Gears of War: Anvil Gate (13 page)

It’s only a few more months. I can handle that
.

The briefing document had given him a description of Anvegad, but no sense of what it felt like to be here. It was a natural fortress on a rocky cliff overlooking the pass into Kashkur from the south. Armies had fought over it throughout history to control Kashkur’s rich cities and silver mines. The silver had been mined out long ago, but Kashkur still had plenty to interest invaders—one fifth of Sera’s imulsion reserves.

When Hoffman’s COG transport rumbled down that road for the first time, and he saw the fort rising up out of nowhere from that crag, it looked like a mirage, a bizarre trick of nature. The air was so still and clear most mornings that every color, even the black shadows, seemed unnaturally vivid. Captain Sander, Hoffman’s CO, painted pictures of it.

That was his hobby—watercolors. He said this place was
magical
, the poor deluded bastard. Hoffman was marooned here as second in command to a goddamn
artist
—and an artillery captain, at that. Maybe COG command was trying to civilize him, the same way that Staff College had instructed him on the right fork to use at dinner and how to press his best dress uniform. He was nearly thirty. He didn’t need to be taught how to wipe his own ass, thanks. That still rankled.

Come on, you’re an officer now. If you can’t hack the internal politics … you should have stayed an NCO
.

The spectacular landscape changed color as the sun rose. He’d have to take a picture for Margaret, or maybe she’d prefer one of Sander’s watercolors. Married or not, Hoffman was still at the
stage of worrying that he was just a bit of rough for her, a novelty she’d tire of and then wonder why the hell she hadn’t married one of her own kind. She was a trial lawyer, for God’s sake—college educated, having dinner with people who’d probably expect the likes of Hoffman to park their cars or mow their lawns. She was well traveled in the kind of way that didn’t involve rolling into foreign towns with an armored division. She was out of his league. And yet—she’d married him.

Yes. A nice painting. She’ll like that. Or maybe some of the local silver jewelry. Or is silver too cheap?

Hoffman went back to shaving. The mirror reminded him unkindly how fast his hair was thinning. He studied his scalp, moving a little so that the harsh light from the single bulb caught the worst reflection, and then made the decision he’d put off for some time. He wasn’t going to turn into one of those insecure assholes who always fretted about their bald patch.
Fuck it
. It was just too much testosterone, that was all. He’d embrace it. He’d
flaunt
it.

His hair was buzz-cut anyway. There wasn’t much to lose. He lathered the shaving soap over his head and took the razor to it.

It’ll grow again if I change my mind. Or if Margaret doesn’t like it
.

When he rinsed off the soap in the shower—a trickle of tepid water, two minutes, nothing indulgent—there was still a haze of dark stubble under the skin. But he felt unburdened. He dressed and made his way down the steep stone staircase to the adjutant’s office, not expecting anyone to be up and about yet except the duty sentry, whose task was more to keep out pilfering locals than the enemy.

Anvegad had one thing going for it, at least for anyone who wanted a quiet war, which Hoffman didn’t. It wasn’t on the front line. Vasgar—neutral, but not stupid when it came to keeping the COG placated—was a nice big buffer running the length of Kashkur’s southern border. There were no Indies loitering in the front yard. Hoffman wasn’t used to that.

“’Morning, Victor.” Ranald Sander looked up from a pile of paper on the signals desk, phone pressed to his ear, and froze. “Is this the new barbarian look?”

Hoffman ran his palm over his scalp. “I didn’t want to look too civilized.”

“Good.” Sander held up a finely pleated sheet of teleprinter paper soaked with black ink. He had three piles of paper in front of him on the desk, and he pushed one across to Hoffman. It was the stack of regular messages from the Gears’ families. “Just going through the overnights and checking what’s missing. This bloody thing’s still jamming.”

“At least the family-grams came through. Remember, if there’s anything urgent from HQ, they’ll call.”

Sander seemed to need to be reminded of these things. He was very young, a brand-new captain at twenty-three. Hoffman felt like a sergeant nursemaiding a green lieutenant again but that wasn’t a bad thing. He knew how to do that, even if he had never done it outside the infantry. It beat worrying about using the right fork at dinner.

