They said this was once a palace. Well, it’s not very palatial now.
The Kashkuri government was going to be furious. For some reason that worried Adam more than the prospect of someone on the next floor emptying their magazine into him. Helena put her finger to her lips and pointed up, then signaled Collins and Rawlin to cover the stairs. She gestured at Adam, pointing her finger and counting out five: I’m going up, five floors.
He trained his Lancer on the gaping hole above. There was so little floor left that nobody was going to be moving around easily. Helena picked her way across the precious debris of centuries and eventually reached the central staircase, then began working her way up along the treads that were still in place. Adam could still hear the occasional creak above his head.
Helena’s voice in his earpiece was right at the limit of his hearing. He was more deafened by the artillery than he realized.
“I can see where’s he been,” she breathed.
There was a loud creak of wood giving way. “Easy …” Adam said.
“Wait.”
Adam looked to Collins, who just kept his Lancer aimed up into what had been the stairwell. Rawlin prowled carefully around the lobby, watching other doors.
Then the shooting started.
All Adam heard was three bursts of automatic fire, the thud of boots running, and then the overlapping shots of a close-quarters battle, very short, very sudden. The disemboweled palace fell silent. He didn’t hear anyone call “Clear.”
Oh shit …
He motioned the two Gears to stay put and ran up the remains of the stairs. He’d lost the element of surprise anyway. All he could think was that little Anya had lost her mom and he had no idea who would take care of her now. When he got to the top floor, he dropped to a crouch and looked along a gallery where some glass cases still clung to the walls. Reflections moved. He swung his aim, conscious of the gaps in the floor, and saw Helena standing frozen, head turned to one side. Then she swung around a corner—into an alcove, he assumed—and there was another short burst of fire.
“Bitch,” he heard her say. “You won’t be calling in any more arty now, will you?” Then, almost as an afterthought, she called out: “Clear—one Indie down.”
“For God’s sake, Stroud, I thought you’d been hit.” Now that the adrenaline was ebbing, Adam was a lot more wary of the state of the building. He felt his way along floorboards that moved alarmingly. “Sure we haven’t missed anyone?”
Helena was checking through a pile of equipment. There was a woman dead on the floor, no UIR uniform, just dark blue coveralls. She’d been brown-haired and in her early thirties before Stroud had blown half her head off. In the alcove that overlooked Gorlian Square, there was radio equipment, maps, binoculars, and a geometry kit of compass, set square, and protractors that could easily have been a schoolchild’s.
There was also a UIR sniper rifle, and that definitely wasn’t any kid’s.
“One frigging woman,” Helena said, exactly as a man might have done if he hadn’t had much respect for females. “But I’ll have that lovely rifle for Mataki, thanks. She’s always complaining about the Longshot being a pain to reload every time. Bribery with a semiautomatic might work.”
Helena had her plans, then. Or maybe it was just instinct. Either way, she wanted the best Gears under her. Adam was just doing what he felt obliged and honor-bound to do; Helena was making a career of it as well.
He got on the radio. “Gold Nine to Control and FDC—Indie forward observer in the museum, now neutralized. We’re moving on to cover the main road.”
“Roger that, Gold Nine.”
As they left the ruined museum, he stopped to pick up something that caught his eye. It was a small silver statue of a horse, very heavy, about thirty centimeters tall and inlaid with turquoise and garnets. Adam took a guess that it was from the earliest days of Kashkur’s ancient empire. He had no idea what to do with it. He couldn’t bear to leave it there to be looted, but he also didn’t feel he had the right to take it away, either. He stood looking at it for a moment, lost.
Helena gave him an odd look. “There’s a lot of that stuff.”
“What’s going to happen to it all? Who’s going to recover all this?”
“The Indies, if we don’t get a move on and finish off that bridge.”
“Centuries. Millennia. Gone.”
“Sir, it’s metal. It’s a thing. Things get remade. Come on.” She held up an admonishing finger, almost joking, but he wasn’t too sure. “And please—don’t start mourning the burned books.”
