“You let us worry about that; they’ll be facing the wrong way. We’re going to take that car, and we’re going to get it moving; the tracks themselves are clear. That’ll get us past the enemy’s forward lines.”
“Jane—have you been hit on the head? Esa, has she been hit on the head? That world is pulsed; that locomotive’s engine requires fusion power to run, and the fusion batteries inside won’t work.”
“We’ve got an answer to that. Just figure out a flight plan to intercept that train while it’s in motion—we won’t be able to risk letting it stop, not while we’re barreling through enemy positions, so we’ll have to transfer from it to you as it’s moving down the track.”
“If you let it go too far—however you’re planning to get it started to begin with—there’s another break in the bridge, several miles down. Just so you know. That’s a long drop to take in a metal box. A metal box that’s not, you know, me.”
“Understood. Jane out.” She switched off her comms, then looked at Sho, who had been following what sounded to him like a one-sided conversation with wide eyes.
“Who were you talking to?” he asked.
“Our ship,” Jane answered. “She’s coming to pick us up.”
“Your ship can talk?”
I almost smiled at that; the question was . . . familiar, to say the least. I’d asked Jane the same thing, almost verbatim, what felt like lifetimes ago.
“Yes, she can,” Jane told him, her voice full of the same poorly hidden annoyance she’d answered me with. “Not important right now. You got those electric lights to run, down below, and the pulse didn’t burn them out, because the power was coming from you, the same way Barious are protected.”
“What are ‘Barious’?”
“Also not important, at the moment. Do you think you can do the same to a fusion battery, in an old train car?”
He nodded confidently; I was quietly impressed. He’d been through a hell of a day, but here he was, clinging to Jane’s back, doing his best to help. “I’ve activated fusion batteries before,” he said. “In the ammunition factory. They don’t last very long—a half a day, at most, before the reaction starts to sour and I have to power them down—but I can get them running.”
“That’s all we need. Esa? You got the plan?”
I nodded confidently. “We make our way through this . . . shit . . .”—I waved at the gas cloud around us, and the concrete ruin of the bombed-out surface of the factory world barely visible behind it—“until we can find access to the train line above, probably a ladder up the trestle supports. Then we climb that ladder—in full view of all the enemies around us once we breach the top of the gas—and we pray we don’t get shot while we’re doing it. Then we launch an assault on this train car, otherwise known as an enemy sniper position—”
“Quit whining, I already said they’ll be facing the wrong way—”
“And then we get the train car running—if we’re not dead by that point, that is—and barrel past the enemy lines, theoretically heading toward wherever the hell all these assholes are coming from, so that Schaz can pick us up, transferring from a moving train to a moving spacecraft. Before we run out of train track—and bridge—and come to a much more sudden stop at the bottom of a concrete ravine. That about the long and short of it?”
Sho looked from me, back to Jane. “She makes it sound a lot harder than the thing you said,” he told her solemnly.
“She has a bad habit of doing that,” Jane replied, glaring at me. “We’ve got this, Sho. This is what we do.”
“Is it?” he asked me.
I nodded, trying to force a confidence into my voice that I really didn’t feel. We were probably about to get shot at a lot. “It is,” I told him. “This plan is kind of crazy, yeah, but on a scale from one to ten, as compared with some of the other plans we’ve executed, and survived? It’s, like, a four.”
“Four is still . . . higher than one. Or two. Or three. I think I would prefer any of those numbers to a four.”
“So would I, Sho,” Jane told him, “but you play the hand you’re dealt.”
“If this is a four, what would be a ten?”
“Once we get clear of all this, remind me to tell you the story of when we stormed a dreadnaught,” I told him. “That was, like, at least an eight.”
“Nine point three,” Jane grunted, standing and shifting Sho’s weight on her back.
“You only think that because you got shot a little.”
“You got shot?” Sho asked her.
“All you’ve seen today, Sho, and you think it’s surprising she’s been shot?”
“Not for the first time, kid,” Jane told him, ignoring me.
“They had to give her a new liver,” I told him. “She has, like, a machine liver now. And kidneys too.”
“Can we stop talking about insane escapades we’ve pulled in the past, and concentrate on the insane escapade we’ve got to pull right now?” Jane asked.
I shrugged, standing as well, pulling Bitey up into ready position. “It’s your plan,” I told her.
“Yes, it is. And, as usual, I would prefer if we could just execute it, and not stand around a goddamned war zone talking it to death.”
“Just point the way, partner.”
“Down into those trenches.” She nodded toward a shadow in the mists I could barely see; I hadn’t really noticed them before, but now that she’d named them, I could tell that’s what they were—high concrete walls, maybe canals for wastewater, way back when, now repurposed as cover from the firing positions in the factory somewhere behind us. “They should take us most of the way to the access ladder; that way we only have to cross a little open ground to get to it, as opposed to a lot.”
“Okay. And how many heat signatures did you read from Schaz’s scans down in those trenches?”
“More than a couple. And the concrete could be hiding a whole lot more.”
I took a deep breath through my mask; even filtered through my teke field, the oxygen had a bitter tang to it, almost metallic, like rust. Or blood. “Okay, Sho, I might have been wrong. This might be a five instead.”