Hoffman sorted through the messages, checking off the names with a stub of pencil. Some men didn’t get messages at all. Some got the maximum allocation of three a month, two hundred words each. This far from home, morale hinged on a few basic things—letters from loved ones, a full stomach, and the weekly delivery of a single precious movie that everyone on Jacinto had seen a year ago. The full stomach had to be shipped in too. Anvegad relied mostly on food brought in by road from the north. A fortress city’s strengths were also its drawbacks.

Sander put the phone back on its cradle a little too heavily. “Screw them. I can’t wait all day.” He took the vehicle keys off a hook on the wall and tossed them to Hoffman. “Come on, let’s walk the course.”

Sander grabbed his camera and a small wooden box with a brass catch. Hoffman humored him. Everyone was marking time here, and maybe one day Sander’s paintings would be worth something. He drove slowly through narrow streets that were almost deserted at this time of the morning, catching scents of baking loaves, spice-laden coffee, and drains. There was one way in and out of Anvegad. The steep, winding track was just wide
enough for a large truck, flanked by a sheer drop onto the rocks below. Even in the small all-terrain vehicle, Hoffman took things carefully.

“How’s your wife, sir?” Hoffman asked.

“Complaining about swollen legs and indigestion,” Sander said. “Five weeks to go. At least we’ve agreed on a name now—Terrance if it’s a boy, Muriell if it’s a girl.”

Hoffman hadn’t given much thought to families. They happened to other people, and he was still caught up in the adventure of being a couple. “You really should put in for compassionate leave.”

“I’ll do that. How’s married life treating you? Your wife’s a lawyer, isn’t she?”

No need to sound amazed
. “She is, sir.”

“How did you meet?”

“She was working on an inquiry for the Defense Department.”
It wasn’t at a cocktail party after the opera, but you guessed that, didn’t you?
“She asked me some questions and I gave her some frank answers.”

That was what she told him later:
You’re the most honest man I’ve ever met, Victor. And I don’t meet many in this job
.

“Very cryptic,” Sander said.

Hoffman let it drop. He breathed again when the track leveled out and all four wheels were on the flat. From the base of the cliff, he drove out on the usual route—the road south through the narrow V-shaped gorge that was the pass, seven kilometers down the pipeline to the Vasgar border, and then left to follow the invisible line that divided the Coalition of Ordered Governments from a nervous neutral world that hadn’t made up its mind yet. There was nothing physical to mark it apart from a thick red strip painted around the girth of the overground pipeline, and the remains of a seasonal riverbed that had been dry for so long that even the maps didn’t show it in blue.

Six more kilometers would have taken them to the refinery. Sander tapped the dashboard to bring Hoffman to a stop.

“I won’t be long,” he said. “Five minutes. Ten, tops.”

It was the light. Hoffman had worked that out by now. Sander liked painting Anvil Gate when the sun was just above the horizon, because the shadows were dramatic, and this was the best vantage point to look back on the whole cliff.

Shame about the gun battery. And all the metal gantries. Spoils the Silver Era illusion
.

Sander got out of the ATV and sat on the fender with the contents of his wooden box laid out on the vehicle’s hood, roughing out a picture on a piece of card with a stick of charcoal. Hoffman jumped down from the driver’s seat and wandered off for a smoke. He’d have to give that up before he next went home. Margaret didn’t like it. It’d be the death of him, she said.

When he turned and ambled back toward the ATV, Sander was busy taking photographs.

“That’s cheating,” Hoffman said.

“It’s that, or stay here for another hour or two.” Sander frowned at the camera, fiddling with the lens. “Why’s it cheating?”

“Aren’t you supposed to depict what you notice with your own eyes?”

“And you keep telling me you’re not a cultured man.”

“I married a cultured woman. She knows all that stuff.”

Sander chuckled to himself as if Hoffman was being witty. But Hoffman meant it. He didn’t point that out. They climbed back into the ATV and carried on along the border for a while before looping back and returning to Anvegad. A truck was grinding its way up the narrow track, and Hoffman decided to wait until it made the gates at the top before he followed it. Trucks broke down on that gradient all too often. Turning or reversing all the way down wasn’t something he fancied doing. By the time he saw its tailgate vanish between the huge carved pillars, his guts were rumbling in protest at being forced to endure goddamn amateur art while empty.

