Gears of War: Jacinto’s Remnant (49 page)

Dom expected Michaelson to give Ed the full COG speech on whose territories all the islands were, but he just ignored the comment. “Why should I negotiate with criminals who attack unarmed fishing vessels?”

“We haven’t touched your boats, man. Not for a while, anyway.”

“Very public-spirited. Perhaps another subsidiary of your Stranded enterprise sank the
Harvest
, then.”

“I tell you, we haven’t been near your fishermen.” Ed sounded wary. He was probably expecting Marcus to open fire. Dom was fascinated at his willingness to come right into the naval base, trusting the COG not to ambush him. “You lost one?”

“You know damn well we did.”

“I ain’t wasting my breath trying to convince you.”

“If I were to hand this gentleman back to you, instead of standing him in front of a firing squad as he deserves,” Michaelson said, “then I would want that done by your
management team
in person.”

“I’ll ask. I’m just the messenger boy.”

“And to show goodwill, I’d like the handover to be at your main location.”

“We’re not that stupid. Or trusting.”

“Then they can meet us here. Discuss how things are going to be from now on.”

“I think,” Ed said, “that they’ll want a neutral location. At a time of their choosing. You know how it is.”

Michaelson just folded his arms. “You’d better be able to put something substantial on the table and enforce it. Come back to me if and when you’ve got something to offer.”

Ed pushed off from the ladder and started the outboard. He left a lot faster than he’d come in, leaving a wide wake. Dom waited for Michaelson to tell everyone what he was really planning.

“Sounds like a nice simple deal.” Marcus lowered his rifle. “What’s the
real
one?”

“I imagine Ed is trying to work that out, too,” Michaelson said. “But this isn’t international diplomacy, Sergeant. We don’t have treaties with organized crime. And they are
very
organized. Let me show you something.”

He gestured to them to follow him and strode back toward the deepwater berths. It was a constant route march to move around VNB. Dom felt he spent most of his day walking around the place, and wondered if it would have been so hard to free up some vehicles and fuel to save time.

But I can walk anywhere without expecting the pavement to rip open and grubs to spew out of the hole. That’s
got to be worth some boot leather
.

He caught up with Marcus. “I always wondered what the navy did all those years when it wasn’t ferrying supplies. I’m starting to find out.”

“And Hoffman knows he’s doing this?”

“As long as
Prescott
knows.”

“Yeah,” Marcus said. “He always tells us everything. Never pulls need-to-know shit on us.”

“I think Michaelson’s making for
Clement.”

“Shit. Armor off…”

Clement
was a tight fit. A fully armored Gear wouldn’t even get down the hatch. They left their plates, weapons, and boots on the jetty—Marcus insisted on a guard for it all, even here—and squeezed into a whole new world that smelled of fuel and stale coffee. It wasn’t designed for really big men. Marcus kept scraping his shoulders on bulkhead instruments along the narrow passages, clusters of dials and tiny handwheels packed so tightly together that they looked almost comical. Dom tried to imagine locating the right control in a pitch-black boat after a lighting failure. That alone scared him enough to kill any thoughts of serving at sea. He’d take grubs any day, thanks.

“Welcome to the control center,” Michaelson said. The passage opened out onto a slightly less confusing space that spanned the beam of the boat. “Commander Garcia here is one of our last Pendulum War submariners, and this is our only boat, so we take very good care of both. Even so, we haven’t been able to maintain all the boat’s systems.”

Garcia was a lot younger than the grizzled old sea dog Dom expected to see, maybe forty or so, hunched over a small chart table.
Not much older than me. Shit. How much combat experience has he got, then? Can’t be much
. When Garcia unhunched, he didn’t manage to expand much in the space available.

“We like Corporal Baird,” Garcia said. “Very able engineer. Can we keep him? Trade you a few packs of coffee.”

“Tempting,” Marcus said. “But I have to decline.”

Michaelson tapped one of the gauges on the bulkhead, frowning. “Okay, here’s the plan I’ve put to Hoffman. We could afford to ignore a lot of piracy when the COG had a mainland presence. It wasn’t our problem so long as it didn’t affect us. Now we can’t—Vectes shipping’s going to be the single richest target they’ll have, and we’ll depend on safe seas until we can reclaim the continent. So now’s the time to give them a serious smacking and not just dick around picking off the occasional boat when we run into it.”

“What did you have in mind?” Marcus asked.

“Find their bases. Cream their vessels and eliminate their members. Sends out a message to the noncriminal Stranded, too.”

“And pirates are harder to pin down than you think,” Garcia said. “We don’t have the reach or the kit these days. But at least we can listen better now, thanks to Baird.”

Garcia fiddled with a control panel that Dom couldn’t even begin to recognize, and a very broken -up radio signal filled the small space. Dom had to concentrate hard to make out anything. But then the sounds started to fall into place, and he realized he was eavesdropping on intercepted radio chatter between pirate vessels. It was patchy, but it was better than nothing.

“We know roughly
where
some of them are, and
who
they are,” Garcia said. “Some of these guys have been around for years, like the gang Massy’s linked to. So now we know that they want him back, he’s finally going to be some use to decent society for once in his life. As bait.”

“I’m still not getting this,” Marcus said. “You lure a few gang bosses to a handover. You blow them up. And?”

“You knock out a chunk of their command,” Dom said. “It puts them off balance for a while.”

“And there’ll always be another asshole to take the job.”

“But there won’t be replacement vessels,” Michaelson said. “And knowing there’s an operational submarine around that can take them out will make them think twice about even going fishing.”

