Chapter 5 — Fifty-Nine Minutes

Chapter 5 — Fifty-Nine Minutes

At seven minutes, the first workboat grounded below the north spoil bank.

Pell saw its bow rise through the reeds. Four soldiers climbed out, then eight, then a gun team pulling a low folding carriage. He reported them before firing. That mattered. Dain had made him practice reporting before firing until he could do it while angry, exhausted or convinced that the entire exercise was pointless.

Now the report moved two squads before the gun could settle.

The Ninth came off the ridge in short Blinks, appearing beside solid cover and firing across the landing. The first boat backed away. The second tried to put its bow between two concrete drainage blocks and grounded sideways. Its gunner fired into the spoil bank, tearing brown streaks through the wet earth.

Quinn went down the cut toward it.

Pell had seen the General turn a carrier that morning. He had not understood that he had been watching a restrained use of strength. What came down the service road now moved with the weight of a machine and the judgment of a man who knew exactly where every friendly soldier stood.

Quinn caught the second boat under its reinforced bow. He lifted until the hull came out of the water and the men inside lost their feet. Then he turned it across the landing channel and drove its nose between the drainage blocks. The first boat struck it while trying to withdraw. Both engines screamed. Water climbed over their sterns.

He left the enemy a way to get onto the mud and none to bring the gun through.

“North bank contained,” Pell reported.

At nine minutes, the first heavy vehicle reached the western bend.

The Rust Clan had found the maintenance causeway south of the bridge. It was too narrow for the great haulers but wide enough for an assault carrier followed by infantry. Its commander had stripped away the upper storage racks so the vehicle could pass beneath the conveyor arches. Fresh metal shone along the cut edges.

Quinn returned to Switch Nine.

He did not stand in the center of the firing line merely because a song would one day put him there. He used the freight crawler as cover, let the carrier expose its flank at the bend and struck when its gun could not bear on him.

The Gray Lady became a hammer.

The first impact broke the carrier's forward suspension. The second drove its nose into the bank. Quinn caught the edge of its hull, hauled it sideways and left it across the lane where its following infantry needed to advance.

The soldiers behind the wreck scattered into the spoil cuts.

Pell's squad stopped being frightened of one huge vehicle and began being frightened of dozens of men they could not always see.

“Don't chase them,” Quinn said. “Make them come through the cut.”

At fourteen minutes, Tavin got the southern team on the relay.

Cavil had reached the first terrace. The service road was mined. He and Vale had taken their people through a pipe gallery instead, emerging behind the machine sheds. There was fighting in the gallery mouth. One of their line team was dead. Two wounded were going back with an escort.

“Battery confirmed,” Cavil said. “Three mounts. Separate control housings. We can't finish it from one point.”

Quinn listened without interrupting.

“We will separate inside their perimeter,” Cavil continued. “Vale has the center. I have the northern mount. Third team goes south. No ship strike until we identify all three.”

“Acknowledged.”

There was a pause.

“How is the line?” Cavil asked.

Quinn looked down the road. Rainwater ran around the wrecked carrier's hull. Beyond it, muzzle flashes appeared and vanished in the bank.

“Occupied.”

Cavil gave a short breath that might have been a laugh.

“Keep it that way.”

At eighteen minutes, a Rust gun team found the left wall of the cut.

They had hauled their weapon through a drainage culvert and onto a shelf of basalt above the road. Its first burst tore into the rear detail from the side. Legionnaire Essan fell beside the ammunition cache. Another man went down trying to pull him clear.

Quinn could not turn the Gray Lady toward the shelf without uncovering the road. He pointed with his free hand instead.

Pell and two others Blinked into the shelter of a service recess below the gun. From there they could see the tripod legs against the sky. They could not see the gunner.

One of the Legionnaires, Haret, took a demolition puck from his belt.

“I'll go up.”

Pell looked at the wet stone. There was no useful landing on the shelf that the enemy could not see. A man appearing beside the gun would have a heartbeat to work and nowhere to go afterward.

“Wait,” Pell said.

The weapon traversed. Its belt feed shifted across the lip of the shelf. Pell could see a small section hanging loose beyond the armored tray.

He braced his rifle against the recess and fired three rounds into the feed.

The gun stopped. Someone above swore. Haret threw the puck before the loader could pull the damaged belt free.

The blast folded the tripod. The gun went over the shelf, striking the road behind Quinn in a spray of broken metal.

Pell Blinked back with his hands shaking for a reason he did not yet mind.

Essan was still alive when they got to him. He died before the medic finished opening the wound seal.

Pell stood beside the body for half a second too long.

Quinn touched his shoulder.

“Your position,” he said.

Pell returned to it.

At twenty-two minutes, Commander Vargo understood what the General had done.

