Chapter 242: The Reserve Line

The combat district was four zones of real walls and real lanes, and the only thing in it that was not real was the casualty column.

Twelve marked transport sleds, weighted to move at the pace of a stretcher party, tagged with exercise markers that recorded every impact they took. They started at the district’s northern entry and they had to reach the extraction point on the far side of Zone Four, which meant crossing every wall, lane, and service passage in between.

They could not defend themselves. That was the entire design.

"Objective is the column," said the controller over the district channel. "Sled damage is scored. Student and beast contact is scored separately. Aggressors are live and they are not restricted to your zones. Begin at the mark."

Neris was somewhere on an observation walkway and said nothing at all.

Jin took the middle of Zone Two, where he could see two of the four zones and hear the other two, and put Glitch eleven meters behind him at the reserve line.

The trigger sheet was on his slate and he had read it twice that morning.

[Deployment condition 1: threat crosses a zone’s declared fallback boundary following local containment failure]

[Deployment condition 2: designated withdrawal route under direct threat]

Glitch settled onto the marked ground and radiated an opinion about it that Jin could feel through his boots.

The first forty minutes went well and Jin was almost entirely useless during them, which was the point.

Ruiz’s Skitterhawk found a threatened crossing in Zone One eleven minutes in and she rerouted the column’s approach by about twenty meters without asking him anything.

"Column’s coming through the eastern gap instead of the arch," she said. "Arch has three aggressors sitting on the upper walkway and I don’t like the angle."

"Received."

That was the whole exchange. She had a boundary and two triggers and neither of them had fired, so she had made a call inside her own zone and told him afterward.

Vance held the Zone Two crossing, which was the worst piece of ground in the district — a raised span with a single approach and a drop on both sides — and the Cragmaw Boar stood on it for nineteen minutes while the column crawled across.

He asked for one thing during the whole of it.

"Astor. What’s behind me?"

"Two aggressors in the service passage, coming your way, and they’ll reach your rear in about ninety seconds. Ruiz has them."

"Received."

He did not ask for help. He asked for information, and Jin gave him information, and the Boar turned to face the passage mouth eighty seconds later and the two aggressors decided against it.

Berne’s Ashvein Serpent sat in the Zone Three approach where Jin had placed it forty minutes before anything happened there.

That had been the hardest decision of the morning. Six minutes to relocate, four on clear ground, which meant Berne was a wall Jin built once and then lived beside. He had put him on the northern approach because the northern approach fed into the column’s route at two separate points.

At the fifty-minute mark it paid.

Four aggressors came down the northern line, found an area they could not cross, and went around into the western lane instead — which was longer, more exposed, and covered by Ruiz.

"That’s your placement working," said Berne, on the channel, with the flatness of a man who had watched it happen and thought Jin should know.

"Received."

Jin wanted to deploy Glitch three times in the first hour and did not.

The worst of them came at fifty-eight minutes, when two aggressors got past Ruiz’s outer line in Zone One and reached the column’s rear sled before Vance could turn.

He could see the solution. Glitch was eleven meters away and could be there in four seconds and would have ended it immediately.

Difficulty isn’t a trigger.

He kept his mouth shut, told Ruiz where they were, and watched her Skitterhawk drive one of them into a lane where the Boar could reach it while the second one bounced off a sled and took a scoring mark.

One damaged sled. It went on the record.

One sled versus spending my reserve at hour one on something the zone could solve.

Behind him, Glitch had come up onto his forelegs and stayed there.

Not yet.

The mistake happened at the Zone Three handoff and it was small enough that Jin nearly did not notice himself making it.

Ruiz called her route.

"Taking the Skitterhawk up the eastern wall line. It’s slower but I keep eyes on the column the whole way."

Jin looked at his map and saw a better one.

The service passage on the western side ran parallel to the column’s route and would have put her ahead of the crossing by about forty seconds, which mattered, because forty seconds was the difference between scouting Zone Four before the column arrived and scouting it after.

"Ruiz — take the western passage instead. It’s faster and it puts you ahead."

There was a pause of about a second.

"Western passage loses visibility on the column for about twenty meters."

"You’ll be ahead of them."

"Received."

She took it.

It worked, in the sense that nothing bad happened, and it cost her about eleven seconds of divided attention while she rerouted a beast that was already committed to a line, and her next report came in later than it should have.

Jin registered that the report was late and did not, at the time, connect it to himself.

The burrowers came at the ninety-minute mark, through Zone Four, along a route nothing could scout.

Ruiz could not see them because they were underground. Glitch could not feel them because Zone Four’s northern half sat on broken fill over an old service void, disconnected from the district’s poured slab, and Jin had marked that section amber on his own map two days ago for exactly this reason.

The first anyone knew was the column’s forward sled taking a mark.

"Contact — something’s under them—"

"Ruiz, get the column moving south, get them onto the slab."

The sleds moved and the burrowers followed, and about eleven seconds later three of them crossed onto connected ground and Glitch’s whole body changed.

Jin felt the reports arrive — heavy, grinding, three sources, converging — and he looked at where they were going.

The withdrawal route. The marked lane between Zone Four and the extraction point, with a casualty column crawling down the middle of it.

That’s the second trigger. That’s exactly the second trigger.

He did not deliberate.

"Glitch — go. Withdrawal route, they’re under it."

Glitch crossed forty meters in about six seconds and then stopped running and started standing, which was the part that mattered.

He put himself on the connected slab at the point where the three contacts converged, three meters ahead of the lead sled, and set his feet.

The first burrower came up directly beneath him.

[Harden]

It hit him from below at full commitment and Glitch did not move.

That was the difference the consolidation had made and Jin saw it clearly. Five weeks ago that impact would have rocked him and he would have had to reset. Now the force went into a body that had spent a fortnight becoming denser and better seated, and it dispersed into the slab through four planted feet, and the burrower’s own charge went nowhere.

Glitch turned after the contact and put his tail across its forelimbs while its weight was still going up.

The second came up nine meters east, angling for the column’s flank.

"Berne — east side, deny it."

"Six minutes."

"Then don’t relocate, just extend — can you reach nine meters east of your current line?"

A pause. "Yes."

The Ashvein Serpent extended its denial area and the second burrower went into it and came back out and found that Glitch had moved four meters east and was now standing between it and the sleds.

The third one was the clever one. It went deep, crossed under the column entirely, and came up on the far side, between the sleds and the extraction point.

Vance was already moving.

"I’ve got it. Boar’s closer."

"Take it."

The Cragmaw Boar hit it as it surfaced and held it in place, and Ruiz’s Skitterhawk harassed its head, and Glitch never left the slab because the slab was where the other two were.

Ruiz redirected the column through the lane Glitch had cleared. All twelve sleds passed the Bronze 6-Star beast standing in the middle of the withdrawal route, two of them carrying damage marks, and reached extraction at one hour fifty-one with three burrowers trapped behind them.