Gears of War: Jacinto's Remnant Read online

  “I’ll get her on a COG transport,” he said, wanting to die of shame. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “Oh, I do. Because I can’t trust you any longer.”

  “I’m sorry.” He was; he regretted having to do it, so much that it hurt. “I am so, so sorry.”

  She made an odd little strangled noise, as if she’d started to laugh and then lost the will to carry it through. “Sorry? Fuck you, Victor. Fuck you and all your secret little cabals, holed up in your bunkers while the rest of the world dies.”

  He’d rarely heard her swear in their entire marriage. He understood why the news had devastated her—she wouldn’t have been human if she’d taken it in stride—and he knew this fight was coming. He also knew that even if changing his mind could turn back the clock and make her respect him again, or even despise him a little less, that he’d still nod and say to Prescott that this had to be done.

  “Don’t go down there, Margaret,” he said. “Please. The roads are at a standstill. You won’t get back in time, either of you.”

  “And Nattie won’t make it out otherwise. And you knew.”

  Hoffman could have begged forgiveness, or told her that it was Prescott’s decision, or that the best estimate now was that the Locust would reach Jacinto Plateau in ten days, probably sooner, in numbers that the whole army couldn’t stop. But there was no point.

  “Yes, of course I damn well knew,” he snapped. “I’ve known for a week or more. And what would you have done if I’d told you?”

  “Oh, if this is going to be the public-spirited lecture on not spreading panic, Victor, why don’t you switch on the goddamn TV and watch the panic now?”

  “You’d have told Natalie. Then she’d have told her colleagues. She’d have tried to move patients early, and the whole thing would have been a hundred times worse, with numbers of refugees worldwide that we just couldn’t handle. And the enemy guessing what was coming, or even knowing, and concentrating on Ephyra—because once they take Ephyra, the human race is finished. Do you seriously think I would go along with this if I thought we weren’t facing extinction?”

  Margaret held up her hands to shut him up. “I don’t want to hear this bullshit,” she said. “The longer I listen and try to believe the man I married might still be inside you, the later I’ll be to save someone who actually matters a damn to me.”

  “So what’s it about, Margaret?” She couldn’t possibly make him feel like a bigger pile of shit than he already did. “Me not treating us as special cases who need to be saved when every other bastard has to take their chances, or destroying most of Sera? Spit it out, honey. I don’t quite know where the moral outrage is coming from.”

  “I don’t have to justify my outrage to you.”

  She snatched up her jacket and walked straight at him; he thought of just grabbing her and pushing her back, but that only turned the tide of a fight in movies. She wouldn’t suddenly see how he’d done a necessary thing, weep for her sister, and fall into his arms. She’d just spit in his face.

  It had been a long time since she’d fallen into his arms at all. Hoffman stepped aside and followed her down the hall.

  I can get her stopped at a checkpoint and turned around. Or detained. And she’ll curse and loathe me, but she won’t get killed, and then she can get on with life without me if she wants.

  He had a plan, then. She wouldn’t get far out of Ephyra anyway, even if all the traffic was heading into town. The intersections were blocked. She wouldn’t get off the Jacinto ramp, let alone reach Corren.

  Kill it to save it. Kill Sera, and humanity gets to survive. Kill our marriage, and she lives.

  Hoffman had traded one catastrophe against another all his army life. “If you want me to explain,” he said, “it’ll all be clichés. This really is the lesser of two evils. For once, the numbers matter. Because one of them is zero.”

  “No, you’re all murderers,” she said. “You must have known that millions wouldn’t be able to reach Ephyra. Not in days, maybe not even in weeks.”

  “And I’ll have more deaths on my conscience if we don’t do this. In ten days, more or less, the grubs will be here. In this house. I’ve got nothing left to stop them, and we all know it.”

  “Victor—shut up. Just shut up. You can’t argue this with me. You disgust me. This isn’t collateral damage. It’s mass murder. And you kept it from me. How in the name of God did you think I’d react?”