He did not have the full Imperial medical doctrine. He had a stolen training brief, two unreliable prisoner statements and an old recording of Quinn being carried from a battlefield while soldiers hid his face from a camera. He had dismissed parts of the brief as a recruitment myth in reverse: an enemy's hope that an unstoppable man would eventually stop himself.

The fresh reports made that hope more interesting.

Quinn's wounds had closed. His strength had increased. He was holding a position from which every retreating Imperial transport would remain visible. Vargo asked for the time of the first engagement at Switch Nine and put a marker an hour beyond it.

“Stop feeding him vehicles,” he told Rask.

“We still need the field.”

“We need to reach it after he falls.”

She looked at the marker.

“You're gambling on a medical report.”

“I'm gambling on a man who knows his own medical report. He put himself there for a reason.”

“If the battery goes, they'll lift.”

Vargo studied the three remaining civilian transports. Their loading indicators were still open. A medical crawler moved between the shelters. Behind the field, the southern ascent corridor remained empty.

“Then we make his last minute worth waiting for.”

He moved fresh infantry into the spoil cuts. He sent his remaining heavy gun behind the northern drainage wall. He ordered the reserve not to show itself. The ordinary pressure on Switch Nine continued, enough to hold the General's attention, too little to spend the soldiers Vargo would need later.

Quinn noticed the change almost immediately.

He had been commanding battles longer than Vargo's family had kept a name. A quieter enemy was not necessarily a weaker one. The missing vehicles, the fewer bodies on the road, the new probing fire from the north: the pattern had a shape he did not like.

“Rear detail,” he said. “At fifty minutes, prepare for a full assault. They know what they're waiting for.”

Nobody asked him to explain.

At twenty-eight minutes, the first southern charge failed.

Vale had crawled under the central battery mount while Cavil's team drew its guards toward the northern housings. The weapon stood in a shallow pit surrounded by concrete heat baffles. Its barrel rose through a hinged armored cover. Below the cover, a replaceable drive collar carried the elevation loads into the platform.

The collar was where she placed the charge.

Her detonator flashed failure.

She looked at the cable. A round had cut it where it crossed the pit rim.

Above her, the mount began to turn.

Vale pressed herself into the service space while the collar moved within inches of her helmet. Heat filled the gap. The gun had found another ascent solution; somewhere beyond the ridge, a pilot was about to receive a reason not to trust it.

She pulled the manual firing lead from the charge and found its switch by touch.

The collar rotated again.

Vale lost two fingers of her left glove before she felt the injury beneath it. She tried to pull the hand free. The armored drive caught her forearm and held it against the housing.

“Lieutenant,” Cavil said over the net. “Status.”

She looked at the switch in her right hand.

“I've got it.”

“Get clear.”

The mount stopped turning. A loader shouted above her. She could hear boots on the pit stair.

“Get clear, Vale.”

She hooked the emergency tool on her belt under the trapped armor seam and pulled until the release tore loose. The glove stayed in the collar. Her hand did not. She rolled out of the service gap with blood spraying the baffle and pressed the switch.

The charge broke the elevation collar. The barrel dropped nose-first into its own pit. Hot coolant burst from the damaged bearings. The guards on the stair disappeared behind steam.

Vale crawled toward the access trench.

Cavil found her there. He sealed the wound, lifted her with his other arm and Blinked them both behind the outer housing. The movement made her scream. She had intended to remain professional about the whole thing and was briefly furious with herself for failing.

“One mount disabled,” she told him.

“I can see that.”

“Don't be pleased about it. We still need the north one.”

At thirty-four minutes, a transport pilot asked whether she could lift early.

“Negative,” field command answered.

“My loading is complete. I can stay under the ridge.”

“You can't stay under it and climb.”

The pilot argued for nineteen seconds. Then the southern battery fired at an Imperial aircraft passing above the terraces. The flash outlined the ridge and convinced her to save her fuel.

At thirty-six minutes, Quinn stopped another heavy shot with the Gray Lady.

The impact drove the artifact's edge into the freight crawler. He pulled her free and found a small red mark beneath the wrist seal of his armor. His body was still doing what he had asked of it. That did not mean the world had stopped charging him for it.

Pell brought a replacement ammunition crate up the north recess. He had learned to use the path in three movements, each ending behind a known piece of cover. On the second, a blast threw dust across the recess. He waited until it cleared, then completed the third.

“Corporal says you're still favoring the left,” he told Quinn.

“You have spoken to her?”

“Medical channel. She wanted to know if we'd forgotten her rifle.”

“Have we?”

Pell lifted it from the side of the crate.

Quinn looked at the weapon, then at the young soldier.

“Good.”

