Gears of War: Jacinto’s Remnant (23 page)

“Marcus paid for whatever mistakes he made.”

“He did. And we all make them.”

“Sir, may I go on the recon mission?”

“Why?”

“There are injured male Gears still on combat duty who are physically less able than me. I can do
more
. I’ve been bringing my fieldcraft and weapons skills up to speed.”

“I know. Mataki’s been giving you individual tuition.”

“We need
everyone
pulling their weight, sir. Don’t you think I’m capable?”

Hoffman didn’t have much of a veneer. The man she saw was mostly the inner core, only his natural fear and guilt kept in check, and he never seemed bothered to learn to lie. He smiled ruefully.

“You’re your mother’s daughter, Anya. She never took any crap, either. You go right ahead.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the comms desk. “Find me another one like Mathieson, preferably two, because
nobody
should be working twelve-hour shifts every day, and I’ll seriously consider you for frontline duties. Now let’s get this recon planned. Go find Fenix.”

Hoffman could have called Marcus on the radio, on duty or not. He knew that. He was just being Hoffman, still trying to atone for what he’d done to Marcus, and so—indirectly—to her. Dom might have been convinced that the two men were now locked in some mutual loathing, but all Anya could see was that they both still wanted to admire each other despite their respective lapses: Hoffman bewildered by Marcus abandoning his post, Marcus still shaken by being left to die in the Slab. Neither were the actions of the men they knew they were.
You’re all guilt, aren’t you, Colonel? You’d have gone back for Marcus eventually. You know you would
. I
know you would
.

“Will do, sir.”

Marcus was off duty. Anya knew roughly where he was at any given time because she kept the duty rosters, and there weren’t yet any places in Port Farrall where he could hole up and hide. If he wasn’t with Dom, he’d be patrolling the camp’s warehouse block or keeping an eye on a food distribution center on his own time. Nobody wanted any downtime to think.

And nobody with any sense was venturing outside today if they didn’t have to. Anya hunched her shoulders against the cold and tried raising him on her radio.

“Marcus, where are you? It’s Anya. Hoffman’s going for the recon. He wants a planning session right away.”

Her earpiece crackled. “I’m in Sector Alpha-Three. You still in CIC?”

“No, I’m about half a klick from you. Just passing the medical station in Alpha-Two.”

“Wait there. I’ll walk back with you.”

It was so quiet that she could hear a Raven’s engine starting up in the dockyard. The whine rose in a crescendo, then the
chakka-chakka
of the rotors, and she glanced up as she walked to catch a glimpse of it. No, she was wrong:
two
Ravens. They zipped low overhead at top speed, heading inland. It wasn’t a routine sortie. Nothing was scheduled; she would have known. That either meant some refugees had been spotted, even this long after the evacuation, or there was trouble somewhere.

Anya pressed her earpiece and tried to pick up the comms traffic. One was a pilot she barely knew, a guy called Rorry, but the other was Gill Gettner, and she was going for broke. Anya could hear the two pilots trading targeting data; they’d spotted Locust on the surface.

“Yes, run, you ugly fucker.” That was Gettner. “Corpser, two klicks dead ahead, asking for it… I’m on.”

“Six Boomers, three o’clock, one klick and closing, I’m engaged.”

“Roger that, Three-Three.”

“Targets heading away from Farrall, half a klick west of the highway, repeat,
away
from Farrall, still on the surface.”

“Control, this could be a decoy. Advise perimeter security.”

“I’m in—engaging now.” Rorry sounded detached. Black smoke from the rocket strikes boiled into the sky; Anya could see it even from the center of town. “Confirming that kill, stand by.”

Anya stood waiting to pick up Gettner again, finger jammed in her ear, and watched the skyline. Another pall of smoke and flame rolled skyward.

“Corpser down,” Gettner said. “Anyone want to dance on it?”

“All targets neutralized. KR-Three-Three returning to ship.”

