Chương 67: CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN: THE FOURTH WINTER

The fourth winter was the mildest since Marcus had arrived. He did not trust the mildness. He had been building plans against hard winters for long enough that a mild one felt like a variable not an answer, and he continued running the winter operations at full rigor while privately noting that the stores were going to carry with more margin than any previous year. The margin showed in things that were hard to quantify. The clinic's patient load in January was lower than any previous January.

The civil patrol's reports showed fewer incidents of the specific kind of social friction that hunger and cold produced in confined communities. The school's winter enrollment held — children coming even when the cold made the walk from the outer district difficult, which in previous years had seen enrollment drop because families kept children home for warmth.

The garrison stood the winter patrols without the rotation difficulty that had plagued earlier years, because forty-seven soldiers was enough to maintain the northern circuit without pushing anyone to exhaustion. Confluix's heliograph reports were consistent through December, January, and February: the Adversary was stable at its plateau, the Ironfen's feedback mechanisms were holding, the approach to the core was clear.

The spring operation planning happened through February and March, in evening sessions that Hollis ran with the systematic precision of someone who had been thinking about this operation for six months and was now translating thought into executable plan. Marcus attended every session. He asked questions. He added the intelligence analysis that Hollis's planning required. He approved what was ready to be approved and sent back what needed more work. By the end of March, the plan was complete.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. The operation would involve sixty soldiers — Hollis's full force minus the garrison minimum required to maintain wall defense in their absence. The four rifle operators. Twelve devices, the full stockpile, deployed in the sequence Washington had developed from Confluix's intelligence about the Adversary's core response patterns.

And Confluix itself, operating in the coordinated role that the alliance had been building toward since the first meeting in the clearing.

"The coordination protocol," Marcus said, in the final planning session.

"How confident are we that Confluix and the ground force can execute it in sequence?"

"We've run it three times at the boundary," Hollis said.

"The signal system works. Confluix's timing on the previous tests has been precise to within thirty seconds of the projected window." He paused.

"The uncertainty is in how the Adversary responds to the initial engagement. The plan accounts for three response scenarios. If the actual response is outside those three, we adapt."

"What does adapt look like?"

"Depends on the specific deviation," Hollis said.

"The principle is: Confluix holds the core engaged while the ground force deploys the devices in the secondary pattern. If the primary pattern doesn't produce the expected fragmentation, we move to the secondary. If the secondary doesn't work—""Then we withdraw," Marcus said.

"Intact. We come back."

"Yes," Hollis said.

"The operation has a withdrawal condition. We're not running this to the last man." He paused.

"The withdrawal condition is my call, not yours."

"Agreed," Marcus said. The plan was finished. The spring was coming. The operation was scheduled for the second week of April, weather permitting. Marcus went to the north wall that evening and looked at the Ironfen on the horizon and thought about everything that had been built since he first stood on a wall and looked north and felt the weight of eight hundred people on borrowed shoulders. He was not afraid of the operation.

He had assessed the risks with the same clarity he applied to everything, and the assessment said: managed risk, reasonable expectation of success, non-negligible cost, necessary action. He accepted the assessment. He was afraid of the cost. The cost was always the thing he was afraid of. He went back down.