Well, it had. It damn well had.
He had to hand it to the Indies; they’d certainly thought this through. It was a very economical siege. They’d gone for the long game and cut the supply chain rather than throw men and munitions at it. If anyone ever told him again that army engineers were the tail and not the teeth, he’d punch them into next week. These guys didn’t just lay tracks and clear mines. They could actually ruin your entire day without even picking up a rifle.
Very clever. Very effective. Bastards.
And the key to besieging cities was leaning on the civilians.
The shelling was sporadic now, clearly more to create uncertainty and fear than to try to destroy the fort itself. Hoffman stopped to watch the water distribution in action. A city official supervised the filling of containers and marked the individual’s ID card to say they’d had their allocation for the day. No ID card meant no water, and nobody could come back twice. Hoffman liked the Kashkuri, but people were people, and he was wondering when the aldermen would discover the first forged card. It wasn’t that hard in a low-tech place like this.
But it was a small city. Most people knew one another by sight, and that was probably enough to deter wide-scale fraud.
I hope.
“I’m disappointed that nobody has tried to clear the pass,” Casani said. He was carrying two five-liter containers, just like everyone else in the city. “I realize the Coalition is heavily committed elsewhere, but I feel we have been abandoned.”
Hoffman thought it was a good idea not to mention that most sieges he’d studied at staff college lasted years. Anvegad had only been cut off for twelve days. But those long sieges were against cities with porous boundaries, with gates and bridges for people to slip in and out, and even places to grow food. Anvegad was effectively an island with two weeks’ grace at any time. The effects hit home a lot sooner.
“Sir, I’ve made my feelings clear to Colonel Choi,” Hoffman said. “But he can’t clear the road, and he can’t commit a strike force to drive the UIR back. He’s more worried about the Indies pushing east within Kashkur. If that happens, it won’t matter a damn if we open the road or not. We’ll be surrounded.”
Hoffman didn’t believe that Choi wanted the road cleared at all. The COG probably needed to keep that pass blocked for the time being as much as the Indies did. Hoffman was now wondering when the time would be right to ask the Indies to let the civilians leave. The situation hadn’t deteriorated that far yet, but he knew how long these things took to go through neutral diplomatic channels. Then there was the logistics of moving five thousand people across a wilderness to the nearest town.
“People are going to die here,” Casani said. “Disease. Dehydration. Starvation. We maintain this garrison. The least COG command can do is keep us alive.”
“Do you want to evacuate the city?” Hoffman asked. It was as much Hoffman’s litmus test of the man’s resolve as anything. “Because if that’s what you’re considering, I’d better get the diplomatic wheels in motion now.”
“No, we intend to stay,” Casani said. He actually stopped in his tracks and turned to face Hoffman. The street didn’t smell of the usual coffee and baking bread today, just sewage. “This is not some observation post we can choose to defend or abandon. This is our home. Would it be beyond your masters to airlift some food?”
“I keep asking. It has to come by helicopter. Their range limits the options.”
It was true, but Hoffman also knew that if the will was there, the goddamn supplies would be here in hours. Terns could land and refuel a few hundred kilometers north. He was making excuses for Choi—or Choi’s boss, or Choi’s boss’s boss—and he knew it. That walked along the thin boundary of lying. It was a path he never wanted to take.
“Seven hundred calories a day is not enough,” Casani said. “Hungry people become restless and difficult.”
“But it gives us three times as long to hold out,” Hoffman said. “And we’re only at the two-week mark.”
“You know as well as I do, Lieutenant, that this will not be over in weeks.”
Casani stopped short of asking how much food the garrison had stashed away as dry rations. Hoffman wasn’t going to touch that yet, not for the civilian population. If the garrison was going to fight—and there might come a point where the Indies would try to physically take the fort—then Hoffman needed fit men. He wasn’t proud of holding out on the civvies, but they had the option of being inactive. His Gears didn’t. So they got the food.
But the folk here knew that. They’d get resentful sooner or later.
