Subject Zero: Faceless

Third Squad was a day out. Marrow said so at the morning brief as if reading a delivery schedule, and added that until they arrived Rook was untasked and would remain inside the wire, and Renner said, without looking up from her imagery, that she had a use for him if the colonel didn’t.

”The reconnaissance section that walked the far ridge is going south this morning to re-walk the corridor behind us,” she said. ”Supply’s reported movement on the road near the old compound — vehicles at night, no lights. Somebody’s using that ground. I’d like someone along who knows what it looks like when a person from that compound is lying to them, and I’d like him to see it in daylight with people who’ve walked it before.”

Marrow considered the request for the length of one breath. ”Inside the section’s perimeter. Back by dark. No use of anything on his strap or off it without a threat to life, and the corporal reports it if there is.”

”Understood.”

”Then he’s yours till dusk.” Marrow was on to the next item before the sentence finished.

The section was waiting at the motor pool, four men, their corporal, and a light truck with the netting half off. The corporal in charge had his back to the road, checking a rifle he had checked before, and when he turned around Rook knew him a half-second before the corporal knew Rook, because the corporal had only ever seen a mask and Rook had seen the face under a hood at a vault door.

Bram.

Older by a season and some, which at his age was a visible amount. Corporal’s stripes new enough to sit stiff. The same set to the jaw he’d had at a tailgate, watching a stranger put words into a medic’s head, and the same rifle-hand that had come up on reflex then and stayed at his side now, with what looked like effort.

”Corporal Bram,” he said, to the mask. ”Reconnaissance section, out of the base you were processed at. We swept the compound after your convoy got hit. Major Renner says you’re with us today.” He said it as a report, each item set down and left. Then, after a pause he clearly hadn’t planned: ”I know who you are. Better said at the truck than carried for an hour.”

I knew you at the door. You had your rifle up.

Bram read the slate. ”I did. I’d do it again with what I knew that morning.” He turned back to the truck. ”Mount up. We’ve got twenty miles of road and I want to be at the cutting before the light’s flat on it.”

* * *

The corridor south of camp was the same corridor he’d come north on the day before, and it looked different from a truck bed with the netting off and four rifles pointed outward. Bram’s men didn’t talk. They watched their sectors and drank from canteens and one of them, a private with a scout’s glass, kept a tally on his sleeve in grease pencil of every vehicle track that crossed the road, and said the number aloud to Bram every mile.

Rook watched the ground come. He’d seen this stretch once, from the inside of a truck with Voss’s hands pressed against his ribs, half-blind with a new sense and bleeding, and he found his body had kept more of it than his mind had. A bend where the rock came in close on the east. A stretch where the road dropped and the trucks had to slow. His ribs knew the place before the private said it.

”Cutting,” the private said. ”Half a mile.”

The rock faces closed in on both sides, twenty feet and then thirty, the road running through a slot that had been blasted for it. Something Core-fed and fast, the walls still showing the smooth scoop of it under half a year of weather. Bram had the truck stop short of the mouth and dismounted the section on foot, two up each wall, himself and Rook on the road.

The lead truck was gone. Somebody had dragged it out months back; there was a scar in the packed stone where the charge had gone off, filled in and packed over by the supply convoys since, and along the east wall a fan of scorching that rain hadn’t finished with. He stood where the second truck had stopped.

Here.

Bram looked at the slate, then at the ground, then up at the west face, where three men had come down at a run. ”Here,” he agreed. ”I was on the truck’s far side. I put three rounds into that slope and then I put more into it, and you were off the truck and in among them before my second magazine was seated. That’s in the report. The sergeant told me after that the colonel read my paragraph out at your board and the brigadier had a different one.” He said it without heat. ”I’ve walked this cutting nine times since. Every sweep south, I stop here. I’ve stopped being sure what I’m looking for.”

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What did you find. The afternoon after.

”Where they’d waited.” Bram pointed up the west face, to a shelf under an overhang that was invisible from the road unless you knew to look. ”Two men’s worth of waiting, two days of it. Cold rations, a scrape for sleeping, a place to lie and watch this road. They had a view of the mouth and none of the walls, and they didn’t need one.” He lowered his hand. ”The sergeant put it in the log as a Foundry security element lying up. I put it in mine differently. Those three weren’t hiding from the compound. They’d come out of it.”

