[SPEAKER_00]: The order to withdraw came three hours too late for most of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And everyone on that line knew it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they went on fighting anyway, because there was nothing else left to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Trooper Jarrick Thorne had seen retreats before.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had seen the orderly kind.
[SPEAKER_00]: where a regimen folded back on itself, like a boxer drawing in his arm to strike again.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he had seen the other kind.
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind that had no name in any drill manual, because no one wanted to write it down.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the second kind.
[SPEAKER_00]: The toe had broken the eastern
[SPEAKER_00]: and from that moment the battle had stopped being a battle and become a long grinding piece of retreat in which the numbers on one side simply ran out faster than the numbers on the other.
[SPEAKER_00]: There would be no reinforcements, command had said as much over the vox in the flat, careful voice that officers used when they were telling you that you had been spent.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fleet could not hold the void above them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The other fronts could not spare a single man.
[SPEAKER_00]: The position was lost, and the only thing left to salvage was whatever flesh and equipment could be carried off it before the end.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the word came down at last.
[SPEAKER_00]: pull the ground troops out, save what you can.
[SPEAKER_00]: Run.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Thorn did not run.
[SPEAKER_00]: He worked.
[SPEAKER_00]: He stood at the lip of the embarkation field with the fog of his own breath, whipping past his face on the cold air, dirt by the jets from transport aircraft, and the occasional hot air ejecting from a nearby artillery piece.
[SPEAKER_00]: He stood and sorted the living from the nearly dead with his hands and his voice, shoving men toward the waiting transport, hauling the slow ones up by their harness straps.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was terrible work.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had done it before.
[SPEAKER_00]: He suspected in the part of him that had stopped flinching years ago, that he would do it again if he lived.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was work that cost him a little more of himself, each time he did it.
[SPEAKER_00]: behind him and above him, the fullness of the artillery sang its last.
[SPEAKER_00]: The gun crews were dying at their pieces, and they knew it, but they did not stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every shell they had left was being fed into the breaches by suit covered hands as fast as they could move.
[SPEAKER_00]: A wall of fire flung up between the muster point and the advancing tower lines, and that wall was the only reason anyone was
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a simple bargain, the kind the Imperium struck a thousand times a day, across 10,000 worlds, and never once recorded in its ledges.
[SPEAKER_00]: A battery of men, and the guns they served, traded outright for minutes, not for victory, not even for their own lives, which were mostly already forfeit, only for time.
[SPEAKER_00]: For the handful of minutes it would take the transports to fill and lift,
[SPEAKER_00]: paid for in powder and blood, and the courage of people who keep working a gun.
[SPEAKER_00]: They know, will be their grave.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn heard one of the batteries go quiet to the north.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then another, out of shells, or out of crews.
[SPEAKER_00]: From where he stood there was no way to tell the difference, and it did not matter, because the silence meant the same thing either way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Move, he said, to a boy who could not have been more than 17, and the boy moved.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Valkyrie was already turning its engines over when he reached it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The downwash flattening the grass and snatching it his coat.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corder had the controls.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn could see the pilot silhouette through the armor glass, hunched and still amid the chaos.
[SPEAKER_00]: His hands moving across the panel, with a pace that seemed to think panic was a luxury he could not afford, and had simply set it down.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the next few hours, he never doubted the man could fly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Inside, the troop bay was a press of bodies and noise.
[SPEAKER_00]: A Vox operator called Tel Nasser had folded himself into the corner nearest the cockpit bucket, with the Vox unit cradle against his chest, both arms wrapped around it.
[SPEAKER_00]: His whole posture, cold, protectively over the battered machine.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way a man might curl over a wounded animal, he had carried a long way, and would not now set down.
[SPEAKER_00]: The box was cracked along one side, its casing scorched, and half its runes dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nassau was young enough that the fear still showed plainly on his face, and loyal enough that he had thought to grab the one piece of equipment that might let them call for help before he thought to save himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn marked both of those things and said nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Across the bay, medic Ren Halvex was on her knees over a man who was not going to live.
[SPEAKER_00]: She knew it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorne could see that she knew it in the set of her shoulders.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the way her hands kept moving anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: Pressing a dressing to a wound that no dressing would close, her lips moving in something that was half-field litany and half-simple human comfort.
[SPEAKER_00]: The words you give a dying stranger because you don't want to give them nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was a surgeon, not a soldier.
[SPEAKER_00]: She had come to this war to mend, and the war had been very patient, in teaching her how little mending it would allow.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the man's chest stopped moving, she stayed bent over him, a moment longer than she needed to.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then she closed his eyes with two fingers, gently.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way you would settle a child to sleep, and she moved on to the next one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn had watched a great many medics learn to stop doing that.
[SPEAKER_00]: He found, obscurely, that he was glad she had not stopped.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the last of them we're getting, he called to the cockpit.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyone still out there is going to have to get the next bird.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then close it up, quarter answered.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ramp ground shut, the engines climbed to a hole, and the Valkyrie hold itself up off that dying field and into the murk, and the muster point fell away beneath them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The running figures, the burning guns, the small brave fires of the batteries that were still even now, feeding their last shells into the dark to buy the lift that was carrying thorn away from them.
[SPEAKER_00]: They flew, they did not hover, they did not circle the garrison waiting for a gap.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fleet was scattered high above the far horizon, and the rendezvous lay a long way away across enemy thickens sky, and so Codder put the nose down and ran for it, low and fast, threading the fog in the smoke, and the battlefield shrank behind them, until it was only a smear of orange light, low in the murk, and then it was not even that.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Shelfire died away one position at a time as he flew.
[SPEAKER_00]: Each battery going dark as its munitions ran dry.
[SPEAKER_00]: Until the last of them got it out, and the only thunder left in the world was the thunder of their own engines.
[SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere back there, the tower advance was rolling forward over ground, no longer defended.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn did not look back to watch it.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was nothing to see in the fog, but fog, and nothing to fear but the distance opening up between himself and the enemy.
[SPEAKER_00]: The hit came without warning.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way the worst things always do, no tracer he could follow, no warning run, only a sound.
[SPEAKER_00]: A single enormous concussion somewhere half, felt before it was heard.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a fist of pressure that slammed up through the deck and into thorn spine and teeth.
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole airframed lurched, then the note of the engines changed, dropped, sheared into a shriek of tortured machinery that no amount of skill at the controls could fix, and the floor tilted hard beneath him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had the time and the presence of mind to clip his harness into some of the aircraft's webbing, and get one arm hooked through a stanchion.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had time to see Nassau's eyes go white-rimmed and wide,
[SPEAKER_00]: He had time to hear Corda saying something into the dark of the cockpit.
[SPEAKER_00]: Low and fast and not afraid, fighting the controls of a machine that had stopped being a flying thing and become a falling one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then the fog and the forest came up to meet them, and the world turned over and over.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was a long, roaring instant, in which Jeric Thorn understood with perfect clarity, that they were going down miles from anywhere, beyond every map, with the muster point already overrun behind them, and nothing ahead but unknown ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there was the impact, and after the impact, there was nothing at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: He came back to himself, hanging upside down.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the first fact, and for a while it was the only fact that he was inverted in his harness with the blood pooling hot behind his eyes and the world the wrong way up.
[SPEAKER_00]: The second factor arrived more slowly.
[SPEAKER_00]: The engines were silent.
[SPEAKER_00]: The hull and the thunder were gone, and in their place was a stillness so total, that for one disoriented moment he thought he had gone deaf.
[SPEAKER_00]: Until he caught, threading through it, the small sounds.
[SPEAKER_00]: The tick and creek of cooling metal, the drip of fluid he hoped wasn't fuel.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone breathing in ragged catches a few feet away, the faint far off keening of the fog itself, moving against the broken hull.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn did the thing he had been trained to do, the thing that had kept him alive on three worlds before this one.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not thrash, he took inventory, his own body first, fingers, toes, the grinding aching his ribs that meant bruised and not broken, the wet warmth that his hairline that meant a cut, and not worse, alive, whole enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: He braced one arm against the buckled ceiling that had been the floor, released his harness, and lowered himself down into the ruin of the troop bay with a soldier's care.
[SPEAKER_00]: The dead were easy to count, most of the bay had not survived.
