Chapter 148 - 146 — The Last Approach III (Bonus)

"Hands," Hana said to Sokolov.

He put them out.

She turned them over and pressed something in the heel of the right one and he did not react, which apparently was the answer, because she pressed it again harder.

"That is strain and it is not a tear. Stop closing that hand when you set an anchor."

"I do not close it."

"You close it. I have watched you do it eleven times today."

---

Then me, and it took longer.

Left forearm from the wrist up, which is going a colour I have not seen on myself before. The three lines across my back from the drainage passage, closed and holding. The place across the chest where the one in the civic range got me, which is a bruise about the width of a polearm shaft and the length of my sternum.

And the hip, which has taken four Talaria arrests today and is going to be the thing that stops me rather than any of the rest of it.

"Do you want anything," she said.

"Do I need anything."

"No. And you will not tomorrow either, and I want to be clear that those are different answers."

"Then no."

"Good." She closed the pack. "Two closings. I am not spending one on a forearm that works."

---

"Anton. Say what you have."

"Four," he said. "Perhaps five."

"And the big one."

"The big one is not available." He sat down against the base of one of the fallen frames and put his hands flat on his knees. "You are thinking about whether I can put something across that ramp and hold it."

"I am."

"I can. For thirty seconds. Then it is gone and so am I, and whatever is on the other side is still coming."

---

I looked at the ramp for a while after that.

Four metres wide. Forty metres long. Straight, so anything on it can see the whole of the room from the top, and anything in the room can see the whole of the ramp.

And nothing on either side of it to stand behind.

"I could go back out," I said. "There were three of them on that plaza and two of them were the outer walkers, and outer walkers on open paving are the easiest thing on this floor. Take them at the top of the ramp before they come down."

---

"No," Hana said, and she had clearly been waiting for me to say it.

"Say why, properly."

"Because we have spent six hours getting into a room with one entrance and you want to go and stand outside it."

"I want to fight them where there is room."

"You want to fight them where there is room, and while you are doing that the two of us are down here, and whatever else is on that plaza is coming toward the noise you are making at the top of the only way in."

---

She let that sit for a second and then gave me the rest of it.

"And if it goes badly out there, it does not go badly for you. It goes badly for them." A hand at Sokolov. "Because he is six anchors and I am two closings and we are forty metres from you down a ramp we cannot climb fast."

"Understood."

"I am not finished. If it goes well out there, you come back down here with less than you have now, and we still have to hold this for an hour."

---

Sokolov had not said anything for about two minutes and was looking at the two fallen frames.

"There is a third option."

"Go on."

"Do not hold the ramp. Narrow it."

---

He got up and went to the nearest of the two frames that had come down.

It is bronze, three metres of it, lying on its side across its own mountings, and it is in two pieces because the upper section has sheared at a joint.

"That," he said, and put his hand on the upper section. "And the block behind you, and the two beside the mounting. Four pieces. Into the mouth of the ramp, at the bottom, leaving a gap."

"How wide a gap."

"A metre. Perhaps a metre and ten."

---

"I cannot move that on my own," I said. "Not the bronze."

"No. You can move it if it does not fall over while you are moving it."

And that is the whole of his Ability, said in one sentence, by a man who has been telling me what it is for two days and has now found the thing it is actually for.

---

"Thirty seconds each," I said.

"Thirty seconds each, four times, and then I have two or three left." He was already looking at the angles. "And when it is done it stays done, because it is stone sitting on stone and it does not need me any more."

"That is the part I like."

"That is the part I like as well."

---

It took us about forty minutes and it was the hardest physical work I have done in a month.

Not the fighting kind. The other kind, where a thing weighs what it weighs and there is no Ability anywhere in my Status that makes it weigh less.

Strength thirty-nine got the first block to the mouth of the ramp in three pushes, and then it wanted to go over sideways onto my leg, and Sokolov held it upright for twenty-two of his thirty seconds while I got the second one in behind it as a brace.

The bronze section was worse. It is awkward rather than heavy and there is nowhere to get a hand on it.

---

Hana stood at the top of the ramp for the whole of it and watched the entrance and said nothing except twice, and both times it was "clear," and both times she said it because she knew neither of us could look.

---

What we have at the end of it is a gap.

The mouth of the ramp is four metres wide. Two blocks and a bronze section and a fourth piece we levered off a mounting now take up three of those metres, in a rough line across it, on the chamber side rather than the ramp side.

That leaves a metre and a bit, on the left, against the wall.

Anything coming down that ramp arrives at a wall of stone and one gap it has to come through.

One at a time. With its shoulders turned.

---

"And when they do come through," Sokolov said.

"Then they come through where I am standing."

"Yes."

"And they come through at whatever speed they like," I said, "and a metre of gap does not slow down a thing that goes from a walk to full speed in no distance at all."

"No. It does not slow it down." He put his hand on the top of the nearest block. "It stops there being two of them."

---

Which is the difference between this morning and now.

Three of them in a square this morning, from three directions, and four seconds of standing still cost me forty-two Health and knocked me off my feet.

One at a time, through a gap, at a man who is expecting it.

I can do that for a long time. I do not know how long. Longer than I could do the other thing.

---

We put ourselves where we are going to be.

Sokolov sat down eight metres inside the gap with his back against the disc side of a fallen frame, where he can see the gap and reach it with an anchor and is not in the way of anything.

Hana went to the far side of the disc, twenty metres back, which is the furthest from the entrance that anybody can be in that room, and she did not like it and she went anyway, because she is two closings and she is no use to anybody standing in a doorway.

And I stood between the gap and the disc, about six metres from the gap, which is far enough to see something come through it and close enough to be there when it does.

---

Then there was nothing to do.

That is the part nobody writes about. You spend six hours getting somewhere and then you are there, and the room is quiet, and the ceiling has three cracks in it, and the only sound is somebody else’s breathing and the wind going down the ramp.

I looked at that pillar four times in five minutes and it was dark every time.

She is walking on a bad leg across four hundred metres of open paving with two things standing at the entrance. That is all I have. That was true two hours ago and it is still the newest thing I know.

---

Whatever is happening to them is happening now and I will find out about it afterward, which is the whole of this floor in one sentence.

There is nothing I can do about any of it from this room except be in this room when their pillar lights.

So I am going to be in this room.

---

At about the eleventh minute Sokolov said, "Listen."

I had already heard it.

Not on the ramp. Above the ramp, out on the plaza, at the top: stone on stone, the particular flat clap of a plated foot coming down on a paving slab, and then another one that was not in time with the first.

Then a third.

---

"Three," Hana said, from across the room.

"Three."

"Anton."

"Four," he said, without being asked. "Four, and I am not spending one until something is through that gap."

---

The first of them came onto the ramp.

You can hear exactly where a thing is on forty metres of straight dressed stone. It came down four or five paces and then stopped, and the second one came in behind it and stopped as well.

They are looking at the wall we built.

I would give a great deal to know what a Warden does when it arrives at a room it has stood outside for sixty years and finds that somebody has changed the shape of the door.

---

I put both fists up and felt the plates come in, four clicks a side, all the way out to the first knuckles.

Two hundred and twenty-seven out of five hundred and ten. A hundred and eighty-eight out of two hundred and eighty.

One gap. One at a time.

And a black column four metres behind me with no light in it at all.

---

Then the first one started down the ramp again, and it was not walking.