Read Online Gears of War: Anvil Gate by Karen Traviss - Free Book Online

voices, but that didn’t mean they cared about the grunts listening in. Dom felt like a kid, or the hired help, expected not to notice what his elders and betters were saying. Prescott parked his ass on a vacant desk and sat gazing intently at the Gorasni leader with a concerned frown.
    “My decision was
not
popular,” Trescu said. “Many of my people wanted to stay on the mainland and take their chances. I promised them they would be safer in your shadow, and now you make a liar of me. A hundred or so starving vermin, and you can’t get rid of them? So much for the mighty Coalition that brought the Independent Republics to their knees.”
    “Because this isn’t a damn war,” Hoffman growled. “It’s terrorism in our front yard. We can’t burn them out or bomb them out because this is the only place we’ve got left. So we pick them off. You got a better idea? Last time I looked, you’d lost a whole frigate and didn’t know how it happened.”
    Trescu—late thirties maybe, a real hard case with buzz-cut dark hair and a neat beard streaked with early gray—leaned close to Hoffman, not buddy-buddy but right in his face. Dom waited for the colonel to lose his shit with the guy. But all Hoffman did was clench his jaw as if Prescott had told him to keep it zipped no matter what happened.
    “Colonel, you COG are
soft
. You are
tolerant
. You give
amnesties.
” Trescu somehow made it all sound like some kind of perversion. “And so you have a Stranded problem, despite holding several hundred potential hostages and informers within your very walls. But we are
not
soft. We
solved
our Stranded problem.” He paused a beat. “And our frigate—I
shall
find out what happened.”
    Prescott joined in. “They aren’t hostages, Commander,” he said. “They accepted an amnesty. Mostly women, children, and older men.”
    “Like I said.
Soft.
”
    Hoffman was almost shaking. The old bastard had a temper, and Dom always expected him to have a stroke when he blew a gasket. Trescu pulled back slowly.
    “Feel free to teach us how it’s done
anytime,
” Hoffman said. “Pull out a few fingernails. We’re not good at that.”
    Trescu was talking a tough game for a man who had just a few ships and an imulsion rig. “Bring me some Stranded and I will,” he said. “You need intelligence from them—I’ll get it.”
    For a moment, Dom thought Trescu was asking them to round up the Stranded who’d been given amnesty and beat some information out of them. He could see some logic in that—the folks in New Jacinto couldn’t have forgotten everything about their buddies on the other side of the fence—but it made him uneasy.
    “We have a squad in pursuit right now, Commander,” Prescott said, glancing at Mathieson. “They’ll detain live prisoners.”
    “Then I want them.” Trescu picked up a folded map from the table. “And you can wash your hands of it all to keep up your pretense of being civilized. Now, I have to go and calm my people down.”
    Trescu stalked out. Prescott looked at Hoffman and raised his eyebrows.
    “Excitable fellow, isn’t he?” Michaelson studied the chart on the wall, arms folded. “But with only three or four thousand people, the scale of the threat looks very different to him.”
    “We lost good men today too, Quentin,” Hoffman said. “I feel pretty threatened myself.”
    Prescott was obviously back in his own world of power games again. “We need to wean him off the idea of
his
people and
his
territory. Let’s watch our semantics in front of him, shall we? Us, us,
us.
”
    “So I can’t call him a pissant who’d be scrubbing latrines if he didn’t have a lot of imulsion.” Hoffman ran both hands over his bald scalp, eyes on the tote board. “But we can’t shit ourselves and hide every time a bomb goes off. We can’t let this turn into a siege.”
    “Bring a few of these animals back alive for Trescu, then,”Prescott said. “Give him a sense of ownership of the