  Hoffman gave up at that point. It wasn’t the bigger picture that was pissing her off. Whatever the bleeding hearts said about humanity and its suffering, the only pain they really felt, could feel, was for the faces they knew and would miss. Margaret had been lied to—he admitted it—and she wanted to save her sister. That was it. That was the level of distress he could understand.

  “Shit, woman, you expected me to blow your brains out if the bastards got here,” he said. “And you’ve never once asked me how I feel when the body bags come back from the front line. And now you give me this shit when you don’t have a single fucking option to put in its place.”

  “I’m going, Victor. I’m taking the car.”

  “Are you waiting for me to physically stop you? Prove what a loving husband I am?”

  Margaret stopped at the door. The hallway was long, High Tyran style with a dado rail on each side, and an overmantel mirror above the console table on the right. She reached for the car keys without looking. For a moment, her fingers tapped around on the polished table, groping for the key ring, but she wouldn’t take her eyes off him to look down and locate it.

  It told him more about the state she was in than anything she’d said. She was completely terrified, disoriented, unable to cope. But she was Margaret, so she looked totally in control of the situation, except for that few seconds’ lapse.

  “Would you stop the Hammer strike?” she asked. “Can you?”

  He couldn’t make matters any worse, and the only lie he had ever told her in twenty years was by omission, keeping the destruction of Sera to himself.

  “I can’t,” he said. “And I wouldn’t.”

  “Fuck you, then,” she said, and closed the door behind her.

  She didn’t even slam it.

  Hoffman waited for a few minutes in case she came back, anger deflated, but he knew she wouldn’t. She meant what she said about getting her sister out of Corren. Natalie was an emergency doctor; she was always busy, and the chances of her voluntarily evacuating now were slim. Margaret would flash her ID card at checkpoints, use his name to bypass the lines, work her contacts. Hoffman had his uses.

  “Shit,” he said. “Shit.”

  There was nothing more he could do tonight except sleep so that he could function tomorrow, so he poured himself a drink, settled down in front of the TV—should he watch the news or not?—and picked up the phone to CIC.

  “Control, I need a favor. Pass a message to all VCPs. My wife’s gone looking for her sister. I want her stopped and turned back—escorted, arrested, whatever it takes. And tell them to ignore her angry lawyer bullshit. Just get her back into Ephyra.”

  He hoped it didn’t sound flippant. But it was better for everyone to think he was a callous bastard than to hear a man with a Hammer command key break down and sob.

  Either way, the marriage would be over. But Ephyra would survive, and so would Margaret.

  POMEROY BARRACKS, SOUTH EPHYRA, REGIMENTAL HQ OF THE 26TH ROYAL TYRAN INFANTRY, 0500 HOURS, FORTY-SEVEN HOURS TO HAMMER STRIKES.

  “The phones must be screwed,” Dom said. “They have to be. She wouldn’t just ignore it, not when I’m deployed.”

  He kept dialing home, and Maria kept not answering. In the corridor outside it might as well have been midday. The entire regiment was returning a company at a time, filling the accommodation block with smells of breakfast, soap, and vehicle exhaust. The place hadn’t felt this crowded in years.

  Marcus stood at the basin, shaving for what seemed like the third time in an hour, putting neat edg
es on the strip of beard down his chin.

  “Overloaded exchange,” he said. “Everyone’s trying to call everyone else.”

  “Yeah, I think I worked that out, thanks.”

  “Dom, it’s five o’clock in the fucking morning. She probably took her meds and slept.”

  “But she doesn’t know we’ve been recalled.”

  “Okay. Enough.” Marcus wiped his face carefully. “We’re going to go see her. Come on. I’ll talk to the adjutant and beg a ten-hour pass. He owes me.”

  “Now? We’re on standby.”

  “Just do it, Dom. Then you can get some sleep.”

  “What’s the Hammer strike going to be like? What will we see?”

  “If you see it, Dom, you can kiss your ass goodbye.”

  “Your dad never talks about it, does he?”

  “If you’re asking if I already knew about this shit, I didn’t.”

  “I never thought you did.”

  “I’d have told you if I had.” Marcus tapped his watch. “Back in ten minutes. Stay put.”

