Where are the civilians? Where are the people who live here? Where do they go?
They’d melted away before the COG moved in, or so it seemed. He wanted to believe that the Kashkuri forces had evacuated everybody, but you could never completely clear a capital like that. In the basements and hidden places, terrified families huddled and waited. He knew it.
But there was nothing he could do about it, so, just as his father had taught him—by advice and example—he simply shut it out of his mind and focused on the next task.
The building they’d taken over on the southwest corner of the square had turned out to be a dental surgery. Adam thought that was a wonderful stroke of luck at first, as good as finding a ready-made first-aid post, but apart from a cupboard stacked with local anesthetics, hypodermics, and dressings, it was short of most of the things they needed for emergencies. It was still better than treating badly injured Gears in filthy streets, though. He did a discreet head count as he went around from room to room at the back of the building, and it wasn’t encouraging; there were more than twenty wounded. The medic had moved them into groups according to their severity, waiting for the helicopters. Anyone who wasn’t T-1 or T-2 and could hold a rifle was back fighting.
Down to half a company. God …
He had to get them casevacked, if only to free up the Gears taking care of them.
Corporal Collins was in the upstairs office with a light machine gun resting on the windowsill. He’d pushed filing cabinets across the windows, leaving himself small gaps to fire through like crenellations.
“Rough out there, sir,” he said. “There’s as many of the bastards behind us as there are in front of us.”
Adam edged to the window with his back to the wall and studied the reflection in the framed dental school diploma above the desk on the opposite side. The museum was on the northeast corner of the square, five floors and a lot of windows that gave whoever was in there a complete view of anything that moved below or out on the road.
“Top floor, roof?” he asked.
“I think so. I’m sure I caught muzzle flash. There’s a sniper there if nothing else. But I’m betting the FO’s up there too. Look at the skyline. The only high building that hasn’t been creamed.”
Adam imagined long, case-lined galleries in the museum, thousands of years’ worth of artifacts and history. It was irrelevant. It would break his heart, but it was a case of saving objects or lives. He did what he had to and got on the radio.
“Gold Nine to Green FDC.” For a moment, he couldn’t believe the next words would ever escape his mouth. But they did. “Can you target the National Museum?”
The Sherriths’ fire direction control could have been anywhere now. “FDC here, what do you need?”
“We think they’ve put their observer on the museum roof.”
“Shit, half the Indie army must be inside Kashkur. Let me get a range on that and warn off aircraft. Wait one.”
Every sword had another edge. Adam despaired of ever getting a Tern or a Raven to land. But the observer had to be put out of business.
“They’re a liability,” he said.
“Sorry, sir?”
“One for the mess over a beer when we get back, Collins.” Adam was fascinated by the theory of warfare, but the reality depressed him, not because it was violent but because it was executed so badly. It didn’t have to be this primitive, this wasteful of life and property. “I’m going to find Lieutenant Stroud. Keep your head down, Corporal.”
“Always do, sir.”
Helena had a plan by the time Adam caught up with her, one that involved an extending metal ladder. She was standing in what had been the waiting room of the surgery, bracing the lowest rung on her knees and seeing how far she could push it out single-handed. At the far end of the long room, Sergeant Fraisen was trying to guide the other end onto the edge of a table. Adam could guess what Helena was planning.
“Are you going to use that to bridge the gap between the buildings?”
She put the end of the ladder on a low table. “I am. Like this.”
The ladder was stretched out like a gantry now, resting on two solid supports. Helena stood on it and walked across unsteadily like a tightrope walker in need of more rehearsal.
“You won’t be able to do that ten or fifteen meters off the ground,” Adam said.
“I used to do it on a log over water in basic training, sir. But I can crawl, too.”
“Well, you won’t be crawling anywhere yet. I’ve asked the Sherriths if they can hit the museum roof. I’m waiting on their response.”
“And if that fails?”
