Gears of War: Anvil Gate (5 page)

“Okay,” Anya said, “At least I’m not missing an easy answer.”

Bernie changed gear as the Packhorse groaned its way up the hill. She made sure the subject was closed by giving Anya something more immediate to worry about. “Keep your eyes open, ma’am. Remember how different things look from ground level.”

Anya was used to seeing the battlefield through an airborne bot’s camera. But bots like Jack were in short supply now, and that meant keeping them in reserve for critical jobs. Patrolling the thousands of square kilometers between the naval base and New Jacinto in the south and Pelruan on the north coast had to be done by Gears. Anyone who didn’t have authority to be off-camp—everyone except farmers, work parties, and their protection squads—was a legitimate target. The exclusion zone meant what it said.

We didn’t protect Jonty, though, did we? Poor bastard
.

She still didn’t know which of the Stranded had murdered the old farmer. That was a pretty good reason for slotting all of them as far as she was concerned, just to make sure.

The dash-mounted radio crackled. “Byrne to P-Twelve, over.”

Anya took the mike one-handed, still cradling her Lancer. “Stroud here. Go ahead, Sam.”

“I’m ten klicks south of the hydro plant. Recent enemy activity—I’m looking at a lot of disturbed soil on the main road. Grid six-echo, five-nine-zero by two-eight-eight.”

“Explosives?”

“A remote device,” Sam said. “I can’t see if there’s a wire. But it’s too far off the track to drive over it, so it’s not a mine. Someone’s got to be watching the road with a trigger in their hand.”

Anya hesitated for a moment. Bernie didn’t see her reaction because Mac shoved his head forward again.

Come on. You could do it in Ops. You can do it now
.

Bernie waited agonizingly long seconds, giving Anya a chance to make the decision before she intervened. She had to learn to make the call herself.

“You can’t deal with this on your own,” Anya said. “Stand by for backup.”

That probably sounded like fighting talk to Sam. “Look, I can work out where they are, okay?” Her accent made her sound even more aggressive than she was. “They need line of sight. They need to bury the det wire. So the only vantage point is a wood five hundred meters from the road. The rest of this place is open fields.”

Bernie checked the terrain on the map. It was open country, the road overlooked by a tree-covered hill, the kind of location you could slip into at night but couldn’t approach unseen by day. If there was a Stranded unit there, the best option was an air strike, but they’d hear the Raven coming half an island away.

And here I am, calling them units like they’re real troops …

Anya flicked the mute button on the mike. “You think we could ambush
them
instead, Sergeant?”

“Overland?” Bernie visualized the location as best she could and began estimating where they’d have to leave the Packhorse to make an approach on foot. “It’ll take an hour or so to get in position, if we’re the closest unit.”

“Okay.” Anya frowned to herself, then opened the mike again. “Sam? Sit tight … Control, this is P-Twelve. Contact in grid six-echo, five-nine-zero by two-eight-eight—Byrne’s located a roadside device and thinks enemy personnel are still in the area. We’re going in. Any other units nearby?”

“Control to P-Twelve,” said Mathieson. “Are you asking for air support?”

“Negative.”

“Wait one.”

Bernie kept a wary eye on the countryside as the Packhorse idled in the middle of the road. Eventually Mathieson came back on the radio.

“P-Twelve, Rossi’s unit is ten klicks north of Byrne’s position,” he said. “He’s moving in. Control out.”

Sergeant Rossi was an old hand; he’d expect a lot from Anya as the senior officer, and it looked like she was all too aware of that. She slapped her palm on the dashboard.

“Let’s do it.”

Bernie refolded the map with the six-echo grid uppermost and handed it to Anya. “Okay, we’ll go off-road at the stream and come around the back of that incline. It’s on foot from there. Where are you going to put Rossi?”

Anya pored over the map. “Here …”

“How about a little further over
here?
” Bernie pointed. “Then he can cut them off to the north
or
the east.”

“Good call, Sergeant.” Anya nodded. “Thanks.”

It was a sergeant’s job to nursemaid the junior officers until they were safe to be let loose on their own. Bernie was all too aware that this would be Anya’s first real firefight. She wouldn’t have the armored protection of a ’Dill and a bloody big gun this time. Mac could probably smell the sudden tension, because he started making little whining noises in the back of his throat and squeezed his head past Bernie’s shoulder to poke his nose out of the open window.

