Gears of War: Anvil Gate (60 page)

“He’s in with Trescu and Michaelson.”

“The triumvirate.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because there’s three of them, sir.”

“I mean—never mind. Where are you going to be?”

“Sergeants’ mess. Unless you’ve got new tasking for me.”

“No, go get yourself a coffee and clean up. I’ve lost track of who needs an extra pair of hands until Major Reid gets back.”

The mess—a couple of basement rooms, one of which had been an ice store—was deserted, and there wasn’t any coffee. She poured herself a glass of the rum that the locals made from sugar beets and settled at the bar, chin resting on her hand. Eventually she heard Hoffman’s boots approaching at his usual fierce pace and wondered how to open the conversation this time.

He just stared at her for a moment.

“Shit, woman, you look like death warmed up.”

“You always did know how to make a girl feel special, Vic.”

He gave her a pat on the back, typically awkward, and then relented and put his arms around her. It went beyond affection. It felt more like he hadn’t expected to see her alive again, a really desperate, crushing hug.

“Okay, what’s wrong?”

He tried to force a laugh, very un-Hoffman. “What
isn’t?
”

“Tell me you’ve not assassinated Prescott.”

She was joking, or at least she thought she was.

“Look, there’s something I’ve got to show you,” Hoffman said.

“There’s nobody else I can talk to about this.”

“You’re scaring me now, Vic.”

Hoffman perched onto the bar stool next to her and slid something out of his breastplate. It was a data disk. He held it up between his forefinger and middle finger for her inspection like it was a cigar he was about to light. “Tell me what this is.”

“Not the payroll details, judging by your face.”

“I don’t know what the hell’s on it. All I know is that it’s encrypted, none of the COG Command keys can open it, and Prescott didn’t want me to see it.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I broke into his desk.”

“Well, bugger me. Honest Vic joins the fallible human race.”

“What’s so secret now that he couldn’t tell me when we were going down for the third time?”

“He’s the kind of man who thinks the time of day is classified information. It could be anything.”

Hoffman gazed at the disk as if it was going to combust if he stared at it long enough. “I really need to find out what’s on here.”

“Ask him. Go on, have it out with him, once and for all. I’ll back you up. I’m bloody sure Marcus will, too.”

“Had the chance.” Hoffman drummed his fingers on the bar for a moment. “Failed.”

Hoffman folded his arms on the bar and rested his forehead on them for a moment. It was a rare lapse for him, a naked moment of weary vulnerability. Bernie struggled to think what Prescott
might be up to. There were no secrets left in the world worth keeping, unless the Chairman had discovered a secret stash of coffee he was hoarding for himself. All the things that governments fretted about were beyond irrelevance now.

“Give it to Blondie,” she said. She hated to see him ground down like this. “He’ll be into that in no time. But just ask yourself what you’ll do when you find out what he’s hiding. You might not want to know.”

“Whatever else I screw up, I always know how to pick a sensible woman.”

“I’ll do now, will I?” It just slipped out. She wanted him to understand that he’d hurt her all those years ago and that while she might have forgiven, she hadn’t completely forgotten. “Last game in town?”

“Look, I’m not proud of how I treated you. But I’ve grown up. I’m sorry.”

“We’re
sixty years old
, Vic—it’s about bloody time.” She regretted it as soon as she said it, and knew she’d made her point. “And talking of secrets, are you ever going to finish telling me about Anvil Gate, or do I have to wait for your memoirs?”

Bernie had tried patience and sympathy. She’d dragged the story out of him a line at a time, but been interrupted or thwarted so often in the last few weeks that she wondered if she was meant to know the truth. Her best chance now was to provoke him.

“No. No, you don’t.” Hoffman reached for her glass, and she thought he was going to drink what she’d left, but instead he pushed it away to the far end of the bar. “Let’s finish that story right now. Every last damn word of it.”

It was definitely a day for telling the truth.

Hoffman felt as if a few years and a ton or two had lifted from him as he walked through the workshops in search of Baird. He’d never been sure if Bernie would stare at him in disgust when he
told her the full story of Anvegad. But she’d nodded, said she would have done the same to the Indie officer, and agreed that the Kashkuri guy had got what was coming. For some reason, she didn’t seem to understand that it was the Indie officer who haunted him, not the Kashkuri.

