Chapter 6 — Carry Him Home

Chapter 6 — Carry Him Home

Cavil handed Vale to the first medic he reached.

“Keep her alive.”

The medic looked at the engineer's sealed arm, then at the blood on the Colonel's armor.

“I was planning to.”

It was an excellent answer. Cavil was grateful for it even as he turned away.

The north access lay beyond the carrier's ramp, a narrow service road between the fuel wall and the basalt cut. A retrieval crawler waited there with its rear bed lowered. The engineer at its controls held up a thumb. They had cleared a route to the freight crawler at Switch Nine. They had not cleared the men trying to close it.

Cavil checked his clock.

Forty-eight seconds.

He could reach his father. He could not reach him, load him and bring the whole detail out within forty-eight seconds unless the enemy agreed to stop existing for most of that time.

“Overwatch,” he said. “Withdrawal now.”

Quinn turned toward the north wall.

The heavy gun behind the drainage line fired at the retrieval crawler.

Its first shot broke against the basalt above it. The second struck its front running assembly. The crawler lurched, shed a drive wheel and slewed across the road. The engineer jumped clear as the fuel cell vented beneath the cab.

The rear bed remained intact.

Cavil saw it and changed the plan without wasting time being angry at the old one.

“Pell. Four on the bed. Release it from the drive. Everyone else cover west.”

Pell looked at the broken crawler, then at the General.

He moved.

At the cut, Quinn brought the Gray Lady back from the road. The metal shortened into the familiar dark blade. He secured her against his armor where she would not catch the men coming for him.

Thirty-one seconds.

He could hear the reserve moving beyond the western wrecks. Vargo had held them until now, and the heavy gun had done the rest. The road filled with boots. Portable shields flashed through the smoke. A launcher team climbed the northern bank.

Quinn sent ice across their approach. The wave took the bank's lower slope and the feet of the nearest infantry. Men slipped, caught one another and fell. The attack slowed without stopping.

Twenty-four seconds.

Cavil reached him.

“North recess. We have a bed.”

Quinn looked at the distance. “You have a bed without an engine.”

“I've found volunteers.”

“Have you?”

“They were very enthusiastic.”

Quinn took a step toward the recess.

The enemy launcher fired.

He saw the line, saw Pell and the soldiers separating the rear bed from its burning drive unit. There was open road between them. Nothing had yet closed it.

Quinn moved into that road.

The shaped charge struck the Gray Lady and burst against the ruined freight crawler. Fragments swept over the cut. One hit Cavil's shoulder hard enough to turn him. Another tore the side from the ammunition crate behind Pell. The General remained standing.

He looked back at his son.

“That was the left,” he said.

Cavil stared at him.

Quinn's mouth shifted in the smallest suggestion of a smile.

“Tell the Corporal I remembered.”

The clock reached sixty minutes.

There was no great explosion of light. No final roar. His body stopped accepting the will that had moved it through the hour.

His knees folded.

Cavil and Pell caught him before his head struck the road.

For one instant Pell thought they had caught a building. The armor bore down through his shoulders and into his damaged knee. Quinn's face was beside his visor, eyes open, breath steady and shallow. Pell waited for the great man to tell them how to do this part.

No command came.

He could not even raise a hand.

“Bed here!” Cavil shouted.

The four soldiers hauled the detached platform through the recess. Its loading rails rattled over the broken road. A round struck the side panel beside Pell's hip. Another hit the wall above Quinn's head.

Cavil lifted under his father's shoulders. Pell and two others took the hips and legs. They rolled him onto the bed while the rest of the detail fired across them.

“Straps,” Cavil said.

Pell found the first buckle. His gloves slipped on it. He swore, wiped one hand against his thigh and tried again.

Quinn's eyes moved toward him.

Pell knew he was watching. That helped his hands more than being watched had ever helped them on a parade ground.

The buckle closed.

“Ready.”

They pulled.

At the western bend, Vargo's reserve entered the cut.

The commander came behind the front shield team in a low armored command car. He had waited for an hour of Imperial strength to become a minute of Imperial labor. Now he could see the retrieval detail moving, could see the great gold figure lying flat among men who strained to drag it away.

His medical report had been right.

“North recess,” he ordered. “Close the recess.”

Rask sent the command to the heavy gun. The crew traversed. Its barrel moved across the drainage wall toward the thin file pulling Quinn home.

Pell saw the muzzle.

