Chapter 4 — The Last Road

Chapter 4 — The Last Road

At the eastern embankment, the frightened became useful as soon as somebody gave them work they understood.

The furnace crews took over the stretcher line. A bus driver found a cargo tug, reversed it up the surviving lane and began hauling stalled vehicles away from the ramp. Three school cooks organized water at a drainage shelter. Nobody asked whether that was their place in an evacuation plan. There had been a plan at dawn, but it had belonged to a bridge without a hole in it.

The teacher reached the far bank with all sixteen children.

She counted them again anyway.

Her name was Edda Senn. Cavil learned it when she caught his forearm and told him there was an old man still inside the last bus. He had refused to leave the seat beside his wife.

“Is she hurt?” Cavil asked.

Senn looked toward the bus.

Cavil went back for him.

The old man sat with his hand through the strap of a handbag. The woman beside him had a coat folded over her lap. A piece of the broken window had entered below her ear; her husband had cleaned her face with his own sleeve.

“I can't take her,” he told Cavil.

“We can.”

“They said the living first.”

Cavil looked down the aisle at the soldiers waiting for his order.

“We are taking you both.”

They carried the woman in the coat. Her husband walked beside them holding the bag. On the far bank, Senn took his arm and kept him moving toward the field.

Quinn saw them go from the western rise.

The buses were empty now. Vale's last inspection team had come out of the lower railway. The wounded from the rearguard had reached the ramp. Only Dain's squads and the General remained west of the gap.

The road ahead of them was filling again.

Vargo had stopped asking the broken train to move. His infantry used its armor as a succession of firing positions. Teams with short heavy launchers crept from hauler to barrier, waiting for Quinn to expose the damaged side of his armor. A second force moved along the northern channel in shallow workboats, seeking an approach beyond the bridge's eastern end.

“Four boats,” Dain reported.

“Six,” Quinn said. “Two under the steam discharge.”

She sent the correction east.

Cavil put a squad on the northern outfall. They could see the boats when the steam thinned. They waited until they could see them well enough to make waiting worthwhile.

At the west entrance, Quinn formed a fan of ice above his open hand. Twelve narrow blades hung there, pale and still in the rain. He sent three into the launcher's exposed mounting and the rest at the men working around it. Ice burst against armor joints and concrete. The gunner fell backward from his seat. One of the rounds in the ready rack cooked off with a sharp flash.

Quinn used the pause.

“Rear detail. Across.”

Dain acknowledged. The withdrawal began by pairs. Each pair covered the next, using the divider and the disabled buses until the line shortened to three positions. Pell fired his last rounds from the western bus stop, Blinked to the midspan barrier and discovered he had been holding his breath.

Dain arrived beside him.

“Still here?”

“Against my better judgment.”

“Good. You're developing some.”

Quinn was thirty yards behind them. His left arm moved again, but reluctantly. A heavy rifle round struck his thigh as he passed the nearest hauler. It would have gone through a lesser soldier's leg and entered the road. Against the General it opened the armor, drove him one pace sideways and remained buried somewhere beneath the gold.

He kept walking.

Pell raised his rifle to cover him.

Something slammed into Dain's back. Her armor threw an emergency warning across Pell's display. She struck the barrier with her shoulder, tried to recover and went down on one knee.

He caught her before she fell.

“I'm fine,” she said.

It was the wrong voice. Too level. Too far away.

He pulled her toward the ramp.

“Pell.”

“We'll be over in a second.”

“Listen.”

He would not.

She grabbed his wrist hard enough for the pressure to register through his glove. “My pack. Take the charges out of the right pouch.”

He looked at her.

“They're not cooking, you idiot. The trigger's broken. Vale needs the spares.”

He laughed then, a terrible burst of relief, and she used the moment to shove him into motion. They made the ramp together. Cavil took her other arm. A medic was already coming.

Quinn reached the east side last.

“All clear,” Vale said.

She did not sound pleased.

Quinn looked back over Nine Crossing. The nearest enemy squad was halfway along the freight lane. One man had reached the red divider and was kneeling beside the abandoned ammunition case.

The General raised the Gray Lady in acknowledgment, though there was nobody across the road to misunderstand it as a salute.

“Now.”

Vale's charges broke the western approach first. The narrow road dropped at the loading marks, leaving the center span standing across a channel it could no longer be reached from. The eastern ramp sheared loose and fell against the abutment. A section of upper deck followed, turning as it went, and the water took it with a sound like a door closing underground.

The enemy squad on the span went flat. The men behind them stopped at the broken west road.

For the first time since morning, there was no vehicle route between the Rust Clan and the people leaving Nacre.

Quinn turned east.

He got six steps before his knee failed.

Cavil caught him.

The nearest soldiers looked away instinctively. Quinn saw that, and it irritated him more than the wound.

“I didn't fall out of the sky,” he said. “I've been shot.”

A few men laughed. It gave them permission to move again.

The medical team brought a carrier large enough for a Praetorian. Quinn waved it toward Dain.

“Her first.”

“She's already going,” Cavil said.

“Then somebody else.”

Cavil lowered his voice. “There is always somebody else.”

For a moment Quinn let his weight rest against him.

