Gears of War: Jacinto’s Remnant (45 page)

Marcus shut his eyes at that point. Dom, like any Gear, grabbed sleep when he could, but he couldn’t sleep now. It wasn’t just the constant shaking of the ’Dill; he was too scared to close his eyes. He’d fall asleep, wake up, and then have to accept all over again that the nightmare out there was real. He hated those few seconds of forgetfulness every time he woke up before the crisis of the day reminded him it was still waiting for him. The best way to deal with it was to gorge on it, overload himself with the pain until it ceased to have any meaning, and not try to avoid it.

“Hey, we’ve got an obstruction ahead.” Pad slowed the ’Dill. “We’re about a kilometer outside Gerrenhalt. I’m going to back up to a point where we can get off this track.”

“You’re going to roll this damn thing,” Marcus muttered. He sounded like normal Marcus again. “Can you get back on the road?”

“Hang on …” The engine revved. Pad kept shunting back and forth, trying to turn and hit the bank at the right angle. “Whoa …”

“Shit, Pad, take a run at it,” Dom said.

“That’s what I’m doing.”

The ’Dill’s engine screamed and for a moment it felt like it was floating. Then Dom’s teeth nearly punched through his lip as all four tires hit the ground again. Metal crunched and groaned.

“I think I hit a car,” Pad said. “Like that’s hard to do here. We need a bloody Centaur for this. Control? This is PA-Five-One. You getting all this? It’s useless deploying ’Dills. You better send out tanks next time and just get them to roll over the debris.”

He continued along some gap—possibly the soft shoulder that would bog down cars—scraping metal on one side in a near-continuous screech. Dom had had enough of imagining what was going on and moved to open the top hatch.

It took him awhile to work it out, but the velvet -coated landscape was now different. The shapes of the cars were distorted, and the more he looked, the more he could see they had no tires and their glass was gone.

“Shit,” he said. “Guys, I think the fires came this far. Look.”

The bitter, sooty smell that filled the air in Ephyra was now overwhelmingly smoky. Palls still rose from buildings in the distance, black plumes on a gray sky. There was no color at all in the landscape. The only color Dom could see was inside the ’Dill—blue lights, yellow warning signs, red emergency controls—and it just added to his sense of unreality, like watching a black-and-white movie. Real life was
colored
. Everything in Dom’s brain told him not to believe what he was seeing.

“Pad? Pad,
stop
. Marcus—you got to see this.”

Pad stopped the ’Dill and opened all the hatches. With the hatch covers fully retracted, they could all stand up in the crew bay and stare around them. Dom watched their faces to make sure he wasn’t going mad, and he knew then that he wasn’t.

“Oh, fuck …” Marcus did that very slow head shake that he reserved for his worst moments, like he couldn’t find even a few basic words to express what he was feeling. His shoulders sagged. Eventually he managed something. “It’s just
incinerated.”

Dom had to dismount and look. He knew he wasn’t going to like what he found, but he had to do it. He tried to walk between the cars, but many of them looked as if they’d rammed into each other in some pileup, and then he realized that their fuel tanks would have exploded in the intense heat, and he was simply seeing how they’d been thrown against the vehicles around them. A truck was silhouetted against a lighter patch of sky, the bones of a metal frame all that was left of its trailer. So far, Dom hadn’t seen any recognizable bodies in the seats. Marcus called him on his radio. “Dom, get your ass back here.”

Yeah, Dom had done what he had to do. There would be kilometer after kilometer just like this, and they hadn’t even reached the first city that had taken a direct hit. He made his way back to the ’Dill. Pad cleaned the periscope glass again. “I’m going to take a pee break. Then we head back. That okay with you, Marcus? Either we use Centaurs or wait for the air to clear and send in Ravens. This is crazy.”

Marcus grunted. Pad walked down to the shoulder of the road to unzip.

“You okay, Tai?” Marcus asked. They got back in the ’Dill and waited. “It can’t all be like this. The Hammer can’t cover every square centimeter of planet.” He looked down at his gloves. “Very few of the islands were targets. Grubs can’t get to them.”

