[SPEAKER_01]: Hi everyone and welcome to the Law Keepers librarian.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There are mornings in the life of a night pilot that arrive with a particular quality of stillness to them, a kind of held breath in the air that has nothing to do with the weather, and everything to do with what the day intends to become.
[SPEAKER_01]: An orderic vein had learned, across eight years of sitting the helm, to recognise them when they came, and to receive them with the same unhurried attention, he gave to everything else that deserved it.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was one of those mornings.
[SPEAKER_01]: The call had come to house vain three weeks prior, transmitted across the void in the clipped and urgent shorthand of an administrator in the early stages of panic, which is to say that it had been formal in its language and desperate in everything beneath the language.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way that official documents sometimes are, when the people writing them, understand that the situation they are describing, has already outpaced the bureaucratic methods available for describing it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Ralthus IV was a manufacturing world of no particular distinction, the kind of place that the imperium maintained in its millions, productive, loyal and remarkable.
[SPEAKER_01]: and now dying in the particular way that world's die when the tyrannids swarm selects them, slowly and comprehensively.
[SPEAKER_01]: The swarm had made planet 4, 6 weeks before the core reached house veins seat, and in those 6 weeks it had done what swarms do in the early stages of a consumption.
[SPEAKER_01]: Fluttered the outer districts with expendable creatures, probing the defenses, learning the shape of the resistance, shepherding its larger and more purposeful creatures forward through the channels that the lesser ones had opened and paid for in their expendable lives.
[SPEAKER_01]: The hive city of Aranthus Prime had held after a fashion, because hive cities are built to hold, and their populations are large enough to sustain losses that would shatter a smaller settlement entirely.
[SPEAKER_01]: But holding was not the same as safety, and the planetary governor, a man named Dravantal, whom Aldrich had never met and likely never would.
[SPEAKER_01]: Had understood this distinction clearly enough to reach for every asset available to him, which included through a chain of obligation, an ancient compact that stretched back further than anyone currently living, had reason to trace.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Lances of House Vane
[SPEAKER_01]: Cassian had accepted the deployment without drama.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Lancet shipped within the week, six nights in their households folded into the transport capacity of a navy vessel that smelled of recycled air and old metal, and had clearly not been designed with the comfort of its passengers as a primary consideration.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich had spent the transit in the way he generally spent transit, reading, sleeping, sitting in companionable silence with Cassian over meals that neither of them would remember.
[SPEAKER_01]: And visiting the warglove in its secured bay each morning, to run checks that were unnecessary, but felt nevertheless necessary.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their mission, as Cassian had transmitted it to the lands on the first day of the transit, and repeated without alteration on every day thereafter, was precise and unambiguous in the way that good orders often were.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hold the Manufactorum corridor designated, veranthos 2ndary 9, which connected the outer industrial districts to the Hive City's southern underbelly, and hold it long enough for the guard regiments already committed to the Hive's defense to consolidate their position, and establish the kind of layered resistance that the early chaos of the invasion had prevented.
[SPEAKER_01]: If the corridor fell, the swarms larger organisms would have a clear path to sections of the hive city that were not built to resist them.
[SPEAKER_01]: If it held, the defenders gained time, which in the theatre of a siege was as close to victory as one was likely to get in the short term.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the kind of mission that nights were made for.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was also the kind of mission that did not come with guarantees.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had been in the warglaves cockpit since before the light changed, running his pre-engagement checks with slow and careful thoroughness.
[SPEAKER_01]: The machine spirit stirred against his awareness as he worked, not demanding, simply present.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a patient thing, older than Ordrick, and quieter than most.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in his years of piloting, he had come to think of its patients as a kind of companionship, steady and uncomplicated and deeply reliable.
[SPEAKER_01]: The sort of company that asks nothing of you, but is somehow exactly what you needed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Around him, below him, the staging area moved through its own morning with the organised and purposeful energy of a lance preparing to go to war, which is to say that it was loud in all directions and yet purposeful.
[SPEAKER_01]: Every apparently disconnected thing, revealing itself on closer inspection, to be part of a larger hole that was preceding entirely as it should.
[SPEAKER_01]: The household's serfs moved through the warglave's shadow, without glancing up, long accustomed to the mild indignity of conducting their work beneath machines that could crush a ground car without breaking stride, carrying manifests and calibration tools, and small offerings of incense that would be pressed into the hands of the engine seers for the morning's rituals.
[SPEAKER_01]: Guardsmen from the 114th of the Rathos infantry occupied the eastern edge of the staging area in loose clusters, checking and rechecking equipment that did not need checking.
[SPEAKER_01]: Talking in the low and almost casual voices of soldiers, who were not yet frightened, but were beginning, quietly, to give the matter some thought.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich watched all of it from his open cockpit, with the particular pleasure of a man who finds the world around him, genuinely interesting, without needing to be part of all of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he ran his checks, and the machine spirit hummed, and the morning continued to hold its breath.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sarah Devans held her in, stood some 30 meters to his left, and Sarah herself was doing what she always did in the hour before an engagement, which was to run her targeting systems through a calibration sequence that her machine neither requested nor required, and which she performed anyway with discipline.
[SPEAKER_01]: old Rick had watched her do this across a dozen deployments and had never once felt compelled to mention it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because there was nothing to mention, it was simply Sarah being Sarah and that was a reassuring constant in the variable business of going to war.
[SPEAKER_01]: she looked up from her work and caught him watching, and raised one hand in the brief economical greeting that was the entirety of her social vocabulary before an engagement.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he returned it in the same spirit.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mechanicus updated the swarm density figures overnight, she said, her voice carrying the flatness of someone transmitting information, rather than expressing concern about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: They read higher than the preliminary survey
[SPEAKER_01]: I saw, Aldrich said, the morning settled comfortably around the pores that followed, neither of them feeling any particular need to fill it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sarah returned to her calibration sequence, and Aldrich watched her for a moment with something close to appreciation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not affection exactly, for they were not close in that way, but the quieter and perhaps more durable, feeling of genuine respect, the kind that accumulates overshared deployments.
[SPEAKER_01]: The district will be close work for you," she said at last, without looking up.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, old Rick agreed, you'll have better angles.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some.
[SPEAKER_01]: She allowed herself the smallest possible sound, somewhere between acknowledgment and dry amusement.
[SPEAKER_01]: Try not to walk in front of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: I make no promises, Aldrich said, which was as close as either of them came to Whitt before noon, and Sarah accepted it with another small sound and returned to her work.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was perhaps another quarter of an hour before Cassian mourn himself appeared in the staging area.
[SPEAKER_01]: Moving between the machines, with the unhurried ease of a man, entirely comfortable in the company of things considerably larger than himself, which after 30 years of piloting, was simply the natural condition of his existence.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was not a tall man, nor a particularly imposing one, in the way that some senior nobles cultivated in position as a tool of their authority.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was none of that careful performance about him.
[SPEAKER_01]: None of the deliberate weight that men sometimes adopt when they wish to be perceived as significant.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not need to.
[SPEAKER_01]: The significance was simply there, one likely.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way that genuine confidence is always one likely by people who arrived at it through experience rather than assertion.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had been Audrey's bond leech for eight years, and in that time Audrey could come to understand him in the way that the helm mechanicum made possible, and that no other relationship quite replicated, not perfectly, not completely, for no bond revealed everything about a person, and nor should it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But deeply enough to know that Cassian Mawn was, at his core, a man who had seen a very great deal, and had allowed it to make him quieter, rather than harder.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were pilots who carried their years of war like armor, layering experience over experience until what remained was something dense and impenetrable.
[SPEAKER_01]: Cassian had gone the other way.
[SPEAKER_01]: He listened more carefully than most men half his age.
[SPEAKER_01]: He spoke when he had something worth saying, and was genuinely comfortable with the alternative.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had, in Aldrich's considered estimation, earned every line on his face and won none of them with complaint.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he was, in the particular way, that mattered most between a bondleach and his bondsman, entirely trustworthy.
[SPEAKER_01]: He exchanged a word with one of the engine seers as he passed, glanced up briefly at the warglave with the quiet assessing look he often wore in the pre-engagement hour, and then continued toward his own machine.
[SPEAKER_01]: The night paladin that the household roles recorded under the name Iron Veil, though Cassian himself never called it anything at all, which old Rick had always found somehow characteristic.
[SPEAKER_01]: He climbed to his cockpit with an ease of long habit, and Aldrich watched him go, and then returned his attention to his own checks, and the staging area continued its busy and purposeful morning, around them both.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the helm sealed, and the lance bond opened fully, Cassian's presence returned.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich had grown so accustomed to this feeling over the years that he had largely stopped noticing it, and it was only in the moments of its return.
[SPEAKER_01]: After maintenance intervals, after communication blackouts, after the brief necessary silences of system restarts, that he became aware of how completely it had become part of the ordinary texture of being himself.
[SPEAKER_01]: the wider lance assembled itself around them both in the neural web.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each signal distinct and recognizable.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sarah to his left, precise and alert as her calibration sequence had promised.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lord Deveth Cole further out, carrying in the bond, a quality of restless energy that preceded his best fighting.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lady Oren Vash, anchoring the formations far end, with the immovable steadiness of someone who had held lines that should not have been holdable and intended to do so again today.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were taken together, a well-balanced thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: The kind of lands that reflected careful thought, about what a manufacturing district at close quarters would demand.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rather than simply the machines a house happened to have available.