[SPEAKER_00]: The men and women he had shoved aboard with his own hands and hour ago were gone, broken against the structure that had been meant to save them, and Thorn moved through them quickly and without ceremony, not because he did not feel it, but because feeling it now would not help any of them, and there were still three voices in the wreck that might.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nassau was alive.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was wedged half beneath the collapsed bench with the vox still clutched to his chest.
[SPEAKER_00]: Still against everything, holding it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when Thorn reached him, the boy's first words were not about his own legs, which were pinned.
[SPEAKER_00]: But about the unit, it's cracked worse, he said.
[SPEAKER_00]: His voice high and shaking.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's warm.
[SPEAKER_00]: Trooper, it's still warm, it's still got power.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Thorne told him to be quiet and save his strength.
[SPEAKER_00]: And got the bench off him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And found the legs bruised but sound.
[SPEAKER_00]: Halvex had been thrown clear into the forward bulkhead and was already moving when he found her, already dragging herself toward the sound of the others on instinct.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was blood on her face and her left wrist hung wrong, but her eyes were clear.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corder, she said, before Thorn could ask.
[SPEAKER_00]: The cockpit.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's breathing.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knocked his head on the panel.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not making sense yet, but he's breathing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corda was concussed.
[SPEAKER_00]: His pupils mismatched.
[SPEAKER_00]: A deep gash above his ear, and his word sliding loose and dreamlike went thorn checked him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He would live if nothing else came for them.
[SPEAKER_00]: That last clause arrived in Thorn's mind, unbidden.
[SPEAKER_00]: And once it had arrived,
[SPEAKER_00]: Four of them then, four were alive out of all that the Valkyrie had carried, Thorn climbed out through a hole in the hole and stood in the fog to make his assessment, and it was the assessment that frightened him more than the wreck, more than the dead.
[SPEAKER_00]: The beacon was gone, not damaged but gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole emergency transponder housing torn away somewhere in the four, which meant no automated signal was climbing up out of this place to tell the fleet where they had come down.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Ausbex, when he pulled it from his webbing and woke it, gave him nothing but a slow, grey churn.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fog scattered its returns into useless static, blinding the one sense that might have let him see what shared this ground with them.
[SPEAKER_00]: His eyes told him no more than the ospects did.
[SPEAKER_00]: The mist sat close and white in every direction.
[SPEAKER_00]: Swallowing the world ten meters out.
[SPEAKER_00]: and through that white faint and far, and from no direction he could fix, came the screams.
[SPEAKER_00]: Human screams, other crews, other birds that had fallen as theirs had fallen, scattered across this nameless wilderness, men and women dying somewhere out in the fog.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their voices thinning across the distance.
[SPEAKER_00]: As Thorn stood and listened, one of them stopped, simply stopped, mid-cry, cut off clean.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a moment later, further off, another.
[SPEAKER_00]: He stood very still and understood several things at once.
[SPEAKER_00]: Going back the way they came, was death.
[SPEAKER_00]: The master point was gone, overrun.
[SPEAKER_00]: and even if it had not been, it laid miles away across open country, with the whole town advance rolling over it.
[SPEAKER_00]: To walk back, was to walk into the enemy, with no cover, and no friends, and three wounded at his side.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was nothing behind them now, but the war they had just escaped, and it was not waiting for them any more kindly than it had before.
[SPEAKER_00]: Which left only forward, an old imperial outpost, the one whose map of the area showed clearly but marked as a point of interest rather than a manned base.
[SPEAKER_00]: abandoned, distant, but built by human hands, and perhaps still holding something that could call for help.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a thin hope, but he had survived on thinner.
[SPEAKER_00]: He went back to the others to tell them they were going to have to walk.
[SPEAKER_00]: Out in the fog, something that was not human had already begun to learn the sound of their voices.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a kind of map that exists only in a soldier's head, and Jarrick Thorne consulted it now, standing in the fog beside the broken back of the Valkyrie, with three wounded people depending on the answer.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had seen the survey data weeks ago, in a briefing that had been about something else.
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of detail you take in without meaning to, and store away in case the world ever asks you for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: This wilderness had been charted long ago and badly by an imperium that had come here, built something and left.
[SPEAKER_00]: The outpost was about 20 kilometers away.
[SPEAKER_00]: Give or take the lies that distance always tells in country like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Set on high ground to the west.
[SPEAKER_00]: It had been abandoned for years, but it had been built to watch the sky, and a thing built to watch the sky has a vox array tall enough to throw a signal past the fog that was blinding them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that single fact was the whole of their hope.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was thin, but thin hope and no hope were not the same thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a man could walk a very long way on the difference.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one argued with the destination.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the road there that they argued about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn wanted the fast line, straight west, across the broad shallow valley the fog was hiding.
[SPEAKER_00]: A route that would put them at the outpost by nightfall if their legs held.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said as much, and he was already turning to lead off when Corders voiced stopped him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not that way.
[SPEAKER_00]: The pilot had haught himself upright against the hull, one hand pressed to the gash above his ear, his pupils still mismatched, and his words still coming a little slow.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they came certain.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorne turned back.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corne was looking out at the valley.
[SPEAKER_00]: They could just about begin to see through the fog.
[SPEAKER_00]: His head tilted, reading something in the lie of the ground that Thorne, for all his years, did not have the eyes for.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's open bottom land out there, quarter said, flat.
[SPEAKER_00]: No cover for two clicks, maybe more.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've flown over a thousand stretches like it, and I'll tell you what they are from up high.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're killing floors.
[SPEAKER_00]: You put four people with no air cover and no support out in the open middle of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And anything with a long gun owns you.
[SPEAKER_00]: We should go around the north edge through the tree line.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's slower.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's also the difference between walking into that outpost and being found in pieces halfway there.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, Thorn would reflect later the first time he truly looked at Earl and Corder.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had taken the man for a flyer and a tocker, charming and a little soft.
[SPEAKER_00]: The saw to survive wars by being elsewhere when they happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there was nothing soft in this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I agree we should take the tree line, Thorn said, lead off when you can walk straight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corder almost smiled.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can walk straight now, walking quickly is what I'll have trouble with.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they went north and then west along the dark margin, where the wood met the valley, and the slower road folded them into the broad and tall pine-like trees, and that, though
[UNKNOWN]: You
[SPEAKER_00]: They walked into the fog and the white closed behind them, as if the war they had come from might never have existed at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a strange thing what the mind does in fog like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: The world narrows to the few meters you can see, and the people you can hear, and those people become very quickly, the entire population of creation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorne came to know the others by their sounds in those first hours, far better than he
[SPEAKER_00]: He learned that how vex flinched, not at the things a soldier flinches at, not at the crack of a settling branch, or the sudden break of a bird from cover.
[SPEAKER_00]: The honest startles that mean something might be there.
[SPEAKER_00]: She flinched at the wrong things, at silences, at the moment between sounds.
[SPEAKER_00]: How good hand kept going to the last pistol on her hip, and then leaving it, going and leaving.
[SPEAKER_00]: A small repeated gesture of a person reaching for a competence, she did not quite trust herself to have.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn watched it for a while before he understood it, and when he understood it, he found he did not have the heart to tell her to stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: She told him why herself while they walked, in the flat, exhausted way that people confess things when they are too tired to guard them.
[SPEAKER_00]: but the dying came to her already broken by hours and days and the slowness of the system that moved them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And too many of them died on her table for one to minutes she had not been given.
[SPEAKER_00]: She had requested a combat posting after the 6-1 she was sure she could have saved.
[SPEAKER_00]: Out here, she said, the saving was immediate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Out here, a wound was a wound, and your hands were on it the moment it happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: And whatever you could do, you did now, with no one's permission and no form to fill.
[SPEAKER_00]: She had not said it to be pitted, she had said it the way you explain a decision, you have stopped being able to justify and have simply chosen to live inside, thorn understood.
[SPEAKER_00]: He learned that NASA talked, the boy narrated hope, the way other men narrated fear, compulsively, to keep it alive.
[SPEAKER_00]: The array would be intact, he was sure of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: These old posts were built tough,
[SPEAKER_00]: The fleet would still be in range when they raised it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone was already looking for them.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: He kept the cracked varks slung across his chest, one hand always resting on it, and he spoke to the others and to himself a little, and to the machine.
