Page 9 of Kavan

KAVAN

The first one comes out of the west arch at 0412 by my chrono, and it doesn't walk like a machine.

That's what undoes the officers. We're trained against drones, against tracked units, against the jerky corrected motion of something being told where to put its feet. This thing pours. Four meters of obsidian plate strung on a frame with too many joints, blue light running the seams, and it comes down the rubble slope of a collapsed archway with the loose grace of an animal that has done it ten thousand times.

It kills Rask before anyone fires.

There was nothing I could have done differently and I'll take that apart later for years. He's on the west arch because I put him there. The construct reaches him at a speed his training has no answer for, and the light along its forearm brightens, and then Tolan Rask simply isn't standing anymore.

"Suppression, left, now."

Eight rifles isn't enough. We put forty rounds into it and it ignores thirty-six of them; the four that matter are the ones Vesk puts through the joint seam at the shoulder, because Vesk has been shooting things for longer than most of these people have been alive. The arm goes. The construct adjusts its balance and keeps coming.

"Fall back to the east arch. Civilians first, moving, moving."

I hold the line at the plinth with Vesk and two others and we buy them ninety seconds, and ninety seconds is enough because Larkin has already found the way out.

She found it during the fight. That's what I still turn over.

The east arch is half blocked, and beyond it a service corridor runs down at a grade for two hundred meters before it forks, and at the fork she stops the entire column with one hand raised and puts her lamp on the wall.

"Left," she says.

"The right is wider."

"Left, Marshal."

Behind us the construct is in the corridor. I can hear the plates.

"Give me a reason in four words."

"They can't go left."

I take it. I have no basis for taking it and I take it anyway, and I put nineteen people down a passage barely wide enough for my shoulders while Vesk and I walk backward at the rear with our lamps off and our sights on the dark.

The construct arrives at the fork. Its light washes the wall.

Then it stops.

It stands there filling the corridor with its ruined arm hanging and it won't enter, and after a long moment it turns and goes right, and the sound of it recedes, and I'm left in the dark with my pulse running hard for the very first time since planetfall, understanding that a human woman has just kept nineteen people alive with an act of reading.

Later, when we have distance, I ask her.

"Two glyphs," she says. She's filthy, and a burn runs along her forearm that she has mentioned to nobody. "There's a cluster that shows up over doorways. I've seen it my whole career. But there's a variant with a hooked third element, and it's on every passage the constructs use, and it isn't on the ones they don't."

"What does the variant mean?"

"On Threshold it's translated as permitted." She rubs her eyes with the back of her wrist and leaves a stripe of ash. "I think that's wrong. I think it means this one is ours. They aren't hunting us, Kavan. They're patrolling a route. We keep stepping into their route because we don't know it's a route."

It's the first time she has used my name.

I don't react to it. There's a great deal I let pass without reacting, and the list has been getting longer since the morning she laughed in the dirt, so I add this to it and move on.

"How much of the map do you remember?"

"Most of it."

"How much is most."