“Roger that, KRs.” That was Mathieson. “Dispatching a ’Dill to check the area.”

Everybody had scores to settle, comrades in need of avenging. Anya wasn’t sure what Gettner’s individual story might have been, but it was impossible to find anyone now who hadn’t lost family and friends to the Locust or the consequences of living in a city wrecked by war. Like Bernie always said, grieving was a little easier when everyone knew what it felt like.

Marcus ambled up to her, Lancer cradled against his chest. He nodded in the direction of the smoke. “They never give up.”

“At least we know what they’ve got left.” Anya started walking back to CIC with him. It was—by their standards—quality social time. “Some Corpsers are still tunneling away from the Hollow, presumably. Wiping us out still seems to be their priority.”

“Consistent.”

“Yes, you have to give them that.”

“They could sit and wait until we freeze.” Marcus’s mind was definitely on something else. He had that slightly defocused look. “Maybe they’re running from the last of the Lambent. Maybe it’s nothing to do with us at all.”

“Say it.”

He blinked a couple of times but kept his eyes straight ahead. “Say what?”

“Your father. Finding all those recordings of his voice in the Locust computer … don’t tell me it didn’t upset you. If that had been my mother, I’d be pretty upset, too. And angry. And confused.”

“It’s like getting wet. Once you’re soaked to the skin, you can’t get any wetter no matter how much it rains.”

“What was he
doing?”

“Damned if I know. And I never will.”

Marcus must have heard the talk about his father being a traitor; like father, like son, some had said. Nobody said that now. But Anya doubted that he’d forget. She waited a few moments in case he was planning to go on, but he wasn’t.

“Anyway, Hoffman’s sending you and Delta to Vectes to evaluate it,” she said. “That’s why I came to find you.”

“A trip to Toxin Town. We get all the perks.”

“Prescott says it’s safe now.”

“Imagine that.”

Marcus didn’t say anything else all the way back, and just kept pace with her. But it was the longest conversation they’d had in a while. Anya settled for quantity over quality.

“Fenix,” Hoffman said, not looking up from the chart on the table. “Did your father ever tell you anything about Vectes Naval Base?”

“Not really.”

“Me neither. We’ll work from Michaelson’s data.” Anya went to sit down and get on with some paperwork, but Hoffman stopped her. “You’ll want to sit in on this, Lieutenant.”

“Something you want me to do, sir?”

“You wanted some hands-on time. Well, you’ve got it. You’re going to Vectes, too.”

Healthy? How
healthy
do you expect a Gear to be? Years of chronic sleep deprivation. Exposure to more environmental toxins
than I’ve got tests for. Acquired hearing loss. Rustlung. Depressed immune function because they’re totally burned out. Brain
damage, everything from blast proximity to serious head trauma. And that’s without the psychiatric issues. Traumatic stress is a
given. In hospital, those boys made more noise asleep than they did awake, because it was one long frigging nightmare. So nearly
all our men of fighting age are utterly—and maybe irreparably—damaged
. (DR. MARYON HAYMAN, SUMMARIZING FUTURE HEALTH ISSUES FOR CHAIRMAN PRESCOTT.)

OUTSKIRTS OF PORT FARRALL, SIX AND A HALF WEEKS AFTER THE EVACUATION OF JACINTO, 14 A.E.

“Andresen picks his moments.” Baird shuffled from foot to foot in the icy morning air, rubbing his gloved palms together. He had a Hammerburst rifle slung across his back today. Locust weren’t the only ones who looted from their fallen enemy. “Why the hell do we go running after every grub that shows up?”

Sergeant Andreson had blown a big hole in a grub on perimeter patrol last night, he claimed, but it had run off and he’d lost it. Now Delta and Sigma 4 were doing a line search near the woods. That was where the things seemed to keep emerging.

“Because they’re there, Blondie,” Bernie said.

“Or we could be smart and wait for them to come to us. Because they do. We’re just wasting calories.”