Sheraya Olencu Byrne wasn’t any old civvie, of course, and she ate in the garrison mess. She was staff, goddamn it. She was pregnant. Hoffman would apologize to nobody for that concession.
He inhaled reluctantly as he walked, aware of the sideways glances that followed him, accusing looks that seemed to say he could perform miracles if he wanted to but he just wasn’t trying. The smell was getting to him. Anvegad had always smelled of sewage, but now the smell was becoming a stench. The sewage system needed a minimum flow of water for the ancient drains to be kept clear. And the weather was getting warmer. Casani was right: disease was a real threat.
We never covered shit disposal at staff college. Maybe I’ll send a memo to the General suggesting it goes on the curriculum, headed RE: SHIT.
“You’re going to have to dump human waste outside the city,” Hoffman said. “Which is going to be tough, whether folks throw it over the walls or you organize collections and ship the shit out.”
“We are dealing with it,” Casani said wearily. “We will drive a truck outside the walls at night and tip it where we can.”
Hoffman left Casani at the end of the main street and continued on his own, climbing the levels until he was on the gantries above the level of the ancient walls. It was a no-go area in daylight now. A sniper could have picked him off at any time, but he was prepared to take that risk to get an uninterrupted look at the terrain. There was still no big Indie force massing out there. They knew the range of the main guns, and they had no pressing need to rush into eastern Kashkur yet. They could wait on the outcome of the fighting in the west.
Hoffman climbed down from the walls and wondered what Margaret was doing right then. He imagined her in the middle of a hearing, giving some hapless defense counsel hell.
How often does she think about me?
Hoffman wondered if he had any right to expect her to think of him at all. She wasn’t on his mind all the time. That made him feel guilty.
Back in the mess, the off-duty Gears were listening to the radio and eating bowls of chunky soup in grim silence. Byrne ladled it out in carefully equal portions like the head of the household. With Sheraya there, the gathering had the air of a family meal. The soup smelled pretty good.
“Better keep the windows closed,” Hoffman said. “Don’t piss off hungry civvies.”
“Goat,” said Gunner Jarrold. “Bai and the lads donated a couple of goats they happened to run into. In the dark, of course. Very discreet. They butchered it before they brought it back.”
“As long as we’re not eating dead snipers.”
“Maybe we ought to spread that rumor and really put the shits up the Indies, sir.”
“I think the prospect of getting a Pesanga blade through your brain is doing a fine job of that already.”
Hoffman had thought six Pesangs weren’t going to make much difference, but they punched well above their weight, and often in these unexpected ways. Bai Tak had made his mark from the start as the natural leader, the one ready to have a go and risk anything, as if he was trying to find out just how much he could do. They got a kill most nights and hauled back useful kit. That had to be crimping the Indies’ ability to move around out there.
“Sir?” Carlile stuck his head around the door. “Just heard from Brigade. They’re sending a Corva down from Ibiri, mixed cargo of water, medicine, food, and some fuel. But that’s right on the limit of its range with a full
cargo bay.”
“Shit, are those old wrecks still flying?” Byrne said. “Well, let’s be glad they are.”
“Is it going to try to land?” Hoffman asked. The veteran helicopter couldn’t airdrop a load here—there was nowhere they could drop anything that didn’t involve dodging the Indie guns to retrieve it, if it didn’t end up in a ravine in the first place. “Because hovering here is asking for trouble.”
“We’ll make it work,” Carlile said. “ETA two hours.”
The world could change in a few seconds. Hoffman allowed himself a scrap of optimism, and didn’t call Lakar back to ask them why they couldn’t ship out earth-moving equipment if they could get a Corva in the air. Those old crates could carry bulldozers as underslung cargo. But the supplies were the most urgent issue. He’d ask for the engineering kit later.
“Okay, Byrne, let’s get some security positions set up. That’s a big slow bird coming in. Jarrold, give me suppressing fire just before it lands. Just keep the Indies busy.”
Hoffman got up to take a look at the likely landing zone with Carlile, hoping there’d be some goat soup left by the time he got back. His belt was already getting slack, and he didn’t have fat to lose to begin with. He followed Byrne along the roof-level gantry and they surveyed the land north of the fort.
