Deathwatch (The Faded Earth Book 1)(24)
He didn’t leap. That would have been idiotic. The cable could hold the weight of his suit, but shock loading it was a good way to end up helpless and alone on the ground. Instead he walked to the edge, carefully playing out cable and maintaining tension on it, then allowed himself to tilt. Finding his balance while standing sideways on the outside of the wall would have been much harder without the AI in his armor.
He stood less than a yard from the side of the ladder. Eshton reached over his shoulder and pulled his blade, then swept it in a wide arc across the ladder to clear space.
“Start pulling!” he barked.
The ladder began to rise. Slowly, thanks to the weight of the Pales still on it, but it moved. His blade lashed out again as the head of another Pale came within reach. Its lifeless body tumbled down, smashing the Pale below it on the ladder free and sending them both spinning to the earth.
With a lurch, the ladder rose higher as his men hauled its suddenly reduced weight upward. Every time a Pale clinging to the rungs came within Eshton’s range, he lightened the load further.
Within thirty seconds, the ladder was atop the wall. His unit made satisfied noises over the channel, and he took a few seconds to take in the rest of the battle. Bursts of intense heat popped across his view as other Guards used their firearms, some for the first time in their careers. Every shot had to be accounted for, reports written, and explanations given. If ever there was a time to use them, this was it.
Other units mimicked his idea to pull the ladders up, though only one used his method. Two ladders down, one group had brute-forced a solution by hacking right through the top rung, then yanking the two sides of the ladder apart before lifting it up to repeat the process. He couldn’t help smiling at that. No matter how much you trained for finesse, give a man a suit of armor that gave him Herculean strength and he’d find a way to use it.
The rapid loss of the ladders didn’t stop the Pales. In what seemed eerily like a preset backup plan, they fell back on the usual method of scaling the wall. Bodies used other bodies as makeshift platforms, climbing atop each other.
He saw two markers where Watchmen had fallen or been pulled from the wall. The biomonitors in their suits showed flat lines where they lay on the ground.
“Fuck this,” Eshton said, not keying his mic. “I have a train to catch.”
On the general channel, he said, “Incendiaries! Now!”
There was a general mutter of unease at the order, not unexpected. Protocol dictated using them only when a population of Pales was trapped in an enclosed space. Otherwise you risked the burning metal spreading too thin and not killing them, which just left you with dying but furious Pales that were on fire.
From his perch on the side of the wall, Eshton tossed his entire load of incendiaries into the crowd. His throw was toward the back—he didn’t want them running off. The flare of burning magnesium from the ignition acted like a beacon for the others, and within seconds dozens more burning spheres rained down on the crowd.
A mist of blazing thermite whooshed out from the spheres, searing even stony flesh. Eshton silently thanked whatever power drove the universe for the rare kindness of not being able to smell what happened below.
*
“Took you long enough,” Stein said half an hour later. “Everything go okay?”
Eshton stepped out of his armor inside the Loop carriage and flopped unceremoniously down onto one of the bench seats. The surface was scorched, pitted, and scratched. One of the last standing ladders had been rushed at the last minute by terrified and furious Pales trying to escape the conflagration, arriving just as he was making his way past that particular stretch of wall. “We lost three. About half the Pales got away, but I know for a fact some of them are badly hurt. I don’t think they’ll take another run at us soon. I wouldn’t be surprised if they gave up and tried another Rez.”
“I’ve been getting reports,” Stein said, tapping the helmet in her lap. “Ladders? Thoughts on how exactly that happened?”
Eshton shook his head. “No. We haven’t done recon more than twenty miles west of here. This group probably came from the west. There could have been a supply of them, maybe an old shopping complex. I’m more concerned with how fast their learning seems to be accelerating. This wasn’t just using tools like we’ve seen before. They planned, recognized weak spots in our defense, even had contingencies.”
Stein’s frown was thoughtful. “Well, that’s fucking terrifying, isn’t it? I’ll check your video feed when the dust settles. You two have fun on your trip.”
Across from him, Beck frowned at this but said nothing. Stein locked her helmet back in place and keyed in several commands before exiting the carriage and sealing the door behind her.
“You lied to me,” Beck said as the carriage began moving down the track. A high pitched hum filled the space as the motors cycled up. “You deliberately made me complicit, then told your superiors so I’d be forced to join up.”
Eshton sighed, weary to his bones. “I did, yeah. I haven’t had much experience with the old man, but the others in the Movement have seen him do horrible things to keep our secrets. I didn’t want that to happen to you.”
She was quiet for a while, long enough to let Eshton start to drift toward sleep.
“Because I can’t handle even more stress right now, I’m going to let it be until after this meeting is over,” she said. “But know we’re going to have a talk afterward.”