Gears of War: Anvil Gate (52 page)

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?”