Either way, Anvil Gate was worth a long-haul effort to take it. He didn’t need to guess about that. He just had to sit tight. Geology was on his side. He had power, he had unlimited water, and he had supplies—for the time being anyway. He checked on the briefing room to see how Pad was getting on with the Pesangs, and sat down to call Brigade Control at Lakar.
“Control, we’re not going anywhere fast,” he said. “Where’s the Behemoth?”
“We can’t get it to you. The Indies have broken through at Mendurat and they’re holding the road. What’s your estimate on supplies?”
“Around twelve days food and ammo.”
“You’re not critical, then.”
“That’s why I’m flagging up the timescale now.”
“We’re aware of your situation, Lieutenant. Are you able to hold your position?”
“It’s a mountain, more or less. We could hold it dead if we had to. Look, I have five thousand civilians here, and if things get bad, I have no way whatsoever of evacuating them.”
Control went quiet for a moment. “We’re aware of that too. There’s nothing we can do until we regain full control of Kashkur. Keep us updated.”
Hoffman began to feel like a nuisance, as if he hadn’t really got any problems and Control was just too polite to tell him so. If Anvil Gate had been one fort of many, and not as pivotal as it was, then he would have had a wholly different range of options including abandoning the position. But he hadn’t.
He had to plan for the worst scenario. That was what he was trained to do. Anvegad wasn’t just an army base, it was a city full of noncombatants. And that changed everything.
But, as Control had reminded him, his situation wasn’t critical yet.
If the Pesangs could clear the hinterland of hostiles, then maybe Hoffman could find another way to clear the gorge.
He went back to the briefing room. The six Pesangs were clustered around a map on the table with Sam Byrne who had shown up as well. They were working out positions and the areas they needed to cover. Six men for a huge area like that seemed to be stretching it.
“Don’t worry, sah, we do this,” Bai Tak said. He adjusted his webbing and penciled something on the folded map in his hand. “At night, much better.”
While they were talking, there was a distant explosion from the north, a distinct pomp. It didn’t sound close. Hoffman’s first thought was that one of the imulsion fields had been sabotaged, and he went out to the rear gantry to look for a red glow on the horizon. The sky was still velvet black.
He got on the radio anyway. “Anvil Gate to Control, anything going on to the north of us? Maybe fifteen, twenty klicks? Big explosion, but we can’t see anything.”
“Negative, Anvil Gate. If we get any reports, we’ll come back to you.”
It could take hours for anyone to report an attack. Hoffman wasn’t going to relax yet. He waited on the gantry for a while, wondering if the Indies had developed any night-sights yet and realizing this was going to be a dumbass way to find out, then went back inside. The Pesangs had moved out. He hadn’t even heard them leave. It was very hard not to hear things out here in this still air.
“The Indies are jerking our chain, sir,” Byrne said.
Hoffman sat down and took out his notebook to continue with his letter to Margaret. It was rapidly turning from an emotional last letter to be treasured and reread to a detailed record of unfolding events.
“Got to be,” Hoffman said. “They can’t smash their way in.”
He listened for gunfire while he wrote, and at one point he simply nodded off with his head on his arm. He woke with a pounding headache to find Byrne shaking his shoulder.
“Sorry to disturb you, sir,” Byrne said. “This might be nothing, but the baker says his watermill’s stopped. The flow’s down to a trickle. Carlile’s taken a look at the cisterns down below and they’re not filling, either.”
The river that cut underground and flowed through Anvegad’s bedrock had also been harnessed to run waterwheels in some parts of the town. It was a roaring torrent all year; it was one of the things that made Anvegad impregnable, a limitless source of water and power. Rivers didn’t stop suddenly like a tap being turned off. If this one had, something was very wrong.
Hoffman was already dealing with an enemy that had cut off his only road access from the north, so the UIR was equally capable of diverting a river the same way. He was fighting engineers now, not troops. That was something he hadn’t been prepared for. He felt his scalp tighten.
“That explosion,” he said. “I think the bastards have blocked the river.”
ANVEGAD HILLS, NORTH OF ANVIL GATE GARRISON: THREE DAYS LATER.
It was a siege, whichever way you looked at it. Anvil Gate was cut off by road, it couldn’t get food and ammunition, and now its water supply had been reduced to a trickle. Bai hadn’t expected his war to be like that. But now that it was, he’d deal with it.
He squeezed through the cleft in the rock and looked down into the mouth of the sinkhole below him. There was still water flowing, but he could see from the ferns and eroded rock left high and dry that the level had fallen dramatically.
“Not much water, sah.”
Carlile, the engineer, scrambled up the rocks behind him. “Shit.” He looked genuinely shocked. “That’s normally a big waterfall.”
Well, it wasn’t a waterfall now. The river was just a stream that tumbled over the jagged edge and splashed onto smoothly eroded rocks before gurgling into the darkness underground.
“So—how much water we got?” Bai asked.
“About enough for basic survival.” Carlile was a nice man. He used a lot of technical words in his job, but he obviously tried hard to find easier ones for Bai. “Some water’s still getting through, but not enough. Then we’ve got the water in the big storage tanks underground—the cisterns. We use it faster than they’re filling up. So we’re going to have to ration it.”
