Chapter 1

Chapter 1 — The Far Bank

The first man to tell the story got the weather wrong.

He said the sky had been red. Years afterward he would insist on that detail in drinking halls, at school assemblies, at the unveiling of the memorial. Other survivors remembered a gray sky, low enough to hide the upper floors of the pumping towers, and rain so cold it made the wounded shake beneath their thermal blankets. The red had come later, from the fires on the far bank.

On the morning itself, Legionnaire Joren Pell remembered neither color. He remembered the taste of copper inside a helmet he could not get clean, and the number on his ammunition counter.

Eleven.

There were eleven rounds left in the magazine, one spare in the left thigh pouch, and something approaching a company of Rust Clan infantry working through the water-treatment plant ahead of him. The enemy came in fitted gray armor streaked with orange dust. No two squads wore quite the same equipment. Their vehicles had been assembled from conquered armies, purchased war stores and whatever their mechanics could force to accept the same ammunition. Their guns, however, all agreed on the direction of the Imperial line.

Pell fired twice through a gap in the filter housings. A shape fell. He ducked before the answering burst tore the edge off the steel beside his face.

“Nine,” he said.

“Congratulations,” Corporal Sera Dain answered. “You can subtract.”

She was kneeling beside a maintenance access, tightening the seal over a wound in Legionnaire Hol's thigh. Hol had stopped complaining. Pell found that considerably worse than the complaining had been.

Beyond them lay the west approach to Nine Crossing: three lanes of elevated freight road, a pedestrian deck bolted beneath its southern edge, and a maintenance railway that ran through the great concrete ribs supporting both. The crossing spanned the outfall channel of the Nacre pumping works. Below it, a dark current carried industrial foam toward the sea.

On the other bank, evacuation engines made a distant, persistent growl.

The people who needed those engines were on this bank.

They crowded the loading square behind Pell's position: families from the western housing blocks, wounded soldiers, workers brought out of underground processing galleries, and a school group whose teacher had tied lengths of insulation tape between their wrists. The children kept lifting their linked hands whenever someone passed a stretcher through them. They had learned that without being told twice.

Nine Crossing was the last serviceable route to the evacuation field. The northern viaduct had collapsed during the night. The southern tunnel was full of water and broken vehicles. An intact bridge was almost sufficient reason for the Rust Clan to want it. The thousands of people behind the bridge were another.

“Company says we withdraw at the next pressure drop,” Dain told him.

“To the bridge?”

“Through the bridge. You will know it by the enormous fucking bridge.”

Pell tried to laugh. His throat made a dry click.

A shell struck the upper floor of the treatment plant. The building breathed dust through every window. Something large fell inside, striking successive levels with the slow, dreadful regularity of a drumbeat.

Their pressure drop had arrived.

Dain hauled Hol upright. Pell took his other side. They Blinked from the filter housings to the low wall beside the freight road, coming back into rain and the startled cry of a woman who had been certain the space beside her was empty. The Ninth's movement could still frighten people. Pell had grown up seeing it on recordings; the first time his own body disappeared, he had vomited into an expensive training helmet.

Hol sagged between them. His blood smeared the wall.

“Another,” Dain said.

“His seal—”

“I can see his seal.”

They reached the collection point as the line behind them began to come apart.

Some units withdrew on command. Others arrived in small knots, carrying men whose legs no longer worked. A communications specialist with a burned shoulder brought a relay pack heavier than he was. Two Legionnaires carried a door with four children sitting on it because one of the children could not walk and the others refused to let go of her.

Then the first Rust vehicle cleared the treatment plant.

It was a low assault carrier with a wedge of replacement armor across its nose. Its gun swept toward the loading square.

Pell saw the muzzle begin to settle. There were too many people between him and the square, too many backs and raised hands, and no shot he could take that would matter. Dain pushed Hol down behind a concrete wheel stop. She was reaching for a launcher she did not have.

The carrier stopped.

At first Pell thought it had broken an axle. Its front end dipped, the rear lifted, and both tracks shrieked against the road. Then a tall figure stepped through the hanging dust, one armored hand planted against the carrier's nose.

Gold caught the flat morning light. Silver plates moved over black beneath them. The man wore no helmet. Rain ran over a bald head and a close gray-flecked beard. His face was almost peaceful, except for the concentration around his eyes.

He turned the vehicle.

There was nothing theatrical about the movement. He shifted his feet, found the failing edge of the road under its left track, and shoved. The carrier rolled onto its side. Its gun fired into the water. The discharge struck the channel in a white eruption that soaked the nearest civilians.

Quinn lowered his hand.

“The loading square,” he said into the open command channel. “Clear it.”

For a moment nobody answered. Then the square moved.

Pell had seen Titus Quinn before. On parade screens. On recruitment walls. Once from the opposite end of a hangar aboard HMS Havana, when the General had been listening to an engineer with a broken arm. None of those occasions had prepared Pell for how much room he occupied in an actual battle. Men did not simply look toward him. They began arranging their movements around the fact of his presence.

Quinn crossed to Hol and knelt. The movement put his face level with the young soldier's.

“Name?”

“Hol, sir.”

“I know. I meant the woman keeping you alive.”

Dain looked up. “Corporal Dain, General.”

“Stay with him, Corporal.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pell.”

Pell stiffened so sharply that his damaged knee struck the barrier.

Quinn pointed across the square. “The teacher has lost two children from her line. Find them. They may be under the blue freight trailer. Do not frighten them further.”

