Chapter 78: Racing the Fire

Wren had the relay up on the table beside the lamp, and the first thing it carried, once Osei's report had gone south, was the yard.

"Command, this is Intelligence. Three trucks taken in the yard, loaded. The rest went north through the far gate before we reached it; I've a section's rifles on the gate and nothing to chase them with. The store is lit at both ends and the roof's in. They're holding the north door from inside, eight or ten, and there's a stair behind it. I've put the reconnaissance section at that door and been thrown off it, and I need the company's rear." Renner's voice, level as it had been at a ford. "I need it now."

"Intelligence, Command. Negative. The buildings at the far end have come out. They're on the road toward the center in strength and the platoons are falling back on it. You hold what you've got in the yard. Nothing is coming to you." A pause on the channel, and then Marrow to the hall, in the same voice: "Leading element. The building is held at any cost. That building is what Corps sent a company for. Acknowledge."

"Leading element copies," Osei said. "Held at any cost."

She had the squad moving before the channel closed. Cade to the hall's south door, Hollis with him; Ilsen along the west wall of cots with the two rifles they had taken off the door guards; Wren on the chair in the annex with the relay and the man on the cot. "You stay on him," Osei told her. "If he stands up, you tell me. If he does anything else, tell me before he's finished."

"Yes, ma'am."

The platoons came in through the south door in the order they had gone out of the dead ground — in fours, at a run, with two lieutenants counting them past and the last four backing in with their rifles on the road. Marrow came in behind the last four. He had lost the folder somewhere, and his coat was open, and he stood inside the door and looked down the hall at twenty-four dark housings and a rig under a height, and did not ask about either.

"Cots to the doors. Both doors. Lieutenants, one platoon each, and the guns on the road." He turned. "Osei. Your prisoner."

"On his cot, Colonel. With Wren."

"Good. He stays there." He looked at the mask then, and Rook understood that Marrow had read Osei's report on the relay before he had reached the hall, and had come in with a sentence already decided. "You turned toward a door for four seconds and set your own mask. I've got it on paper from a lieutenant. It changes nothing about tonight. The building is held, and you're in it."

* * *

Rook had the slate out before Marrow had finished.

The store.

Marrow read it. "Is Major Renner's tasking, and she has what she has."

What was done to me is under it. On paper. The order your major has a copy of with the destination blacked out — its copy is here, and so is everything that order was going to need. The man on the cot says so. Under the Sight he believes it.

"Under the Sight he believes it." Marrow said it back without weight. "Then it's Foundry paper, in a Foundry vault, in a fire, and if it's the paper you say it is then it's the thing Corps sent an intelligence lead north to recover, and she's at the door of it with a section and can't get in. Corps has decided tonight, through me, that this building is worth a company and that paper is worth the major. Not the company. Not you." He set both hands on the iron rail of the nearest cot. "You hold here. That is an order, and for once it's one you'd have given yourself."

Rook stood up.

His leg was late. He had paid for one use on the picket and had been walking on the bill since; the ringing had gone, and the whiteness had thinned to a line at the edges, and the weight behind the sternum was the weight it always was. He clipped the slate to his belt and unclipped it again and wrote.

I'm going to the store.

"You'll be walking off a lawful order in front of two platoons."

Then they've seen it.

"Lieutenant." Marrow did not raise his voice. "The asset is under your tactical command."

"Yes, sir." Osei had her book out; it had been out since the relay. "I'm the witnessing officer. I'll write the time he went through the door, and I'll write that you ordered him held, and I'll write that I didn't hold him, and I'll sign it." She wrote the time. "He's six. He's going out that door as one of six, and I've a building to hold with the other five, and I'll write why."

This copy was made without author approval. Readers can find the chapter on NovelPhoenix, where supporting the writer is possible.

Marrow looked at her. Then at the two lieutenants, who had heard all of it and were looking at the road. Then at the mask.

"I can't spend you," he said. "I've told you what that means. The thing on your strap ends an output; it doesn't stop a man walking, and I've never pretended it did. When you're through that door you're the major's problem, and you can tell her I said so." He took his hands off the rail. "And it goes on your file beside the other one. Corps will draw a line through the two of them and call it a policy."

Corps has been drawing lines through me since a records room. He turned the slate so the lieutenants could read it too, if they wanted to. I'm going to read what they wrote.

Cade stood aside from the south door, and looked at the mask, and said, "Fifty yards. Then it's yours," and went out ahead of him into the road.

* * *

The road ran from the hall toward the yard and the fire, and the guns from the buildings at the far end were on it.