“They blow up the river, like mining?”
“Yeah. You can change the course of a river if you place enough charges in the right place. Like you can blow up a gorge.”
“They come back and try to stop all the water, I bet.”
Carlile gave Bai a wary look. “Good point. They might.”
“Ah, we always have shit like that.” Bai was used to disputes over water. “My father—he sort it out.”
The Shaoshi often dammed streams from their side of the border and diverted them from Pesang land to irrigate their own pasture. Every so often, it ended in a skirmish and even a few deaths, and then everything would calm down again for a few years. With the current drought, there was no water to steal this year. Harua wouldn’t have to worry about that while he was away.
Carlile looked at the machete. “Yeah, I can guess your dad was pretty persuasive.”
“We find blocked bit, yes? Then we wait for bastards to come back and teach them lesson.”
Carlile chuckled to himself. “Your Tyran’s improved a lot in a few days.”
It was a case of having to learn. Bai lived in a country where there were at least five languages he had to speak just to get by. He was starting to realize that the COG didn’t do things that way, and just settled for making everyone speak the same language. It made sense. But it would never work in Pesang.
The river was fringed by trees, rare and useful cover up here. Bai assumed that whoever was doing the blasting not only knew the terrain like the back of their hand, but was probably still out there now keeping watch. He set off along the higher ground above the old riverbed, trying to keep the course in sight, but the overhangs jutted out so far that it was easier to climb down to the river itself and just walk north along its bed. He clambered down the slope and dropped the last meter onto the wet gravel that now lined the bank. Carlile was keeping up with him pretty well for a man in those big Gears boots, but he was never going to be able to creep up on anyone making that much noise.
When they reached the next rapids—j
ust a pool of foam now, although the eroded rock proved they’d been impressive—Bai stopped to get his bearings.
“Listen.” He squatted down, rinsed his face, and drank from his cupped hands before filling his water bottle. “You hear?”
It was the steady rumble and splash of a big, fast river not too far away, as loud as the trucks on the road through Paro. Carlile looked blank and shook his head.
“River,” Bai said. “You COG guys, all deaf.”
“Too many loud guns for too many years,” Carlile said. “You’ll be like that one day, too.”
They walked for another ten minutes, the steep banks getting higher and deeper as they went, then rounded a bend to see a long, sloping hill cutting right across the course of the river. Bai guessed that hadn’t been there a few days ago. The rocks were jagged and free of vegetation even where the water was seeping through them. It looked like someone had blown up an entire cliff to send the rubble plunging into the river.
“Yeah, that work really good.” Bai climbed up the dam of boulders and peered over the top. The water had now found a new path south, smashing through trees and flowing into a smaller channel that vanished down a slope into the distance. “Maybe it fall down one day, but not soon.”
“Well, we can’t shift this without vehicles,” Carlile said. “But we can’t get them out here.”
“No helicopters? Why is nobody coming to help?”
“They’ll come,” Carlile said. “But it won’t be for weeks. Come on, let’s head back to base.”
Weeks didn’t sound hopeful, because Bai was sure that most of Anvegad didn’t have that much time. He was used to living like this, just scraping by in a harsh environment and walking a few kilometers to find water. Hunting small animals for food would be relatively easy here. There were even wild goats, a really easy meal for a man with a good rifle. So none of the Pesangs were going to starve to death, and even Gears used to a soft city life could get by. But the civilians would be hit very hard.
Every night now, the Pesang squad went out on patrol. That was their sole task—to catch any Indies operating around the fort. Apart from the pretty spectacular evidence of sabotage and surprise attacks, Bai could tell they were there anyway. They probably thought they were stealthy, but he could smell them and he had a pretty good idea where to look for them now simply by working out the eye lines, the positions they needed to be in to keep an eye on activity in and around the garrison.
Smell and plain carelessness gave them away, too. He found the places they laid up with their rifles and took a leak, because whatever they ate made their urine smell different. He could also smell the oil they used to maintain their weapons. He found the pieces of cut wire coated in bright plastic—just tiny beads, nothing more—that they’d used to lay charges.
They can’t be special forces. Unless they’re just not very good at it.
Bai had thought that becoming a Gear would be a long, slow training process. He still wasn’t fully comfortable with the Lancer rifle, and the rules and regulations were something he’d always have to look up in a book, but the stuff that Lieutenant Hoffman wanted him to do—observe, track, trap, kill—came naturally to him.
Well, maybe not the killing. I haven’t killed a man yet. But these guys are out to kill me, so I’ll do it when the time comes.
The squad split into pairs, fanning out from the fort on three sides. Bai went with Cho. They’d been out for a couple of hours when he heard the sound of small stones moving. There was a definite crunch and a sliding noise, like something heavy moving on gravel, not the sound of a lighter animal like a goat picking its feet up and placing them carefully. He tapped Cho’s shoulder and they both dropped to the ground to wait.
Over there, to the right, Cho gestured.
