Chapter 3 — The Words They Remembered

Chapter 3 — The Words They Remembered

The train arrived behind its own weather.

Smoke canisters burst along the west approach, laying a gray curtain low across the road. Rain drove holes through it and the haulers filled them again. From Pell's position beside the central divider, the machine appeared a piece at a time: the top of the assault ramp, a rotating sensor, the blunt nose pushing wreckage ahead of its tracks.

It was wide enough to leave less than a man's breadth on either side.

“That's going to be difficult to go around,” Pell said.

Dain looked through her sight. “We're not going around it.”

The evacuation was still crossing behind them. A damaged medical carrier had slewed sideways in the center lane, forcing stretchers around a wheel that would no longer turn. Vale's engineers were working under it. Farther east, the last buses from the lower galleries had arrived at the west loading ramp with their windows cracked and people standing between the seats.

The count had never become final.

Quinn could hear the train's generator under the noise of its engines. A continuous shield covered the first hauler and overlapped the nose of the second. The crew had learned from the lost tracked gun. Their heavy weapons sat behind armored shutters, opening only long enough to fire. Infantry advanced within the machine's shadow.

“Colonel,” he said.

Cavil answered from the far bank. “I see it.”

“Keep your launchers on the second hauler. Wait for my mark.”

“There are people under your line.”

“I know.”

Quinn turned toward the rear detail.

“East of the red divider. All of you.”

Dain moved her squad. Pell went last, collecting the ammunition case they had been sharing. A shot struck the handle and spun it out of his hand. He let it go. Dain had taught him, in unusually forceful language, the difference between retrieving useful equipment and donating his head to a position already registered by a gunner.

The General stood alone in the center lane.

The Gray Lady changed into a spear. He planted her point between two road slabs and set both hands against the shaft. A low sound began in the metal, too soft to be heard properly and strong enough to make Pell's teeth ache.

One second.

The train's shutters opened. Its guns fired into the gold figure ahead.

Two.

Quinn turned his head away from the heaviest strikes. Impacts beat sparks from the artifact and tore the road beside his boots.

Three.

A hit punched his damaged shoulder backward. He held the note.

Four.

The sound opened.

Pell felt it pass through the air above the barrier. The train's shield flared bright enough to show every layer, a curved stack of pale surfaces over the haulers. Much of that light tore away. What remained flickered, unable to recover its lost strength.

“Now.”

Cavil's launchers answered from the eastern embankment. The first missile broke what remained of the forward shield. The second struck the generator housing between the haulers. A white flash filled the coupling. Armor panels blew outward and rang against the bridge barriers.

The train kept coming.

Its first hauler had an independent engine and a crew with no remaining interest in stopping short. The assault ramp lowered until it scraped the concrete. Behind the machine, infantry began to run.

Quinn pulled the spear free.

He drove its butt into the road. Ice burst from the point of contact and traveled west along the surface, a widening wave that caught the nearest feet and the lower sections of the hauler's tracks. The freeze reached the machine's return rollers. One track seized; the other ground against its shoes, cracking the ice and dragging the nose sideways.

It slowed.

It did not stop.

The hauler's left corner struck the divider and climbed. Concrete blocks rolled away under its weight. The assault ramp rose with it, a broad steel mouth that would fall directly across the lane carrying the buses.

“Down!” Dain shouted.

Quinn met the ramp.

He set the Gray Lady across its upper edge in the shape of a heavy bar. Then he stepped into the machine's forward movement. The road cracked beneath his boots. His left knee bent. For a terrible instant Pell thought the General would simply vanish underneath it.

The ramp stopped descending.

Quinn twisted the bar. Steel curled around the artifact. He moved one foot, then the other, forcing the ramp across the hauler's direction of travel. The vehicle slewed into the freight barrier. Its right track found the hole left by a shell. The nose dropped, and the drive assembly shrieked as the engine tried to carry the rest of the train over it.