[SPEAKER_01]: Cassian's Paladin, Iron Veil, carried the repurchase sword and rapid fire battle cannon that made the pattern so reliably effective across the full range of engagement distances.
[SPEAKER_01]: Equally capable of breaking a mast infantry assault and punching through the armour of the swarms larger creatures, a weapon for all occasions and none of them gentle.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich's own warglave paired its thermal spear and reaper chain cleaver with the heavy stubber mounted at its armour.
[SPEAKER_01]: Built for speed, built for close ground, built to go where the larger knights could not, and deal with what it found there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sarah's Helverin carried twin armature auto cannons in place of the warglaves close quarters armament, a ranged platform that could sustain withering fire across distances that made it a natural complement to Aldrich's forward aggression.
[SPEAKER_01]: His violence close and decisive, hers, measured and reaching, Lord David Cole's night errand led its own pair of warglaves, identical in pattern to old Rick's own, though their pilots were younger and rather more enthusiastic about demonstrating it.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the Eren's Thermal Cannon gave that group its teeth against anything the swarm might have grown large enough to require serious persuasion.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lady Orrin Vash's Knight Crusader was the Lance's anchor and its heaviest voice.
[SPEAKER_01]: carrying the Avenger Gattling cannon and rapid fire, battle cannon, that made the Crusader pattern, the preferred choice of those who wished to hold ground, and were willing to accept a certain inflexibility of pace, in exchange for the ability to make that ground extremely unpleasant for whatever approached it.
[SPEAKER_01]: her own pair of helverins, extended her reach up the flanking channels.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their auto cannons giving her eyes and firepower, in places that crusaders bulk, could not follow.
[SPEAKER_01]: Czechs complete, Cassian asked.
[SPEAKER_01]: complete, ordric replied.
[SPEAKER_01]: The machine is ready.
[SPEAKER_01]: David Cole's hunters would push into the districts interior, following the Swam's density toward the larger creatures moving within it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lady Orange and Ker would hold the corridor entrance behind them, her helverins reaching up the flanking channels, keeping safe the ground that could not be given back.
[SPEAKER_01]: Cassian's group would move between them, flexible, responsive, ready to become whatever
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich found nothing in any of it that wanted changing.
[SPEAKER_01]: He rallied it, the district will be difficult, Cassian said.
[SPEAKER_01]: Agreed, Aldrich replied.
[SPEAKER_01]: The blast doors at the staging areas northern end were enormous things, three stories of reinforced adamantium and ancient hydraulics that had been opening and closing on this particular threshold, for longer than anyone in the 114th Veranthus infantry could account for.
[SPEAKER_01]: Long enough, certainly, that the mechanism had developed a voice of its own, a deep and resonant groan that rolled through the staging area, like distant thunder, and brought every conversation in the space to a momentary home.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich had heard it twice in the days since the Lance's arrival, during logistics runs and patrol sorties, and he had noted each time that it had the quality of a pronouncement rather than simply a sound, a declaration that something was beginning, or ending, or changing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It grown now and the doors parted, and the world outside entered the staging area in the form of light and cold air, and the distant layered sound of a hive city under pressure.
[SPEAKER_01]: The percussion of artillery somewhere to the north.
[SPEAKER_01]: the lower and more continuous rumble of something biological moving in the outer districts, in numbers that individual sound could not account for.
[SPEAKER_01]: And beneath it all, so low it was felt rather than heard, the frequency that those who had fought the swarm before learned to associate with the tyrannid advance at scale.
[SPEAKER_01]: Beyond the doors, the manufacturing corridor designated veranthus, secondary nine stretched northward into the haze, a wide arterial channel between the towering faces of processing plants and storage complexes.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's surface cracked and stained, and in places already bearing the pale organic residue of swan presence at its edges, like frost forming at the margins of a window.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not a beautiful place, and it had likely never been one, but it was a necessary place, because what layered its southern end, the underbelly of veranthus prime, the residential and command warrants that housed the beating heart of the hive city's resistance.
[SPEAKER_01]: The people, and the infrastructure, and the command structures, without which the entire defense would come apart, like a knot pulled from both ends simultaneously.
[SPEAKER_01]: Was worth more than beauty, worth more than comfort, worth more if the morning asked it, than any individual machine or pilot committed to its protection.
[SPEAKER_01]: If the corridor fell, the swarm would be inside the hive's southern districts before the day was out.
[SPEAKER_01]: If it held, the guard regiments consolidating their positions in the upper city, gained the time they needed to become something the swarm could not simply walk through.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was, in the end, as simple as that, and simplicity of purpose was something that aldrich had always found clarifying rather than diminishing.
[SPEAKER_01]: the ground acknowledging each night footfall, the air displaced by the passage of machines that stood 10 meters at the shoulder and carried enough firepower to rearrange the geography of whatever they were pointed at.
[SPEAKER_01]: The surfs and guardsmen in the staging area stopped what they were doing to watch, and Aldrich did not blame them for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had watched Lance's move out from the outside, once long ago, before he sat the helm for the first time, and he still remembered what it had felt like.
[SPEAKER_01]: The involuntary stillness, the sense of something ancient, and enormous moving through the world, with absolute purpose.
[SPEAKER_01]: But now he was part of it, and the warglave spirit pressed forward against his awareness with its quiet, patient readiness, and old Rick moved with it, and the corridor received them, and the great doors groan shut behind them, and the day began in earnest.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a strange and particular thing to move through a battle as part of a lance in full communion, and those who have never sat a helm cannot easily be told what it feels like, because the language available for the purpose was built to describe experiences that happened to one person at a time.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is not quite that.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is more like being a single voice in a chord, entirely oneself, entirely distinct, and yet aware at every moment of the other voices sounding alongside.
[SPEAKER_01]: The whole shape of the harmony present in the mind, even when individual notes cannot be separately heard.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich had known no other way of fighting since his first deployment, and he had come to think of it not as an advantage, precisely, but simply as the natural condition of going to war as unremarkable and as essential as the hell itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: The district received them.
[SPEAKER_01]: With the hostility of a place that had already been thoroughly invaded, by something that had no interest in leaving.
[SPEAKER_01]: The manufacturing buildings rose on either side of the advance in broken silhouettes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their upper floors collapsed inward.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their windows long since emptied of glass, and filled instead with the organic residue that the swarm left on every surface it occupied for long enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first contact came within minutes of entry, because the swarm did not believe in waiting, and had not learned the value of stillness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Homogons poured from a collapse transit hall to the lance's left flank, fast, low, shrieking, which was lesser sound than a pressure against the nerves.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Aldrich was already moving before the threat registered fully in conscious thought.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warglave flowing into the response with the easy, unhesitating readiness of something that had been waiting, with its particular patient hunger, for exactly this.
[SPEAKER_01]: The thermal spear found its first mark, and the second, and the third.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each shot a column of superheated directed energy that left nothing worth describing behind it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warglave moved through the engagement with the long-legged speed that was its greatest gift, outpacing the swarms' attempts to encircle and closing angles before they could fully open.
[SPEAKER_01]: And through the bond, Aldrich felt the lance moving with him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Felt Cassian steady presence like a hand on his shoulder, felt Sarah's helver in shifting to cover the channel he had exposed in his advance.
[SPEAKER_01]: felt the distant thunder of David Cole's errand, doing its own violent and enthusiastic work, somewhere deeper in the district.
[SPEAKER_01]: And beneath all of that, around all of it, the guard were there.
[SPEAKER_01]: The 114th veranthos had deployed into the corridor alongside the lands at first light.
[SPEAKER_01]: and they move through the manufacturer of district in the way that good infantry move through difficult ground, not with the dramatic momentum of knights, nothing so visible or so loud, but with the competence of soldiers who understood that their job was not to match the swarms fury, but to be present, reliably, and in the right places, when presence was what the situation required.
[SPEAKER_01]: They held the channel mouths that the knights could not simultaneously
[SPEAKER_01]: their lasguns laying down the kind of sustained, discipline fire that thin the swarms lesser organisms before they could accumulate into the surging masses, that even a night found taxing to deal with at close quarters.
[SPEAKER_01]: mortar teams had established themselves in the upper floors of the more structurally sound manufacturing buildings, dropping shells into concentrations of organisms that the night's sensors identified and marked.
[SPEAKER_01]: Melta gun teams moved in pairs through the narrower service corridors.
[SPEAKER_01]: clearing the spaces too tight for anything larger than a human being, doing the quiet and unglamorous and absolutely essential work, of ensuring that the swarm did not simply flow around the Lance's advance and pull behind it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich was aware of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had worked alongside the guard on enough deployments to have developed a genuine respect for what they did and what it cost them to do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: These men and women in their flak armor and their faith, standing in the shadow of machines that dwarf them entirely, and facing with the weapons available to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Things that those
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a kind of courage in it that was different from the courage of a night pilot, not lesser but differently shaped, and Aldrich noticed it now as he moved through the district, and the 114th moved through it with him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each part of the formation doing its own necessary work in its own necessary way.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everything was as it should be, everything was functioning as it had always functioned.
