Chapter 15 — The Crucible

The map was wrong by seventeen kilometers.

Siefr had done it at 0600, in the logistics room, with two BNCY operations officers present as witnesses. He'd been precise, placing the plateau coordinates with steady hands on the updated regional survey, designating the zone Hostile-Red. Fredrick had looked at the map. Fredrick had nodded.

Fredrick didn't know the coordinates were wrong.

Seventeen kilometers was the distance between empty wasteland and the plateau. On the map they were identical. They weren't identical. One had dry scrubland and rock formations and nothing else. The other had Rad's gate.

Rad heard it before he understood what he was hearing.

He was at the gate, as he'd been every morning. A habit. The kind that forms when you've decided something is worth defending. He'd been working on the upper rail since before sunrise. The weld was quiet work. He liked quiet work.

The percussion arrived from the south. Not sharp — deep, the long sound of ordnance at distance, the kind of sound that means not here yet but also coming. He set down the weld and looked south.

The sky was wide and brown-gold, the sun not yet at full height. Nothing visibly wrong. He listened to the percussion moving, calculating the distance by the delay between the launch sound and the impact sound, which he'd learned to do years ago from someone who was now dead.

His comm clicked. "Marcus."

"I hear it," Marcus said.

"Aimed at the wrong coordinates."

"Yes." A pause. "Two hours before they correct the targeting data."

Two hours.

Rad picked up the weld.

He was reinforcing the lower hinge when the monitor inside the shelter began its alarm — not the emergency alarm, the other one, the one that meant significant change in Chrys's biometrics. He stood. The alarm meant something was happening in there that hadn't been happening a minute ago. In either direction: worse, or better.

He went inside.

Chrys heard the percussion through the floor.

He'd been somewhere between sleep and not-sleep, the state he'd been in for — he didn't know how long. His internal clock, which had always been exact, had been running wrong. He'd stopped trusting it. He trusted the shelter walls instead: the color of the light coming under the door told him approximately what time it was, and the depth of the silence told him approximately what was happening outside.

The silence wasn't deep.

He opened his eyes. The ceiling of the shelter was bare rock with Rad's lattice across the crown. He knew every seam of it. He'd had a long time to learn them.

He tried to sit up.

His arms responded, slowly. The room did something complicated around him for a moment. He waited for it to stop.

He sat up.

The conduit burns on his arms were darker than the last time he'd been conscious enough to look at them. Long, irregular marks from wrist to elbow on both sides, the record of what happens when the Hydrolysis Engine runs past what the chassis was designed for. They ached. Not the bright ache of a fresh injury — the dull, constant ache of something that had been going on long enough to become the baseline.

He put his feet on the floor.

Through the soles of his boots he could feel the percussion, arriving in the rock at regular intervals. Too regular. Not natural. He let the Tesseract sense extend — carefully, slowly, the way you extend a hand into water you can't see the bottom of. It came back dim, flickering, unreliable.

But present.

He felt the incoming ordnance. Not the weapons themselves — the energy they carried, the vectors of momentum arranged into intent. Enormous amounts of it, moving from the south. Aimed at something seventeen kilometers away.

He felt the correction happening.

The moment — real-time, arriving as he sat on the cot — when the mercenary company's targeting data updated. When seventeen became zero.

Twelve minutes.

He stood up.

The room tilted and he held the wall until it steadied.

He breathed.

He made it to the shelter entrance without falling, which was more than he'd expected from himself, and stood in the doorframe with one hand on each side. Outside: the plateau wide and red-brown and quiet, the morning light coming in low and clean, the sky enormous above it.

Rad was at the gate.

He'd picked up the weld again. He was working on the upper hinge, the one he'd been reinforcing since morning, and he moved with the careful precision of someone for whom precision was not an effort but a habit. He wasn't watching the south. He was watching the gate.

Chrys stepped off the frame.

The first step was a decision. The second one was the body agreeing, reluctantly, to implement the decision. By the fifth step the body had stopped arguing and they were simply walking across the plateau, thirty meters of dry ground between the shelter door and the gate, and the percussion was coming through the earth with every step.

Twelve minutes was becoming ten. Was becoming eight.

"Rad."

Rad looked up. His face moved through something fast, none of it slow enough to read, before settling into the face he wore when he'd already calculated the situation and was waiting for instructions.

"You shouldn't be standing," he said.

"I know." Chrys looked at the gate, the new bracing on the upper rail, the reinforced hinges that Rad had been working on since yesterday. "Twelve minutes. They correct the targeting data in twelve minutes."

"I know." Rad set down the weld. He stood. He was a full head taller than Chrys, twice the mass, and he looked at him the way he'd been looking at him since Chrys arrived at the plateau — the look of someone who has decided a person is worth the attention and has stopped questioning the decision. "What do you need."

Chrys held his hands out. Looked at the burns. Felt the dim flicker of the Tesseract sense, low, unreliable.

Present.

"Stand back," he said.

Rad's expression didn't change. "Chrys–"

"Please."

A beat.

Rad stepped back, not far, but back.

Chrys closed his eyes.

He found the incoming ordnance. The vectors, the energy, enormous amounts of it organized and aimed. He found the correction that was happening — he could feel it in real-time, the targeting data updating, zero becoming the number. He found the first wave.

He reached.

The Hydrolysis Engine answered badly. Raggedly, like a machine starting after a long winter. He felt the burn start: the conduit marks waking up, the chassis objecting, the sensation of running at a speed it hadn't had the fuel for — and he pulled anyway.

He pulled the energy from the first wave and dispersed it — not absorbed, dispersed, scattered, the kill radius reduced from something unsurvivable to something that would shake the gate and crack the east wall and leave them breathing.

His legs went.

Rad caught him before he hit the ground. The gate held.

The first detonation arrived at the plateau edge. Dust and sound and the smell of hot stone. Not the crater the mercenary company had ordered. The gate held.

"I can do the next one," Chrys said. From somewhere against Rad's shoulder.

"You can't," Rad said.

"I can do the next one."

He could feel the second wave coming, bigger than the first.

Rad held him. He looked south, at the dust settling, at the line of mercenary steel still moving across the flat land. He looked at the gate. He looked at the man he was holding, who was lighter than he'd been a month ago, which was something Rad had noticed and had been tracking and had not said anything about because saying something wouldn't change the weight.

"Then do it," Rad said.

Chrys did it.

The second detonation arrived and scattered before it landed. The ground shook. The gate held.

Chrys was silent for a long time, breathing. Rad didn't put him down.

"There's a third wave," Chrys said, eventually.

"I know."

"I don't think I can do a third."

"I know that too."

They were quiet. The plateau settled. Somewhere to the south the mercenary line paused, recalculating.

"We have a few minutes," Rad said.

"Yes."

"I'm going to set you down. Then I'm going to finish the hinge."

"Okay."

Rad set him down, carefully, with his back against the gate. Chrys looked up at the sky, wide and brown-gold, enormous. The Klak trees were three hundred kilometers north. Big T was gone. But the sky looked the same from here.

Rad picked up the weld.

He worked on the hinge. The sound of the weld was quiet and steady in the still air.

"Rad," Chrys said.

"Yes."

"The gate's going to hold."

Rad didn't look up. "Yes," he said.

"I mean after. Whatever comes after this."

Rad stopped welding. He was quiet for a moment.

"I know," he said.

He went back to work.