Bernie understood the need to go after every contact. It wasn’t just pragmatic; humans would never be able to get on with living again until they knew the last Locust was dead. It didn’t even matter if they weren’t a viable breeding population.

Do they talk about us like that? In animal terms?

She thought of Prescott’s speech.
Genocidal monsters
. Humans were conducting the genocide now. She was fine with that.

“Look, as long as we leave any alive, even a couple, then the bastards will start breeding again,” she said. “We have to hunt them down.”

“Yeah, but they’d be so inbred they’d look like that nurse in J Sector medical station.”

“That’s cruel. True, but cruel.”

“You like hunting shit, right ? Go back down there and hunt for Berserkers. Kill the females, and it doesn’t matter how many boy grubs are left.”

“So Cole finally sat you down and told you where babies come from. With all the rabbit pictures.”

Baird took it in his stride. “You know I’m right.”

“You volunteering?”

“It’s a better plan than playing hide-and-seek with the assholes.”

“Maybe. But we’re in no shape now for another Landown -style assault. Even if the place wasn’t under water and full of imulsion.”

The weather might have been pure frozen hell, but at least the thaw had set in between her and Baird. There was, as she’d hoped, a trace of regular human behind that thick shield of self -centered cynicism. Nobody had ever cared much about Baird except Baird, she suspected, not until he enlisted and realized that there were people who’d put their life on the line for him for no other reason than being a Gear. Now he’d managed to score a black knitted cap for her, the kind she could pull down over her ears—not exactly flattering, but essential kit for a sniper. She didn’t want to think who he’d outsmarted to get it. He was trying hard, and that was all that mattered.

“So you get to go on the all-expenses-paid Delta trip to Vectes,” he said. “A perk from Hoffman?”

Ouch
. “We go back a long way, Blondie. Nearly forty years. Maybe I lent him my pencil in class once, and he never forgot it.”

Baird never really grinned. He just had this
smirk—
there was no other word for it—that got to her when she was least expecting it. He was near a raw nerve now, and he knew it.

“Whatever.” The smirk got broader as he kicked through the frozen grass. “I
like
to see old folks happy. If you’re going to croak with a coronary anyway, you might as well go with a smile on your—”

“Now go say that to Hoffman.”
Play it cool. It only encourages him
. “And I’ll make sure Doc Hayman’s standing by to reattach your balls.”

The smirk took a long time to fade. If she hit him again, it would just be etched there permanently. The turf sloped away gradually into the valley and the Jacinto road. A hundred meters away, Marcus and Dom paced slowly, eyes down, Cole a little way behind.

If Andresen had chased down a drone here, then there should have been traces. Bernie squatted down and searched for blood in the thick layer of frost. There was no point in anyone wandering into the forest at random. They hadn’t even located an emergence hole yet.

“If the grubs are watching us, they’ll know we’re thinking about leaving.” Baird took his earpiece out and fiddled with it, then rubbed his ears. “They’re not stupid. They’ll see stuff being moved to the docks, like the vehicles.”

“Then they’d better give us their best shot, hadn’t they?” She clipped his ear. “Wear a bloody helmet. Or earmuffs. You’ll get frostbite.”

But something wasn’t right today.

She couldn’t hear birds and animals that she’d become used to. The noises were there, but more distant. It sounded like the area had been cleared. Maybe the wounded grub was lying in wait, gathering itself up for a final effort to take one last human with it. She pictured a doting drone dad with a crib full of little newborn grub bastards, a fresh generation of terror, and knew that couldn’t be allowed to happen. She knew how the things bred, too. Hoffman had told her. It was one excess too far, too personal. Any species that bred by rape didn’t deserve to survive. She’d heard horror stories about COG baby farms way out in the country, but fertile women knew their worth to society, and she’d
seen
some of them since the evacuation, well fed and healthy, not looking like prisoners or victims of abuse. It was different.