Bai had to wait a while, but then he picked up movement. Even on a moonless night, there was enough light to see a dark shape that didn’t blend in or match the shadows, especially when it moved. It drew his eye.
Yes, it was a man all right. Now that he’d focused on him, he could see the rifle and something else long and narrow on his back. The guy moved into a position that was almost level with the top of the city walls, and began assembling a small mortar.
This was where the difficult choices started. A mortar like that would be ready to fire in a few moments, but Bai didn’t know if there were other Indies in the area, and shooting the guy—easy from here, even for him—was going to be heard halfway across the mountains. Cho obviously had the same idea. He drew his machete slowly and gestured to Bai to go around one side of the man while he moved to the other.
Bai definitely couldn’t have crept up on the Indie in regulation Gears’ boots. He got to within a couple of meters of the man, and even when the guy scanned slowly from left to right, he looked straight at Bai but didn’t seem to see him.
It was just a matter of timing.
The machete was a heavy blade. Bai thought it was pretty humane if you put some force behind it. None of this messy throat-cutting business, trying to subdue a struggling man; he was used to dispatching an animal quickly, and a good hard blow would stun as well as slice. The guy suddenly looked to his left, probably spotting Cho far too late, and Bai simply reacted. He was on the Indie in a heartbeat and brought his machete down in an arc with his full weight behind it.
The thwock noise was louder than he expected. The handle almost jerked out of his hand, because the man fell with no more than a grunt and the blade stayed embedded in his skull. It was over in a moment. Bai didn’t think it would be like that, even though he knew what the blade could do.
But now he had to retrieve his weapon. It took a bit of effort, and he was glad he’d done this at night and not in broad daylight. The blood looked jet-black. Cho dismantled the mortar, slung it on his back, and took the guy’s rifle and ammo clips. There was no point leaving the stuff for the other Indies to use. Everything the enemy had to haul up here slowed them down a little more.
And maybe his buddies would find the body. That would say plenty to them. It would tell them who they were dealing with, a corner of the COG that didn’t play by their nice city-boy rules.
“You better clean that elsewhere,” Cho whispered.
Bai waited until they were some way from the body and in the shelter of a rock before he wiped the blade on a patch of scrubby grass. He rinsed it with a splash of water from his bottle. If he didn’t clean off the blood, it would mess up the sheath. For a moment he paused to work out how he felt right then, and although his heart was thumping, he felt quite numb about the whole thing. Was it really that easy? Maybe this was some kind of shock. Either way, he’d done it, and he hadn’t lost his nerve.
Is it going to be that easy next time?
It didn’t matter. He and Cho completed the rest of the patrol, saw no more Indies that night, and made their way back to the garrison just before dawn. The sentry on the gates just stared at them as he let them in.
“Wow,” he said. “Been shopping?”
Cho showed off the Indie rifle and the mortar. It was a sniper rifle, and the guards were so impressed that they went to get Pad Salton. Within a few minutes, Cho and Bai had an audience, and Pad came to admire the rifle.
“Didn’t hear any shots in the night,” he said. He winked at Cho. “Have you been saving ammo?”
“Bai got him,” Cho said. “No point making noise, is there?”
“And you look like such nice little lads, too.”
Bai was starting to feel a bit shaky now that he was back in the garrison and no longer pumped up waiting to be shot or ambushed. All he could do was grin. It wasn’t because he found it funny, or took it lightly; he just didn’t know how to respond to these foreign Gears, and he was almost embarrassed by that. But it seemed to be what they expected—that Pesangs were nice, friendly people who could switch to being unseen, silent assassins in seconds, and who knew no fear. The fact that he was so small seemed to impress them even more. He could guess what they would te
ll their buddies in years to come.
But I get scared just like you. You think I’m that different?
But yes, he was generally happy with life, happy to be making a living for once, happy to have stopped some Indie bastard—which he’d first thought was one word from the way Hoffman said it—from launching a mortar into the crowded city. He’d done his job, upheld his honor, and not been killed. He was also going to sit down to a huge breakfast. What was there not to be happy about?
And if that image of the little Pesang who would appear out of nowhere and cut your head off made a few more Indies think twice about attacking the garrison—he was happy with that, too.
ANVIL GATE GARRISON: DAY TWELVE OF THE SIEGE.
As the siege started to bite, Hoffman decided that running a city was a far harder job than fighting a war.
Combat was the easy bit. It was anticipating all the little things that made civvies scared, restless, and difficult that took the time. He walked around the center of the city with Alderman Buyal Casani—driving wasted of precious fuel—and saw all the ways that a community unraveled, even one where the people were used to an isolated life with frequent hardship.
And if I hadn’t started rationing food early, we’d be eating cardboard now.
Water rationing had become a daily routine, too. As soon as the sun came up, queues started to form at the water tanks on the main streets, with lines of grim-faced people clutching plastic containers and buckets. They got fifteen liters per person per day for all their cooking, drinking, and bathing. Hoffman had settled on fifteen liters on the basis of a desperate call to a refugee agency office in New Temperance. Anvegad had no plan for survival water because it hadn’t seemed possible that the river would ever run dry.