“Lieutenant?” Dr. Salka edged forward, wiping his hands. “I regret I failed to stop the hemorrhage. The young man is dead.”
There were routines that Hoffman fell into, officer or not. There were burial details, pay corps and next of kin to inform, ceremonies to be observed, all the tidy bureaucratic closure after losing a Gear in combat. He wasn’t sure where—or even if—the locals buried their dead. Maybe they cremated them. Pereira’s family would want his body returned home eventually, just like Sander’s widow and the others he didn’t know much about.
“Reaves, get a mortuary set up and work out where we can dig temporary graves.”
“Yes, sir.”
It was still daylight. Hoffman was expecting things to get worse when night fell. But he was holding a heavily fortified city with a sensible civilian population that wouldn’t present easy targets to anyone taking potshots. It was a matter of sitting tight—and blowing the shit out of anything that moved. There was no more wait-and-see.
Have I missed anything?
Can I do this? Can I really do it?
“Let’s work on the basis that we’re surrounded,” Hoffman said. He took a breath and wondered if he should have warned the aldermen what he was going to do, but he’d have to explain himself later. They’d had the warning siren. They should have been expecting the firing to start. “All fire teams and battery gun crews—stand by.”
Evan cut in on the radio. “Sir, we’ve got Indie tanks moving forward. There’s only one place they can be heading. Or they might just be moving into range to shell us.”
Hoffman was more worried about infiltration. But he couldn’t just sit back and not show these assholes that the COG meant business.
“Start as we mean to go on, Sergeant,” he said.
The height of Anvil Gate now came into its own. All Evan or any of the gunners had to do was lay the sights on whatever enemy target they could see below them. They didn’t need a forward observer to adjust fire. The Indies could see that plainly, but they came on anyway.
Are they insane?
The border was seven kilometers away, and the first tank crossed it.
“Fire for effect!” Hoffman yelled.
At that moment, the order was all he could recall of fire discipline, the proper procedure for artillery. But he was an infantry grunt and the gunners didn’t expect him to do anything other than give them objectives. This was their garrison; he was just there to stop shit happening to them—and he’d already failed to do that.
Should have sent out patrols earlier. Should never have let that bastard get in so close with an RPG. All my fault.
Hoffman knew the guns were about to fire. But nothing could have prepared him for the moment when they did. It felt like an earthquake had hit the fort. And the noise actually hurt. It resonated in his chest.
“Shot, out!” Evan yelled.
There was a long moment of silence, and then a sound like thunder in the distance.
“Splash,” Jarrold responded. “One tank, two APCs destroyed, other targets dispersing.”
Hoffman strained to see what they’d hit. There was a distant column of smoke rising, and when it cleared the Indies had spread out into a long ragged line. He had to watch a few moments longer to realize they’d actually come to a halt.
“That’s overkill, sir,” Evan said. “But they got the message.”
The guns were relics almost exactly like the ones on the old COG battleships, a piece of history in their own right. Maybe nobody these days knew what to make of them.
The tanks and other armored units were about 6,000 meters away now. Hoffman saw a flash and a belch of white smoke, and seconds later an explosion shook chunks out of the cliff slope right beneath the observation point. The blast plates on the windows rattled furiously.
Then Anvil Gate’s 155 mm guns opened up. The battle had begun. Hoffman had been under fire more times than he could remember, but this was different; this was standing still and taking it, with no chance of moving position or gaining better ground.
But you’re on a goddamn peak. Highest ground. Defended by rock. Impregnable.
High or not, the only line of sight he had was from the guns and the other firing positions that were fanned out around 300 degrees of the fortifications. The enemy couldn’t see within the city walls without aerial recon, but the defenders couldn’t see out, either. More shells thudded into the fortifications, shaving off rocks and making a lot of noise and smoke, but Anvegad stood and shrugged it all off. And it responded in kind, pounding the UIR column with its One-Fifties until a curtain of smoke hung across the plain.
