Gears of War: Jacinto’s Remnant (30 page)

Dom took the eye contact thing seriously. The growing crowd was made up of all kinds of healthy -looking people, including a lot of kids. Many people here—maybe most—hadn’t seen a Gear in full rig before, that was clear. One small boy, seven or eight, trotted alongside Dom, staring at his boots. They seem to fascinate the kid more than the Lancer.

“Why d’you need those big boots?” the kid asked.

Dom missed being a dad. He hadn’t been a dad often enough, not when he added up all the days he’d actually been home with his kids. “To stomp big grubs.”

“I never seen one.”

“You keep it that way. You wouldn’t like ’em.”

A man’s voice from behind him made him look over his shoulder.

“Hey, don’t I know you?” The guy was talking to Cole, keeping pace and craning his neck to look him in the eye. “Yeah, you’re Augustus Cole! Damn it, you’re the Cole Train! What are
you
doing in uniform?”

Shit, have they been totally cut off from the war? How much are we going to have to tell them?

Cole chuckled. “Got to spread the pain to a different game, baby.”

“I saw you play in the final for the Eagles. The last season before you joined the Cougars. Man, you were
good.”

“I
know,”
Cole said, grinning. “But that was just trainin’ for the really
big
game, know what I mean? Hey, you guys play thrashball here? Want a game? I promise I’ll be gentle.”

By the time the weird procession reached the center of the town, Cole had fallen back a long way, surrounded by people who remembered him when he was a thrashball star, signing autographs. Dom had almost forgotten that world existed. It must have been strange for Cole, too; he looked happy enough—he almost always did—but it had to feel weird to be reminded of the life he once had.

Bernie, standing off to one side, watched the crowd with an expression that wasn’t curiosity or wonder but suspicion. She was shadowing Anya, close enough to be a bodyguard. She was also trying to keep an eye on Cole, and she couldn’t do both.

Shit, she really didn’t trust anyone who wasn’t a Gear. But this place could have been a small town in southern Tyrus decades ago, and the people in it didn’t seem like Stranded. It felt more like a COG outpost that had been waiting for the government to finally show up and tell them what was going on. Dom scanned each street and checked each roofline as he passed, more out of habit ground in by urban patrols than fear. That was when he saw it: a frayed and much-repaired banner fluttering from a polished brass pole, the white cog-shaped symbol still clear on a black background that had faded to charcoal gray. Hell, that was
exactly
what this place was. Not an abandoned site colonized by passing Stranded, but a community that was still part of the Coalition of Ordered Governments.

It was probably going to take a while for Bernie to realize that.

“Where are we, anyway?” Dom asked. “Does this place have a name?”

Baird nodded silently in the direction of a painted sign on a nearby wall. It read PELRUAN TOWN HALL. Dom was sure that was where they were heading, but Gavriel went into what looked like the local bar instead. He seemed to be pretty friendly, warning shots aside. Whether he’d still be so sociable when he heard what Marcus had to say was another matter. He stopped everyone at the door, including the guy who was reluctant to lower his weapon.

“Come on, Will, you can see who they are.” Gavriel sounded placatory. “We don’t need protection from our own people.”

“Hey, Dom, company man,” Baird whispered. “We lucked out.
Finally.”

“Check out the banner, Baird. It’s home.”

Home turf or not, it was pretty hard to sit around in a deserted bar looking casual in armor. Dom tried. He shook hands the way his father had always insisted—just hard enough to make an honest impression, not break anything—and watched Marcus and Anya sit down opposite Gavriel at a small table. Dom felt a vague and nagging sense of guilt that he couldn’t place. He was one big tangled ball of guilt now, and working out the particular thing that triggered it each time was getting harder.

“Fenix,”
Gavriel said, still on the small talk. “I don’t suppose you’re related to Adam Fenix, are you? He came here a few times. Always a big VIP visit when he showed up.”

“My father.” Marcus’s jaw muscles twitched. “And he died a few years ago.”

“Oh … I’m sorry.”

Anya cut in. She could always time it right. “How long since you had news of the mainland, Lewis? You know about the Locust.”

