Even obscured as it was, the front was immense, an insane stretch of violence and wasteland—it was hard to wrap my mind around the concept that this was just one battlefield in one war between just two of the sects fighting and dying for control of this one planet. So much blood being shed, so much pain, and all of it for . . . nothing. Nothing that mattered to anyone, beyond this one lonely sphere in a barely charted corner of our galaxy.
I turned away from the long panorama of the fighting, kept climbing. The bridge rose out of the mists like towers from a sea of fog, stretching on toward the horizon in one direction, shattered and broken in the other, well short of the city walls. Above us, warplanes ducked and dove, making strafing runs against the factory’s defenses. We could hear the wailing of the air-raid sirens from within the city, the same sirens we’d heard on our approach from the south. The steel of the trestle shook under my grip as an artillery barrage landed somewhere nearby. I held still for a moment, waited for the shaking to subside, then kept moving up, Jane and Sho just a little ways off to my right.
The lip of the bridge above was approaching quickly now, and we hadn’t been shot at yet. Hopefully a good sign. The theoretical snipers in the train car back toward the break in the bridge couldn’t see us from their positions—Jane had been right about that—and anyway, they didn’t have any particular reason to look: we were climbing up from well behind their own front lines. We’d emerged from the subway tunnels already closer to the enemy front than the territory of the sect controlling the factory, and we’d only headed deeper into Tyll-controlled territory from there.
Of course, because we were almost there, the end of our climb in sight, that was when the Wulf acted on Scheherazade’s warning, and at least a dozen of their big guns fired a massive barrage on the enemy position she’d marked below, directly beside the trestle we were ascending.
The factory worlds had been built to last; this bridge had stood through two centuries of war, only breaking away from the factory walls under concentrated effort from the Wulf defenders of the city. Still, there was only so much abuse a structure could take: it was just metal and alloy, after all. Several of the rivets on the trestles popped free, a terrifying “spanging” sound like bullets being fired. Jane was slightly ahead of me now, and I saw the rebar in her hand just pull clean off the structure, still tight in her grip. She had good reflexes, she wouldn’t still be alive otherwise: she leapt for the next trestle up even as she started to fall, launching herself upward, but she wasn’t going to make it.
I freed my own hand—at least the steel in my grip was holding steady—and reached out with my teke, feeling my mask drain away as I did so; hopefully we were high enough that I didn’t need it anymore. I ripped the piece of rebar Jane was reaching for free from one side of the trestle, bending it outward, within her reach; she grabbed tight, then scrambled up from there, onto more solid parts of the structure.
For a moment, she simply held stock still, letting her adrenaline rush subside; then, “Thanks, partner,” she said over the comms. I could hear her breath coming fast and heavy behind the words.
“No problem,” I said, continuing my own ascent. I felt a little bit better about being slower than she was now—if I hadn’t been a little behind her, I wouldn’t have been able to see what was happening. She’d begun climbing again as well; we were almost even on the span. “Ready to storm the train car?” I asked Jane, waving at Sho on her back; he gave me a wan little wave in return, then very quickly returned his grip to her shoulder. “Because that’s your plan, remember? To storm their sniper positions.”
“Most of their soldiers are below us, remember?” she reminded me. “Preparing to storm the tunnels? And also now hopefully buried or torn to pieces by artillery shells. So they likely won’t have guards watching their backs—why would they? This’ll be easy.”
We came over the edge of the bridge, hauling ourselves onto the relatively level concrete surface; looking toward the broken end of the span, I could see the train car—and the occasional flash of rifle fire from inside, as the snipers tracked targets on the city walls.
If we wanted to get that train car moving, step one was getting the enemy snipers out.
CHAPTER 10
I hate to admit it, but Jane knows her tactics. The work we did clearing out the snipers’ nest wasn’t pretty, but it was quick, and it was quiet; most of them never even heard me coming. The one who did got his neck snapped for his troubles—now that I wasn’t having to hold the telekinetic gas mask in place on my face, I was back to full combat efficiency, which meant that at close range I was damn near unstoppable. If I did say so myself.