Hoffman checked the terrain from every vantage point, still wondering why the hell a relatively small force like this was bothering to confront the fort head-on. He scanned the horizon, expecting to see a long plume of dust thrown up by more armor approaching from the west. But there was nothing.
Why the hell are they throwing their lives away like this?
Anvil Gate only had to sit it out and smack down anyone stupid enough to get too close. This was what it had always had done, even before the invention of cannon and gunpowder. It had swapped archers and catapults for cannonballs, and then for shells. It was all the same to Anvegad.
Hoffman could see that from the way its people behaved. He decided against risking the external gantries to move around and made his way down the stone stairs inside the walls of the fort. When he emerged at the second floor, the streets he looked down on were quieter than usual but not deserted. Apart from his Gears and the occasional city official walking calmly between muster points, close to the walls and head down as they’d been told, some civvies were out delivering essentials and wheeling handcarts of produce through the streets. There was no sense of tension or panic at all.
Hoffman thought that was getting close to dumb complacency. Indie gunners would have a tough time getting shells over the city walls, but nobody knew where the guy with the RPG was now. He’d proved he could take an opportunistic shot at vulnerable spots in the taller structures.
The Pesangas can deal with him. Meanwhile—
Shit, I haven’t thought about Margaret once. I hope to hell this isn’t on the news. She’ll worry her guts out.
The steady thump of artillery fire in both directions had suddenly become background noise. But one explosion broke the pattern as he crossed the compound to check on the Sangar manned by his own Gears. He almost dismissed it until the second whump a few moments later and the yell of “Incoming! Mortars!”
The explosion threw up a column of smoke and flame, almost as if it had gone off next to him. A rain of debris—fragments of roof slate, hissing metal, wood splinters—hammered down on the buildings around him. He ducked beside the wall and covering his head for a moment, then ran for the nearest Sangar.
He had to scramble up a short ladder to reach it. The three Gears inside were crouched behind the rocket screen, surveying the crags below the walls with field glasses.
“Where the hell did that come from this time?” Hoffman could hear the city’s small firefighting force honking its vehicle horns, trying to get through the narrow streets. Many of the city’s buildings were made of wood, a tinderbox in waiting. “That’s got to be north of us.”
“It definitely didn’t come from the Vasgar side, sir,” Dawes said.
Hoffman pressed his radio. “Byrne? Where are you?”
“The monastery tower, sir. I’m moving a couple of small guns up here. It covers our dead area, more or less.”
“Well, at least we know what their strategy is now.” Hoffman still wasn’t sure if his head injury was distorting his take on the situation or if he really had been a dumb asshole not to see this coming. “The frontal assault was to keep us busy while they moved up behind us.”
“Yeah, we’ll lose some civvies, sir, but they’re not going to take the city with a few mortars—not unless we let it burn down,” Byrne said, brutally pragmatic. “And half the place is still solid stone,
so good luck with that.”
“We could really do with a Raven right now. Even a Tern.”
“I don’t think they’d have much more luck spotting these bastards than we would.”
“I’m going to get Carlile to rig some mortar grillage on the key buildings.”
“It’ll be dark in a couple of hours, sir. Good and bad—if we black out the city, we can move around above cover, but they can still fire on our position and be pretty sure of hitting something.”
COG bases got hit all the time. There was a big difference between doing serious damage and actually mounting an assault on a scale that could overrun them. They’d lose a few lives, a few buildings, as Byrne had said, but the city wasn’t going anywhere.
And neither was anyone else, not as long as that road was blocked. Hoffman had options, though. He had food, he had water, and he had electric power. And, if the worst happened, the civilians could take shelter in the network of tunnels deep in the rock.
Hoffman could sit it out for a couple of weeks. By then, Shavad would be won or lost, and that outcome was outside his control.
SHAVAD, WESTERN KASHKUR.