[SPEAKER_00]: And every word of it was a small defiance flung into the fog.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn did not silence him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hope, even foolish hope, especially foolish hope, was a kind of ammunition.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he learned that Corda guarded his pack.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a small thing Thorn might have missed it in anyone he was watching less closely.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the pilot, for all his easy talk, kept one hand in the top flap of his field pack, whenever the going jossled them.
[SPEAKER_00]: and twice when Nasa reached past him for a ration, he turned his shoulder, smoothly, so that the packs swung out of reach.
[SPEAKER_00]: He never opened it where the others could see.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever was in it, it was not rations, and not ammunition.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because Korda spent both of those freely.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thor noted it the way he noted everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: The arcs of fire and cover the trees gave them, the soft ground that would slow a runner, and the way the light was failing.
[SPEAKER_00]: and filed it away without comment.
[SPEAKER_00]: A man was entitled to his secrets, out here, most men had them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn would learn what it was when the world decided to tell him, and not before, and there was no sense spending worry on it now.
[SPEAKER_00]: He read the ground, and he kept them in the cover, and he listened to the fog.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, in the failing light of that first day, the fog gave
[SPEAKER_00]: They smelled it before they saw it, not rot, which Thorn had braced for, but something cleaner and somehow worse, a butchers smell copper and exposed bung.
[SPEAKER_00]: He brought the column to a halt with a closed fist and went forward alone.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what he found in the little hollow ahead of them stopped his breath for a moment, and Thorn did not stop easily.
[SPEAKER_00]: An imperial fire team, six of them, or what was left.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had been taken apart, the meat stripped from the bone with a care that was unsettling.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was not a feeding ground, nothing had torn through these men in hunger and left the scraps.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had been processed, the long bones cracked in clean, the smaller ones set aside.
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole work done with the patience and an order that no starving thing could manage.
[SPEAKER_00]: The bones had been arranged, not scattered, arranged, laid out in patterns that meant nothing to thorn, and were clearly meant to mean something to someone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or something.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sight of it crawled up the back of his neck like cold water.
[SPEAKER_00]: He heard how vex come up behind him and make a small broken sound.
[SPEAKER_00]: He heard Nassos stop talking for the first time in hours.
[SPEAKER_00]: What did this, Kodas said.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not quite a question.
[SPEAKER_00]: The pilot's face had gone grey, and the easy confidence had drained out of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for the first time he looked like a man out of his depth and beginning to know it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn gave them the truth, in the only word it deserved.
[SPEAKER_00]: He told them quickly, and he told them flat.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because there was no kind way to say it, and dressing it up would only waste the light.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had seen this before, years ago, on another world, a command squad that had not come back, and Thorn sent to find them, had found instead, a thing he had spent a long time trying not to remember.
[SPEAKER_00]: The crew do not simply kill, he told them, they eat to learn.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is in their blood, in the strange alchemy of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Consumer thing and take a piece of what it was, its strength, its swiftness, and worse,
[SPEAKER_00]: He had watched a pack that had fared on a command squad turn around and used that squad's own tactics against the relief column that came after.
[SPEAKER_00]: Set their pickets the Imperial Way, called the Imperial Challenges, and moved like men because they had eaten men.
[SPEAKER_00]: The leader, the Shaper, here's the one who leads them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The rest are hunters, and the hunters are bad enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the Shaper is the one that thinks and learns, and the one that teaches it back to the others.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever ate these men, he nodded at the arranged bones, and did not let his voice change.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because if it changed, he would lose them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Know how a Gardsman thinks, knows our drills, knows our voices.
[SPEAKER_00]: for a moment no one spoke.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fog pressed close, somewhere far off a sound that might have been a bird and might have been nothing at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then called a laughed, short, harsh, not because it was funny.
[SPEAKER_00]: Voices, he said, it learns our voices.
[SPEAKER_00]: Trooper, with respect.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've been in this fog too long.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's enos, vicious ones, fine.
[SPEAKER_00]: But their animals with rifles, not not whatever ghost story you're selling.
[SPEAKER_00]: mimicry, tactics, a monster that wears men.
[SPEAKER_00]: He shook his head hard, and Thorn watched him do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And understood with the same clear sight corridor had used on the valley, exactly what he was
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not stupidity.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corder was not a stupid man.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had proven that in the first hour.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was something else.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was a man rationing his fear.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corder had stood in that cockpit and watched the fleet pull away and done the calculations that Thorn had done.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he had come out the far side of that math, knowing in his bones that no one was coming for them.
[SPEAKER_00]: a man who believed that, and who then let himself also believe, in an enemy that could not be outthought or outthought, an enemy that learned, that man would simply lie down in the fog and stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corder could not afford the shaper to be real, so he was refusing it out loud, with all the scorn he could muster, because scorn was a war, and behind the war he could keep moving.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn let him have it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope you're right, he said, which was true and which was also a way of saying, I know you're not.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I know why you need to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Corder heard at least the first of those and looked away.
[SPEAKER_00]: They moved on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fast and now and closer together, and Halvex's hand did not leave her pistol anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: It came an hour later in the last grave before full dark, and it came not as a shape, but as a voice.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hold, hold your position, regroup on me, sound off.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was perfect.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the thing that turned Thorn's blood to ice in the half-second before his training caught up.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was perfect, a Gardsman's voice, clipped and certain and correct.
[SPEAKER_00]: The exact cadence of an officer rallying a scattered section, drifting out of the fog from the west at a range and an angle that made complete tactical sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every reflex of soldier owns answered it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Halvex turned toward it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Naso took a step, his mouth already opening to sound off, to answer, to obey the order that promised there were friends out there in the white, and the nightmare was over.
[SPEAKER_00]: Down, thorn snarled, and got a fist in Nassau's harness, and hauled him off his feet, and threw himself flat, and dragged Halvex down by her coat as he went.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's bait, nobody answer, nobody move toward it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The crew'd hit the space where they had been standing.
[SPEAKER_00]: They came out of the fog from the other side, not the west where the voice had called, but the east, the flanked the voice had turned the squads back to, and in the screaming chaos of the next instant, was the proof of everything Thorn had said, and the thing that saved their lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: The squad was not in the open.
[SPEAKER_00]: Codder's slow road had folded them into a stand of heavy timber, fallen trunks, and standing trees.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when the rifles cracked out of the fog, the rounds found bark and wood instead of flesh, because there was cover, because there had been cover the whole way.
[SPEAKER_00]: And because one frightened man had refused to cross the killing floor.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn got his lays gun up into the dark, and began to fire at the muzzle flashes in the fog.
[SPEAKER_00]: And behind him, he heard Korder swearing in a low steady stream, that had no scorn left in it at all, and he thought, in the cold, clear place, where he did his fighting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now you believe me, Emperor help us all, now you believe.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first thing a firefight takes from you is the comfortable lie that you are ready for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn had been ready, as ready as the fog allowed, and still the opening volley nearly ended them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The crude rifles cracked from the east in a ragged line, muzzle flashes blooming dull or engine the white, and the rounds came in low and fast, and far too well aimed for things firing blind.
[SPEAKER_00]: cover, into the timber behind the trunks, move.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn's voice cut through the noise and his people moved, because in the first shock of contact, a soldier will obey any voice that sounds like it knows what it is doing, and Thorn's did.
[SPEAKER_00]: He shoved Halvex toward the great fallen trunk on their left, an old forest giant come down years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: Its bowler's thick as a man was tall,
[SPEAKER_00]: Naso, he sent to the right to a cluster of standing trees and a low hammock of root and earth, with one barked instruction.
[SPEAKER_00]: Keep the vox alive, keep your head down, do not move from there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Codor took the gap between a half-rotted stump and a litter of smaller logs.
[SPEAKER_00]: His last pistol already up.
[SPEAKER_00]: It made a line, thorns or it form, even as he dropped behind the fallen giant, and brought his laser gun across the top of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The four of them strung along the timber with their backs to the west, and their heavy wood between them and the guns.
[SPEAKER_00]: A rough firing line may be 15 meters, end to end.
[SPEAKER_00]: The crewed were east, in the fog, no more than 30 or 40 meters out by the sound.