“Esa, just—”
“I know; I’m going.”
“We’ll be right behind you.”
“Good luck!” Sho called out softly. I almost grinned at that. I’d need it. We all would.
CHAPTER 8
I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but the gas was even thicker in the trenches than it had been in the subway tunnels, and it was an absolute soup compared to the thinned-out variety I’d been dealing with once we’d reached the surface. Whatever this shit was, it was heavier than the surrounding atmosphere, which meant the enemy sect was constantly pumping it out, probably from the bridge somewhere above us—the very bridge we were about to assault.
That was a problem for later. Now, there was just the trench.
We could hear the sounds of fighting somewhere behind us, and above, as well, the enemy using the gas attack to launch an assault on the factory walls as a diversion, keeping the sect inside from realizing that the true threat was about to come from below. It all seemed very distant, in the mists—the yellow-green fog and the high trench walls isolating us, making it seem as though we were on an entirely different planet from the world Jane and I had landed on this morning.
I stepped over rubble and debris and the detritus of war: broken guns and mortar craters and torn-apart armor plating. My feet swept through a carpet of loose shell casings like gravel, every step making telltale clinking noises that seemed to echo far into the mist. Every few minutes—not quite regular, but close—there was a heavy thumping sound, like a heartbeat, something more felt than heard. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, only that it likely wasn’t anything good.
There were very few corpses, from either side. Bullet holes and bloodstains marred the concrete—bloodstains in several different colors, mostly red and teal—but very few actual dead. A part of me shivered away from the implications of tha
t; I doubted, however intense the fighting got, that they were carting the fallen away for proper funeral rites. The more likely implication was that the constant war that raged across this world had given their sect at least a partial solution to the chronic food shortages common on a nonagricultural world like this one.
After all, it wasn’t exactly “cannibalism” if the enemy’s fallen dead were mostly comprised of a different species. Still, elsewhere in the galaxy, fucking eating another sentient being was frowned upon, to put it lightly.
“Three, forward. Manning a big gun,” Jane whispered through the bug in my ear. I almost jumped out of my skin at her voice—as I moved along the trenches, through the fog of death, it was easy to forget that I wasn’t entirely alone, a feeling that wasn’t exactly relieved by the fact that, even carrying Sho on her back, Jane was entirely fucking soundless, carpet of debris underfoot or no. A reminder that even after years of training, I still had a long way to go to catch up to her.
I raised Bitey up a little higher, slipping my finger inside the trigger guard. Inched closer to the booming reports echoing down the trench. That was what I had been hearing, what sounded like a heartbeat—the reports of the artillery, a big ground-based gun smashing away at the distant factory walls. We were close enough now that the sound was accompanied by a brief flash of light in the fog, like watching a thunderstorm from a distance and seeing lightning bloom inside the bruised veil of the storm clouds. I came to a curve in the trench; the gun should be just on the other side.
I waited for the next report, when the enemy would be at their busiest, reloading, rearming, preparing their beast of a weapon to fling another round at the thick walls somewhere high above us.
It came, the flash almost blinding, the sound deafening. I moved.
I took all three of the gunners down with quick bursts from Bitey, the shots lost in the fog of war and the general distant chaos in the gas cloud. Reached out with a mild application of my teke and broke the control mechanism for the gun, too. That wouldn’t do much good in the long run—and like Jane was constantly reminding me, we weren’t actually here to try and win this war; getting sucked into a sect conflict wouldn’t help us, or Sho, at all—but it made me feel better, just like smashing the gas pumps outside of the breach tunnel had.
In the silence left behind after the big gun was broken, I could hear another sound, a kind of rhythmic chanting, a repeated phrase, over and over again. Many voices, speaking in unison. Jane came around the corner; I frowned at her, tapping one ear with my free hand and then indicating the general direction of the noise. There were three paths out of the gun nest—the way we’d come, a path opposite that one, further along the trench line to the east, and a path leading north, deeper into enemy territory.
The northward path was where the sound came from; I hoped dearly that wasn’t the direction we needed to go. Several different experiences with Jane over the last few years had taught me a valuable lesson: chanting is bad. Anybody worked up enough to chant in unison is usually planning something horrible.
Jane listened as well for a moment, then raised Schaz again. “Schaz, Jane here,” she said softly. “Can you scan radio frequencies, patch into the communications of the sect that’s under siege?”
“I can, and already have,” Schaz replied, a little petulantly. “Want me to tell you what they’re talking about? They’re mostly reacting to chaos in the tunnels below their little fort, trying to get civilians out—”
“I want you to wait a few moments, then send a message to them,” Jane cut her off. “Do whatever you have to to convince them it’s legitimate; impersonate one of their scouts or something. You’re reading our position?”
“I am. You’re close to the bridge access.”
“Good. There should be some sort of structure nearby, a warehouse or a bunker or something. Can you make it out, through the gas?”
“I think I’ve got it—I can’t tell what it is, but I’m reading the location, southeast of you. A container of some kind, maybe a water tank. I can’t get heat signatures, though: too much concrete.”
