“Look on the bright side, sir. If we can’t get anything south to the fort, the Indies can’t get anything through going north.”
“I’ll cling to that small mercy, Carlile. Thanks.”
Hoffman walked back up the access road, stopping every so often to look back at the landslide. He’d always been security conscious, even for a Gear, but now he was fixated on who might be out there watching.
We’ll need tighter security now. The locals won’t mind being stopped and searched when they go in and out.
As he walked past the sentries at the city gate, crowds milled around trying to get a look at the destruction. The air was hazy with rock dust. A line of Gears and the local constabulary was stopping anyone from going outside the walls, on Captain Sander’s orders, but there was nowhere worthwhile to go anyway. Outside was definitely not the safest place to be.
Sander called to him from across the square. The captain was talking to a couple of the councilmen, no doubt doing his we’ve-got-it-all-under-control act. He was good at civilian liaison. Hoffman felt a little ashamed for thinking of Sander as a soft college kid who was more interested in painting than being a soldier, because he was actually proving to be a reassuring and steady presence for everyone.
And he had the sense to stock up to the rafters on supplies. Smart guy. Clairvoyant, even.
Sander exuded concerned calm as Hoffman approached the group. “Lieutenant, Alderman Casani is making sure all the residents are accounted for. What’s the update on the road?”
“The sappers say it can be cleared with a specialist excavation vehicle,” Hoffman said, remembering to start with the can-do part of the news. Civilians need to hear that. “It’ll take a few days to get earth-moving equipment down from Lakar, that’s all. The phone lines might take longer, but we’ve got radio comms.”
Casani was a sober-looking, thin guy in his forties who looked like he should have been running an investment bank rather than this lonely outpost. “People will be sensible,” he said. “This is no different from being snowed in.”
“Snow doesn’t set out to kill you, Alderman.” Hoffman didn’t want these people to get complacent. “We’re on a war footing now. People have to take precautions, however well-defended this city is. Anyone who can close the road can do a hell of a lot worse if they put their minds to it.”
Sander’s fixed calm flickered a little. “We’ll step up patrols, Alderman. But I have to ask you to activate the civil emergency procedures. Restrictions on movement, management of resources, cooperation with our security measures. Purely as a precaution.”
“But when the road is open again,” said Casani, “there will still be the UIR on our doorstep and the need to watch our neighbor suspiciously.”
“Yes, things have changed,” Sander said. “They changed the minute the UIR sent forces across the Vasgar border. We’ll all have to live with that.”
Casani did a little nod, as if the reminder of the invasion south of this border was an explanation for everything. Maybe the reality hadn’t sunk in. “This city understands its responsibilities, Captain. You will always have our full cooperation.”
Hoffman and Sander made their way back to the garrison. Most of Anvegad’s five thousand inhabitants seemed to have taken to the streets to try to get a glimpse of the damage or chat about it. Every damn surface was covered in a layer of dust. It was starting to settle, crunching under their boots like a dusting of dry, gritty snow.
“Usually,” Sander said, “civvies get a little wobbly when a big bomb goes off next door. These people just seem curious.”
“Anvegad’s never been captured. Makes folks feel bulletproof.”
“That’s preferable to panic at the moment.” Sander was in the process of moving operations from the main admin block to the gun emplacement itself. One of the engineer corporals was busy unplugging a radio kit when Hoffman got to the top of the stairs. “I’m sending out a forward controller just in case. Damn bad timing to piss off the Vasgari while we still need to move around out there.” He started taking stuff down from the walls. “Give me a hand with the maps, Victor.”
If Hoffman was going to nitpick, Anvil Gate wasn’t the best garrison for a modern army. It was all narrow passages and steep stairs, five floors built entirely around those huge guns, like a keep in the center of an ancient castle. Anvegad itself was the castle grounds, just as narrow and crowded, a city built when the idea of fuel-driven vehicles was witchcraft. But the guns—big artillery didn’t change much. That was why Anvil Gate remained.
