Gears of War: Anvil Gate by Karen Traviss Page A

him, a half-cleaned section of Lancer chain in one hand and a time-frayed wire brush in the other. Dom didn’t meet his eyes.
    “It’s Andresen,” Dom said. Just saying his name made it real. Up to that point, it had somehow been optional whether to believe the guy was really dead. “I just heard from Anya.”
    “Aww, shit, man.” Cole shut his eyes tight for a moment. “Where’s his old lady?”
    “Reid’s gone to find her. They come through fifteen years of grubs and he dies
here
. He dies
now
. I tell you, there’s no frigging sense in it.”
    Sense
. Yeah, that was it. There really had been some sense to fighting grubs, even though nobody knew what the hell the assholes had really wanted to achieve other than wipe out every human on Sera. Now Dom was back to the gray areas of the Pendulum Wars, where his enemy was someone whose motives he knew and shared. Humans should have known better. It was harder to take.
    He checked his Lancer. “Should have gone with Marcus …”
    “Yeah, maybe, but—”
    Whoomp
.
    Cole’s voice was drowned out by a blast that made Dom drop instinctively. There was a split second of silence before the ball of smoke and flame shot up above the level of the naval base walls, and he found himself running toward the explosion. Everyone who didn’t have their hands full right then did the same thing. He couldn’t pick out the exact location, but it looked like the Gorasni camp beyond the perimeter walls.
    If it was
inside
the walls, then the COG’s problems were a lot worse than anyone thought.
    But it wasn’t. Cole and Dom reached the northwest gate in time to see a couple of open trucks heading up the main access path into the mass of Gorasni tents beyond the perimeter. The smoke was spiraling up from the far side of the camp. Even CIC seemed to be having trouble working out what had happened and who’d been hit. The Gorasni were chattering away in whatever they spoke, and CIC was trying to get sense out of them in Tyran. It wasn’t working out too well.
    Dom’s instinct was the same as every Gear’s in that base—to deal with the situation, whether by helping the injured or securing the site. They strode into the camp, but two Gorasni guards moved in on them right away.
    “We have everything under control,” one of them said in Tyran. He sounded as if he’d been trained to repeat the phrase but didn’t actually understand it. “Thank you.”
    “That’s a
bomb
, baby.” Cole always wanted to help. He really did. “That don’t look like
under control
to me.”
    “You want to do something?” the guard said. He understood Tyran just fine, then. “You do your job, Gear. Keep the roads free of bombs. You don’t know how? We show you. But
later.
”
    “You’re not in Gorasnaya anymore,” Dom snapped. “There’s no goddamn border here.”
    “We have people trained. Too many of you run around here—you just get in their way.” The guy’s tone wasn’t aggressive now. But he didn’t move, either. “Thank you.”
    Cole caught Dom’s shoulders and turned him around to steer him back to the base. “Other things we can do. You heard the man.”
    “Ungrateful assholes.” The guy was right in a way, but Dom wasn’t used to being told to run along. The frustration—shit, he wasn’t sure what it was, whether it was a reaction to Andresen or Maria or any one of a hundred other shitty things. He just knew he didn’t want to stand around and think. He pressed his earpiece. “Santiago to Control, you need me and Cole to do anything?”
    Control was going to be overwhelmed right now and the lastthing they’d need would be Gears asking for work to do. But there was a plan for emergencies, and bypassing that made more work for Ops. There was a long pause before Mathieson responded.
    “You could give us a hand up here, Dom. Drive a radio for me.”
    “On our way,” Dom said.
    The main naval base building was part of a terrace of red-brick barracks four or five