Cities could always be rebuilt, especially small ones.
It took six hours for the Gears to assemble the population and start loading the trucks and carts. Bai saw Byrne cuddling his wife, patting her pregnant belly and telling her that he’d see her at New Temperance. He helped her clamber up the step into the driver’s seat and hung on to her hand through the open window until the last minute. Did he tell her he had the chance to go with her? Maybe some things were better left unsaid.
“You come and find us, Samuel,” she said. “We’ll be waiting.”
The truck pulled away down the road, turned right, and then its tail lights vanished around the bend. Byrne stood there for a while staring into the night, maybe waiting to make sure that the Indies didn’t break their word and open fire, and then he scratched his head and walked back to the gates.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s finish the job.”
ANVEGAD CITY GATES; SUNRISE.
What was it—seventy, eighty days? A hundred?
Hoffman had lost track of the length of the siege in the time it took to walk from the garrison compound to the outer gates. Sam Byrne walked beside him. Hoffman didn’t need to put on an act to look like the defeated commander whose tragic last stand backfired; he really did feel like shit.
But that was because he was willing to fake a surrender.
It was like crying rape for no reason. It meant that the next person who really, really meant it would find it harder to make anyone believe them. It would make surrenders more uncertain, the enemy less likely to put on the safety catch and move into the international laws of decency and treating prisoners humanely. He’d abused an ancient convention of war that was as near as damn it sacred, and for good reason, but that still didn’t make it feel right.
“Here we go, Sam.” He looked up at the iron gates and their archaic but perfectly operational locking system of ratchets and cogs. His Lancer was slung in the low port position, magazine housing visibly empty, safety catch on. “Sorry I dropped you in this shit.”
“It’s okay, Vic,” Byrne said. “You’re a bastard, but you’re our bastard.”
Hoffman managed a smile. “I’ll remember that and use it one day.”
“Two-Six RTI, the Unvanquished.”
“That’s us, Sam.”
Hoffman turned the handwheel, and the gates swung slowly inward. The UIR captain standing a few meters away with a squad of troops was a young man who didn’t look as if he wanted to dominate the world or slaughter refugees, and that made the whole damn thing ten times worse. Hoffman needed an enemy he could loathe with every fiber of his being, an enemy so monstrous that anything he did was justified and right, because he hated the gray areas that didn’t give him clear answers and left him wondering where his enemy ended and he began. Just once in his life, he wanted that complete clarity.
The young captain looked stunned for a moment, staring right past Hoffman. Of course; he’d probably never seen a city in this state before. Bombed and broken was one thing, but piled with garbage, uncremated bodies, and excrement was another nightmare entirely. He must have been able to smell the place three klicks away.
“Captain Benoslau of the Fifteenth Furlin Cavalry.” The Indie saluted. “Lieutenant Hoffman, the Union of Independent Republics thanks you for your honorable decision. I now require your formal surrender.”
Hoffman handed Benoslau his Lancer two-handed. He’d run out of ammo anyway, and he clung to that fragile approximation of honesty like a kid crossing his fingers behind his back while lying shamelessly.
“Sir, I want to talk about the conditions of treatment for my men and some civilians who’ve refused to leave. Will you come to the city authority’s office?”
“We’ll need to secure the city. My company will move in and occupy the area now.”
It was all very civilized, and for a second, Hoffman thought, Fuck it, let them have the place, let’s not die over this. But it was gone in the next breath, like a pointless impulse to heave a brick through a window after one beer too many.
“Go ahead,” Hoffman said. “We’re all in the old quarter anyway. Might as well follow me.”
At that moment, it turned from a surreal ritual to the beginning of the endgame. This was the real battle for Anvil Gate.
“Oh … God,” Benoslau murmured.
“We tried to burn as much as we could,” Byrne said. “That’s what happens when you stop the water and food supply to five thousand people. We’ve got dysentery and some kind of respiratory epidemic, too, so that’s why we’re all huddled up here. You might want to do the same.”