[SPEAKER_01]: the lands and the guard together with a single purpose and motion, and the morning, for all its waiting quality, was preceding in a way that felt entirely within the compass of what they had prepared for.
[SPEAKER_01]: It would not do so for much longer.
[SPEAKER_01]: Outriq would think about it afterward, and he would never quite be able to say whether there had been any warning at all, whether some shift in the swarms behaviour, some quality of stoneness or sudden redirection, should have told him.
[SPEAKER_01]: that what was coming was not simply another wave of expendable organisms, but something that had been grown for a specific purpose.
[SPEAKER_01]: A living weapon aimed at a specific target, which was the bond itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: The organism was not large.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was the detail he returned to most often, afterward, because he had expected in the fractional moment between seeing it and understanding it, that something capable of what it did should have been enormous.
[SPEAKER_01]: Should have announced itself with the scale of its intention.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not.
[SPEAKER_01]: It looked at the distance from which he first perceived it, like nothing so much as an unusually dense cluster of biometre, pressed against the remains of a manufacturer more.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then it detonated.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the word detonated is perhaps not quite right, because an explosion moves outward from a point in space.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this was something different.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was a pause.
[SPEAKER_01]: A discharge of bioelectric energy that expanded through the air and found the helm's long-range neural conduits, the way lightning finds the highest point in a field.
[SPEAKER_01]: The burn lasted less than a second.
[SPEAKER_01]: Cassian's voice had been present in the bond in the middle of a word.
[SPEAKER_01]: A tactical observation, something about the Northern Channel, a sentence that would never be finished, and then it was not.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not fading, not breaking apart into static, not dimming gradually the way a fire dims when the fuel runs low, simply there, and then not there.
[SPEAKER_01]: with the absolute and total quality of a door closing in an empty house.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sarah's signal went with it, and dove with cones, and laid your ends, and the whole architecture of the Lance's shared mind came down at once, as completely as if it had never existed, and he was left in a sudden, and enormous silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: He allowed himself the full experience of the silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: Did not reach for the bond, did not attempt the transmissions.
[SPEAKER_01]: He already understood to be useless, did not spend himself on responses that the situation had made irrelevant.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had always been a man who preferred to understand a thing clearly before attempting to act upon it, and what he understood in those few still seconds was this.
[SPEAKER_01]: The conduits were burned, the lance was unreachable, and the swarm was already moving into the space between him and the rest of his house, with the confidence of something that had done exactly what it intended to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: he turned his attention to the ground.
[SPEAKER_01]: Behind him, the organisms were thickening, as the swarm flooded the gap, as deliberately as water fills a vessel.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the gap closed, with every second he spent considering it.
[SPEAKER_01]: ahead, the district continued in its broken and occupied silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: The far edge of it somewhere beyond sight.
[SPEAKER_01]: Beyond the next collapse transit hall, and the one after that, and however many more, the manufacturing district contained between here and open ground.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not know what
[SPEAKER_01]: What he knew was that the ground behind him was being taken from him faster than he could take it back, and that a warglave alone against the density of tyrannids, now moving in that direction, was not a tactical choice he would be willing to make.
[SPEAKER_01]: Forward, then.
[SPEAKER_01]: The decision did not feel like courage, and it did not feel like resignation.
[SPEAKER_01]: It felt like the only choice he could make given the circumstances.
[SPEAKER_01]: He pressed the warglave into motion, and the machine spirit responded with an immediate and uncomplicated readiness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Pressing forward alongside his intention, as though it had been waiting for exactly this moment to express itself without the broader bond's noise to compete with.
[SPEAKER_01]: The district closed around him as he moved deeper into it, and the silence settled onto him like weather.
[SPEAKER_01]: A complete isolation that was his to navigate alone.
[SPEAKER_01]: what the district would ask of him.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not yet know.
[SPEAKER_01]: He moved through its shadow, the warglave moved on, and the morning moved with it, and behind them both the swarm filled the ground between him and the other knights.
[SPEAKER_01]: He could hear their weapons roar as they tore into the advancing tyranny-hard, but he was powerless to get back into formation.
[SPEAKER_01]: the severing of Audrick from the main lands was the kind of loss that does not arrive all at once.
[SPEAKER_01]: It came in increments, slowly across the first hour of his fight through the districts, not as a single sudden thing, but as a series of small absences.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each one minor in itself, and each one adding its weight to the one before, until the some of them became something that had genuine texture and could not be ignored.
[SPEAKER_01]: The fighting in those first hours was familiar enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: The swarm pushed forward and found its way towards him in waves, without subtlety, without particular strategy, trusting in its numbers and its hunger to accomplish what power and accuracy might have done more efficiently.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the district provided the close and cluttered terrain that a warglave was made for.
[SPEAKER_01]: Broken walls and collapsed overhangs and the long shadowed channels between manufacture and buildings that rewarded speed and punished anything that tried to hold ground.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich moved through its smoothly, relying on instinct and experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: The thermal spear finding its marks, the warglave threading the gaps in the rubble, with the long-legged shawness of a machine that knew this kind of work intimately.
[SPEAKER_01]: and required very little instruction in its performance.
[SPEAKER_01]: His judgment did not fail him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Every decision he made in those early engagements was sound, every response appropriate, every adaptation swift and correctly calibrated to what the ground and the swarm were telling him.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet, again, and again, he reached for the bond of the larger nights and found nothing there.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not a dramatic thing, this reaching, it did not announce itself, it was a movement of the mind towards something deeply accustomed.
[SPEAKER_01]: He would see something worth noting, an unusual density of organisms concentrating at an intersection 200 meters ahead, or a structural collapse that had opened an angle he had not expected.
[SPEAKER_01]: All the particular quality of movement in a group of termigands that suggested a larger organism directing them from somewhere out of sight.
[SPEAKER_01]: And before the observation had fully formed itself into thought, some part of him would already be preparing to share it.
[SPEAKER_01]: with Cassian, with Sarah, with the Lans, which was not there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each time he caught himself, each time the catching had its own small quality of disappointment, not sharp enough to be called grief, but persistent enough to make itself felt.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way a bruise makes itself felt when pressed, not unbearable, but present, and more present than one would prefer.
[SPEAKER_01]: He counted five such moments in the first hour, and then he stopped counting.
[SPEAKER_01]: Old Rick was not a man who found it useful to give unnecessary weight to things he could not change.
[SPEAKER_01]: What he could not prevent, however, was the silence itself, which was not just an absence of voices, but the absence of a particular kind of knowing, the peripheral awareness of the Lance's disposition, the felt sense of where Cassian was and what he was attending to.
[SPEAKER_01]: The background understanding of how the battle as a whole was moving, that the bond had always provided without being asked.
[SPEAKER_01]: Without it, Aldrich's world had contracted to what his own senses could reach, and what his own eyes could see.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this was a great deal less than he had grown accustomed to.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was not blind, not deaf, not incapable.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was simply smaller than he had been, and the smallness took some adjusting to.
[SPEAKER_01]: The district offered no particular sympathy for this adjustment.
[SPEAKER_01]: It continued to push organisms at him in the unharried way of slow attrition, and the hours passed, and the silence accumulated around him, like something building patiently toward a weight it had not yet reached.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not speak aloud, not yet.
[SPEAKER_01]: He moved and fought, and assessed, and made his decisions in the quiet of his own mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: And each time he reached for the bond, he found the same thing waiting.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing, and the shape of nothing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Which was somehow more present than nothing or to have been.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was in the quiet passages between engagements, brief intervals when the swarm had momentarily spent its nearest wave, and the district held its breath before assembling the next, that Aldrich first began to notice the thing that had been there all along.
[SPEAKER_01]: The machine spirit had always been present.
[SPEAKER_01]: He knew this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Eight years of sitting the helm had given him a perfectly adequate understanding of its rhythms
[SPEAKER_01]: the particular quality of attention it brought to different kinds of work.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had attended to it beautifully, as any pilot who respected his machine attended to it, and he had understood it well enough to fight effectively, and to keep the warglave in the kind of condition that spoke well of its pilot's care.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had simply never until this morning heard it clearly.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Lansbond had a quality of noise to it, not unpleasant noise, not the noise of disorder or confusion, but the noise of presence of multiple consciousnesses occupying the same neurospays, each one distinct, and each one contributing, its signal to the shared warmth of the whole.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was he thought now, rather like being in a room with people one loved, one was aware of them constantly, their movements and their voices, and the small sounds of their presence, and this awareness was a comfort, and because it was a comfort one stopped truly hearing it, the way one stops hearing the sound of rain on a familiar roof.
[SPEAKER_01]: It becomes the background, it becomes the condition in which other things occur.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in the empty room, the machine spirit was suddenly remarkably audible.
[SPEAKER_01]: It did not communicate in anything resembling language, and Audrick was careful not to make the mistake of hearing it, as though it did.
[SPEAKER_01]: It communicated in the way that very old things sometimes communicate, in the physical, in the immediate, in the pre-verbal vocabulary of sensation and response.
[SPEAKER_01]: Attention in the actuators that was not mechanical stress, but something more like alertness, a warmth in the cockpit that rose and fell with the intensity of the warglaves engagement, as though the machine's attention had a temperature.
