The cell reads eighty-one percent when I come out of the shoulder tunnel, and the valley is the colour it always is at this hour, which is no colour. Grey snow, grey sky, the far ridge a darker grey with two lights on it where their generator is venting. Twelve hundred metres of floor between us. I have run it forty times and I have carried a Core across it twice.
Vesk is on the net before I have taken a step. "Grid's up. They have a post on the moraine."
"Which end?"
"North. Just the one."
One post on the Rail means they are watching the Rail. It does not mean they are holding it. I drop coupling and let the shoulder take me.
The first thirty metres out of any base are the ones that decide the run. The shoulder at Tallow falls away at something like twenty degrees, packed hard by wind, and if you enter it on Traction you arrive at the bottom walking. If you enter it on Glide, feet together, weight back, the Drive does what it is for: the envelope lets go of the ground and the ground stops being a floor and becomes a direction. I am at sixty before the first undulation and ninety when the spur flattens out, and I have not touched the cell.
"Kestrel is out," Vesk says, to the team, not to me. "Longtail, go."
Longtail is the decoy and does not know it yet. That is not cruelty; it is the plan. Two Runners leave on two lines, and the defence commits to one, and the one it commits to is the decoy by definition. We have done it this way since the compact. Longtail takes the Floor, loud and wide and visible, and I take the Rail.
The Rail is the moraine crest along the eastern side of the valley, a ribbon of packed snow two metres wide that runs for eight hundred metres and drops, on average, the whole way. It is the fastest line on the map and everyone knows it, which is why you do not use it unless you know something they do not. What I know is that they have one post, at the north end, and one post sees one thing.
I Cut onto the crest off the last undulation, a lateral Burn to swing the Vector east without losing any of it, and the HUD ticks from ninety to a hundred and ten just from the drop. The cell reads seventy-six. The crest is good today. The wind has been from the west all week and the snow has packed into a surface like glass with grain in it, and I lean into the grain and the Drive hums the way it does when the coupling is low and the speed is high and nothing in the world is holding on to me.
At a hundred and forty the HUD marks the Break. It is a line on the speed readout and a tone in the helmet and a change in the way the envelope sounds, a stiffening, and after that everything I do costs more and buys more. Above the Break you cannot stop. You can only choose where you arrive.
"Longtail's got two on him," Vesk says. "Ranger and a Strider. They bit."
"Interceptor?"
"Not seeing one."
That is the sentence I do not like. A Concord base runs a Lantern Line: they seed the likely lines with sensors and they hold an interceptor at the intersection and they do not chase. If Vesk is not seeing an interceptor, it is because the interceptor is not moving, and an interceptor that is not moving is waiting.
I have the Rail. I do not have the ridge. Somewhere on the shoulder above the north end of the crest is a Vector Cannon that has been looking at this ribbon of snow since the match began.
There are two ways to run the end of the Rail. The safe one is to let the crest deliver you into the gully at its foot, lose forty in the compression, and climb the enemy spur on Burn under the turret. The other one is to Rise off the crest at its steepest point, four hundred metres out, and take the last of the valley in the air.
A Rise is a bet. You trade ground speed for altitude, and altitude is where the Vector Cannons live, and in return you arrive on a Burn Arc that a defender has to lead, and a defender who has to lead you can be wrong.
I Rise. Cell: sixty-one. The crest drops away under me and the valley opens, and for a moment I can see the whole of Tallow Reach the way it looks on the map: the Floor, with Longtail on it, a bright dot with two duller dots closing; the glacier to the north, seracs like broken teeth; their shoulder ahead and above, the generator vent, the turret, the black mouth of the Core Station tunnel. And, on the survey hut's roof on the far spur, a Bulwark, kneeling, with its mortar up.
That is not for me. A mortar is not a weapon; it is the last link in a chain, and the chain is not pointed at a Runner in the air.
The first round comes from the shoulder, not the hut. The Vector Cannon. I see it as a streak because a slug that fast is only ever a streak, and it passes a body-length in front of me, where I would have been if I had held the arc. I did not hold the arc. At the top of the Rise I put a lateral Burn into the envelope, half a second, just enough to bend the Vector two degrees south, and two degrees at a hundred and thirty is the difference between a Vector Hit on the ledger and a slug in the snow.
"Kestrel is above the Break, inbound," Vesk says, for the record.
Cell: fifty-two. The shoulder comes up fast. I Dive.
A Dive is committing. You put the nose down and let the gradient take you, and if there is ground under you in the wrong place, you are a mark on the telemetry. The shoulder above their tunnel is a snow-shelf on rock, and I have landed on it twice and eaten it once. I meet it at a hundred and twenty on Glide with the last of the Rise's altitude turned back into speed, and the shelf takes me like a hand, and I am across it and through the tunnel mouth before the turret has traversed.
The turret does not fire. It is off. Somebody has cut their generator.