[SPEAKER_00]: the valley fell away, open and pale at his back.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the fallback if it came to falling back and it was no fallback at all because it was the killing floor quarter had spared them and to retreat onto it was to die on it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there was no retreat.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was this line of fallen trees holding it and nothing else.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn picked his shots.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had perhaps two charge packs for the laser gun, and a pistol beyond that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a man who fired blind into fog, in answer to muscle flashes would be empty and dead soon enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he fired at flashes, single aimed shots, and he made his people do the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: Called it down the line in the clipped cadence of the drill.
[SPEAKER_00]: pick your targets, short bursts, conserve, and for a few seconds the discipline held and the line held, and thorn let himself believe they might simply win this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then the crew did something that no animal does.
[SPEAKER_00]: He heard it before he understood it, a shift in the firing, the eastern gun slackening just slightly, and a rustle, and a thud of bounding bodies swinging out to the north, to the open end of the line, where NASA crouched over the varks, a flanking move, a clean, correct doctrinal flanking move, fixed the enemy with frontal fire, peel a second element wide, to roll up the exposed flank.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the exact manoeuvre Thorn himself would have called.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was he realized with the cold, lurch of a man, recognizing his own reflection in a dark window.
[SPEAKER_00]: The exact manoeuvre a guardsman would have called, and these things had eaten guardsmen and kept the lesson, and were running imperial doctrine back at him in the fog.
[SPEAKER_00]: their flanking right.
[SPEAKER_00]: He started to call the counter, the textbook answer, swing the reserve to refuse the flank, and the crew to what already countering the counter.
[SPEAKER_00]: The bounding element checked and split before he had finished the order.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two of them breaking wide to cover the very move he was about to make, anticipating the doctrine, because the doctrine was theirs now too.
[SPEAKER_00]: They knew the answer to the flank, because they knew the flank.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were inside his decisions, thinking half a beat ahead of his training, and his training was the thing they had learned to read.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Thorn stopped using it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It came to him in the half-second, the way these things come to soldiers who have lived long enough, not as a plan, but as an instinct, a door opening sideways.
[SPEAKER_00]: The dead fire team would have refused the flank by the book, so he would not.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did the wrong thing, the thing the manual forbade, and the thing therefore no consumed guardsmen could have taught them.
[SPEAKER_00]: He abandoned the line entirely, calling his people off the cover and toward the flanking element, straight into the bounding crute, in a short vicious rush, while their wide pair was still swinging out to counter a textbook move that was no longer coming.
[SPEAKER_00]: He turned the defense into a charge in the one instant the enemy had committed to predicting a defense.
[SPEAKER_00]: It worked because it was stupid.
[SPEAKER_00]: It worked because it was exactly what an experienced commander would never do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the shape of stolen wisdom had no answer for a man throwing away the rubric.
[SPEAKER_00]: The two lead croot caught midbound and expecting a static firing line to wheel and meet them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Found instead, three guns closing the distance and firing into them at ten meters.
[SPEAKER_00]: Cauder's pistol cracked twice, and the second of the pair stumbled, and went down thrashing in the wet leaves.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the third, the one that came round the standing trees for Nasser.
[SPEAKER_00]: The one the whole flank had been meant to deliver onto the boy in the vox.
[SPEAKER_00]: That one, Halvex killed.
[SPEAKER_00]: she did it without flinching.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the thing Thorn saw, in the corner of the eye that misses nothing in a fight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ren Halvix, who had reached for her pistol and left it a hundred times in the fog, drew it now and did not leave it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The crude broke from the trees three meters from NASA, all quill and blade and speed, and how vex turned and shot it through the side of the skull.
[SPEAKER_00]: One round, clean, her wrist steady on the splinted arm that should not have been steady at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: It dropped at NASA's feet.
[SPEAKER_00]: The boy had not moved.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was cold over the Vox exactly as told.
[SPEAKER_00]: Both arms around the cracked machine, riding out the storm with a stubborn animal faith that the order to hold meant something.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it had.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because how vex had made it mean something.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then the fog went quiet.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not silent, the wounded croutes still thrashed, and some were east the rest of the pack moved unseen.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the storm of it broke and fell away.
[SPEAKER_00]: The surviving hunters melting back into the white, as suddenly as they had come.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way a wave pulls back down the shingle.
[SPEAKER_00]: The croutes did not hold ground they were losing.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had learned that from someone too, perhaps.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were simply gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn did not let his people cheer, because there
[SPEAKER_00]: counted, he said, and they counted it, and the count was grim.
[SPEAKER_00]: A charge pack and a half spent, call it a third of everything they had, gone in 90 seconds.
[SPEAKER_00]: How vexes splint loosened and bludded again from the recoil.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nassos hands were shaking so hard now, in the aftermath, that he could barely hold the vox he had guarded so perfectly through the whole of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had killed three, maybe four, of a pack that numbered, who knew not how many.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had not won, they had survived, which is a different and lesser, and far more honest thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the difference between the two is most of what there is to know about war.
[SPEAKER_00]: That wasn't a victory, Kodas said quietly, echoing the thought, his earlier scorn nowhere now.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was then finding out how we fight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes Thorn said, it was.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was then, as he lifted his eyes from the spent rounds and the bodies to the dark east and tree line, where the fog hung heaviest, that he saw it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It stood among the far trunks, where the white was thin, and it did not fire.
[SPEAKER_00]: The others had fought and bled and fled, this one only watched.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was bigger than the hunters, taller, broader through the shoulders.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's outlined strong with trophies.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn was glad the fog spared him seeing clearly.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it stood with the terrible stillness of a thing that has all the time in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not aiming, it was not advancing, it was simply looking at them, at the four of them, at the way they had moved and the trick Thorn had poured, and the shot-howvex had made, taking it in the way a scholar takes in a text, and Thorn understood with a certainty that put ice in the roots of his teeth, that he was being studied, catalogued, learned.
[SPEAKER_00]: He raised the laser gun.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thing was gone before the Muscle came level, not fleeing, simply no longer there.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fog closing over the place, it had been, as though it had never been at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Move, Thorn said, his voice rougher than he wanted it.
[SPEAKER_00]: West, now, before it tells the others what it saw.
[SPEAKER_00]: They went into the white, leaving the dead behind them, and somewhere back in the trees, something that had watched a man break his own doctrine to live, was already turning that lesson over and over, and beginning to learn the shape of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: After the tree line, the crout stopped fighting them.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was how Thorn knew it had gotten worse.
[SPEAKER_00]: A pack that charges you is a pack you can shoot.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is an honesty in an open firefight.
[SPEAKER_00]: The enemy is here in this direction, and you may live by facing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the thing in the fog had learned at the tree line that facing these four-costed bodies, and so it simply stopped offering thorn anything to face, the guns fell silent.
[SPEAKER_00]: the bounding rushes ended, and in their place came the worst thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The patient thing, the thing that turned every hour of that second day into a slow unwinding of the nerves.
[SPEAKER_00]: it came as voices.
[SPEAKER_00]: They drifted out of the fog at intervals.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn could never predict, always at the edge of hearing, always from a direction that made just enough sense to be believed.
[SPEAKER_00]: A man calling for a medic, a woman's voice cracked with weeping, asking if anyone was out there.
[SPEAKER_00]: the discipline bark of a sergeant trying to rally a section that no longer existed.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were perfect.
[SPEAKER_00]: Perfect in the way the first false order had been perfect.
[SPEAKER_00]: Perfect, because they were real.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every one of them a fragment of some guardsman who had screamed those exact words on this world before the crew ate the screaming and kept it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn knew now where the voices were stored.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were stored in the shaper, somewhere out in the fog, playing back the harvested grief of the dead to draw the living onto its blades.
[SPEAKER_00]: Knowing that did not make the voices easier to bear, it made them worse, because each one was a small tombstone, and the fog was full of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And every voice was a question with no safe answer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Go toward it, and it might be bait, and probably was.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ignore it, and it might be a real survivor.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some other crash, some living soul out there in the white, who were die because four people who could have helped, chose to believe the fog was lying.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no way to know.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the cruelty of the thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It had taken the most human instinct any of them had.
[SPEAKER_00]: The instinct to run toward a cry for help and turned it into a way to die.