A hundred Gears could hold it. A bigger force would logjam itself trying to move around.
“Very cozy ops room, sir.” Sergeant Byrne squeezed past him in the passage on the ground floor, scraping his rifle along the stone walls. “The maps are a nice touch. Makes a man feel at home. Maybe some cushions, though.”
“You’re nest-building,” Hoffman growled. “You sure it’s Sheraya who’s pregnant?”
“I suppose this postpones the wedding.”
“The hell it does, Sergeant. Do it today.” Hoffman didn’t mean it to sound ominous. It wasn’t. He just knew how army life got in the way of everything else, and why it mattered to grab these things when you could. “When you get a lady knocked up, you don’t keep her waiting for the ring. Okay? That’s an order.”
“The aldermen are going to be too busy, sir.”
“I’ll see that they find you one with ten minutes to spare for a ceremony. You can save the celebrations for when we’re not spitting dust everywhere.”
Sander must have heard the exchange. He looked up from the desk, radio in one hand, as Hoffman came in.
“You’re a sentimental man after all, Victor.”
“I want his mind on the job. It’s one less thing for him to worry about.”
“I know the feeling. If you want to send a message to Margaret, by the way, you might want to take your own advice about sooner rather than later.”
Hoffman’s reflex reaction beat his private wishes to the punch. “If the men can’t send personal messages via operational channels, sir, then I won’t, either.”
Sander just blinked for a moment as if he’d taken that as a rebuke. It wasn’t. Hoffman decided not to dig a deeper hole by explaining that.
Margaret will understand.
“Okay, all we can do is wait, then. We’ll run patrols along the Vasgar line, but not across it—yet.” Sander turned to look at the sector map behind him, a maze of tightly packed contour lines. “It’s at times like this that a man needs a Pesang detachment. Those little chaps can get to places even the damn goats can’t.”
“It won’t be long, sir. A week.”
“You think the Indies are going to wait that long?”
“They sound pretty busy at Shavad.”
“Maybe so.” Sander looked around the room that now resembled a frontline trench on the Ostri front thirty years ago. The air smelled of musty canvas and wool, and almost every centimeter of the planked walls was covered with charts, lists, and—yes, Byrne was right—paintings of the fort. “But we’ll see them coming, that much we do know.”
Hoffman was used to the waiting game. He grabbed some rations, stuffed every spare pocket with ammo, and went up to the gun floor to sit at the back of the chamber. A couple of ammo crates and a few folded blankets with that dusty, flat smell of graphite lubricating grease—that was all he needed to get his head down and have a short nap when he needed to.
“Captain kicked you out, sir?” the artillery sergeant asked.
“Can’t bear sitting on my ass and listening to a game on the radio, Evan.” Hoffman took his notepad out of his belt and flipped over a clean page. He’d write that letter to Margaret. “Got to watch the action.”
“It’ll be way over there. Even if they’re not going to give us forward air control, we can still manage direct fire. We can see for ten or fifteen klicks easy enough if the visibility’s okay.”
There were ten gunners on this c
rew. All except Sergeant Evan had ear defenders parked around their necks like ancient torc necklaces. Hoffman had never been this close to guns this big. He started scribbling.
Margaret, if I don’t come back from this deaf, I’ll be damned lucky … but this is if I don’t come back at all.
It never felt real, that line. However many times he’d written that last good-bye to anyone, it always felt theoretical. He wondered if one day it would seem solid and inevitable, and then he’d know that somehow fate was giving him a big hint that this was it.
Hunting around for the right words took more time than he expected. He didn’t look up until the radio—his and everyone else’s—changed from routine voice traffic to something more urgent.
“KR-Five-Three-Zero to control … four Indie artillery units and an infantry company moving north out of Porra, fast. Five-Three-Zero out.”
Porra was a hundred kilometers south of Anvegad. The Indies didn’t need many men to take the refinery, and it was the first target anyone would secure. Hoffman decided he’d have treated it as a priority if he’d been in their position in case the staff or the garrison tried to sabotage it.