There was no General left to stand between it and them. No unspent bubble that could carry an entire detail. No voice that could lift the enemy out of the road. Cavil was firing one-handed while helping pull the bed, and the men at the front could not see the gun at all.

Pell let go of his strap.

He Blinked into the recess below the drainage wall, the same sort of useless-looking angle he had learned to use earlier in the hour. The gun's underside showed above him. Beside it, a power line ran from a field cell into the traverse housing.

He fired until his rifle locked open.

The cable split. Sparks ran down the wall. The barrel stopped moving, a few degrees short of the retrieval route.

“Pell!” Cavil shouted.

The gun fired anyway.

Its round entered the empty service building east of the recess. The explosion hurled the roof into the air. A wall came down across the route they had just left.

Pell Blinked back through falling dust and landed on his hands. Someone caught the back of his armor and dragged him into motion.

“Volunteer,” Cavil said, shoving a strap into his grip. “You're still enthusiastic.”

Pell pulled.

Behind them, the rear detail gave ground by pairs. They used every piece of cover they had prepared, every magazine they had placed, every small act of work Quinn had made them do while he stood still and healed. His hour had ended. The position he had built had not.

At the marked wall, the last engineer waited with a detonator.

She watched the rear bed pass. Counted the soldiers following it. Held her hand high until Cavil saw it.

“Clear!”

The wall came down into the cut.

Basalt struck the lead shield team, buried the narrow road and drove Vargo's car against the wrecked assault carrier. Its driver tried to reverse. Infantry crowded the lane behind him. For the second time that morning, the enemy commander found an army stopped by a structure he had expected to serve him.

Rask was shouting from the rear compartment.

“Out of the car!”

He reached for his door as the remaining northern rifle team found the stalled vehicle's side. Their burst passed through its light armor. Vargo struck the window with one hand, looking east toward a gold figure he could no longer see.

Rask got out through the rear hatch. She crawled behind a fallen shield, found a working radio and ordered the surviving reserve back to the spoil banks.

The field was gone.

At the carrier, Dain heard them before she saw them.

The rear bed's rails hammered over the loading ramp. Soldiers came with it, black with dust, some without rifles, some wearing other men's blood. Cavil was at the front. Pell staggered at his shoulder. On the bed lay Titus Quinn, looking impossibly large and unguarded beneath the carrier's white interior lights.

Dain stopped asking where he was.

The medical team took the platform. Cavil tried to help them and was told, with gratifying directness, to get out of their way.

He went to the ramp instead.

The last rear pair appeared through the smoke. One man was carrying the other. Cavil ran down, took the wounded soldier and got them both into the bay.

“Count,” he said.

Pell looked at the figures on the doorway register. His vision would not settle. He blinked at the numbers, blinked again and read them aloud.

The bay chief checked the count against her own slate.

“All aboard.”

“Close.”

The ramp rose. The ground disappeared beneath it.

The carrier lifted hard enough to put the standing soldiers onto their knees. Its pilot kept low behind the ruined ridge, then climbed through the corridor opened by the southern team. The wrecked battery passed below them, three black pits among the terraces. Beyond it, smoke marked the remains of Transport Two.

Pell saw that and remembered there would be other lists.

They rose through rain into a brief layer of bright cloud. For the first time all morning, sunlight entered the bay through the small viewports above the ramp. It fell across Quinn's armor and showed every place the gold had been stripped away.

The General lay still.

Cavil knelt beside the bed.

“We're clear,” he said.

Quinn looked at him.

“The last transport made the corridor. Havana has the survivors. We're clear.”

The older man's eyes closed.

He did not wake when the carrier docked. He did not wake when the medical teams moved him into the great ship's treatment section. At the end of his hour he had incurred a day in which none of their work could restore the strength he had spent. They could clean his wounds, repair what remained of his armor and make him comfortable. They could not make him rise before the price had been paid.

Cavil stayed until the surgeon told him to go and let the living see that somebody still commanded them.

He did that.

The first official return listed five thousand one hundred and four civilians lifted alive from the Nacre field. It was not the number who had been expected at Nine Crossing, and it was not the number who had started toward it. Names kept arriving from the lower galleries, from the wrecked transport, from people who had carried a stranger into a loading bay and discovered only afterward that nobody knew which family he belonged to.

