Free Gears of War: Jacinto’s Remnant by Karen Traviss

the intercom. “Get me the Attorney General, please. Not on the phone—ask him to come here as soon as he can.”
    “Yes, sir. You know his brother’s still missing, don’t you?”
    Everyone was grieving. “I do.”
    Prescott sat down to wait, and turned up the sound on the monitors to watch the latest headlines. It astonished him that camera crews were still willing to go out and film the destruction. But what else could they do? In crisis, humans reverted to doing what they knew, part reflex, part comfort.
    He was doing the same. He sat wondering why the final refusal from Deschenko—the confirmation that he had no control, that he’d failed to convince the rest of the COG that drastic action was all that was left—hadn’t crushed him. He felt cleansed by it. A burden had lifted.
    God help me, do I actually want to do this?
    No, he wasn’t a monster. He was sure of that. He knew what monsters looked like now. They were gray, and they came in many hideous forms, and they delighted in the suffering of humans. And they had to die, or all of humanity would be wiped out.
    What have we done?
    We should never have let it get this far. It has to stop, right now. Any way we can . He pressed the intercom again. “Jillian, it’s time you went home.”
    “I’m fine, sir.”
    “Do you have family anywhere else? Outside Jacinto, I mean.”
    “Only my sister, sir. She’s in Tollen.”
    “You might want to ask her to come and stay with you. Ephyra’s going to be the only part of Tyrus that’s safe from Locust. In fact, make it soon. The grubs are getting closer every day.”
    Jillian paused, and that wasn’t like her. Prescott hoped she understood the urgency of moving her sister, and from that pause, he knew she understood at least a little of what he had in mind.
    “Thank you, sir,” she said at last. “But I’ll wait here until the AG’s shown up. Is there anything else I can do in the meantime?”
    Prescott wanted to sleep now. He decided he could manage a half -hour nap before anyone answered his summons.
    “Yes,” he said. If it had to be done, it could be rolled up in one meeting. “I need to see General Salaman, too. And the Director of Special Forces—Hoffman. That rough little colonel with all the medals.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Prescott had his quorum now. “And Adam Fenix. Get Professor Fenix. The meeting’s going to get technical.”
    THE SANTIAGO HOUSEHOLD, EPHYRA .
    “Maria? Maria, honey, are you there?”
    Of course she was there. She hardly ever left the house now. Dom stood in the hallway and waited for a response. He knew where she’d be, and he could simply have walked upstairs and opened that bedroom door, but it was just too hard to see her sitting there staring at the cot. She wanted that quiet time, too. In the last year, they’d reached an understanding about no-go areas in this house as complex as any minefield in the war. He’d rented this house for them to be happy in it, for the kids to have a big backyard to play in, but it didn’t work out that way.
    “Maria, I brought Marcus back.” Dom waited, listening for movement, giving her time to get herself together.
    “I’m going to cook dinner. You come down when you’re ready, baby.”
    Marcus was still standing on the doorstep, staring up at the birds. He always waited to be invited over the threshold now, as if he felt he was intruding, and that upset Dom; Marcus was family, and Dom’s house was his, anytime. With Bennie and Sylvia gone, Dom took nobody for granted now. He tugged at Marcus’s sleeve.
    “Hey, come on. Kitchen duties.”
    “You sure I’m not making this worse?”
    “No. She likes to see you. You know that.”
    They peeled vegetables and jointed the chicken in silence, while sounds of movement from upstairs indicated that Maria had left Sylvia’s room and gone into the bathroom. Dom knew her ritual: she’d close the door, and then spend fifteen minutes, almost to the second, putting a soaked ice -cold