Chapter 554 - 553: The Underside

Chapter 554: Chapter 553: The Underside

Location:Wild Confederacy — the northern flats, bore site, 8 km northeast of Windbreak

Date/Time:TC1857.03.06 – TC1857.03.11

The slurry got into everything, and by the fourth day Silas had stopped being able to taste anything else.

It went into the water. It went into the bread. It was in the corners of his mouth when he woke and it was on the rim of every cup on the site, a fine gray silt with a flat mineral flavor and something bitter under it from whatever the Federation put in the mix to keep it from setting, and Alek Voss had told him on the second day that you never lost the taste, you only stopped noticing, and that this took about nine years.

He would have put up with a great deal worse.

Because it was going down.

Thirteen meters by that evening. Thirteen meters of open hole in a material that had eaten a driven casing in the west yard and killed a man in a trench at Windbreak, and the slurry stood in the pipe with its dull skin on top, and the walls stayed where they were, and every meter of it was a thing Silas had failed to do by himself for four months and had watched somebody else do in four days.

He had said so, out loud, on the first evening. Alek Voss had looked genuinely puzzled and said that Silas had built a test column that told them precisely what the ground did, and that this was the entire job, and that the rest was just plumbing.

***

Ilva Merrit came in on the fifth morning with fourteen people and the face of somebody who had walked the whole north road to be somewhere she did not want to be.

She looked at the rig for about a minute. Then she looked at the ground around it, and then at the path from the tents to the rig, and then she said the first useful thing anybody had said to Silas since he arrived.

"Where’s your wood?"

"We’ve a deck round the rig."

"You’ve a deck round the rig." She walked it. "That’s twelve paces across and there’s ninety paces of open dirt between it and where your people sleep. What do you do when you’re standing in the middle of that?"

"We haven’t —"

"No. You haven’t." She turned around. "Right. Everybody who isn’t holding something."

They laid board road until dark and most of the next day, out of shuttering, out of crate lids, out of the sides of two supply wagons that Maren Holt took apart with her hands in a way that made three of the Millford people go and stand somewhere else. A lane, plank-wide and doubled, from the sleeping tents to the rig deck, with a spur to the mixing pit and a spur to the latrines because Ilva Merrit said that was where people died.

Silas walked it that evening from end to end, and it was a good piece of work, and it was only when he was standing at the far end looking back along it that he understood what he was looking at.

A road. One lane wide. Between two places, with nothing on either side of it that anybody could stand on.

He went and found Ilva Merrit and said it to her, because he had learned in the west yard that saying the uncomfortable thing early was cheaper than saying it later.

"I know," she said. "I thought about it while we were laying it. There isn’t a better answer, and I’ve been looking for one since Millford." She was eating and did not stop. "You can have a corridor, or you can have nowhere to put your feet. I’d rather the corridor, and I want it in whatever you write down that I knew."

***

They came at the turn of the night, in the hours when nobody is properly awake, and there was nothing to hear.

The first anybody knew was one of the Millford people at the mixing pit saying, quite conversationally, "That’s them," and then saying it again much louder.

Silas got out of the tent with his coat half on, and the cold hit him, and he could not see anything at all. No lamps out beyond the board road. The flats went out into black in every direction and the only lit thing on the continent was the rig deck, and Ilva Merrit’s people were already moving and shouting the same word over and over — boards, boards, get on the boards — and Silas got onto the boards.

Then the lamp swung, and he saw one.

Longer than the swarm things had been described. Lower. It came out of the dark at the edge of the light with four legs working and two more limbs folded up against its front like a held breath, and it did not make any noise going over the fill at all, which should have been impossible, because Silas had spent four days listening to boots make noise going over the fill.

Six of them. He counted six and then stopped counting because one came onto the board road.

Onto it. Not across it. It put itself lengthwise along the lane, low, and went up the boards toward the tents with its body fitting the width of the lane as though the lane had been measured for it.

"Off the road —"

That was Ilva Merrit, and it was already too late for two people at the far end who did the correct thing and stepped aside, off the wood, into ground that took their feet, and the thing did not even slow down for them.

