Gears of War: Jacinto’s Remnant (10 page)

Hoffman had the kind of peripheral vision honed by years of trying to keep an eye on superior officers about to drop him in the shit. Salaman didn’t seem to be bothered. Martial law was just turning up the volume on what was happening now, after all. Prescott obviously wanted to keep his fledgling administration looking clean, doing everything by the book. Maybe he wanted to go down in history as the last and only moral leader.

“You
do
,” Audley said, “but it’s ill -advised, because you won’t be able to enforce it outside Tyran borders without effectively declaring war on every other COG state. You don’t want to do that, do you, sir?”

“All I want to know is whether it’s legal. Whether it’s constitutional.”

Audley was on the spot, and it was clear that even his lawyer’s shark brain couldn’t work out Prescott’s angle. Hoffman knew that look: the quick lick of the lips, a flicker of the eyes, the moment any adviser dreaded, when a yes or no to an apparently straight question would become something with a frightening life of its own, something that would come back to bite you hard on the ass. Hoffman had been there.

“It’s legal, Chairman, but it’s not a good move,” Audley said at last. Bets were hedged. Asses were covered.

“I’d advise discussion with the Secretary for Interstate Relations.”

“I’ve passed that stage, Milon. I just needed to know that I wouldn’t be acting illegally. I do have a pragmatic reason.”

“Not a constitutional one, then …”

“I’m going to restore the Fortification Act and declare martial law throughout the COG.” Prescott looked away toward the door as it opened and Adam Fenix walked in. “Good evening, Professor. Take a seat.”

“Apologies, Chairman. Roadblocks.”

“Just so that we’re all up to speed … the Attorney General has advised me that I’m within my rights to use the Fortification Act to declare martial law.”

Hoffman had decided some years ago that whatever was admirable in Adam Fenix’s son had come from the maternal side of the gene pool. Fenix put a folder of papers on the desk in front of him but didn’t open it, almost as if he wasn’t sure he was in the right meeting and might have to up sticks and go find the right room.

“Would you like to give me some
context
, Chairman?” he said.

Prescott meshed his fingers and leaned his elbows on the table. “I want you all to understand that what I’m about to say is born of last resort. General, in layman’s terms, as of today, how do you evaluate our chances against the Locust?”

Salaman perked up a little. “Depends who you mean by
us
, sir.”

“I think I mean Tyrus. I’ve seen enough in the last few weeks to know that some states are closer to collapse than others, whatever they say.”

“We’ll still be overrun in a month, then,” Salaman said. “Militarily—we’re hemorrhaging. The infrastructure is collapsing globally. Civilian casualties—if they’re not slaughtered by the grubs, then they’re dying of disease, and refugee movement is spreading more cross -border infection. You can’t dump millions of corpses on the system and maintain disease control. We’re
finished
, sir. I’m sorry. The grubs are in pretty well every city on the planet.”

Fenix looked at Hoffman. Maybe he thought they had some kind of rapport and that Hoffman would have a different opinion. He didn’t.

“Remember that we no longer have any emergency command bunkers outside Ephyra, either,” Hoffman said.

“We don’t even have the option of saving the chosen few and the art treasures and sitting it out, as we had in the last war.”

“All destroyed?” Prescott didn’t look disappointed for some reason. “Even Cherrit?”

“That’s the problem with underground facilities and a burrowing enemy, sir. I hope they appreciate fine art and canned beans.”

Prescott took a breath. He looked too young. He was in his late thirties, and there were a few gray hairs in his beard, but he was remarkably unlined. A few more months in office would put that straight.
But we don’t have months. It’s weeks
.

“Gentlemen, I’m going to deploy the Hammer of Dawn,” Prescott said.

It wasn’t the first time that Hoffman had been caught totally off guard by a COG chairman, nor the first when the realization hit him that Adam Fenix was here to do the dirty science work.
And me. Now I know why I’m here, too
.

