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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 drillwithout 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