Gears of War: Jacinto’s Remnant (18 page)

Don’t keep things from me, Mr. Chairman. Not even opinions. I can’t do my job if you don’t level with me. There aren’t enough of
us left to dick around with this need-to-know bullshit any longer
.

(VICTOR HOFFMAN TO RICHARD PRESCOTT, DURING A FRANK DISCUSSION AT PORT FARRALL.)
THE HOFFMANS’ APARTMENT, JACINTO, FOURTEEN YEARS AGO, APPROXIMATELY ONE WEEK TO HAMMER DEPLOYMENT.

“Are you awake, Victor?”

Sleep was getting hard to come by since Prescott had penciled in the end of the world. Hoffman knew that lying awake with his eyes open invited conversation, and discussing his troubles with his wife was the very last thing he could do now.

His head buzzed from lack of sleep and his mouth tasted of metal. “What time is it?”

“Five o’clock,” she said. “You told me to make sure you got up.”

“So I did. Thank you.”

Margaret was a meticulous woman, and he respected that. She was also a lawyer. Her capacity for spotting a man evading cross-examination was unrivaled.

“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” she asked.

Hoffman padded over to the shower, wondering how much longer there’d be running water in the city. “Well, there’s the war, it’s bad, and we’re running out of body bags. That’s about it, really.”

“Don’t patronize me. We’ve been married nearly twenty years, and it’s
all
been war except for six weeks. Something’s changed.”

Hoffman turned down the water temperature to cool. “We’re going under. But you know that.”

“You’re doing field showering again, Victor.”

“What?”

“You do this every time you’re about to go on frontline duty.”

Margaret knew him far too well. Hoffman cut short his showers and ran the water colder to prepare himself for the basic facilities he’d get in the field—and he’d been lucky to get a shower at all most of the time. But he hadn’t realized he was doing it again now. His subconscious had told him he was going to pick up a rifle and do the job for real again.

Shit
.

He switched off the water and wiped the condensation off the shower screen to check the clock on the wall: three and a half minutes.
And the fact that I can tell that means I checked the time before I went in
. He was more strung out than he thought.

“It’s gone beyond bad, hasn’t it?” Margaret said.

At least he didn’t have to lie about that. Maybe it was time he started getting her used to what was going to happen, and why. “It’s as bad as it gets. They’re going to overrun us sooner or later.”

She stood there looking at him in her bathrobe, arms folded, head slightly on one side as if she was expecting him to break down and confess in front of a jury. How the hell did he tell her that most of Sera would be a smoking wasteland in a week or two? How did he
not
tell her?

She’d be safe in Jacinto. She’d be fine, so it was okay for him not to tell her. The law said he couldn’t, anyway. He carried the burden of being privy to state secrets.

“Damn,” she said quietly. “Is this a case of saving the proverbial last round for yourself?”

“With luck, it won’t come to that.”
Luck, and Adam Fenix
. “But they’re a loathsome enemy, and I would
not
care to be taken prisoner, honey.”

“They don’t take prisoners, you said.”

Hoffman ran the razor over his scalp. “That may be their only virtue.”

“How long?”

“What?”

“How long have we got, do you think?”

Hoffman knew to within a few days when most of urban Sera would probably cease to exist. Operational security was just an excuse for not telling her that he’d be responsible for it. She’d hate him for it.

It’s Prescott’s decision. Why am I assuming responsibility?

And if I wanted to stop the detonation … could I?

They’d do it with him or without him, command key or not. But it needed doing. He could see no other option. Maybe it didn’t matter who killed you in the end, just how quickly it was over.

“I’m thinking in terms of weeks,” he said.

Margaret didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “Is there
nothing
we can use against them? Didn’t we have all those chemical stockpiles? The satellite lasers?”

She was a smart woman. She asked logical questions.

“They’re in our cities,” Hoffman said carefully. “It’s not like they’re behind their own borders.”

Hoffman wasn’t sure if he was hoping she would guess the truth to spare him the eventual revelation, if he was encouraging her to see that weapons of mass destruction and 90 percent casualties made sense, or if he was just lying by omission.

