Gears of War: Jacinto's Remnant Read online

  “Come on, folks,” Dom called. “We know you’re in—”

  Suddenly doors edged open and men—no women in sight—began appearing in the paths between the shacks. They were armed with an assortment of half the weapons that Anya had ever seen: hunting rifles, a couple of Gnasher shotguns that no civilian should have had, snub pistols, and even a Hammerburst. Why the guy needed that—or how he got it—Anya couldn’t imagine, but scavenging had been a daily necessity for fifteen years. Extraordinary things were traded from place to place. It didn’t mean the man had fought Locust or even seen one.

  “I hope you understand our shoot-to-kill policy now, Lieutenant Stroud,” Will said quietly. “We were never armed, and so we’ve got very few personal weapons. We’ve traded for whatever we can get.”

  “You’ve got us now.” Bernie wandered past, right behind the man she’d flushed out of the cruiser, who kept glancing at her as if he was expecting to be shot in the back. “Cole, cover me, will you?”

  Anya couldn’t sit this out. She jumped down, trying to tread the fine line between looking like she meant it and not provoking an incident. She hadn’t managed to nail that Gear body language yet. It was an effortless movement where the rifle became an extension of the arms and eyes, and she knew she’d need to achieve that or remain the useful desk jockey that everyone else had to protect in a tight spot.

  One of the Stranded must have passed a ribald comment about Anya to his buddy within Bernie’s earshot. Bernie paused and gave him the angry sergeant stare.

  “You so much as smile at the lieutenant,” she said, “and you’ll be pissing through a straw.”

  The man with the Hammerburst didn’t look as if he was going to shoulder the weapon anytime soon. “Well, fancy seeing the COG here at last. Welcome to Massy’s territory. That’s me, by the way. You’re on my turf.”

  “The COG’s moving back in.” Marcus just rolled over the challenge as if he hadn’t heard it. “Looks like we never left.”

  “Shit, you’ve come to the middle of nowhere to find another place to kick us out of, asshole?”

  “We’re just asking you to be more considerate neighbors to our citizens.”

  Massy was probably forty or so, balding, bearded, unusually heavyset for a Stranded. They looked much better-fed here. “I’m seeing three of you—oh, and the dick from the town hall—and about thirty of us. You good at math?”

  “Top of my class.”

  “You want to check your figures again?”

  Marcus just looked at him, then back at Bernie and Anya. “Dom, check my working-out, will you?”

  Dom shrugged. “Well, there’s five of us, and Mr. Berenz, and then there’s the missile launchers and guns on the Raven, and a bored chopper crew, so I make that outgunned plus eight. But maybe I forgot to carry the one.”

  Anya heard the rasp of metal bearings, like someone opening a reluctant jar. Sorotki trained his gun in the vague direction of the shacks, making more noise than he needed to.

  Oh God.

  Anya felt the jolt of adrenaline flooding her thigh muscles. She was scared. But…

  I hate even thinking it, but I feel alive. Seriously alive.

  She’d never expected that. She wasn’t new to life-or-death situations, but she’d never been physically involved in them until the last few weeks. And she didn’t want to die, but right then she wouldn’t have traded places with Mathieson for anything.

  “Okay.” Massy sounded relaxed, and he shouldn’t have been. He lowered the rifle, and every Stranded male did the same. “Here’s the deal. You keep away from us, and we’ll let you stay awhile.”

  Something seemed to have caught Bernie’s attention. She walked past the shacks along the shoreline, along a row of small boats upturned on the pebbles. She looked them over as if she was thinking of buying one.

  Massy seemed to notice her for the first time. “You got a problem, lady?”

  Bernie turned around. Anya could see she was chewing the inside of her lip. A couple of the Stranded men had moved round a little so that she’d have to walk past them. Anya’s warning bells went off, but Cole was already prepared and made a noisy show of cocking the Lancer manually and blipping the chainsaw for a second.

  “The blue dinghy,” Bernie said, fixing on Massy. Anya was sure she had the other Stranded in her peripheral vision. “Anyone want to admit to owning that?”

  “You want to make an offer?”

  “Simple question. Is the man who owns it here?”