So Marcus knew some detail, then. Dom imagined him trying to extract some information from his dad on behalf of his squad, neither of them able to manage more than a couple of words at a time.

“I can change nothing in the past,” Tai said, “so I must move on.”

Dom envied his ability to do that. Maybe, though, he was just saying it to persuade himself that he could. Then the sound of crunching boots interrupted the quiet.

“Shit.
Shit.”
Pad jumped back into the Dill like he’d come under fire. “Shit.”

“Hey, what’s wrong?” Dom’s first thought was that he’d seen a fire front approaching. “What is it?”

“It’s all
bodies.”
Pad was shaking. “I was having a piss by the wall, and when I looked down on the ground I thought it was just burned wood or plastic or something, but it was all
bodies
. It was
people.”

He slid into the driver’s seat, but he started fumbling with the controls as if he didn’t recognize them. Marcus reached out and caught his arm.

“Come on, Pad. I’ll drive.”

“I’m okay. I’ll be all right in a minute.”

“I know. Come on.”

Padrick wasn’t a guy who gave in to anything, but he let Marcus take the controls and sat with his head in his hands. Even on the punishing ride back, he kept that position. The ’Dill was the last APC back to base that night. When they rolled in, the engineers were trying to clean the filth off the other ’Dills.

“Yeah, we get it,” one of the guys said to Marcus as he dismounted. “It’s bad out there.”

Pad only got as far as the Dill’s front scoop. He sat down again. Marcus waited, so Dom and Tai did as well.

“You want a beer?” Dom said. “Come on, Pad. Let’s get totally shit-faced for once.”

Padrick shut one eye, head slightly cocked to the side, and stared into the distance like he was sighting up. “It’s so easy.”

“What is?”

“Death. Done right.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, man?”

“I’ve seen it maybe three, four hundred times. Because I
see
it, right? I’m the only one who does, not even the guy I hit. Close up.
Magnified
. That’s what my job’s about. I pull the trigger, and the guy’s gone. One minute he’s having a smoke or thinking about home, and the next he doesn’t even know he’s dead. His brain’s liquefied like
that.”
Pad snapped his fingers. “In a fraction of a second, he’s got nothing left to feel pain or fear with. Good way to go, Dom. Few of us get that privilege.”

Marcus just stared at him. Dom was getting worried. Nothing that Pad had said was shocking or new, but his tone was scary: not depressed but wistful, as if he thought that instant nonexistence was something wonderful. Eventually he got up and ambled out of the hangar.

“Tai,” Marcus said, “you want to keep an eye on him? We can take shifts.”

“To prevent what?”

“Tai, he’s losing it. Guys do dumb things when they’re like that.”

“Once something is seen, it cannot be unseen,” Tai said. “Who are we to force him to live with what’s in his head when it’s not in ours?”

Tai almost smiled—he never seemed to let anything get to him—and then followed Padrick. He wasn’t being callous at all, just Tai, but Dom couldn’t imagine standing by and letting Marcus put a gun to his own head simply because he had a right to. There was nothing to say that Pad was planning to do that, of course. He just seemed to be making the point that he thought some ways to die were better than others, and being barbecued by the side of the road wasn’t one of them. Dom would have said that made sense, too. But the look on Pad’s face, that weird hopefulness, scared the shit out of him.

“Go home, Dom,” Marcus said.

“You staying here?”

Marcus didn’t quite shake his head. It was more a shrug. “I’d better go see Dad.”

Dom was relieved—again—that he wasn’t invited to supper at the Fenix estate.

KING RAVEN KR-42, FOUR HUNDRED KILOMETERS WEST OF EPHYRA ACROSS THE TYRAN BORDER, ONE WEEK LATER.
It was the most spectacular sunrise that Richard Prescott had ever seen.

He was so mesmerized by its intensity as the Raven banked that he forgot for a moment why the sky looked so breathtakingly beautiful, a wonderful streaked palette of coral, scarlet, and magenta. It was because millions of tons of fine debris had been kicked up into the atmosphere by the Hammer strikes. For a few seconds, the open bay of the Raven framed only a brilliant sky unspoiled by anything else. Then it tilted down, and the landscape below was just stumps of buildings scattered across charred wasteland, unrecognizable as the industrial city it had once been.