The brigadier called them a security element too.

”The brigadier called them what let him argue the thing he wanted to argue.” Bram shrugged one shoulder. ”I was a rifleman in a room full of officers. Nobody was asking what I’d put in mine.”

He stood on the spot a moment longer. His ribs itched under the harness strap along the line a man improvising with a knife had opened there, and he registered the itch and let it be an itch. The Sight sat available, the way it always did; he could have turned it on Bram and read whatever sat under the report, and he didn’t. He wanted, he found, to be told.

* * *

The compound came up out of the country an hour on, and it was smaller than he had carried it.

From the south approach it was a set of walls the color of old bone, with the Dominion insignia scorched off every surface that faced the road and the ghost of it under the scorching if you knew what shape to look for. The same color as a pin on a wall map two provinces south, and he understood now that whoever had chosen that pin had seen this place. A gatehouse with no gate. A water tower. The long low block where the vaults had been, its roofline broken in one place by whatever had brought the site down eleven days before a squad had come through the door.

He had spent eleven years inside those walls and had never once seen them.

Bram stopped the truck a quarter mile short and did not take the section closer. ”We don’t go in. Standing order since the sweep. It’s logged as cleared, and the colonel at the base wants it to stay logged that way rather than have somebody find out otherwise the hard way.” He walked Rook forward on foot instead, along the road’s edge, to a culvert where a drainage channel passed under the approach.

”Look at the mud.”

Rook looked. Boot prints, many, some over others. A vehicle’s twin tracks, narrow, entering the channel where it dropped below the road’s sightline and following it toward the compound’s south wall, where a service gate he had never known existed sat open on one hinge.

”That culvert doesn’t show from the gatehouse. Or it didn’t, when the gatehouse had people in it. The guard positions were sited to watch the road, and the channel runs under the one stretch the positions couldn’t cover. You’d have to have stood in the gatehouse to know that.” Bram crouched and put two fingers beside the freshest print without touching it. ”These are days old. They come and go. They use the service gate and not the main one, and they park where the water tower would have hidden them from the old watch post on the north wall. Nobody scavenging a ruin knows where the dead guards couldn’t see.”

You’re saying they know the compound.

”Better than we do.” Bram stood and wiped his fingers on his trousers. ”Corps has a word for them now — remnants, the major says, like something left in the bottom of a pot. Everyone at the base still says stragglers. Stragglers don’t come back to the one building everyone knows to look in. People come back to a house they own.” He looked at the walls, then at the mask. ”Whoever’s running that valley the major’s been watching — some of them stood in that gatehouse. Some of them knew you were in there before we did.”

He didn’t write anything. The service gate hung on its hinge. Somewhere behind it were rooms he could have walked to blind, and he had no intention of proving that to anyone, and Bram, who had been at the door when those rooms opened, didn’t ask him to.

* * *

They marked the culvert, the tracks, the gate, and the private with the grease pencil put a number on his sleeve and read it out. ”Fourteen vehicle crossings since the last sweep, Corporal, four of them fresh.” They walked back to the truck. Bram waited until the section was aboard and then didn’t get in.

”Something I should have said at a base gate and didn’t.” He said it to the road, and then made himself say it to the mask. ”You saved Voss’s life twice before noon that first day. I had a rifle on you at the tailgate ten minutes after the first time, and I’d have had it up after the second if I’d had a hand free, and I walked out of a base yard without a word to you, and I left before dawn the morning you shipped so I wouldn’t have to decide whether to say one.” He stopped. ”The rifle was right, with what I knew. I know what the rest of it was.”

It was a debt.

”It’s still a debt.” Bram’s jaw did the thing it had done at the tailgate. ”Saying so doesn’t square it. You’re in my section till dusk. You should know where I stand without having to read it off me with — whatever you read things with.”

I wanted it in words.

Bram looked at that for a moment. ”All right,” he said. ”It’s said.” He climbed into the cab. Then, through the open window, not looking back: ”Voss is at the base. Same truck. She asked me, if I ever ended up standing near you again, to tell you it’s still running. I said I wouldn’t. Consider that I didn’t.”

The truck pulled out. Rook rode in the bed with his back to the tailgate and the compound at his shoulder, bone-colored, getting smaller, and the private licked his grease pencil and started the tally over at one.