Chapter 75: Insertion

The near position had six on it and looked like six. That was all of Marrow's plan the wall could read, and Rook stood at the north edge of the near position and let the wall read it.

Wren sat a pace behind Osei with the relay in her lap and the glass in her left hand. Osei had counted them onto the position at dusk, aloud, and once since. Cade and Hollis had the fire lane. Ilsen was across it on the far position, feeding Bram's heavy rifle, and Bram's section lay along that position's sandbags with their rifles on a valley whose stanchions had come up an hour ago until the wall was lit from the gatehouse to the river.

Below the wall, in two hundred yards of ground the stanchions' light didn't reach, a company lay in fours and did not move. He had laid the baseline sense over that ground and it had given him rock and the cold coming down the slope, and he had stopped looking, because if he could not find them then neither could anything on the wall.

The gate had opened between midnight and three on every night the section had watched it. Wren had the time and said it every quarter-hour, low, and Osei let her.

"Two."

The stanchions either side of the gatehouse went out.

* * *

Twenty stanchions, as before, and the gate opening into the dark it had made, and the shapes coming through. He had the wrongness first and then the count. Fifty, sixty, in a loose column. And then he had the thing that was different.

No hum.

They came up the road at a run. No cylinders between pairs of men, no thread at knee height. Rope, the coils on the shoulders that had carried them every time, and rifles slung, and behind them, from the top of the wall itself, the heavy guns they had brought to the road six nights ago, laid now onto the picket at long range, walking the sandbags.

Sixty. No screen. They're running at us. Guns on the wall.

Wren read it off the slate and put it into Osei's ear, and Osei's hand went up and came down, and both positions opened at two hundred yards. The column did not go to ground. They took the fire and left men on the road and kept coming, with the wall's guns holding the sandbags' heads down, and at a hundred yards Rook understood that they had decided the picket was a thing to be run through and not measured.

"Rook." Osei, beside him. "Conventional means are about to fail. The lead rope team. Defensive, witnessed. Go."

The four men at the head of the column with the coils on their shoulders, sixty yards and closing, on the road with nothing in front of them but the road. He reached, and it answered at once.

He felt it cross the scrub. He felt it cross the place, thirty yards down, where it had died on two nights — and it did not die. It went on down the slope, pressure using the shape of wind, and arrived, and the four men at the head of the column stopped being on the road.

The cost came in on schedule. He paid it and for the first time on this front had something to show for the bill.

The column came on over the four.

They had known. They had counted on one use and spent four men to have it spent, and the rest came up the last fifty yards under the wall's guns. Bram's heavy rifle on the far position took the road in long bursts. Cade and Hollis had men in the lane at twenty yards. A rope team reached the sandbags at the north edge. Three of them, coils coming off shoulders, and the pitch of the baton in the hand of the nearest one, the pitch built for a body like his, close enough to feel.

His hands went.

The nearest man's wrist was in the first lock before the baton had finished coming up, and the elbow went where the Foundry had drilled elbows to go, and the man went over the sandbags onto the position's floor with his arm wrong and the baton loose. The second had a loop of rope open. Rook took the loop and the hand behind it and turned, and the second man's knee found the sandbag frame and stopped working. The third stood at the edge with the coil still on his shoulder and looked at the mask, and Hollis shot him.

The baton lay on the sandbags, humming. He picked it up because it was there, and it hummed in his palm at the pitch of eleven years, and he put it down on the far side of the sandbags where nobody would step on it.

Then the dead ground under the wall was full of men.

* * *

He did not see it start. He had the whiteness at the edges and the rope man at his feet and Osei's voice counting the problem down, and then the slope below the picket, on the sortie's left, was full of muzzle flash from ground the wall's guns had never once been laid on, and the sortie's rear turned to face it and found a company.

A plain origin note: is the author's publishing page, while this copy was taken without permission. Reading there helps the author.

The company did not stay to fight it. It rose out of two hundred yards of dead ground in fours and went past the sortie's flank at a run into the dark stretch of wall where twenty stanchions had gone out, and through the open gate, and it did not stop at the gate. The sortie was left on the road between a picket that had held and a gate that was no longer theirs, with their own guns on the wall above them firing at things inside the wall now. Some went back. Some went down. Some ran for the gate and into the rear of a company.

Wren's relay spoke without being called.

"Leading element, this is Command. Through."

"Six." Osei was already up. "Cade, Hollis, the lane. Wren on me. Rook — with me, and if that leg's late you say so."

It's late. I'm coming.

They went down the slope through the sortie's ground. Men lay on the road with coils of rope beside them; one was still moving, and Cade stepped over him. Ilsen came across the lane at a run from the far position, the heavy rifle in Bram's own hands now, and Bram's section peeled away toward the gate's other side, where Renner stood with the company's rear and the threat-assessment officer beside her.