  Dom tried again to take in the scale of the planned Hammer strike and failed. It was too much to imagine. There was something completely unreal about the way it was being … managed. That was the only word for it. A day and a time, a tidy schedule for what was going to be pretty well the end of the world. He had to repeat that a few times in his head and then actually say it aloud before it started to make his stomach knot in the same way it did when he feared the worst for his family.

  Marcus reappeared in the doorway and held up a couple of small blue cards—absence permits. “I’ve got a special way with adjutants.”

  “How are we getting there?”

  “You’ve seen the traffic. Double time—quick march.”

  Even for a city so used to war, Ephyra felt on the edge of panic. People were stuck in traffic, waiting in line for besieged hotels—impatiently, Dom noticed—and arguing with law enforcement patrols about where they could and couldn’t go. He’d never seen anyone getting mouthy with a cop before, except outside the seedier bars. One guy was suddenly pounced on and hauled away to a nearby patrol car. He looked more shocked than angry.

  And none of these people looked like threadbare refugees. It was probably going to be worse at the temporary camps.

  “Shit, is that what we’re going to end up doing?” Dom asked. “Guarding refugee camps?”

  “If Ephyra’s all that’s left in a couple of days, what else is there for us to do?” Marcus began moving at a steady jog. In combat rig, a Gear could go anywhere and civilians would stand aside for them. Gears had a job to do; it was always urgent. “Going to be hell to manage that kind of influx.”

  Most milling crowds parted for them—locals, or at least Tyrans. Some didn’t. Marcus had to stop and ask them to clear the way, and they seemed pissed off that he expected it. Marcus, always rigidly polite with civvies, had an edge in his voice when he had to repeat himself.

  “Where the hell are we supposed to go?” The man who stopped Marcus had an accent Dom couldn’t place. “How do we find—”

  “Ask the patrol officer, sir. Over there.”

  They had to be from across the border, not even from other regions of Tyrus, Dom thought. It just wasn’t the COG way of doing things. COG citizens—no, Tyrans, that was who he meant, that was who he was—were disciplined and hardy, stoically accepting necessity. They understood that restrictions were there for a reason. It was the former Indie states, the independent alliance the COG had fought for so many decades, who thought orderly government just crimped their style. They were used to protesting in the streets. Tyrans just sucked it up and made the best of a bad job.

  “They’re going to get a shock here,” Dom said. “This isn’t Pelles.”

  Marcus just moved on through the crowd, leaning slowly against the press of bodies when people didn’t get out of his way fast enough—and it worked. He was like a goddamn mounted patrol. Dom had seen horses trained to do that. For some reason, he found it unbearably funny.

  “What’s the joke?” Marcus said. They were now on a relatively empty backstreet and heading for one of the bridges across the river. “I could—shit, look at that.”

  Dom caught up with him. From the approach to the bridge, he had a grandstand view of the southern side of Ephyra. The cityscape was a single mass of stationary lights stretching to the horizon, each road picked out in vehicle headlights.

  “I didn’t think there were still that many cars on the road,” Dom said.

  Marcus shook his head, just a slight movement as if he was talking to himself. “You won’t see that again.”

  It took another fifteen minutes to jog to Dom’s home. It was nearly six in the morning, close to sunrise, but lights were on in pretty well every house. Dom imagined families huddled around the TV or radio trying to make sense of it all.

  His house was still in darkness. He sprinted the rest of the way, almost dropped his keys in his hurry to unlock the door, and dashed upstairs two at a time.

  “Maria? Maria, baby, it’s me, are you awake?” He didn’t want to sneak up on her and scare her. “We’re back at base. I’ve been trying to call you—”

  The bedroom was empty. Their bed hadn’t been slept in. He checked each room, but she was gone.

  Marcus stood in the hall. “Dom, what’s wrong?”

  “She’s gone. Oh shit—shit.” The kitchen was tidy, as if she’d cleaned the place up before leaving. He ran back upstairs to check the closets. The suitcases were there, but an overnight bag was missing; he couldn’t tell if she’d taken any clothes. “Shit, she’s packed and gone. Where the hell would she go?”

