CHAPTER 13

Anvegad’s doctor specialized in fractures and liver flukes, two things he saw a lot of in this nonindustrial backwater. He would also treat injured goats if asked nicely.

Now he was trying to stop Gunner Arlen Pereira from bleeding to death. Hoffman watched the doctor shaking his head and probing inside Pereira’s open abdominal wound, trying to instruct one of the battery medics where next to try clamping. They didn’t seem to be able to work out where the blood was leaking from.

Hoffman sat astride a wooden chair, tolerating first aid from Private Reaves and trying to hold his radio headset to his ear so he could carry on talking to HQ.

“Lieutenant, we’re not going to be able to get help to you for a while,” said the female major on the radio. “We can’t even get a casevac chopper to you while Shavad’s going down the tubes.”

“I don’t need help, ma’am,” Hoffman said. “This is for your situational awareness. We’ve got adequate supplies and ammo for the time being. We’re not under sustained attack yet. For all I know, it might be a disgruntled local goat-shagger with a grudge against the garrison. But the attack came from the Kashkur side of the border, so this might be Indies inserted behind the lines weeks ago.” Hoffman could take the shit as well as any Gear, but he felt angry now on behalf of others. “Captain Sander’s dead and his pregnant wife needs to be told. Gunners Dufour, Tovey, and Pole are also dead. We’ve got eight men wounded, two seriously. And the fucking road to the north is still completely blocked, so we can’t evacuate the goddamn civvies even if they wanted to leave. Are you clear about the situation now, ma’am? Are you?”

The major paused, but didn’t bawl him out. “I am, Lieutenant. Do you still require a Pesanga squad for recon?”

“What?”

“Captain Sander put in a request for them.”

Everyone knew the Pesangs’ reputation. This was the kind of terrain they lived in. One Pesang could cover the ground of five Gears. And they were feared.

If there were any Indie assholes hiding out there, they’d find them.

“If you can get them here, ma’am, we can make use of them.”

“We’ll think of something. I’ll expect a sitrep from you in ten hours, unless the situation deteriorates.”

Hoffman went to stand up. Sheraya and Reaves pushed him back down.

“Nine,” Sheraya said. “There are nine wounded. That includes you, Lieutenant.”

“I’ve got to go out there.” Hoffman felt he shouldn’t have been sitting on his ass in the first-aid station. “I’ve got a job to do, ma’am. Let me do it.”

“It can wait a little longer.” Sheraya kept looking past him. Hoffman wasn’t sure what state the back of his head was in, but Reaves was using a lot of surgical tape. “You hit your head that hard, then sometimes you collapse and die many hours later.”

“Fine. As long as I get the time to secure this garrison.”

At the makeshift operating table, Dr. Salka’s expression was changing to quiet desperation. Reaves slapped Hoffman on the shoulder. “Just as well you shave your head, sir. Makes this sort of thing a lot quicker.”

Hoffman stood bolt upright and regretted it as giddiness seized him. He could not give in to injury now. He had more than a platoon to run, more than a garrison, even more than a city full of civilians: he had to hold Anvegad. And he didn’t know yet exactly what he might have to hold it against.

He put his headset on properly, with the strap around his forehead and the audio bud in his ear. “Salton, anything out there?”

“Negative, sir.” Pad had gone searching the slopes around the fort with Byrne and a local man who knew a bit about climbing and had some equipment. “No sign of a vehicle on either side of the pass, either. We should set up an obs post to keep an eye out three-sixty degrees. The Indies over the border might be the least of our worries.”

“Do it, Pad. And they’re going to send us some Pesang troops.” Hoffman steeled himself to check on the gun floor again. “Sergeant Evan, are you making progress up there? Do you need more assistance?”

Hoffman couldn’t bring himself to spell it out in front of Sheraya. Have you finished clearing the bodies? Do you want someone else to do it, so you don’t have to see your buddies like that? He felt he should have done it himself. He hadn’t served with them for years, and they weren’t his own. He had more distance. The memories that inevitably came back later wouldn’t be as bad as they’d be for Evan.

“The guns are okay, sir. They don’t dent easy.” Evan’s voice was a bit shaky, but other than that he seemed fully in control. “No movement at the refinery yet.”

“Okay, we continue the lockdown of this city—we are at full defense alert. Ma’am—Mrs. Byrne—I’d like you to get the aldermen together so I can talk to them. There are measures we have to take. I’ll send Private Wakelin with you. I want you to have an escort at all times.”

Sheraya gave him an embarrassed half-smile. “This is my home, Lieutenant. If I’m not safe here, where will I be?”

“You’re safe from your own people, ma’am, but so was Captain Sander until some bastard put an RPG past us when our guard was down.”

She just nodded. In reality, there was little that Wakelin would be able to do for her if a mortar or a sniper round was aimed inside the walls, but Hoffman owed it to Byrne to at least show some willingness.

“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.

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.

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.

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 knowing 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.

“Holy fuck,” said the man. “You nearly made me shit myself. You little buggers really don’t make any noise, do you?”

Bai didn’t yet have the language skills to tell the red-haired tattooed giant that he’d almost shit himself as well. He saluted. He didn’t know what else to do.

“Private Bai Tak, sah,” he said. “We Pesanga. Six Pesanga. You want help?”

“Bloody right we do, son. Come on. Come and meet the CO. I’m Pad, by the way. Private Salton.” He turned around as he led them down the slope and grinned, staring at Bai’s machete. “Is it true that once you draw your blade, you’re not allowed to sheath it again until you cut some bugger’s head off?”

Bai understood most of what Pad was saying, but putting an answer together in Tyran was a lot harder. He just did what everyone did when faced with a foreigner who seemed to be friendly. He grinned back.

“Damn, you love your work,” Pad said. “We’re going to get on just fine.”