“Here we go,” Evan said. He looked at his watch. “I give them two hours, max. Now, with the right wind, we could probably hit the refinery from here. Just about.”
Sander’s voice cut in. “Let’s keep Anvegad’s unbroken record, Gears. All garrison personnel, go to REDCON One.”
The garrison sirens were tested every month, and every crisis had its own voice. REDCON One started like a deep intake of breath and then rose up the scale to a series of ear-busting blasts.
“Adrenaline’s brown,” said Jarrold, the gunner in charge of the shell hoist. He was Pad Salton’s age, maybe eighteen, maybe nineteen, but looked a lot younger to Hoffman. The shells were monsters that made the munitions for the smaller guns that Hoffman had seen earlier—the “One-Fifties”—look like Lancer rounds. It all added to the impression of Jarrold as a child playing with oversized adult things. “But ours is bigger than theirs.”
“Remember that if they get close in, Private, ours are going to be all pretty well the same size.”
That was the point of the big guns—to stop the enemy from getting too close. Guns had a minimum range as well as a maximum. Under a certain distance, they’d have to rely on close-in weapons. But the Indies were coming for the refinery. Hoffman knew it.
“It’s five hundred meters, sir,” Jarrold said. “And at that range, we could just as easily stroll out and punch them in the face.”
“What is?”
“Minimum range.”
It was still surprising how fast arty trucks could move on an open road, especially when they met no opposition along the way. Hoffman put away his letter and stood at the observation platform, focusing the range-finder binoculars on a point far beyond the refinery.
“Make the most of it, sir,” Even said. “Because once we’ve got something to shoot at, we’ll be needing those.”
It was mid-afternoon when a message was passed from Battalion HQ to alert Anvil Gate that the UIR column would reach the refinery in two hours.
At least Hoffman had a good idea now of why the Indies had put so much effort into blocking a route that conventional military wisdom said they needed.
They couldn’t take the garrison. But they probably didn’t want COG reinforcements diverted east through Kashkur and down through the pass to close in on them in a pincer movement. They wanted to concentrate on Shavad and keep a single front.
That way, they could work their way through Kashkur to the imulsion fields, and eventually Anvegad would be irrelevant. They were playing a more patient game than Hoffman had thought. He stared into the distance at the point he expected to see the UIR appear.
But he could be patient, too. And, after centuries of standing guard at the gates of Kashkur, so could Anvegad.
SHAVAD, NEAR THE SOUTHWEST KASHKUR BORDER.
If the war ever reached Ephyra, then it would look like this, Adam realized.
Shavad had the same elegant, tree-lined avenues and fountain-filled squares as the Tyran capital, the same colonnaded public buildings. The style was more oriental and exotic, but the city was the heart of a modern province where people liked shopping and theaters and clean trains that ran on time. The people were just like Tyrans.
Yes, it would be just like this. And that scared him.
He tried his radio again. This time the channel was working. “Gold Nine to Control, we requested casevac an hour ago. I’ve got Gears down, a lot of them Tango-One—they can’t wait for you to finish your coffee break. What’s happening?”
It took a few moments for the controller to respond. Adam counted three incoming shells in that time, one so close that he felt the brick dust sting his eyes a few seconds later as the blast washed down the road.
“Control to Gold Nine, you’re not the only company taking heavy casualties.” The controller sounded fraught. “We’ve lost five Terns to ground fire during attempted extractions—you suppress the Indies behind the lines, and maybe we’ll have something left flying to send you.”
They seemed to be everywhere. It wasn’t just the artillery, tanks, and missiles from across the river that were tearing the guts out of the Shavad defenses. On the north side, the fragile front line of the city itself, COG ground forces were getting hit in the back from snipers and mortar fire. Adam could only think that the UIR had been slipping special forces into Kashkur for months ahead of Vasgar’s collapse.