Now it was down to the Pesangs and Pad to monitor the movement into the city. When the bulk of the 15th Furlins were inside, the gates would be shut, and the fires lit to cut off the main routes.
We might all burn to death. I never thought I’d just be curious about what it finally feels like to die.
There were machine-gun positions on the walls, of course. But they’d been there throughout the siege. Now they were idle and without belts.
And we have ammo.
The twin guns were silent again. Benoslau paused to stare up at them.
You’d be amazed how much explosive you can extract from a few of those big, shiny shells.
And there were eighty men with rifles, bayonets, and even machetes that would take your goddamn head clean off—if the fires didn’t get you first.
Sorry, Captain.
Casani’s old office seemed suddenly even bigger and more empty. Benoslau sat down at the table with his lieutenant, and Byrne left them to it. Hoffman tapped his ear.
“You don’t mind me keeping my radio open, do you? My men need to keep in touch. They’re pretty wrung out.”
Benoslau took a water bottle off his webbing and handed it to Hoffman. He also laid his sidearm on the table in full view. “My apologies. I didn’t think.”
That gesture almost poleaxed Hoffman. This enemy wasn’t supposed to be compassionate, better than him. It was not how he saw this event panning out. Despite himself, he twisted the cap off and drank. There was, and never would be, anything that tasted better than that liter of fresh water, however warm it was.
“Thank you,” Hoffman said.
“Do I have to sign anything?”
He could hear the whispered exchanges between Pad and the others in his earpiece. He had seen the ambush happening fast, a frenzy of confusion, but he’d underestimated how long it took two hundred troops to get their asses in gear and move into a city—even a tiny one—and imagine they were securing it. The longer this took, the worse he felt. He didn’t want to find any common ground with these people now, because it changed nothing, and he still couldn’t let Anvil Gate go.
The dead are still dead. Do your job.
“Yes, there really is a document,” Benoslau said. The lieutenant seemed to be looking for it in his pack. Hoffman handed back the bottle and steeled himself to stop thinking, right now. “We have medics, by the way, and if any of your personnel are infected or wounded, we can transfer them to a military hospital rather than a prisoner-of-war camp.”
“They’re in,” Pad’s voice said. “Or most of them. Ready to roll.”
Hoffman shut his eyes. This response was just a whisper. “Yes, do it for Sander.”
“Sorry, I didn’t hear you, Lieutenant,” Benoslau said.
The first explosion blew out the windows in the office; it must have been a lot closer than Evan and Carlile had planned. The ceiling caved in but didn’t collapse completely. Hoffman ducked under the table to dodge the beams that were creaking and sagging over his head and drew his sidearm.
It was pure chaos from that second onward. The dust was as thick as smoke. He had to get out of that room and regroup with the platoon.
“But we were talking—” Benoslau said, as if Hoffman’s worst crime was breaking his word about that. The man was on the ground, head bleeding, feeling around the floor for something. It might have been his sidearm or he m
ight have been reaching to check where his lieutenant was, but he wasn’t going to find the pistol anyway.
He knows that. So do I.
Hoffman still fired twice because that was what he’d been drilled to do. It was muscle memory, hardwired and independent of the voice screaming, How could you do that, how could you do that to him? in his brain. He found himself scrambling through the broken door, looking for escape before he’d even started regretting what he did.
Out in the street, the fires were taking hold. The Silver Era architecture, the carved wooden frames and gargoyles and plaster made with horsehair, went up like a match. Evan—somewhere, unseen—triggered explosions in a long chain all the way down the street that ran north-south. It cut the city in half, igniting an almost instant blaze down a whole block. The fuel vapor that had wafted from soaked garbage and filled empty spaces started exploding almost at random. Automatic fire rattled from every direction.
Hoffman no longer knew what was going to blow next. This was the point to start pulling back to the walls and concentrating fire toward the center. He ran for the stone stairs that led to the first-level gantry and got his first elevated look at Anvegad burning. He could already see three Gears down and couldn’t tell who they were. But there were a lot more Indie bodies sprawled in the roads.
