Gears of War: Jacinto’s Remnant (46 page)

Well, there was Sera. It would need the best minds left alive to heal the planet again. Fenix could make a start on that.

Back at the House of Sovereigns, Prescott passed cleaning crews hosing down the headstones next to the Tomb of the Unknowns. The neat, austere gardens looked almost back to normal, on the surface at least. Ephyra was an orderly city where citizens knew their place and purpose, and now they were doing what they did best: getting on with life and doing their civic duty.

Jillian, his secretary, greeted him with a folder of reports and a cup of coffee when he reached his office. Yes, life did go on.

“Sir, the catering manager is worrying that we might run short of coffee,” she said. “I mean, they’re not going to be harvesting this year, are they? Shall I start putting some aside?”

“I can live with herb tea,” Prescott said. He loathed it, but it didn’t hurt to be seen to make small sacrifices. “If I have to.”

He sat down at his desk and let the chair tip backward as far as it would go on its tilt mechanism. As he leaned back, he looked at the two phones on his desk: one for routine calls, the other a dedicated line that was used only by ministers and other COG heads of state. Normally that line would be moderately busy, but it hadn’t rung in nearly two weeks.

Prescott tried to remember the last conversation conducted on it, and he thought it might have been Deschenko calling him from Pelles—overrun by Locust, close to collapse—to tell him what an evil, murdering, genocidal bastard he was, and how he would surely rot in hell before too long.

Hell was a little too far in the future for Prescott at the moment. He had only to look outside the window to get his priorities in order, and hell had to wait its turn.

He stared at the phone a little longer, but it still didn’t ring. He knew it would never ring again.
CORREN-KINNERLAKE HIGHWAY, SIX DAYS LATER.

Private Padrick Salton now sported a ripe black eye, and seemed reluctant to share the story of how he acquired it. He walked beside Hoffman on a stretch of what had once been road. The bulldozers had driven through for the first time the day before, shoving aside debris so that Ephyra now had a clear route to the sea. Why the hell it needed one at the moment, Hoffman had no idea. There was no sea freight in or out because there was nowhere left to ship it from any longer. The NCOG—what little was left of it after E-Day—was crammed into ports along the Ephyran coast and at Merrenat to the northeast. The route clearance was a monumental waste of frigging time and fuel.

But he was here, walking that road, because he needed to. For some reason, Salton needed to do it as well. The paving and substrate was crazed with deep, narrow fissures down to half a meter where the temperatures had fired it like ceramics.

Shit, Margaret was probably nowhere near here. I just don’t know. That’s what I hate. Imagining
.

“No word from the Islands yet,” he said.

“I know, sir.” Salton’s buddies called him Pad, and sometimes Hoffman did, too. He’d been one of the most successful snipers in the Pendulum Wars. “But there were islands we never heard from after E-Day, too, and they turned out to be okay. Just no comms.”

Hope was evil. It seduced you, then dumped you on your ass so hard and so fast that you were worse off than when you started. Hoffman ignored it. “Kaliso hasn’t mentioned his.”

“Well, he’s got this mystic fate and eternity shit going on, but me, I think that when you’re dead, you’re dead, and that’s the way it should be, so you finally get some peace.”

“You ever going to tell me how you got that black eye? I’m not going to stick you on a charge.”

Hoffman tried to walk the fine line between cutting his Gears some slack and letting discipline collapse. In the lunatic asylum that was post-strike Ephyra, knowing how to hang on to civilized conduct was what mattered. People were shocked and grieving. The curfew didn’t stop anyone having arguments over a drink at other times of the day.

“I got totally rat-arsed in a bar last night, sir, and one thing led to another,” Pad said at last. “Someone mouthed off about Sergeant Fenix’s father. So I got
regimental
on him. I’m still Two-Six RTI.”

Hoffman nodded, searching for the right response. “Okay, Private, we’ve all done it. Just don’t let it become a habit.”

Loyalty was an astonishing thing. Hoffman accepted it like faith. It didn’t have to make sense, and it almost certainly didn’t, but the things it could inspire men to do were extraordinary. Coupled with the stress and nightmares, though, it made for flash points.

And I’m a fool. Why am I here now?