He went across it at an angle, off the packed stone and onto the valley floor, where the ground was rough and the guns at the far end had to guess. Cade held the hall's corner for fifty yards, and then Rook was past the corner and Cade's rifle was a sound behind him. He ran. The leg answered late and then on time and then late; he stopped counting it. The wall's stanchions were lit along their whole length but for the dark twenty at the gate, and the fire at the valley's end stood up over the yard and lit the ground between him and it in a color that had no ward in it.

Men were on the floor of the valley. The company's, in fours, dead in the order they had gone forward; and theirs, with rope beside them, in no order. One of theirs was alive against a truck's wheel and had a rifle and did not lift it, and looked at the mask as it went past, and the Sight gave Rook something it had never yet given him off one of them: the rehearsal gone, and under it a man watching what he had been sent for run past him toward a fire, and afraid, and the fear was not of Rook. He did not stop for it.

The yard came up around him: trucks in a line with their tailgates down, two with their loads still roped under canvas, the third with the canvas off and boxes showing, and Bram's heavy rifle laid across a tailgate on the store's north door at forty yards, and Bram behind it, and the section along the trucks' far side. Renner stood behind the second truck with the threat-assessment officer and a signals pad, and she turned when Rook came in over the tailgate and looked at the mask for a moment with the fire on one side of her face.

"Marrow," she said.

Ordered me to hold the hall. I'm here.

"Then you've walked off an order twice in front of me, and this time I didn't give it. The band."

A man. On a cot in that building, with a face, holding every one of them that's left. Osei has him. He wiped the slate and went on. He says what they did to me is under that store. The order with the destination.

Renner read it through. Then she looked at the store.

Long, low, stone, its roof gone at the south end where the flame stood highest and the north end pouring smoke from a door that stood open onto a dark that had men in it. The officer had the glass on it. "The stair's inside the north door, down. Eight at the top of it. They've held it against the section three times and they haven't come out once, and they've had the chance." He lowered the glass. "Everything else in this valley they built out of what we had. Whatever's under that door, they're holding as if it's the one thing that isn't ours."

"Corps wants the boxes," Renner said. "I want the boxes. Those three trucks are my tasking and I put a section at that door three times for what's under it and had one of them hit doing it, and the fourth time I didn't send one." She faced the mask. "You're not on my tasking. I can't send a man down those stairs for what you want. I can watch you go, and that's the true version, so it's the one you get."

I didn't ask you to send one.

"No," she said. "You never do."

* * *

Bram had come along the trucks while they were talking, with the heavy rifle in his hands and the private who'd inherited the grease pencil behind him. He stopped in front of the mask and looked at it, squarely.

"Major says you're going down there."

Yes.

"Then the top of the stair's mine." He set it down as a report. "I've stood at a Foundry door once, Rook. I was on the outside of it with a rifle up, and I've stopped at that cutting every sweep since, deciding what I thought about that. I'm not going to stand at the top of a stair and watch you go down it and decide again after." He shifted the rifle. "Section takes the door. I take the top. Below that's yours, because nobody's putting a section into a Foundry vault on a corporal's judgment, and that's the standing order, and I've kept it."

It's still a debt.

"It's still a debt." Bram's jaw set. "I'm not squaring it. I'm holding a stair."

He turned and gave the section the door with two words and a hand, and the heavy rifle went first, from the tailgate, into the dark of the north doorway in one long burst, and the section went in behind it in pairs, and Rook went in with the second pair.

The door was smoke. He went through it on the baseline sense and his ears — the section's rifles ahead of him, close, in a stone room that gave the sound back; a man's voice shouting a word in the Dominion tongue; the heavy rifle again, from the door. The eight at the stair's head had a barricade of crates and had been holding it against rifles from the door, and the section came over it at them at a range where a rifle was a club, and Rook's hands went, as they had gone on the picket. A wrist. An elbow. A rifle taken from a man and turned so the man could not have it back. He did not kill anyone. He was careful of that, in the dark, with his hands doing what the Foundry had drilled them to do; he had carried one dead man's daughter's bird since a crest, and he did not mean to carry anyone out of this room.

It took less than a minute. Bram's private said "Clear, Corporal," in a voice gone high, and Bram came in over the crates with the heavy rifle and stood at the head of the stair.

The stair went down into the floor — stone steps, wide enough for one, a Foundry rail on one side, the smoke pouring down them from the burning end as if the vault below were drawing it. There was light at the bottom, dull, red, moving.

"Top's mine," Bram said. "Down's yours."

Rook put his hand on the rail. It was the vault block's rail, or one cast in the same mould — the same section, the same cold under the hand. He went down.