“Hoffman to all call signs.” The radios were still working, so the comms room was still in one piece. “All call signs, fall back to the perimeter. Fire teams—get to the wall positions.”
He didn’t know if they heard him. But he did hear the Stomper, the belt-fed grenade gun, and when he reached the end of the gantry, he saw Byrne manning it with Jarrold.
Jarrold spotted him and pointed at the target taking all the Stomper’s rounds. “Sir, Indies in the warehouse over there—about twenty. Bai Tak’s gone into the alleys with other Pesangs.”
“I’ll find him. I’ve got to grab a rifle.”
Hoffman retrieved one from a dead Gear who turned out to be one of the engineers, Hollis. The fires were spreading through this half of the city, but there was nothing Hoffman could do right then to move bodies out of the flame path. He knew he wouldn’t even remember where they were if he went back later. He just had to keep moving out of the fire, engaging anything that wasn’t a Gear or a civilian. The wholesale arson had definitely flushed them out into the open; there was nowhere to find safe cover without crossing that square, and that was where Evan’s crews had moved the light machine guns. They just sat there picking off anyone who tried to get out. Hoffman moved back road by road, heading for the oldest part of the city that was all narrow alleys and overhanging balconies that no vehicle could get through.
This quarter wasn’t on fire. Either the charges hadn’t gone off or it was somewhere no fuel had been spread. But the Pesangs had chased a squad of Indies in here, and Hoffman wanted them out so he could find the engineer with the flamethrower and clear the area the hard way. When he reached the center of ten or so winding passages, he found Bai, Cho, and Shim. He heard them before he saw them, and it was the stream of unintelligible Pesan punctuated by shrieks of sheer animal terror that told him he’d found them. They came out of a small shop with their Lancers still on their backs and their machetes drawn.
“Did you lose them?” he asked. For some reason he thought they’d given up and were trying another tack. Then he looked inside the shop front. There was a damn machine gun aimed out of the front window, and five dead Indies in there, all hacked about.
Bai wiped the sweat from his nose on the back of his hand, as if the rifles were an afterthought.
“No room to fire in there,” Cho said. “We do close quarters our way.”
The fires were now a complete wall of searing heat and the rattle of weapons was gradually becoming more intermittent. Hoffman couldn’t raise anyone on the radio now. The best he could do was search the relatively undamaged side of the city road by road, and work out who he still had standing.
His watch told him it had been an hour since the first explosion kicked off the ambush. He’d have to take its word for that.
Gradually, he found more of the gunners and his own platoon, some of them searching the stone buildings, some just blurs of armor as they ran past at the end of a road and were gone. He went back to the Stomper position while looking for Byrne. He could have been anywhere, but the Gears all knew to muster at the gun emplacement when they lost comms and could move freely.
“Sam?” Hoffman still approached it carefully, alert for any lone Indie. “Sam? Come on, man. Where are you, Byrne?”
Byrne hadn’t left his post. He was still half-sitting, half-squatting on a shallow ammo crate with one arm draped over the Stomper and his forehead resting on the optics. Hoffman’s stomach knotted instantly. He knew what he was looking at, but he still wanted to believe that Byrne had paused for a moment, exhausted. But he didn’t move even when Hoffman went right up to him.
“Shit, Sam.” Hoffman felt for a throat pulse, but then he saw the big exit hole in the center of his back. “Shit. I’m sorry. Goddamn it, I’m sorry.”
Byrne would still be there when Hoffman had finally got his shit together. He made himself move on, counting off bodies on his fingers, trying to recall who he’d seen alive and who he hadn’t. He decided to go back to the muster point. Pad was already there with five of the Pesangs and a lot of the gunners. Carlile had bad burns to his hands, but he was alive.
“We did it, sir,” Pad said. “I got a call in to Brigade. They know we’ve held it. Still the Unvanquished.”
