Chương 36: Defend the Hold

The cull-event didn't arrive. It came due. A maintenance cycle doesn't arrive. It comes due, everywhere in a section at once, on a schedule that never thinks to ask what's living in the section when the cycle turns. The first thing wearing the System's gray stepped into the hold's main run, and I read its seam and killed it before it had finished deciding I was the work. The second came up out of the same doorway. I killed that one too.

By the third I understood that things it sent was the wrong way to think about any of it. It wasn't sending anything. It was processing the section, and the gray shapes were only what the work looked like where it ran into something that argued. I was the thing that argued. The section went on a long way. For a while the build was everything I'd made it to be. I read each unit's seam fast, the same read I'd run on all of them since the break, in the half-beat before it set its feet. A fastener run past torque.

A guard cycle a hair slow on the left. I put the focused point through the gap, and it came apart at the place I'd named. The core in my arm answered before I finished asking. The array took the discharge and made it a line instead of a spray. The coherence held my three arguing parts on one beat. For a few minutes I was the most efficient thing in the Stack, and being good at the one thing felt the same as it always had: like nothing at all.

"The coupling in that one's chest is line-fresh," Errata said as a unit folded.

"Worth more than this whole tier. No. I know. You haven't the half-second. I only want it on record that I saw it and we left it to be wiped with the rest. The grief is noted." I put down the next, and the one after, and reached for a third, and the arm wasn't there. The power wasn't gone, just cycling. The Auditor core had to gather itself between discharges, a gap I'd known about since I tore it out of the thing that grew it, a gap I'd spent every hour since telling myself the rest of the build would cover.

One kill at a time, it had. This time it didn't. The next unit walked into exactly the distance the core needed to come back online, and I was holding a dead arm out at a thing wearing the System's gray. [Auditor-Kinetic-Core: discharge interval exceeded. Host arm thermal load critical.]"There's your hole." Then the flat one, the clinical voice she kept for when my body was the thing on the bench.

"Don't wait on the arm. Left hand: the vent, dump it into the floor, now. You'll lose your footing. Good. Losing your footing puts its wrist where your good hand already is. There. The arm comes back in two seconds and you have one of them to spare. Spend it deciding not to build your whole survival on a part with a gap in it, in the one fight that never stops to let it close." The arm came back hot.

The thermal load ran up past the wrist and didn't stop at the wrist, the core billing me at the one moment I had the least to pay it with. I paid, and killed the unit in the doorway, and the doorway already had another in it. Sefa was everywhere she shouldn't have been, which by then was everywhere. She was running line, real line, the salvaged coil off the gantry, turning the wide doors into chokes faster than people twice her age could clear them.

When a unit broke the right flank she didn't freeze and she didn't run. She dropped flat, hooked the coil through its ankle assembly mid-step, and pulled its own footing into the path of my shot. She'd read its step like I read a seam. She was fourteen.

"She's better in here than you are," Errata said, the thing she said when she wanted me to do something and knew that asking wouldn't land.

"She doesn't tire and she doesn't admire anything, which between them is most of staying alive. She is also about to be standing where the next one comes through. Be the reason she isn't." Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Eyes on the door," Sefa said, not looking up, already rationing the next length of coil before the last had cleared her hands.

"Not me. Door goes, you won't get a second to find me. Spend it on the door."

"Stay in the chokes," I said.

"I am in the chokes." She was three steps outside the chokes, hooking a downed unit's plating into the gap where the lifter would give.

"Mostly." I put the next one down through the door she'd told me to watch instead of the kid I wanted to watch, and I hated every part of being right to do it. We held the main run for a while, and then the lifter gallery, and then the place where the lifter gallery narrowed, because holding a thing and being walked off it a step at a time turn out to be one motion at two speeds. Time stopped keeping its usual shape. Then the next one, and the read, and the shot, and the next one.

The arm went from hot to a thing I decided, each time, to keep using. Behind me a child was crying, the flat worn-out crying of someone who'd been at it a long while and had stopped expecting it to change anything. I didn't turn around. Turning around would cost a kill I couldn't spare. And it didn't matter. The good minutes had hidden that, and the gap had begun to show it: it did not matter. The doorway I cleared filled again. The flank Sefa bought back held, and then it didn't.

For every shape I read and unmade, the work put up another in the same place, not faster, not angrier, just next, a tally moving to the line below.

"Give me a bad one," I said, between kills.

"One cheap clamp. One weld they rushed. Anything I can open."

"There isn't one." For once she didn't dress it.

"They aren't built badly. They aren't built at all. They're issued. You're asking me to find the flaw in a quantity, Carole. There isn't one to find. There's just more of it." I went on looking anyway, because looking was the one other thing my hands knew how to do, and I found nothing in front of me made badly enough to fail. Only more of them. I rang every bell I owned doing it. [Anomaly profile: 39/100. Remediation in progress.]"One point," Errata said, quiet now.

"Any other night a profile climbing like that brings the whole weight of them down on your head. Tonight it moved one, and nothing turned to look. You're not loud in here, Carole. In here there's nothing left to be loud at."

"Then I'll be quiet about it," I said, and killed the next one without a sound, and it changed nothing. The lifter on the left gave with a deep, final crack. The line folded back to the last wide door. Behind it waited the part of the hold that couldn't fight: Renn flat over his kit, the smallest ones folded to the back, Adoma holding a cutting bar in a grip that knew machines and not murder. And Sefa, who had stopped being somewhere she shouldn't be only because no such place was left.

I had killed everything it sent. I would go on killing everything it sent, for as long as the arm would cycle and the hand would close, and it would go on sending, because sending was not what it did. It was finishing a section. A section is large. The work was on schedule.

"You can't kill a schedule, Carole." The snark had gone out of her. It only went when a thing couldn't be made any smaller. She'd let me set that fact down on the gantry with the hours still on it; I picked it up now, and the room had not one body in it. A process wearing hands, and everything I'd cobbled out of the dead was built to find the one thing the room didn't have. The door broke on the left where the lifter had been.

The section had so much more room left in it, and the only answer I'd ever owned was already on the floor in pieces, working exactly as I'd built it to, and not enough.