That was Longtail. Longtail was never the decoy; the two lines were both real, and he took the Floor with a satchel and two escorts and a grudge, and while their Ranger and their Strider were running him down, he had already done what he came for. Vesk had told him. Vesk had not told me, because I did not need to know until I was in the tunnel and the turret was dead, and Vesk is a good sensor operator.
The Core Station is a chamber in the rock with one door I came through and one I will leave through, and in the middle of it is the cradle, and in the cradle is the Core.
I have never got used to it. It is the size of two fists and it is not machined; it has the sheen of something grown, the way a shell has, and it sits in its cradle with a shield over it that drops when a hand is on the release long enough. Eleven weeks in a crucible. One per Drive. Every operator on both sides of this valley is wearing one, and every one of them knows that the thing I am about to pick up is the only piece of them that cannot be replaced.
Three seconds on the release. Shield down. I take it. The HUD changes: CORE, and a timer, and the speed readout, which has never gone away and never will.
Cell: fifty-five. It has been recharging while I stood still. Everything you do standing still is paid for in a different currency.
"Kestrel has it."
"Copy. Their Strider's turning. Ranger's staying on Longtail. Out the back, Kestrel. Rail's closed now; they know."
Out the back is the snow-shelf again, then the glacier. The Serac Drop is a line I have never run with a Core. It is a chain of Burns across the ice-fall at altitude, and the last of it is a Dive down the glacier's face onto our own spur, with nothing left to land with. Nobody runs it under fire. That is the argument for it.
The chamber's rear door opens on the shelf and the shelf drops to the glacier's edge and I am on Glide before I have thought about it, because this is the part that is not thinking. Coupling low. Weight back. The ice is harder than the snow and gives more, and the seracs come up in a wall, and I Rise.
Cell: forty. Thirty-one. The first serac's shoulder takes my feet and gives them back. Twenty-four. The second is further, and the Burn is longer, and the envelope sings, and I look down at the crevasse field between them and it is blue and it goes down further than the light does. Eighteen.
"Incoming," Vesk says, and then the mortar lands.
It is not aimed at me. It is aimed at our generator, which is under the snow-shelf below our base, and the Bulwark on the survey hut has been kneeling there since the match began waiting for a Target Beacon to give it a solution. I saw the beacon's tone on the net twelve seconds ago and thought nothing of it, because I had a Core in my hands. Somewhere behind our shoulder a Strider I never saw put a marker where it needed to go and left, and their relay stayed up, and their Bulwark read the sky, and the round fell.
I see it hit from four hundred metres up. The snow-shelf over our generator lifts as a single white sheet and hangs and comes down. Our turret goes dark. On the net, two of ours are calling for repair, and Vesk is saying "beacon, find the beacon," and Longtail, who has just finished doing this to them, is quiet for a moment in a way I understand exactly.
This is what the chain feels like from the receiving end. Not a hit. A sequence you were not watching.
"Kestrel, they've got a second solution up. Do not land on the shelf."
The Serac Drop ends on the shelf.
Cell: eleven. The third serac. Then the face.
The glacier face at Tallow is three hundred metres of blue ice at fifty degrees, ending in the compression gully behind our spur. A Dive down it is a hundred and eighty, then two hundred, then whatever the ice says. With a Core the Drive is heavier, the envelope is fighting more mass, and the numbers are all worse, and there is nothing to do about it but lean.
I take the face. The HUD goes from the Break to a number I have seen twice in my life, and a tone I have never heard on this map, and the ice is a grey blur with the light in it and the compression is coming up faster than I can read it. The second mortar round lands on the shelf, exactly where the Drop ends, exactly where I would have been.
I do not land on the shelf. I Cut. The last of the cell, four percent, into a lateral Burn at two hundred and forty, which is not a manoeuvre the foundry rates, and the Vector bends and I come off the face sideways and hit the gully wall on Glide, and the wall takes it. All of it. There is a sound the envelope makes when it is holding a body together at the edge of what it can do, and the sound is not a sound so much as a pressure behind the eyes, and it stops, and I am on the gully floor at ninety with a Core and no cell and our Station's door forty metres away.
Traction. I walk the last ten metres. The Core goes into the cradle and the shield comes up and the HUD says what it says.
Cell: two. Then three.
Behind me, on the shelf, our Engineer is under the snow with a Repair Pack, pulling the generator back to life one plate at a time, and the enemy's beacon is still transmitting somewhere on our shoulder, and Vesk has found it and is telling Longtail where, and Longtail is already moving, because a Runner with nothing to carry is an infiltrator with a grudge. It is not over. It is a ledger. We are up one Core, and they are up one generator, and the Bulwark on the survey hut has not moved.
I stand in the door of the Station with the cell coming back and look across the valley at the Rail. Someone is on it. Small, fast, a Strider in grey. He has taken the crest the way I took it and he will Rise where I Rose, and above the north end, on our shoulder, Vesk has an interceptor who has been looking at that ribbon of snow since the match began.
"Grid's up," Vesk says.
I drop coupling.