  Marcus went into the dining room and picked up the phone. “Dom, take it easy. She can’t have gone far.”

  “It’s not like we’ve got any family left. She won’t be at my folks’ place or hers. Will she?” Dom was really starting to panic now. Maria only went out for a walk every day. She didn’t have friends to visit, and if she was out tonight, in this chaos, what did she need to pack for? “Shit, I hope she’s not trying to get to Mercy and tend her folks’ graves.”

  Marcus stood with the phone to his ear, looking unmoved except for his rapid blinking. That told Dom the worst. Marcus was worried, too. “Why would she go there?” he asked. “She’d have the sense to stay in Ephyra.”

  “Marcus, she’s not well. She does weird shit from time to time. Hell, totally normal people do things like that under stress, let alone … oh God …”

  Marcus held up his finger for silence as if someone had answered. “Dad? Dad, it’s Marcus. Look, I know it’s early, but I need a favor. We’re back at Dom’s, Maria’s not here, and I need to … Oh God, really?” Marcus shut his eyes for a moment and blew out a slow breath. Dom’s heart was close to hammering its way through his rib cage. “Well, Dom nearly shit himself, so a note would have been good … Okay, we’re coming over … Okay … Yeah … No, I didn’t. See you later.”

  Marcus slammed down the receiver. Dom could hardly bear to hear what he had to say.

  “She’s at our place. Panic over.”

  Dom’s legs were shaking. He felt like an idiot. “Shit, man …”

  “Dad was worried about her hearing the news alone. He sent a car for her and she’s been there for a couple of days.” Marcus had that tight-lipped look that said he was veering between pissed off and embarrassingly relieved. “Everything’s okay. But nobody thought to leave a frigging message. You okay?”

  “Yeah.” Dom just wanted to see Maria and forget everything outside Ephyra’s city limits for a while. “We better get going. It’s a long way on foot.”

  “He’s sending transport.”

  “How the hell is anything going to get to us? You’ve seen the jams.”

  “He’s Professor Adam Fenix. He can make that kind of shit happen.”

  And he did.

  A COG government car rolled up outside the house, light bar flashing. Dom felt like a complete asshole climb
ing into it when the rest of the world was going to hell in a handbasket. One of the neighbors watched from her doorstep, maybe thinking he had some urgent official business, or he was being arrested, or something. She just nodded at him as the vehicle roared off.

  “So you turn down a Raven ride home, but you’re okay with your old man diverting a car for me.”

  “I never said I was consistent.”

  “I owe you, man.”

  “Shit. You know you don’t.”

  “And I owe your dad.” Dom didn’t feel that the few minutes of utter pants-pissing fear for Maria mattered now. Marcus’s father cared enough to look after her when he knew she would be worried out of her mind. “He’s always been good to us.”

  Marcus didn’t comment. The driver broke every traffic regulation in the book, mounting sidewalks and ignoring one-way signs, to get to East Barricade. He didn’t say a word, either. Dom could see the guy thinking that he had some VIP’s son on board, wasting his time, and what an easy life someone with a name like Fenix would have.

  Not true, buddy.

  The car rolled through the big main gates of the Fenix estate and past formal gardens, greenhouses, and trees, scattering gravel along the drive. The house was a mansion. It wasn’t a house at all as far as Dom was concerned, more an antique-filled and wood-paneled museum of a place that had scared him as a kid. He’d always been afraid of breaking something priceless when he visited. It was lavish, imposing, and breathed money; it was also cold and empty. To understand Marcus, you had to see that house.

  Adam Fenix was already standing in the doorway. He managed a smile for Dom, but worry was written all over his face.

  “How did it go?” he asked. “Are you okay?”

  “Bayonet broke again,” Marcus said casually. “We need something better to get through grub hide. Maybe a powered saw of some kind.”

  “I’ll have a think about that.” Professor Fenix turned to Dom and shook his hand vigorously. “I’m sorry I worried you, Dom. I’ve been a little preoccupied lately.”