The Kashkuri certainly built things to last. The museum in Gorlian Square had lost its impressive steps, half of its stone-mullioned windows, and most of the statues in the second-story wall niches. But it was still standing. Another shell hit the roof balustrade, throwing a small avalanche of masonry onto the square below. Smoke wafted out of broken windowpanes. The east wing was on fire.
If that didn’t keep the Indie observer’s head down, nothing would. But it was a big, flat roof, and there were still plenty of vantage points left even if the whole top floor was blown away. Until someone took a look from the air, Adam Fenix wouldn’t know if the casevac flight was going to get his Gears to hospital or be brought down in flames.
“We’ve got to go with it now.” He turned to Helena. “You handle the Terns. Get those Gears ready to move.” He radioed the FDC to pause the guns for a while. “Gold Nine to FDC—check fire. Inbound casevac. Check fire.”
Helena was on the radio to the Tern pilots, one hand cupped over her earpiece and the other holding binoculars to her eyes as she scanned the front elevation of the museum. If the Indie observer wasn’t incapacitated yet, he’d hear the guns fall silent, and the sound of helicopters, and he’d know he had a target on the way in. And if he did—then the Terns had to get in and out fast. Adam started thinking how they could be better protected against ground fire, and added it to his list of projects to deal with if he survived this campaign.
Of course I’m going to live. My boy can’t grow up without a father. No Indie’s going to do that to him.
It was that kind of silly death-denying logic that most Gears went through at times like this. Adam looked at Helena Stroud, single mother, and was reminded that kids grew up without fathers all the time.
“T-Five-Twenty to Gold Nine, we’ll be on the ground in two minutes—if we can find a parking space.” The Tern pilot was circling, looking for a level surface to set down in the sea of rubble that had once been a pretty square with gilded fountains. “Let’s do it.”
Adam had moved two mortar teams to the north of the square. He’d thought that the Terns might come in behind them, on the riverbank side, so that he could make sure the museum observer was distracted during the casevac. But unless they flew dangerously low between the buildings, they’d probably take fire from the Indies across the river. He had to leave it to the pilots’ skill and judgment. They could see what he couldn’t.
“T-Five-Twenty to Gold Nine—critical cases on the first bird, maximum six.”
“Roger that, Five-Twenty.” Adam signaled a squad to move out and secure the landing zone. They’d only be able to land two birds at a time, and that was pushing the available space. “Keep your eyes open for Indies on the museum roof.”
“Not a lot of it left, Gold Nine … let the looting begin. Save me a few Silver Era funerary urns.”
Adam couldn’t take his eyes off the museum. Even when the first Tern touched down, he found himself looking down the sights of his Lancer, checking the building’s facade window by window, as if he had a hope in hell of seeing anyone before they got off a shot or a grenade round. He talked of snipers and observers; but the reality was that he had no idea who or what was in there. The Indies could have inserted a dozen machine-gun crews, one man and one component at a time slipping into Shavad over a period of months. They’d had intelligence agents in Kashkur for years, just as the COG had them in UIR territory, unseen and unacknowledged.
Wounded Gears were waiting in the open even before the first Tern touched down, the worst cases shielded bodily from the downdraft by their comrades, and, Adam had to imagine, from possible sniper fire. He found himself wondering if he would put himself between someone and a bullet like that, because he’d never consciously done it. It shamed him for reasons he couldn’t yet understand. The Tern lifted off, didn’t take a direct hit from an RPG, didn’t burst into flames, and headed north to the field hospital at Lakar, out of range of the Indie guns. Adam let himself breathe again. The other Tern, which had been hovering behind the shattered stump of a block of apartments, moved in to pick up the next batch.
The Indie guns were still hitting the same targets they’d been pounding half an hour ago. They seemed to have moved on from this part of the city.
Maybe that meant their observer was out of action.
The second Tern took off and the last two landed. They were too close together for Adam’s peace of mind. He found himself existing solely for the moment when they were clear and away. Then Helena moved, and for a moment his attention was broken.