And I bet they engineered the end of the Vasgari government as well.
“Control, we need some routes cleared, too. We can’t get the ATVs out to the north.”
“Roger that, Gold Nine. I can divert a Behemoth for you. One hour, maybe two. It’s leaving Lakar soon.”
Adam took off his gloves and spat on his fingers to try to wipe the grit from his eyes. He always hated wearing goggles, but now he was going to make a point of finding a complete helmet. His eyeballs felt scoured; his mouth was caked with dust and grit.
It had now taken him half an hour to move less than a hundred meters down the road. Every time he tried to make a dash for the next available cover—a doorway, basement steps, a burned-out truck—a hail of fire drove him back. A mortar blew tiles off a nearby roof, raining shards on him. The Indie barrage had changed the landmarks of the area so much in the last couple of hours that he had to check his compass to make sure he was still heading the right way. He didn’t recognize a single major building along the river now.
But he had to move. He couldn’t cower here all day. He took a deep breath to steady himself and then ran for it, moving in short sprints from cover to cover. Eventually he reached the end of the street and crouched by the corner of a building to peer around it.
He could see the river that wound through the center of the city—promenades along the banks, elegant stone balustrades now smashed to rubble, polished brass flower troughs that had been ripped apart like paper. The waterfront walk was now a shooting gallery. Nothing could move along that route.
Adam couldn’t see if all the road bridges across the river had been blown or not. The COG was relying on sporadic intercepts of the UIR comm net to work out where the Indies could and could not go. Three bridges seemed to be impassable, but the fourth, the one closest to him, was stubbornly refusing to collapse into the water. Two of the Sherriths’ tanks had been pounding it for a couple of hours with little success, although the barrage was forcing the UIR advance to try elsewhere. Their infantry had been forced to trickle across a narrow pedestrian bridge five kilometers west.
But they kept coming. It was like trying to stop a leak, watching the water rising, and every time one crack was plugged another opened. Adam took a breath and slipped back into the shadow of a collapsed hotel awning.
How can it be this hard to move across one block?
He retuned his radio to call Helena. “Lieutenant, any luck?”
“No, sir. Looks l
ike they’ve got a couple of guys up in the museum—I can’t think of another building where they could put a forward observer. I swear there’s sniper fire coming from there, too.”
“No joy on the casevac, either.”
“Why the hell do we spend so much budget on those things?” Helena sounded as if she was choking back an expletive. “Casevac’s going to be impossible anyway until we take out some of the Indie positions on this side of the river. Can we get around to the back of the museum via the promenade?”
“No, the Indies are lined up along the south bank like they’re waiting for the regatta to start. Ideas?”
She paused. Adam could hear the steady rattle of fire in the background and a lot of shouting about applying pressure. It was the combat medics trying to give Gears first-aid instructions while they were tied up on other casualties.
“I think we can get into the museum at third-story level,” she said.
“How?”
“The gap between the exterior walls is four meters.”
“And you think we can breach it without being seen.”
“Ladder, smoke grenade, speed.”
Adam thought of all the lectures he’d attended at the academy, all the strategy theories and lessons from history played out with wooden blocks on table-sized maps. In the end, battles came down to solutions held together with string and individuals snatching flimsy opportunities.
“Okay, I’m heading back. We’ve got one chance at this.”
“Teale’s dead, by the way, sir. Sorry.”
That made twenty-two KIAs out of a company of ninety men and women. Adam had lost Gears before, but not in those numbers and not in a matter of days. He added Sergeant Teale to the list of personal letters he’d have to write as soon as this was over. Maybe he’d phone the families instead, if the lines weren’t down. His father had always told him that he had to be man enough to do that, or he wasn’t fit to be an officer.
“Okay. I’m working my way back now. Don’t start without me.”
As he moved down the street, he felt like the last human being left on Sera. He couldn’t see another Gear out there. The explosions and gunfire were just disembodied sounds not related to the people who were making them.