Subject Zero: Faceless

Marrow gave the order at the morning brief in the same voice he used for the supply tally.

”The reconnaissance section reports the gate opens for inbound traffic between midnight and three. I want it watched from closer than the ridge. There’s a roadman’s hut on the corridor a half-mile short of the wall. Stone, roof gone, the only cover on that stretch. Third Squad and the section go up at dusk with a relay and hold it till first light. Lieutenant Osei has the element. Observe, count, report. If they come out for you, you fight from the walls and you hold.” He looked up from the survey. ”Questions.”

Osei had one. ”The company, Colonel.”

”The company is where I’ve put it.” Marrow moved his stone to the next item.

Rook watched Osei decide not to ask what that meant. She had been given an order with a hole in it, and she wrote it in her book without looking at the hole, and closed the book.

He wrote nothing. The company had been moving at night for two days, in fours and fives, and he had counted the tents that stayed dark after and not asked anyone where the men in them had gone. It had seemed, at the time, like the colonel’s business.

* * *

The hut was four walls of fieldstone and a doorway with no door, sited where the corridor’s last bend put the gatehouse in view a half-mile on. They reached it at last light and Osei put the section on the north wall and the squad on the east, Rook at the north corner where the two met, because that was where she put him, and a different private of Bram’s lay in the doorway with the relay and the glass, the grease pencil inherited along with the tally.

The valley’s ward line came up at dark, one thread from end to end. They watched it for three hours. Nothing moved on the road.

Then the gate opened, and nothing came in through it.

They came out. Rook had them before the private did — the spacing, the patience, the wrongness of people crossing open ground as if it were theirs — and he had the hum before the shapes. This time there were two of it. Two arcs of four cylinders each, carried between pairs of men at a walk, one on the road and one along the slope east of it, and behind each arc a knot of men who carried no rifles at all. Rope. He knew the coils by their weight on the shoulders that carried them.

Forty, more. Two screens. Rope teams behind both. They’re not here to probe.

Wren took the slate, read it, and put the words into Osei’s ear, and Osei’s hand went up and came down, and the east wall opened at two hundred yards.

The dozen in front went to ground and answered as they had on the picket slope, short bursts walking along the stone, and the screens kept coming under it. At a hundred yards the two arcs set down, road and slope, thirty yards apart and thirty from the walls, and the thread came up between the cylinders — knee height, dull, humming at the baton’s pitch — and the rope teams stood up behind it and started forward at a walk.

”Rook.” Osei, beside him. ”No. Not into that. Rifle.”

He fired the rifle. He hit what he aimed at.

It was going to be enough or it was not. He had time to know that. The rope teams crossed twenty yards behind their line with rounds coming off the stone around them, and men went down among them and the rest kept walking, and Bram’s heavy rifle on the north wall found the road screen’s left carrier and the cylinder he had carried stayed standing on its legs where he had set it, humming, with nobody to lift it.

Then the slope lit up from the north.

Two guns, then four, from ground Osei had been told was empty — long bursts, laid across the front of the hut at knee height, walking the road and the slope together, and the rope teams were standing in it. A voice came out of the relay in the doorway without being called, level, from a mile away.

”Hut element, this is Command. Hold your walls. Do not withdraw. You are the fixing element. Company guns engaging. Acknowledge.”

The private looked at the relay. Osei took it out of his hand.

”Command, hut element. Say again fixing element.”

”You heard it. Hold.”

She held it. There was no other thing on that ground to do. The company’s guns worked the slope from the north for four minutes, and the remnants’ discipline held for two of them, and then it went — the two arcs lifted, one cylinder at a time, the thread going out between them, and the men who could still walk went backward toward the gate at a run, which Rook had never seen them do. They left the road screen’s fourth cylinder standing on its legs. They left nine men on the slope who were not going to stand up.

The company’s guns stopped. The gate closed. The ward line was whole from end to end.

”Positions.” Osei’s voice had gone to a place under the level one. ”Count.”

Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author’s preferred platform and support their work!

”Four and me,” Bram said. ”Nobody new.”

Hands along the east wall. Ilsen. Cade. Hollis. Rook. And Wren, sitting against the stone with her rifle across her lap and her left hand clamped around her right arm above the elbow, blood coming through the fingers in the ward light, saying, in a voice with too much air in it, ”Five. I’m five. I’m fine. It came from behind us.”

Ilsen was on her before she’d finished. Osei crossed the hut in three steps, looked at the arm, looked at the wall Wren had been kneeling behind — the east wall, with the enemy in front of it and the slope’s guns to the north — and for a moment said nothing.

Then she keyed the relay. ”Command, hut element. Enemy withdrawn to the gate. Nine of theirs on the ground. One device component abandoned intact at the road. One friendly wounded, upper arm, through and through, ambulatory.” She stopped. Rook watched her decide, as he had watched her decide on a picket slope, and then she said it. ”The round came from the north.”

The relay was quiet for a moment.

”Copied. Recover the component. Bring her in.”

* * *

Marrow had the cylinder on the map table when they came into the command tent, on a square of ground sheet, its casing split along one side where the heavy rifle’s round had found the carrier and gone on into it, a dull Core-light still guttering in the crack. Renner stood on the far side of it with her hands behind her back. She had come in after the guns, not before them; Rook had heard her sent for.

