Chapter 69: Under Fire

He went to Renner before she could send for him, at first light, with the slate already written, and put it on her table on top of Osei's report so she would read his account before the lieutenant's.

She read both. She read his a second time.

"A person." She set the sheets down square. "Reached as you'd reach a thread, uninvited, and let go before a word. I'm not going to ask you whether that was wise. I'm going to say the thing I'm required to say, which is that a person can be reached, and then I'm going to stop, because the last time I finished that sentence in front of you it cost me a board and I was wrong." She looked at the mask. "Marrow has this?"

Osei's report went to him first. Mine is for you.

"Then he'll have doubled the picket by noon and put the company on the flanks where you can see it, and he'll have done that because whatever is at the end of that band knows where you were sitting, and will know where you're standing." Renner stood. "He did it before I'd finished reading. Go and be where he's put you. I'd like you visible tonight, and I'd like you to know I said so."

* * *

The picket had a company on either side of it now, dug in on the slope's shoulders with their guns laid on the road, and Marrow at the near position's relay with the folder under his arm, because he had come forward himself and said nothing about why. Third Squad held the sandbags, four of them; Wren's place was Cade's, and the north edge, where Osei had put him on a crest and every night since, was Rook's.

The ward line across the valley came up at dark. They watched it for an hour.

Then it went out.

A stretch of it — twenty stanchions, the length of the gatehouse and the wall either side — went dark at once, as a row of lamps goes when somebody throws the switch, and the gate opened into the dark it had made, and they came out of it in a column that did not stop coming.

He had the wrongness before the numbers, and then the hum. Three of it. Three arcs of cylinders carried between pairs of men. And this time they did not set them down. They walked them. The thread came up between the cylinders at the gate, knee height, dull, and the carriers walked it forward up the road at a steady pace with the column behind it, and the column was not forty men.

Eighty. More. Three screens, moving. Rope behind all three. They're coming through, not past.

Osei read it and put it into the relay in the same words, and Marrow's voice came back from ten yards away and a mile at once. "Copied. Company guns, engage at three hundred. Picket holds. Nobody withdraws."

The company opened at three hundred yards and the column answered it.

That was the difference. On the slope and at the hut they had answered with bursts meant to pin; tonight they had brought guns of their own, heavy ones, and they laid them on the company's shoulders from the road and the slope and kept them there. The picket's stretch of the road went white and dark and white. Bram's heavy rifle found a carrier at two hundred and the cylinder went down and the pair behind lifted it before it had finished rolling and the thread came back up between them without a gap. They had drilled that. They had drilled all of it.

At a hundred yards the column split, a third of it going to ground to hold the company's guns on themselves, the rest coming on behind the screens.

"Cade, Hollis, the lane. Ilsen, on Bram's rifle, feed him." Osei's voice had the count in it, as it had a count in everything. "Rook."

The nearest screen's centre cylinder, sixty yards and closing, a shape on legs between two men. He reached, and it answered at once.

It died on the thread at thirty yards. He felt it flatten and go, and felt the bill arrive. The ringing that wasn't sound. Paid, in full, for nothing. The screen kept walking.

Effect none, he wrote, and didn't hold it up, because Osei had seen.

The rope teams were forty yards off behind the moving thread and the company's guns were being held on their shoulders and Cade had a man on the ground in the lane and another coming, and Hollis was firing past Cade's shoulder at a range where the muzzle flash lit the faces.

He had one more thing.

Reyes had built him a door on a scratch range and taught him to open it in order so that a thing done in order was a thing he could do scared. She had never taught him the other door. Nobody had. The other door had opened itself under him in a rig with a wall of glass panels in front of it, at fifty-five on a technician's dial, and the technician had said he isn't producing this, something's drawing through him, and a colonel had thrown a breaker. It had opened itself again at a landing zone with a relief force coming, and had not closed when the strike landed, and had taken most of a minute from him. He had never once put his hand on it. It had only ever put its hand on him.

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He put his hand on it.

Not aimed, he thought, and did not write it, because there was no time and no one to write it to. Let it.

He let go of the thing Reyes had taught him to hold first.

It came through. Not from him — through him, from somewhere behind his sternum that had no floor, the pressure that used the shape of wind arriving from the wrong side of him and going out with no line drawn for it. It found the nearest screen because the screen was a thing built to catch it, and the screen caught it. He felt it caught. The thread between the four cylinders brightened from dull to white as it took the load, as the panels in the rig had taken it, holding, holding — and the centre cylinder cracked.