She’d also asked him if Sam knew her father had turned down the chance to escape with her mother. Bernie cared about those things. She’d been the one who finally told Dom how his brother Carlos had died. She knew what a tough call it was to decide whether to burden someone with the truth about a loved one, good or bad.

No, I never told Sheraya. So Sam probably doesn’t know, either. And Pad didn’t tell her, because he told me so
.

And where the hell did
he
go? Is he still alive?

Samuel Byrne’s decision was one of those things that would either be too painful to bear knowing or a precious revelation, and Hoffman had never known which. It was time he found out. He was the last man around who knew the sacrifice Byrne had made. That was something to be remembered and honored, not some dirty secret to be taken to the grave.

There
were
dirty secrets, but he wasn’t going to bury those, either. He held Prescott’s data disk gripped tightly in his fist. The workshops were big, echoing spaces that smelled of old oil and burning rubber, and today they were busy, full of people trying to salvage or repair what they could from various ships and vehicles. The hammering and drilling of metal hurt his ears. He tried to avert his eyes from the searing white welding arcs.

“You’ll go deaf if you keep doing that,” he yelled.

Baird’s blond head popped up from the engine compartment of a Packhorse. He wasn’t wearing ear defenders. Cole was. He winked conspiratorially and took them off.

Baird straightened up and wiped his hands on a rag. “If it’s about your limo, Colonel, it’s going to take me some weeks to get around to emptying the ashtray.”

“Goddamn it,” Hoffman muttered. He liked Baird’s acid side as long as he followed orders. “You’ll just have to do something else to avert my wrath, then, Corporal.”

“Okay, my staggering range of skills is all yours.”

Hoffman debated whether to involve Cole in this. Knowledge put pressure on everyone. Baird would have to do a mucky job and keep it quiet from his best buddy, and Hoffman felt he owed Delta more than that. He couldn’t bitch about Prescott’s lack of candor if he didn’t practice what he preached. But he was also compromising these men by even mentioning the disk to them.

“You can say no to this, Baird.”

“If you’re trying to psych me up to say yes …”

“I’ve got an encrypted disk that none of the COG codes can open. And I shouldn’t have it.”

Baird got a look in his eye just like that damn dog did when Bernie said “Seek!” He
loved
this shit. He didn’t just enjoy solving puzzles; he needed to solve them before anyone else could. He took comfort and identity from being the smartest kid in the class.

“Well,
that
narrows it down,” he said.

“Prescott knows I’ve got it.” Hoffman dropped his voice as far as he could in the pounding, scraping, drilling cacophony around them. “That’s why you can walk away from this without any stain on your technical manhood. You too, Cole. You don’t have to get involved in this shit.”

Baird laid down the wrench. “Nice psyops, Colonel. You’ve got my undivided attention. Hand it over.”

“What’s Prescott gonna do about it?” Cole picked up the discarded wrench and continued working where Baird had left off. “Bust you down to private?”

“Better wash my hands,” Baird said. “Don’t want to leave any fingerprints.”

Hoffman shoved the disk into Baird’s belt. “I don’t know if it’s urgent or not. Might just be embarrassing pictures from his wild youth, if he had one.”

“I’ll be in my executive suite,” said Baird, and strode off.

Hoffman paused a moment to look for a reaction on Cole’s face. Cole just raised an eyebrow and went on tinkering with the battered Packhorse.

“I’ll let Marcus and Dom know what’s going on,” Hoffman assured him. “But I don’t want everyone knowing that the Chief of
Staff’s been reduced to stealing data from the Chairman. Not good for morale. We’ve got to at least look as if it’s a united front.”

“Understood.” Cole frowned at the Packhorse as if he was changing the subject. “Baird makes this shit look easy. Damned if I know what’s wrong with this thing.”

“The man’s gifted. Don’t know what we’d do without him.”

“You ever tell him that? He’d appreciate it, sir, even if he gives you a load of bullshit about how he don’t care what anyone thinks.”