”Lieutenant.” Marrow didn’t sit. ”Report.”

”You have it, Colonel. You were on the relay.”

”I have what happened. I’d like it from you.”

Osei gave it. Two screens, rope, forty-plus, the walls, the rifle. The company’s guns from the north. Nine dead. The component. Wren. She gave the round’s direction as she’d given it on the relay, a bearing and no adjective, and then stood with her hands at her sides and waited for the question she was going to answer whether it was asked or not.

Marrow asked it. ”Say what you want on the record.”

”I want it on the record that I wasn’t told. I was given an order with the company left out of it and a private of mine was hit from ground I’d been told was empty. That’s the whole of what I want.”

”It’s on the record.” Marrow set both hands on the table’s edge. ”They read a squad’s posture as well as he reads a face. I’ve watched them do it twice. An element that knows it’s bait stands like bait, and they’d have watched it stand from the wall and gone back to bed. An element that doesn’t know stands like an element. So I didn’t tell you, and they came out, and for the first time on this front they’ve left their dead on the ground and one of those on my table.” He nodded at the cylinder. ”Corps has never held one. It’ll be south by morning.”

”For an arm.”

”For an arm, nine of theirs, and the first hard proof that they’ll spend numbers to get him. Which is the one thing I needed to know before I put a company under that wall.” Marrow’s voice did not rise or fall. ”I’d sign it again tonight. You’re entitled to ask me to sign it in front of you next time, and I won’t, for the same reason I didn’t this time.”

Osei glanced at the mask beside her, then back. ”Understood, Colonel. I’ll have my report on your table before first light.”

”Write it as you saw it.”

”I always do.” She said it without weight. ”That’s why you asked for us.”

Marrow let that stand. He neither confirmed it nor asked where she’d had it from, and Rook watched the colonel take the measure of a lieutenant who had just told him she knew the price she’d been bought at, and put it wherever he kept the things he’d have to answer for later.

”Dismissed. Not you,” Marrow said, as Rook stood. ”Major, I’ll keep him a minute.”

Renner went out behind Osei. She didn’t look at the cylinder as she passed it.

* * *

”Say it,” Marrow said.

You told me you issue conditions. He turned the slate. You didn’t issue this one.

”The condition was that you not know. I’d have told you afterward whatever happened; I’m telling you now. I’ll tell you the next part too, since you’ll work it out on the berm by midnight.” Marrow looked at the charge on the strap, then at the mask. ”I can’t spend you. That’s the whole difficulty of you. They won’t shoot you and I can’t afford to lose you, so you’re the one thing on this front nobody is permitted to spend. Which makes everyone standing next to you the currency. Osei knows it. She’d have known it by the second night without my help.”

He had carried Marrow, since a borrowed office at the Ninth Front, as a policy with a rank on it. A policy had not chosen which wall Wren knelt behind.

Then the next time you want to know what I’m worth to them, ask me.

”You’d tell me the truth. It wouldn’t be the same measurement.” Marrow straightened. ”Get some rest, or whatever it is you do instead.”

Rook wiped the slate and wrote one word on it and turned it, and Marrow read it and something at the corner of his mouth moved, once, and stopped.

Noted.

* * *

Hollis was on the sandbags outside the aid tent with his rifle across his knees and the valley’s ward line whole in front of him, and he moved along to make room before Rook could go in.

”Sten had a map,” he said, when Rook had sat. ”Survey sheet, good paper, a road drawn straight through a valley. Only the surveyor had never been in that valley. He’d drawn what needed to be there for the road to make sense. Sten kept it on top of the stack. Called it the most honest map he owned, because you could see exactly what the man wanted from the ground.” He looked at the wall. ”Marrow draws that kind. We’re the road.”

He said everyone next to me is currency.

”He’d know. He’s the one spending it.” Hollis was quiet a moment. ”Osei told you she knew. I heard her. I’ve been in that woman’s squad two years and I’ve watched her write things about you she didn’t like, twice, and tonight she said from the north in front of a colonel, and she’ll write it again on paper with her name under it. She’s never once written a thing Corps didn’t want. She’s about to.” He shouldered the rifle and stood, favoring the bad side. ”You should know what that costs a lieutenant, since it’s being spent on you. Go in. She’s awake, and she’s been asking Ilsen whether you’d come.”

He went in.

Wren was in the aid tent with her arm strapped across her chest and a medic’s stamp on her dressing, and Ilsen on the stool beside her, and she looked at the mask and said, ”Don’t. Whatever you’ve got on that slate. Ilsen’s already done the arithmetic and I’ve told him what he can do with it.”

”Nine for one, and a machine,” Ilsen said. ”I said it was a good rate. She threw a cup at me.”

”With the wrong hand. It went nowhere.” Wren settled back. ”I saw where it came from. I’ll say so when they ask. Somebody was going to be in that lane, and the lane was there because you were, and I knew that when I got on the truck. Hollis told me on the wall, the first night, what we’d actually been bought for.” She shut her eyes. ”It’s still my arm.”

It’s still your arm.

She didn’t see it. Ilsen read it to her, and she nodded once with her eyes closed, and kept them closed, and after a while her good hand let go of the dressing.