He walked down one road out of thousands in the blast radius in the hope of closure. If he had his wish and Margaret’s death had been instant, then there’d be nothing left of her or the car. If he found anything—and where the hell did anyone start looking?—then he’d agonize over how long it took her to die.

“I’m sorry about your wife, sir.”

“Thanks, Pad. I’m not unique, though.”
God, Anya probably told Dom Santiago, and now every bastard knows
what went on
. “It’s a shitty broken world.”

“Do you know where she was? Sorry to ask, but that’s why you came out on patrol, isn’t it?”

“You don’t know, then.”

“All Dom said was that she didn’t make it back to Ephyra.”

Hoffman felt a pang of guilt for even thinking Anya had done anything more than warn people off asking him painful questions. The kid was incredibly loyal. There it was again: loyalty. Hoffman would take loyalty over genius anytime, not that Anya Stroud wasn’t a smart girl.

“Pad, I know I’m not going to find her alive. She’s gone.” Hoffman surprised himself every time he said that. He hadn’t even cried yet. Part of him was an old hand at grief and could stand back and watch the other Hoffman going through the same stages without trying to hurry it along. “I think I just needed to see
where
. Why the hell are you here, anyway? You’re rostered off today.”

“I lost it walking down a road some days ago. I need to be able to patrol again without seeing bodies under my feet.” Pad stopped dead. “Got a last reported location? I’m up for it if you are, sir.”

“It’ll be a waste of resources.” All Hoffman needed to do was put out the word to patrols that if they found anything in the months to come, anything at all, to let him know. “Pad, I’m grateful for your support. But there’s not enough intel or reason to do this. I think I needed to walk this road to convince myself of that.”

They walked on another two or three hundred meters to a mound of rubble the height of a two-story house. The highway was straight at this point; if Hoffman stood dead center, the debris pushed aside almost looked like monuments, a conquering army’s triumphal route into an ancient city.

Am I letting you down by not searching, Margaret? Shit, it’s too late to bust my ass for you now. I despise
people who show more love at funerals than they ever did in someone’s lifetime. Including me
. Pad moved around the mound cautiously, checking. It was still a dangerous job. Fires had raged underground, too, burning through ruptured pipelines and sewers, and subsidence was always a threat. There were probably forests and open land where the fires were still burning deep in the soil and would smolder for years.
And they couldn’t burn those bastard grubs underground?

Hoffman was about to call Pad back—there was no reason to do this, no urgency—when he lost sight of him. His earpiece crackled.

“Contact, sir,” Pad said. “Movement, over there. Left of… shit, left of what?”

“I hear you, Pad.” It was time to alert CIC. “Control, this is Hoffman, possible grub contact, approximately one klick inland from Corren coast, just off Kinnerlake highway. Stand by.”

There weren’t enough landmark features to get bearings. Hoffman checked his rifle and went after Pad. The rubble was about knee high, so it shouldn’t have been hard to spot anything, but Hoffman couldn’t see what had grabbed Pad’s attention until something moved and he turned in time to catch a glimpse of something gray.

“It’s an e-hole,” Pad whispered. He indicated a line at shoulder height. “Grub breaking cover.”

Hoffman didn’t see enough to make the call on what it was—drone, Boomer, whatever. Did it matter?
Bastard
. He moved in with Pad. They were about ten meters away before they could even see the hole in the ground, a sharp-edged pit that might have been a swimming pool or even a basement before the fires scoured the place. Neither of them knew if they were chasing a single grub or if they were about to engage a whole platoon of the things. It was a dumb position to get in when there were just two of them with the nearest backup being a Raven that was at least ten minutes away.

They edged up to the pit and looked down, Lancers aimed. It was a big rectangular hollow with arches at chest height that looked like tunnels or very deep recesses. There was so much scattered debris that it was hard to work it out.

“It’s a cellar,” said Pad. “And that’s either a tunnel or a sewer down there. But that doesn’t mean it’s not an ehole, too.”

“Shouldn’t we be more worried about this?”

“Only if a few dozen of them rush us.”

Pad jumped down, boots crunching the black wood to dust, and squatted to peer into the sewer. He sighted up.

“Whoa!” He jerked the Lancer’s muzzle to one side. “Human. It’s
human
. Shit, someone’s
alive
. How the hell did they live through this?”

