Chapter 154: Where the Signal Breaks
He spent the first four runs doing nothing except listening.
It was the least satisfying thing he had ever done in a dungeon, and he was aware the whole time that the version of himself from before Meridian would have found it unbearable. That version had also never owned a sense that told him where a voice went.
The thirteen investigative runs took several days. Jin rested and reviewed his notes between them, refusing to treat any single reading as a rule until he could reproduce it.
The rules came together slowly, and Jin wrote them down as he found them, because the Rift had taught him that things he felt certain of at hour two were often wrong by hour five.
The upper galleries had long connected shelves of unbroken stone, and the commander’s signals crossed them almost undegraded. Jin could stand the avatar at one end of the eastern shelf and read a strike from four hundred meters away with the spacing intact.
The rails were better than the stone. The old hauling lines ran on steel bedded into rock, and an impact anywhere along one arrived at the far end nearly clean, which explained a great deal about how the colony had been outmaneuvering him in his early runs.
The fractured sectors were where it fell apart. Anywhere the old blasting had shattered the floor into loose plates, a signal came in late and smeared, and in two places it arrived so distorted that Jin could not tell how many strikes had been sent.
Those were the shadows.
The relay mantises confirmed the shape of it. Whenever Jin put the avatar into a shadow, one or two ordinary hunters drifted to the shadow’s edge and sat there, striking the floor between movements, repeating the rhythm inward at a fraction of its strength.
They’re standing on the boundary. They know exactly where reception stops.
He tested the descending approaches on run six and got an answer he did not enjoy.
Four routes led down out of the mapped quarry. Three produced a response within about twenty seconds. The fourth produced a response in under six.
Six seconds, every time, from anywhere he tried it.
The commander had picked a position and stayed in it, and the position covered that fourth route absolutely.
Run seven cost him.
Jin had found what looked like a clean approach through a fractured gallery on the western side, a signal shadow eighty meters long with poor floor and an air gap under half of it. He had checked it twice across two separate runs and gotten nothing moving in it either time.
He sent Glitch through at a walk.
The mantis was standing in a side niche four meters off the route, and it had not moved for what must have been a very long time. Tremor Sense reported what Tremor Sense always reported about something that did not move, which was nothing whatsoever, and the first indication Jin had was a blade arriving out of the dark at head height.
[Harden — Active]
The avatar survived the strike and very little else. It got out of the gallery on three working legs with its left flank open, and Jin pulled it back toward the surface and let it go rather than waste an hour limping.
[Avatar Defeated]
[Respawn Time: 02:00:00]
He lay in the dark and looked at the timer and felt the specific hot embarrassment of having been beaten by something standing still.
I checked it twice and both times I checked for movement. It never moved. It has never once moved.
The commander had worked out that the shadows were where Jin liked to walk. It had stationed a hunter inside one and told it to hold position, and the hunter had held position, possibly for days.
Two hours later Jin went back in and stopped assuming that shadows were empty.
Runs eight through eleven were the contest, and he enjoyed them more than he could entirely justify.
He tried a collapse on run eight, and the commander pulled the colony off the sector before the dust settled, because it had seen him bring a ceiling down before and had learned what the preparation looked like.
He tried a false trail on run nine using the rolling ore trick and got a correction inside two seconds, which was the fastest response he had ever measured and which he took personally.
He split his disturbances across two sectors on run ten, and the commander ignored one of them completely.
That was the run where he finally understood what he was looking at.
The commander did not chase everything. It triaged. It let a distant problem run unattended while it held the important ground, and it committed only when a disturbance threatened the colony’s coherence or the descent.
It isn’t defending the quarry. It’s defending one door, and keeping enough of the network alive to know if anything comes toward the door.
On run eleven he found the junction.
It was a broad wedge of unbroken stone about sixty meters back from the fourth descending route, where three shelves and two rails met in a single connected mass. Every clear signal Jin had tracked across eleven runs had crossed it. A strike delivered there reached most of the mapped quarry at usable strength.
The commander had chosen the one place from which it could cover the door and command the colony at the same time.
Jin sat with that for a long while, and then sat with the better half of it.
It can do both from there. It can only do both from there.
If enough of the network lost contact at once, the commander had two options. It could accept disorder across several galleries, or it could move to a different transmission point good enough to restore control.
Neither option was a mistake, and that was what made the plan viable. Jin was not trying to trick it into doing something stupid. He was trying to build a situation where every available choice cost it something, and then take the thing it valued third.
The opening came together over two more runs, entirely out of terrain that was already there.
The northern gallery carried a hauling rail down most of the sector’s length, well bedded, capable of moving strong impacts across three separate zones. A disturbance on that rail would arrive in several places at once and look far larger than it was.
The floor between the northern gallery and the eastern shelf was fractured for a long stretch, so anything the avatar did inside it would read as vague and directionless.
And the clearest single transmission path between the junction and the northern half of the colony ran along one narrow spine of connected stone that a mining crew had left standing between two old cuts.
That spine was breakable. Eight meters of it could be dropped into the cut below without bringing the rest of the gallery with it. Jin looked from the rail to the fractured stretch, then to the spine, following the route with one finger across his notes.
A large enough disturbance in the northern galleries would demand attention. Breaking the spine would make the resulting reports worse, while the fractured floor kept Glitch’s real position vague. A commander that could no longer hear half its colony could not know what else might be moving toward the door.
Jin ran the rough sequence in his head six times and found the flaw on the fourth pass.
He said it out loud anyway, because saying things out loud had become a habit that a Fourth Class student had beaten into him.
"The opening only exists while it’s confused."
The avatar stood in the dark of the quarry and waited.
"So I get one window. It moves, I cross the shadow, I take the fourth route down." Jin looked at the map he had built out of eleven runs of vibration and guesswork. "And the moment it works out what I did, it comes back, and it comes back to the only place that matters."
Which put Glitch on the far side of a door while the door closed.
Two hours, he reminded himself. That’s the entire cost. Two hours and a walk back to the entrance.
He believed that, and he still did not like the shape of it, and he started the run anyway.