Gears of War: Jacinto’s Remnant (3 page)

Easy. Really, it is
.

Bernie had to believe that. And she had to think no further than the next step. That was how you kept going, one hurdle at a time, then the next, and the next, until the huge task had been chipped away. Now she was halfway up the slope. When she got close to the top, she’d work out how to secure herself with the rope, free both hands so she could assess any injuries, check that her Lancer still worked, and see what kit she still had in her belt pouches.

And time to call in again. Shit, they can’t have lost all comms, can they?

She lay flat and listened for a moment. The city still groaned and screamed as the weight of water crushed it. But that was a little further away; closer to her, she could hear rhythmic slaps on the water, as if someone was swimming.

I’m not alone. God, I’m not alone. It’s Sorrens. He made it
.

Bernie took a few breaths and gathered her strength to sit up as best she could and take a look. Before she did, she tried calling Control again.

“Control, this is Mataki, requesting immediate extraction. My position is the Allfathers Library roof.” She could still hear the splashing. It was getting closer. “Control, come in …”

The splashing stopped.

Bernie raised her head and looked down at the sea. Now that she was facing away from Jacinto’s death throes, the seascape simply looked stormy, the drifting smoke more like dark clouds than the end of urban society. She couldn’t see anyone in the water—nobody alive, anyway.

“Sorrens?”

She couldn’t ignore what she’d heard. She tugged on the line to make sure it was secure, then tied the other end around her waist like a safety line. She was losing body heat, she reminded herself, and there was a cold night ahead, so any survivors would stand a better chance if they huddled together. Braking her slide with her heels, she edged down to the top of the wall again, wondering how she’d haul him inboard. The sea looked almost solid, like churning, oily lumps rather than water. She strained to see a head bobbing between waves. Nothing.

Then the water erupted.

A body burst through the surface like a porpoise breaching. She sucked in a breath, jerking back, because it wasn’t Sorrens, and it took her a second in her exhausted state to register that fact. She was face -to-face with a Locust drone, a big gray bastard of a grub. It could swim. It should have been dead. It wasn’t. It scrambled for the wall,
her
wall,
her
safe haven.

“Shit,”
she said, and reached for the knife in her boot.

KING RAVEN KR-239,

EN ROUTE TO PORT FARRALL.

The comms link crackled in Dominic Santiago’s earpiece. “KR -Two-Three-Nine to Control. Are you receiving that signal?”

Oh shit oh shit oh shit, did I do it? Oh God, I did it, I killed her. I
killed
her
. Dom could hear the chatter between the two Raven pilots, but it was just noise, words, sounds without meaning. His body was carrying on without him; he felt like he was coming around from an anesthetic. Whatever instinct had held him together during the mission was now wearing off, leaving behind it a paralyzing horror that drove out everything else except the sheer choking pain from that last look into her eyes.
I killed Maria. I killed my own fucking wife. It couldn’t have been her, could it? Did I really do it? Oh God oh
God oh
God,
how am I going to breathe again—

“Roger that, Two-Three-Nine. It’s Mataki. We lost the signal, but she’s somewhere on the Allfathers’ roof.”

“We’re low on fuel.”

“Okay, we’re just calculating which KR can get back to her—”

Marcus’s voice cut in. “Control, I’m up for it. If Sorotki thinks he can make it.”

“And if not?” Sorotki said.

“Then drop me off and I’ll frigging
swim
back for her.” It wasn’t a growl. Marcus just sounded exhausted.

“Baird, you got any objections?”

Baird must have shaken his head, because Dom didn’t hear a reply. The guy always came back with some smart-ass retort about Mataki. But not this time.

“Just so you understand,” Sorotki said, “we don’t have the fuel for anything fancy. We just winch her clear and go, okay? We’ll be flying back on vapor as it is. Hey, Mitchell, quit the sightseeing and get your ass back here. Crunch me some numbers.”

“On my way.” The co -pilot abandoned the aerial recon and stowed the camera. “Mataki punched out Baird. We’ve
got
to rescue her, so she can do it again.”

Marcus put his hand on Dom’s shoulder. “Hey … you with us?”

“Yeah. Yeah, let’s do it.” The words were out of Dom’s mouth before he could think. Shit, he
couldn’t
think. There was a loop playing in his brain now, over and over, disjointed but agonizingly vivid, and it wouldn’t stop even when he shut his eyes.

It was just the beginning. It wasn’t going to go away. He wanted to die; nothing mattered now, not even breathing. But when he turned his head and met Marcus’s eyes, he was jerked back into a world where people depended on him, where friends put themselves on the line
for him
. That included Bernie. There was no giving up now.

The co -pilot returned to the cockpit and Sorotki banked the Raven in a loop to retrace their course back to Jacinto. Dom stayed at the door, staring down onto the ocean as the chopper skimmed over an extraordinary fleet of vessels that ranged from hovercraft and rust-streaked beam trawlers to tankers. A group of carriers
—Raven’s
Nest
class—led a flotilla of shabby warships. One was just a matte black lump right on the waterline, then the helicopter tilted, and Dom picked out a solid sail and the bulbous outline of a sonar dome on the bow.

“Shit, look at that,” Baird said. Dom felt something clack against his back plate, and realized Baird had clipped a safety line to his belt. That wasn’t like him at all. “We still got a
submarine
. Hey, I just
got
to play with that. Torps away, flood Q, all that shit.”

Dom felt Baird was humoring him, like he was a kid who’d just woken screaming from a nightmare and needed distracting. Baird had heard what he’d told Cole. He hadn’t realized Dom had found Maria, let alone that he’d taken his sidearm and—

Dom could still see it, over and over, whether he wanted to or not. But he couldn’t say it even in the privacy of his own mind. He stared at the carrier beneath, trying to shut out everything else.

