Read Gears of War: Jacinto’s Remnant for Free Online

found his kids.”
    Anya had a hard time distinguishing Stranded from citizens now. Many refugees were so ragged and scruffy that they could have been either. And while that Gear had found his family, others were still searching the human chaos for faces they recognized. A man stood to one side of the stream of people, calling out: “Anyone seen my son? Tylor Morley. Fourteen, brown hair, skinny. Anyone?”
    He repeated it over and over, like someone standing on a street corner selling newspapers. Anya knew there’d be many more desperate searches like that in the days to come. The satisfaction at evacuating most of Jacinto was now giving way to the guilt and dismay of realizing how many had been lost.
    “That’s the hard stuff,” Hoffman said. “I’m thankful that the emergency guys can handle all that. Fighting grubs was the easy bit.” He paused. “When Santiago reports in, ask him to see me.”
    “Will do, sir.”
    Hoffman looked as if he was going to say something else, but he just turned around and walked back toward the EM truck. Anya wiped her face with the back of her hand. Her skin was starting to sting with the steady barrage of snow.
    “Better get moving,” she said. She shut the hatches and started the engine. “I want to check out the medical tent. I’ll drop you off at CIC.”
    “What’s all that about Dom?” Mathieson asked.
    Anya went into protective mode. Dom had defended her from intrusive interest when her mother was killed, and now it was her turn to watch his back.
    “I didn’t think you knew him,” she said.
    “Everyone knows Dom. Won the Embry Star at Aspho. Screwed his career defending Fenix at the courtmartial. Hoffman’s favorite. Spends all his free time looking for his missus.”
    “Yes, that’s Dom.” Anya steered the ’Dill out of the line, keeping to the vehicle lane marked in the grass by reflective cones. She kept a wary eye out for stray pedestrians. “Like you said, Hoffman’s favorite.”
    It was as good an explanation as any. She’d get to Dom before the gossip started. So far, the only people who knew weren’t the gossiping kind: Delta Squad, Hoffman, and herself. It was nobody else’s business. When she reached the CIC truck, she jumped out of the ’Dill’s cab to find herself ankle deep in slush and regretting not changing into combat boots and fatigues. Mathieson swung himself out on prosthetic legs that were the best that the COG could manage to make, and that wasn’t very good at all. Anya made a note to sweet-talk Baird into seeing what modifications might be possible. Baird wasn’t exactly the most bighearted Gear, but he couldn’t resist a mechanical challenge.
    And humanity was now facing a future with even less technology at its disposal. Although that was obvious, and everyone knew that abandoning Jacinto meant leaving behind almost all the trappings of modern society, the full realization hadn’t hit Anya until then.
    No workshops. No bakeries. No computer network. No drugs manufacturing. We didn’t have much in Jacinto, but now we’ve even lost most of that .
    The CIC truck’s interior looked like any small office, minus windows. It smelled of damp wool, fuel, coffee, and sweat, packed with weary and stressed people trying to grab a hot drink to keep them going while they worked out humanity’s chances of survival on the back of a used and reused notepad. This was an old emergency management command vehicle from the pre -Locust days, a mobile base for the response team, designed to go wherever a civil disaster occurred. Anya almost didn’t recognize Prescott when she walked in; he was sitting on one of the desks, in a thick pullover and ordinary pants like the rest of the civilian team—no smart tunic, no medals, no gold braid. It might have been common sense—civilian rig was warmer than his uniform—but it looked like a subtle message that he was in it with the common people, suffering what they suffered. Design or accident, it