The word warmed Pell in a place the rain could not reach.

At forty-one minutes, Cavil destroyed the northern mount.

He did not do it by arriving in front of every gun at once. Vale had shown him the service drawings. He used the blind side of the cooling plant, sent his remaining riflemen through a maintenance hatch and entered the control housing behind the crew. The fight inside was close, loud and brief. The operator died with one hand still under the emergency screen cover.

Cavil put a burst through the control cores. His line team set charges on the traverse machinery. Outside, their southern element reported its own mount disabled, the breech destroyed by a charge carried in under the ammunition lift.

All three guns were out of the battle.

The guards were not.

Cavil withdrew carrying Vale while his people fought their way back through the sheds. He lost another man at the pipe gallery. A wounded soldier went back for the body and had to be ordered out twice.

“Overwatch. Battery closed. Field may lift.”

At Switch Nine, Quinn looked east.

The first transport's engines brightened. Its hull rose slowly from its landing blocks, a great dark mass lifting thousands of small decisions away from the ground. The pilots took it north of the destroyed battery, banking through the corridor their soldiers had opened.

The second followed.

Quinn did not watch either for long. Vargo's reserve had begun to move.

At forty-seven minutes, the Rust gun behind the drainage wall fired.

Its round struck the freight crawler, penetrating the upper body and exploding against the wall behind it. Shrapnel swept through the service niche. Tavin fell across his relay. The command net broke into a high electronic squeal.

Pell ran to him.

The specialist's visor was open. One eye looked at Pell. The other looked at nothing. His hand still held the cable he had bridged beneath the battery.

Pell reached for the wound seal on his belt.

“Relay,” Tavin said.

“Stay still.”

“It's… the plug.”

“Medic!” Pell shouted.

Tavin tried to point. His hand moved once and stopped.

Pell looked at the connector hanging beside the broken panel. He put it back into its socket. The squeal vanished. Cavil's voice returned, breathless from the southern gallery.

“—north access is cut. We're coming through the lower fuel trench. Do you copy?”

Pell stared at the man beside him.

“We copy,” he said.

At fifty minutes, Quinn told the rear detail to begin its withdrawal sequence.

Vargo attacked before the sequence was complete.

Infantry came over both spoil banks while a replacement shield team advanced through the cut. The heavy gun registered on the north recess. A carrier, hidden until now in the maintenance road, brought its front plate around the wrecked first vehicle and began pushing it aside.

Quinn went out to meet it.

The Gray Lady lengthened in his hand. He drove the spear through the seam beneath the carrier's gun mounting and tore the mechanism free. The crew reversed. Its track caught the wreck behind it, climbed and rolled the whole vehicle onto its flank.

He left it burning across the lane.

The nearest infantry tried the north wall. Pell's squad met them. A grenade burst inside the recess and killed Haret. His demolition pucks went off a moment later, punching a black hole through the wall Pell had been using as cover.

Quinn turned toward the new gap.

“Clear the western lane.”

The rear detail moved. He drew his first breath, felt the ache in his throat and took the second anyway.

The War Cry struck the cut and the men trying to force it. Its pressure tore the shield frames apart, drove the front rank into the wreckage and filled the narrow approach with fragments. The northern assault stalled as soldiers ducked against the bank.

It would buy minutes.

At fifty-four, the third civilian transport lifted.

The rear detail's carrier was still on the ground, its loading ramp facing the north access. Medical teams moved their remaining wounded into it. Dain sat strapped into a wall cradle with an oxygen line below her nose and a weapon somebody had thoughtfully failed to give her.

“Where's Pell?” she asked.

The medic looked toward the ramp.

“Where's the General?”

Nobody answered quickly enough.

At fifty-six minutes, Cavil reached the fuel trench with fourteen soldiers and Vale.

Rust infantry had the direct road. He could see their helmets beyond the pipe racks. He changed his route, sent two riflemen to secure the corner and carried the engineer through the service cut toward the carrier. Her blood had soaked the front of his armor. He could still feel her breathing.

At fifty-seven minutes, Pell lost track of the rounds in his magazine.

He fired until the rifle stopped. Changed magazines. Fired again. An enemy soldier appeared at the north breach with a launcher against his shoulder. Pell shot him before the barrel reached the General's exposed side. The man's body fell backward into the smoke.

Quinn glanced at Pell, understood and raised one hand in thanks.

At fifty-eight minutes, Vargo brought his last reserve through the maintenance causeway.

There were fewer than he had wanted. There were more than the rear detail could hold after the General fell.

Rask sent them their timing marks.

At fifty-nine minutes, Quinn put the Gray Lady in the road, point down, and looked back toward the carrier.

He could see Cavil coming.

He could see how far his son still had to go.