He heard it. Glass, under the guns. The carriers dropped it. The thread flared and went out.

The draw did not fall off. It went looking. It found the second screen thirty yards to the right and went into it the way water finds the low point of a floor, and the second screen held for less time than the first because it was built to catch a single use and the draw had no size, and two cylinders went at once, and the men carrying the third let it fall and ran. The third screen he never saw go. He felt it go. He felt there was nothing in front of him any more that was built to catch what was coming through him, and it kept coming.

It went into the road. It went into the slope. Men on the road stopped being on their feet.

The company's guns had a column in the open and no screen in front of it, and used it.

He was on his knees behind the sandbags, and the whiteness was a sheet, and the ringing had stopped being a thing at the edges and become all he had, and somewhere under it he was reaching for the door to close it and could not find where he had put the door. He had let go of the handle. That was all it had taken. He could see, ten yards off, Marrow at the relay, and Marrow's hand at his collar where whatever the charge answered to was carried, and Marrow's hand not moving, and Marrow's face turned toward the road and not toward him.

Hollis's face. Close. Saying a word he couldn't hear.

Then not that.

* * *

He surfaced once into dark, on his back, moving, a ground sheet under him and somebody's grip on the corner of it by his head and a strap across his chest that was the charge's strap, and went back under before he had decided whose shoulder.

The second time it was daylight and a canvas roof and the aid tent's particular pressure, and Wren's face, from the next cot, turned toward him with her arm strapped across her chest.

"You're on my side of the tent," she said. "Ilsen carried your feet. He says you're heavier than you look, which is nothing, so I don't know what he means." She watched him. "It's past noon. You've been out the better part of a night and a morning. Cade and Hollis had the head end of the sheet from the picket and Osei walked beside it counting, and I've never seen her count one thing that many times."

He found the stylus by touch. The slate was on the cot beside his hand where someone had put it.

The screens.

"Gone. All three. Cracked on the road where they dropped them; the company's got the pieces in a crate. Thirty-some of theirs on the road, Hollis says, and the rest went back through the gate at a run and the ward line came up behind them and hasn't gone down since." She stopped. "Six of the company dead. Nine hurt. Bram's people are whole. We're whole, all six. I'm counting you."

He let that settle. Under the charge his sternum ached in a way that had no shape yet, and his left leg, when he moved it, did not answer at first and then did, late, as a relay answers when the glass ring has gone grey.

Osei came in with the light behind her and stood at the cot's end.

"Report, since you'll want it and I've written it. One asset use, defensive, witnessed, on my order. Effect: none. One further asset use, defensive, witnessed, on no order of mine. Effect —" she gave the next word no more weight than the rest "— decisive. Three enemy devices destroyed. Enemy assault broken at the picket line. Asset non-responsive from the moment the third device failed until this morning. Colonel Marrow was present at the picket and did not trigger the suppression device. I asked him to confirm that for the record and he did."

Why not.

"You'll want that from him. He's outside. He's been outside since it got light and he hasn't asked to come in, which I'll take as him asking." She looked at the mask. "Hollis says he had his hand on it. Hollis says he watched him not. Hollis is standing outside too, and he's not going to come in until the colonel's been, and I've told him that's a stupid order of precedence and he's ignored me." She turned to go, and stopped. "Six," she said, to the tent generally. "Four on their feet, one on a cot who says she's ambulatory and isn't, and you. I've written six every night on this front and I'm not changing the number because two of it are lying down."

She went out, and Marrow came in.

He stood where Osei had stood, with the folder under his arm, and looked at the charge on the strap over Rook's sternum, and then at the mask.

"I said I'd end an output if I judged it about to cost me a soldier or an objective." He said it as he had said it across a map table on the first day. "I judged. It was about to buy me one. Three of their devices and their line broken in the open and a gate they haven't opened since. I had my hand on it and I let it run, and you went down at the end of it, and I'd have let it run if you'd gone down sooner. You'll want to know I'd do it again. I'm telling you before you have to ask."

Rook looked at him for a while. Then he wrote, slowly, because his hand was not yet entirely his.

Two hands on me last night. Neither was mine.

Marrow read it. He didn't argue with it, any more than he had argued with leash.

"That's the condition," he said. "It was always the condition. Last night's the first time you've seen both hands at once." He tucked the folder tighter under his arm and went out.