  “No.”

  “Shame,” she said. “I’ll have to keep looking.”

  “Okay, we’re out of here.” Marcus motioned everyone back to the Raven, and the tension seemed to drop. “Glad we’ve reached an understanding.”

  Then Anya learned how fast a situation could veer from calm to a fight. As Bernie passed between two of the men, one moved to jostle her. Anya didn’t see the moment of contact. He might have just shoved Bernie, or maybe he’d touched her backside or something, but he had just enough time to start a leering grin before she spun and smashed the butt of her rifle hard across his mouth. Metal cracked against teeth. He went down like a stone.

  Anya’s instinct said to pitch in, to back up her squad. But she’d hardly moved before Dom was on the second guy, Lancer shoved hard in his chest, and Cole was blocking Bernie. Everyone froze; every weapon was now raised. There was an awful pause.

  “Anyone else want some?” Bernie said, aiming at the man on the floor. She didn’t look like steady, good-natured Bernie now. She looked like she wanted an excuse to fire. “No? Good call.”

  “Yeah, I know who you are now,” one of the men called. “Stupid bitch. You’re really going to get what’s coming to you now. Didn’t you learn your lesson?”

  “You need to stay out of my frigging way.” She began backing away with Dom and Cole as the Raven’s rotors started up. “Because you never learned yours.”

  Sorotki’s voice came over the comms. “Move it, people. You’ll be late for diplomacy class.”

  Marcus covered their exit and then jumped aboard. The Raven lifted clear. Nobody said a word while Bernie put her head in her hands for a few moments, then sat up straight again.

  “Shit, I’m sorry.” She looked dreadful, every year of her age and then some, as if something inside had crumbled. She was a veteran Gear, no stranger to violence; Anya had seen her simply shrug off close calls with Locust. Something was wrong. “I could have got you all killed. Baird’s right. I’m a liability.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with your reflexes, Bernie,” Dom said. He ruffled her hair as if she was one of the men. “It’s okay. Nobody got hurt.”

  Cole joined in the vigorous hair rubbing. “Well, apart from the guy spittin’ out teeth, that is. See, that’s why I never played ladies’ thrashball teams. Girls get rough.”

  “It’s not okay.” Bernie submitted to the horseplay. Anya thought that was revealing, seeing as she’d reacted so violently to someone else touching her. “I just lost it. I’m old enough to know better.”

  Nobody asked what the man had meant by knowing who she was, and that she hadn’t learned her lesson. Anya tried not to guess. But she was already starting to fill in gaps despite herself.

  “Bernie, we’ve all done it.” Anya reached across between the seats and grabbed her hand. “Even I’ve hit a guy. Okay, anyone here who hasn’t lost it with someone?”

  Marcus shrugged. “Got kicked out of junior school for fighting. Had a fight on my first day at Olafson Intermediate, too. And I hit Hoffman.”

  “Well, I just do friendly taps,” Cole said. “But yeah.”

  “See, Bernie?” Anya squeezed her hand. “You’re in the company of serious scrappers. Everyone’s been there.”

  “I feel better already,” Bernie said, clearly not meaning it.

  It was part of a ritual, and Anya knew it. Everyone rushed to reassure Bernie in this awful, semi-joking way, listing their own moments when they forgot discipline and procedur
e and just lashed out. But the real question wasn’t asked, and wouldn’t be until the civilian was out of range: what had happened before she rejoined the army?

  Will Berenz just gazed at Bernie with undisguised admiration. He didn’t seem remotely curious. All he seemed to see was a Gear who would put the Stranded in their place, Stranded who’d terrorized him and his neighbors. Anya had seen the Stranded on the fringes of Jacinto as unlucky misfits at best, and lazy cowards at worst, but she was now starting to see another element—the utterly lawless who’d never been in fear of COG justice in places where civilization had completely broken down.

  Back at Pelruan, Will opened up the town hall and gave the squad the keys to the emergency storeroom. “Just somewhere to eat and bed down for the night,” he said. “Unless you want to be billeted with families.”

  “We’ll be fine here, thanks,” Dom said. “We snore.”