A stupid, desperate thought went through Hoffman’s mind. No, it couldn’t possibly be Margaret. He was furious with himself for even thinking it.

“Hey, come out,” Pad called. “Are you hurt? COG forces here—we’re on your side. Come on out.”

Hoffman could hear sounds of rubble moving. Eventually someone crawled out on all fours like an animal. It was probably a woman. He decided that from the long mud-caked hair, but it wasn’t until she knelt back on her heels that he could tell. She was completely covered in gray ash, wearing a rucksack back-to-front on her chest.

“Are you hurt?” Hoffman said. “How did you get here? How did you survive the fires, let alone the strike?”

She rubbed her sleeve across her mouth. “I hid.” Her accent was heavy, not Tyran at all. She’d come across the borders. “I hid in the drains.”

“Shit, you better come with us.” Pad held out his hand to help her to her feet. “We’ll get you cleaned up. You’re not local, are you? What’s your name, sweetheart?”

It was a perfectly ordinary question. It was simply what you said to scared civvies to break the ice and get them to do what you asked. Hoffman found himself trying to imagine how this woman had survived, and only then did he begin to realize how she might see them.

Enemy. Hostile. The ones who did all this
.

Pad pulled her upright. She paused for a moment, unsteady, then launched into him, screaming in a foreign language, fists pummeling. He held her off one -handed, rifle still gripped tight in the other, but she managed to get in a few hard blows before Hoffman jumped down and pinned her arms. Maybe she didn’t speak enough Tyran to understand Pad was trying to help her.

“Whoa, whoa, steady, steady …” Pad avoided a kick, but Hoffman caught it in the shin. She was completely nuts. She stank of smoke and sweat. “Lady, calm down. It’s okay. We’re not going to hurt you. We’re COG. We’ll get you to a hospital in Ephyra, get you some help. Look, you want some water? I bet you need water.” He reached for the bottle on his belt. “Come on, it’s okay now.”

“You help me ? You help me
now?”
She spat in Pad’s face. Somehow that was always more shocking than a fist. She struggled to find the words in Tyran. “You let us die! You killed everyone! I come here to find Ephyra, find safe place, but we have no time, and you bomb us!”

What the hell could any man say to that? Pad just stared back at her. She’d exhausted herself, and Hoffman now needed to hold her upright rather than restrain her. Her rage was focused squarely on Pad. Maybe she only had enough energy left to hate one Tyran bastard at a time.

What am I going to do, tell her it’s all about asset denial? How it’s a sensible strategy? Bullshit
.

“I’m sorry,” Pad said. “I’m really sorry.” His face was bleeding; she must have caught him with her nails and clawed him. “But you’re safe now.”

“My family is gone. Why should I care about
safe?”

Hoffman let go of her and tried to turn her around to face him. He could hear a Raven approaching. “Ma’am, please, let us help you. I’m sorry, but we had to stop the grubs somehow.”

“Grubs don’t kill my family,” she said.
“You
kill them. You left us stranded. I stay with people I
trust.”

She backed away and ducked into the opening again. Pad crouched down and tried to coax her out, but she was gone. Hoffman heard her scuttling along the echoing concrete tunnel like an animal. If they went after her without some plan or support, there was no telling what they’d find. They’d have to come back later and do a proper sweep of the area, and maybe send in civilian aid workers.

“Shit,” Pad said. “There must be more of them down there. What if they’re everywhere?”

Hoffman radioed in to CIC. A Raven circled overhead. “Control, this is Hoffman. There are
survivors
. I repeat

—we’ve found survivors. They’ve been stranded outside the boundary. So far, one female, age and nationality undetermined, but she’s refused aid or evacuation. I expect there’ll be more, so advise patrols accordingly. Hoffman out.”

Pad was still staring into the tunnel like a cat watching a mousehole.

“Come on, Pad,” Hoffman said.
Why did I ever think that poor bitch would see us as the good guys now?

“Nothing we can do here.”

Pad bent down and placed his water bottle just inside the tunnel. He waited as if he was expecting the woman to come out, then shook his head and took a ration bar from his belt pouch. He laid it next to the bottle and walked away. Hoffman wasn’t sure if it was practical compassion or some kind of peace offering.
I’m going to have to make a lot of those now
.