Gears of War: Jacinto's Remnant

by Karen Traviss

  “Sierra One to Control, this is Mataki …” Time. She just didn’t have time. Even if anyone heard her, could they loop back and find her before she went under? There were no bloody miracles on the way, that she knew. If she was going to survive, she’d have to perform her own. “Sierra One to Control, this is Mataki, are you receiving?”

  There was just the empty random hiss of background interference. Maybe they could hear her, though. Maybe they couldn’t respond. She needed to give them a location, just in case, and tried to work out where she was in this suddenly unfamiliar landscape, but it was hard to orient herself when only her head was above water. She racked her brain for where she’d seen the eagle finial before, trying to visualize Jacinto as it had been only hours ago.

  “Sierra One, this is Sergeant Bernadette Mataki … I need extraction urgently, repeat, urgent extraction … my position is … wait one …” Shit. Where the hell am I? What’s that dome over there? Suddenly it came to her. “Allfathers Library, south side of the roof. I’m facing the Ginnet Mausoleum. Request immediate extraction, over.”

  This was the point where it suddenly got harder and demanded decisions. How long did she wait before she decided they were never coming?

  Bernie found herself scanning the horizon to the east, looking to see if any of the small islands around the harbor had survived the seismic activity. If she could shed at least some of her plates—maybe grab the next chunk of debris that passed as a flotation device—then she might make it to dry ground. She could see only the outer harbor wall now, a stump of granite that had once held a lighthouse. It was a very long swim, even under the best circumstances.

  “Control, I’ll hang on as long as I can,” she said at last. “Request immediate extraction, repeat, immediate extraction.”

  Bernie decided that if anyone had heard, then she’d given them long enough to triangulate on her signal. She shut down the radio to conserve power. All she could do now was stay put and try to avoid being hit by the flood of rushing debris.

  How long before it gets dark?

  She had two or three hours’ light left. Maybe getting up on that gable end was feasible after all—if it didn’t crash down on her or sink with everything else. If she moved around to the other side, a little further along the gutter, the sloping gable would be facing away from her. She could edge her way up it.

  For a moment, she felt inexplicably pleased with herself, and realized that it was because of the water—her worst nightmare, the thing she dreaded, and yet she was in control. It hadn’t beaten her. If she could deal with this, anything was possible.

  “Screw you,” she said aloud to nobody in particular, and felt carefully beneath the water for her belt. If she took it slowly, she could find a length of line even with fingers so cold they felt like they were being crushed between rollers.

  Don’t drop it. No, don’t open the pouch, lift it so the stuff doesn’t float out.

  Bernie shook out the line and almost lost it. Now the challenge was to form a loop to anchor it to something solid. Tying a bowline one-handed when someone threw you a line was a basic survival skill, but with nothing to secure it to, she had to slide the line under her other hand, the one gripping the gutter. It seemed to take ages. Eventually, gathering the line with slow care, she managed to form a noose, and clamped the end between her teeth to avoid losing the thing if she dropped it.

  Pirate time. Shit, I must look like a complete dickhead.

  Then she made her way hand over hand along the gutter until she was looking at the inside of the gable end. It took every scrap of strength she had left, but she dragged herself over the gutter, taking her weight on her chest, then swung one leg as if mounting a horse. The sea had now overtopped the wall. She straddled the brickwork for a moment, struggling to balance properly because her thigh-plate had caught on something she couldn’t see, and slowly lifted the line in both hands to try to lasso the finial.

  Shit.

  She missed twice. She missed a third time. Either the polymer rope was too light or she didn’t have the strength now to heave it.

  Again …

  As long as she was trying, she was alive. And the effort was warming her up.

  And again …

  The loop of rope caught around the neck of the eagle with a wet slap, and she pulled the line tight. It held. The gable leaned at around fifty degrees; all she had to do was walk up that slope, even crawl, and the rope wouldn’t have to take her whole weight.

  It was weird how the brain compensated, she thought. Something that was plainly as dangerous as staying put had now become a sensible option. She found out just how dangerous when she tried to work out how to stand up.

  The wall, of course, wasn’t level. It was at the same canted angle as the gable, because the whole building had tilted. It was just the fact that it was broken—split vertically—that gave her hands and backside the illusion of being level. When she pulled one leg out of the water and jammed the heel of her boot into a gap in the brickwork, she found herself slipping toward the gable. Standing up took a massive effort that was more like an explosive squat. Her face smacked into the bricks, and she found herself spread-eagled on the inner surface of the gable, one boot on the wall and the other dangling in the sea that had filled the building.

  But she had the rope in one fist, and she was mostly out of the water. It left her feeling heavy and oddly warm. Now all she had to do was climb.

  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 R
AVEN 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 navy-in-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, well-drilled 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 d
oor, 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.”