[SPEAKER_01]: The particular quality of resistance in the controls, when the spirit disagreed with the direction, not defiance, nothing so dramatic as that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But a heaviness, a reluctance, the feeling of a living thing that has an opinion and is expressing it in the only way available to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He found himself attending to these things with a care he had not previously given to them, listening with the part of himself that had always been better at listening than at speaking.
[SPEAKER_01]: The machine spirit did not offer reassurance, that was not in its nature, and old Rick would not have trusted it if it had tried.
[SPEAKER_01]: What it offered instead was simpler and in certain ways more valuable.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was entirely uncomplicatedly present.
[SPEAKER_01]: It did not carry the weight of the bomb's absence.
[SPEAKER_01]: It did not reach for things that were not there.
[SPEAKER_01]: It occupied the moment it was in, with a completeness that old Rick found, somewhat to his own surprise, quietly instructive.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was not sure in those early hours, whether what he felt toward the machine spirit could yet be called trust.
[SPEAKER_01]: Trust in his experience was earned through specific things, through demonstrated reliability in specific circumstances.
[SPEAKER_01]: through the evidence of repeated decisions made well.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had not yet tested the machine spirits' instincts against anything that posed a high risk.
[SPEAKER_01]: What he could say and what he did say to himself in the privacy of his own mind as the district moved past him in its broken silence was that the machine spirit was there, fully and without reservation.
[SPEAKER_01]: and that in the context of this particular morning, with the bond burned away and the lance unreachable and the district pressing in from every direction with its patient hostility.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was more than enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: The route he had chosen ran along the interior of a collapsed transit hall.
[SPEAKER_01]: Its roof partially intact, and offering the kind of covered approach that a warglave pilot learned to value in swarm heavy terrain.
[SPEAKER_01]: Limited exposure controlled sightlines.
[SPEAKER_01]: the ability to move quickly through space that a master salt could not easily fill.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had identified it 300 meters back, as the ground shifted, and the district began to open into a wider industrial section, and it had seemed, on assessment, like the most sensible
[SPEAKER_01]: The warglave disagreed, it was not a dramatic thing this disagreement.
[SPEAKER_01]: The machine's spirit did not seize the controls, or cry out in any way that might have been described as alarm.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was subtler than that, a heaviness in the stride, a quality of reluctance that entered the movement somewhere below the level of instruction, and made itself felt the way an unvoiced doubt makes itself felt, as a gentle, persistent pressure against the direction
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich stopped.
[SPEAKER_01]: He stood for a moment in the shadow of a manufacturer and war.
[SPEAKER_01]: The war glaaves machines spirit continuing its low patient communication of concern beneath his hands.
[SPEAKER_01]: He looked at the transit hall ahead and then looked at what else the ground offered.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he found, when he looked with genuine attention, rather than confirmation of a decision already made, a second route.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lest direct, running along the building's exterior, rather than its sheltered interior, offering poor recover and a longer approach.
[SPEAKER_01]: And none of the tactical advantages he had originally favoured.
[SPEAKER_01]: He took it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He could not have said in that moment, whether the choice was a considered tactical response, or simply an act of deference to something that knew things he did not.
[SPEAKER_01]: It felt if he were being entirely honest with himself, rather more like the latter than the former, and this troubled him only briefly, only for the duration of the moment, in which he noticed it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Before the district moved on around him, and the question was superseded by the next thing requiring attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: He discovered what had been waiting in the transit hall, some 20 minutes later, from a position on the exterior ridge of the adjacent building.
[SPEAKER_01]: When a carnifex emerged from the hall shadowed interior and moved south through the rubble, with slow, deliberate movements.
[SPEAKER_01]: It seemed to taste the air for the particular flavour of a low-night moving through its territory.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was very large.
[SPEAKER_01]: It moved with unharried confidence, like a creature that had never learned to doubt its own capacity for violence, and it passed below him at a distance that would have been, had he taken the original route, approximately the distance between a thing, and the other thing it intends to destroy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich watched it go in silence, after the carnifex had moved out of his sightlines, and
[SPEAKER_01]: He placed one hand against the interior of the cockpit, a small gesture made without particular forethought.
[SPEAKER_01]: The machine spirits warmth met his palm through the metal, steady and present.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not he thought that the machine spirit had understood the danger in any way he could map on to human understanding.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was older and different in kind, and he would have been foolish to project onto it, the mechanisms of a mind it did not possess.
[SPEAKER_01]: What it had done was simpler and more remarkable.
[SPEAKER_01]: It had known something in its own wordless and physical way, and it had said so in the
[SPEAKER_01]: And he had, for the first time, been quiet enough to hear.
[SPEAKER_01]: After that, the quality of his attention shifted.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not stop making his own assessments.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not surrender the work of judgment to the machine's spirit.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nor would he have known how to do so, if he had tried.
[SPEAKER_01]: He simply stopped moving through the district, as though the machine's spirit's instincts were a system to be monitored, and began moving through it, as though they were a voice in a conversation.
[SPEAKER_01]: One worth hearing, worth pausing for, worth the occasional deference that good conversations sometimes require.
[SPEAKER_01]: The line between his instinct and the warglaves began to blur, and he found that this did not trouble him in the way it perhaps should have, because the decisions that came from the blurring were good ones, and the district for all its hostility and all its silence was beginning to feel, not safe, nothing so generous as that, but known.
[SPEAKER_01]: He heard it before he saw it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The creature announced itself through the ground, before they announced themselves through the air.
[SPEAKER_01]: A deep and rhythmic percussion transmitted up through the warglaves feet, and into the cockpit as something between a vibration and a sound.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich had felt it twice before, in his career, on other worlds, in other corridors, and he had not forgotten what it meant.
[SPEAKER_01]: He brought the warglave to a halt in the shadow of a collapsed processing tower, and waited, and listened, and let the district tell him what it knew.
[SPEAKER_01]: The carnifix came from the east, accompanied by enough lesser aliens, to suggest that it was not wandering, but directed.
[SPEAKER_01]: That something in the swarms distributed intelligence had identified the lone warglave moving through its territory, and had sent an answer to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The lesser Xenos came first, pouring around the base of a manufacture and war in a wave of bodies and shrieking motion.
[SPEAKER_01]: Term against mostly, their fleshbore is spitting clowns of living ammunition that rattled against the warglaves armor.
[SPEAKER_01]: with the sound of hail on a metal roof, and Audrick was already moving before the wave had fully formed, because the worst thing one could do against a carnifix escort was stand still and let it establish its ground.
[SPEAKER_01]: The thermal spear took the leading cluster of termigands, and what had been a cluster became briefly a very bright light, and then nothing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the warglaves machine spirits surged forward into the gap with an aliveness that Audrick felt in every control surface, not the patient attentive presence of the quieter hours, but something roar and more urgent.
[SPEAKER_01]: The machine fully awake and fully committed.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Carnifex came around the war fall, and it was considerably larger than the space it occupied, seemed able to accommodate.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was old, or had been grown as though it were old.
[SPEAKER_01]: Its carapace layered and ridged with the accumulation of some long organic history.
[SPEAKER_01]: Its sithing talons, each the size of the warglaves own arm.
[SPEAKER_01]: Its head, a ridge of bone and malice, that swung toward him.
[SPEAKER_01]: With the slow, certain movement, its eyes, if they could be called that, found him across the rubble, and there was nothing in them that resembled thought, as aldrich understood thought, but there was something that resembled intent, and intent, in a creature of that size, was menacing.
[SPEAKER_01]: He gave it the thermal spear, not a single shot, a sustained deliberate expenditure of some of the weapons remaining charge across three concentrated bursts that he placed with the careful economy of a man who understood he was spending something he could not replenish and had made his peace with the cost.
[SPEAKER_01]: His charge was now running worryingly low.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first burst caught the carnifix across its upper carapace and stripped the layered armour away in a wash of superheated matter that fell in drops like molten rain.
[SPEAKER_01]: The second found the junction between carapace and shoulder where the layering was thinner and the thermal weapon tore into the creature with red hot aggression.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Carnifex staggered, genuinely staggered, one great limb buckling beneath it, and screamed.
[SPEAKER_01]: If the sound it made could be called a scream, which was a sound that had no human analog, and that Aldrich felt in his back teeth.
[SPEAKER_01]: It did not fall.
[SPEAKER_01]: The escort surged forward in the moment of the shot.
[SPEAKER_01]: They did not pause to reassess when their larger kin were wounded, but accelerated.
[SPEAKER_01]: As though the violence done to one was an invitation extended to awe, and Audrey was suddenly in the middle of something close and loud and grinding.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warglaves chain cleaver came down into the press of bodies with the roaring shuddering impact, the weapon doing exactly what it had been designed to do, and the machine spirit was incandescent with it, blazing with an aliveness that communicated itself to Aldrich through every surface of the cockpit.
[SPEAKER_01]: He fought through the escort with the Carnive X still moving behind it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Wounded and slowed, but neither stopped nor gentle.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the work of it was everything that close.
[SPEAKER_01]: Engagements in narrow ground always were, loud, physically demanding, and a constant cycling of threat assessment, and response and repositioning, that left no space for anything as leisurely as fear.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was only the next body, the next angle, the next decision, the chain cleaver rising and falling with the warglaves machine spirit blazing alongside every movement.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Carnifex came through the remnants of the escort with an intent seemingly furious.
