Chapter 2 — What a Shield Can Hold

Chapter 2 — What a Shield Can Hold

The bridge had been built to carry ore trains, and the men who built it had expected the world to be heavy.

Its piers stood on foundations driven through thirty yards of silt into bedrock. The freight deck could lose a lane and remain serviceable. The maintenance railway had its own load path. Even the lower pedestrian deck, an addition approved in a cheaper century, hung from more steel than the evacuation required.

Engineer Lieutenant Nima Vale knew those facts because she had inspected the crossing six months earlier. She repeated them to herself while she crawled along the access grating beneath the west approach.

They were all becoming less useful.

A shell burst under the southern edge. A suspension rod snapped with a report louder than the explosion. Vale struck her helmet against a brace and tasted blood where she had bitten her tongue.

“Lower deck section three is closing,” she told command. “I'm moving the pedestrians upstairs.”

“How long?” Cavil asked.

“Until a rod kills someone. So, now.”

“Do it.”

She reached the nearest stair and waved the flow back. A man carrying a girl with her face buried in his shoulder tried to argue. Vale put one gloved hand against the damaged rod. It vibrated like a plucked string.

“Up,” she said.

He went.

At the west barrier, Quinn heard the change in the bridge through his boots.

He had spent enough of his life inside collapsing structures to distinguish a local failure from a dangerous conversation between several parts of the same building. Nine Crossing was beginning that conversation. The enemy batteries were not trying to kill him. They were asking the bridge to choose where to break.

“Overwatch to engineers. Identify a cut we can afford.”

Vale crouched beside the stair as civilians climbed around her. “Say again?”

“They need a route off the road. Give them one that ends where we want.”

She stared at the plan on her wrist. Then she understood.

The western maintenance spur ran beside the loading square, under a row of unused freight conveyors. It connected to the lower railway through a service gate. Open the gate and it looked like a covered approach to the first pier. Demolish twenty feet beyond the gate and it became a cul-de-sac above the channel.

“I can take the spur down,” she said. “But I need three minutes and a firing line above me.”

“You will have both.”

Quinn moved the rear detail by squads. Two watched the upper freight approach. One covered the service gate without making its interest obvious. The rest contracted around the square while the last of its stationary crowd joined the crossing.

Dain found Pell staring at the roadway.

“What?”

“He's letting them come under us.”

“I heard.”

“That sounds bad.”

“Then shoot well enough to improve it.”

Pell adjusted his sight over the barrier. Through the drifting rain he could see enemy infantry hauling shield panels forward on wheeled frames. A small tracked gun followed them. Its ammunition feed hung loose enough to slap the ground at every bump.

One of the shield teams went down. Another took its place. These were not fools throwing themselves against an invincible figure. They watched the General, measured the time between his attacks and kept their support weapons outside the straight approaches.

A sniper struck Quinn's breastplate. He shifted. The next shot passed through the place where his throat had been.

“South roof,” he said.

Dain acknowledged. Two Legionnaires Blinked to the conveyor supports, found a slant of fire and put rounds through the sniper's position. Dust burst from the roof. Neither man lingered to admire it.

The tracked gun fired.

Its first round hit the empty loading crane. Its second struck the barrier where Quinn had been standing. The third would have reached the civilians bunching at the closed lane.

Quinn came across the open roadway between one breath and the next.

Pell had learned to recognize Blink by the absence it left: a body gone, air settling, presence elsewhere. This was different. The General crossed the intervening space with a violence that made his passage seem like part of the attack. He placed himself between the shell and a woman holding two small hands.

The blast hurled all four of them against the freight barrier.

When the smoke thinned, Quinn was on one knee. The woman was crawling toward a boy who had lost a shoe. A girl's cry rose above the gunfire. Quinn's left shoulder plate hung open at its lower fastening, and dark blood marked the black beneath it.

“Move them,” he told Pell.

Pell obeyed. His fingers closed around the boy's wrist, found the girl with his other arm and guided them toward the next soldiers. The woman kept trying to thank somebody. Nobody had breath to answer.

Quinn stood. His armor sealed itself over the wound with a grinding sound.

“Tracked gun,” Dain said. “Under the canopy. Can't get a clean angle.”

“Clear the center lane.”

The Gray Lady shortened, dark metal folding upon itself until a broad shield covered Quinn's left side. He walked into the gun's next burst. Heavy impacts struck the artifact. He angled her to send fragments away from the fleeing people, then Blinked to the concrete island between the gun and its nearest shield team.

The shield became a spear.

He drove it through the tracked chassis. Electricity flashed under the canopy. The ammunition feed writhed, shed glowing links and fell still. Quinn withdrew the blade and swept it through the mounting of the nearest panel. The artificial shield folded into a shower of sparks.

He could have pursued the soldiers behind it.

Instead he returned to the crossing.

Vargo watched that decision twice.

“He won't spend distance,” he said.

His operations officer, Len Rask, marked the destroyed gun on her display. “He's spending our guns.”

“We can replace those.”

She glanced at him. “Not indefinitely.”

“No. Which is why we will stop offering them one at a time.”