Which I did.
We piled the bodies on the track beside the car—or at least I did; Jane was still carrying Sho, having covered me with her rifle from a prone position down the track while I did the dirty work of clearing out the train—and then it was time for Sho to do his thing.
The interior of the car was pretty gloomy, given that the enemy had welded over the windows with steel except for firing slits here or there: it was lit only by a handful of bare bulbs powered by a gasoline generator I could hear chugging along somewhere toward the back, and most of the seats had been torn out, replaced with sandbags and ammunition stores for the snipers.
As Jane and Sho went to work out front, messing around with the battery housing, I moved to the back door of the car and began tossing the ammunition stores outside one by one; the last thing we needed, if we were going to use this rail car to barrel through the enemy positions, was to have it be full of material that would explode when we were inevitably shot at. That would end our train ride to freedom real quick.
The gasoline fumes were almost overpowering in the enclosed space; I wondered how people had lived with that smell, when this was their only option for power. I ignored it as best I could and kept working—I had about half of the munitions tossed out the door when there was a sharp “crack,” and then a recognizable hum filled the train car, the fluorescent lights hidden by the welded steel flickering to life.
Sho had managed to power up the fusion battery inside the car’s engine. We had power.
Sho and Jane joined me momentarily, Jane unbuckling Sho and setting him carefully down on one of the remaining seats. I grinned at him, and did what she hadn’t thought to yet—took the gas mask off his muzzle so he could breathe a little more clearly. Jane, meanwhile, scooted underneath the train conductor’s control panel, going to work on the wiring, pulling spare bits and bobs from one of the pouches at her belt as she did. Fusion power or not, this machine was a hundred years old, at least—getting it running might not take a miracle, but it would require some elbow grease.
“Does she know what she’s doing?” Sho whispered to me. “Can we actually get this thing moving again?”
“She knows what she’s doing better than I do,” I replied to him with a grin, going for “incongruously cheery” despite the fact we were in a war zone and still in . . . quite a bit of danger. Sho had said goodbye to his mother just an hour ago, was leaving behind the only world he’d ever known. I could manage just a little bit of upbeat, even if it wasn’t usually in my wheelhouse. “I was raised on a world a great deal like yours,” I told him, just trying to keep him occupied. “As far as levels of technology go, electrical engineering is . . . not my strong suit, to put it mildly. Plus, Jane’s a hundred and ninety years old—she has experience at just about everything.”
“Not a hundred and ninety, Esa!” Jane called out, her voice muffled on account of the fact that her head was stuck somewhere inside the access panel. Also she may have had something between her teeth.
“For a hundred-and-eighty-nine-year-old, she’s also very touchy about her age,” I replied to Sho, giving him a conspiratorial grin. That actually earned a slight smile, albeit with shock still chasing the edges—a smile that ended with a cough, the gas fumes in the train car getting to him. I stood, and cut off the power to the gasoline generator, then carefully
lifted it out the door with my teke, the wires linking it to the light bulbs growing taut, then snapping; once I’d flung it over the side of the bridge, that was it, that was the majority of the combustible material removed from the train car. The smell improved almost immediately.
We were as ready as we were going to be.
Jane slid out from underneath the access panel, a handful of loose wires held in her mouth until she spat them out on the floor. “Not a hundred and eighty-nine, either,” she said.
“Are we good?” I asked her.
“We’ll soon find out,” she answered, reaching up and pressing the engine primer.
The train hummed to life. It actually jerked forward a bit, like an animal roused from a torporous state, until its brakes kicked in and it settled back on the rails. “We’re good,” I told Sho. “Just a short train ride and a pickup, and then you’ll be up there.” I lifted my eyes skyward, indicating . . . well, the roof of the rail car, mostly, but also the sky and stars above.
“And I can leave this world behind for good.” Sho barely breathed the words, like if he said them too loud they’d crack and fall apart in his mouth.