[SPEAKER_01]: and old Rick met it with the last of the thermal spears charge, spent in a single point blank burst that he delivered from a distance he would not have chosen, if the distance had been his to choose.
[SPEAKER_01]: The result was decisive, and the creature finally fell, skidding to a halt just shy of the warglaves feet.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich stood in silence for a long moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warglaves machine spirits slowly settling from its blazing aliveness, back towards something quieter.
[SPEAKER_01]: He ran a quick assessment of the thermal spears' status, and received the confirmation he had already known was coming.
[SPEAKER_01]: Charge exhausted, the weapon inert, a capable arm now carrying dead weight.
[SPEAKER_01]: He noted this fact, and moved on.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had the chain cleaver, he had the heavy stubber, he had the warglave and its spirit and whatever the district ahead still intended to ask of him.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a stretch of the district, perhaps three kilometers in length, where the swarms presence thinned to something manageable, not absent, but dispersed, as though the organisms in this particular section had been drawn elsewhere by some other priority, and had left behind only the ambient, patient residue of the swarms occupation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Organic matter clung to the walls in its pale and faintly luminescent way.
[SPEAKER_01]: Spore clouds drifted at the upper levels of the manufacturer and buildings in slow, aimless currents.
[SPEAKER_01]: Occasional movement flickered in the shadows of the edges of his sensor range, small things, nothing that required immediate response.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll drink and move through it at a measured pace, and somewhere in the second kilometer of the quiet, began to talk to himself and the warglave to pass the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was pleasant in this silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: He has never been in the machine for any length of time, without the connection to the wider lands.
[SPEAKER_01]: This time gave him a moment of deep connection to his machine spirit, and he had started to fully relax into it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He walked on through the thinning swarm and the drifting spores and the long dusty light.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the machine spirit kept its council, and the silence between them was, he thought.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not an empty silence, but a full one.
[SPEAKER_01]: The manufacturing district of Varanthos had been before the swamp came, a place of relentless and unglamorous productivity, full of the noise and heat, and organized tedium of industrial processes, conducted at a scale that required entire populations to maintain.
[SPEAKER_01]: The people who had worked here had lived here too, in the have blocks that rose between the processing plants, like afterthoughts.
[SPEAKER_01]: and they had eaten and slept and raised their children with an earshot of the machinery, and they had been by all the evidence available to our drink as he moved through what remained, neither more nor less than people, ordinary and particular.
[SPEAKER_01]: The swarm had moved through all of it within difference.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich was making his way back to the main force and moved through it and read it as he went.
[SPEAKER_01]: The swarm had filled the low points first, the natural channels and underpasses and sheltered courts where they could concentrate without exposure, and then spread outward from those concentrations as the pressure of its own numbers demanded more space.
[SPEAKER_01]: The upper levels of the manufacture and buildings were largely clear, stripped of anything biological by the same instinct that kept the swarms lesser organisms close to the ground.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the ground itself, and everything within two or three stories of it, bore the marks of the occupation in every surface.
[SPEAKER_01]: The encounters in this section of the district were smaller and more dispersed than what had come before.
[SPEAKER_01]: Individual Zino's or small clusters, the swarms presence thinned here by whatever drew its denser concentrations elsewhere, and old Rick and the warglave moved through them, with a new ease of a pair that had found its rhythm.
[SPEAKER_01]: A group of homogons boiled out of a collapsed underpass, and the warglave was already repositioning before they had fully emerged.
[SPEAKER_01]: The heavy stubbers sweeping the approach in a long controlled arc that the machine spirit guided.
[SPEAKER_01]: A lone organism of a type, Aldrich didn't immediately recognise something larger than a term-agant, built low and fast, clearly designed for hunting, rather than assault, came at him, from the shadow of a processing tower, and met the chain cleaver before it had closed to striking distance.
[SPEAKER_01]: The machine spirit, having registered its seconds before Aldrich's own senses, confirmed the threat.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was not sure in the moment, whether he had reached for the cleaver, or whether the warglave had simply moved it into position, and the fact that he was not sure no longer troubled him in the way it once might have.
[SPEAKER_01]: The distinction had become somewhere in the long hours of the districts crossing, academic, a philosophical question interesting to consider, but irrelevant to the work.
[SPEAKER_01]: They moved together fluidly.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was the operative fact.
[SPEAKER_01]: Between the smaller encounters, the district offered its strange and broken beauty in the long dusty light and the drifting spores in the pale membrane, glowing faintly on the walls.
[SPEAKER_01]: An old Rick received it with the same quality of attention, he gave to everything, unhurried, observant and present.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was something in this place beneath the horror of what the swarm had made of it that remained itself, the bones of a human world, the evidence of human hands in the proportions of doorways and the placement of structural supports and the occasional detail that served no functional purpose, but had been put there by someone who wanted the thing to be in
[SPEAKER_01]: He passed a war on which beneath the layer of organic residue, thin enough to remain translucent.
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone had painted something.
[SPEAKER_01]: Colors he could not quite see, a form he could not quite identify.
[SPEAKER_01]: A human gesture made permanent in pigment on a wall that the swarm had covered, but not entirely erased.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not stop.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was no time to stop, and stopping would not have restored it to what it had been.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he noted it, and the machine spirits seem to note it with him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or perhaps he only felt that it did.
[SPEAKER_01]: The far edge of the district became visible in his senses, perhaps 20 minutes later.
[SPEAKER_01]: He moved toward it with the same measured pace he had maintained all morning, and the warglave moved with him, and the bond between them was at its most settled, and its most complete.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something that had grown into itself, over the course of the day's crossing, like a knot that titans properly only went weight is applied to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The district did not end so much as relent, gradually releasing its hold on the landscape, the way that a long piece of music releases its tension, not in a single resolution, but through a series of smaller easings, each one making the next feel inevitable.
[SPEAKER_01]: The manufacturing buildings grew shorter and more widely spaced.
[SPEAKER_01]: The ground between them opened up, rubble giving way in places to the cracked but navigable surface of what had once been a logistics road, wide enough for the heavy transport vehicles that had serviced the processing plants, and wide enough now for a warglave to move along it, without the constant close navigation that the district's interior had required.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich slowed his pace without deciding to.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warglave slowing with him, both of them reading the same ground and arriving at the same response to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The sensor picture ahead was complex but not immediately threatening.
[SPEAKER_01]: Movement to distance, the blur of a swarm consolidating around something, or moving toward something.
[SPEAKER_01]: But nothing with the directional urgency of an imminent engagement.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had, it seemed, a moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: He took it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warglave settled into stillness, its systems dropping from engagement readiness to the lower steadier hum of a held position.
[SPEAKER_01]: The machine-spirits presence in the helm was at its quietest.
[SPEAKER_01]: Old Rick sat within it and looked at the district behind him, and the open ground ahead, and the hazy smoke-coloured sky above both.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he allowed himself, for the first time since the severance.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something that was not quite stillness, and not quite peace, but was somewhere between the two.
[SPEAKER_01]: A moment of genuine, uncomplicated presence in his own skin.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Bonnes absence was still there.
[SPEAKER_01]: It would he suspected always be there in some form, not as lost, not anymore, but as a shape in the space beside him, that he had learned to navigate without needing to fill.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was aware, sitting in that brief stillness, that he was different from the pilot who had entered the district that morning.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not in any way that would have been obvious to an observer, not in ways he could have easily named, but different.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something had clarified.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some question he had not known he was carrying had, somewhere in the grinding and the silence and the slow learning of an alien companionship, quietly answered itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not try to examine it too closely, such things tended to retreat from direct examination.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warglaves machines spirit stirred, gently, pressing its attention toward the ground ahead.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something that Aldrich had come to know as its version of, when you are ready.
[SPEAKER_01]: He found that he was.
[SPEAKER_01]: He found somewhat to his own quiet surprise that he had been for some time.
[SPEAKER_01]: He pressed the wargly forward out of the thinning district and toward whatever the open ground beyond it held, and the machine spirit went with him as it had gone with him all day, fully and without reservation, and in the only way it had ever known how to go anywhere, which was completely.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are things in the swarm that are not accidents of biology, not just the product of the hive mind's endless and indifference ability to grow new creatures, things that have been grown with a purpose.
[SPEAKER_01]: The difference between encountering one of these things and encountering the swarm's ordinary expendable organisms is a difference that an experienced pilot feels before they can account for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had emerged from the districts thinning margin into a wider section of the logistics road.
[SPEAKER_01]: The manufacturer of buildings falling back on either side to create a killing ground of open rubble and cracked ferrocrete that offered long-site lines and very little cover.
[SPEAKER_01]: And his first reading of the ground had been that it was navigable, not comfortable, but navigable, the kind of terrain that favored speed and rewarded the warglaves long stride.
[SPEAKER_01]: His second reading, arriving perhaps 30 seconds after the first, as his senses resolve the shapes moving at the far end of the open ground, revised that assessment.
[SPEAKER_01]: The lesser organisms came first, as they always did.
[SPEAKER_01]: But these moved differently from the waves he had been fighting through all morning.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not with the swarms characteristic surging urgency, not pouring and flooding and filling every available space, but spreading wide, moving outward to the flanks in a deliberate arc that had containment in it, rather than simpler salt.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were hurting him, or rather something was directing them to hurt him, and that something had not yet revealed itself, and the fact of its concealment was itself a piece of information worth taking seriously.