“That’s
Sovereign.”
Dom could see the pennant code under the bridge wing, peeling and faded. He couldn’t remember the other carrier’s name. “They were overdue for the scrapyard even before E-Day.”

It was the sheer volume of small civilian craft that surprised Dom—tiny clinker-built dinghies, rigid inflatables, grimy white motor cruisers with wheelhouses covered in nets and wicker fenders. He’d never known this navyin-waiting existed; all these shabby hulls must have been carefully laid up on blocks in garages or derelict buildings for years, waiting for the worst to happen. People still ventured out to fish in the estuary after E-Day to supplement their meager diet. And everyone knew there were distant islands out there—for those willing to risk the journey, anyway.

Like Bernie
. Island-hopping from the other side of Sera.
Crazy woman
. Dom had experienced the sheer terror of the sea in his commando days, and the idea of spending months afloat in a boat that size almost made him shit himself.

“Pretty impressive that they can hold a convoy formation,” Baird said. “We haven’t had a fighting navy since E-Day, let alone exercising with civilian vessels.”

“Discipline, man.” Dom tried to imagine how many people could cram into a carrier. “We got an orderly, welldrilled bunch of—”

She’s gone
.

And I killed her
.

Dom ground to a halt midsentence. For a few moments he’d thought about something other than Maria, but now it had all come crashing back again. His free hand shook. He grabbed the adjacent rail just to keep it steady. All he wanted was oblivion—fuck it, just five minutes of
nothing
in his head so he could pull himself together. The images superimposed on everything he looked at. He found himself screwing his eyes shut and turning his face away from the open door. It was like that night on board
Pomeroy
, when he’d lost his brother at Aspho Fields, lost half his buddies, and heard his daughter had been born—a terrible chaos of agony and joy, unbearable, so disabling that he didn’t know how to get through the next hour. All the time he was fighting to stay alive, he could cope. Once the pressure was off, the tidal wave flooded back. The Locust were finally gone. The world could start over. But Maria was gone, too, more gone than she’d been for the ten years she was missing, and he was the one who’d killed her.

Maybe I could have saved her. Why didn’t I get to her sooner? Why did I pull the trigger?

He knew why. He knew she was past saving. He also knew that wouldn’t stop him tearing himself apart thinking about all the things he could have done differently.

His torment must have showed on his face. Baird nudged him with his elbow but didn’t say anything. Baird wasn’t good at reassurance. He didn’t have Marcus’s unerring ability to say the right thing when it really mattered, but at least he wasn’t carrying on as if nothing had happened, like he usually did.

“Ten minutes.” Sorotki’s voice interrupted their short-range comms. “Lots of smoke drifting down there. I hope we can spot her. Fenix, you’re winchman. If Mataki’s not in any shape to help herself, you’ll have to go down yourself and put the sling on her.”

Marcus checked the clips, tugging the sling and cable hard and scrutinizing them. “Under the arms?”

“Yeah. Cable to the front, slip the sling over her shoulders and under the armpits, then get her to keep her arms down at her sides or hands clasped in front and
relax
. Grab her when she’s level with the deck, and pull her inboard. Simple.”

Marcus nodded to himself and sat with the harness on his lap, head bent as if he was meditating over it. Baird didn’t seem to know what to do with himself. There was no small talk to pass the time, not now.

“Two hundred meters, port side,” Sorotki said. “I have a visual on the building.”

Dom moved across the bay deck to the other door and stared out. Jacinto looked just like someone had thrown a pile of broken dollhouses into a bucket of water. The scale was somehow distorted; the landmarks were all in the wrong place, or at least it seemed that way because some of the ornate towers and domes were missing. Even when the Raven dropped to twenty meters above the sea, the city didn’t look life-sized any longer.

“Oh, shit,” said Sorotki.

Marcus leaned out of the door, hanging on by one hand. Dom was blinded by the mass of rolling smoke. But the pilot could detect something they couldn’t. Baird put his goggles on and peered out as well.

“What’s up?” he asked. “Can’t you see her?”

“I see her, all right. Which of you is the best shot?”

It was the worst thing Sorotki could have said. Dom felt his guts knot. His mind raced ahead to fill in the gaps. No, Sorotki didn’t mean
that
at all.

“She
is,” Marcus said calmly, still gripping the sling. “She’s a sniper. What’s the problem?”

“She’s got company, and not the let’s-keep-our-spirits-up kind …”

The wind parted the smoke for a moment, and Dom caught a glimpse of someone else’s hell for a change. A Gear—it could have been anyone in that armor—clung to a jutting section of brickwork while a grub tried to climb aboard too.

“Time to break up the party,” Marcus said. “Sorotki, get me in close as you can.”

ALLFATHERS LIBRARY.

Bernie heard the sound of a Raven getting closer but didn’t dare take her eyes off the grub to look up. The thing was struggling, trying to heave itself out of the water. That didn’t mean it wasn’t going to kill her. Locust were tougher than humans, harder to kill, and all that nearly drowning had done to this one was exhaust it. It looked right at her—vile pale gray eyes with pinprick pupils—as if it was surprised that a human had survived. And she was stuck.

She was now lying flat on her back on the sloping wall, trapped and hanging from the length of line. Her Lancer, slung on her back, was jammed underneath her. All she had to rely on was her knife and a very bad attitude toward anything that wasn’t a Gear. The grub gripped the brickwork with one huge clawed hand, then tried to lunge upward. She kicked out at it.

“Fuck off,” she yelled, trying to work out the best place to strike. The nearest target would be its head or hand, not exactly effective places to stab an assailant. She needed to slice into a major artery or somewhere blindingly painful. Stabbing was a slow kill, or a distraction to slow someone down while you tried something else, but that was all she had. “This is
my
frigging wall. Just piss off and
die.”