He could smell burned insulation, wet concrete and the bitter chemical smell of damaged armor. Beneath them was the familiar human smell of fear. He had carried it through more battles than either of them could easily count. Men wrote that time made it easier. They were usually men who had found a safe way to watch.

“How far to the field?” he asked.

“One mile to the first shelters. Another half to the launch pads.”

“Then we walk.”

They joined the rear of the evacuation.

Beyond the embankment, the service road climbed between spoil banks to a freight junction called Switch Nine. The name predated the Legion's arrival by two hundred years, which had not prevented a number of Ninth soldiers from claiming it as a favorable omen. At the junction, a cut through the old basalt ridge opened toward the evacuation field. It was broad enough for two transport crawlers and narrow enough that wrecking one would close it.

Quinn studied it as they passed.

East of the cut lay the launch shelters, fuel farms and four great civilian transports. Their loading hatches stood open. Families disappeared into them by columns while medical teams fed stretchers into lower bays.

West lay the approach road, the spoil banks and the channel. The workboats would put Rust infantry on this side within minutes unless Cavil's northern squad had been more successful than any squad had a right to expect. Farther south, maintenance causeways offered a longer route for vehicles. The broken bridge had bought time. It had not bought an afternoon.

“Overwatch, field command,” a new voice said.

Quinn stopped.

The voice belonged to a woman who had already delivered the bad news twice and was discovering that repeating it did not improve it.

“The southern ridge battery is active. They let our first lift clear the shelters, then engaged. Transport Two is down behind the fuel wall. Survivors coming out now. The other pilots are holding.”

Cavil looked toward the south.

There were no convenient guns in sight. The battery had been dug into the industrial terraces beyond the ridge. Its fire crossed the only low ascent corridor clear of the battle overhead.

“Havana?” Quinn asked.

“Ground clutter and our people above it. They'll take the position if we give them clean designation, but we can't put a ship strike through the lower fuel works. We need the battery disabled or exposed.”

Quinn studied Cavil's slate. A service road led south through the terraces. Vehicle sheds and pumping stations broke the line of sight. A small team could approach. It could not do so instantly, and it would have to come back through a field the Rust Clan was already circling.

“I'll take it,” Cavil said.

Quinn looked at the launch shelters. Smoke rose above the southern fuel wall. He counted the transports that could still leave, counted their open ramps, counted the people not yet inside them.

“How long?”

“Forty minutes to reach it and finish the job, if the route is open. Twenty back.”

“If the route isn't open?”

Cavil did not answer with a promise. He looked again at the map.

“We will open it.”

Quinn handed the slate back.

“Take Vale. Take a line team. Let the rest load the ships.”

“You need a surgeon.”

“I need an hour.”

Cavil went still.

They both knew the price of that hour.

Quinn had used Juggernaut before. His soldiers told those stories in versions that grew larger with every campaign: the strength, the healed wounds, the movement nothing ordinary could stop. The last part was less often mentioned outside the Ninth. An hour spent that way ended in absolute helplessness. Twenty-four hours in which the General could not stand, fight or call on anything that had made the hour possible.

Someone had to carry him afterward.

“No,” Cavil said.

“Colonel.”

“You cannot hold this field alone.”

Quinn looked past him at Pell, who was helping a medic move Dain toward a transport. At Tavin, crouched over the broken relay with a borrowed battery. At Vale, checking demolition stores with blood dried into the joints of her gloves.

“I haven't held anything alone.”

Cavil shut his eyes for one heartbeat. When he opened them, the son had stepped back far enough to let the Colonel work.

“The cut,” he said.

Quinn nodded.

“Your line behind it. A covered retrieval route along the north wall. No transport leaves without room for the rear detail.”

“And a carrier that can take your weight.”

“Yes.”

“You are not ordering it away.”

“No.”

Cavil caught his father's forearm.

“You will have a place to come back to.”

Quinn closed his hand over his son's.

Then Cavil turned south.

At Switch Nine, the General made his soldiers prepare a position rather than watch him suffer. They dragged a freight crawler across one lane, laid firing lines through the other and moved loose fuel stores beyond the first spoil bank. Tavin set the repaired relay in a concrete service niche. Vale sent her last available engineer to identify the section of wall that could be collapsed behind a withdrawing carrier.

Pell returned from the transport without Dain.

“She says you're to keep the head down on your left,” he told Quinn.

“Does she?”

“She says the armor's open there and you keep forgetting.”

Quinn glanced at him. “Tell her I'll try to remember.”

“She says she'll be checking.”

The General almost smiled.

He stood in the shelter of the crawler while two soldiers held the damaged outer plates clear of his wounds. He had to be still now. Truly still. The body beneath the armor wanted to shake; he refused it movement while the Red Spark gathered.

Beyond the western bank, enemy engines began the long turn toward the field.

Quinn listened to his people working around him. He heard a magazine strike a rifle housing, Tavin asking for a second length of cable, the engineer marking the wall with a bright white cross. Useful sounds. Living sounds.

The wound in his flank began to close.

Muscle drew together beneath ruined armor. The broken structure in his arm knit with a deep internal heat. His leg straightened. He remained still until the transformation had completed, until the damaged body had become whole enough to spend again.

Then he lifted the Gray Lady.

“Start the clock,” he said.