That was typical Cole. Hoffman gave him a slap on the shoulder. “Yeah, just for you, Cole. I’ll give him half an hour before I go find him. He’ll have it cracked by then and I can tell him what a smart boy he is.”

Walking around for a while was a good thing to do right now. People needed to see the top brass out and about, doing something useful or at least looking like they were. It also gave Hoffman quiet thinking time. By the time he’d covered the distance from the workshops to the edge of the Gorasni camp, he’d worked out that he was going to offer to tell Sam about her father, and give her the choice of whether to hear it. It was all too much like Dom’s situation. There was no painless way to tell someone their dead loved one had done something heroic and sacrificial. It would always be bittersweet.

The Gorasni refugees paused in their cleanup operation to watch Hoffman for a few moments, more curious than suspicious now, as if Trescu had put out the word that the COG bastard wasn’t wholly bad and didn’t need to be shot on sight. It was progress of a kind. Yanik waved to him as he went by. It seemed churlish not to acknowledge the man.

“Has she found her dog?” Yanik called.

He could only mean Bernie. “Not yet,” Hoffman called back.

“Is a lovely day, yes? The
garayazi
have gone. No more Stranded. I can save
many
bullets now.”

Yanik walked on, grinning. He didn’t fret about shooting anyone and he probably wouldn’t have lost a second’s sleep over stealing classified data, Hoffman knew.

We’ve all done things we’re not proud of just to survive. Or because we think it serves a greater good. Maybe I don’t have the right to judge Prescott
.

But that was bullshit, and he knew it. If Prescott had a secret this late in the game, then it was big. And Hoffman’s duty wasn’t to a single politician but to use any means necessary to maximize the chances of humankind making it through the next few years.

Hoffman carried on walking, checking his watch every few minutes.
Half an hour, I said. Baird’s probably cracked the encryption and found a way to turn the data disk into a perpetual-motion machine by now
. He made his way back through the naval base, skirting around roped-off holes and working parties until he reached the disused lavatory block where Baird had set up a makeshift workshop of his own.

The corporal was sitting on one of the toilets in a cubicle whose door had long vanished. Its black plastic seat was folded down to make a chair, and in front of it was a bench made out of old ammo cases. An odd assortment of disembodied components was spread around the bench, linked by strips of ribbon cable and wires like a set of entrails in need of a body cavity. It wasn’t until Hoffman recognized a computer terminal—just the flat part of the screen, nothing else—that he realized what he was looking at. Baird had wired together an array of scavenged computer components to make a working system. He looked up, his expression grim.

“Couldn’t fit all this in a case,” he said. “Even if we had a spare one, which we don’t.”

Hoffman watched him for a while. Baird was a different man when he was playing with his toys. Hoffman actually felt sorry for him. Maybe that was why Bernie did, too.

“Well?” Hoffman said.

Baird shook his head slowly as he hammered at the battered keyboard. “You think I can do anything, don’t you?”

“Yes. Can’t you?”

“Not this time.” He stared at the monitor for a moment, but it was clear that he wasn’t seeing what was on it. He was just searching
for the right moment to look Hoffman in the eye. “I can’t open it. I’ve never seen anything like it. Don’t think I’m making excuses—but this isn’t anything the COG’s ever used.”

Hoffman wasn’t sure what surprised him most, Baird’s defeat or the fact that he admitted it so openly. Disappointment gripped him. This wasn’t the time to tell Baird as much.

“You want to talk me through that, Corporal?”

Baird straightened up. “None of the COG security codes work, but you know that already. In fact, it doesn’t look as if it uses any of the encryption technology that the COG’s ever had—military or industrial. I’d guess that it’s something that Prescott had built for him specially.”

“I won’t ask how you actually know all the COG encryption codes,” Hoffman said.

“But you’re glad that I do.”

“Damn right I am.”

“I’m going to keep at it. Anything that’s encrypted can be unencrypted, and
nobody
locks
me
out forever.”

“Even knowing what you
can’t
do with it tells me something.” He thought of Cole for a moment and took his advice. “We rely heavily on your talents, Baird. I don’t take them for granted.”