Subject Zero: Faceless

Third Squad dug in fast, low, without discussion. Nobody had told them how long the shoulder needed to hold. Ilsen and Cade cut into the thin soil with entrenching tools that rang off buried rock more often than they bit it. Wren stacked loose stone into a knee-high wall facing the crest. Hollis took the far edge, rifle up, watching the gap where the fortified position used to be as though it might still have something left to say.

Nobody watched Ashfall-Zero dig. Osei had put him at the shoulder’s inside corner, closest to her own position, and hadn’t explained why, and he hadn’t asked. His hands worked the same as anyone’s. His legs carried the small, unreliable hitch from the shelf, better than it had been an hour ago, worse than it should have been by now, and he used the digging to test it, one shovel-load at a time, without letting anyone watch him do that either.

The shoulder gave them cover from three directions and none from the fourth, the crest itself, unanswered above them. Sweat had gone cold under every collar in the last twenty minutes; nobody had eaten since the transports. A squad that had expected to be back at the staging tents inside the hour was recalculating, quietly and without being told to, what the rest of that hour was actually for.

Osei tried the relay again.

It was a handheld thing, palm-sized, a dial ringed in Core-lit glass that should have carried a faint blue glow even at rest. She thumbed the contact and spoke the callsign into it, patient, the fourth time in six minutes, and waited the standard five-count before trying again. On the third attempt something answered: half a syllable, pitched wrong, gone before it finished forming. On the fourth, nothing at all. On the fifth, the glass ring dimmed by degrees she could actually watch happen, the blue going grey going nothing, the casing in her hand cooling from a real, physical warmth to the flat temperature of the rock everyone was crouched behind.

She looked at it for a second longer than the moment needed, then set it down beside her knee, not in her pack. Leaving it where anyone else could reach it if she couldn’t.

”Relay’s dead,” she said, to the squad generally. ”Not jammed. Dead. There’s a difference and I don’t currently care which one this is.”

Ashfall-Zero understood it anyway, distantly, though no one had ever taught him how this world’s machinery actually worked. A jammed signal fought something and lost. A dead relay had nothing left in it to fight with.

* * *

The heavy element never called back. Neither did Ferro. The last usable fragment — element’s already committed — sat in the morning air unfinished, and stayed that way.

Wren was the one who said what everyone else had worked out and was leaving unsaid. ”So nobody’s coming.”

”Nobody’s coming yet,” Osei said. Command still knew where they’d started; someone would come looking, eventually. ”Eventually isn’t a plan.”

Ilsen, working a stone loose from the wall he was building, didn’t look up. ”Eventually’s usually what they tell you right before it stops being eventually and starts being never.”

”Noted,” Osei said, in a tone that closed the subject rather than agreeing with it.

Ashfall-Zero kept digging. He thought, once, briefly, of the colonel, of the thread that had held across real distance days ago, on the transport that had carried him here, faint but present, unconfirmed at the other end. He could have reached for it now. Nothing stopped him. But she was a long way from this ridge, in a base with no standing to redirect a heavy element or hold a road she’d never see, and reaching for her now would have accomplished exactly what knocking on a locked door usually did. He let the thought go without acting on it, and didn’t look too closely at what letting it go cost him.

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* * *

It was Cade who spotted the column first, wordless as always — he simply held his hand up, flat, and everyone stopped what they were doing.

Through the field glasses, passed hand to hand along the wall, the picture sharpened by degrees. The company-sized column Osei had reported was moving, angling around the crest toward the road below, as it had been an hour ago. But a piece of it had broken off, twenty soldiers, maybe twenty-five, cutting up rather than around, climbing toward the crest itself on a switchback trail none of the approach maps had marked as usable.

”They’re not leaving it empty,” Hollis said. He didn’t need the glasses; he’d taken his turn with them and handed them on. ”Whoever’s up there now, that’s reinforcement.”

Wren counted them out loud, low, more for herself than the squad. Packs slung high and tight, rifles carried loose rather than ready — soldiers expecting to arrive and dig, not arrive and fight. No heavy weapons visible yet, nothing towed or crewed, just rifles and entrenching tools of their own. A picket becoming a garrison, and not finished becoming one yet.

Osei took the glasses back and held on this time, watching long enough that Ashfall-Zero saw her jaw work once, twice, weighing numbers none of them could see.

”Call it,” Ilsen said, quiet, not pushing, just marking that the moment had arrived.

”Twenty minutes,” Osei said. ”Maybe less if that trail’s better than it looks from here. That’s how long the crest stays worth taking.”

* * *

He watched her work it, visibly, without performance, no wasted motion spent on making the process look easier than it was, the effort of running a number twice because the first result was one nobody wanted to be right.

”If we sit here,” Osei said, mostly to herself, working it out loud because the alternative was working it out silent and that helped nobody, ”we hand them the ridge and the road both, and command finds out about it from someone who isn’t us.” She lowered the glasses. ”If we go, we might hold the one thing this whole push was actually for. Might.”

Wren’s grip tightened on her rifle. She didn’t ask the question out loud, but Osei answered it anyway.

”There’s no version of this where I like the odds,” Osei said. ”There’s a version where I like them less.” She looked down the line — Wren, Ilsen, Cade, Hollis, and last, longest, Ashfall-Zero, the same look she’d given him at the close of the last fight, the one that asked nothing and filed everything. ”We move in five. Fast, low, same order as the climb. If that trail’s as good as it looks, they beat us there and we turn around and this conversation didn’t happen.”

Nobody answered that with anything but motion, magazines checked, straps resettled, Wren’s makeshift wall abandoned half-finished, the work of the last ten minutes turning into something none of them would come back to reclaim.

Hollis passed him on the way to his own position, close enough to touch, and didn’t stop to say anything. He reached out instead and tugged the loose strap on Ashfall-Zero’s kit tight against his shoulder — brisk, wordless, gone again before either of them could decide what to call it.

Ashfall-Zero set the entrenching tool down against the rock, the same unhurried motion he’d used on the rifle before the shelf, and understood, with a plainness that didn’t need dressing up, that whatever waited on that crest in the next twenty minutes hadn’t been part of anyone’s plan when this push started, not Ferro’s, not Osei’s, not the enemy commander who’d known about the shelf before Third Squad ever set foot on it.

They knew where we’d be an hour ago, he thought, watching the last of the reinforcing column climb toward high ground that was supposed to be undecided. I’d like to know how far ahead of us that actually runs.

He didn’t raise it. There wasn’t time, and Osei hadn’t asked, and some accounting always seemed to be owed and never quite due.

Osei went first, up the last stretch of the shelf and onto ground none of them had crossed yet, Wren a half-step behind her, then Ilsen, then Cade. Hollis fell in at the rear, where he could watch the trail the reinforcing column was climbing without anyone having to tell him to. The rock here ran steeper than anything below it, loose underfoot where the near slope had at least been honest about its footing, and the crest itself stayed hidden behind its shoulder of stone until the last possible turn, refusing to be seen before it had to be.

Third Squad went up the shelf a second time, faster than the first, into ground nobody below them could see, and nobody above them, for the next twenty minutes at least, could be entirely sure was still theirs to lose.