He laid the silver horse back in the rubble. It would be found again and stolen, maybe even melted down, but he simply couldn’t walk away with it. “Let’s go,” he said. The company was now down to sixty or so Gears. Adam regrouped them into two platoons and readied them to move east along the river to the bridge, another piece of Kashkuri construction that just wouldn’t yield. He radioed the field hospital at Lakar and checked on the casualties—Vallory had made it, which cheered him enormously—and waited for a sitrep from Control.
The smoke was now a thick fog on the water. If the last bridge was down, he couldn’t see it, but he could hear the guns still pounding in a slow rhythm as if they were getting bored with the whole battle.
“Gold Nine, get out of there now,” said the controller. “The Indies have taken the bridge. They’re moving northeast. You’re going to be cut off if you don’t fall back now and rejoin the main battle group.”
Adam’s gut sank. He took a breath before relaying the order. “Change of plan, people. We’re rejoining Choi now. We’ve lost the bridge.”
There was an awful silence, the kind you got when you’d lost so many men and women to gain so little. Helena put her hand flat on his backplate.
“No, sir. Two-Six RTI didn’t lose it. The Sherriths couldn’t hold it. We remain the Unvanquished.”
She slung the looted sniper rifle over her shoulder and strode off toward the waiting transport, an open truck filling up with exhausted Gears. Adam didn’t think there was a difference. She clearly did, though, and it seemed to improve everyone’s mood a little.
Adam’s mind was made up at that moment. This was not his calling, but it was Helena Stroud’s. He wasn’t good at this. He didn’t have that charisma and certainty that a real leader needed. He fought because he felt it was wrong to let others do the dying, but now he knew he could save more lives by designing better weapons and systems, designing deterrents to war, than by being a mediocre infantry captain.
When he finished this tour of duty—if the war went on as it always had—he was going to take the Defense Research Agency offer a lot more seriously.
As he climbed into the truck, he thought of the exquisite silver horse, abandoned to its fate. His father would have been disappointed in him for not salvaging it for the Fenix estate.
DIVISIONAL HEADQUARTERS, PESANGA BRIGADE OF RIFLES, GULAN PROVINCE.
Bai Tak couldn’t recall ever having this much food in his life. And so much of it was meat. No wonder the Gears, as the Coalition called its soldiers, were so big.
He sat in the canteen surrounded by Pesang men from all over the country, and simply ate whatever was put in front of him. Some of the veteran riflemen found that funny.
“Ah, you can always spot a new recruit by how fast he gets indigestion,” one of them said. His name was Cho Ligan. “And then your pants get too tight. And then the novelty wears off.”
“I think it’s going to take a long time to wear off for me.” Bai looked at the chunk of steak left untouched on Cho’s plate. “If you’re not going to eat that, I will.”
“Go ahead.”
The only drawback of this new life was that Harua had been furious and had sobbed her heart out when he left for training. It was all too fast, she said. He gave her no time to prepare for him going away. Even handing over the recruiting bounty he got for signing on for five years didn’t calm her down, but at least he had the comfort of k
nowing she had plenty of money to pay for food and to hire some help with the herd. She might even have enough to replace animals that didn’t survive the drought. The bounty was a lot of money by Pesang standards.
But he hadn’t started really missing her yet. Things just felt strange. He was too overwhelmed and exhausted by all the new things he had to learn to have time to mope around. He was still coming to terms with the rifle they called a Lancer, which was not only complicated but absolutely huge. The one thing he understood instinctively was the bayonet that clipped on to the barrel. Although it was for stabbing, he knew that if he was ever in a tight spot that his machete would serve him a lot better when it came to dispatching an enemy.
“So how long do you think it’s going to be before we get to fight?” Lau En was single, a little younger than Bai, and keen to save enough from his pay to buy a workshop in Paro so he could get a wife with a lot of land. “I don’t want to lose my enthusiasm.” He nudged Bai and indicated one of the white COG officers making his inspection rounds of the canteen, checking to see that the Pesangas were satisfied with the food. “See him? He knows about ten words of Pesan, so don’t ask him anything complicated.”