[SPEAKER_00]: The worst of it came near midday.
[SPEAKER_00]: A voice began to call to their south, a young man's voice, hurt, frightened, calling for his mother, and then catching himself, then calling for help instead, the way the very young do, when the pain strips the soldier off them and leaves the child.
[SPEAKER_00]: It went on.
[SPEAKER_00]: It did not have the clean repetition of the others.
[SPEAKER_00]: It broke and rallied and broke again, and it begged
[SPEAKER_00]: And NASA stopped walking and stood rigid in the trail with his face gone white and stricken, because NASA was barely older than that voice and could hear himself in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: His real NASA whispered, trooper, that one's real listen to him, no monster does that.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't know that, Thorn said, we could check
[SPEAKER_00]: And if it's the Shaper, we walk four people into a kill, built for exactly this, using exactly that voice, because it knows where the kind that would check.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorne kept his own voice level, and it was the hardest thing he did that day, because the boy was not wrong, and he knew the boy was not wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: The voice in the drawer might be a dying soldier.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were going to leave him to die either way, because the cost of being right was their own for lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: We keep moving, west.
[SPEAKER_00]: They kept moving.
[SPEAKER_00]: Behind them the voice called until it didn't, and then the fog was quiet again, and none of them ever knew which it had been.
[SPEAKER_00]: How vex would not look at Thorn for an hour afterward.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn did not blame her.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Vox was the only thing that kept them walking towards something, instead of merely away.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nassau had it half alive by the second evening, coaxed, cajoled, prayed back into a flickering half life, with the patience of a man tending a fire in the rain.
[SPEAKER_00]: But half alive was not enough, and he made himself say so, miserably, because hope that lied was worse than no hope at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: It'll transmit, he told them, hunched over the cracked casing in the failing light.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's weak, down here in the fog, on the flat, the signal won't carry.
[SPEAKER_00]: It'll die in the murk before it clears a single ridge.
[SPEAKER_00]: We need height, real height.
[SPEAKER_00]: We need to get it up high in clear, and then it might, it just might.
[SPEAKER_00]: Throw a call far enough that the fleet hears it.
[SPEAKER_00]: the outpost, Thorn said.
[SPEAKER_00]: The outpost, Nassau nodded.
[SPEAKER_00]: There'll be a comms tower, these old listening posts that built around the array.
[SPEAKER_00]: There'll be a mast, tall, on the high ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: If I can get the vox of that tower and patch it to whatever's left of the array, we can shout loud enough to be heard off-world.
[SPEAKER_00]: He managed something that was almost his old smile.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the whole game now, isn't it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Get to the tower, get up the tower, call home.
[SPEAKER_00]: It gave the march a shape it had not had before.
[SPEAKER_00]: The outpost was no longer just shelter, just a place with walls.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the one point on this whole, drowned world, from which their voices could leave it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything narrowed to that mast.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn felt the others feel it too.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he was grateful for it, because a person walking towards something can bear what a person merely fleeing cannot.
[SPEAKER_00]: That night they found a hollow under a leaning shelf of rock, dry and defensible and small, and thorn let them rest in turns, and in the held quiet of it, how vex and naso talked.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn pretended to sleep and listened, and what he heard was not about the crude or the tower, or the fog at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was about before, Halvex spoke first, told the boy, haltingly, the same thing she had told thorn on the trail, the patience lost to slow hours and slower systems, the ones she was sure she could have saved.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Nassau, in the dark, gave her something back.
[SPEAKER_00]: The vox isn't mind, he said.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not really.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was such an alas.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why Mar-Aller?
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the section Voxman before me, 20 years on the company net, knew every trick there was for coaxing a signal through bad air.
[SPEAKER_00]: A pause.
[SPEAKER_00]: The small sound of a young man steadying himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was teaching me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was the understudy, you know, the one who carries the spare set and learns by watching.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't ready.
[SPEAKER_00]: He always said I wasn't ready, not unkind, just true.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had maybe half the time with him I needed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another pause.
[SPEAKER_00]: He went down at the first emplacement, the morning everything broke.
[SPEAKER_00]: It took Shrapnel through the back.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he, he pulled the set off himself while he was dying, and he put it in my hands, and he said keep the net alive.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the whole hand over.
[SPEAKER_00]: 20 years of his life into a kid who wasn't ready in about four seconds.
[SPEAKER_00]: so you keep it alive, Halvick said softly.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I keep it alive.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn heard the boy's hands move on the cracked casing, the gesture he made a hundred times a day, and that Thorn had read, wrongly, as nervous habit.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not habit, it was grief, one smooth by repetition, a young man's hand resting on the last thing a good man gave him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone thinks I'm the optimist.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not optimistic.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just can't let his last order be the thing I failed.
[SPEAKER_00]: The signal gets out.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has to.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because if it doesn't, then I wasn't ready.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he knew it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he gave it to me anyway for nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Halvex did not answer that with words, Thorn heard the small sounds of her moving closer, and the boy's breathing evening out, and he lay still in the dark, and felt something in his chest he had thought the years had finished wearing away.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had taken Nassau for a hopeful child.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been wrong about that, the way Corder had been wrong about the fog, wrong because it was easier.
[SPEAKER_00]: The boy was not hopeful.
[SPEAKER_00]: The boy was carrying a dead man's faith because he could not bear to drop it, which is a heavier and a braver thing than hope.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Thorn resolved lying there to get that box up the tower if it was the last thing his own life bought.
[SPEAKER_00]: He resolved to, in the same dark, to watch Corder.
[SPEAKER_00]: It shamed him a little, to set suspicion of one man beside tenderness for two others in the same hour.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Thorn had not lived this long by letting tenderness blind him.
[SPEAKER_00]: and quarters pack had not stopped pulling it his eye.
[SPEAKER_00]: The pilot still guarded it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Still turned his shoulder.
[SPEAKER_00]: Still hung a half-step back of the rest, where a man who wanted to slip away would stand.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the trouble, the real trouble, the thing that Nordathorn, was that he could not tell whether he was seeing a traitor.
[SPEAKER_00]: or making one out of fog and fear, because Korda had been right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right about the valley, right about the cover, right in the way that had saved all their lives at the tree line.
[SPEAKER_00]: A man whose judgment you have trusted with your life is a hard man to suspect, and Thorn turned it over and over, and could not make the picture resolve.
[SPEAKER_00]: Paranoia and good sense were the same face.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was NASA in the end who forced it, reaching past the dozing pilot for the water at the next day's first rest, clumsy with exhaustion, and catching the flap of the guarded pack with his elbow so that it fell open before Corders hand could close it.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a beacon inside, not a damage transponder, not imperial wreckage.
[SPEAKER_00]: A working emergency beacon, its room display alive and steady, intact and powered and transmitting.
[SPEAKER_00]: And on its little glowing face, a set of coordinates, and beside the coordinates, a recognition glyph that Thorn had seen exactly once before, on the gun camera feed of the things that had shot them down.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was Tao.
[SPEAKER_00]: The beacon was calling the Tao.
[SPEAKER_00]: It had been calling them quietly, from inside Cauders' pack, the whole long walk through the fog.
[SPEAKER_00]: For a moment nobody moved, the fog dripped, then Thorn had his pistol out and level, and Cauder raised his empty hands, and did not look surprised, and did not look ashamed, and that was the worst of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not what Cauder
[SPEAKER_00]: because it was exactly what it looked like.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he was too tired or too honest to pretend.
[SPEAKER_00]: He let the breath out.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, all right, you want to hear it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me say it standing up.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said it's standing with Thorn's pistol on him and the terrible thing was how reasonable it sounded.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one is coming, called a said.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know that.
[SPEAKER_00]: You did the math from the line same as I did, Thorn.
[SPEAKER_00]: I watched you do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fleets gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Reinforcements aren't real.
[SPEAKER_00]: That outposts array.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even if the boy's machine works, even if the mast's still standing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Best case, we throw a signal into a sky that the Imperium has already written off.
[SPEAKER_00]: They abandoned this whole world.
[SPEAKER_00]: They abandoned us.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ledger closed the second that order came down.
[SPEAKER_00]: He looked at each of them in turn, and he was not raving.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was pleading, with the awful calm of a man who believes he is the only one in the room seeing clearly.