Marcus looked dubious. It was pretty clear that Michaelson had penciled in Delta to do some of the work. Dom wondered if Marcus was having a moral moment about all this, because even if he wouldn’t admit it, there was a lot of his father in him, especially the urge to do things right.
Right
could be very hard to define;
lawful
didn’t cover it. Dom recalled Hoffman’s barbed comments about Adam Fenix getting edgy over what to do with the civilian scientists in the raid on Aspho Point.

“I’m not used to fighting that kind of war,” Marcus said. “And it sounds like overkill. Torpedoes can sink a destroyer.”

“We don’t have many of those, so we won’t be wasting them until we can replace them,” Michaelson said.

“But don’t underestimate the deterrent value of a submarine.”

“Don’t you have to leave someone alive to tell the tale for a deterrent to work?”

“That, or surface in the right places occasionally.”

“I accept it’s a step beyond entrapment,” Garcia said. “But the pirates got used to that. They won’t be expecting this.”

Marcus nodded. Dom couldn’t tell if it was grudging approval. “Sneaky.”

“Submarine
. Are you missing something here about the word
submerged?”

“I meant double-crossing them over a deal.”

“If they were gray, scaly, and lived underground, would you do it?”

Marcus shrugged. “Sure as shit, sir.”

“Well, there you go,” Garcia said. “We’ve asked Hoffman for your squad for the surface element of the mission. So if you want to feel up front and honest when you kill them, you can.”

Marcus just looked at the chart on the table, nodded a few times, and then gazed around the control room as if he was memorizing the detail. Maybe he was wondering how anyone coped here if the lights failed. It was the kind of thing anyone trained to strip a weapon blindfolded would consider.

“If Hoffman tasks us,” Marcus said, “then we do our jobs.”

Back on the quay, Dom and Marcus put their armor on and stared at each other in silence for a moment.

“Okay, I’ll say it.” Dom sometimes got frustrated with him for not leaving that kind of high-level moral wrangling to his commanders. “The day you start worrying if we’re being fair to fucking
pirates
is the day I haul you off to Doc Hayman for a brain scan.”

“Fair?” Marcus started walking back to the barracks. Getting him to stand still and talk had always been hard. He always seemed to be on the run from conversations. “They’re assholes. They prey on people who’ve got nothing. I just feel
… uneasy
. That’s all.”

“Would you feel better if we declared formal war on them first?”

“Probably.”

“Talk to Bernie. Get yourself mad. Then declare your own war. I have. I’m fine with it.”

Marcus never talked about his time in prison. The Slab was a cesspit for the worst of the worst, and Dom had no doubt what those who were let loose when the Locust overran the area ended up doing. They didn’t all go into the army, or even stay in uniform. Maybe Marcus was trying not to let what he’d seen shape what he did as a Gear, a man with rules and standards. It was hard to tell. He didn’t say another word until they were almost at the barracks gate.

“I don’t give a shit about them as human beings,” Marcus said. “I just wonder what kind of society we’ll rebuild every time we bend our own rules.”

Dom decided to drop the subject. It was all what -ifs and exceptions, theoretical shit that might have been a great debate over a beer but didn’t help him deal with the here and now—his job, his task. And that was to protect the people he cared about, and the civilians who couldn’t protect themselves. That was the deal. He served the COG and defended the way of life he knew.

The pirate gangs had declared war on all that the moment they hit their first target. He was happy to play by their rules now.

We’re willing to meet you. Neutral water, time and coordinates to follow. No more than two vessels each. Nothing bigger than a
patrol boat. No tricks. And we want to see that our colleague is alive and unharmed before we do or say anything
. (RADIO MESSAGE FROM CORMICK ALLAM, CHAIRMAN OF THE LESSER ISLANDS FREE TRADE AREA, TO CAPTAIN MICHAELSON, NCOG.)
CNV
FALCONER
APPROACHING HANDOVER LOCATION, EARLY MORNING, SOUTHWEST OF VECTES, NEARLY TEN WEEKS AFTER THE

ESCAPE FROM JACINTO, 14 A.E.

Anya now understood the insistence on the time and place, and also why few Stranded ever made it to Vectes. Just to reach this mid-ocean point was a long, rough journey by sea even at patrol boat speeds. Tackling the distance by sail alone would have put anyone off. And now she saw another hazard for herself.

“Fog,” she said.

“Mist,” Franck Muller corrected. He stood with one hand on the helm and the other on the radar console, pressing buttons. “It’s not fog until the visibility is half this, ma’am. This time of year, it’s almost guaranteed around here. It’s two currents meeting.”

Anya stood in the open wheelhouse door, scanning the mist bank through binoculars. There were three vessels in there, bouncing back small profiles on radar, but that didn’t seem to tell Muller everything he wanted to know. The intermittent radio chatter they’d picked up had stopped eight hours ago.

“So much for two vessels,” Muller said. “I’m glad they’re not going soft on us.”

Anya shrugged. “Well, we didn’t tell them one of ours was a submarine, so we’re even.”

Marcus was leaning on
Falconer’s
starboard machine gun as if he couldn’t find a comfortable firing position. The shoulder braces hadn’t been designed for someone in heavy armor. Michaelson stood to one side of him, watching.

“I didn’t expect them to stick to the rules,” Michaelson said, checking his watch. “I hope you’ll feel better about us blowing them to kingdom come now, Sergeant Fenix.”

It was hard to get a sense of scale with nothing on the water to use for comparison. Anya found that if she lowered the glasses and changed her focus slowly, the cloud layers transformed themselves into distant mountains, and the sea below became a lake, an empty plain, a desert—or even more cloud. It could look like anything you wanted it to be.

And I could make a hell of a lot of mistakes out here if I don’t learn fast
.