The folded limbs came out then, and Silas understood the shape of the whole night in about a second and a half.

They were long. Longer than the legs, jointed backward, and they did not need the animal to leave the lane to use them — it stayed low and centered on the planking and reached out sideways into the dark on either side, into the ground nobody could stand on, and took a man off the fill at the full stretch of them without breaking stride. It did not hunt across the flats. It hunted along the road and fished off both sides of it.

They had built the only footing for two hundred paces and then walked up and down it all day marking it out for whatever had been watching.

***

The measure was correct. Silas would be certain of that afterward and would say so in every room that asked him.

Low. From the side. Under the body where the plate turns beneath. Two fingers of feathered edge, then hide.

Ilva Merrit went in on the second one exactly as her own sheet said, from the wood, with footing under her, bent, opening pulling — and Silas was six paces away with a mallet in his hands and saw the whole of it, and saw her knife stop.

Not slip. Stop. It went in the width of the blade and met something and did not go on, and she came out from under it fast and flat on her back on the boards and shouted the thing that saved everybody else on that site.

"It’s closed underneath. It’s plated underneath — don’t go low, it’s closed —"

Somebody down the lane was still going low. Silas heard it happen to him.

***

After that it became a thing with no shape to it.

Alek Voss got two engineers onto the rig deck and put the mixing frame across the gap at the head of the lane, which was the single most useful thing anybody did that night, because it made the road narrow and the road was where they had to fight. Maren Holt came off the deck with a two-meter length of casing stock and made it into something else on the way — Silas watched her do it and could not afterward describe it, only that the pipe went into her hands round and came out of them with an edge on it, and that it took her about the time it takes to cross a room, and that her nose was bleeding when she finished.

She put the edge into the joint behind the head-plate of the one on the road and killed it.

"Neck works," she said, to nobody. "Neck still works. Pass it down."

Neck works went down the lane and up it and out to the mixing pit, and it was the only doctrine anybody had, and people used it, and some of them got close enough to use it, and some of them did not.

Silas killed nothing. He wants that written down as well. He held a lamp up on the deck for an hour and a half with his arms going dead, and he handed tools to people, and twice he grabbed somebody by the collar and pulled them back onto the wood, and one of those two lived.

The bite went through Alek Voss’s forearm above the wrist at some point Silas did not see, and the man kept working for another twenty minutes and then sat down on the deck very suddenly and looked at his own hand with a kind of professional interest and said, "That’s gone off, then."

It had not bled much. That was the thing about it. A small wound and nothing in it, and the cold went up the inside of the bone the way the Ferrow’s Rest sheets said it would, and by dawn the arm was warm to the touch and answered nothing at all from the elbow down.

***

Maren Holt died at the head of the lane about half an hour before the sky changed.

She had made three more edges by then out of whatever was to hand, and given two of them away, and she was standing at the narrow place with the mixing frame at her back when a second one came up the boards behind the first. Nobody had thought about a second one coming up the boards. There was room on that lane for exactly one of them and one person, and she had known that when she took the position and had taken it anyway, and the arithmetic of it was that the first one had to be killed before the second arrived, and it was not.

Ilva Merrit went in to pull her out.

She got a hand on her. Silas saw that much from the deck with the lamp in his numb arms — he saw Maren Holt already down and Ilva Merrit with one hand in the back of her collar and both heels braced on the wood, doing the exact thing she had been sent the length of a continent to do, which was to get somebody onto wood.

The board she was braced on lifted at the far end.

It should not have. It was doubled, and it was pinned. But the fill under it had been walked on all night by things that weighed what these weighed, and the material had gone where restrained material goes, which is sideways, and there was nothing under that end of the plank anymore.

She went off the road backward with Maren Holt’s collar still in her hand.

***

It was over about twenty minutes later, and Silas has never been able to say why.

They killed five. He is sure of five, because he counted the carcasses himself when the light came and made a mark for each one on the back of a mix sheet before he let anybody move them.

Six came. Five were killed.

The sixth went back out onto the flats sometime in the last part of it and nobody shot at it and nobody chased it, and it was not driven off — it stopped, and turned, and left, with no damage on it that anybody could see. Silas asked everybody on that site over the next two days whether they had seen it hurt. Nobody had.