“Engineers,” Quinn said through clenched teeth. “Coupling.”

Vale and Amadi Blinked to the sheltered side of the first hauler. Their charges were small; all they needed to do was persuade a damaged linkage to fail. Amadi pressed the first clamp onto the towing neck. Vale set the second and pulled him back by the shoulder.

The explosion separated the haulers.

The middle unit ground to a halt. The first kept sliding, carrying its broken ramp and the front section of the barrier over the edge. Quinn let the Gray Lady go long enough to catch the exposed brake housing with both hands. He tore it sideways. The emergency shoes dropped against the remaining track, locked and brought the machine to rest halfway over the channel.

He stood with the water beneath one boot and the whole west road firing at him.

Then the Gray Lady was in his hand again.

“Back,” he told the engineers.

Amadi began to move. A burst struck him below the ribs.

Vale caught him before he fell through the broken barrier. Her own shoulder hit the hauler, trapping her arm. She tried to Blink and lost her grip on him. She swore, caught the sergeant's harness again and dragged him behind the track.

Quinn crossed to them.

The infantry had reached the wreck. They were close enough now that he could see eyes behind visors, see one man realize what he had run toward and try to stop the man behind him. A squad leader raised his rifle and shouted for the line to fire together.

Quinn put himself between them and the engineers.

He drew a breath.

“You…”

Pell had heard the word on recordings. Every Legionnaire had. He had heard it shouted badly in training yards and imitated by drunken soldiers at the end of campaigns. He had never heard it spoken by a man with blood coming through the seals of his armor.

Quinn drew the second breath.

“SHALL NOT PASS!”

The air struck west.

He had narrowed the force to the road beyond the wreck. It tore the nearest infantry from their feet, drove shattered shield frames backward and punched the smoke flat along the approach. The squad leader vanished beneath a tumbling section of assault ramp. Farther out, men fell clutching broken limbs or rolled against the barriers with their weapons scattered beyond reach. At the far end of the lane, the survivors tried to stand and found the world refusing to remain still.

Pell was behind the General and outside the corridor. Even there, the pressure slapped his armor and the sound made his damaged ear cut to silence. His suit dampers recovered with a stutter. For a moment he could hear only his own breathing.

The road ahead was empty of anyone still advancing.

Quinn lowered his head.

“Take your sergeant,” he told Vale.

Amadi was conscious. Blood bubbled at the puncture in his chest seal. Vale pulled the emergency cover over it and called for a carrier. He tried to help her, and she told him, fiercely, that he had been enough trouble already.

The General walked back to the center lane. His breathing sounded rough over the open channel.

Pell looked at Dain. She touched two fingers to her ear and shook her head. He moved closer so she could read his lips.

“Did you hear that?”

She stared at him.

Then, despite the blood and the broken road, she laughed.

On the Rust command net, three different officers reported a weapon strike. One described a directed pressure charge. Another called for chemical protection. A third simply kept repeating the name of the man at the crossing.

Vargo shut the third officer's feed.

“Casualties?”

Rask worked through the overlapping reports. “Front infantry wave broken. Train disabled. West batteries still firing.”

“Then give the batteries something useful.”

“They have the support coordinates.”

Vargo shook his head. “Stop wasting shells on foundations. The new buses are on the deck. Hit the east approach joint.”

Rask looked at the image. The bridge was full of people.

“Understood,” she said.

The first shell struck the eastern abutment without breaking it. The second landed a lane's width short and threw a bus against its barrier. Cavil's soldiers pulled open its doors while the passengers climbed over each other inside.

The third hit the joint below the road.

Nine Crossing made a noise Pell would recognize in nightmares long after he had forgotten the sound of the War Cry. It was a deep, drawn-out complaint, steel moving where steel had agreed to remain still. The eastern freight deck dropped three feet. A lane section tilted. The damaged medical carrier began to roll toward the new gap.

Cavil Blinked to its flank and braced against the housing. Two soldiers came with him. Together they held it while a medic pulled the last stretcher free.

