Chapter 33 - 32 — Blood Against Blood I
# Chapter 18 — Blood Against Blood
**POV: Hadrian Nolan**
---
I came down out of the dark at a hundred and forty metres with tracer going past both shoulders.
Below me the installation was lit up like a factory shift.
Varga’s insignia hung down the front of what had been a regional defence ministry eight months ago, four storeys of it, and they had not even taken the government seal off the wall underneath. They had hung theirs over the top.
The perimeter housing was gone. Not damaged. Gone, in the way that only happens when somebody decides a row of houses is a firing obstruction.
And in the eastern yard, under floodlights, they were loading transports.
Twenty-six of them, in a line, with crates going aboard on forklifts. That was what we had come for. Whatever those trucks were carrying was going to be pointed at somebody’s city inside a week.
Two hundred and forty human infantry were coming through the southern approach on foot at that moment.
There were three of us in the air.
---
The first crimson lance came up at me from the roof, and I did not put a wall in front of it.
A wall that size at that distance takes long enough to arrive that I would have been through the space before it formed.
I put a plane the size of a dinner tray under my descending boot instead.
I landed on it in mid-air, kicked off sideways, and the lance went under my heel close enough to light the sole of my boot.
The second came from my left.
That one I did meet, with a panel the size of a door angled at about thirty degrees, and it skated off the face of it and went into an unmanned defence tower and took the top eight metres of the tower with it.
Then the roof came up at me, and something came off it.
He was enormous and his whole body was plated in something dark and mineral, and he had jumped straight up to meet me rather than waiting, which told me he had done this before.
He came down on me with both fists together.
> **[Bastion]**
Aegis puts force where I throw it. Bastion puts it on me, compressed down against the skin until my forearms are wearing something about four millimetres thick and considerably harder than the plating he was covered in.
I caught it on both arms.
We went through the roof together and through the floor under it and stopped in a corridor with the ceiling coming down after us.
He got his weight up first.
But I had taken the whole of that impact through Bastion, and Bastion does not simply absorb.
> **[Reprisal]**
It keeps a portion of whatever comes into me and holds it badly, the way you hold a hot pan.
Seconds. That is the honest figure.
A small charge I can carry for eight or ten, a large one for perhaps four, and after that it stops being stored and starts looking for an exit. The shortest exit out of a man holding force is the man.
Which is why, in a long fight, I am doing this constantly. Take, dump, take, dump.
Most of what I absorb across an hour goes into walls and roads and the ground under my own boots, simply to be rid of it.
Nobody watching ever notices that. They only remember the times I put it into somebody.
I gave this one four seconds and then I put it through my elbow into his sternum.
He went through two internal walls and out the other side of both.
I did not assume that had finished him, because assuming that has killed better men than me. I went through the holes after him.
He was already up, with the plating gone in a spray down his left side and something wet underneath it, and he came again anyway.
I put two vertical planes either side of his leading arm and closed them until they held it, and while he was working out that his arm was not coming back, I stepped inside and drove a Bastion fist into his throat.
He went down.
His hand was still trying to make the shape that starts his Ability when I finished it.
---
Outside, Marek and Lucia were earning the reason command sends the three of us to places like this.
A speed type broke off the southern wall and went at our infantry column, and men like that can put forty soldiers on the ground in twenty seconds because nobody can lay a hand on them.
Marek folded the distance and was standing in his path.
> **[Riftstep]**
The man changed direction immediately, which was the right decision, and tried to slip around behind the soldiers where Marek would have to chase him through his own people.
Then he did the thing his Ability does at the end of a movement, and it did not work.
> **[Anchor]**
Marek had locked the space across the entrance. Nothing teleports out of that, and nothing gets displaced through it easily either, and a man who has spent four years trusting an escape that suddenly is not there loses about half a second finding that out.
Half a second was more than Marek needed.
On the western side, two of them were working artillery-grade Abilities from behind an emplacement, dropping ordnance into our column without ever showing themselves.
Lucia took the temperature out of the entire structure.
> **[Zero Frost]**
Concrete does not like that. The emplacement went white, and then grey, and then it started shedding pieces of itself off the corners.
One of them broke out through the frozen face of it and came at her.
> **[Glacial Body]**
Her shoulder and arm went from skin to something dense and blue-white in about a quarter of a second, and she took his strike on it instead of being folded in half by it.
Then she got a hand into his collar and drove him headfirst into the frozen wall.
Both of them cracked. He did not get up.
The second one ran.
> **[Whiteout]**
The air across sixty metres of that yard turned to fog and then to falling ice, and the ground under him went from concrete to a sheet, and his feet went out from under him at a dead sprint.
He was still trying to stand up when the infantry finally got an angle on him.
That is the part people forget when they talk about this war. Ordinary soldiers were not useless. They were waiting for somebody like us to make them relevant for four seconds, and when we did, they took it.
---
We reached the central supply building at fourteen minutes.
Charges went onto the load-bearing columns and along the racking, and a captain called Renn started the demolition timer with his thumb over the arming switch.
Then something struck metal under the floor.
Not once. A rhythm, three and three and three, coming up through a steel service column that ran down through the slab into whatever was below it.