“Don’t worry about it; we already know how many enemies are inside. Fucking all of them. That’s their staging ground for the assault down through the tunnels.” Oh. Oh, fuck. I hadn’t put that together. We were currently standing in between the massed might of the enemy sect and their path down into the factory stronghold. The chanting was their commanders, getting them worked up before they started their attack. Fucking hell, this was not a good place to be.
“Once we’re clear,” Jane was still talking to Schaz, “relay that position to the sect inside the city. Have them pound the fuck out of it with their big guns.” I grinned at that; probably a savage reaction, but I didn’t care. We weren’t supposed to choose sides—the Justified, I mean. It didn’t do any good, in the long run. If we’d come at the front lines from the other direction—if Sho had been born into the northern sect, as opposed to the southern one—we would have likely wound up on the other side of this conflict, fighting to break into the city, rather than killing off those assaulting it. It was just a matter of luck we’d wound up on the Wulf side of the fighting rather than the Tyll.
All the same, the Tyll sect had used poison gas to kill indiscriminately, and they were about to storm the subway tunnels to launch a cowardly attack on civilians, civilians including Sho’s mother, if she was still alive. We’d seen signs that they ate the dead, and that they were somehow fighting off the pulse, but only so they could better wage their war. Plus, they’d shot at us, or at least tried to. So fuck them; they could eat hot artillery shells. I’d sleep just fine that night, knowing we’d fucked up their plans to win their stupid little crusade.
“Tell me we don’t have to go through them,” I whispered to Jane. She shook her head, pointed down the eastern trench running along the front instead. I nodded, exhaling with relief, then reloaded Bitey, stepping over the bodies of the dead gunnery crew to take us down the correct route. I wanted as far from the massed assault battalion as we could get, as quickly as possible.
After just a few minutes, something shifted: it might have been my imagination, but I thought I could hear new sounds above us—not just the echo of distant gunfire, but a change in the low moan of the constant wind. Maybe even the creak of metal. We were underneath the bridge now, closing on our goal. Sure enough, another few steps forward into the trench, and the trestle supports loomed out of the fog, a wall of metal lattices rising up and up and up, seeming to climb forever up into the sickly toxic atmosphere like a cliff face of woven steel.
“Decision time,” Jane said as she came up behind me and saw the trestles as well. “We can keep moving forward—there’s an access ladder on one of the support pillars—or we can free climb the trestles themselves.”
“One of those things will be easier to do than the other. Especially with you carrying Sho.”
“True. But on the other hand, one of those things might have snipers in the city watching for enemy movement and an easy kill, snipers who won’t be able to tell us from Tyll. We’re going to be very exposed either way, but it’s significantly less likely those snipers are scanning the trestles themselves for movement.”
“Oh. Fuck.”
“Hadn’t thought of that, had you?”
“Congratulations, Jane, you’re very clever in figuring out awful ways for us to get shot. So we free climb, then?”
“I think that would be best. Unless you want to take a high-powered rifle round to the back of your intention shield; see if you can hold on to the ladder while that’s happening. You could make it into a game. A game called ‘Will Esa fall to her death or not?’ And also, ‘Can her shield recharge before the sniper reloads?’ I’d give that one about even odds.”
“You’re kind of awful sometimes, you know that?”
“So I’ve been told. Mostly by you. Come on: up and over. I’d like to get climbing—and get clear of where Schaz is going to direct that Wulf artillery barr
age—as soon as possible.”
CHAPTER 9
I was too short to be a very good climber.
This was just a statement of fact. I was short, even for a human, and humans were short compared to most of the other species—we weren’t out and out small, like Reint or Reetha, but compared to Mahren or Wulf, we were on the shorter side. And of course, it wasn’t like the train trestles had been designed to be climbed at all—that’s what the ladder access, the access we were currently ignoring, was for—but even if they had been, they would have been designed to be a Wulf arm-span apart, and that was a solid foot longer than my own reach.
All of which was to say Jane was climbing faster than me, and she had Sho on her back. That just wasn’t fair. I gritted my teeth behind my teke mask and tried to put just a little more speed into my ascent. I’d long ago given up on actually competing with Jane on this sort of thing—not only was she close to purpose-built for athleticism, just genetically, she’d spent well over a hundred and fifty years honing her body for this kind of work. Still, I’d be damned if she was going to power through a handicap like “one hundred pounds of furry Wulf adolescent hanging off her back” and still hand me my ass.
I climbed faster. The fog was swirling above; we were approaching the top of the gas cloud now. Thank whatever deity. I was thoroughly sick of the world being nothing but yellow-green mist, not to mention holding the telekinetic mask in place across my face. As I passed through the last of it and the sky finally opened up above us—the sun still high, nearly directly overhead, the pale gold light of the day making the stretch of the trestle upward seem dreamlike, unreal—I couldn’t help it; I looked down.
It didn’t seem like we were too high up, mainly because of the swirling mist of death that obscured how far we’d already come. The fog just spread and spread, stretching out in either direction, all along the walls of the looming factory complex to our left-hand side. Tiny blooms of light were barely visible in the yellow-green clouds below, gunfire or artillery shells landing.
A Chain Across the Dawn Page 4