  Marcus nodded. “Appreciate it, Will. We’ll mount patrols tonight, just in case. You’ll hear the APC. Anya, maybe you can draw up watch rosters for the Ravens.”

  Now they were on their own, with no outsiders to limit their conversation. Bernie hauled out folding camp beds while Dom investigated the food stores. Gettner and Sorotki’s co-pilot, Mitchell, volunteered to cook dinner. To Anya it felt like a settled and normal night in barracks in Jacinto, except there were no grubs to worry about, just a handful of feral humans down the coast who would have been unwise to show their faces here.

  No, not exactly like Jacinto: there were no sounds of a crowded city, no urban noise—just the wind, roaring surf, and occasional voices outside. The squad and Raven crews played cards. But there was no barroom conversation this time, just bids and declarations. Cole couldn’t keep up the silence forever. Anya watched him picking his moment to steer Bernie to one side, taking an occasional deep breath as if he was about to ask something.

  “Bernie, you want to do some liquid resource investigation at that handy little bar?” he asked.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” she said. “But thanks.”

  Cole laid his hand of cards on the table, frowning at it for a moment. “Baby, you ain’t obliged to explain a damn thing to us. But if you want to tell us what all that shit was about, you got a sympathetic audience.”

  Bernie rearranged her hand in silence, shifting cards around as if she was doing some complex calculation, but Anya could tell she wasn’t really concentrating on the game.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you a horror story,” Bernie said. “With monsters in it.” She laid down her cards faceup, an obvious bust. “And one of them is me.”

  CHAPTER 11

  There’s justice, and there’s vengeance. Justice is vengeance administered impersonally by a bureaucrat in a standardized and predictable way, so we all know how much punishment to expect and when we’ll get it.

  (CAPTAIN QUENTIN MICHAELSON, NCOG, ON MAINTAINING SOCIAL ORDER.)

  PELRUAN, VECTES, SEVEN WEEKS AFTER THE EVACUATION OF JACINTO, 14 A.E.

  Gears were family, and families didn’t have secrets.

  They had disagreements, and favorites, and annoying dumb-ass habits, but they didn’t keep serious shit from each other—especially if there was something that could be done about it. Cole hoped Bernie understood that.

  “Ain’t prying, Bernie,” he said. The card game didn’t matter now. It was just to pass the time, anyway. “But we know you’re troubled.”

  “Who isn’t?” she said. “The whole army’s a psychiatric ward. Our civvies are stressed shitless, too. Can’t live in a world like this and stay normal.”

  “Hey, Gill, let’s check out that bar.” Mitchell stood up and went for the door. It was getting too grim and personal for him. Gettner took the hint. “This is squad business.”

  There was a clear understanding of who was squad at any given time and who wasn’t—nothing personal, just the way Gears were. Bernie took a long time to say anything after they’d left.

  “No point pissing around with a long tale of woe,” she said. “I was raped by Stranded a couple of years ago. So I went after them. I killed two of the guys, but the third got away. That’s about it. Anyone want to play another hand?”

  It was hard to follow that. Real hard. It even took a few moments for the full meaning to sink in for Cole. Anya shut her eyes for a second or two, and Marcus didn’t look like he’d even heard what she’d said. That normally meant he was listening to every syllable but didn’t want to react. But someone had to say something, do something, or poor old Bernie would be wishing she hadn’t mentioned it.

  Dom was sitting right next to her. “Shit, Bernie, I’m sorry. I had no idea.” He was the kind of guy who hugged and back-slapped everyone. He put his arm out automatically, but suddenly looked too scared to touch her. “You’re not a monster. You were dishing out justice.”

  Cole remembered something Bernie said not long after she first showed up in Jacinto. It hadn’t all been jokes about her shooting cats for food and fur. He knew damn well—after he’d talked to her and watched her for a while—that some bad things happened to her while she was traveling. Stuff happened to most people; they took their chances out there. But it was tougher for a woman.

  What was it she’d said? I’ve done some bad stuff. It wasn’t just cats I skinned.

  Well, if Bernie had some interesting earrings now as well as kitty-fur boots, then that was fine by him.