“Good boy,” Bernie said. “Quiet, now. Okay?”

Mac was only thirty kilos of vulnerable, unarmed meat, but somehow having a dog alongside made Bernie feel a lot safer. It was primal. A dog said
weapon
to any human.

“Byrne, Rossi—Stroud here,” Anya said. “Anything moving?”

“Byrne here. Nothing, ma’am.”

“Rossi here. Where do you want us?”

“Five-eight-zero by three-eight-zero, close to the stream.”

“Roger that.”

He didn’t sound worried. Bernie glanced at Anya as she released the switch on the mike. She’d definitely honed that reassuring voice to perfection over the years, but she kept licking her lips in a way that said she was scared shitless. Bernie was, too—sensibly afraid, the way any sane soldier should have been—and almost hoping the Stranded would make a run for it before they showed. But they were scumbags, and they had to be put down. She felt ashamed of herself.

I really am getting too old for this shit. Baird’s right
.

“Where’s Sam from?” Anya asked. “I can’t place her accent.”

“Tyran father, Kashkuri mother. She’s from Anvegad—Anvil Gate.”

Anya seemed genuinely distracted for a moment. “I didn’t realize.”

“I like to know what I’m taking on. It’s a habit to cultivate.” Bernie watched Anya doing the mental calculations. Everyone did, wondering if Sam was old enough to remember the siege. “No, ma’am, she was born a few months after it all ended.”

“Sergeant’s telepathy.” Anya looked embarrassed, too diplomatic to ask the obvious questions. Any mention of Anvegad and its COG garrison—its romantic Kashkuri name reduced to the prosaic Anvil Gate—inevitably led to Hoffman’s involvement there. “Handy.”

“Sam’s had a lot to live up to.” Bernie hesitated, because she’d never said aloud to Anya what everyone thought—that her war-hero mother was a tough act to follow. “Like you.”

But Anya didn’t say anything. She kept her eyes on the road. They were ten klicks from Sam’s position now, and Bernie started looking out for a break in the fields where she could drive across uncultivated land rather than churn up crops.

But she still had her personal radar tuned to anything that didn’t look
right
.

Gears didn’t see roads the same way civilians did. Civvies looked for oncoming traffic and hazards from side roads. Gears looked for choke points, kill zones, and ambushes. They were always on the alert for combat indicators. Bernie found herself checking for blind spots and cover to either side.

“Five hundred meters is a damn long wire,” Anya said. “Must have taken them some time to bury it.”

“They’re not in any hurry.” As she drove, Bernie was starting to get that
feeling
. The instinct was born of years moving through hostile places, rational clues that could be analyzed later—a weird stillness, things that should have been there and weren’t, a thousand subliminal details—but now it simply told her to get ready to fight. “It’s a war of attrition. We’re not used to that.”

“Why are you slowing down?”

“That bend ahead.” The angle was so tight that the road seemed to vanish into an isolated stand of trees. For once, she couldn’t see any birds around. “If I was going to jump someone—look, humor me, there’s something not quite right.”

Anya picked up the mike again. “P-Twelve to Byrne, P-Twelve to Rossi, stand by. Possible contact, grid six-delta … zero-one-three, two-five-four.”

But there was bugger all that the others could do for them if the worst happened. Anya checked her Lancer. Bernie prepared to pull off the road down a shallow slope fifty meters ahead. The road was in poor repair here, a mass of potholes and cracked concrete patches, and suddenly that surface became the only thing she could focus on.

Yeah, something’s wrong
.

The Packhorse bounced as the nearside front tire hit a hole. The next thing she knew—something smashed down hard on her head, the Packhorse was going
up
and not
along
, and the road vanished. The dog fell on her, yelping. She had no idea how, but she was sure she was falling too. And then she hit bottom.

For a few moments, she couldn’t work out where the hell she was. Then she realized she was lying with her head under the steering column and the Packhorse was upside down, maps and water bottles and windshield fragments everywhere. The driver’s door was gone. She could taste smoke, cordite, and blood.

