Chapter 61: First Contact

The picket line sat a mile north of camp on the corridor's east shoulder, where the road bent toward the valley and the ground rose enough to see it bend. Two sandbagged positions, a relay, a fire lane cut through the scrub with more optimism than saw. Third Squad had drawn the near position the morning after they arrived and Bram's section the far one, forty yards apart with the fire lane between, and by the second night out the two had stopped being two.

Rook took the north edge of the near position because Osei had put him there on a ridge once and he had never asked her to put him anywhere else. The post of trust, Wren had called it. He sat with the rifle across his knees and the charge on his strap and let the sense that stood in for sight lie over the slope below like a cloth, and for three hours the slope gave him rock and scrub and the cold coming down off the valley.

Then it gave him people.

He counted the wrongness before he counted them. Spacing too even for animals, movement too patient for anyone lost. He reached with the Sight because reaching cost nothing, and the slope came back as a fence line once had. Purpose worn smooth. Rehearsed. Every one of them at ease on the ground they were crossing and with what sat at the top of it.

A dozen. More behind, harder to fix. And among them, carried between pairs of men at a walk, four low heavy shapes, and the pitch of them reached him before the shape did. The hum he had heard in a ravine and at a fence, the one built for a body like his, four of it at once and moving.

Contact. Twelve plus, east slope, two hundred yards. Carrying something. Same hum as the fence.

He passed the slate to Wren, who passed the words to Osei at once, and Osei's hand went up in the signal for contact and every rifle on the near position came off its knee.

* * *

The dozen came up the slope at a steady walk, well spread, and when the near position opened on them at a hundred and fifty yards they went to ground and answered. Rifles unslung now, disciplined, short bursts that walked along the sandbags and held the position in place. Suppressing fire, and only that.

The four heavy shapes kept coming under it.

Bram's section opened from the far position on the flank, and the dozen shifted to answer that too, and for a minute the fire lane between the two positions was the only quiet ground on the slope. A private from Bram's section went down in the lane trying to cross it, hit low, and lay there with the rounds walking toward him in the dirt a hand's width at a time. The grease-pencil private. Rook knew him by the shape of the glass on his chest.

"Ilsen, Cade, get me a lane on that." Osei, level, counting the problem down like a headcount. Ilsen and Cade burned a magazine each into the scrub where the nearest bursts came from and the bursts moved and came back. "Hollis."

"Can't reach it from here." Hollis, shifting. "Give me twenty seconds and a—"

"No." Osei didn't look at the mask. She'd never needed to look at it to give him an order. "Conventional means have failed. Rook. The gun on the left, the one walking on him. Defensive, witnessed. Go."

He set the rifle down.

Breath. The first beat, as Reyes had drilled it into him over five days on a scratch range — the pause that emptied the rest of the body out and left one thing standing. She had never cared whether he could take one. She cared that he stopped, in order, before he reached. Stance. The ground under his boots, the sandbag against his knee, the slope's angle read and kept. Target. The gun on the left, forty yards below and left of the fire lane, a muzzle flash and the shape of a man behind it and nothing else in the world.

He reached inward and it answered at once. It had never answered at once before. On a shelf it had taken a full second of nothing, at Corvale it had come when called but only just. This time it was there, waiting, the door standing open before his hand reached it. He opened it.

The pulse went out. He felt it go — a pressure using the shape of wind — aimed down a line he had drawn from his sternum to a man's rifle. He felt it cross the fire lane. He felt it cross the scrub.

Then he felt it stop.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Against something, all at once, as a hand stops against glass in the dark. The whole of it arriving at a line thirty yards below the sandbags and flattening there and going out. The scrub beyond the line didn't move. The gun on the left kept firing.

The cost arrived on schedule.

The ringing that wasn't sound. Whiteness crowding the edges of what he saw with. The weight behind the sternum, under the charge, exactly where a clean single use had always put it — a bill delivered in full for a thing that had bought nothing at all. His left leg hitched when he shifted it, the old hitch from a shelf on Aldern Ridge.

Below him, the four heavy shapes had stopped moving. They sat in a shallow arc across the slope thirty yards down, squat cylinders on legs, and between them a line. He could see it now that he was looking for it, a thread of dull Core-light strung cylinder to cylinder at knee height. A ward laid the wrong way round, and the hum off it was the baton's hum.

