Invent something.”

“Already got a plan for putting a mine flail on a grindlift rig. Now get your ass in that bird before you break anything else.”

“
Arse.
” She ignored him and snapped her fingers at the dog. Mac trotted to her side and sat to attention like he was waiting for orders. “Mac? Want to find bad guys?
Seek.
”

“You got perforated eardrums, or just going senile? Time to go.”

“It wasn’t much of a bomb. I’m fine.” Mac was already rooting around and making a line for the trees. “The trail’s less than a day old, though. Best time to follow it.”

“Head injuries. Subdural hematomas.” Baird wondered if he was going to have to haul her on board. He found himself worrying inexplicably about how to grab her. “Delayed onset of cerebral swelling. Coma.”

“Thanks. You’re such a cheery little bastard.”

But she gave him a motherly pat on the back, just like she did with Cole, and went after the dog. Marcus was still examining the crater. He looked up.

“Where the hell’s she going?” he asked.

“Asshole hunting. It’s an Islander thing.”

“And you let her.”

“Hey, I’m not a geriatrics nurse.”

Marcus sighed and pressed his earpiece. “Mataki? Get back here.”

There was a pause before she came back on the radio. She must have been in a dip, because Baird could only see gray hair and the top of her backpack bobbing above the grass as she walked.

“Mac’s picked up a trail,” she said. “You want to pass this up?”

“How hard did you hit your head, Mataki?”

“Not hard enough to forget I owe these tossers a really bad time.”

Marcus didn’t bother to argue. He gestured at Baird to follow her and pressed his earpiece again. “Sorotki? We’re going after them. Get Lieutenant Stroud back to base.”

“Roger that,” Sorotki said. “Call us when you need us.”

Anya’s voice interrupted. “Look, I’m fine. I should be out there with—”

But she was cut short by the whine of the engines as the Raven lifted clear. Baird didn’t approve of women in combat roles, but it was asking for trouble to override her like that—and not just because she outranked Marcus. She wouldn’t take that dismissal lightly, whatever the motive.

“Wow, harsh,” Baird said. “You won’t be getting any for a
long
time.”

“Shut it, Baird,” Marcus muttered.

Baird never had much control over his mouth, and he knew it. Something smart-ass always emerged unbidden; he couldn’t even blame it on stupidity. Sometimes it was fear, sometimes frustration, but mostly it was habit, and he wished he could just keep it zipped. He realized that all the people closest to him—this squad—were those who seemed to understand that and knew when to ignore him.

It was kind of comforting. For once in his life, he felt easy with a group of people.

His earpiece radio clicked. “They’ll hang around, won’t they?” Bernie said. “They’ll be somewhere relatively close.”

“They’ll want to know if they hit their target,” Baird said. “They’d have to be deaf not to hear the explosion.”

“Are we checking the farms for missing chemicals? They make their own sodium chlorate and nitrate fertilizer here.”

“Oh, great.”

“You can kill someone with most anything if you want to. Farms need agricultural chemicals, Blondie.”

“Spoken like a farmer, Granny.”

She had a point, though. The Stranded would use whatever they could find to make explosives, whether that was weed-killer, fertilizer, or even old and unstable TNT. And when they ran out
of the chemical stuff, and then ran out of bullets, it would be pit traps with shit-smeared wooden stakes at the bottom. Whatever they used, however low-tech the guerilla war became, people would still end up dead or injured.

We’ll end up chasing them forever. Too many places to hide. Not so many places for them to target, though. They’ve got to come to the settlements or ambush vehicles in transit. Time we lured these assholes into our own ambushes
.

Marcus grunted, finger pressed to his ear. He was listening to the comms between Rossi and Control. “They’ve lost them,” he said. “Sam’s gone back to dismantle the device. She says she needs the materials.”

“Crazy bitch. Good luck civilizing her, Granny.”

“Waste not, want not, Blondie.”

“We beat
grubs
, man. We should have done the same with these assholes and bombed the shit out of them when they were all still in one place.”

“Amen,” Bernie murmured.

Marcus cut in. “I think we should all shut the fuck up.”

The dog led them along a zigzag path toward a patch of woodland. Baird caught up with Bernie as she came to a halt at the edge of a steep bank. A couple of meters below them, a stream glittered through a mesh of thin tree trunks jutting out from the slope, and Mac trotted back and forth along the edge, sniffing the air.

Bernie snapped her fingers to get his attention. “Seek, Mac. Did they cross here? Did they? Go on. Find ’em.”

The dog picked his way down the bank and paddled a few meters along the shallow bed, looking lost. Baird didn’t trust all this wilderness shit.

“You sure that mutt can hunt?” he said. “If all it takes to throw him off the scent is some water, he’s not a lot of use.”