“Shit.” That was all she could manage. She fumbled for her Lancer—it had to be close by—but caught a handful of fur instead. Mac whimpered. At least he was still alive. “Anya? Hey,
Anya!
”

“Get clear. Come on.” There was a metallic sound and a loud grunt. Anya’s voice seemed to be coming from a distance. “Can you hear me, Bernie? Can you move?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I can. I can.” Bernie grabbed her Lancer automatically, struggling out of the crushed gap where the door had been, expecting to come under attack.
It’s an ambush. What happened? Grenade round, bomb, or what?
She went into the drill
without thinking.
Assess, cover, evacuate
. Just because you were still alive, it didn’t mean the incident was over. “You hurt?”

Anya crouched beside her against the underside of the stricken Packhorse, Lancer raised. The vehicle had come to rest in a shallow roadside gully, stopped from settling completely on its roof by the slope. “Can’t tell,” she said, scanning 180 degrees. “You sure you’re okay?”

“I’ll wet my pants and cry later.” Bernie suspected she might well do at least one of those, but the operative word was
later
. Right now she took a strange comfort from the fact that she could still handle it. She was scared shitless and in shock, but the hardwiring created by years of drill pushed that aside and went straight into a defensive routine. “Let’s call a cab. If we start walking, we’ll get picked off or hit another mine.”

She had to assume that. The words were out of her mouth before she remembered that she had to leave more decisions to Anya.
Never mind. Either way, she learns
. Anya pressed her finger to her earpiece, her voice just a little shaky.

“Control, this is P-Twelve. Control, come in. This is P-Twelve. We’ve been hit, position grid six-delta, main road—”

“P-Twelve, we’ve got you,” Mathieson said. “We’re scrambling a bird.”

“No hostiles spotted, but we might be bait.”

“Understood. Injuries?”

“We’re both T-three.” Not in immediate danger—and if either of them was bleeding internally, they were too pumped on adrenaline and shock to feel it. “The Packhorse is wrecked.”

“P-Twelve, I’m diverting another squad to Byrne’s position. Wait one.”

Bernie edged around the rear of the vehicle, head level with the burst nearside tire. There was a ragged crater about thirty meters behind them. One side of the road had been ripped up, and lumps of concrete were scattered around. It was a smaller hole than she expected.

Shit, we drove over it. Or we hit it and it threw us forward. A few seconds—that’s all that saved us
.

That reality would sink in later. The tailgate of the Packhorse looked like someone had hosed it with random caliber rounds. The front end was just mangled by the hard landing, still hissing hot, rusty water from the broken radiator. The vehicle’s tail had taken the blast. Whatever the device had been, it had detonated late. And it had been planted since yesterday’s patrol. It was hard to spot disturbed soil out here because of the thick vegetation that flanked the roads.

Astonishingly, Mac was wandering about, sniffing the churned soil around the vehicle and looking none the worse for his experience.

A fresh trail for the dog. Shit, now would be the best time to track these bastards
.

“You don’t look too good, Bernie,” Anya said. “You sure nothing’s broken?”

“I hit my head. I can use that as an excuse for being cranky for days.” Bernie had had more than a few close calls with ordnance over the years. Doc Hayman said an explosion didn’t have to kill you or even knock you out to do brain damage. “I really should get the dog on the trail. It’s less than a day old.”

“You’re going straight to triage,” Anya said firmly. “And that’s an order.”

Bernie suddenly felt that tracking these bastards was more important than anything. Mac seemed okay. And if she had any brain damage, there wasn’t much Doc Hayman could do about it. They had no state-of-the-art neurology unit. The COG had just lost a century in technology terms.

She could hear the clicking of cooling metal, so at least the blast hadn’t deafened her. Eventually it gave way to a distant droning sound overlaid with the chatter of rotor blades. The Raven was coming.

“Two explosive devices today,” Anya said, still scanning trees a couple of hundred meters away. “You think they’ve got a new strategy?”

“If they have,” Bernie said, “I’d love to know how they’re being resupplied.”

“P-Twelve, this is Byrne.” Sam’s voice buzzed in Bernie’s earpiece. “Rossi’s in position. You’re going to miss the party.”

Bernie supposed that was Sam’s way of checking they were still okay. “Sorry for the no-show. I’m sure we’ll get another chance to have a girls’ day out with extreme violence.”

Mac paused in his investigation of the soil and stared out across the grassland into the trees, trauma apparently forgotten. It might have been rabbits that got his attention.