[SPEAKER_01]: It came around the remains of a logistics depot at the Rhodes Eastern Edge.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Aldrich's first clear sense of reading of it produced a number that he looked at twice because the first readings seemed improbable.
[SPEAKER_01]: A mass and a height that placed it in a category of organism, he had encountered only in briefing documents and the careful warnings of pilots who had survived meeting such things and wanted to ensure that others understood.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not a Carnivex, he had fought a Carnivex that morning, and he understood now, with the immediate and uncomplicated clarity of direct comparison, that the Carnivex had been a different kind of problem.
[SPEAKER_01]: This thing was built on a different principle, not the Carnivex's dense and armored aggression, but something longer, lower, purposefully articulated, its limbs configured for the specific work of bringing down large machines rather than simply destroying whatever was nearest.
[SPEAKER_01]: It had weapons grown into its carapace that he did not immediately recognise.
[SPEAKER_01]: Organic structures that tracked with the slow, methodical movement of targeting systems rather than the spasmodic readiness of natural weaponry.
[SPEAKER_01]: Its eyes and there were many of them distributed across its carapace in a way that suggested force spherical awareness.
[SPEAKER_01]: found the warglave across the open ground and stayed there with a fixed gaze that was entirely unlike the swarms' usual distributed attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: It knew what he was.
[SPEAKER_01]: More than that, it had been made to know what he was and made specifically to answer the question of him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Audrick took all of this in, across perhaps four seconds of sensor data and personal observation.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he felt, alongside the clear-eyed assessment of what he was facing, the heightened aliveness of a person who has correctly identified a situation as genuinely dangerous, and whose body in mind are responding accordingly.
[SPEAKER_01]: The machine spirit felt it too, or responded to it, pressing forward against his awareness, with an urgency it had not carried since the Carnivex, but an urgency that was different in quality, less the blazing joy of a weapon given its purpose, and more the straining attention of something that was awake, fully and completely awake, to what was coming.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not wait for it to reach him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Waiting was the wrong answer here, with a creature designed for close engagement with heavy walkers.
[SPEAKER_01]: Every meter it closed was a meter of advantage conceded, and the lesser organisms spreading wide on his flanks were account down as much as a threat.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're encircling arc, tightening with each passing second in a way that would, if he allowed it to complete itself,
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich pushed the warglave into motion at a hard angle, cutting north across the open ground to collapse the western arm of the arc before it could close.
[SPEAKER_01]: The heavy stubber opening up with a sustained sweeping burst that tore through the term against, completing that flank.
[SPEAKER_01]: The creature responded to his movement with a speed that the sensor data had not quite prepared him for, pivoting.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tracking, the organic weapons on its carapace, discharging in a quick intelligence sequence.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first shots struck the ground three meters to his right, and removed a section of ferrocrete in a way that told him, with great clarity, and very little room for interpretation.
[SPEAKER_01]: What the weapon would do to warglave armour if it found its mark?
[SPEAKER_01]: He was already moving again, cutting back the other way, using the warglave speed the way it was meant to be used, not to flee, but to deny, to keep the creatures targeting solutions perpetually out of date, to make himself a problem that could not be solved by simply pointing a weapon, at where he had been.
[SPEAKER_01]: The machine spirit was extraordinary in this.
[SPEAKER_01]: It had always been quick.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warglaves pattern was built for speed, and the spirit had always inhabited that speed naturally.
[SPEAKER_01]: But under the pressure of this engagement, it achieved something beyond quickness.
[SPEAKER_01]: a responsiveness that felt less like a machine, executing instructions, and more like a living thing, moving on instinct, adjusting to the ground and the creature's movements with a fraction of a second's advantage over what Aldrich's own processing could have managed alone.
[SPEAKER_01]: He gave the heavy stubborn to the lesser organisms, wherever they pressed close enough, burning through the flanking term of ants in controlled bursts that kept the encirclement from completing, while he kept the creature itself at the edge of effective range.
[SPEAKER_01]: Never quite letting it close, never quite opening enough distance to make the engagement feel safe.
[SPEAKER_01]: The chain cleaver he kept in reserve, because the chain cleaver required a proximity to this creature that he was not yet prepared to offer.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not until he understood its reach more completely.
[SPEAKER_01]: and across the three minutes, and then five, and then seven.
[SPEAKER_01]: The understanding assembled itself, not as a revelation, but as an accumulation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each exchange adding its evidence to a picture that was becoming, with every passing second, harder to read as anything other than what it was.
[SPEAKER_01]: The creature was not tiring, it was not expanding itself the way the carnifix had expanded itself, burning through its aggression in the sustained fury of close combat.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was patient, methodical, tracking, content to let the lesser zenos continue their slow herding work, while it waited for the moment when Aldrich's options narrowed.
[SPEAKER_01]: He held the assessment at arms length for one more exchange, and then another, and then he let it settle into certainty.
[SPEAKER_01]: This could not be finished here, not alone, not with a spent thermal spear and a chain cleaver and the heavy stubber that was burning through its ammunition at a rate the engagement was not going to allow him to sustain indefinitely.
[SPEAKER_01]: The hardest thing he had done all day was not the Carnifex, and it was not the long, grinding hours of the districts crossing, and it was not the sustained management of the absent bond or the first terrible silence after the severance.
[SPEAKER_01]: The hardest thing was the moment he turned the warglaves back on the creature and moved away from it, because everything in him that was a noble of house vain, everything that had been placed in him by blood and upbringing, and eight years of piloting and the long tradition of what nights were, and how they imported themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of it rose against the turning with a unanimous and forceful objection,
[SPEAKER_01]: that he felt physically, in the chest, in the jaw, in the hands, on the controls.
[SPEAKER_01]: He turned anyway.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not in flight, the distinction mattered, at least to him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Though the creature behind him was unlikely to appreciate the nuance.
[SPEAKER_01]: he moved with the pace of a controlled withdrawal.
[SPEAKER_01]: The heavy stubber maintaining its suppressing fire against the smaller aliens to discourage pursuit.
[SPEAKER_01]: As he moved away, the creature followed, as he had half expected it would.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not immediately, it paused at the edge of the open ground, as though it were confirming something before committing to it, and then it came, steadily,
[SPEAKER_01]: The lesser organisms fell back around it, their flanking arc dissolving, now that the containment it had been building toward was no longer the objective.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich noted its following, with the part of his mind that tracked tactical information and filed it appropriately.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he put his attention on the ground ahead, the far edge of the district properly visible now in his senses, the open territory beyond it beginning to resolve into something more than a directional abstraction.
[SPEAKER_01]: Somewhere out there, the imperial perimeter, somewhere out there, the lance.
[SPEAKER_01]: The machine spirit settled gradually from its straining aliveness into something steadier, as the engagements immediate pressure receded.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's presence in the helm, shifting from the heightened urgency of the fight to the deep, attentive readiness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich moved with it, and the creature moved behind them both, and the far edge of the district drew closer with each stride.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not know what waited there.
[SPEAKER_01]: He knew, with the quiet certainty, of a man who had spent a full day, learning to trust something that communicated only in instinct and warmth, and the honest pressure of a machine spirit that had never once pretended to be anything other than what it was.
[SPEAKER_01]: that he would meet it, as he had met everything else, the day had placed in front of him.
[SPEAKER_01]: He pressed forward and the warglave went with him, and the creature came on behind, patient and purposeful in the grey and failing light, and the last stretch of the district unfolded beneath their feet, like the final pages of a very long and very serious letter.
[SPEAKER_01]: He heard it before he cleared the last of the district's margins.
[SPEAKER_01]: The sound of a battle already in progress, the rolling percussion of night weapons, at full engagement, the thinner and more continuous crackle of last fire from guardlines.
[SPEAKER_01]: And beneath all of it the sound of the swarm, which was not one sound, but many sounds, collapse together into something that the ears processed as a background noise.
[SPEAKER_01]: The last manufacturing building fell away behind him, and the ground opened up, and Aldrich saw it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The perimeter had been drawn tight, far tighter than the original defensive plan would have intended, the kind of compression that hinted at hours of hard fighting, and ground given up not willingly but necessarily, each retreat accalculated concession to the balance of survival.
[SPEAKER_01]: The guard held the inner line in the organized desperate discipline of soldiers who had been during this long enough to have moved past fear into something more durable, firing in rotation and conserving ammunition.
[SPEAKER_01]: Earthworks had been thrown up with whatever the ground offered, ferrocrete slabs and the wreckage of vehicles, and in places simply the rubble of the district itself, piled and shaped into barriers that were not elegant, but were working, which was the only quality that mattered now.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the defensive line, standing in the smoke in the noise with the particular gravity of machines that had been fighting for a long time and intended to keep fighting, were the knights.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich saw them immediately through the smoke and noise.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lord David Cole's errand stood at the perimeter's northern edge.
[SPEAKER_01]: Its thermal cannon tracking something in the middle distance with a focused attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lady Oren of Vashis Crusader anchored the southern end in a haze of its own making.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Avenger gatling cannon cycling through a sustained burst that turned the air in front of it into a killing field.