“I’m going to ask you something that might offend you,” she said.

Here we go
. No, she couldn’t possibly guess the full plan. Not even Margaret’s razor mind could extrapolate like that. “Ask away.”

“If it comes to it… I wasn’t joking about the last round. If it happens that way, if everything goes to hell, will you do it for me? Shoot me? Because I saw that news report from Bonbourg, and … I refuse to let them do that to me.”

It was one thing knowing that war was brutal, and another actually seeing the detail of an enemy that didn’t seem to want anything else but to cause suffering.

“Good grief, woman, you mustn’t think that way.”

“Victor, I have to know.”

“Okay. Yes. I promise.”
Would I? Would I know when the situation was that bad? Would I regret it later?
“I wouldn’t let anything like that happen to you.”

She looked relieved. He’d underestimated how much the Locust advance scared her. He thought she was the last person on Sera who’d let herself be intimidated, and that she’d greet those grub bastards at the gates by slapping a subpoena on them. That was why he’d married her: she didn’t take shit from anyone.

“Thank you.” Damn, how many women were happier for knowing their old man could give them instant oblivion with one round ? It wasn’t the best of marriages, but he
respected
her. “You never pull your punches with me, Victor. That’s what first appealed, you know? No prevarication. No airs and graces. No lies.”

It stung, like ironic compliments always did. “As long as it wasn’t my flowing mane of hair.”

Hoffman chewed over the comment all the way to the House of Sovereigns. That had been his opening to tell her, to prove he was the plain-talking man she always thought he was, but he hadn’t. Everything from now on would compound the deceit. And despite a lifetime in the military, where the ability to keep your mouth shut was both demanded and necessary, this was the ultimate deception.

Margaret had family in Corren, in the far south of Tyrus. That was going to become an issue all too soon. Salaman was already in Prescott’s office when the secretary showed Hoffman in, and the number of empty coffee cups on the chart table said he’d been there for a few hours. Prescott was standing at his desk, one hand in his pocket, phone to his ear.

“Sorry, Professor … No, what other data do you need? … Well, that’s the update … No, I’m okay with that…

Yes, we’ll still be here.”

Prescott laid the phone slowly back on its cradle and wandered over to the chart table.

“Fenix is almost ready to go,” he said. “From tomorrow, he says. He’s made allowances for programming new targets on the fly if need be.”

“So when he gives the word, you’re making the announcement, sir.” Salaman looked as bad as Hoffman felt. His face was waxy, very pale, and he kept pressing his fist to his chest as if he had bad heartburn. Everyone’s digestion was suffering now. “Still three days?”

“Yes. The longer the delay, the higher the chance of the Locust working out what’s coming.”

Hoffman traced the main cross-border highways into Tyrus on the chart with his fingertip. There were no civilian flights now; it was too risky for airlines, and they were struggling to keep running anyway. That meant vehicles, trains, and pedestrian traffic only. Maybe some would come into Ephyra via the port of Jacinto. He found himself calculating how far anyone would get in three days.

If they can get a ride. If they can get a ticket. If they find a ship
.
Oh, shit…

“So when do we start pulling back units?” Hoffman asked. “We can’t expect them to make a run for it with the refugees.”

Salaman didn’t look up from the chart. “That’s going to need some careful handling. If we’re not giving civilians more than three days’ notice, to maintain some element of surprise, then sudden troop withdrawals are going to clue in the grubs even more effectively.”

A man never knew where he drew the line until it was tested. Hoffman discovered his.

“If you’re suggesting that we leave Gears stranded, General, then
serious misgivings
hardly begins to cover it.”

He wondered if he was looking for an excuse to get out of the general quandary. No, it pissed him off to his very core. “It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve sacrificed units for intelligence purposes, but this is an army that’s given more than everything it has.”
So Gears are more worthy than civilians? Wrong argument to sway this guy
. “And what’s the point of decimating enemy numbers if we reduce our own at the same time? We’re already hopelessly outnumbered. Even if we burn every Seran city to the ground, we won’t kill all the grubs. We need an army to crush what’s left when the smoke clears.”