The carrier went over empty.

The road did not follow it, but the gap remained. Five yards of broken approach lay between the main deck and the eastern embankment. Reinforcement bars stood out of the concrete in twisted bundles. People stopped on both sides. Those farther back kept moving until the stopped crowd began to crush against itself.

“Halt at the west loading marks!” Quinn ordered. “Do not push the bridge.”

His voice was hoarse, but the command traveled. Dain's soldiers spread across the lanes, hands raised. The teacher gathered her children against the divider. A man with one trouser leg burned away sat down on his luggage and began to apologize to no one in particular.

Vale reached the break with blood on both arms.

She went flat beside it, looked at the exposed steel and sent the damage picture to Cavil.

“The lower railway is still joined,” she said. “Its eastern stair is gone. We can rig an exit, but the stretchers won't make it fast.”

“The freight ramps?”

“Buried under that joint. If we can get one up, we can span the road.”

“Can you free it?”

“With a crane. And the crane's on the wrong side.”

Quinn was already coming east.

The rear detail followed in short movements, firing back toward the crippled train. Dain left two squads at the west entrance, then moved the rest along the outside barrier. Vargo's infantry had recovered enough to use the overturned haulers as shelter. They were bringing fresh shield frames forward.

At the gap, Quinn knelt beside Vale.

“Show me.”

She sent the structural overlay. Beneath the fallen lane segment lay the emergency freight ramp, hinged into the abutment for routine maintenance. Twelve tons of concrete pinned its free end. The hinge itself had survived.

Quinn put the Gray Lady down beside his foot and reached into the wreckage.

The first block came free. He shifted it east, where Cavil guided it away from the people waiting at the edge. The next was smaller. The third had reinforcement running through it into the larger mass.

Quinn leaned forward.

Blood ran down the inside of his armor. He could feel the foreign edges of metal against flesh, the deep opening at his flank, the beginning of a tremor in the hand he had kept steady through every order. There had been no minute he could spend healing. Every interval had belonged to someone else.

He released the block.

Vale looked up.

“I can cut the bars,” she said.

“How long?”

“Four minutes.”

At the west end, an enemy heavy gun opened fire. Rounds struck along the divider, walking toward the crowd. Dain's voice came over the net, clipped and very calm.

“They're on the road again.”

Quinn looked at his son across the gap.

For ten thousand years, people had asked him to do what they could not. Most had mistaken the asking for an answer. Cavil had never been permitted that comfort. He could see the blood. He knew what the General had already spent.

“Give us the ramp,” Cavil said. “I'll take the people.”

Quinn nodded.

He set both hands under the concrete and lifted.

Something tore inside his left arm. He kept lifting. The reinforcement stretched, screeched and pulled loose from the broken slab. Vale seized the exposed ramp release. Cavil and three soldiers hauled from the eastern lip. The ramp rose through powdered concrete, a broad ribbed panel unfolding over the gap.

Quinn held the slab until its edge could no longer strike it. Then he pushed the dead weight into the channel.

The impact sent water higher than the freight deck.

Vale locked the ramp's braces. People began to move again before the spray had fallen.

Quinn stood, his left arm hanging badly.

Cavil reached across the first safe section of ramp and caught his shoulder.

“Come over.”

Quinn looked west. The last buses were still unloading. Dain's position was beginning to take fire from the conveyor roofs. The children were moving, their teacher walking backward so she could count them.

“Not yet.”

“We can hold it from here.”

“You can hold this end.”

“And when they take the other?”

Quinn lifted the Gray Lady with his good hand.

“They haven't.”

He went back.

Cavil watched him pass the final bus. Then he turned toward his own line.

“Medical carriers first. Rifle squads on the embankment. Vale, give me demolition points that will leave no road when we leave.”

“The bridge?”

“The approach. We are taking everyone we can get across it.”

He looked west again.

“Including him.”