  “Okay,” she said. “It needn’t have happened. This gang of bastards spent most of its time cruising the islands, killing, robbing, raping—preying on other Stranded. I happened to have my nice big Longshot, so I put a few holes in them. Then they came back. I can probably handle one man, but three—no.”

  Cole could see Bernie was going to cry at some point. He just wanted to make things right for her. Maybe getting it off her chest would do that, or maybe he’d opened up something nasty she couldn’t handle.

  “Any of the gentlemen we just made acquaintance with?” Cole asked. “’Cause me and Baird, we run a really good etiquette program on how to treat ladies with respect.”

  “I told you they were frigging animals.” Baird leaned back in his chair and looked over his cards again. He didn’t mean to be an asshole, but sometimes he just couldn’t put things nicely. Cole stood by to shut him up if he couldn’t manage some tact. “Dom’s right. Why are you the monster? Because you shot a few? They’re vermin. You should get a medal.”

  “I didn’t exactly shoot the two I tracked down.”

  Baird shrugged. “Good call. Why waste ammo on ’em?”

  Bernie didn’t have to draw a picture for Cole. He could guess how she’d settled the score. She knew her way around a carcass, and he’d seen her nearly lose it with that grub back at Port Farrall. But she was still Bernie, still fun to be with, still someone he’d trust with his life. She wasn’t one of the monsters. She just had to deal with them too often.

  “So,” Marcus said slowly, “what are you planning to do when you find the third guy?”

  Yeah, he always got straight to the point.

  “I know what I want to do,” she said. “And you’re going to give me that disapproving Fenix look.”

  “Is that what’s really bothering you? What I think?”

  “I don’t know, and that’s what’s bothering me.”

  “If the asshole shows his face, we got a legal system, right?” Cole was starting to wish he hadn’t started this. “Martial law. Rules are clear. The boss man’s comin’ soon, and we’ll be runnin’ the place just like we did Jacinto. Can’t argue with a legal system.”

  “I’m not the jury, Bernie,” Marcus said. “Can’t say I blame you. Can’t judge you, either.”

  Bernie just shrugged. “Well, now you know. I’m not traumatized or any of that shit, because I won’t let them win. But if I have a choice, I’ll be predator, not prey.” She looked like she’d had enough, and stood up to leave. “Okay, wake me when it’s my watch. I’ll be back to normal in the morning and everyone can forget we had this
conversation.”

  Anya hadn’t said a word up to then, but now she moved in. There was some sisterly ladies’ stuff going on. Anya probably knew best what Bernie needed to hear. “Come on, Bernie. I’ll make coffee.”

  Cole felt he’d failed Bernie somehow. He thought that a bit of comradely support would work wonders; Gears were closer than family, because there was nothing as tight as a team that’d been under fire together. But whatever was really getting to her wasn’t going to be fixed by sympathy.

  “Shit,” Baird said. “What kind of pervert rapes old women? I mean, no offense, but Bernie’s Hoffman’s age.”

  Dom shrugged. “Maybe they were, too.”

  Marcus gathered up the cards from the table and shuffled them. “It’s about power and humiliation,” he said. “Nothing to do with animal lust.”

  “Well, if she catches the last asshole, don’t expect me to stop her and tell her to be civilized and legal about it.” Baird took the deck from Marcus and dealt new hands. “I’ll hold her coat.”

  “Bernie’s right,” Dom said. “We’re all messed up by one thing or another. If I’d …” He seemed to be concentrating hard, like he kept forgetting what he had to say. “If I’d come face-to-face with the actual grubs who did that shit to my Maria, I’d have done just what Bernie did … whatever that was, but I can guess. That’s all I’m saying.”

  It was the first time Dom had said anything like that. He only talked about Maria’s death in vague and general terms. But now he’d spelled it out to everyone: the grubs had done something terrible to her.

  Shit, everyone knew that. But sometimes you had to say it out loud just so you could hear it, so you accepted that folks were gone and never coming back.

  Baird had dealt Cole a lousy hand. He hadn’t done Dom any favors, either.

  “I’m out,” Dom said, pushing his cards back into the center of the table. “And I’m so tired I won’t even have nightmares tonight. Wake me up when it’s my watch.”