Chapter 418 — The Northern Line I

Chapter 418: Chapter 418 — The Northern Line I

The crossing was not a clean line of trenches and sandbags. Close up, James saw it was much more ordinary than that.

The road came south over the stream on a low concrete bridge and ran on past the edge of an industrial estate. On the near side, the Irish had dug in among whatever was there. There was a tyre centre with its shutters down, a builders’ merchant with pallets of blocks stacked in the yard, and a row of low units with their signs still lit. A garden wall ran along the road. Three cars had been abandoned in the middle of it with their doors open. Soldiers were crouched behind all of it, firing.

Further back, behind James, the evacuation was still going on. An ambulance was turning in the road with its back doors open and a medic hanging out of them. Two soldiers were trying to lift a man with his leg strapped into the back of a jeep. Every time they got him halfway up he cried out, and they had to stop.

Gunfire came from more than one direction. It was in front, from the bridge, but there was more off to the left beyond the units, and something heavier further east that came through the soles of James’s boots as a dull thump before he heard it. The air smelled of smoke and hot metal and something burning that had rubber in it.

He noticed that the Irish soldiers were not all facing the same way. Some were watching the bridge. Others were turned half round, toward the gaps between the units, trying to work out where the fire from the left was coming from.

A soldier came running back from the line, bent double, and dropped into the ditch beside Farrell.

"Ma’am. Lieutenant says they’ve lost four, five more wounded. He needs—"

Something hit the line before he could finish.

It came off the bridge as a flat burst of force that went across the road and into the garden wall, and a section of the wall came apart. The soldiers behind it went flat. Somebody screamed. Dust went up in a cloud.

James saw her.

She stood on the near end of the bridge, half behind the parapet, with British soldiers spreading out to either side of her. She was a woman, and he could see that now. She had light brown hair pulled tight to the back of her head and wore dark combat kit, close-fitting and plain, built for moving in rather than for show. There was a sword in her right hand, long and straight, held low and loose.

She was not firing. She was not ducking. She stood at the end of the bridge and looked at the Irish position the way James looked at a room on a new floor. She was checking where the defenders were, which corners they held, and where the Challengers stood. Her eyes went from the tyre centre to the builders’ yard to the garden wall and back.

Then she moved, three quick steps along the parapet, and stopped again.

She was choosing.

"That’s not a soldier," said Eamon beside him, very quietly. The grin had gone completely. "That’s a pro. Look at her. She hasn’t wasted a step."

Farrell had her radio down.

"Challengers. On me. Now."

They went to her in the ditch.

"Priority hasn’t changed," she said. "We hold this until the last of the wounded and the civilians are out. That’s the job. Nobody goes chasing anybody across that bridge because they’re strong. If I see one of you over that stream, you’ll answer to me." She pointed. "Hale, Kelleher. Left side. The tyre centre. That’s where they’re pushing hardest and they’ve got a Challenger with them. Help the section there hold."

"Got it," said Finn.

"Ganner. Right. The builders’ yard. If she comes over, that’s where she’ll come. Stop her getting to the wounded."

"Understood."

Finn and Eamon went left along the ditch, low, and were gone.

James drew Durendal, properly this time, and went right.

---

The builders’ yard was a mess of stacked pallets and blocks and sand in bags, with a forklift abandoned on its side. Six Irish soldiers were in among it, firing over the top of the pallets at the bridge. A seventh lay on the ground behind them with a medic over him.

There was an Irish Challenger with them, a lad in his twenties in Ironwall colours. He was crouched behind the forklift with a heavy shield of light up in front of him. He had obviously been there a while, and his face was grey.

James got to them just as the British attack came across.

It was not the woman. It was another British Challenger, a man, coming over the bridge on the right with a section of soldiers behind him. He threw something ahead of him as he came, a crackling bolt that hit the top of the pallet stack and blew blocks across the yard. The soldiers behind the stack went flat. Two of them had been at the far end, by the gate. When the blocks came down between them and their mates, they were cut off on their own, out in the open, with nothing between them and the bridge but a gap in the fence.

The British Challenger saw them and turned toward the gap.

James was already moving.

He came round the end of the pallets and across the yard in four strides. The British Challenger saw him coming and brought his hand round, and the bolt came off it at James’s chest.

James went under it. He felt it go over his back like a blowtorch. Then he was inside, and Durendal came up across the man’s body. The man got an arm up and a sort of crackling shield round the arm, so that the blade hit the shield instead of him, and the shock of it went up James’s wrists.

The man was quick. He went back two steps and threw a second bolt, short range, at James’s face.

James turned his head. It took him across the cheek and the ear, hot and stinging. Then he stepped forward into the space the man had backed out of. The man had no more room behind him, only the fence.

Durendal came round again, and this time the shield did not come up in time.

The British Challenger went down against the fence and did not get back up.

`[CALL OF SOULS — MANA RESTORED: +30]`

`[MANA: 3,100 / 3,100]`

It was full anyway. The panel said so, and James felt it go into him regardless, cold and small. He had felt it a thousand times on a thousand floors, and he had never once felt it for a person.

He made himself look away from it.

The two soldiers by the gate had already moved. One of them was down on one knee, holding his arm, but he was moving. The other was already hauling him by the webbing back toward the pallets. They got behind the stack. The medic grabbed the wounded one.

The soldier who had done the hauling looked up at James.

"Thanks," he said. He was breathing hard. "Thanks. Can you—" He pointed past James, down toward the bridge end of the yard. "Lads up the front. They’ve been cut off. There’s three of them up there and they can’t get back."

James looked.

At the far end of the yard, near the bridge, three Irish soldiers were crouched behind a skip. They were pinned. British soldiers were coming across the near end of the bridge in short rushes, under the cover of the woman with the sword.

An Irish soldier came out from behind the skip to try to stop them. He was big, a sergeant by the stripes, with a rifle and a bayonet. He went at the nearest British soldier.

The woman got there first.

She came off the parapet onto the road, and her sword met the sergeant’s rifle in the air. She did it once and then twice, and then a third time, short sharp movements with nothing extra in them. The sergeant went back a step with every one. On the third she took the rifle off line and put her shoulder into him, and he went back into the skip and sat down hard.

She did not kill him. She did not need to. She turned to the soldiers behind the skip.

James knew straight away that she was nothing like the man by the fence.

"Stay with your wounded," he said to the soldier beside him. "Keep them behind the blocks."

He went.