“Sir, that’s just not possible.” Fenix seemed to think that Prescott was just kiting an idea. Hoffman could see he wasn’t. The man had a stillness about him—no fidgeting, no sweating, not a hint of uncertainty—that said he’d made his decision. “It’s not a tactical weapon. It’s strategic. You can’t deploy it in urban areas, and that’s the kind of war we’re fighting.”

“Losing,” Prescott said quietly. “Right now, we’re
losing
the war. And that will
not
happen on my watch. This is where it ends.”

Hoffman glanced at Salaman, and they both knew this was now about
how
it would be carried out, not
if
. Audley simply bowed his head and said nothing.

Fenix was still staring at Prescott, demanding an answer with raised eyebrows. Hoffman wondered if he ever yelled or lost his temper.

“You
do
know how the Hammer works, Chairman?” Fenix said.

“Not the physics, but I do grasp the fact that the satellite platforms cover the entire planet, which is what I require.”

“What are you going to target? Is that what you need me for, to advise on blast coverage?”

Salaman cut in. “Grubs don’t take over cities, sir. They
clear
them. They’ll only be in areas where there are humans to kill and resources to plunder. They strip a city and move on.”

“I
know
that, General,” Prescott said. “I know that very well. They’re using our own equipment and supplies against us. They adapt our own technology to kill us.
We’re feeding their war effort
. So we stop them. We destroy everything in their path. And a lot of grubs will die, too—not all, but this is about asset denial.”

I know where this is going now. God help us
.

Hoffman found himself wanting to call Margaret, not to warn her but just to hear her voice, and he hadn’t felt that way about her for years. It was as close as he’d come in his adult life to panic. Fear—he’d lived with it for so long that he wasn’t sure if he could perform well without it. But this was
different
. There was no border across which life would go on after surrender or a victory.

“Okay, sir,” Salaman said. “Have you thought about what we’ll have left to fight the grubs who survive?”

“The only major center of population that they don’t appear to be able to penetrate far is Ephyra—Jacinto in particular,” Prescott said. He stood up and unfurled the global map on his wall. “Largest unbroken area of granite on Sera. And that’s where we’ll regroup. I want the entire Hammer network deployed. Salaman, I need a priority list, because we’re going to have to do this in stages—am I right, Professor?” Prescott turned around, one finger still on the black type that said EPHYRA. “We feed in the coordinates for the first batch of targets, activate the lasers, then feed in the next batch, move the orbital platforms, and so on. We don’t have enough orbital devices to sweep Sera in one simultaneous attack, do we?”

Shit
.

Shit, this is
planet
denial, not asset denial
.

“What the hell do you propose to do with the people in those cities, Chairman?” Fenix sat back in his chair as if he’d been winded. “This is going to incinerate millions of our own people. Do you understand me? This is wholesale slaughter.”

I don’t want to hear this
.

I know what the options are going to be
.

And I helped the COG grab the Hammer technology
.

Prescott waited a few beats, looking at Fenix as if he was the difficult kid in the class who just didn’t get the math and needed a bit of prompting. For a moment, Audley looked as if he was going to intervene, but he just shifted position and looked as if he’d given up. He wouldn’t be alone. Everyone else except Prescott had.

“I’m ordering an evacuation to Ephyra,” Prescott said. “We’ll give refuge to anyone who can make their way here. Three days after the announcement we deploy the Hammer.”

“We—can’t—move—millions—of—people—in—three—days.” Fenix slammed his fist on the table to emphasize every word. Fenix, Mr. Stiff Upper Lip, the man who never reacted, had finally lost it. Hoffman didn’t want to watch this disintegration; there was no satisfaction in it. It just confirmed that he was right to feel that he should be shitting himself right now. “They’ll die. They’ll all
die.”

Prescott looked to Salaman and nodded for a response.

“Once we announce the recall, we have to assume the grubs will know,” Salaman said. “And when people start moving in numbers, they’ll just home in on them. So it has to be fast—or it has to be covert.”

“What, we don’t tell people we’re going to fry the goddamn
planet?”
Hoffman said. “So we just spare Tyrus?

And who gets told it’s time to run?”