Shit, if they don’t…

“We had long-range comms until the Hammer strike. After that, we lost day-to-day contact, but we know that it’s bad out there. We hear things occasionally.”

“But you’ve survived okay since then.”

“We’ve always had to be a self-sufficient community. The town was here for the naval base—mutual dependence. The town might as well
be
the base.”

“Couldn’t you get to Ephyra? You heard about the recall.”

“Yes, but how could you relocate a town in the middle of the ocean in three days, or even three months? And I thought the government would need to reactivate the base sooner or later, so … well, my team decided that if the locals stayed, we
all
stayed. Then, as time went on, we’d get short-range radio contact from passing boats, or an island, or the occasional refugee would show up, and we pieced the news together.”

“Did the government realize you were still out here?” Marcus asked.

“No idea. Obviously, we didn’t get a Hammer strike, but whether anyone realized we hadn’t evacuated …”

Gavriel changed tack. Dom felt pissed off on his behalf. “The Locust are destroying everything, aren’t they? Well, they haven’t reached
us
yet. Is that why you’re here? Is the COG starting up the biochem programs again?”

Anya was good at breaking awkward news. Marcus seemed to have taken an invisible step back, arms folded, to let her tackle it.

“The war’s all but over,” she said. “We finally wiped them out. Most of them, anyway. We still get stragglers, and that’s a problem, but we need to consolidate what we have left before we deal with that once and for all.”

Gavriel’s lips parted for a moment as if he had a million questions and they were all jamming the exit trying to get out.

“It’s … pretty damn strange to know there’s been something terrible going on for so long, and we’ve known next to nothing about it. Except from the Stranded.” He didn’t sound as if he was about to celebrate. Dom supposed that it was all just too weird, sudden, and disorienting for anyone to take in. “So what happens now?”

“Lewis, everything’s gone. Even Ephyra.”

He blinked a few times. “What do you mean,
gone?”

“We even had to destroy Jacinto to stop the Locust. We flooded the whole city to drown them in their tunnels.”

Anya’s shoulders rose a little, as if she’d taken a deep breath to blurt it out all in one go. “That was the last place we held, so we had to evacuate the survivors to Port Farrall—and that’s been derelict for years. The majority of the human race is now in a single refugee camp. At least ninety-nine percent of the population of Sera died in the years after E-Day.”

Gavriel seemed like a calm sort of guy. Dom thought that was probably an essential quality for a man whose job once had been to look after some of the most lethal weapons in the COG. But there was
calm
quiet and there was
paralyzed by shock
quiet, and this was the latter variety.

“Oh … my God …”

Anya nodded, as if she was reassured that he’d started to understand just how serious the crisis was. “We have to rebuild Sera from scratch. We’re starting over with the few we saved.”

Shit, the scale of destruction was too much even for most Gears to grasp. How could Dom expect people like this to take in a fifteen -year war, with no TV or radio from Jacinto, just occasional Stranded passing through?

Even Bernie said she hadn’t ventured this far.

Dom could hear everyone’s breath, each tense swallow. That was how quiet things were right then.

“I suppose you want us to come back, then,” Gavriel said at last. “I can see why. Some won’t want to go, I can tell you that now, but… well, this is desperate.” He shrugged. “I rather like it here.”

Here it comes
.

Oh boy, this is going to sting …

“Lewis.” Anya leaned in a little and put her hand on top of his. Only Anya could have done that right then. She was just the person to tell you the very worst and make it hurt less, because she had that calming CIC voice honed by years of talking Gears through tight situations. “Nobody’s asking you to leave. The mainland’s going to be no place for
anyone
for a while. We want to bring what’s left of Jacinto here before we lose everybody.”

Gavriel definitely wasn’t taking it in now. Dom could see that he wasn’t focusing on Anya, and his lips kept moving as if he was trying to spit out an insect he’d inhaled.

But he pulled himself back on track. “Sorry … how can we … how can we feed a
city?
I mean … this is
thousands
of people we’re talking about, isn’t it? We’re a small community. About three thousand here, and then there’s the other settlement, anywhere up to a thousand Stranded. We avoid them for the most part.”