The gate was a gap in a wall with the light gone out of it. He went through it behind Osei.

* * *

Inside the wall was a road, and buildings with roofs, and the company's guns going forward along the wall's inside face toward the vehicle yard, where the fire still stood out of the long low building at the valley's far end and lit the trucks. In the dead stretch by the gate the ward's absence sat on his skin as a room feels different with a door open.

Ahead, at the valley's center, the tall structure.

He had disliked it from the ridge, on the first evening, before the rest of him had an opinion. It reached him now from four hundred yards, and he knew the pitch before he knew he was hearing it. Under the guns, under the company's boots on the road, a hum coming off the building as if the structure were one of them.

"Leading element. The center." Marrow's voice, on the relay, from somewhere on the road behind them and not from a tent. "That's what Corps sent you for."

"Copied." Osei didn't slow. "Six. On the building."

Two of them at the door. Hollis had the first and Ilsen the second before either had a rifle level, and Osei put Cade through the door and went in after him and Rook went in third.

It was a hall. High. The height was the first thing, the roof a long way up on trusses, and lamps along the trusses that somebody had left burning. Down each long wall, a row of cots. Iron-framed, made up, blanket squared, a restraint strap folded at the foot of each. Twenty-four. Osei counted them under her breath. At the head of each frame, bolted to the iron where a pillow would have been, a squat grey housing the size of a fist, and every one of them lit with a dull Core-light, and every one of them humming.

He stopped inside the door.

The slate in his hand had gone grey. He looked at it and it was a dark pane with no light in it, a dead relay's glass. He pressed his thumb to it and it did not wake.

Beside him Wren said, "The relay's gone," in the voice she'd used on a crest with a dial in her hand. "Ring's gone grey. It's not jammed, it's—" She stopped.

He had no slate. He had hand signals. He gave Osei the one for hold, as she had taught it on a staging yard, and she read it and held the squad at the door, and he walked out between the two rows of cots on his own.

The Sight went first. He felt it go by degrees, as the stanchions had come up along the wall — not a slam, as the ward in a holding-room floor had been, but a dimming, cot by cot, the sharp sense he had woken with at a vault door thinning as he passed each humming housing until, halfway down the hall, it was not there. What was left was the old sense. The dull, secondhand, borrowed one he had carried for eleven years: shapes without edges, warmth without detail, a cot as a colder patch beside a warmer one, the far end of the hall a pressure and not a place. It had never been eyes. He had forgotten, in the months since a door opened, that it had once been everything he had.

He kept walking. His boots on the floor were loud; Osei's voice behind him said his name once, and he heard it whole, a lieutenant at a door, because they had left him that, and he did not turn round.

The rig stood at the hall's far end under the full height of the roof. He knew it by its outline: a frame for holding a body still relative to something, veined with etching he could feel as a fine cold pattern across the dull sense, and behind it, stacked to the trusses, a wall of dark panels, more than he could count, built to catch what came off a body strapped in that frame. That was what the height was for. On the wall above the panels, painted, kept up, was the insignia that had been scorched off every surface he had ever been carried past. Nobody had scorched anything here.

Beside the rig, at the height of a hand, a lever in a housing. A colonel had thrown one in a demonstration room with the panels cracking, and he had been strapped in a frame ten feet from it and had known where it was.

He put his hand on it.

For a moment he stood there with the hum in his teeth and the twenty-four housings lit along the walls behind him, and he understood what had held everything of his under a floor for eleven years, and what had let it up when the site's Core died with the Dominion, and why the first words he had ever put into another mind had gone into a medic's at a tailgate and not, in all those years, into a handler's.

He threw the lever.

The hum stopped. All of it, at once, the twenty-four housings going dark along the walls together as the stanchions had gone dark at the gate, and the pressure came off his skin and the Sight came up under it — the hall arriving whole, Osei at the door with four behind her and her rifle level on the room — the sharp particular sense returning as it had once returned through a vault door.

The slate woke in his hand.

He walked back up the hall between the cots, on a leg that was late, to the door, and wrote for Osei, because she was the witnessing officer and it had been his hand on their plant.

Twenty-four housings, one to a cot. Same pitch as the baton and the screen. They take the Sight and the slate and the relay. I walked the row and threw the breaker at the rig. Off, as of now. By my hand.

Osei read it. She looked past him down the hall, at the frame under the height, and back at the slate, and opened her book.

"That's the building," she said. "That's what they put in the middle." She wrote the time. "Wren, the relay."

"Ring's back, ma'am. It's—" Wren had the set up on her knee, one-handed, and the needle had gone below the marked bands and stopped, hard against the pin, and the glass ring around it was brighter than he had ever seen it. "It's pointing," she said, and turned the set on her knee until the needle sat where it wanted to sit, and what it wanted was a door in the hall's north wall, past the rig, a plain door with a handle.