He wrote that down and left the column beside it blank, because Ostrek’s method had been read out to him twice by Raven personally and he could hear her doing it.

***

The dead were: Ilva Merrit. Maren Holt. Two of the nine engineers. Four of the fourteen Millford road people.

Eight.

Seventeen more hurt, including Alek Voss’s arm, which Silas listed separately because he did not know what column it belonged in.

And the bore was fine.

That was the part he could not get past. The rig stood untouched on its deck through the whole of it because nothing had gone for it — not one of them had so much as brushed the pipe — and when the light came up, the slurry was standing in the casing at the same level it had been at midnight, with its dull skin on top, holding a hole open in a material that eats holes.

Thirteen meters of the thing a man died at Windbreak for and Torva died learning how to hold. Perfectly intact. In the middle of eight bodies.

***

The ten Millford road people who were still alive buried their four themselves and would not be helped with it, and afterward they sat in a row on the end of the board road with their boots hanging over the edge and did not talk to anybody from the Corps for a day and a half. It was not blame. Silas made himself go and check that it was not blame, because it would have been easier to assume and worse to be wrong about, and what one of them told him was that they had come north to teach a thing and the thing had been out of date before they arrived, and they were working out what that made them.

He did not have an answer. He wrote the sentence down instead, because it belonged in the record more than most of what was going in it.

He went over the carcasses with Alek Voss on the second morning, because Alek Voss could not use his right arm and refused to be useless with the left, and because somebody had to, and Silas was the only person on that site whose job was looking at things.

They turned the first one with poles.

The underside was plated. Not thinly and not as an afterthought — the chitin carried right across the belly in the same offset courses as the back, thinner than the dorsal but continuous, with the seam running down the centerline where two courses met and overlapped. There was no flank. The place where the plate had turned under on every animal anybody had ever cut was now the place where the plate met more plate.

"That’s a month old at most," Alek Voss reported. He was sitting on a crate with his dead hand in his lap. "Look at the seam. It’s tidier than the back is. Whoever did it did the back a long time ago and did this last week and hasn’t got bored of it yet."

Silas measured the underside plate at seven points and wrote every number down.

Then he wrote the two lines that mattered and made himself write them plainly.

The flank measure is dead. It is dead because there is no flank, not because the ground was wrong. The ground being wrong killed people at Windbreak in the second month. This is a different reason, and the sheet must say so, or people will read the amendment and think planking is the answer, and planking is not the answer; it is only a floor.

The neck joint still works. That is the whole of what we have.

He looked at that for a long time before he added the third line, and he added it because Ilva Merrit had asked for something like it about a road, and had died before anybody had written anything down for her at all.

Whoever reads this: we did the measure correctly. Every one of us. It was correct five weeks ago. Somebody should say plainly in the next sheet that being correct is a thing with a date on it.

***

Windbreak sent a cart on the third morning, and Kael-Ren came with it, which nobody had expected, and stood on the board road for a while looking down its length at the marks the animal had left going up it.

"You built a lane," he said.

"We did."

"For yourselves."

"Yes." Silas did not defend it. "The woman who laid it knew what it was while she was laying it and asked me to write down that she knew. I’ve written it down. She’s under the tarpaulin at the end of the second row."

Kael-Ren went and looked, and came back, and stood with his hands in his coat for a while.

"You’ll want to stop," he said. "Sink no further. Take your people home and come back in the spring with soldiers."

"Alek Voss says the hole closes if we stop. The slurry will hold it for a week, and then we lose it, and we start again in the summer." Silas heard his own voice do something he did not like and let it. "We are thirteen meters into a hole that people have now died for, and I do not know how to be the man who says we go home. So I’m going to ask you instead, because it’s your ground and the letter says you set the method, and I’d rather it was your name on it than mine."

Kael-Ren looked at the rig for a long moment. Then out at the flats, gray to the horizon, perfectly even.

"Sink it," Kael-Ren answered. "And put my name on that, in writing, tonight, where your people can read it. If it’s my ground, then it’s my name."