[SPEAKER_00]: The towel, take prisoners.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not propaganda.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've seen the after-action reports it's true.
[SPEAKER_00]: They'd rather have you working than dead.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the whole rotten point of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: That beacon is for people, getting off this planet alive.
[SPEAKER_00]: The greater good doesn't care that you're in period, it just wants you breathing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't going to leave you, I was going to bring you with me, that was always the plan.
[SPEAKER_00]: You were walking us to the tower, so we'd stop watching the trees while you found your moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorne said,
[SPEAKER_00]: I was walking us somewhere we could survive while I waited for the pick-up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Caudaceit, the towers as good a place to wait as any.
[SPEAKER_00]: I never lied about the route, the cover was real.
[SPEAKER_00]: I kept you alive, every step.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ask the tree line if I kept you alive.
[SPEAKER_00]: and that thorn thought was the dagger of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was true.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every word about the ground had been true.
[SPEAKER_00]: The man had saved them with one hand, or calling the enemy with the other.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Halvex was listening.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not agreeing.
[SPEAKER_00]: but listening, the way you listen to a thing you have been afraid to think, because she had stood over enough dying men to know what the Imperium spent and how little it counted the spending.
[SPEAKER_00]: And some exhausted part of her wanted the lie that there was a door out of the fog that did not end in blood.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was Nassau who broke it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He called them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The boy's voice was not the boy's voice.
[SPEAKER_00]: It shook, but not with fear.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's been calling them this whole time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sergeant Aller died for that net.
[SPEAKER_00]: Good men burned on that line so we could run.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you've had the things that killed them on speed vox in your pack.
[SPEAKER_00]: His own pistol was up now, and his hands were not steady, and his eyes were bright and wet and murderous.
[SPEAKER_00]: Give me one reason, give me one reason I don't put him in the leaves with the others.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Thorn, who could have given the order, some cold version of himself might have given the order, looked at the shaking boy in the pleading pilot, and made the choice that he would carry afterward alongside all the rest.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, he said, lower it tell, we're not executing him.
[SPEAKER_00]: After what he, we're not.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorne kept the pistol on quarter, but his words were for NASA, gentle and immovable, because you'd have to live with it, and you've got a dead man's faith to carry already, and I won't load that on top of it, and because he looked at quarter and let the contempt show, we don't have to.
[SPEAKER_00]: He justured at the white wall of the fog with his pistol.
[SPEAKER_00]: Take your beacon, take your water, not your ammunition, not the rations, those you stole from us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And go, walk to your rendezvous, out there, alone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corder understood, Thorn watched it land, the dawning knowledge of what was being done to him, which was cooler than a last bolt and required no hand to deliver.
[SPEAKER_00]: to send a man alone into that fog, with the voices and the silence and the thing that War the Dead was a sentence.
[SPEAKER_00]: They simply did not have to be the ones to carry it out.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fog would do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn, quarter said, and there was the first real fear in him now, the pilot's certainty finally cracking.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know what's out there.
[SPEAKER_00]: You told us what's out there.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not mercy.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's just, it's more than you gave the men who died so you could run.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn said,
[SPEAKER_00]: Walk.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Corder, because there was nothing else left to do, took his beacon and his water and walked into the white.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the fog closed over him, the way it had closed over the shaper, the way it closed over everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in a few steps, he was a shape, and in a few more, he was nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they were three.
[SPEAKER_00]: They stood a moment in the awful quiet of what they had done, and then very close, closer than any of them had let themselves believe it could be, out of the fog to their left came a single sound, a dry, deliberate rattling click, the sound of quills, drawn slow against one another, the way a man might tap a finger while he thinks.
[SPEAKER_00]: It had been there the whole time, it had listened to all of it, and the outpost was still kilometers away.
[SPEAKER_00]: They walked the last kilometers in a silence that had teeth, three people who had stopped being a squad, and become something smaller and harder, and the fog gave up the outpost to them, grudgingly.
[SPEAKER_00]: A shape resolving out of the white, the way a drowned thing rises slow to the surface of a steel pool, but it gave them the killfield first.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn smelled it before the war's came clear.
[SPEAKER_00]: That same clean butchers wreak he had learned to dread, copper and open bone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Stronger here than it had been at the first hollow.
[SPEAKER_00]: He brought halvex and naso down low, with a closed fist and went forward.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what lay scattered before the outposts broken gate was worse than the fire team in the wood, because there were more of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: a dozen guardsmen perhaps more.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was hard to count what had been so thoroughly taken apart.
[SPEAKER_00]: The garrisons last defenders, or another crashed crew, or the survivors of some other doomed walk through the fog.
[SPEAKER_00]: It did not matter now which.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had reached the outpost.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had not reached safety, because there was no such thing here.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was only the next place the crew would find you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And among them, near the edge, set a little apart from the older dead, was a thing that stopped Thorn's heart for the length of a breath.
[SPEAKER_00]: A flight jacket, navy cut.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not need to turn the body to know it, and he was glad, fiercely glad that the fog and the crewed between them had left little enough that he could not be made to be certain, but he was certain.
[SPEAKER_00]: The pilot had walked his lonely sentence through the forest and reached the outpost ahead of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps hours ahead, perhaps with the beacons still calling uselessly into a sky that sent no answer.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the thing in the fog had taken him the way it took everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: The man who had chosen himself, who had reasoned his way so calmly to the conclusion that survival was the only God worth serving, he had not survived.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had become meat for the thing that hunted the rest of them, and worse than meat.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn understood, looking at what little was left, that cordless voice was in the shape of now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every word the pilot had ever spoken in the fog, all that easy charm, harvested and kept, and waiting to be played back.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fog had a new tool, and it had built it out of a man Thorn had walked beside for two days.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not tell NASA what the jacket was.
[SPEAKER_00]: the boy had wanted to kill Codder, he did not need to see what had killed him instead.
[SPEAKER_00]: Eyes west, Thorn said low, on the tower, don't look at the ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, mercifully, they didn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: The comms tower stood at the outpost's heart, and Thorn read it not as shelter, but as terrain.
[SPEAKER_00]: As a problem in geometry that he and the people he had left would have to solve.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a single spire of rock-crete and rusted gantry, climbing maybe 40 meters into the murk, an internal ladder stair switch backing up its hollow core to the array housing at the top.
[SPEAKER_00]: The array still had power, barely.
[SPEAKER_00]: When Thorn forced the base hatch, and Naso got the panels open, a few runes woke, solid and amber in the dark, and the boy's breath caught with something like hope.
[SPEAKER_00]: It live.
[SPEAKER_00]: marginal, starved running on whatever trickle the old geothermal tap still pushed up from below, but it lived, and a signal patched into it from the top of that mast would clear the fog and the ridge lines, and have a chance of being heard off world.
[SPEAKER_00]: The rest of what Thorn Red was less kind.
[SPEAKER_00]: one way up, one way down.
[SPEAKER_00]: The same stair for both, a close throat of a structure, with a single hatch at its foot, which meant the base was the only door, and the base was where the dying would be done if they were assaulted.
[SPEAKER_00]: The climate self was exposed, an open-gantry in places, a long slow haul for a man carrying a vox with nothing but the height to protect him,
[SPEAKER_00]: And across the cracked apron outside, in the lee of the wall, the outposts old refueling station, a row of squat, promithium cells, and fat drums of fuel left behind when the garrison ran.
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of thing a careless round could turn into a sun.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thornmarked them the way he had marked court as pack.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way he had marked the arcs of fire in the wood, filed away, not yet needed.
[SPEAKER_00]: A fact about the ground that might one day be a weapon.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's how it goes, he said, and his voice had the flat certainty that made people obey it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tell.
[SPEAKER_00]: You climb.
[SPEAKER_00]: You take the box up that mast, you patch it to the array, and you send.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't stop for anything you hear down here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't look down.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your whole world is the top of that tower, and the core you're going to make.
[SPEAKER_00]: Understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tell Nassau, looked at the long dark throat of the climb, and at the cracked vocks, and at the two of them, who would be staying at the bottom, and Thorn watched the boy understand the instruction completely.