It was all slopes. The Corva would have to stop at a hover and roll off cargo. If the bird was going to do that, it might have made more sense to hover over the city itself. Hoffman would talk to the pilot when the guy got to see the terrain.
Byrne spent a while adjusting his field glasses, as if he was working up to saying something. “We’re lower on dry rations than I thought, sir,” he said. “Maybe I’ve miscounted the boxes. I’d hate to think of our civvie help pilfering our food.”
“They wouldn’t,” Hoffman said, not believing his own denial for one minute. People would steal anything, anytime, anywhere. At Berephus, they’d had to put armed guards on ambulances to stop the locals from siphoning off the fuel while the paramedics went to haul out bodies. “Capital offense, stealing military supplies in theater.”
“Yeah.”
Hoffman thought this was as good a time as any to mention his worries. “If we evacuate the civvies, Sam, I want you to go with Sheraya. I want you both out of here.”
Byrne walked off along the gantry, head down. Beneath them, a long line of civilians waited for one of the daily bread handouts. Hoffman decided not to tell them there was a supply aircraft inbound until it had been safely unloaded and they were sure they’d received crates of food and not ball bearings intended for some other base.
“That’s very generous of you, sir,” Byrne said at last. “But she probably won’t want to leave her city. And I wouldn’t leave fellow Gears in a fight like this.”
Hoffman knew that was going to be Byrne’s answer. He’d have to find another way to get them out.
In the end, it wasn’t possible to keep the news of the airlift from the people of Anvegad. They could hear the old Corva for kilometers, that rising-and-falling groan that Hoffman hadn’t heard for a few years. Slow and old, and heavy on fuel; but the bird still flew, and when he saw the wobbly black profile emerging slowly out of the golden haze sitting low on the hills behind the fort, it actually moved him. It was a striking image. He thought of poor damn Captain Sander, and how he probably would have liked to do a painting of it.
“CC-Seventy-Four-Five to Anvil Gate.” The pilot was a woman. “I hope you’ve cleared your pantry. Mom’s brought the groceries.”
“Not much choice of landing zones, ma’am,” Hoffman said. “Steep slopes, lots of loose debris. You want to try for the ground at zero-zero-four-eight-three-zero or hover?”
“I’ll land,” she said. “It’s a little breezy around here.”
“You’ll hear the arty boys start up soon. Just keeping our Indie visitors busy and out of your hair.”
“Thanks for the heads-up, Anvil Gate. I startle easy.”
The Indies must have heard the Corva too. Their guns opened up when the helicopter was a few minutes out. It circled over the LZ, kicking up a dust storm, and Hoffman realized it was going to be a pain in the ass getting the crates back into the city. Everything had to go over the walls, a backbreaking task. The best landing the Corva could make turned out to be right on the limit of the slope it could handle.
“Let’s get the fuel out first,” the pilot said. “I really hate sitting on a firebomb with all this ordnance flying around.”
Gears and civilians moved in to shift the metal cans and stack them clear of the chopper. Hoffman watched from the gantry, squatting to minimize his outline, and kept checking his watch. The wind was picking up. The pilot was getting impatient.
“Hey, I’m going to have to turn,” she said. “That’s one hell of a crosswind. Clear the LZ and I’ll come in again.”
The dust billowed up as the Corva lifted and climbed slowly to the side. Hoffman was already calculating how much more breathing space the supplies would give them, and how long he would have to eke them out.
That’s another month’s grace, at least.
He looked up from the manifest that Carlile had scribbled just as a streak of light and gas shot from his right-hand field of vision and hit the Corva square in the flank. He stared, frozen and horrified, at a sky of orange flame.
He didn’t even duck. There wasn’t so much as a shout from anyone for a long, slow second, that brief moment of disbelief before the reality kicked in. The rotors and burning airframe tumbled down the steep slope and left a wake of black smoke pluming in the air. The Corva was out of sight before two more explosions sent more smoke climbing.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit!” Hoffman brought his fist down on the square-section steel rail and kept punching it until he knew he’d done himself some damage. It was pointless to send in a fire-control team. He gave the order anyway. “Damage-control party—medic—get down there.”