It stopped. There's a line. Four devices, a light between them. The pulse died on it.

He wrote it with a hand that shook slightly and held the slate up for whoever would take it.

"Died on it." Osei read it once, and something in her voice set. "All right. Then we do it the slow way. Bram, I need your far gun on the left position now, I don't care what it costs you in rounds. Cade. The lane. Wren, on Cade. Move."

* * *

The slow way took nine minutes.

It took Bram's section's heavy rifle walking fire along the left position until the gun there went quiet, and Cade going flat into the fire lane and dragging the grease-pencil private out of it by the harness with Wren firing over both of them, and Ilsen and Hollis putting enough into the scrub that the dozen's fire slackened and shifted and slackened again. It took the picket doing what a picket did, without him, while he sat behind the sandbags with his rifle back in his hands and the whiteness thinning at the edges and his leg not yet trusting him.

He fired the rifle. He hit what he aimed at, or near it. Nobody had deployed him for that.

And then the dozen went.

They went in order. That was what he watched, when the whiteness had thinned enough to watch. The four heavy shapes were lifted between pairs of men, the thread of light between them going out cylinder by cylinder as each was hoisted, and the dozen walked backward down the slope in the same even spacing they'd come up in, firing as they went, and were gone into the dark toward the valley without leaving a body. They had come up a slope into two positions and a Class II asset, held for a quarter of an hour, and left when they had what they came for.

They had come within thirty yards of the sandbags and no closer, stood behind a line, and watched whether it held.

It had.

"Positions, count." Osei's voice, unchanged from a truck's tailgate at noon. Hands went up along the sandbags. "Six. Bram."

"Four and me. One hit, low, through and through, he'll keep." Bram's voice came across the fire lane, tight. "One of theirs went the wrong way when they pulled out. Ran toward my far gun instead of away from it, and your Cade was in the lane and had him on the ground before my gun could decide. He's alive. He's not talking."

"Hold him. Nobody touches him till the major sees him." Osei crouched by the relay and keyed it and waited for the glass ring to warm. "Ninth Actual — belay. Command, this is picket north, Osei. Contact, twelve plus, withdrawn in order toward the valley. One friendly wounded, stable. One prisoner. One asset use, defensive, witnessed, on my order." She stopped. Rook watched her decide how to say the next part and then say it as she said everything. "Effect: none. Enemy raised a field device, four components, that stopped the output at thirty yards. They withdrew with the device intact. Picket holds."

The relay hissed. Then Marrow's voice, level, from a mile away, with no delay in it at all. "Copied. Hold the picket. Renner's coming forward for the prisoner. Osei. Say again the effect."

"None, Colonel. It died on their line. They watched it die and then they left."

"Copied," Marrow said, and the channel closed.

* * *

Hollis found him at the north edge afterward with a canteen he didn't offer, because he had stopped offering the ones that couldn't be received a long time ago, and sat down on the sandbags beside him unasked.

"You did it right." He said it to the slope. "I've watched you do it more times than anyone breathing. That was the cleanest. Breath, the stance, the whole thing Reyes drilled. I could see you do it from twenty feet. It went where you sent it." He drank. "And it didn't matter."

No.

"They knew it wouldn't. That's what I keep sitting on. They walked four of those things up a slope under fire and set them down at the range where they'd need them and not one yard closer, and then they stood there and let you throw it at them." Hollis capped the canteen. "Sten used to say a map's only bad if the other side's got a better one. They've got a better one. Of you."

Corps deployed me here as the thing they couldn't answer.

"Corps deploys what it's got. Turns out they had an answer. They've probably had it since the ravine. They just didn't need to show it to you till now." He stood, and his shoulder caught and he waited for it and then finished standing. "Leg?"

Hitching. It'll settle.

"It always does." He looked down at the mask. "Osei wrote effect: none. She wrote it because it's true and because Marrow asked her to say it twice, and I watched her not like writing it. That's the second time I've seen her not like writing something about you. The first one was on the crest." He shouldered his rifle. "Renner's at the far position with the prisoner. Cade's holding him. Says he's got the look. You'll know the one."

He went back along the sandbags to his own sector. Rook took the north edge again with the rifle across his knees and kept it until the relief came up at first light.