“I’ll take the family-grams over to the barracks,” Hoffman said. Anvil Gate was a small garrison, around a hundred men and women—a battery of Prince Ozore’s Artillery, with two attached platoons from 26 RTI and the Ephyra Engineers. “I could use the exercise.”

He’d grab breakfast with the men, too. There was no officers’ mess to speak of, just a sitting room in the HQ building where his quarters were, and they often ate at one of the local bars that Sander had taken a shine to. But Hoffman missed the company of sergeants. Separation from the ranks left him feeling lost.

The Gears’ quarters were spread across a number of buildings, some in regular barracks on the far side of the compound, some in the first cellar level of the huge gun emplacements. Anvil Gate was a vertical sort of place—more deep than wide, a small footprint with tunnels and cellars dug deep into bedrock that was already honeycombed with natural caves and fissures. There was even an underground river that branched off from the surface ten klicks away. Hoffman didn’t like the underground world and its damp, fungal smells. When he wandered into the small mess in the main battery, the perfume of frying eggs and local sausage did a thorough job of disguising them.

“Safe as houses down here, sir,” said Padrick Salton, pulling out a chair. “Fried egg sandwich?”

“It’s a damn coffin,” Hoffman muttered. He put the sheaf of printed messages in the center of the table. “Here’s the mail. And yes, I
will
have one of your heathen delicacies, Private. Thank you.”

Salton—“Pad” to everyone—was a South Islander who’d brought strange food habits with him, not that Hoffman was complaining. Pad didn’t cook the exotic native dishes of fruits, strange roots, and goat meat. He was a descendant of northern colonizers. But he existed somewhere between the two cultures. His northern fried egg sandwich was laced with blisteringly hot Islander spices, and he had full-face blue tribal tattoos on freckled, pale skin. Hoffman was fascinated and always tried not to stare at him. What looked right on darker-skinned indigenous people looked disturbing when topped by red hair.

It wasn’t just the stark contrast in color. It was a kind of warning that Pad had embraced everything about his particular island’s culture, including the tendency to no-quarters-given warfare.

The sandwich was an experience. Hoffman’s eyes watered as fierce chemical warfare was waged against his sinuses. The rest of
Pad’s platoon showed up and helped themselves to the bread, fried eggs, and sauce, a ritual that seemed timed to the minute to coincide with the 0700 radio news.

“Ninety percent boredom, ten percent shit-yourself panic,” said Sergeant Byrne.

“Make that ninety-nine percent here,” Pad said. “Maybe a hundred.”

Hoffman chewed in silence, wondering if having an officer there inhibited them, an officer who’d been one of them until recently. He also felt that nagging guilt that he was coasting here while most of 26 RTI—his comrades, his friends—were on the much tougher, much bloodier front line on the western border.

He wondered where Bernie Mataki was at that moment. She had tribal tattoos, too. None on her face, though. She said her tribe didn’t do that.

The radio burbled away in the background. It was a weak signal this far from Ephyra, but nobody cared as long they heard voices in an accent and a language they could understand. The first morning bulletin with its international headlines was something they all knew their families would be listening to at that same moment. It gave them a sense of communion across thousands of kilometers.

Margaret listened to it, too. She’d promised she would. Hoffman closed his eyes and tried to imagine how she’d interpret the headlines. She always had something to say, and she didn’t have a lot of respect for politicians. He liked that in a woman.

The crackling voice reading the bulletin this morning was a young man’s. “
Vasgar’s President Ilim is facing a vote of no confidence after his administration failed to agree to budget measures with the opposition Unity party. Meanwhile, on Vasgar’s southern border, the dispute with the UIR over gas supplies to—
”

“I hope they can pay their imulsion bill,” Pad said. “Or we’ll have to go out there with a frigging big spanner and turn off the pipeline.”

Everyone laughed and Hoffman got up to fry another egg for himself. Life went on. Bills got paid and letters got read. After more than sixty years of fighting, war had become the normal, the
stable, the expected, and all of Sera—formally involved in hostilities or playing at being neutral observers—had rebuilt its reality around it. Hoffman wasn’t sure if that was stoic resilience or plain damn stupidity.