"Tunnels," a sergeant said. "They’ve got a reserve in the tunnels."
I put my hand flat against the column and felt the next set come up through it.
"A reserve does not signal in threes."
"Sir?"
"That is somebody who wants to be found."
I did not know it then, but the man doing it was a signals corporal out of a regiment overrun in the spring.
He had been down there five months, and he had been hitting that column with a length of broken bracket every time he heard vehicles overhead since August.
Nobody had ever come.
"Hold the charges."
"Sir, we are inside a window that is already closing."
"Hold them."
It took two of us to force the stairwell door. It had been sealed from the outside, which is not how you secure a tunnel entrance and is exactly how you secure something else.
I went down first.
At the bottom I stopped, and I did not go through the last door for a moment, and I have been told since that I stood there with my hand against it for longer than the situation allowed.
I do not remember deciding to stop.
---
There were somewhere over four hundred people under that building.
Holding areas, is the term the reports used afterwards. What they were was a machine hall with wire strung across it, and people behind the wire in numbers that meant nobody could sit down at the same time.
The smell reached me before the light did.
Some of them were wounded and had been wounded for a while. A lot of them were starving, and I mean the kind you can see in a face rather than the kind you can see on a chart.
Along the far wall there were maybe thirty shapes under sheeting, laid in a row, because there was nowhere else in that room to put them.
When the door opened and armed men came through it, nobody cheered.
The children went silent and got behind adults, all at once, like birds going up off a field.
And a woman near the front put herself in front of two of them and looked directly at me, at my hands and the force still crawling across my forearms, and she did not move.
She was not looking at a rescue.
She had spent eight months learning what it means when a Player walks into a room where she is being kept, and nothing about my face was going to change that in two seconds.
I put Bastion down.
I did not decide to. My hands opened and the force went off my forearms.
I stood in that doorway with nothing on me, in front of four hundred people who had been taught what my kind is for, and it did not help. She did not move.
There was a boy behind her leg, six or seven, looking at me around her knee with his mouth open.
He had the flat unbothered face of a child who has stopped being frightened of things because he has run out of the part that does the frightening.
We had been running operations against this installation’s supply line since June.
Four months of watching those transports, counting them, timing the shift changes on that eastern yard, and none of us had ever once put a man on the ground to ask what was underneath the floor.
I had walked past that building in a satellite photograph eleven times.
Renn came down the stairs behind me.
"Sir." He had the timer in his hand. "Enemy reinforcements are nineteen minutes out at the outside. We cannot move four hundred people and blow this building."
I looked at the wire.
"Those trucks are carrying enough to open another front. If they roll, a city goes."
I know. He was not wrong. He was doing the arithmetic he was paid to do and his arithmetic was correct.
"Change the timetable."
That is all I said. He looked at me for about a second and a half, and then he turned around and started shouting at his sergeants, and to his eternal credit he never raised the point again.
---
Marek came down and started working out what Passage could actually do.
> **[Passage]**
It opens a corridor between two points and holds it open, and people can walk through it, and it is the single most useful thing any of us brought to that building.
It is also not a door. It is a man holding two pieces of the world apart with his mind.
The more people crossing at once, the faster it eats him, and the further apart the two ends, the faster still.
Push both together and the corridor starts to shiver at the edges. Marek told me once what happens to somebody inside it when it stops shivering and does something else.
"Twenty at a time," he said. "Maybe twenty-five. Not more."
"How far?"
"Get me a closer end and I can go faster."
Lucia took the first group up through the corridors with a section of infantry, and the soldiers started organising four hundred exhausted people into blocks of twenty, which is harder than it sounds when half of them cannot walk unaided.
I stayed at the rear.
If anything came through that facility while civilians were queuing in a stairwell, I was the correct thing to have standing between them.
---
The first counterattack arrived before we had moved a hundred and fifty.
An outer wall came in as powder rather than rubble, and the man who did it put a concussive wave straight down the corridor into the queue.
I got a wall across the opening.
The wave hit it edge to edge and the whole plane went white and started spidering, and I felt Reprisal begin to fill behind my sternum like a held breath.
Before I could put it anywhere, a second one came through the dust.
Thin cutting arcs off both hands, and they curved after they left him, which meant they were still his after they were thrown and they were not going to travel in the straight lines I wanted them to.
So I was holding a wall for a hundred and fifty people with one hand and trying to intercept curving blades around my own body with the other.
That does not work. I want to be honest about the mechanics of it.
I put four small panels up in sequence and killed four arcs, and the fifth came around the outside of the last one and opened my side from the hip to the bottom rib.
I kept the wall up.
Then I stopped holding it and pushed it instead.
A wall going forward is not a defence any more, and the concussive man had put his whole weight behind another blast when sixty square metres of force arrived at him at speed. He went back across the yard with it.
And I let Reprisal go through it.
Everything he had put into me came back out through his own attack and crushed him against the outer structure of the building he had opened.
The cutting one used that to close, which is what I would have done.
I let Bastion take a shallow one across the shoulder to buy the step, got inside where his arcs were more dangerous to him than to me, caught his wrist, and finished it from there.