“That’s all right,” Cho said. “We only speak ten words of Tyran. So we’re even.”
The canteen was very brightly lit. Bai was used to few lights indoors and a lot of dull, dark wood surfaces, so he thought he might never get used to this bright and shiny COG world. He was scared of leaving fingerprints on everything. But the most foreign thing of all was the television in what the Gears called the mess.
Television was a radio with movies. He had a radio at home, and once every couple of years he walked all the way to the occasional theater in Paro when the owner announced he’d found a film to project on the whitewashed wall of his barn. But seeing the two combined in one small machine was something that amazed Bai. The screen was about thirty centimeters across, and the images were black and white, not colored like the movies he remembered, but he still couldn’t take his eyes off it. He could actually watch the man who read the news bulletins.
“You’ll get fed up with that,” Lau said. “It’s all bad news. The COG’s taking a pounding again. We’ve had a few bad years.”
Bai had to get used to we and us also meaning people who lived unknown lives in ornate and rich cities.
“Shavad,” he said. “I know. Do you think they’ll send us there?”
“We’ll lose Shavad by the time any of us get deployed. Two-Six RTI and the Sherrith Cavalry have lost a hell of a lot of men. And women. They have women Gears. Officers, too.”
“Hey, we’ve all got women in command at home, right?” Cho said. “How will we notice the difference?”
Lau was right. It was depressing news from Shavad. The pictures filled in the gaps that Bai couldn’t work out from his grasp of the language. He wondered what use he’d be in this kind of war, a man used to oxcarts and no electricity for weeks at a time.
After lunch—he got four meals a day in the COG, another amazing thing—there was more rifle training out on the ranges. Bai wished he’d laid off the second helpings. Lying prone to fire was uncomfortable on a full stomach, but he’d made the mistake and so he would learn from it.
He was secretly relieved when the sergeant halted firing for a moment. He was still partly reliant on the hand signals for drill because he often couldn’t follow the different accents among the Tyran-speaking foreigners, but the hand signals were clear. He had no idea why they’d halted firing. It was just a welcome excuse to ease himself off his belly and relax a little. He watched an officer in bulky metal armor plates—a major—stride across the grass to talk to the sergeant, then turn to face the men who were waiting patiently with their unfamiliar Lancers.
He spoke really good Pesan, this major.
“I need some volunteers,” he boomed. His voice carried right across the field. “I need six men used to moving around mountains without being seen, men who can track. I know many of you can already do that. But this is in potentially dangerous territory, and you have to be able to live in the wilderness, maybe without support for weeks at a time.”
Cho was two positions to Bai’s left. He sat back on his heels in one movement and raised his hand.
“Sir, I can do that,” he said. “With or without a rifle.”
Bai turned his head slowly to look at Lau, just to see if he was shaping up to volunteer. A few more men raised their hands. Bai suddenly had a desperate urge to stick with his new buddies, as well as a powerful sense of missing out on something important if he didn’t take part in this.
No point sitting on my backside. If I’m in, I’m in. Whatever it is.
Bai raised his hand. “Sir, I come from the borders,” he said. “We had a lot of trouble with Shaoshi raiding our herds. I’m good at ambushes.”
The officer smiled. “Ah, you obviously understand what this job requires. Good man. Anyone else?”
Lau obviously didn’t want to be left behind. “Me too, sir. I can track. I’m a good climber, too.”
The officer rubbed his hands together. “That’s what I like about you lads. You’re always willing to give it a go. Okay, report to the quartermaster in half an hour and get your kit. You’re going straight to Kashkur.”
Bai let the words sink in. That was the trouble with volunteering. Sometimes, you just didn’t have the full picture first. He made an effort not to let the shock show on his face and got to his feet.