So what did you expect, Professor?

Prescott watched Adam Fenix. He had a fixed safety line on his belt, but he stood confidently on the sill of the bay, hanging on to one of the overhead grab rails like the Gear he’d once been. Prescott expected to see shock on his face at the very least. No man could look at that scene below and not be unsettled in some way. But Fenix just closed his eyes for a moment.

“It’s certainly been effective,” he said. “In terms of asset denial, anyway. There’s little for the Locust to take now. But that’s a two-edged sword—we’re going to have to rely wholly on our protected reserves of fuel, food, and water for months. You’ve seen how much contamination’s blown across Ephyra.”

Prescott gave him points for not degenerating into emotion and regret. “Adam, we knew from the start of the Hammer program that the consequences of using it would be serious.”

“Yes, but even I can’t tell you what the full repercussions will be. Noticed how much cooler it is? That’s simply sunlight being blocked by the dust in the atmosphere. The climate effects are already here. The pollution—

we’ll be living with the consequences of that for decades, perhaps centuries.”

“Modern life’s always a trade-off between the easy life we want and the poisons it creates.” Prescott tried to work out if his own numbness was normal human shock at the scale of the horror he’d been forced to unleash, or fear that he might have made the wrong decision. No; terrible as it was, there was nothing else anyone could have done. “Better that we live to find a solution than letting the enemy slaughter us.”

We’ve been through all this. God, how many times did we argue about this over the last three years?

But that was before anyone had thought of deploying the entire orbital network at once.
Yes, that was me. That was my decision
.

It was simply a chain of intense fires raging across the planet. Who needed chemical weapons when you could just set fire to Sera and release the toxins already in factories, refineries, and homes? Prescott sometimes let himself be shocked by the complexity of the world he tried to manage, and how little control he found he had over it. But then he shook it off and did what he could. Nobody could ever have all the answers.

“Why do we keep having this conversation?” Fenix asked.

“Perhaps we’re rehearsing our excuses for posterity,” said Prescott. “How’s your son?”

“I’m not really sure.” Fenix stepped back from the sill and sat down, buckling himself into his seat again. “He said it was like walking through dark gray snow. The first patrol, I mean. His squad did the first patrol after the strikes.”

The Raven looped around and headed back to Ephyra. Beneath it, the landscape developed more detail as the blast radius expanded, showing how the destructive force had diminished with distance. Rain had washed a lot of the airborne pollution into the rivers. The dark snow was now more like slicks of oil, wet and shiny where the water had pooled, and Prescott began to believe that he had only to wait a few more weeks for nature to begin its own cleanup, and things would look more encouraging.

No, that was wishful thinking. He’d just be able to see more of the consequences of his decision. The closer they got to Ephyra, the more black dots Prescott could see in the sky—other Ravens mapping the blocked roads and directing engineer detachments to where they were needed. The most they could do would be to clear a route to hell. He wondered what the rest of Sera looked like, but much of it was beyond the range of a Raven, and he would simply have to guess that whatever he’d seen in the last few hundred kilometers was a sample of the rest of the planet.

“Still no Locust,” he said.

Fenix shook his head. Something below had caught his eye, and when Prescott leaned to look, it was an APC

picking its way along the remains of a road that had buckled in the heat. “But we can’t possibly have wiped them out. They’re underground. Even if we killed all those on the surface, there’ll be more of them deep in the tunnels.”

“The pollution runoff should kill a good few of them, too, then?”

“Perhaps.” Fenix watched the APC with intense interest until the Raven left it behind. “It’ll poison the water table in places, and they must be making use of that, too.”

“You always sound bewildered rather than hostile when you talk about the Locust, Professor.”

Fenix paused for a moment. “I am,” he said. “I don’t know how to deal with them now, other than destruction. But I’m not someone who has the energy to hate anything, I’m afraid. Call it sorrow.”

Prescott imagined Fenix having been one of those boys who kept scorpions and venomous spiders as pets, and found them appealing. It was the scientist in him. What would he do now? He was a weapons man. If the Locust were crushed, he’d have to find something else to occupy him.