Gears of War: Anvil Gate (51 page)

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.