Ember Legion

The night the grid tripped, Snaptooth did not attack.

That much caught Chen Jin off guard. After that howl the whole port had stayed black till morning, and outside the wall there was only the sound of claws on the ground, back and forth, like something pacing the walls. Small bands tried the wall twice—both times at the east gate, a dozen or so apiece, claws barely hooked in the mortar joints before reloaded rounds slapped them back. They withdrew in good order too. Formed units: not one came up.

Chen Jin spent half the night crouched on the north wall. No fires in the dark—you worked by ear alone. One circuit of claw-scratches ran the better part of half a watch, unhurried; but along the north wall, right where the breach faced, the steps would slow half a beat. A pause. Then on. He counted three circuits, and all three did it. He put down his field glasses, and the cold climbed the back of his neck layer by layer—it wasn’t patrolling. It was picking its spot.

The panel’s glow sat harsh and bright in all that black. He thumbed it to its lowest setting and left it unopened; he’d rather not look. The soldiers huddled in the dark along the wall, and from inside came the creak of the reloading press crank, groan and groan, slower than it ran by day—the hands on the crank were frozen stiff.

It was waiting. Waiting for the lights in the city to die all the way down. Waiting for the people inside to break first.

The next morning the meeting convened at the old customs house. Twice the usual crowd, nobody late, and nobody taking the front seats. Zhou Zhengting spread the intelligence across the table: the outposts around the orbital port had all gone silent overnight; fire was up toward the berth works, smoke still hanging there at midday; and out toward the port district the swarm’s columns stretched to the horizon—what went in never came out.

”What about the evacuation ship?” someone asked.

Nobody took it. Zhou Zhengting turned a page in the master register and flattened his voice. ”At two in the morning it killed every light aboard. There’s no sign of it on any orbit now.”

The room stayed quiet a long time. A ship that hadn’t slowed down in seven hundred years, playing dead. Old Lu, who ran the storehouses, lifted his teacup lid and set it back, set it back and lifted it again—the seventh time he caught his own hand midair.

From a corner, a mutter: ”If the ship isn’t coming, what are we holding the wall for?”

”What about a message to the shelter district—ask them for men?” someone said, low. This time even the man who’d muttered didn’t take it up. What the shelter district was like, every man in that room knew without saying.

”Whether the ship comes is the ship’s business,” Chen Jin said. ”People are still alive, so the wall still matters. And there are still our own people inside the orbital port—berth crews, warehouse men. I’m going in after them.”

Zhou Zhengting pressed his pencil stub down on the map. ”Tighten the lines. Go get them—back by noon. The north wall goes to Lei Changgeng.” The tip snapped off against the map, dead center on the port district.

No bugs blocked the road out to the orbital port. The main columns of the swarm came streaming down the trunk road deep into the port district, wave after wave, and they did not so much as glance at the little squad—what they wanted was bigger than people. The Ember Guard hugged the drainage ditch for a good mile. The first thing they found was a searchlight rig, toppled into the ditch, its lamp lens shattered across the mud.

Farther on, the berth works stood half-built, concrete still wet, claw prints stamped all over the boards. The work sheds had their roofs peeled off; several of the sealed crates had been smashed apart, regulation paper seals still nailed to the planks, contents strewn across the ground. The enforcement men had gotten there first and roped off the whole crossing—nobody allowed close for a look. Inside the rope line lay a few things nobody could put a shape to anymore. One of the young enforcement men crouched outside the rope, throwing up; when he finished, he wiped his mouth and went back to standing post.

They found the men in the freight corridor. Twenty of them, tool kits hugged to their chests, two days on one sack of raw rice. The sack had come down the line to the last man with only a handful left in it, the top rolled down three times. The old-timer leading them knew the dark-gray armor on sight and pulled himself up the wall to his feet. First words out of him: ”The ship? They said when it came, we’d go—”

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”The ship left a long time ago,” Chen Jin said.

He regretted it the moment it was out. He spent the walk back trying to find a better way to say it. He never found one.

The old man didn’t cry and didn’t curse. He cinched his tool kit tighter on his shoulder. ”Moving. Gear stays with us—it’s company property. Lose it, you pay for it.” Behind him a young worker counted heads front to back—twenty—and reported it after every count. Some of them looked first at Chen Jin’s gun, then into the black throat of the freight corridor, and nobody asked how one sack of rice had carried twenty men through two days.