“Bastard,” she muttered, dropped to one knee, and aimed somewhere along the museum frontage. “Bastard.”
He didn’t see what had caught her eye. He only heard her short burst of fire, almost simultaneous with a rocket streaking past just above head height. He had no idea how it missed the Terns. He could have sworn it actually passed between the two sets of rotors. Automatic fire started up from the window above his head, so Collins must have seen whatever Helena had spotted, and then the mortar teams joined in. It bought the Terns the time they needed. Adam gave them time to clear, pulled everyone out of the square, and got back on the Sherriths’ FDC.
“This is Gold Nine to FDC, resume—adjust fire, grid Alpha Eight, seven-one-five-zero-zero-three, over.”
“Grid Alpha Eight, seven-one-five-zero-zero-three, out.”
It took about ten seconds for the next shell to find the museum and pound it. By then, the Terns were gone. The museum was still substantially intact. Smoke belched from the windows on its northeast side.
“We have to check he’s not still functioning in there,” Helena said. The Indie had become a man, no doubt one they all had an individual image of in their minds, when he could easily have been a squad. “Permission to go in and clear the building, sir.”
“I should have worried about collateral damage a few hours ago,” Adam said. “But we can’t keep shelling the building and hoping we got him. Okay, lead on.”
“I can do this. You worry about holding the road.”
Adam knew he should have hung back, but part of him wanted to see how much damage he’d done. One day, he knew, he’d look back on this battle and feel appalled that he’d destroyed something precious and irreplaceable. He would understand that human lives came first, but he would mourn for the loss of knowledge all the same.
“Helena, I know you can do it,” he said. “But so can I. You’re going to get yourself killed one day if you don’t learn to stand back.”
“If I do,” she said, “it’ll be because something needed doing.”
She moved off, working her way up the right-hand side of the square. Adam gestured follow us to Rawlin and Collins.
“We should have bribed Timgad Company to lend us Mataki,” Helena said. “She’d have dropped him by now. I swear that woman could shoot the balls off a
gnat at a thousand meters.”
“Well, we didn’t, so we’re down to house-clearance tactics now.” The four of them stacked around what was left of a door to the right of the main entrance. “Okay, big floor space, not many walls—open galleries. No idea where the stairs and exits are, so this could be a slow job. In three—two—go.”
Adam usually started at the worst scenario and scaled down. He expected to meet fire. He didn’t. But what he saw stopped him in his tracks for a moment.
“Oh God.” Helena said it for him, and looked up into a halo of daylight. “What a mess.”
The museum was a shell.
The exterior walls were almost all that was left in most places. It looked like a thrashball stadium, an empty amphitheater. Its floors had mostly collapsed, leaving splintered ledges along the walls. Adam could see the sky through at least two gaping voids. Then he looked down and realized what he was about to step on. In the glittering carpet of broken glass and shattered plaster, the contents of the display cabinets lay everywhere.
They were just … objects, nothing more; not people, not alive, and of no practical use at that moment for an army trying to hold back an invasion. But Adam felt as much anguish and guilt as if he’d slaughtered a nation. There were canvases torn from their frames, fine oils depicting the ancient nobles of Kashkur; there were shards of porcelain, exquisite shields skinned with beaten silver, tapestries, crude clay pots, and hand-illuminated manuscripts that were now charred and smoking. Kashkur had ruled an empire long before Ephyra had even been a village. He tried not to let the shock distract him when there could have been Indie crosshairs centered on his forehead, but he felt he was watching the end of the world.
“Mind the glass,” Helena whispered, pragmatic to a fault. “But he’ll hear us coming anyway.”
Adam couldn’t see any flames, but he could certainly smell the smoke. The fires seemed to be confined to the wing at the far end. It smelled of scorched paint. As he kept to the wall, looking above, he could hear creaking—maybe the floor joists starting to give way, maybe someone moving around.