“Then we can try your lunatic idea. Put a credible plan together and convince me.”
Adam realized he’d fallen instantly into accepting that she was going to breach the building if push came to shove. That was Helena all over. She wanted things done, and she wanted them done now. And she never seemed to trust anyone to carry out her plans without her personal supervision.
Adam had a certain sympathy for her impatience. His own frustration was a lack of intel; there was no aerial recon worth a damn. Helicopters, even the expensive new Ravens, were vulnerable overflying infantry and armor. All Adam knew was what he could see with his own eyes, and what he was told over the radio by other commanders who had as limited a view as he did.
There had to be a smarter way to do this after sixty years. His grandfather would have recognized most of the doctrines, and probably even some of the technology.
Whoomp.
The building shook and plaster snowed from the ceiling. For a moment he thought it was an Indie special forces team breaching the building, but it was a mortar, and he felt ludicrous relief. Just a mortar. Good God, man. There were still piles of old-fashioned sandbags out on the street, five deep and twelve high, doing nothing much of use. When it got dark, he’d retrieve those and try to reinforce the surgery position as best he could.
He was only supposed to hold the Indies off until the big guns and even bigger guns came down from the north. It wasn’t meant to drag on like this. He wasn’t supposed to be surrounded. He ran his palm over his face, forehead to chin, and his hand came away with a thin streak of blood.
Nobody told me I was bleeding, either.
Helena crouched beside him. “Sir, we can move along the alley at the back of this block, come out in the northwest corner at the theater, and enter its basement via the scene dock doors. Then we go to the top floor and traverse the gap to the museum. That brings us out on the third floor. From there, we go up the stairs to the roof. How does that sound?”
“If we need to.”
“Okay, if we need to.”
Helena exuded confidence. She always did. It wasn’t cocky bravado; she simply seemed to know that she was going to succeed, and the possibility of failing wasn’t an issue for her. Where Adam would have looked at the downside, she seemed to see only the up.
Outside, the sporadic thump of shells sounded like a very slow racketball game in progress, the slight variation in pitch creating an impression of something being batted back and forth across the river. The automatic fire barely seemed to pause to draw breath. Adam went to check on the wounded.
“Vallory isn’t looking too good, sir,” said Kinnear, one of the medics. She was repacking the man’s leg wound, a deep shredded hole just above the knee. “He needs blood. Look, I’m willing to call in an ATV and try driving him out of here.”
“You won’t get a hundred meters,” Adam said. Kinnear would have to drive west along the river without the cover of buildings, in full view of the Indie tanks lined up on the other side. “Can you hang on until we’ve shut down the FO on that roof?”
“Can do, sir.” She didn’t sound convinced. Adam got the feeling he’d have another death to explain to a wife before the day was out. I’m sorry we lost your husband, ma’am. We were just waging war the way our fathers did. “Anyone found some morphine yet?”
We’ve just grown too us
ed to this. Satellite recon and targeting, that’s what we need. Fast fighters to deliver payloads accurately. Better still—satellite weapons platforms that can take out a single building without Gears needing to storm it like a damned castle.
Adam had the ideas. He knew he could make them work. He just had to survive long enough. He certainly had the incentive now.
His radio popped. “Green FDC to Gold Nine.”
“Go ahead, FDC.”
“One nasty surprise coming up for the museum,” he said. “Duck and cover, just in case … all call signs, clear Gorlian Square, repeat, clear Gorlian Square.”
The sniper had already made sure there was nobody near the museum, but Adam didn’t have the disposition of all his Gears at any given time, only the squad or platoon leaders. He radioed them anyway.
Helena flattened herself by the window to watch. “I hope their insurance covers this, sir.”
There was no replacement value for unique cultural treasures. Adam had joined the ranks of history’s despoilers, the thoughtless vandals he once so despised, and the ease with which he’d done it appalled him.
“I’ve just given the order to wipe out three thousand years of culture,” he said.