The corner of his vision queued it up:

[Humans saved +20]

On the road back he counted heads twice. Twenty, every one. But yesterday alone, the north wall had carried eleven down. Saved and not saved—he didn’t know how to run that ledger, and the system didn’t teach it. The panel only logged the ones he pulled out, never the ones he didn’t. He walked at the tail of the column and didn’t stop counting until the third pass.

That night, Snaptooth attacked.

Three faces at once: the north wall taking the main weight, one push at the east gate, another along the wall by the port district. And the bugs were different that night—four waves, fifteen minutes a wave, the changeovers coming clean: the spent wave walked off in whole units, the next came up pressing on their heels. The men on the wall had one shift, and it held wave after wave. From the east gate Lei Changgeng’s roar came down the line: ”These things are rotating shifts! The goddamn bugs are rotating shifts!”

The north wall was still the main fight. Deep in the night, the firing at the breach went suddenly quiet—not because the bugs had pulled back, but because every man on the wall had stopped to watch the same thing: the corpses paving their approach were stacking upward this time. Not packing into the ditch—piling high, layer biting into layer, a slope taller than the parapet, squared on the breach, inching toward the wall. The bugs at the bottom weren’t all dead; still biting, and so the pile kept growing on its own. A corpse ramp. Snaptooth didn’t want a gap anymore. It meant to build itself a ramp up the whole face of the north wall.

”They’re using their own for footing,” the young Guard beside him said, voice gone thin.

”People use sandbags,” Chen Jin said. ”Same math. Burn the root of it.”

He lay along the parapet and set the thermal lance on the merlon. He opened the flow full and the recoil drove into his shoulder joint—through two layers of armor it still knocked him sore—and the scorched-shell stink rolled in on the wind, down the throat, thick enough to squeeze a man’s eyes shut. The blue flame swept along the ground and burned a trench of fire through the ramp’s base.

The half-built slope lost its footing and the whole thing came down, and the bugs underneath went to pieces in the crush. He burned two more passes into the confusion, merlon bricks baking so hot he felt it through his gloves. The firelight reached out two hundred paces, and the standing shape out there had not moved.

It never came up. A full night of assault, and it never lifted a claw of its own—only, when the ramp came down, it gave one long call: three short, one long. The howl rolled over, wall bricks humming, brick chips dancing on the parapet, and no man on the wall said a word. A taskmaster’s call.

The swarm drew off before dawn. Over at Wen Heng’s station the lamps went from two to four—wounded had doubled, and litters lined the road outside the shed. The reloaded-round count came up, and Zhou Zhengting held the sheet a long time without speaking: one night had burned through three days of the press’s output. All he added at the end was, ”The copper stock holds another month.” Nobody asked what happens after the month.

The tally came up at first light:

[Night tally: Hound-class x9, War-hound class x1, Humans saved x10]

[Embers: 800]

Eight hundred. Chen Jin opened the STORE—the lance still listed at 150. One for Lei Changgeng: 150. One for the breach: 150. One for each of the twelve Ember Guard: 1,800. By his quick count, one night of killing came up short of arming even half a unit—a war-hound was worth fifty, and it took fifteen hounds to buy one lance. He killed the panel. A dozen steps on, he opened it again and looked. The number hadn’t moved. Eight hundred. It wasn’t close.

He walked the east end on rounds. The swarm’s withdrawal had run toward the port district, columns moving in good order, like the night Grey Jaws came. Out on the high ground past the east gate, Lei Changgeng suddenly pulled him by the sleeve and pointed down at the moat.

A skin of bug husks rode the water, drifting downstream with the current. Not fast, but never stopping. The black water was moving, and the shadows under the surface ran far longer than the husks.

”They didn’t all leave,” Chen Jin said.

Lei Changgeng had roared all night; his voice was wrecked through, air hissing around the words. He watched that one turning husk for a long time, watched it go under, then ground his cigarette out on his boot sole. ”The water east of the city. Where does it go?”

”The shelter district.”

Lei Changgeng didn’t ask anything else. The wind came up the slope with a smell of standing water. The two of them stood on the high ground a while, watching the black water run east, unhurried.