He brought the breaching train forward: three armored haulers linked by flexible blast housings, the first carrying a broad assault ramp, the middle a shield generator, the last a heavy cutting rig. It had opened mining settlements whose owners believed locked gates could settle a dispute with the Rust Clan. Nine Crossing offered a less forgiving approach, but the machine could survive enough of it to matter.

“Take the service spur,” he said. “Hold the train until their lower detail commits.”

Below the west road, Vale seated the second demolition charge. The access grating moved under her knees. Through its slots she could see the water taking pieces of insulation and white plastic southward.

“Lieutenant.”

Her sergeant, Amadi, pointed down the spur.

Figures were already coming through the service gate.

Vale pulled the arming tab. “Two minutes became one.”

“I can hold here.”

“You can help me finish.”

They worked side by side, driving the last clamps into a shear joint. Above them, Dain's squad began to fire. Chips flew from the conveyor housings. A Rust soldier fell through a gap in the grating and caught an arm on a brace. His shouting changed to a high animal sound as the current below pulled at him.

Vale kept working.

She would remember that afterward. She would consider it, reject the easy answer, consider it again. There was no version of the memory in which she could reach him without leaving the charge unarmed. There was no version in which this made his voice easier to hear.

“Ready,” Amadi said.

“Fall back.”

They Blinked to the service stairs. Vale counted the friendly signals on her wrist. Two engineers. Six riflemen. All clear of the spur.

Then another signal appeared on the wrong side of the charge.

Pell.

He had gone down to recover the relay specialist. The burned man had carried his pack until a sniper struck the battery case; now he lay beneath a conveyor with the damaged straps pinning one arm. Pell fired up the passage while Dain ran for the stair.

“Pell, withdraw!”

“He's caught.”

“Cut the straps.”

“Under the brace. I can't—”

The relay specialist was young enough that his beard came in unevenly along his jaw. Pell could see that through the cracked visor. He could also see the enemy boots approaching beyond him.

“Leave the pack,” the specialist said.

“That's the plan.”

Pell pulled. The trapped man's scream made him stop.

At the top of the stair, Vale held the detonator without pressing it. The enemy was almost at the charges. A soldier with a cutting tool knelt beside the nearest clamp.

“Overwatch,” she said. “I have two below the cut.”

Quinn reached the service landing and looked down the narrow approach. He could not see Pell through the conveyor supports. He could hear the young soldier trying to keep his voice level.

He went down the stairs.

The first burst struck his upper arm. The second tore the railing away. Gray Lady widened in his hand, a shield filling the passage while he advanced. At the brace he set her between himself and the attackers, knelt and reached beneath the trapped man's shoulder.

Metal bent.

“Pell. Take him.”

Pell hauled the specialist clear. Quinn lifted the ruined brace far enough for both men to get past him, then let it fall into the path of the next enemy rush.

Something heavy struck his flank.

The shaped charge had been fired from less than twenty yards. It punched through his damaged armor and drove him against the conveyor housing. Pell saw a flash of exposed red inside the opening. The General's breath left him in a sound so ordinary that Pell was frightened more by it than by the blood.

Quinn pulled the two soldiers close.

A bubble closed around them.

The world beyond it blurred at the edges. Gunfire struck the curved surface, and for an instant the impacts seemed to hang there.

“Two,” Quinn said.

Pell did not understand.

The first heavy shot hit the bubble. A pale fracture crossed the curve.

“One.”

Pell understood.

He shoved the specialist toward the stair as Quinn moved with them. The second shot arrived before they reached cover. The bubble burst in a light that filled the passage. The next rounds struck the shield in Quinn's hand and the concrete where Pell had been.

Dain dragged the specialist over the lip of the landing. Pell fell beside her. Quinn came last, turning the Gray Lady to cover the stairs.

“Clear,” he said.

Vale pressed the detonator.

The spur folded away from the bridge in three successive sections. Steel tore. The conveyor tilted west, dragging its housings through the enemy entry point. Men and machinery vanished into a rising cloud of water and powdered concrete.

The remaining road shuddered but held.

For several seconds there was only the sound of fragments hitting the channel.

Pell rolled onto his back. His chest hurt. His hands would not stop shaking. Beside him, the relay specialist began to cry without making any noise.

Quinn stood over both of them, one hand pressed against the wound in his side.

“Name?” he asked the specialist.

“Tavin, sir.”

“Can the relay still work, Tavin?”

The young man looked at the broken pack.

“If I bridge the battery.”

“Then do that from the far bank.”

Dain got the two men moving.

Vale looked at the blood gathering beneath Quinn's fingers. “You need a medical team.”

He glanced at the demolition readout on her wrist.

“I need the bridge.”

“It's holding.”

“Then we both have what we need.”

She wanted to argue. Instead she checked the nearest pier sensor, because he had answered with the only fact she could use.

At Vargo's command vehicle, the service-spur picture vanished in a sheet of static.

Rask swore.

“We lost thirty-one on that approach.”

Vargo said nothing. He enlarged the road image again. Quinn had returned to the narrowest point. There was blood on the gold now. A damaged armor plate hung at his side.

“The train,” he said.

“It has to use the road.”

“Yes.”

“He wants us on the road.”

Vargo watched a medical carrier disappear over the rise on the far bank. Then he watched Quinn turn his head to make certain it had gone.

“And he wants to stay there,” he said. “Let's find out which wish he can afford.”