Helena huffed to herself. “I worry more about the orphans of Gears than a few old vases.”
Adam took it as a deserved rebuke, said nothing, and crawled outside the front door behind the cover of a retaining wall to observe. He didn’t even hear the first shell. But he saw it, all right; it landed on the elegant steps that ran the whole width of the museum frontage, bringing the lower half of them down like an avalanche.
“That’s his ranging shot, I hope,” Helena said.
The next shell took out a row of windows on the second floor.
“Well, I think our chum probably knows we’ve pinged him now,” Adam said. “He’ll move, at least.”
“Maybe he won’t, sir. And we won’t know unless the Indies suddenly keep missing.”
“What about the sniper?”
“We’ve got helicopters inbound. We’ll find out the hard way.”
The artillery shells carried on biting chunks out of the museum. Helena was right; it was just stuff, things, inanimate objects. And the steady chatter of Tern rotors was getting closer. He’d done what he had to do.
COG GARRISON ANVIL GATE, KASHKUR.
“If you were them,” Captain Sander said, “what would you do?”
Hoffman braced his elbows on the sill of the observation post window and tried to steady the binoculars. The Indie column was visible only by the distant plume of dust it kicked up into the still air like a curl of smoke.
“Depends how they think it’s going at Shavad. If they overrun Kashkur, they’ll be more concerned with stopping us from sabotaging the refinery as we retreat.”
“Didn’t think the Unvanquished did that.”
The 26th Royal Tyran Infantry had never retreated or surrendered; the motto on its cap badge—Unvanquished—had to be maintained. Hoffman left definitions of victory to the historians.
“We’re not the only regiment in this fight,” he said.
“I asked Choi if we could take out the refinery now. It’s in range. He said no.”
There were a couple of thousand workers at the refinery. It was almost as much of a city as Anvegad was. Hoffman found himself calculating the speed of the Indie advance against the time it would take for the staff to evacuate the refinery.
“The refinery’s probably not going to put up a fight,” he said.
“Would you, if you were sitting on millions of liters of fuel? Even if they’ve piped most of the stores out by now, it’s still a bomb waiting to go off.”
“Of course, they might even be pleased to see the Indies.”
“So where’s the damn aerial recon?” Sander got on the radio again. “Just one Tern. Is that too much to ask?”
“Yes,” Hoffman said. “It probably is right now.”
“Okay, we wait.” Sander had a channel open to Battalion Command, keeping up as best he could with the situation in Shavad. “And we’ll be doing this without air support.”
Hoffman listened in for a while. Every helicopter in the region was being pulled in to support 26 RTI and the Sherriths, half of them on casevac. Given the shit the Royal Tyrans were in, Hoffman couldn’t feel shortchanged. Frustration was starting to get to him. He’d never been used to sitting on his ass and listening to a battle he wasn’t actually taking part in.
And those are my buddies out there. I’m going to have a lot of funerals to attend.
Kashkur was just one theater in a war that spanned most of Sera. If he listened to the international radio stations, Shavad wouldn’t even be in the top-ten news stories today, so Anvegad—a choke point that no commander in his right mind would ever try to attack—was one of those stories that would never be told.
“Sir, I’m going to get back to the platoon.” Hoffman adjusted his cap. “Shake out a patrol and find some better observation points.”
“Mountain men,” Sander said. “You really need mountain men. I’m going to request some Pesang support if this looks like it’s going to drag on.”
Hoffman made do with what he had and sent Byrne out with a squad to set up observation points five kilometers south, where the terrain was still rocky enough to enable men to move between cover. An hour later, the gunners and Byrne’s patrol got on their radios almost simultaneously to say they’d spotted the first UIR vehicles.
“Definitely heading for the refinery, sir,” Byrne said. “Six self-propelled guns, a dozen tanks, some APCs, and some big unarmored supply trucks. Oh, and a low-loader with tarps all over it. Maybe that’s carrying a track-laying vehicle. Bit thin on the ground for a serious attempt to break through the pass, actually.”
