Gears of War: Anvil Gate (39 page)

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.