Page 35 of Kavan

CHAPTER 22

KAVAN

The command district at 1400 is three armies in a room.

Rourke's people hold the eastern causeway and the ground before the outer gate. The Warden holds everything else. We hold the southwestern trench with twenty-three people, one working relay, six kilos of shaped charge and a woman who needs eleven minutes at a console.

"Vesk."

"Sir."

"You're going to give me a fight on the eastern causeway that Rourke has to answer."

"With what?"

"With eight people and every round we hold that isn't already in a magazine here." I set two fingers on the plan. "You aren't taking that causeway. You're making him spend nine minutes deciding whether you might."

Vesk chews on that.

"And if he doesn't answer?"

"Then he's better than I think, and we go anyway."

He answers.

Nine minutes into Vesk's demonstration, Rourke pulls his southern flank across the plaza to reinforce, and the Warden, which has spent eleven hours holding a defensive line against a static enemy, sees fourteen armed men break cover and move across open ground, and does what it was built to do.

The plaza comes apart.

I have soldiered for nineteen years and never watched anything like it. Six construct positions engage at once from three elevations. Rourke's flank is caught in two kilometers of open nothing, and they're good, they're genuinely good, they go to ground and return fire and start bounding back in pairs, and none of it matters.

"Now," I say. "Trench, forward, move."

We come up out of the southwestern trench into the spire plaza while every machine in the district is busy killing somebody else.

It buys us eight hundred meters, and then a construct on the second ring turns its head.

The next twenty minutes I won't be able to give a clean account of, so I'll give the pieces that stayed.

Corporal Dain Yusuf goes down at the eleventh pier covering Kolar and the wounded, and he does it deliberately, and he knows what he's doing when he steps out.

Vesk takes a fragment in the left shoulder and keeps his element together for another six hundred meters on one arm before Auclair gets to him.

Four of Rourke's people come off the eastern approach into our flank at the fifteenth pier, and they aren't the crew from Convergence. These are his close element. They move like Vakutan.

I put three of them down and it takes everything I have. The fourth puts a blade through my right forearm along the line of one of the scars I collected boarding a hull four years ago, which is a coincidence I'll find funny later, and then Petra Ansel shoots him off me.

And Sophie.

Sophie stops the whole column dead at the twelfth pier, says "Left, all the way left, into the buttress," and puts twenty-two people into a recess that is not on any plan, six seconds before a construct sweeps the pier line with something that turns the flagstones to glass.

Sophie finds a defensive control at the sixteenth. Not a passage but a control — a plinth in a guard alcove, cold for twenty millennia, and she brings it up in ninety seconds and drops a blast shutter across the eastern approach behind Rourke's reinforcement, which strands eleven of his people behind it for the remainder of the day.

Sophie puts her hand on my chest at the eighteenth pier and says "wait" and I wait, and four seconds later a construct crosses the gap ahead of us that would have walked into me.

By the twentieth I have stopped issuing her instructions and started asking her questions.

"Gate?"