Gears of War: Jacinto’s Remnant Read Free

couldn’t tread water: too exhausted, too heavy, too far from dry land.
    All she could hear was the roar and crash of the sea filling the sunken city, creaks of buckling metal that sounded like screams, and a fading chakka-chakka-chakka as the last Ravens shrank to dots on the amber horizon. There was a stench of unidentifiable chemicals and sulfur, as if some kind of gas was pooling on the surface.
    Shit, don’t let that catch fire. I can’t handle burning to death in water as well. That’s one fucking irony too many .
    She had to get on with it.
    One … two … three .
    Bernie took one hand off the gutter and waved her arm. But it was a waste of time, and she knew it; the choppers were too far away. Even the ships and small vessels were out of range. She was just one more tiny speck in a chaotic soup of debris. But now that her hand was free and she hadn’t been snatched from her refuge by the force of the water, she risked turning around, trying to scan the choppy surface for signs of other survivors. There were bodies. She could see how fast the current was running by the speed at which they shot past her. Did they get left behind? Or did they decide to die here rather than keep running?
    People did the damnedest things in disasters. Wanting to stay put was common. Bernie always prided herself on getting the hell out.
    She pressed her finger hard against her earpiece, rocking it slightly to make sure the switch made contact. There was an encouraging hiss of static. It was still working despite being soaked.
    “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