Page 26 of Kavan

It opens onto a stair.

We go through it in eight seconds and Kavan is last and he pulls the panel to behind him with the white light already washing the channel wall, and we stand in absolute silence on a Precursor stair while something enormous fails to find us through a hand's width of stone.

Nobody speaks for two minutes.

Then Vesk says, "Doctor, the wager's off. I'm paying you directly," and the whole column comes apart laughing, badly, the way people laugh when the alternative is worse.

The stair climbs. It climbs for six hundred meters and then it opens, and we come out onto a gallery balcony above the central district, and all of us stop where we stand.

The command spire rises from the city floor to the vault. Not a tower. A column of pale material eight hundred meters through at the base, ringed by platforms, and running up its whole height in a slow spiral is a band of light.

It's amber at the bottom. Two-thirds of the way up, the amber stops being amber.

"Eli," I say. "How far up is the white?"

He does the math. He does it twice.

"Two-thirds," he says, and his voice has nothing in it. "Sophie, it's at eight-twelfths."

CHAPTER 18

KAVAN

The command district is a killing ground and both of us are trying to cross it.

I spend four hours on the balcony with the glass and Vesk beside me, and by the end I have the shape of it and like no part of it.

The spire stands in a plaza two kilometers across. Six causeways reach it, radial, elevated, each swept end to end by construct positions that haven't shifted in eleven hours because they have no need to. This isn't patrolling. The Warden has stopped hunting and started defending, which means it has worked out what we want.

Rourke works the eastern approach with his whole strength, methodical about it, and it's costing him. Four of his people are down in the open. He doesn't withdraw. He puts a support weapon on the causeway lip and grinds a corridor through one construct at a time, with ammunition enough to do it and discipline enough to keep going another day.

"He'll get through," Vesk says.

"Yes. In about nine hours, and with half his people."

"And us?"

"We have twenty, three of them wounded, and Marchant's nine kilos."

"So we don't cross a causeway."

"No."

I take the problem to Sophie without a solution, which is the arrangement now.

She hears me out with her boots over the balcony edge, then says, "Why are you assuming we go over?"

"Because the plaza floor is open ground under six overlapping fields of fire."

"The floor is, sure." She pulls the rubbings out. "But those causeways are elevated for a reason, Kavan. What runs under an elevated causeway in a city that moves people by rail?"

That lands a second late.

"The rail."

"The rail. Six lines, radial, cut-and-cover trench under every causeway, running from the district ring into the spire base, because that's where you'd unload a garrison." She raps the sheet with a knuckle. "They aren't marked as routes. They aren't corridors, they're track. The Warden isn't watching them because nothing has ever walked up one."

"Are they clear?"