“You can leave this world behind for good, and you never, ever have to come back,” I agreed.
“Everybody, hold on to something,” Jane said from the conductor’s cabin. “Based on Schaz’s scans, the tracks ahead are mostly clear, but that doesn’t mean this won’t be a bumpy ride—plenty of rubble and detritus that we’re just going to have to roll right over.”
“And if we hit something you missed on your scans, something we can’t roll over?” I asked.
“Then the train flips, probably goes right off the side of the bridge, and we all die,” Jane shrugged. “If I were you, I’d be more worried about the enemy soldiers we’re about to be passing at speed. It won’t take them long to realize that this car shouldn’t be running, and that they should probably be shooting at whoever’s inside. Here we go.” She eased the throttle forward; the train jerked into motion again, and the bridge—barely visible out the armored windows—started to slide by.
I peered through the sniper slats, watching the bridge rails pass us by outside. “We’re really starting to move,” I told Sho, squeezing his hand. “Don’t listen to Jane about the soldiers outside. They can’t see inside, which means they won’t know where we are enough to target us. We’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Sure I’m sure,” I lied. I hadn’t been Justified for all that long, but I had grown up in an orphanage, and I’d done my time as the oldest kid there, the most capable, the one the younger kids turned to when things inside—or in the settlement beyond—got scary. I knew when to lie, and when to tell the truth. This was definitely “lie” territory; if an enemy sniper did get us, we wouldn’t feel a thing anyway.
“You said—you said I never had to come back.” He was looking out the broken window, and the wind was picking up—I had to strain to hear the words, and not just because of the passage of the train. He was whispering, like he couldn’t quite believe what he was saying; at least he wasn’t thinking about getting shot. “Would I—once I’ve paid off my debt to you, would I be able to, though, if I wanted to? For my mother? I mean, if she’s . . . if she’s . . .”
I frowned at him. “Sho, you’re not an indentured servant, you’re not . . . some kind of a slave,” I said, steering him away from thoughts of his mom—he could mourn later, and would, but we couldn’t afford to have him trapped in his grief right now. “There’s no debt to pay. We’re going to take you to Sanctum, they’re going to explain some things to you—and hopefully repair the damage to your spine, get you walking again—and then you’ll be free to do as you wish.” More or less. If he did choose not to stick around with the Justified, it’s not like we were going to hand him a free ship or anything: we already didn’t have enough to go around, and we weren’t that altruistic. Somebody would give him a lift out to a populated station somewhere, making sure he didn’t know the route back to Sanctum, and then he’d be on his own. We didn’t exactly have unlimited resources, after all. Though compared to what he was used to, it might seem like we did.
“That almost sounds too good to be true.” He said the words with a smile, but there was real cynicism behind them; the perils of growing up in a war zone, I suppose.
“Don’t worry, Sho—you’re going to love it out there. I know I do.”
“At this . . . Sanctum?”
“At Sanctum, yeah, but also, just . . .” I waved upward. “Out there. A million, million different worlds, Sho, and all of them with something wonderful or strange, just waiting for us to see.”
Meanwhile, Jane had lifted her hand to her ear, triggering a different channel on her comm. “Scheherazade?” she hailed our ship. “We’re in motion. Are you on approach?”
“Just starting reentry now, boss,” Schaz confirmed. “If I’m going to keep my stealth systems engaged, I’ll need to find a glide path high in the upper atmosphere to . . . wait. Wait.”
“We’re not really capable of ‘waiting’ at the moment, Schaz,” Jane replied. “An object in motion and all that. What’s going on?”
“I’m reading—this shouldn’t be possible, I don’t even know . . . Jane, I’m reading a high concentration of radiological activity, in the heart of the factory city you’re leaving behind. Why . . . what could possibly be throwing off that much radiation, in the center of a populated—”
“Everybody down, now!” Jane screamed the words, dropping to the floor herself. “Esa, shield! Don’t look behind us!”
