E-DAY plus 14 YEARS, 36 WEEKS

[Port Farrall, 1200 hours]

Anya wanted to be a frontline Gear.

Marcus was not a fan of this idea. Mostly because he knew how dangerous it was, but partly because she'd never seen him in action. He'd been told that he yelled and cursed a lot and was —in the words of the late Benjamin Carmine— "pants-shittingly scary" when he was in the zone. He would also admit to using the Lancer's chainsaw a lot more often than he needed.

So the "partly" bit was that he was worried about what Anya might think of him. The "mostly" bit was lying on the operating table on the other side of the glass from Marcus.

The young Gear who'd taken a Boomshot round to the head was having what was left of his face pieced back together by Dr. Hayman. If she worked very quickly, she might be able to save one of his eyes and most of the skin on his face. But his jaw and cheekbones had been shattered and he'd lost all of his teeth except the molars. His head was going to be held together by plates and wires for at least a couple of months, and even after he got the stitches out he was still going to make Maria look like a supermodel.

Thinking of Anya's delicate beauty being FUBAR'd like that made Marcus want to lock her in Sovereign's security vault until they got to Vectes.

Hoffman and Prescott had deemed the island safe enough to transfer the remnant of the COG to the mothballed naval base there. Tomorrow Sovereign was going to make the first of several trips, loaded up with five thousand people and Michaelson-only-knows-how-many metric tons of supplies. It couldn't happen fast enough for Marcus. It certainly hadn't for the teenager with the destroyed face.

Marcus finally left the observation room when Hayman was able to save the kid's eye. He was walking toward the front of the med center, thinking about exactly which internal organ he would give for a cup of real coffee right about now, when he saw Baird hovering over a gurney in one of the recovery rooms. Baird was standing at the end of the bed looking as if Hammer-like beams might shoot out of his eyes at any moment.

Marcus came through the door. Sure enough, it was Baird's rival, Sharon Keller. "What happened to her?" He was a little concerned that Delta's pet weapons inventor might be out of commission. The robots and rockets had proved to be very useful in their skirmishes with the Grubs. Marcus didn't want to think about how many more Gears with smashed faces there might be if she hadn't shown up on their doorstep five weeks ago.

"Fired a Mark 1 Lancer," Baird hissed through his teeth. "Dislocated her collarbone."

"Why did she do that?"

"Because she ran out into the middle of this morning's firefight, that's why!" Baird swiveled his glare from the sleeping woman to Marcus.

"What the hell? Without armor? Without being a Gear?" Marcus thought of the no-face kid again.

"Exactly! Thank you! Bernie and Sam seem to think it was 'awesome'." Baird used finger quotes for the last word. "Especially since she had this!" Baird displayed the gun Bernie had returned to him. A little more calmly, he explained, "Sharon calls it a napalm pistol. That's what burned the Berserker and that one Boomer. It fires a highly flammable gel and then an incendiary round."

"Let me see that." Baird handed it over very reluctantly for Marcus to examine. It was quite big and bulky for a handgun and had a large revolver-like chamber that would hold six oversize rounds. "So it takes two rounds to make it work?"

"Yeah. The gel and then the tracer round."

"Hmm. I wonder if she could make mounted cannon for the APCs." Marcus handed back the pistol before Baird could get grabby.

"Probably. She could probably frigging solve cold fusion if she really put her mind to it."

"Jealous, Baird?" Marcus was very amused. Baird was so damned cocky about his intelligence, and it was nice having someone around who could put him in his place.

"Damn right I am! Ever since she arrived, her tech is all the Gears can talk about. It's 'Sharon this' and 'Sharon that' and 'Sharon's got this cool gadget that blah-de-blah-blahs'. I'm sick of it! I've been patching together half the tech we've got for fifteen years now, and she swoops in like Father Winter* with a big bag of toys for everyone!" Baird looked like he was going to throw something any moment now. Marcus just hoped he wouldn't toss a bedpan.

"Well, Baird, it seems like all she's got so far is one prototype for each of them. If we want to produce them on a mass scale, that's where you come in."

Baird visibly tried to calm himself. "That's true. She tends to lose interest once she's gotten something to work. See, we can both design and build things, but her main strength is in creativity, and mine is in execution. If you want something built, repaired or upgraded, you need me; if you want brand-new technology, you need her."

"So that's why COG armor tech stopped making big advances ten years ago. Sharon disappeared."

"Yeah. We had to make do with the anti-grav, cloaking and magnetic tech she thought up before she went off the grid." He turned so Marcus could see the back of his armor. "She put this on me this morning. It makes the armor's magnetic deflection work better. I think it especially boosts the field where it covers the Gear's head. The bullets bounced off me so fast I thought they might ricochet into someone else."

Marcus jerked his head toward the operating room. "The kid in there probably could have used one this morning. He's only alive because the helmets are heavily reinforced over the brainpan. Not sure if it's a good thing he survived or not; barely has a face left."

"God." Baird looked a little sick. "Do you think she put it on me instead of him because I wasn't wearing a helmet?"

It wasn't like Baird to be concerned about people he didn't know. Weird. "No, Baird, I think she put it on you because she knows you."

"Oh." He looked at the woman lying unconscious in the gurney before him. "Huh." He shrugged. "Anyway, when she wakes up I'm going to tear her a new one."

"Don't."

"What? Why the hell not?" Baird's face turned that vivid red again.

"It seems like she's going to throw herself into battle anyway. The best you can do is convince her to wear light plate armor and make one of those for herself." Marcus circled a finger at the flat disc on Baird's back. He hesitated, and then decided to make the request anyway. "Have her make one for Anya too." Screw not playing favorites; he didn't want to see Anya get her head blown apart.

Baird wrinkled his face. "Anya? Why would she make one for Anya?"

Marcus managed not to sigh. "Anya's going to be frontline. We've got too few able-bodied Gears left, and far too many in support positions. There's a crippled lieutenant who wants to take over for her in the CIC."

"Frak. See, this is why I don't like having women on the frontline. Now you and Dom are going to be shitting a brick every time she goes out with Delta. I'm probably going to get my ass shot off because everybody will be covering her instead of me."

Marcus felt suddenly defensive. "Her mother was Helena Stroud, remember? Anya can do it."

Baird nodded toward Sharon. "Yeah, well, just keep her away from the Retro Lancers."

Marcus nodded. "Damn right I will."

# # #

I made up "Father Winter" to be Sera's version of Santa/Father Christmas. The GOW universe is so similar to ours that what's different (the Locust, Imulsion, Sera's geography) is a much shorter list than what's the same (Dom is Latino, Marcus says things like "sweet" and "pronto", the Pesangas are basically Southeast Asians, the Gorasni and the UIR are Russians and the USSR, Sera has some of the same animals because there are Thrashball teams called the Sharks, the Cougars and the Eagles, etc., etc.).