CHAPTER 17

Hoffman knew the tough reputation of Pesang troops but he’d never actually come face-to-face with one. Now he was looking at six of them, and he wondered if there’d been a mistake.

They were tiny. They were also very young—most Gears seemed to be, but not that young—and the heavy machetes they carried on their belts looked too big for them. They formed up in a line and stood to attention.

Shit. They haven’t even got full armor. That’s three-quarter grade.

“Sah, we don’t speak good, but we understand okay,” one of them said. “You give us job, we do job.”

“I’m Lieutenant Hoffman.” For some reason, he took an instant liking to this lad. “What’s your name, Gear?”

“Rifleman Bai Tak, Hoffman sah.” He turned smartly and indicated each man in the line. “Riflemen—Lau En, Cho Ligan, Jati Shah, Gi Shim, Naru Fel.”

Hoffman looked at Pad, realizing that this was all the support Anvil Gate was going to get. “Find these men some better armor, Private. I can’t send them out on patrol in their goddamn underwear.” He gestured to Bai Tak, tapping on his own chestplate to get the message across. “Heavy plate. You need more armor. And proper boots.”

Bai Tak frowned slightly as if he was running through a vocabulary list in his head. Hoffman hadn’t realized how little Tyran these men spoke.

“Ah,” he said, face lighting up in revelation. “Sah, no more armor. How we move around all quiet?” He stabbed a forefinger down at Hoffman’s regulation thick-soled steel-capped boots with their armored greaves. “How we climb in those? We fall and get damn dead, sir.”

“Good point, Rifleman Tak.” So they weren’t as green and innocent as they looked. “Okay, go with Private Salton and get yourselves settled in. When you’re fed and supplied, come back here for a briefing.”

They seemed to grasp things well enough, or at least they all moved fast and gave the impression of purpose. Pad gave Hoffman a knowing look as he followed them.

He drew his finger across his throat, clearly delighted. “I hear they’re very light on ammo, too, sir.”

Hoffman didn’t care how much ammo they burned through. He just wanted the Indies cleared out of the high ground behind him, because they were the ones who were going to drop mortars into the city, pick off his patrols, and harass any relief sent to the fort. They wouldn’t bring down Anvegad, but he didn’t want to lose a garrison and half the civvies stuck here just to prove a point about the strategic advantages of a gun battery on a mountain.

He hadn’t lost anyone yet to the frontal assault. It had all been down to one asshole with a rocket launcher. And that asshole was going to pay for it.

The bombardment from the Indie line to the south was sporadic. There was a lot of activity down there, and the gunners responded with the heavy-caliber belt-fed Stomper and the One-Fifty guns, but the main guns only fired twice. That drove the mobile artillery back a few kilometers.

Hoffman was still trying to work out what the Indies’ game was. They weren’t keeping up sustained fire, and the shells were either landing short or striking the cliff beneath. The height of Anvil Gate made it hard for them to drop shots accurately. Hoffman suspected that if they’d inserted troops into the hilly country behind the fort, they wouldn’t risk shelling their own positions.

They didn’t seem to be trying. But there was also the possibility that the commander out there was second-rate, and all they’d been tasked to do was hold the refinery.

Does that solve all my problems?

How long is this going to go on?

Hoffman went up to the gun floor. The place was in almost total darkness except for faint illumination on the controls, and his eyes took a few seconds to adjust. The gun crew were either taking a breather or watching the Indie lines through field glasses. Evan was busy pumping grease into the hoist and loading mechanism.

“Time to hand over to the relief,” Hoffman said. “Get your asses down to the medic. Just because you walked out of here doesn’t mean you’re still okay.”

Evan wiped the nozzles of the copper-plated grease guns with a rag. “I think I know what they’re up to, sir. Look.”

Hoffman steadied his elbows on the sill and adjusted the focus on his binoculars. The knot of Indie vehicles was moving around, and most of them had their lights on. The refinery that had always been a constellation of white, amber, and red stars on the horizon was in darkness, but the damn Indies seemed oblivious of the fact that their vehicles were very, very visible.

“So they’re idiots,” Hoffman said.