Prescott and Salaman might as well have been having a conversation that didn’t include Hoffman. He wondered why they’d included him in this tiny inner circle. He was Director of Special Forces, and that no longer had any meaning in a desperate war where mechanics and cooks had to fight in the frontline too.

“Nobody thought this was an easy decision,” Prescott said. “You understand that as well as any man in the COG. Anvil Gate might not have been on the same scale, but the dilemmas were the same, were they not?”

Ah, now I know. Hoffman, the man who’s willing to do the dirty work
.

The siege of Anvil Gate had transformed his career, but he wasn’t sure if it was worth the nightmares and the nagging fear that one day he would fail and everyone would die because he couldn’t cut it. Salaman said nothing. Maybe it was his heartburn. He didn’t look too well.

“Chairman,” Hoffman said, “after you deploy the Hammer, you’ll need every Gear you have, and you’ll need them on your side. Think about how you’ll command even a Gear’s loyalty once they know you’ll waste them in their
thousands
like that.” Hoffman paused for a breath to let that sink in. “Giving your life in combat is one thing. But this is without precedent.”

See, Margaret, I
can
use fancy words and arguments. I don’t just
tell them flat out that they’re assholes now.
I’ve learned a lot from you
.

Prescott didn’t even nod. He knew damn well what society would be like after the Hammer strike; it would need an army to make sure humans didn’t tear themselves apart. Ephyra would still have refugees pouring in from the rest of Tyrus, if nothing else, and a state that sacrificed its own civilians would have trouble for many years afterward—grubs or no grubs.

“What about the Gears from the rest of the COG states ?” Salaman said. “Not that we have any control over them.”

Hoffman hated himself now, so one more step into the abyss wasn’t going to damn him any worse. “I bet they’d be really happy to start new lives in the state that unilaterally fried their families and neighbors.”

“I may live to regret my double standards, Colonel, but I agree with you,” Prescott said at last. “We’d just be reducing numbers on
both
sides. Start pulling back all units south of Kinnerlake.”

“Navy too?” Hoffman asked.

“At least we don’t have many ships to assemble these days. Yes, bring them home.”

Salaman sat with his arms folded across his chest, staring at the chart, and shook his head slowly. “And that’ll leave the towns down there exposed to grub attack.”

“They’ll self-evacuate.” Prescott turned away and poured himself a coffee. “We’re moving Gears all the time, effectively spinning plates. People will just assume they’re plugging another hole that’s opened up.”

“Are we going to issue misinformation to that effect?” Salaman asked.

“No,” Prescott said. “Even a politician has limits.”

There weren’t any right answers in this war, or any other. There were only bad and worse.

“I’ll get things moving,” Hoffman said. At least Gears had transport and route priority. “Excuse me, gentlemen.”

It was a long walk to the ops room through a maze of splendid corridors lined with paintings of the Allfathers and heroic scenes from COG military history. That gave him time to get his head straight. He’d taken a stand—a quiet one, but a stand nonetheless—for his Gears, and somehow that seemed less selfish and partisan than special pleading for individual civilians.

But I’ll still have to lie to the men
.

Hoffman walked past the rows of comms officers hunched over consoles in the semidarkened room, occasionally putting a firm hand on shoulders to stop people from sitting bolt upright when they realized the top brass was behind them.

“Get me the COs of all COG naval vessels, Four-Two Logistics, all units in Zone Three-Alpha,” he said. “And I mean
all
. Down to the last field canteen. Four-Two L first, then I’ll take the calls as they come in. They’re all recalled to base. I need to touch base with all commanders personally.”

One of the comms officers was Anya Stroud, Helena’s daughter, a good-looking girl just like her mother had been. Hoffman was glad she was safe here for the time being, because Helena deserved to live on somehow. Anya looked at him with the faintest of frowns.