the Walls of San Aurelio: A Novel Four Banners

The war was supposed to be over. Instead, eight thousand Longhua soldiers remain behind the ancient walls of San Aurelio-and nearly twelve thousand Maharlikan civilians are trapped with them. The Longhua campaign has collapsed. Seiran and Goryeon forces control the skies. Maharlikan troops surround the city. Militarily, the isolated garrison has no hope of victory. But General Qiao Ren refuses to surrender. He understands that the defenders cannot escape. He knows that relief will never come. And he intends to make the liberation of San Aurelio so costly that a military defeat can still become a political victory. Outside the walls, Colonel Rafael de los Santos faces an impossible problem. He has the military strength to destroy the Longhua position-but doing so could kill thousands of the very civilians his forces have come to rescue. Maharlikan soldiers, Seiran forces, and Goryeon engineers must form an uneasy alliance to accomplish something far more difficult than winning a battle: they must free a city without destroying it. Beneath San Aurelio lies another battlefield. Ancient tunnels, forgotten cisterns, drainage routes, and maintenance passages may offer a way inside. They may also turn the entire rescue operation into a trap. As the siege tightens, the question is no longer who will win. The question is how many people must die before anyone is willing to admit that victory has already become something else. The Walls of San Aurelio is a military science-fiction novel of war, sovereignty, alliance, and restraint-set in the Four Banners universe, in the years before the tensions that will become the Emerald Cold War.