“I wouldn’t rule out stupidity, sir, but they know we’re stuck here without any prospect of resupply. I think they’re trying to get us to piss away our ordnance.”

Hoffman thought it over. Whether the Indies intended that or not, it was the reality he had to face. A full magazine and shell store looked comforting until you began an assault, and then it evaporated faster than you ever thought possible. It was early days, but all the supplies would run out.

But inviting fire? The Indies had lost vehicles. That meant they’d certainly lost drivers. Suicide troops were always a possibility, but acting as live bait with the near certainty of death—sitting there, waiting for it—was something very few sane people would do, even Gears. Hoffman had seen men and women do crazily heroic things in combat knowing full well that they stood little chance of coming out alive, but it wasn’t calculated and long-drawn-out. They made an instant decision because something had to be done; smother a grenade with your own body, drag that wounded comrade to safety from open ground, charge that gun position. It was the moment when self ceased to exist and the only thing the Gear saw was necessity because his buddies would die if he did nothing.

“I don’t buy it,” Hoffman said. “Nobody sits and fries unless they’re religious crazies or something. You remember those Tennad sailors who crewed those little suicide submarines? Ordinary guys. Sane guys. The Indies had to weld the hatches so those poor fuckers couldn’t change their minds. Because most of them did.”

“Yeah,” said Evan. “I agree. Now watch the lights.”

Hoffman took a while to work it out. Vehicles seemed to be milling around, no unusual thing in itself because they were probably ferrying fuel and equipment out of the refinery for their own use. It was a field of moving points of light. At night, it was hard to judge depth and work out the relative positions of whatever was carrying the lights.

It was just that the movement was … odd.

It took a few moments to sink in. Hoffman defocused and tried every trick he knew to get his brain to see the movement differently instead of letting it apply the patterns it was used to. Then he saw it, and the whole picture shifted.

“They’re moving too precisely,” he said. “They’re following each other at fixed intervals.”

“Now, how many can you see making sharp turns?”

“Shit.” Hoffman was suddenly fascinated. “They’re making big, open loops.”

“Hard tow. Decoys.”

“You’re shitting me.”

Evan chuckled. “I like an officer who talks like I do.”

“Okay, two flaws in that theory. One—the lead vehicle has a live driver, and that’s the one we’re most likely to hit. Two—the vehicles we destroyed earlier were definitely being driven. Separate. Under their own power.”

Evan started pumping the grease again. “You can rig a vehicle to push it as well as hard-tow it. We don’t always hit the lead vehicle. And the first guys we hit probably just underestimated the range and accuracy of these guns. They got the message fast.”

It was still mindlessly dangerous, but there was a chance of surviving. That was enough for some.

“And at night, we don’t even know those are vehicles.”

“Sappers rig dummy lights to look like any number of installations. It’s low-tech and sounds stupid, but at night, it works. All the Indies have to do is keep tempting us to fire.”

“And while we’re looking that way, we’re distracted from what’s happening behind us.”

“See, they’re not as dumb as we think, are they?”

Hoffman wasn’t sure he could trust his own judgment now. He should have spotted that right away—hours ago. Nobody would attempt a conventional frontal assault on a battery like this in open terrain. There had to be more layers to it.

Maybe Hoffman was concussed, but Evan had taken a pounding too, and he seemed to be functioning okay. Sometimes there was no excuse for missing the obvious.

“Okay, let’s assume that’s what they’re doing, and hold back accordingly.”

“One more thing. The big guns need to be maintained. The more we keep firing without relining these babies, the less accurate they get. They must know that.”

“But that’s a long time, isn’t it?”

“No. It’s about three hundred full charge firings, which we could rip through in no time.”

“How many on the clock now?”

“Maybe two hundred.”

“Replenishment’s still going to be our major problem.”

“Yes, sir. It is.”

Hoffman slapped Evan on the back. “Good work. Now change crews and get some rest.”

Hoffman was pretty sure he could work out the tactics now. Attrition, diversion, isolation. He wasn’t so sure about the intention to keep the Anvegad pass closed to stop COG troop movements out of Kashkur, though—unless control of the fort was part of that.

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.”

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—just 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 tell 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.

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.

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.