“Not banking on the refinery fighting to the last man, then.”
“If the rest of Vasgar rolled over, then why should they die in a ditch for a few cans of fuel? They’re only civvies.”
The wait-and-see was getting to Hoffman. But there was no point doing anything else. If the Indies showed signs of moving north of the refinery, then the vintage guns would see them off. Hoffman did his rounds again, checking on the machine gun and antiaircraft positions and noting how few civvies were on the streets.
It was hard to draw a line to mark where the garrison ended and the city began, other than the security checkpoint on the gates of the vehicle compound.
“Lieutenant.” Sheraya Olencu stepped out from between the columns of the council building as he passed and walked along with him. “Is there anything else you need me to do?”
Hoffman thought of Sheraya only in terms of dealing with local procurement, handling the traders and drivers who kept the garrison fed and supplied. Then it struck him that she might well want to be around Byrne if the shooting started. She was pregnant. He had no idea how that was affecting her, but it made sense to him that she’d be anxious about separation at a time like this.
“Did Sergeant Byrne do as I ordered and get the alderman to marry you two?”
“Yes.” Sheraya lowered her eyes. “He always follows orders.”
“Thank God for that,” Hoffman said. “Look, I’m going to risk the captain’s wrath and say this—I’m giving you permission to stay within the garrison if you feel the need. Special circumstances.”
She slowed her pace a little. “You’re a considerate man, Lieutenant. Is it because you miss your own wife?”
Hoffman hadn’t thought of himself as considerate or even sentimental, but he certainly missed Margaret. “When there’s a war on, I don’t believe anyone should put anything off longer than necessary.”
“There’s always been a war on. Even my grandfather can barely recall a time when Sera was at peace.”
“Well, the war’s right here, right now.” Hoffman wished he hadn’t put it that way. “Or as close as it’ll get for Anvegad. Come on. You can sit in the mess until Sam’s off duty.”
Sander
wouldn’t mind. There’d been a time when Hoffman would have objected to having wives inside the garrison other than in designated married quarters, but he couldn’t work up any outrage at the bending of regulations these days. He was starting to feel agitated about the road being blocked. It was the same feeling he got when he had to sit down with his back to a door. He wanted to turn around and face it.
He stopped Carlile on the way through the vehicle compound. “How are we doing on the bulldozer, Sapper?”
“It’s not left Lakar yet. Shavad might need it for the next two days, apparently.” Carlile looked irked. “Fucking typical if you don’t mind my saying so, sir.”
“Well, we’ve got two weeks before we need to resort to cannibalism,” Hoffman said. “I need to get up to speed with what’s happening there.”
“That’s your regiment, isn’t it, sir? Two-Six RTI.”
“Yes. It is.”
“The engineers out there say the Indies put special forces behind the lines into Kashkur before they invaded Vasgar, judging by the amount of sabotage the lads are dealing with. Apparently they’ve got snipers all over Shavad.”
“You hear more than I do.”
“That’s only because I’ve been stuck on the radio trying to get Lakar moving.”
Hoffman climbed back to the gun floor and looked out over the plain again from the observation position. Sander stood on the opposite side of the chamber, field glasses pressed to his eyes.
“Frustrating,” he said. “They’re just in range. But I can wait.”
“Cheer up, sir. They didn’t get their hands on the imulsion supply.”
“It’s only a matter of time before the power stations start running out of fuel. That’s going to put some pressure on them.” Sander lowered the glasses and glanced across at Hoffman. “No word from Lakar?”
“They haven’t dispatched the bulldozer yet. Carlile says it’s had to divert to Shavad. Like the Ravens.”
“Damn. We’re not a priority, are we?” Sander took out a small pad and started sketching. “I’ll have an entire mural done before they pull their finger out and get around to us.”