The General rose before Pell could ask how he knew his name.

Colonel Cavil arrived beside him with three Centurions and a battered command slate. His armor bore the same fresh damage as everyone else's. A deep strike had stripped the finish from his right shoulder, exposing a pale line through the silver.

“West bank count,” Cavil said. “Four thousand eight hundred and twelve civilians at the last reconciled check. Six hundred and two of ours, including walking wounded. More coming out of the lower galleries. We can't call the number final.”

“Then don't.”

“The field can lift in forty-seven minutes once the eastern approach is open. Until then the transports are sheltering behind the ridge. The Rust batteries have the straight run measured.”

Quinn studied the slate. “And the orbital corridor?”

“Havana will have it. Their screen is contesting the turn. Our fighters are staying with the carrier.”

No promise of an easy rescue, Pell thought, searching beneath the blue trailer. No sudden fleet arriving on the strength of a famous name.

The two children were there. One held a small metal tin with both arms. The other had a split lip and looked determined to die before letting anyone see him cry.

“Teacher wants you,” Pell said.

“The road's shooting.”

“We're going another way.”

“Can you disappear us?”

Pell looked toward the people pressing around the trailer, toward the wounded and the makeshift carts. He could move himself. He could help carry these two. He could not wish thousands of frightened people across a battlefield, and nothing in his training made a terrified child easier to hold.

“I can carry you,” he said. “You'll have to hold tight.”

The boy with the tin considered that. “Don't lose this.”

“What's in it?”

“Mum's things.”

Pell stopped asking questions.

At the square's edge, Quinn drew a weapon that had been resting against his back. Dark metal lengthened in his hand. The blade was too plain to belong to the armor, too heavy-looking to be a ceremonial sword. It made a faint sound as it changed, like a breath drawn over the rim of a glass.

The Gray Lady.

Pell had heard a dozen stories about her. Every barracks had its own version. The one point on which the stories agreed was that no sensible person tried to take her from Quinn.

The General laid her in the road and pointed with his empty hand.

“Cavil, take the people east. Establish your second line at the lift embankment. Engineers on the lower deck. Two squads on the maintenance railway. They will try the ribs once they see the road denied.”

“I need one company here.”

“You need that company at the other end.”

Cavil's jaw set. “And you need more than a road to stand on.”

“I have a bridge.”

“Father.”

The word had not gone out over the general channel. Pell caught it because he was passing within a few paces, a child clinging to either side of his armor. For the first time, the two men seemed to stand somewhere other than a battlefield.

Quinn looked at his son.

“I need you to make a place I can come back to.”

Cavil held his gaze. Then he nodded once.

“You will have it.”

The eastern movement began in sections. Soldiers took the outside lane. Stretchers traveled under the freight barriers. Walking civilians filled the center, guided by people whose work that morning consisted of saying the same useful things without stopping: Keep moving. Leave the case. Take her hand. There is water at the far end.

Pell delivered the children to their teacher. She counted them with a finger that trembled so badly she had to start again. Dain appeared beside him, Hol already on a medical carrier.

“We're assigned to the rear detail,” she said.

“I thought everybody was going east.”

“Everybody who needs carrying.” She looked at his rifle. “How many?”

“Nine. And a spare.”

She gave him two fresh magazines.

“Now you're wealthy.”

The Rust Clan sent infantry next, using the overturned carrier as cover. Their first two squads advanced while a second vehicle hosed the barriers above Quinn with heavy fire. Ordinary bullets struck his armor and skipped into the road. He did not ignore them. He turned his shoulder, sheltered his face and waited until the soldiers on his right had cleared his line.

Then he lifted the Gray Lady.

Lightning ran along the dark blade, gathering until every edge of Pell's vision seemed to sharpen. The discharge took the opening between the carrier and a steel pump housing. One hard line of electrical light, no branching, no wandering through targets the General could not see. It struck the gun mounting and the men trying to work around it. The carrier's lights died.

“Forward barrier,” Quinn said.

Dain Blinked to the next position. Pell followed. Together they fired at the troops pulling a portable shield into place.

Pell's hands steadied. He still feared the road, the enemy and the possibility of a wound he could not survive. Those things had not become smaller. There was simply a task in front of them now, and a voice telling them where to begin.

Across the water, Cavil's first units spread along the lift embankment.

The Rust Clan commander watched through a mast camera two miles west of the crossing. Commander Sile Vargo had spent nineteen years purchasing other people's victories and six learning how to make his own. He did not confuse courage with bad arithmetic. His staff had briefed him on the Ninth's commander before the assault.

Nine feet. Prime Praetorian. The Fist of the Queen. Dangerous at every distance. More dangerous when wounded soldiers were behind him.

Vargo enlarged the image.

Quinn stood where the road narrowed, the weapon in one hand. Around him, a thin line of Legionnaires worked their rifles. Behind him, the evacuation crawled across Nine Crossing.

“There,” Vargo said.

His operations officer looked at the screen. “The General?”

“The queue.”

She waited.

Vargo drew a line around the loading square, the causeway and the distant lift embankment. He could not afford a contest arranged to suit a legend. He could afford to make the legend choose.

“Move the breaching train up. Put the western batteries on the bridge supports. I want the lower deck opened before the next infantry push.”

“And Quinn?”

Vargo returned the camera to its wider field. The General looked very small among all those people.

“Let him see what we're aiming at.”

At Nine Crossing, the first ranging shell struck the water below the pedestrian deck.

Quinn turned his head toward it.

The next shell struck closer.