[SPEAKER_00]: What the base was for, what holding it would cost, that every minute he spent climbing, was a minute paid for, in the blood of the two people who would be standing in the door.
[SPEAKER_00]: His face did something complicated and very young.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're buying my time.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said quietly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Down here, you're buying it."
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the job Thorn said.
[SPEAKER_00]: Alebotius once.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we buy it again.
[SPEAKER_00]: You get up there and you make it worth the price.
[SPEAKER_00]: Same as you did for him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nassau's jaw set and his eyes hardened.
[SPEAKER_00]: He slung the vox across his back, the way the dying sergeant had once slung it onto him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he started to climb.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fog at the tree line moved.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was all the warning there was.
[SPEAKER_00]: No voices this time, not at first.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just the white wall beyond the veil, seeming to shift and crawl.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then resolving all at once into shapes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Many shapes.
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole pack, what Thorn had never let himself count, pouring out of the fog toward the tower in a low quail bristling.
[SPEAKER_00]: tied, and behind them, vast and unhurried among the trunks, was the shaper, closer than it had ever come.
[SPEAKER_00]: Watching, as it always watched, but close enough now that Thorn could see it lift its terrible head, open a throat that had swallowed a dozen men's voices, and call.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the voices it sent, ahead of the swarm, were theirs.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't know that, the fog said, in Thorn's own voice, flat and level, played back at him out of the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: We keep moving, west, and then Halvex's voice cracked and exhausted, out here, the saving is immediate, and then Emperor helped them, nassos from the climb above.
[SPEAKER_00]: keep the net alive.
[SPEAKER_00]: The dead sergeants last order eaten somewhere along the trail and kept and thrown back down the tower at the boy carrying it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Shaper had not just been learning how they fought, it had been learning them, the specific shapes of these four souls, their words, their wounds, the things they said when the fog was listening, it had eaten their dead, and it had eaten their grief, and now it wore all of it at once, a chorus of stolen cells, and it flung that chorus ahead of the swarm to
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't listen to it, Thorn said, and his voice shook for the first time in the whole long walk, because his own voice was coming back at him out of the fog, and there is no soldier alive trained for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not us, it's just the thing wearing us, hold the door, then the swarm hit the base of the tower, and there was no more time for anything but the work.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was not the tree line.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no gun line here, no 30 meters of fog to fire across, and no doctrine to break.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the door, the single hatch at the foot of the mast, and it was close, and it was ugly, and it was the oldest kind of fighting there is.
[SPEAKER_00]: They held the throat of its shoulder to shoulder, thorn and halvex, in a space barely wide enough for two.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that narrowness was the only thing that gave them a prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: The crout could only come at them a few abreast, funneled by the geometry into the killing space where two guns could just barely cover the gap.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn's lads gun ran dry in the first half minute, and he did not reload it.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no time to reload anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: He reversed it and used the bayonet, and then the stalk, fighting in the red close press, where you smell the thing you are killing.
[SPEAKER_00]: A crewed came over the lip, and he put the blade through its throat.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another behind it, and he broke its skull with the rifle butt.
[SPEAKER_00]: and felt something in his own arm, give and kept swinging.
[SPEAKER_00]: The choke point was everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: The choke point was the whole war.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two meters of rock creeped all the way.
[SPEAKER_00]: The two people could not quite hold and could not afford not to hold.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Halvex held it with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn would remember it after, in the long cold time that came later, as the thing he had not expected.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ren Halvex surgeon, who had flinched at silences in the fog and reached for her pistol and left it a hundred times.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ren Halvex stood in that door and did not flinch and did not leave it.
[SPEAKER_00]: She had her lands pistol in her good hand, and a crude blade she torn from a dead one in the other, and she fought with the focused calm of a woman who had finally been brought to the one place she had crossed worlds to reach.
[SPEAKER_00]: The place where the saving was immediate, where her hands were on the wound, the instant it opened, where standing between death and the
[SPEAKER_00]: was a thing you did with your whole body, and not a form you filed too late.
[SPEAKER_00]: She had come to this war to hold a line against the dying.
[SPEAKER_00]: She held it now, every crewed that did not get past her was a life kept, NASA's life, climbing above them, and thorns or in her face that she knew it, and that for the first time in a long time, she was exactly the thing she had always meant to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: Climetell, she screamed up the dark throat of the tower between blade strokes, holding the door so the boy could finish it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've got the button, just climb.
[SPEAKER_00]: High above them, Nassau climbed.
[SPEAKER_00]: He climbed through the noise of the slaughter at the base.
[SPEAKER_00]: through his own voice, and there's being flung up the tower at him, by the thing below, and through the burning in his arms, and the cracked vox dragging it his back.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he did not look down, because Thorn had told him not to, and because he could not have dealt with what he would have seen.
[SPEAKER_00]: He climbed for the dead sergeant, who had pressed the set into his hands.
[SPEAKER_00]: He climbed for the two people buying his minutes with their blood in the doorway.
[SPEAKER_00]: He reached the array housing at the top of the mast, 40 meters up in the cold, streaming murk, and with hands shaking and torn, he patched the cracked vox into the old machine, and he found the trickle of power still living in it, and he keyed the transmit, and he sent.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not much, a short-range distressing, a single pulse of coordinates, and the old recognition code of the astro-militarum, thrown up out of the fog, and the ridge lines into whatever waited above.
[SPEAKER_00]: Three seconds of truth flung blind into the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole of their suffering compressed into one small honest cry.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are here, we are imperial, we are alive, come.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the same breath that he sent it, in the very instant the room flashed green to tell him it had gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: A crewed that had climbed the outside of the mast in the silence above the battle, drove a barbed spear through telnazo's body from behind.
[SPEAKER_00]: He felt it, without quite understanding it, the way the young do.
[SPEAKER_00]: He looked down at the point of its standing out from his chest, and then up, passed the array into the streaming white, and the last thing in him was not fear, and not even pain, but a kind of fierce and breaking gladness, because the room was green.
[SPEAKER_00]: The call had gone, he had not been ready, Alah had been right, he had never been ready.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he had done it anyway, in four seconds, the way it had been given to him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had kept the net alive, the dead man's last order and his own last act were the same act, and tell Nassau died with his hands still on the vocks, and the signal already climbing past the fog toward the cold in different stars.
[SPEAKER_00]: carrying the only thing he had left to give.
[SPEAKER_00]: Below, in the doorway full of blood, Thorn heard the boy's body strike the gantry.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knew what it was, and did not have the breath to grieve.
[SPEAKER_00]: For the length of one breath, Jarek Thorn stopped being a soldier.
[SPEAKER_00]: It happened in the doorway, in the red press, with a crude blade stroke he never saw coming.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hissing passed his ear because for that one breath, he was not watching for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sound of NASA's body striking the gantry had reached the bottom of the tower and something in thorn that he had kept welded shut for two days and ten years and a whole grinding life simply gave.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not loudly, there was no cry, his hands fell still on the rifle.
[SPEAKER_00]: And his eyes lost their hard focus on the killing gap, and for that one suspended instant he was not a drop trooper holding a choke point, but only a tired man in a doorway who had just heard a boy.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had failed to save, fall a very long way in the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had told the boy not to look down.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had told the boy his whole world was the top of the tower.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had thought that the height would be protection.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now the net was alive and the boy was not.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the unfairness of it broke something loose in Thorn's chest that no amount of training had ever been able to override.
[SPEAKER_00]: The breath ended.
[SPEAKER_00]: Howvex's pistol cracked beside him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he put down the crew to his blade.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had not been watching.
[SPEAKER_00]: He shut his feelings off again, he would carry the boy later.
[SPEAKER_00]: If there was a later, for now there was the door and the door needed him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he made himself be the thing the door needed.
[SPEAKER_00]: They could not hold the door for much longer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorne had known it from the first, and now it was becoming more and more clear.
[SPEAKER_00]: The base of the tower was open at too many angles, and the swarm was too large despite it being thinned in the fighting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Halvex was bleeding from a spear gash along her ribs that she had not had time to so much as look at.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Thorne did the only thing left, and gave the ground up by inches.
[SPEAKER_00]: pulled them both back off the throat of the door and into the gutted guard room that opened off the tower's base, a squat rock-crete box with one way in, and they put their backs to the far wall and dragged a dead server to cradle across the entrance.