Of the six hundred and two Ninth personnel counted west of the bridge that morning, four hundred and thirty-one were accounted for alive aboard the evacuation ships. The rest were dead or missing. Some missing would be found. Some wounded would die before their families received the first reassuring notice.

Cavil refused to sign a final casualty page until the recovery teams had finished their work.

Pell slept for eleven hours in a chair beside Dain's medical cradle. When he woke, she was looking at him.

“You kept my rifle.”

“Yes.”

“Did you clean it?”

He stared at her.

Her mouth moved behind the oxygen line.

He laughed until the laughter hurt.

Hol came to see them two days later on a powered medical chair. He had lost the leg. He was angry about the leg, more angry about the medical ration restrictions and determined that both complaints should be heard by anyone standing within range. Pell listened to every word with an affection that embarrassed them both.

Vale sent her report from surgery. It included a precise account of the three battery mounts, the demolition sequence and six recommendations for the design of safer service collars. Cavil read the recommendations twice before noticing that she had signed the report with her right hand and added a note apologizing for the untidy script.

Tavin's repaired relay was brought aboard in a crate with his effects. Pell found a small recording stored in its local buffer. There was no image of the War Cry. No perfect view of the General turning the train. The damaged pack had captured voices, engine noise and Tavin asking somebody whether the cable in his hand was supposed to be getting warm.

Pell gave the recording to his family without editing it.

When Quinn could finally stand, he went to the wounded before he went to the command deck.

He walked without escort. The medics pretended not to watch him closely. At Dain's cradle, he stopped long enough for her to inspect the repaired left side of his armor.

“Better,” she said.

“So I have been told.”

“Pell says you remembered.”

Quinn looked at the young soldier sitting beside her.

“At the relevant moment.”

Pell tried to answer and found that the words he had rehearsed were all too large.

Quinn saved him from them.

“You saw the gun.”

“Yes, General.”

“You reported before you fired.”

“Most of the time.”

The older man nodded. “Keep improving that.”

Then he moved to Hol's chair and asked after a leg that was no longer there without making Hol feel that the rest of him had become a lesson.

The stories began before the ships reached safety.

On one transport, Quinn had held Nine Crossing in the air while every civilian walked beneath him. On another, the Gray Lady had become the bridge itself. A child told her mother that the General had shouted the rain backward. Somebody who had heard it from somebody else said he had fought the whole Rust army alone.

Pell corrected that last version the first time he heard it.

“He had us,” he said.

The man telling the story looked disappointed.

“Yes, but you know what I mean.”

Pell thought about Essan, Haret and Tavin. About Vale inside the battery mount. About the schoolteacher counting sixteen linked hands while the deck moved beneath her.

“I do,” he said. “That's why I'm telling you.”

The correction spread too, though less quickly than the version with the bridge in the air.

Months later, when a memorial was finally raised for the Nacre dead, Pell was asked to speak. He did not want to. Dain told him this was a useful sign that he might be worth listening to, which did not make the invitation easier to accept.

He stood beneath a gray sky and looked at the families. Hol sat in the front row. Vale stood beside Cavil with a new prosthesis hidden under her sleeve. Edda Senn had brought the sixteen children. The boy with the metal tin held it on his lap.

Quinn stood at the back, where Pell knew he would.

Pell had written three pages. He looked at them, folded them once and put them away.

“People ask what he was like,” he said.

He had to wait for his throat to work.

“They ask whether the stories are true. The bridge. The train. What he shouted. How many men he killed.”

Rain began to touch the stone in front of him.

“I can tell you he was there. I can tell you he knew our names. He gave us work when being frightened was about to become the only thing we could do.”

Pell looked toward the names cut into the memorial.

“He held the road for an hour. At the end, he couldn't lift his hand. We had to carry him.”

Somebody in the crowd lowered their head.

“He knew we would have to. He trusted us with that before the first minute started.”

Pell found Quinn at the back of the gathering. The General's face gave him nothing easy. He looked, as he had on the road, like a man listening for the next useful thing.

“That's the part I want you to keep,” Pell said.

He stepped away from the lectern.

The title came later. It appeared first in a mechanic's handwritten account, then in a school lesson, then on a recording passed between ships whose crews had never seen Nacre. By then the weather had changed in several versions. The road had grown wider. The enemy had acquired guns it had never owned.

But the central thing remained.

There had been an hour when the Fist of the Queen stood between an army and the people behind him.

He had spent everything he could spend.

And when his strength ended, the line held long enough to bring him home.

THE END