“Blondie, who’s the survival expert around here?”

“Here we go again. The wild woman of the frigging woods.”

Marcus squatted on his heels to watch Mac casting around but said nothing. After a few moments, the dog paused, showed a lot
of interest in a mud scrape on the opposite bank, and went charging up the slope.

“Game on,” Bernie said.

She set off after the dog, probably still buoyed up on the adrenaline of the explosion. Baird wondered how long she’d last.

“If he finds a Stranded camp, does he have the sense not to go charging in?”

“Probably not. Better keep up with him.”

It was hard going over ground knotted with tree roots and blocked by undergrowth, but the dog seemed to know where he was heading, and Bernie looked like she believed him. She kept pausing to check broken branches and other signs of recent foot traffic. Baird, radio tuned to the squad frequency, overtook her.

“Wait up,” Marcus said suddenly. “Listen.”

Baird stopped and Bernie passed him again. Someone had to keep an eye on the dog. Marcus gestured to Baird to listen in, and that meant switching to Control. Marcus was rarely without that damn earpiece, even off duty. Baird was pretty sure he slept with it in place most nights.

“Well,
shit.
” Marcus stared into the trees with that defocused look that said he was listening rather than looking. “It’s showtime.”

Baird switched channels. His ear was filled instantly with a welter of voice traffic straight out of the nightmare they thought they’d finally left behind on the mainland. Squads out on the roads were calling in explosions and ambushes. It was hard to pick out the detail. He found himself listening intently for Cole’s name in case he’d decided to help someone out and been caught up in this shit.

Mathieson’s voice was deceptively calm. “Say again, Ten-Kilo. How many down? Is Andresen T-one? How bad is he?” Then a more familiar voice cut in—Anya. She was back in Ops by the sound of it. “Ten-Kilo, KR unit Three-Three is inbound for casevac, estimate ten minutes. Stand by.”

Andresen
. Baird didn’t hear what had warranted his T1 triage rating—serious abdominal wound, traumatic limb amputation, whatever—but he knew the sergeant well, and that somehow shocked him more than the whole Locust war. Baird had lost
comrades every day to grub attacks and dealt with it. But this wasn’t the war, and they weren’t up against grubs who didn’t know how to be anything else but murdering assholes, and that made Baird spitting mad. They hadn’t survived years of grub attacks to get picked off by human vermin. He’d never felt this angry in his life. The urge to hit back almost choked him. But he was stuck in the middle of nowhere with nothing to kill.

Marcus just looked through him, unblinking. “Fenix to Control. Checking in. Need us to do anything?”

That gave CIC a breathing space to respond in their own time. Anya came on the link. “Marcus, we’ve got ten incidents ongoing, including one involving Gorasni troops. It looks like a coordinated campaign. If you need air support, you might have a wait on your hands.”

“No problem, Control. No contact here so far.”

“Hoffman says to remember to bring back some live prisoners.”

Marcus suddenly focused on Baird. “I’ll make sure we don’t forget that.” He paused. “Keep us posted on Andresen. Fenix out.”

Marcus liked Andresen. Bernie did, too. They both drank with him in the sergeants’ mess. Baird suddenly didn’t feel he was wasting time tracking a few assholes through the mud.

“Shit, I heard.” Bernie walked back toward them. She had Mac on a leash now, straining to hold him. “And that’s how a handful of arse-wipes can screw up a trained army. Come on. Mac’s busting to kill something.”

“I bet the Gorasni are just ecstatic to find their new home’s a battlefield,” Baird said. “That’ll take their mind off their missing frigate.”

“Cheapest form of warfare.” Marcus shook his head, that slow side-to-side gesture that was more disgust than anything. “Not a battlefield yet.”

“Yeah, tell that to Rory,” Bernie said, leaning back on the leash to slow the dog down. “If he survives.”

They resumed the trail in silence. Baird’s pulse was still thudding in his neck. It didn’t slow down to normal until Mac came to a sudden halt and stood with his ears pricked, staring intently past the trees at the slope of a rocky hillside. He never made a sound.
Baird was expecting him to bark like a guard dog, but he just stared, and not even movement around him broke his concentration. The mutt was definitely trained to hunt with a handler.

Bernie crouched next to him. “What is it, fella? You got something?”

Marcus gave the dog a wide berth and stood on the other side of Baird with his binoculars in one hand. He didn’t seem comfortable around the animal. Baird squinted at the hillside and tried to imagine what the dog would see from here. Maybe he could smell something, or even hear it. The dog’s senses were much more acute than his own.

Then he saw it. It was just a fleeting moment, but he was certain; a wisp of smoke or a fragment of ash from the rocks, gone in a couple of seconds on the breeze. Mac’s nostrils twitched.