[SPEAKER_01]: However, in his flanked her, working the sides to make sure their unit was not outmanuvered.
[SPEAKER_01]: And at the perimeter's heart, smoke blackened and scarred in ways that the morning's pristine departure had not anticipated.
[SPEAKER_01]: I unveil, Cassian's paladin, standing with the solidity, like something that had decided it was not going to move, and had communicated this decision to the ground beneath it, as well as to the enemy in front of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Its reaper chainsawed was dark with the evidence of close engagement.
[SPEAKER_01]: Its battle cannon found a mark somewhere beyond Aldrich's sightline, and the ground shook with its barking.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich stood for a moment at the district's edge and looked at all of it, and the warglave stood with him, and neither of them moved.
[SPEAKER_01]: He wanted, in that moment, simply to see it, to receive it with his own eyes, his own senses, before anything else intervened.
[SPEAKER_01]: The bond was still silent, the lance was reachable, and yet there it was, real and present and fighting.
[SPEAKER_01]: The people he had been separated from, still standing, and still holding.
[SPEAKER_01]: He moved toward the perimeter at the warglaves long, ground-covering stride, and the bond found him before he reached it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It did not return all at once, the burned conduits were not capable of all at once, not any more.
[SPEAKER_01]: And perhaps they never would be again, in the way they had been before the morning severance.
[SPEAKER_01]: What arrived instead was something thinner and more tentative.
[SPEAKER_01]: A ghost of the signal feeling its way through damaged pathways.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, as the warglave closed the remaining distance, and the perimeter's edge came within the range, at which the Lance's neural network could make itself felt through even compromise conduits.
[SPEAKER_01]: the ghost thickened and warmed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Cassian's presence entered the helm gradually.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not the full bond, not the rich and complex communion of the morning's departure, not the complete shared awareness.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a fraction of that, a suggestion of it, a voice heard through distance, rather than held close.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it was Cassian,
[SPEAKER_01]: recognisably, unmistakably Cassian, and the recognition of it move through Aldrich with a warmth he felt from his throat to the base of his skull.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich, just his name through the damaged bond, carrying in its single word more than any longer transmission could have managed.
[SPEAKER_01]: A question, and an answer at once.
[SPEAKER_01]: A hand extended.
[SPEAKER_01]: Here he replied, and took his place on the line beside Iron Veil, without waiting to be directed to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warglave settling into its natural position, like a thing returning
[SPEAKER_01]: Across the perimeter, movement caught his eye, Sarah's helvering, shifting its position to better cover the sight lines to his left.
[SPEAKER_01]: While she moved, she turned the machine toward him for just a moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: A brief movement showing an acknowledgement of one professional to another, who has come back from somewhere difficult.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich received it as it was intended and turned his attention to the line and to what was coming.
[SPEAKER_01]: Behind him, somewhere in the district's broken margins, the creature was still coming.
[SPEAKER_01]: It came through the district slowly.
[SPEAKER_01]: The smaller terranids flooded ahead of it as they had done on the logistics road, spreading wide across the perimeter's front in a wave that was not uncorordinated.
[SPEAKER_01]: The swarms deeper intelligence threading its smaller pieces into the gaps the way water threads into cracks, finding every weakness in the line and pressing against its simultaneously.
[SPEAKER_01]: so that the perimeter had to answer in all directions at once, and could not afford to watch any single direction with its full attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: The guard answered it with everything they had, which was considerable, because the 114th for Anthos, had been fighting since before the Lance arrived, and had learned what the swarm responded to, and exactly what it did not.
[SPEAKER_01]: The last fire came down in discipline sheets, overlapping fields of fire, that the sergeants had spent the last hours establishing, and that now proved their worth.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each section covering the sections beside it, so that the wave found no uncontested approach, and paid for every metre it crossed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Mortosheels walked through the denser concentrations.
[SPEAKER_01]: with the mechanical repetition of crews who had long since moved past excitement into something grimmer and more effective.
[SPEAKER_01]: Malta gun teams burned through the creatures that made it to the earthworks with the clothes and sparing violence of soldiers defending the last ground available to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not enough to stop the wave.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was enough to slow it.
[SPEAKER_01]: slowing, bought the seconds that the night's required to answer what was coming behind it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The creature cleared the district's last building and came into the open ground before the perimeter, and the entire battle seemed to register its arrival.
[SPEAKER_01]: A brief collective alteration of attention, guard and swarm alike, as the thing that had been built to end heavy walkers,
[SPEAKER_01]: Cassian's voice came through the bond, thin and imperfect as it was.
[SPEAKER_01]: The lance responded as a unit, each element pivoting to its role, with the coherence that the neural web made possible.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Aldrich felt himself inside that coherence again.
[SPEAKER_01]: Part of the chord after the long solo passage, and the feeling was good.
[SPEAKER_01]: Genuinely, uncomplainingly good.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lord David Cole's errand drove hard at the creature's eastern flank.
[SPEAKER_01]: The thermal cannon opening up at a range that maximized the weapon's devastating potential.
[SPEAKER_01]: Two strikes landing in rapid succession that stripped the creature's right side carapace and sent it pivoting away from the damage.
[SPEAKER_01]: with a speed and agility that drew a short sharp burst of return fire that the errant took across its shoulder and absorbed without breaking stride.
[SPEAKER_01]: Dougheth Cole had always fought with the enthusiastic aggression that his restless bond signal promised, and he fought that way now, drawing the creature's attention eastward, trusting the rest of the lands to use the space his aggression created.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lady Orenner's Crusader gave it no peace from the south.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Avenger Gatling cannon cycling up to its force sustained rate, with a sound like industrial machinery pushed beyond its design tolerances.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rounds striking the creature's armoured flanks in streams that each individually might not have penetrated, and which collectively were doing a work of steady, cumulative damage that would tell, given time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Her Helverins walked their fire up the creature's legs, targeting the joints and the articulations, where the armour was thinnest.
[SPEAKER_01]: Filling every moment the creature was not actively dealing with a larger threat, with the reminder that there was no position it could occupy on this ground that was not being watched.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sarah's however in, worked in concert with Lady Oren's pair.
[SPEAKER_01]: The three of them are sustained and interlocking song delivered in autocannon fire.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Oldrich felt her presence in the bones peripheral awareness, focused and precise.
[SPEAKER_01]: The creature was magnificent in its resistance and terrible, and old Rick watched it absorb the lance's combined attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was genuinely impressive in its capacity for survival.
[SPEAKER_01]: It had been built for this, it had been grown to weather exactly this kind of distributed assault, and keep moving toward the thing it had been made to destroy, and it was doing that now.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was pushing through the fire, with wounds accumulating on its body, like a record of everything the lance had spent, turning always back toward the lance with a slow and fixed attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: In this moment, its attention was fixed on Aldrich's Warglow.
[SPEAKER_01]: Cassian saw it.
[SPEAKER_01]: 30 years of piloting had made him a reader of battlefields.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way long study makes a person a reader of texts.
[SPEAKER_01]: The meaning visible in the arrangement of things, to eyes that knew what they were looking at.
[SPEAKER_01]: Iron Vale moved and the move was clean and decisive and exactly right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Putting the pallet in squarely between the creature and the warglave with the reaper chainsawed, rising to meet the creature's advance in a clash of mass and violence that shook the ground for 50 meters in every direction.
[SPEAKER_01]: The clash between Iron Veil and the creature was not elegant, and it was not meant to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the kind of fighting that Knights of Cassians experience understood and accepted, close, grinding, attricional.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each exchange costing something that would later need to be accounted for in repair manifests and honest conversations about what the machine had been asked to endure.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Paladin drove the creature back by the pure committed weight of its advance, the Reaper chainsawed working in the short, powerful arcs of close quarters engagement, and the creature answered with its own terrible armament in ways that left marks on Iron Veil's armor that would outlast the battle as a record of the encounter.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were in their own violent way, well matched.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Paladin's experience and the creature's purpose meeting, at close quarters, and neither immediately conceding the argument.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the creature was fighting the whole lands.
[SPEAKER_01]: It had been fighting the whole lands for the last three minutes, absorbing fire from four directions simultaneously.
[SPEAKER_01]: while attending to the paladin immediately before it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And even something grown for this precise purpose had a budget.
[SPEAKER_01]: A limit to what it could sustain before the accumulation of damage began to speak louder than the purpose that drove it forward.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was slower now than it had been on the logistics road.
[SPEAKER_01]: Measureably, visibly slower, its movements carrying the slight lag of a system operating under sustained stress.
[SPEAKER_01]: Its responses fractionally behind where they had been when the engagement began.
[SPEAKER_01]: Cassian felt it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich felt it through the bond a half second after Cassian did, and felt it as a shift in the quality of Iron Veil signal, a gathering of intention.
[SPEAKER_01]: The particular focus of a pilot, who has seen the moment forming, and is preparing to make it, rather than wait for it to arrive fully formed.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Paladin drove forward with a committed aggression that was uncharacteristic of Cassian's measured style, and was therefore to Audrey's eyes unmistakable as a deliberate thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I unveil pressing the creature hard and driving it back, not to destroy it, because the angle was not right for destruction.
[SPEAKER_01]: But to move it, to push it eastward and downward across the broken ground until the space to the creature's left opened up, the way a gap opens in a line.