[SPEAKER_00]: They held this new place because it was smaller and because it was the last room small enough for two failing
[SPEAKER_00]: One door, two of them, and one barely standing.
[SPEAKER_00]: A handful of charge between the pistols and nothing more, no relief in the sky that they knew of, no way to be certain.
[SPEAKER_00]: The boys' three seconds of truth had reached anything at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had the room, and the room had them, and beyond the dead server to in the doorway with a fog and the swarm.
[SPEAKER_00]: because there was nothing to say and Thorn looked at the same count and began instead to think.
[SPEAKER_00]: He thought the way he had taught himself to think in the worst places, not about what he wanted, but about what the enemy was.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Shaper.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had watched it for three days now, watched it study them at the tree line, watched it hold back and harvest and learn, and watched it send their own voices ahead of the swarm.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the cold clear place that grief had emptied out in him, the whole shape of it came
[SPEAKER_00]: The swarm did not move on its own.
[SPEAKER_00]: It followed the shape as calls, went where the stolen voices sent it, and struck where the learning thing directed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kill the swarm piecemeal, and you killed nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was always more fog and more pack.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the shape was one, and the shape had a hunger, the same hunger that had made it deadly,
[SPEAKER_00]: And a thing ruled by that hunger would always, always, commit to the richest meal on the field.
[SPEAKER_00]: The most concentrated prey, the most wounded, the loudest.
[SPEAKER_00]: The four man squad that broke its own doctrine and made a shot it shouldn't have, and carried a dead man's voice up a tower.
[SPEAKER_00]: That had been a feast of learning, and the thing had savered every course of it, and it would not be able to help itself when the last and richest course was laid out bleeding in the open and calling its name.
[SPEAKER_00]: The exact trait that made the shape a lethal was the lever that would kill it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorne only had to give it something it could not refuse to eat.
[SPEAKER_00]: The few cells, he said.
[SPEAKER_00]: Halvex looked at him.
[SPEAKER_00]: The refueling station is across the concrete outside.
[SPEAKER_00]: Prometheum, drums of it, soaked into that whole corner of the yard by now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those cells have been weeping fuels since the garrison left.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was already moving, checking the pistol.
[SPEAKER_00]: His voice got flat and fast and certain in the way it did when the plan had arrived whole.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't hold this room.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can't.
[SPEAKER_00]: We give it the one thing it wants more than anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: Us, loud and hurt and out in the open, we can lead it past the fuel.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when it brings the whole pack in, they will have to cross it to get to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then we put a las boat in the cells and we turn the whole thing into the inside of a sun.
[SPEAKER_00]: Halvex understood.
[SPEAKER_00]: He watched her understand all of it, including the party had not said.
[SPEAKER_00]: The part where two wounded people made themselves the bait in the center of the fire they meant to light.
[SPEAKER_00]: And where the difference between baiting that trap and dying in it was a margin too thin to measure.
[SPEAKER_00]: She did not argue.
[SPEAKER_00]: She had crossed worlds to stand between death and the living.
[SPEAKER_00]: She put her good hand on her pistol and nodded.
[SPEAKER_00]: They went out onto the surrounding grounds loud and broken and unmissable, two staggering shapes in the open by the weeping fuel cells, and they called the thing to dinner.
[SPEAKER_00]: It came, of course.
[SPEAKER_00]: The remainder of the pack came after them, across the cracked yard, quill and blade, and the awful keening rush of it, and thorn and halvex fired at the ones who gave them line of sight.
[SPEAKER_00]: as they retreated past the heart of the fuel-soaked station and made themselves an enticing target as they tried to get clear of any blast radius.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, last and vast and unable to stay away from a meal like this one.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Shaper came into view behind the pack.
[SPEAKER_00]: Into the open, into the Promethium Reak.
[SPEAKER_00]: Its terrible head lifting to call the swarm, down onto the feast.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Thorn, on one knee in the muck and fuel-stitched air, with his ribs grinding, his wounds bleeding, and his pistol up, heard the sky chain.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not a thing he saw, the fog hid most things, but he heard it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the keening of the swarm, a deeper sound came down out of the murk above, a hard descending thunder he knew in his marrow, the scream of imperial drop engines burning hard for the ground, shuttles.
[SPEAKER_00]: coming down through the mist toward a short-range distressed pain that had, after all, been heard.
[SPEAKER_00]: Three seconds of a dead boy's truth flung into the dark, and the dark had answered.
[SPEAKER_00]: The boy had not been ready, the boy had done it anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it had worked.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn looked at the shape of a closer now, utterly given over to the feast it could not refuse, exactly where its own deathless hunger had brought
[SPEAKER_00]: He thought, in the last clear instant, that he did not know whether he would walk out of what came next.
[SPEAKER_00]: He put the last boat into the few cells, the world became light.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no sound to it, not at first, only a white that swallowed everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fog and the swarm and the stolen voices, and the great learning thing at the center of them all, a heat and an overpressure, lifted thorn off the ground, and unmade the refueling station.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the hunting horror that had won his dead-like clothes.
[SPEAKER_00]: He felt his body leave the earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then there was ringing silence and ash falling slow out of a sky gone pale and strange, settling soft and grey on the wreckage of everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Jarrick Thorne did not know in that quiet drifting, whether he was alive or dead.
[SPEAKER_00]: they found him still breathing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn came back to the world for the second time in a week to the field of hands on him, gauntleted, hurried, not gentle.
[SPEAKER_00]: A trooper in the scorched plate of some battle group he did not know was shouting something.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn tried to answer and could not.
[SPEAKER_00]: his ears still rang with the white silence of the blast.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fuel had left a black crater reathed in smoke.
[SPEAKER_00]: The refueling station gone, the tower, a leaning broken finger above it, and somewhere under the ash, was everything the fire had taken.
[SPEAKER_00]: They got him onto the shuttle, they got halvex on beside him, alive, barely.
[SPEAKER_00]: The gash along her ribs packed and bound, her face grey as the sky but her chest rising and falling, rising and falling.
[SPEAKER_00]: The most beautiful and ordinary thing Thorn had ever watched.
[SPEAKER_00]: The two of them lay on the cold deck of the shuttle, as it seared and the engines spooned.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was the whole of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was everything the fog had let them keep,
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn learned the shape of it in pieces, later from tired men with data slates.
[SPEAKER_00]: The wound was lost.
[SPEAKER_00]: The outposted fallen long before they reached it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The garrison was dead, the line was overrun, and the towel held everything from the muster point to the sea by now.
[SPEAKER_00]: No relief had ever been coming.
[SPEAKER_00]: No battle group had turned back for them out of duty or mercy, or any of the things the
[SPEAKER_00]: The shuttles had come for one reason only, a short range distressing, flung up out of a tower by a dying boy, had been caught by chance by a passing flotilla, close enough to divert, and they had come down to see what was still alive.
[SPEAKER_00]: And lying on the deck with that knowledge settling into him, thorn thought of those that didn't make it, as he would think of them for a long time after.
[SPEAKER_00]: The shuttle climbed and thorn dragged himself to the viewport because he had to see.
[SPEAKER_00]: Below, the world fell away into its drowning grey.
[SPEAKER_00]: The crater, the broken tower, the endless white wilderness that had no name, and now never would.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as the fog smoothed over the wound they had burned into it, Thorn watched the white shift, far down, at the dark edge of the trees.
[SPEAKER_00]: Something moved in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Low, patient, quill bristle, moving among the scattered dead with the unhurried care of a thing that has all the time in the world, pausing whether bodies lay thickest, taking in what was left.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of them had lived.
[SPEAKER_00]: The blast had not been the end of the pack, only of the one that ran it, and the survivor moved through the ash with the same attention.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorn had watched at the tree line, learning the shape of what had happened here, and in time it would feed, and in time it would learn, and in time the pack would raise another that carried
[SPEAKER_00]: it had not been for nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was not the same as it being over.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thorne watched the small moving shape until the cloud took it, and then he watched the cloud, and he did not speak, and there was nothing in the whole grey world below to say it too.
[SPEAKER_00]: The shuttle rose into the dark, the fog closed over everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: The hunters game went on down there in the white, only the prey had