I lunged at Sho, pulling him to the floor; he made a startled noise, but didn’t resist much—couldn’t, not with his legs the way they were. I didn’t know what the hell was happening either, but reacting when Jane shouted at me had saved my life in the past. We’d fight like hellcats when we were trapped on board Schaz and both bored, but out in the field, when Jane told me to jump, I jumped. Or dropped, in this particular case.
Jane had pulled herself closer to us, close enough that I could wrap all three of us in a telekinetic shield—she tucked herself over Sho and me both, and I just kept pouring on layers, more and more and more, to defend us against whatever the hell was happening. There had been a level of fear—of outright panic—that I didn’t often hear in Jane’s voice. My ear was pressed against the floor of the train, and I could hear the rumble of the wheels on the tracks below. Just beneath that was the sound of my own hammering heartbeat, and Jane’s as well, and Sho’s, so close I could feel their racing pulses through my clothing, through my skin.
Then the steel floor beneath me—all I could see, from my position facedown on the floor of the train—went away; all I could see was brightness, an amazing incandescent flash. There was no sound, just light. No wonder Jane hadn’t want me looking at whatever was happening behind us: I would have been blinded for sure.
What little glass remained in the windows around us all shattered at once as a massive wave of force tried to dislodge the train from its tracks, but amazingly, it just kept going, as if, after a hundred years of dormancy, a little thing like whatever the fuck was happening back in the factory wasn’t going to stop it—it wanted to stretch its mechanical legs, so to speak, and run.
Then sound kicked back in—or caught up—and there was a roar, a howl, like something chasing us, not something alive, but something massive, like a wave or a rockslide or a hurricane. Then a terrible groan of shrieking metal—Sho’s fingers tightened in mine, but we both just kept staring at the floorboards—and we could feel hot wind on our backs, wind we couldn’t feel before. Something was ripping at my shield, like a great creature clawing at it; I just poured on more and more defenses, adding shielding faster than it could be torn away, until that tearing sensation was gone, and there was only the wind. The wind, and a weirdly hollow sensation, almost like a void.
“Mother of gods,” Jane whispered. I looked at her; she was staring behind us. I did the same.
The back end of the train had been entirely ripped away. I wasn’t sure how the damned thing was still running, but it was. We were still in motion, pulling away from a truly terrible sight: the factory complex, the entire city behind us, was just gone, replaced by a rising cloud of fire, blooming out and up from where the city had been, a column of utter destruction topped by something almost like a storm front, the entire stretch of golden sky behind us aflame.
A nuclear blast. Someone had set off a nuke in the heart of the Wulf city.
CHAPTER 11
This made no sense. It made no sense. The whole reason the sects had been fighting was over control of the factory complex; destroying it gained the Tyll sect nothing, made the entire goddamned war pointless. Why would they . . . why would they . . . how could they have done it?
Sho was looking at the blast now too. His breath was hitching in his chest, almost hyperventilating, and then he was howling, a sound of terrible pain and denial and utmost grief, and he was scrambling along the floorboards as well he could with only his arms until I reached out and grabbed him and held him close, let him howl and scream even as I turned his head away from the sight of the rising bloom of atomic fire that had consumed the sky, turning day into something closer to twilight.
The odds against his mother surviving the gas attack in the tunnels had been slim at best, but he’d been clinging to them all the same. Now, there was no hope, no odds, no chance. She was gone, and he knew it. He wouldn’t be able to come back and rescue her, not after we reached Sanctum, not ever. Not until he reached the next life, if there even was such a thing.
I was murmuring something to him as I stroked his fur, but not even I knew what I was saying. His howls finally choked off into sobs, and he pressed his face against my shoulder, weeping into my body armor. The train was still rocking beneath us, its interior lit by the horrible Armageddon glow of the blast receding in the distance. I turned to Jane—who had also climbed to her knees—but she was pointing past me, back toward the fiery corona staining the whole atmosphere orange.
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