“Yeah,” Hoffman said. He could hear automatic fire, just the occasional burst. “So we are.”
His legs wouldn’t support him much longer. He went into the office and tried to sit down, but the chairs were gone so he slumped against the wall and slid down to the floor, eyes shut. He couldn’t get the taste of smoke out of his mouth no matter how much he spat. It was probably all for nothing in the end. But the bastards hadn’t taken Anvil Gate.
That wasn’t going to be much comfort to Sheraya Byrne.
“Sah? Hoffman sah!” Bai Tak was standing over him, shaking him. “You got radio? Listen!”
The Pesang put the headset to Hoffman’s ear. It was a helicopter pilot, some cheery woman with a double-R call sign, one of the new Raven pilots.
“RR-One-Seven to Anvil Gate, are you still receiving?”
Hoffman couldn’t manage an answer. Bai Tak did the talking. “Anvil gate to RR-One-Seven, this is Rifleman Tak. Lieutenant Hoffman, he injured but he says, where the fuck you been, lady?”
The Raven pilot still sounded sunny and charming. “RR-One-Seven to Anvil Gate—there’s a lot of COG traffic heading your way from both sides, ETA one hour, but stand by for air casevac in ten minutes.”
Hoffman wasn’t elated. Hoffman didn’t weep for joy, or give Bai Tak a manly hug, or even come out with an astoundingly apt or funny one-liner to draw a line under the nightmare, as the movies had convinced him he should. Real life was a disappointment. He was just angry. He couldn’t even frame that anger in a stream of curses. The near-unbearable thing was that two kids would now never know their dads. Hoffman couldn’t imagine anything worse than that.
Bai Tak reached above him and took something off the wall. It was one of Sander’s many small watercolors of Anvegad. He rolled it carefully like a scroll and put it in the empty holster on Hoffman’s webbing.
“There, sah,” Bai said. “For your Missus Hoffman. So she know what you did at Anvil Gate.”
THE FENIX ESTATE, EAST BARRICADE, JACINTO: TWO WEEKS AFTER THE RELIEF OF ANVEGAD.
Adam Fenix struggled out of the cab, determined to stand upright and look well for Marcus’s sake.
It was hard to explain to a small child that limping on crutches didn’t mean that his dad was badly hurt. The first impression counted. Adam wanted Marcus to see only that his father had kept his promise and come home. It was probably a memory that would stay with the boy, and it had to be a positive one.
&nb
sp; Elain opened the door—no housekeeper, as usual—and just stood there expressionless for a while. Homecomings were always difficult. They had so much to say and get out of their systems, and yet Adam never knew if he wanted to hold her, or cry on her shoulder, or rush to see Marcus, or … damn, he wanted to do it all at once, and his father had never shown him how it was meant to be done, only that it wasn’t. Paralyzed by the overwhelming relief—yes, he really was home, he wasn’t dreaming this, and he would still be at home when he next woke—Adam just walked carefully up the steps and buried his face in her hair.
“When the news said that Two-Six was at Anvil Gate,” she said at last, “I thought it was you. I thought you were there. I thought there’d been a mistake and you weren’t wounded.”
“I’m okay,” he said. “It was Connaught Platoon. Poor bastards.”
“Daddy! Daddy!”
Marcus came running across the tiled hall. Adam crouched and opened his arms, ready to scoop him up; this time, Adam would damned well not be like his own father. He’d do all the spoiling and indulgently emotional things, all the hugs and love and promises never to go away again. But Marcus suddenly slowed to a dignified walk as if he’d remembered that he had to behave and be the man of the house. He looked Adam in the eye, the same height at that moment, as if he expected the same decorum of him.
“I missed you, Marcus,” Adam said, straightening up. He’d lost the moment completely now and settled for ruffling his son’s hair. “I really did.”
“What’s wrong with your leg?” Marcus asked. “And did you save everyone?”
Adam had lost more than half the Gears in his original company. It was the most painful question he’d ever been asked.
Gears of War: Anvil Gate Page 44