There was no saving the pilot. The off-loaded fuel was little comfort, and the rest of the supplies had been incinerated. Hoffman felt instantly ashamed for even thinking about them when that woman had just paid with her life for trying to land them. He shoved his grazed fist in his pocket, shaking with disbelief and anger, and went to find where that rocket had come from.
The bastards were still out there, for all the Pesangs’ efforts. Hoffman didn’t plan to sleep until the last of them were cut down.
And he meant cut down.
CHAPTER 18
We’re going to be dangerously low on fuel very soon. I’m going to keep nagging you about this, because it radically shapes our options for the future. If we can’t fuel the fleet, then we’re stuck here. If we need to run, we can’t. If we ever want to return to the mainland, then we have to start planning for that right away and conserve what fuel we’ve got left. There isn’t a hope in hell that we’ll be able to find a new supply out here.
(ROYSTON SHARLE, HEAD OF EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT, TO VICTOR HOFFMAN, QUENTIN MICHAELSON, AND RICHARD PRESCOTT)
CNS FALCONER, SOUTH OF VECTES: PRESENT DAY, 15 A.E.
“They’re still there.” Garcia never sounded irritable no matter how many times Dom asked if the leviathans were still around. “But we’re relying on the hydrophones. The side scan’s no use—it’s active sonar. Once we ping a leviathan, it knows where we are.”
Dom braced his hands on the wheelhouse console and looked out into the night. “It might know anyway. We don’t know a damn thing about them, do we?”
“They blow up.” Marcus listened to the radio conversation, frowning at something unseen on the horizon. “That’s all the zoology lesson we need.”
Falconer had suspended her own hull sonar in case she inadvertently pinged either boat and gave the leviathans a clue. But her engines and prop couldn’t be silenced. They were a potential magnet for the creatures. Dom was waiting for them to decide the patrol boat was a soft option and come after it first.
Michaelson let his binoculars da
ngle from his neck and took the mike out of its deckhead cradle. “Falconer to Control, stand by Hammer … Falconer to Clement, Zephyr, we’re in your hands.”
Sometimes you got a Gorasni who was fluent in Tyran, and sometimes you didn’t. “Zephyr to Falconer, we have firing solution. We fire, yes?”
Dom hung around the wheelhouse door. Cole wandered by and nudged him. “What they doin’, Dom?”
“I think they’re both going for the same one but from different angles.”
“And this is shallow, right? Like twenty meters? ’Cos we can hear ’em on the radio.”
“Zephyr here—we fire first, COG, because we are very close. Short track.”
Michaelson opened his mouth for a moment but he never got as far as a response. Dom heard a command in Gorasni, then a snatch of Garcia’s voice: “Fire one …”
Dom shoved Cole out onto the deck. “Come on, when that hits, one of them’s going to—”
“Impact.”
Dom was sure he’d lifted clear of the deck for a second. The explosion sounded like it was a couple of kilometers off the starboard bow, and if he’d been fast enough he might have caught the plume of foam even in the dark. Falconer shuddered. It had to be a kill.
“Yeah, shallow,” Cole said.
“Falconer to Zephyr, Falconer to Clement—time to thin out unless you’ve got a solution on Number Two right now.”
“Zephyr to Falconer—its friend must have heard that. Zephyr to Clement, I hear your tanks—you dive?”
Dom didn’t hear whether Clement responded. He was focused on what he was sure was going to happen next. That explosion would have rattled even a leviathan’s brain. It would either go after a sub, or surface to go after the noisiest, easiest target to find—Falconer.
Dom heard a loud splash like someone slapping the water just as he reached Marcus on the harpoon.
Marcus didn’t always manage to batten down all his reactions. Dom saw the look on his face—frown gradually vanishing, eyes widening, even a very slight drop of the jaw—and turned to see what he was staring at.