“There’s a balance to be struck between giving people adequate time to evacuate without giving the enemy time to react,” Prescott said. “I have to tell the people what the stakes are, but we want to catch the Locust on the wrong foot, too. That’s always an ethical dilemma in war. How many of our own people did we allow to die in the Pendulum Wars because alerting them to attacks would reveal too much about our latest intelligence?”

Fenix spread his hands.
“Ethical?
Good God, this is about a weapon of mass destruction, not a single conventional attack.”

“Don’t start on the old ethics shit again, Fenix,” Hoffman snapped.
“You
made the Hammer technology operational, so don’t tell me we can’t use it when we need it most. My men died to get it for you. It’s
your
fucking bomb. What did you think we’d use it for, a toaster? And just how bad did you think things would have to get before we’d need to use it?”

“It was intended as a deterrent.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. You didn’t realize it was loaded. It was just there to scare burglars.”

“This is precisely the kind of extreme scenario we envisaged using the Hammer for,” Prescott said, ignoring the spat. “If you can think of a more extreme one, Professor, do say.”

“This means destroying most of our civilization to save a fraction of it—if we save any of it at all.” Fenix started fiddling with his pen, turning it over between his fingers like he was tightening a bolt. “And what will we be left with? That level of destruction has two phases—what it kills immediately, and what it kills for months or years afterward by debris thrown into the atmosphere, by chemicals released by combustion into water tables and

—”

“Professor,
do you have an alternative?
That’s not rhetorical. You’ve been a Gear. Do you disagree with the military assessment?”

“Not substantially.”

“Then is there
anything
we can do differently, other than wait to be picked off? If you have anything at all to suggest,
any
avenue we haven’t explored, then I urge you to say so now.”

The argument took Hoffman back three years, to when he’d clashed with Fenix over who needed to die to seize the Hammer technology from the Union of Independent Republics. Fenix couldn’t stomach the need to kill enemy weapons scientists. He was great at saying what was wrong, what was immoral, but he was shit at making the hard call between ugly and uglier. And those were usually the only choices in war. Prescott was still waiting.

Fenix looked as if he was going to say something, then shook his head. It took a few more moments for him to answer. Prescott didn’t hurry him.

“I can’t think of anything else that will stop them in the time we have,” Fenix said eventually. “The incursions have gone too far. If we’d had more time … there could have been other ways we might have stopped them.”

“Let me be clear. There might be alternatives? Can you develop those in the
weeks
we have left?”

“No.” Fenix looked defocused again for a moment, anguished, probably crunching numbers in his head and unable to make them add up. “No. We’ve run out of time. It’s all too late.”

Prescott’s gaze flickered for a moment. “Thank you, Professor.”

“But we can’t accommodate everyone who wants to evacuate, even if they can reach Ephyra in time. The city can’t absorb the global population. Not even with millions already dead.”

“I know,” Prescott said. “It’s brutal. I accept that it’s the illusion of compassion. But either we save who we can, what we can, and preserve humankind, or we do the equitable thing and let everyone share extinction. It’s my call. We’re taking back Sera, starting now.”

“Kill it to save it.” Fenix shook his head. “And what the hell do you think our
society
will become?”

“A human society that’s fit to survive,” said Prescott. He walked over to the inlaid desk that had been used by every COG chairman for nearly eighty years and laid some sheets of paper on it as if he was going to make notes.

“I’m taking full personal responsibility. You don’t need to. You’re only following orders. Milon, you don’t have to take any further part in this. Thank you for your counsel.”

The Attorney General rose slowly, as if his back hurt him, and walked to the door. He looked even older than he had when he’d come in. “I’ll prepare the legal instrument, sir. After all, what you’re doing is
… constitutional
, and I have no grounds to refuse.”

“This remains strictly confidential, Milon. Within this room.”

“I took that as a given, sir.”

The door closed behind Audley, and there was a moment’s silence punctuated by the distant
whoomp-whoomp
of artillery fire. Hoffman rarely noticed it. It was a permanent background noise now.