Chapter 402: The People Behind You

Chapter 402: The People Behind You

Crowe saw them one at a time on Friday, in the small office off Yard Two, with the door half open and a mug of cold coffee on the desk. Lucian came out with an expression Jin couldn’t read. Crowe called Jin in next and pointed him toward the chair.

"I’m not telling you whether you’ll be picked." Crowe didn’t look up from the sheet he was writing on. "I don’t know. Nobody does. I’m telling you what I’d fix if I were you, and you can do what you like with it."

"You’re getting good at keeping both beasts useful," Crowe said. "Your timing in the flight drill showed that. Now tell me where everyone else was when Flicker took the bend."

Jin pictured the sled, the posts, the handler behind his barrier. Lucian had been beside him. Bram had been somewhere by the wall.

"Vale on my left. The handler at the controls. Teller near the gate, I think."

"And the others?"

He couldn’t place them. He’d been watching the turn.

"The yard has barriers and marked positions," Crowe said. "An escort doesn’t. You need to keep track of the people you’re protecting while your beasts fight, and know where they’ll go if your first position fails."

Jin glanced at the sheet on the desk. He’d hoped for something about his spear technique. This sounded less straightforward to practise.

"Don’t stare at everyone in turn," Crowe added. "Know your exits, put people where you can protect them, and check when the situation changes. Your beasts can help you watch."

"What did he tell you?" Lucian asked, outside.

"That I forget people exist."

Lucian snorted. "He told me I chase."

"You do chase."

"I know I chase." Lucian scowled at the yard. "Last Thursday I left a marker to go after Teller’s bear because it looked slow. It wasn’t slow. I lost the marker."

He kicked at the sand. "Hold a good position, he said. Don’t trade it for a shiny one."

"That’s annoyingly accurate."

"So’s yours."

They stood there for a minute, both irritated in the same way.

"We could practise it," Lucian said.

"Practise not chasing?"

"Practise you watching someone while you fight. And me staying put while something tries to make me move." Lucian shrugged. "Same drill, different problem."

They did it on Saturday. Lucian held a marker in Yard Three while Jin sent Flicker at it from different angles, trying to draw him off. Jin had to call the position of a handler walking behind the yard barrier whenever Lucian raised a hand. Twice he had to look away from Flicker before he could answer.

Lucian left the marker once, swore, and went back to it. By the end, Jin was checking during Flicker’s return instead of waiting to be asked. He still missed the handler changing direction once.

That night, the partly used large stone ran dry in his hand halfway through his session. He put it in the drawer with the other empties and unwrapped a new one from the cloth, leaving four untouched beside the two small Thornwatch stones.

The job was on the Association board on Monday morning.

[Hollowmere — Escort Contract]

[Client: Regional Monitoring Service]

[Escort required: maintenance crew (3), Relay Station 9, eastern ridges. Equipment carry and on-site repair, est. 4 hours.]

[Minimum: Combat Rank 2. Appropriate fieldwork licence required.]

[Fee and transport allowance: see contract terms.]

He’d done bounties and a survey. He’d never been paid to keep three particular people alive while they did a job, which was exactly what Crowe had been talking about. He checked the route and contract terms, then accepted it.

The crew lead, Marta Quill, called that evening. Her brisk voice suggested she had another dozen calls to make.

"You’re the drake?" she asked.

"That’s me."

"Good. We’ve had bird tamers before. Lovely birds, can’t carry anything." She paused. "We’re replacing the sensor head on the mast and the battery bank in the hut. Two hundred kilos of kit, near enough. We’ll have a hand-sled for the path. Your drake pulls it?"

"He’ll pull it."

"Then we’ll get on fine."

They went out on Wednesday, in Okonkwo’s hauler, at six. The crew had agreed on the loads and route beforehand; Jin had checked the contract’s area restrictions against his licence. Marta was in the front, with a battered tablet of station schematics on her knee. Deo, a quiet, wiry man in his thirties, would be going up the mast.

Tobin was the apprentice, nineteen and very tall, and he spent the first half hour of the drive trying not to stare at Glitch through the trailer window.

"Station Nine’s on the ridge above the eastern margin," Marta said, while they drove. "Weather mast, ground sensors, a relay to the waystation. Last month the sensor head went dark. Probably lightning."

"We’ve done this one four times," Marta said. "It’s just a long way up."

The hauler stopped at a farm track below the ridges. From there, the path climbed two kilometers along a bare spur of rock and coarse grass, with a scrub-filled gully on its right.

Glitch pulled the sled in a fitted hauling harness that Jin could release at its side. It held the crates and battery cells, lashed down under a tarp, and he dragged it up the path with the air of a beast who considered this beneath him and was going to do it anyway.

Jin walked beside the sled with the spear over his shoulder. Flicker rode on top of the tarp, then on Tobin’s shoulder, which Tobin found terrifying and wonderful. The station was a squat concrete hut on the ridge crest, with one steel door and a narrow window. A chain-link fence enclosed its flat patch of rock.

Most of the fence was still standing, but a three-meter section on the north side had come down and lay flat in the grass. The mast went up from beside the hut, a steel lattice twenty meters high with a dead grey box at the top. Ladder rungs were welded up one leg.

West of the hut, a knuckle of bare rock stuck up out of the crest, waist-high, like a low wall. East, the ground fell away into the head of the gully the path had climbed beside, steep and choked with scrub. North, the ridge ran on toward higher ground.

The hut door faced north, slightly east of the broken fence. Jin walked round the site before anyone unpacked anything, then uncoupled Glitch’s harness from the sled. The hut offered the best shelter. The rock knuckle gave cover if the door was out of reach, but he wanted the crew inside before a threat got that close.

The path back down was the way out, on the south side. Anything coming through the north fence gap would reach the door in a few strides. The eastern gully offered cover almost to the crest; he would need Flicker watching it.

He explained the positions to Marta. She checked the gully and the fence gap, then nodded.

"Anything comes, we go in the hut," she said. "Deo comes down the mast first. Tobin carries nothing he can’t drop." She looked at Jin. "And you’ll tell us when."

"I’ll tell you when."

"Then let’s get on."

Deo went up the mast with a harness and a tool bag. Marta and Tobin went into the hut and started on the battery bank. Glitch lay down beside the sled near the fence gap, where he could see the north ridge and the gully head both. Flicker went up onto the roof of the hut.

Jin stood between them, where he could see the hut door, the mast and the ridge. He kept the spear upright beside him. For an hour and a half, nothing happened. Deo talked to himself at the top of the mast. Tobin swore at a corroded terminal inside the hut and was told to mind his language. The wind blew steadily along the ridge.

Jin checked when a tool clattered or someone moved. Deo on the mast. Marta inside. Tobin at the door. Between checks he watched the approaches, while Flicker surveyed the ridge from above.

At a quarter to eleven, Glitch lifted his head. Through the bond, Jin felt Tremor Sense change. Something was in the gully, on the east side, below the crest. It was heavy and quiet, moving up through the scrub in short bursts, then stopping.

Then Flicker, on the roof, turned her whole body north and stared along the ridge. Something grey was coming along the crest from that direction, low to the ground, a long way off. It was keeping to the dips in the rock.

Two of them, from two sides.

"Deo," Jin said, not loudly. "Down. Now. Marta, Tobin, inside. Door shut."

Deo was already moving.