There was a definite dividing line, then, just like Baird’s: regular humans and Stranded.

“We’ve got our own supplies,” Anya said.
Well, not quite, but some
. But Dom understood why she said that. The locals would be worried that the newcomers were going to leave them starving. “It was a managed evacuation. If we can set down here, we can rebuild our own camp. Look, you know the Vectes base better than anyone. Is it habitable? Can we make use of it?”

“Mothballed,” he said. “Hydroelectric power, run-of-river. One of the reasons this site was chosen was sustainability. We had to be able to keep going if the worst happened … well, that definitely came to pass, didn’t it?”

“That sounds like a plan.”

“I’m only the mayor here,” Gavriel said. “I have to put it to the vote.”

Marcus just gave her a slow, careful look. Dom wasn’t sure if she saw it, or if she was even meant to, but she paused for a moment.

“I don’t want to overstate the case,” she said. “But Vectes can save humankind.
You
can save it. We have nowhere else to go.”

Gavriel licked his lips for a moment, staring at the table, then nodded, but Dom knew damn well that he didn’t know what he was nodding about. He glanced sideways to catch Bernie staring at her clasped hands.

“I feel very bad not offering you some refreshment,” he said. “Would you
…?”

“You’re very kind.” Marcus had taken over again. He had something on his mind. “I’d like to go check out the naval base first. You probably need to do some explaining to your people in the meantime.”

“You’ll need Will to show you around, then.”

“We’ve got the plans,” Marcus said. He seemed in a real rush to get out. “We just need to get the feel of the place. Any operational defenses?”

“They’ve been dismantled, but they could be restored.”

“And how much trouble are the Stranded?”

“Sporadic raids. I’m armed for a reason. People have been killed here. The Stranded know the deal—if they set foot in the town, we shoot on sight now. They haven’t been around for a while.”

“Understood,” Bernie murmured.

Dom kept right behind Marcus all the way back to the Ravens, doing his best to look reassuring, the kind of Gear who had come to make things better. Cole was glad -handing enough for the whole COG. He was turning out to be quite a distraction, and that was a big help right then. Marcus was pissed off about something, and that didn’t help him look more friendly. The civvies stared. No, they’d never seen Gears quite like this before. But then they hadn’t seen grubs, either. That would have made everything a lot clearer for them. The ’Dill was now parked between the two Ravens while the flight crews lounged on the grass, helmets by their sides, chewing ration bars like they were on a picnic.

“Okay, it’s Vectes base,” Marcus grunted. “Who’s driving?”

“Why, yes, I’d be
delighted
to transport you, Sergeant Fenix.” Sorotki got to his feet and did a curtsey. He seemed to be enjoying himself. “Your ill-articulated wish is my command.”

Marcus didn’t react. “Thanks, Lieutenant.”

He turned away to stare out to sea while they waited for Will to show up. Dom saw Bernie roll her head slightly as if she’d resigned herself to doing something, then start the slow stroll toward Marcus to talk to him. Dom decided that was his job. He shook his head at Bernie to divert her and moved in.

“Hey, Marcus, what’s the problem?”

Marcus didn’t turn around. “No problem.”

“Bullshit.”

“I said no problem.”

“And I said—bullshit.”

Marcus did his slow head turn. “You want to know.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, the COG’s going to roll in here and take over this island. We ought to spell that out, because there’s sweet fuck -all the guy can do about it anyway. But instead, we start with a lie—by omission, but that’s as bad. Poor reward for a loyal COG servant who stayed at his post waiting for orders for
fifteen frigging years
, and because he has, we can ship in refugees a little easier.”

“Hey, Marcus, I’d have done the same, okay? Get them used to the idea gradually, make them think it was their own.” Dom put the people he knew and loved first, and wasn’t ashamed of that. But Marcus worried and sacrificed just as much for the stranger, too, and sometimes you just couldn’t do both at once. You had to choose.

“Kinder than walking right in and saying, ‘Thanks for your service, asshole. Now beat it.’ Right?”