24. Nash
NASH
At eleven at night I stand at my father's truck and look out to over two hundred people who all know what a fracture map means now.
"Three efforts," I say. "Loon River and Bracken take the tunnel.
You're not getting in, you're making them believe the war is ahead of them, and you hold that belief for as long as your people can stand it.
Marrow Creek and the Ketterings take the lake-bank vent and hold it open, because that's the road home for everyone who goes under.
The water folk take the crib and the patrol boats. "
"And you?" Loon River asks.
"Down the riser with Caleb and Erin and four."
"That's seven people between that machine and everything."
"Seven people they won't be looking for, if you're loud enough."
Owen's at the back with his arms folded. He steps up and says the thing an old Alpha is allowed to say and a serving one isn't.
"Anybody wants out, walk now, and there's no shame carried and nobody remembers it."
Everyone stands still. My mother reaches over and squeezes my wrist once and goes back to her crates.
It starts at twelve-forty. Loon River hits the tunnel gate and Helix answers in eleven seconds, which is too fast. They were waiting. Muzzle flash comes off the ridge above the alders where nobody should have had a position, and the first casualty report is in my ear before I've reached the shore.
"They've got the high ground on the approach," Caleb says, listening on the handheld. "They have a prepared defense. Somebody told them where we'd come from."
"They've had a few days."
"They've had someone," Caleb says, and lets it go, because there's no time to be right about it tonight.
The water folk take the patrol boats at twelve-fifty and that goes better than anything else all night. Two boats swamped without a shot fired, crews swimming for the crib, and by one o'clock the drop-off belongs to us.
Marrow Creek takes the vent at one-oh-five and holds it, and the noise coming off the tunnel two miles east is now loud, and every radio Helix has is talking about the front.
Exactly what we want. We go down the riser at one-fifteen. Me, Erin, Caleb, and four — two Marrow Creek, Wyatt, and one of the Kettering boys who can carry a hundred pounds up a ladder without complaining.
The heat-rejection gallery isn't cold anymore. The pumps are running at full load, the pipework is hot to the touch, and there's a roar in there that makes speech useless. Erin gets her hand on a discharge line and her face changes.
"They've lit it," she shouts. "That's not a fill. That's rejection at operating load. Nash, the coil is running."
"How long has it got?"
"I don't… Hours? The sequence has stages!" She's already moving toward the fire door. "The control room's on nine-forty and I know that's where to stop it, and I need to be in it!"
Caleb takes the door with a pry bar and two Marrow Creek wolves, and then we're into the works and running. The plant stairwell drops us onto the level we need and into the worst fighting of my life.
They've got twenty-plus down here and they're not the boys from the gate.
Body armor, short weapons, and they've broken into pairs covering the deck approaches, which tells me somebody trained them for exactly this.
Caleb goes left with the Ketterings. I take the right with Wyatt and the Marrow Creek pair, and I shift on the stairs.
The chamber's circular shaft is open and pressure comes up out of it.
The air over it feels thick as syrup and my eyes water and every hair I've got stands up.
The coil is in its cradle above the shaft and it's turning, slowly, humming below hearing, and the granite dome overhead has water beading off it in long dark streaks that weren't there before.
I take the first pair before they've got their muzzles level.
The second pair are better and one of them puts three rounds into my flank and I finish him anyway and go down onto the deck for a moment that costs me.
Wyatt drags a man off my back with his teeth in the strap of his vest. Two Marrow wolves clear the eastern approach and one of them doesn't come back up.
Caleb's voice cuts through the radio somebody's still holding. "Cage is coming down! They're reinforcing from four-eighty!"
Erin goes for the control room during the third push, and she's right to, but I can't cover her.
She runs the north catwalk with Kettering ahead and the three drives still down her jacket, and I'm feet away pinned behind a transformer skid with two shooters holding me there.
I watch her make the glass door. I watch Kettering put a fire extinguisher through the panel beside it.
I watch six technicians come out of that room with their hands up and their faces empty, because none signed up to be underground with wolves.
She's in, at a console, and the service cage is dropping down the shaft behind me with a full stack of reinforcements in it. I shift back long enough to shout, which costs blood.
"Caleb! The cage!"
"On it!"
He isn't going to make it. He's forty yards the wrong side of a fight, and the cage is nine seconds out, and there are twelve armed men in it who will be between Erin and every exit in this chamber.
So I take the hoist rope instead. There's a cable drum on the deck for the crane rigging with hundreds of feet of six-strand wound on it and a shear pin the size of my thumb holding the brake.
I put my shoulder into the drum housing and Wyatt hits it with me and the pin goes, and the whole drum turns over onto the shaft guide rails with a sound like a building falling.
The cage stops thirty feet up, jammed, swinging, with men shouting inside it. I go down on one knee on the deck and stay there a while.
Erin's voice comes across the chamber, cutting through everything, and she's using the flat clear tone she uses on eleven-year-olds and Alphas alike.
"Nash! I'm in! I've got the sequence!"
I get up, and a technician is on the ground of the control room with his hands still raised and Erin's leaning over him at the desk with a binder open beside her, matching what's on the screen against what's on the page.
"Talk to me!"
"Stage two of three, it's been running eighty-one minutes!" She's typing. "There's no stop button. Nash, it's not a machine you switch off, it's a draw, and once the horizon's opened it doesn't close on request!"
Caleb comes across the deck bleeding from the scalp. "Then what does?"
Erin looks up from the console, and I know that face. I've seen it over a core sample and a bridge stringer and a table of dead numbers, and it's the face she makes when she's already found the answer and doesn't want it.
"Something that makes the machine impossible to run," she says.