[SPEAKER_01]: When one part of it is pushed too hard in a single direction.
[SPEAKER_01]: The space opens
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich was already moving.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had felt the intention forming in the bond and had begun his approach before Cassian's push was complete.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warglave flowing into motion with the immediate uncomplicated responsiveness of a machine and pilot that had spent a full day learning each other so thoroughly that the boundary between instruction and instinct had become largely theoretical.
[SPEAKER_01]: The machine spirit blazed up into fuller-lifeness, the way it had blazed in the Carnifex engagement, and in the long grinding fight on the logistics road.
[SPEAKER_01]: That particular incandescence that Holdric had come to understand, as its version of complete commitment.
[SPEAKER_01]: The machine giving everything it had, holding nothing in reserve, as present, and as willing as it was possible for a thing to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: He came in beneath the creature's reach because the creature's weapons were configured for the engagement ranges, at which it had been fighting.
[SPEAKER_01]: For the Paladin directly before it, for the Helverins at Distance, for the Erranton its flank.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the space immediately beneath its guard was the space it was least prepared to defend.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was an oversight.
[SPEAKER_01]: The chain cleaver came up in the full extension of the warglaves' reach, it's adamantium teeth screaming at their operational pitch, and found the creature in the place where the lance is accumulated fire, had done its work.
[SPEAKER_01]: Found the joint where the right side carapass had been stripped by David Cole's thermal cannon, and the exposed tissue beneath.
[SPEAKER_01]: He found it, and drove into it, with all of the force he could find.
[SPEAKER_01]: The creature's response was enormous and brief, a convulsion of its entire mass, all of its remaining systems firing in the automatic protest.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then it was going down, the vast weight of its settling toward the broken ground with a slow inevitability, and the sound it made was the sound of the battle's full crum.
[SPEAKER_01]: The moment about which everything before and after would be understood to have turned,
[SPEAKER_01]: The line held.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was held at a cost that was written in the deadguard across the earth works, in the wounded being carried from the perimeter's interior by the quiet and steady hands of medicy teams, who had been doing that work since before the lance arrived.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was written in Iron Veil's sword and blackened armor, and in the Eren's damaged shoulder, and in the ammunition expenditure, figures that the Helverins crews would compile later.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was written in the swarm smaller creatures, beginning to pull back from the perimeter as the large Zeno's fell.
[SPEAKER_01]: The hive minds distributed intelligence recalibrating as a significant piece of its purpose was removed from the board.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not retreating in the human sense, not feeling lost, simply redirecting and the redirecting felt.
[SPEAKER_01]: to the people on the line who had been holding against it, like the easing of a pressure that had been building for a very long time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich stood beside Iron Veil in the settling dust and the fading noise.
[SPEAKER_01]: The chain cleavours teeth cycling slowly down from their operational pitch to silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: The machine spirit coming down from its blazing aliveness, through the damaged bond, Cassian's presence was steady and warm, and said nothing at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: The line held.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a particular quality to the silence that follows a battle, and it is nothing like the silence that precedes one.
[SPEAKER_01]: The silence before is a held breath,
[SPEAKER_01]: The silence after is something looser and more complicated.
[SPEAKER_01]: The silence of a world that has been through something and is taking stock tentatively of what remains.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is not peaceful, not exactly, but it has peace somewhere in it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way that a piece of music that has moved through difficult passages carries those passages in it, even when it arrives at something quieter.
[SPEAKER_01]: The perimeter settled into that silence now, gradually and unevenly.
[SPEAKER_01]: The sounds of the engagement fading by degrees, a burst of last fire, somewhere to the north as the last of the retreating tyrannids were shot at.
[SPEAKER_01]: The low rumble of the Crusader's systems cycling down from sustained operation.
[SPEAKER_01]: The voices of sergeants calling status reports in flat, professional
[SPEAKER_01]: tones.
[SPEAKER_01]: The bulk doors opened once again to receive the damaged nights.
[SPEAKER_01]: The serfs came out to meet them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The household staff of each night, moving to their machines with the focused practicality.
[SPEAKER_01]: Damage assessors climbed iron veil with auspects equipment and careful hands, cataloging what Cassian's engagement with the creature had cost the pallidin, in terms that would eventually become repair orders
[SPEAKER_01]: and the long patient work of restoration.
[SPEAKER_01]: Others move to the Eren's damaged shoulder and to the helferines ammunition systems and to each of the lances machines in turn beginning the process of understanding what had been spent and what remained.
[SPEAKER_01]: The guard moved through the wreckage of the perimeter outside.
[SPEAKER_01]: The wounded gathered and carried to the medicy station that had been established in the shell of a storage building, 50 meters behind the line.
[SPEAKER_01]: The dead recorded with the careful, dignified attention they deserved.
[SPEAKER_01]: The earth works assessed and short-up against the possibility that the swarms' recalibration would eventually produce another push.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were a great many wounded, there were a great many dead.
[SPEAKER_01]: The people doing the counting did so without flinching, and they were, in their quiet and unagnolaged way, performing one of the most important acts available to human beings in the wake of violence.
[SPEAKER_01]: The corridor had held.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was the fact of the center of everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: The specific, limited, necessary thing they had been sent to do was done.
[SPEAKER_01]: What it had cost to do it was real, and visible, and would be reckoned with honestly in the days ahead.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the corridor held, and the high-city southern underbelly was intact, and the guard regiments consolidating in the upper city had the time the lands had bought them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was what the morning had asked for.
[SPEAKER_01]: The light was changing by the time the immediate work had settled into its longer rhythms, and the perimeter had achieved the equilibrium of a defensive line that had survived its test, and was preparing for the next one.
[SPEAKER_01]: The smoke that had layered the air throughout the battle was thinning.
[SPEAKER_01]: drifting eastward on a wind that had arrived without announcement in the late afternoon.
[SPEAKER_01]: And through the gaps, it left the sky was visible, not the clear sky of better days, nothing so generous as that, but a sky nonetheless, pale and real above the broken silhouette of the manufacturing district, and Aldrich looked at it for a moment, with a simple, uncomplicated appreciation.
[SPEAKER_01]: The bond had been quiet since the creature fell, not absent, not damaged into silence again, but simply quiet, Cassian's presence in the helm, carrying the particular quality of a person who isn't nearby and awake, and has nothing that needs to be said.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a companionable quiet, the kind that only existed between people, who had spent long enough in each other's company, to have moved beyond the obligation of filling silence with sound, and old Rick sat within it, with the ease of a man returned to something that fitted him.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way familiar things fit, naturally, and without the effort that unfamiliar things
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet it fitted him differently now than it had this morning, not less well, differently.
[SPEAKER_01]: The bond that had once been the natural condition of his existence, the water in which he swam without noticing that he swam.
[SPEAKER_01]: had become something he could feel the shape of, something he inhabited, with a consciousness he had not previously brought to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had learned its value from the outside, the way one sometimes has to lose a thing briefly to understand what one has.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the understanding had changed him in ways that were not visible on any surface, but were present in him, settled into the permanent architecture of who he was, as unremovable as the day that had
[SPEAKER_01]: Cassian's presence shifted in the bond, gently, with the quality of a person turning toward you in a room.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when the transmission came, it carried in at something that aldrich recognized immediately, and could not quite have described to anyone who had not sat a helm, and felt such things for themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the same signal that Cassian had always used for the end of engagement check.
[SPEAKER_01]: The same words he had transmitted after every battle in eight years of shared service.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the quality beneath the words was different in a way that was not dramatic and was entirely unmistakable.
[SPEAKER_01]: A fraction less directive, a fraction more open, carrying in its tone the adjustment of a man who has felt something change in the bond and has decided without fanfare to let the change be reflected in how he moves within it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well done, was all it said.
[SPEAKER_01]: Two words, through a damaged bond, in the voice of a person who chose his words carefully, and therefore meant each one.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aldrich held them for a moment in the quiet of the helm, in the late light and the thinning smoke, and the settling sounds of the perimeter, moving through its recovery.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he felt the machine spirit warm against his awareness in its lowest and most restful register, not the blazing aliveness of the engagement, not the heightened attention of the district's dangerous hours, but the deep and patient and utterly reliable presence that had been there before all of it, and would be there when the memory of all of it had softened into the background of a longer story.
[SPEAKER_01]: He knew it now the way he knew the discoloration above the knee joint, the way he knew the particular quality of Cassian's voice in the bond, the way he knew the weight of the morning, and the length of the day, and the specific irreducible value of having come through something difficult, and found himself, at the end of it, still himself.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, he replied, and meant it in all the directions it was true, then he sat for a while longer in the quiet, not yet moving, not yet beginning the next thing, simply present in the helm, and in the day, and in the particular stillness of a moment, that had nothing left to ask of him, and the machine spirit hummed.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the bond held its companionable warmth, and the sky above the perimeter continued its pale and unhurried business.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the ground beneath the warglaves feet was the ground they had held, and it was enough, it was more than enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was everything that the day had set out to protect and hand.
[SPEAKER_01]: Against the considerable weight of everything that had tried to prevent it, succeeded in protecting.
[SPEAKER_01]: Old Rick waited for what came next and found in the waiting that he was not afraid of it.