Chapter 46 - 45 — Twenty Enter III (Bonus)
The Meridian captain came out of the command vehicle at ten past eight and got everybody in close.
He was somewhere in his forties.
There was a healed line running up from his collar into the side of his jaw, pink and recent enough to have been done inside the last few months, and there was only one place he could have got it.
His eyes had the flatness that people get after a week of sleeping four hours.
He did not stand on anything to speak, and he did not raise his voice, and he checked the Gate twice while he was talking.
"Most of you know me. For the ones who don’t, I’m Renard, and I’m running this."
He let everybody settle.
"I am not going to explain Gates to you. You are all licensed, you all had a week, and if anybody here still needs the basics then somebody upstairs has made a mistake I cannot fix in this yard."
Somebody made a noise that was not quite a laugh.
"Four things."
He held up a hand and did not bother with the fingers.
"This Gate has killed Players. Not rookies. It took Adaeze Kalu off me in September and she had eleven years and a Blue-tier record, and it took two more out of the group we went in with the second time.
Whatever is in there is not going to be impressed by your file."
The yard had gone very quiet.
"Second. The break window. The Bureau says thirty hours and the Bureau is being polite. Nobody is waiting for a better team, because there is no time left in which a better team could be assembled. This is the attempt."
He glanced at the surface again.
"Third. Nobody separates. Not for a flank, not for a better angle, not for anything."
"The whole formation holds inside thirty metres front to back, and nobody drifts more than four off their own position."
"If you cannot see the person whose position covers yours, you say so out loud, and we stop until you can."
"Fourth." He looked around properly for the first time. "Nobody chases loot. I am not saying that because I think you are greedy.
I am saying it because the last time, somebody stopped for four seconds and it changed where the whole formation was standing, and I have thought about those four seconds every night since."
Nobody said anything to that.
"And the important one. Our scouting is from two previous attempts and the second one is three weeks old."
"If anything in there does not match what you were briefed, you say it immediately, you say it loudly, and you do not spend thirty seconds deciding whether you might be wrong."
"I would rather stop the raid eleven times for nothing than lose somebody because a person was embarrassed."
He put his hand down.
"Are you ready."
---
The answers did not come as one voice, and I was glad of it.
Three or four said yes immediately, clean and flat, the way people do when they have decided not to think about it any further.
Several just nodded.
The Tank with the shield finished seating her gauntlet, felt it click, and only then looked up and said "Ready."
The ranged fighter beside me put a hand on the case at his hip, went through it one final time with his thumb, and said it after.
One of the healers breathed in and out slowly before answering, and her answer was perfectly steady, and everybody near her had heard the breath.
Gideon said "Ready" without taking his eyes off the Gate.
"Ready," I said.
Renard nodded once and moved on, and did not thank anybody, and I thought better of him for it.
---
Then he set the formation, and it was one raid rather than four parties.
Frontline defence and heavy close-range at the head. Secondary melee and the mobile fighters behind them. Ranged and casting kept deep, with enough bodies between them and anything that got in.
Support and healing in the middle, positioned so either half of the formation could fold around them without anybody having to travel.
A rear element of four watching the way we had come.
"Nolan."
"Captain."
"Your file says Mage." He did not make it sound like an accusation. "Your file also says you put four Players on the ground in a street with your hands. Which is it?"
"I fight at contact range. The Ability comes out of my fists."
"Then you are no use to me at the back." He pointed. "Forward-middle. Behind the front line, off the left shoulder. You go through the gap when the front opens one, and you come back when it closes."
"Understood."
I felt the look before I saw it.
One of the outsiders had the roster up on his own tablet, and he read my line on it, and then he looked at where Renard had just put me, and then at Renard, and then back at the tablet.
Mage designation. Forward position. And a surname.
I could see him counting the exceptions.
I did not say anything. There is nothing to say to that which does not make it worse, and the only thing that will ever answer it is the next six hours.
Gideon was placed two positions off my right, close enough to reach me and not close enough to be standing over me.
I noticed that Renard had done that deliberately, and that nobody had asked him to.
---
The PSB ran the entry procedure, which took eleven minutes and felt like forty.
Twenty licences checked against twenty names, out loud, each one confirmed by the holder. Equipment counts. Space bag capacities logged. Medical declarations.
Then the inner containment barrier came down.
A Bureau officer in a grey coat read the last part off a tablet in the voice people use for things they have said before.
"Confirming for the record. Outside teams will maintain break-response posture for the full duration. That posture will not be stood down on entry, on contact, or on partial clear.
It stands until Meridian reports a confirmed clear from inside, or until the Bureau makes its own determination."
He looked up.
"Do you understand what I have said?"
Renard said that he did.
I watched four or five of the others turn their heads, not much, just enough to look at the tracked units sitting behind us with their weapons trained on the same piece of air we were about to walk into.
Nobody outside that barrier expected this to work.
They were not being cruel about it. They were being professional. And every one of us had just been told, in the flattest possible language, that the guns behind us were going to stay pointed at that Gate the entire time we were in it.
---
"Move."
The first Meridian section went toward the surface at a walk.
Not a rush. Nobody sprints into a Gate. They went in formation, in threes, with the front line intact and the spacing already correct, and I understood watching them that this was the tenth or twentieth time most of them had done this together.
The rest of us followed.
The closer I got, the more the light took over. Orange came up the front of my clothes and across the plating on my forearms until the gauntlets looked like they were already burning, which is a thing I will never get used to.
Another dark band went through the surface as we came up on it.
Somebody two positions behind me swore, very quietly, one word.
Nobody turned around.
I looked back once, over my shoulder, past the raid and the vehicles and the open ambulance doors, at the four hundred metres of empty street on the other side of the barrier where a freight district should have been.
Then I looked at the Gate.
Twenty entered. Five came out.
Except two of the twenty walking toward this surface were never supposed to be within a hundred kilometres of it.
I do not know what that changes. That is the honest position. It could mean two more survivors. It could mean the two people whose places we took are alive and two other people are not.
Gideon came up on my right about four metres from the surface.
"Your father asked me to stay near you."
"I assumed."
"He was quite specific about it." He was still looking straight ahead. "Stay inside my reach, do what the captain tells you, and if it turns, get behind me and stop being clever. You do not need to worry about the rest of it."
"I’m not planning to hide behind you for six hours."
"No," he said. "I did not think you were."
There was something at the corner of his mouth for about half a second.
"He looked very tired when he gave me this job," Gideon said. "I am beginning to see why."
Renard went through first.
The formation went in after him, section by section, each group disappearing into the moving light without any sound at all, which is the part nobody warns you about.
Then it was our turn.
The orange came up over my hands, and closed, and all twenty of us were inside Eastwick.