Look, how hard can this be? I signed up on the spur of the moment. All wars are dangerous. Harua isn’t going to be any more angry with me than she is now. And this—this is something I don’t need to be trained to do. My father said he always volunteered. It never did him any harm.
“You’re nuts,” Cho whispered to him as they lined up to be issued with their new equipment. “You haven’t even qualified with the Lancer.”
“The major didn’t seem to care.” Bai could see Lau ahead of them, being given a huge backpack that looked bigger than he was. “And you’re the one who volunteered first.”
Lau walked past them with his new backpack. “I think this is a hammock,” he said, grappling with the straps.
Seng, Bai’s brother, had seen it all and done it all, and often said that people were basically sheep who would follow anyone who looked like they knew where they were going. Bai got the feeling he was more of a sheep than a wolf. But he couldn’t back out now. Cho and Lau were going, and a man didn’t let his friends down.
He’d never been in a helicopter before. He’d never been outside Pesang. He wasn’t even used to the Lancer yet, not in the effortless way he was used to his machete. But an hour later, he was sitting in the open crew bay of an incredibly noisy aircraft he was told to call a chopper or a bird, with dust and fumes whipping into his face as they flew over the mountains to Kashkur. It was a tiny helicopter, nothing like the big black ones that he’d seen on the TV. It had the words TRAFFIC DIVISION on the side.
He couldn’t even get to know the other men on the journey. It was too noisy to talk. He wasn’t used to constant loud engine noises any more than he was used to blazing electric lights in every room.
And the damn radio earpieces—they itched.
“We’ve got to report to a Lieutenant Hoffman,” Cho said. “At the fort.”
“Where are we landing?” Bai asked.
“Wherever the helicopter can set down. The Indies are attacking Anvegad.”
“I don’t suppose any of the Gears speak Pesan.”
“No.”
“Well, that’s going to be fun …”
“They just point us where they want us to go, we look for the enemy, and either draw a map of where they are or kill them.” Cho shrugged. “How much Pesan do you need to speak for that?”
Bai hadn’t thought much about killing the enemy. It never occurred to him that he might not be able to stomach it, because he slaughtered cattle and sheep when he needed to, and it seemed far harder to him to
kill a dumb, innocent beast than someone who would kill you if you didn’t get the first blow in. He would know what to do when the time came. His father said there was nothing to it.
“That’s Anvegad below.” The loudspeaker in the crew bay barely made itself heard over the engine noise. The pilot had that strained, shouty voice. “And if you look to the south, that’s the UIR at the refinery. I’m going to set down at the north side of the fort because of the shelling. You’ll have to go the rest of the way on foot.”
“We just walk in?”
“Use your radios. Just give the fort the call sign to ID yourselves so they don’t shoot you.”
They said that the Gears used one Tyran word a lot when they were scared, surprised, unimpressed, or generally trying to express strong feeling. In fact, it seemed to mean anything a Gear wanted it to mean.
They said shit.
“Ah … shit,” Bai said.
The helicopter touched down on an outcrop just long enough for them to get out and drag their backpacks after them. Then they were alone, staring out into a smoky violet dusk across a wilderness a lot like home. The fort was a dense black outline dominated by two huge guns.
At least they could see where they were heading. They began picking their way down the rocks.
Cho held up his hand for quiet. “Listen.”
Bai could hear it, too; the occasional slide of gravel as someone crept through the darkness. His instinct was to reach for his machete. The six Pesangs settled down into the rock crevices to wait for whoever it was to make himself seen, but Bai wasn’t sure if it was going to be the enemy now. He got ready to swing his blade.
Boots. Those stupid, noisy, clumsy Gears boots. He could hear the creaks of the leather straps and the scuff of metal.
A Gear, like me.
Then a huge explosion lit up the sky for a moment. He found himself looking up at a man in full armor about to step on him. Bai caught a glimpse of red hair and a face covered in swirls of blue ink. He almost yelled out. He’d never seen anything like it.