Rise of the Horde

Chapter 912: Chapter 911

The third incursion through the Arch facility’s stone came at the first hour of the morning, six days after the second.

It came through the northern corridor’s interior wall at a section the engineers had treated with standard void compound density during the initial application phase, before Aliyah had identified the four undersaturated sections and redirected the morning shift to triple-density coverage. Triple-density application on that section had been completed three days ago. Whatever had been pressing against it from the other side had been pressing against it longer than three days.

Oshrak had reorganized the garrison’s response positions after the second incursion. The bell signal still triggered the response, but the response assignments were different from the previous day’s assignments each day, chosen from a rotation schedule that gave each shift team a different combination of approach corridor, position, and coverage responsibility. The entity’s ability to model the garrison’s pattern and use the model against them required a pattern to exist.

There was no pattern.

The first bell brought six Yurakk from the eastern approach and four highland warriors from the northern watch in thirty seconds, arriving from different directions at different speeds, taking positions in the corridor that had not been their positions the previous morning. Ishara was with the northern watch. She arrived with the highland warriors and went immediately to the ceiling alcove positions that the second incursion had taught the garrison to value.

Oshrak was in the corridor before the first Yurakk arrived. He had been sleeping at a reduced depth near the corridor approach positions for the past five days, a readiness habit that Rakh’ash’tha had noted in her field log as physiologically inadvisable for sustained periods. Oshrak had acknowledged this without altering the habit.

The entity that came through the northern corridor’s wall was smaller than the one that had filled the corridor’s full width during the second incursion. Smaller in volume. Not smaller in speed. It moved through the corridor at a pace that outstripped the second entity’s sustained movement, the way a smaller mass could accelerate in ways a larger one could not. It had covered twenty feet of corridor before the first engagement contact was made.

Oshrak made that contact from the eastern approach angle while the entity was still orienting after emergence. The two-second disorientation window that the first incursion’s probe had taught the garrison to recognize. One strike at maximum force, variable approach angle. The strike disrupted the entity’s leading edge and bought the rotating contact formation time to establish.

Kessin and Durahl were in the instrument room.

They heard the bell. They heard the corridor sounds that followed: the struck-bell tones of contact impacts, bodies on stone, the acoustic quality of a confined-space engagement. They did not move toward those sounds. They were at their stations.

Kessin was on the second Keystone’s station, watching its cycling pattern. The cycling had been running at the shortened four-second interval for six days without further change. It was cycling. Not advancing.

Durahl was on the sixth Keystone’s station. He had been watching it for six days and he knew exactly what its baseline looked like. He had logged that baseline at twelve intervals per watch, twelve entries per shift, seventy-two entries since Aliyah had first showed him what consistent-rate advancement looked like versus cycling variance.

At the third minute of the corridor engagement, the sixth Keystone’s reading moved.

Not cycling. A consistent upward rate. The same pattern Aliyah had shown him in the instrument log from the second incursion: steady, no variability, no rise-and-fall. Not testing. Advancing.

He rang the bell cord twice and went to the instrument room door.

"Aliyah," he said, at a volume that carried to the Keystone chamber without carrying through the rest of the facility. "Sixth station. Consistent rate."

Aliyah was in the Keystone chamber with Vor’gath, running the overnight reinforcement sequence on the third Keystone’s vulnerability point. She heard Durahl’s call and moved to the sixth Keystone’s housing without stopping to read the instrument station first. Durahl had told her what she needed in four words.

She placed both hands on the sixth Keystone’s housing and pushed reinforcement into the binding at the targeting angle she had documented over six days of baseline monitoring. The advancement’s approach angle was the same as the second incursion’s. The directing intelligence was using the same approach because the same approach had worked the previous time and had not been blocked.

It had not been blocked during the second incursion. It was being blocked now.

The corridor fight lasted nineteen minutes. The entity was smaller and faster and required a different contact spacing than the second incursion’s entity: the rotating formation had to operate at wider intervals to avoid the entity’s extension movements catching multiple people in a single pass. Oshrak took a blow to his left forearm from an extension in the fight’s ninth minute. He noted it and kept the rotation. Ishara’s highland warriors from the ceiling alcoves produced six effective impact strikes in the final four minutes, their downward angle disrupting the entity’s ability to orient its defensive response upward while managing the floor-level rotation simultaneously.

At the nineteenth minute, the entity dissolved.

Oshrak counted the down. Six total: three touched by extension movements and unable to continue rotation, two who had gone over when the entity’s field disrupted their footing, and Oshrak himself with the forearm impact. Oshrak was on his feet. The three extension-touched warriors were conscious. The two who had fallen were sitting up.

He went to the instrument room.

Durahl and Kessin were at their stations. They had not moved.

Oshrak looked at the sixth Keystone’s reading on the station display. Twenty-three percent. It had been at nineteen when the bell rang.

Four percent advanced against a reinforced binding that had been responding from the third minute of a nineteen-minute engagement. Without Durahl’s call and Aliyah’s immediate response, the advancement would have run at the second incursion’s rate for the full nineteen minutes. The second incursion had advanced the sixth Keystone by eighteen percent across the engagement window. Nineteen minutes at that rate from a nineteen-percent baseline would have put the sixth Keystone at thirty-seven.

It was at twenty-three.

Oshrak looked at Durahl. He said: "Good." That was the complete accounting, and it was all the accounting required.

He went to find Rakh’ash’tha. His forearm needed assessment and he had six people down who needed it more urgently.