Chapter 118: The Cost of Staying

The juveniles went first, and they went wide.

That was the thing I hadn’t planned for and should have. Two of them broke left along the southern fence and three went right, and inside forty seconds I had animals testing four separate points of a perimeter I’d spent all morning funnelling into one.

"Otto — right! All of it!"

The clatter came round: steel pipe on an empty drum, flat and hard and nothing like an animal. The three on that side shied off the fence into the open, one of them kept going and didn’t come back, and that was as much as noise was ever going to buy me.

Then the matriarch came.

There is no describing the noise properly. It isn’t a thunder. It’s a fast heavy percussion with the ground under it, and it arrives ahead of the animal, and every man-made object within thirty metres starts talking at once.

She hit the vehicle gate at a full run.

Sefton’s repair did what Sefton had promised: it held a wind. The chain snapped, the left leaf went flat, the hinge post came out of the socket with a sound like a bone leaving a joint, and my ugly old welds — every one of them, along with my private opinion of myself as a competent man — bent and split and folded up like foil.

She came through into the lane going too fast to choose.

The pinched left half turned her a quarter-step right, exactly as designed, which I had about half a second to enjoy.

"Mira!"

She pulled.

Four hundred kilos of press bed came off its post and swung down the arc of the cable and caught the matriarch across the ribs behind the shoulder — and the sound of that was flat and dull and enormous, the noise of a hammer hitting wet ground, and the whole storage row screamed on its bolts.

It didn’t stop her. It turned her. Her near foreleg went off the trench lip into a metre of black water and she went down onto that shoulder with her hindquarters still driving, and for one perfect second I thought we had her.

Then the cable ran back and the anchor plate tore out of the post.

Half the plate. One bolt sheared and the other bent, and the steel section slewed, and the whole assembly started to slide toward the trench with the matriarch already fighting to get her leg out of it.

Four metres from her head, Sefton Grier came out from under the loading beam with the secondary line in both hands and put his whole sixty-something kilos backward onto it.

The section stopped sliding. Stopped, and stayed put, and pinned.

He didn’t hesitate and nobody told him to, and he did it because his own people were behind that wall. Whatever my face is worth, it had nothing to do with it.

I was firing by then.

You do not shoot a Stoneback in the front. The frontal plate on that skull was four centimetres of layered keratin over bone; my rifle would have made a scratch and a noise. What you shoot is joints and eyes and the soft line under the jaw, and to do that you need an angle, and to get an angle you have to move.

Predator’s Veil broke on my first shot, as it always does, and after that I was just a man on a roof.

Feline Grace kept me on the roofline while I worked along it — six metres, drop, four metres, drop, the impacts going through my knees instead of my back. What it couldn’t do anything about was my hands. Both palms had opened on the first cable haul, the recoil went into a shoulder that had been complaining since the flooded zone, and by the fifth shot my group had opened up to something I’d have been ashamed of a week ago.

I got her left eye on the seventh round and her right hock on the ninth, and she screamed and heaved and got the foreleg out of the trench.

And then she stopped fighting the lane.

I saw her do it. That’s the thing about an animal that has lived seventeen levels and got the scars to show for it — she stood in the middle of a trap taking fire from above, and she looked at the pinch, and the trench, and the swinging steel, and she turned away from all of it and went for the east block wall.

The east block. Ground floor. Sleeping rooms, and the site office beyond, and Nell in a doorway with a shotgun that would annoy this thing and nothing more.

I was on the wrong roof with the good angle.

I went off the storage row into the yard — three and a half metres, and Feline Grace put my feet under me and took most of it, and my left ankle still turned enough to tell me about it for a week — and ran diagonally across open ground to get in front of her.

That was the closest I have ever been to something that size while it was still working properly.

She came round the corner of the trench with her blind side toward me, dragging the pinned steel, and the leg I’d shot folded on the turn. It only folded for a moment. It was enough. Her head came down and her shoulder dropped and the long white scar on her flank rolled up toward me, and behind the shoulder, where the great fused plate ended and the ribs began, there was a hand’s width of scarred grey hide.

I put three rounds into it from four metres. The recoil split my right palm all the way open, the rifle slipped from my grip, and she was still coming, so I took the long knife off my hip and went in under the swing of her head and put it into the same place to the hilt, twice.

The second one went in somewhere it mattered.

She went down onto her knees a metre and a half from the east block wall, and her weight took her the rest of the way sideways, and the yard shook, and then she was just very large and very still and I was on my back three metres away with no memory of getting there.

The rest of the herd scattered inside a minute. They didn’t need killing. Whatever holds a group like that together had been standing in my yard, and now it wasn’t.

❖ ❖ ❖

[Stoneback Matriarch — Level 17 — defeated.]

[Experience awarded.]

That was all. No level. Nothing else. I read it from the ground and put it away.

The cost took the rest of the day to count.

The vehicle gate was scrap; not damaged, scrap, and would need rebuilding from the posts out. There was blood in the yard in a quantity that made two of the children cry and one of them go very quiet, which was worse. I’d fired twelve rounds. Sefton had a rope burn across both palms bad enough that he couldn’t hold a cup that evening and told everybody it was nothing, which it wasn’t, and let Mira dress it, which was the real answer. My right hand had opened all the way across and needed six stitches, which Mira put in on the trench lip while Nell held my forearm still.

The carcass was worth more than everything it had broken. A Level 17 core the size of a fist. Plate, hide, tusks, and something over four hundred kilos of usable meat if we butchered it properly and fast, which meant we were butchering it whether anybody wanted to or not.

I did not consume the core. I looked at it for a while — sat on the trench lip with it in my bandaged hand while the light went, thinking about how much easier the next month would be with it burned — and then I put it in the ring.

Nobody had to be organised. That’s what I remember most clearly about that evening. Sefton was on the gate posts with his hands wrapped, giving orders he couldn’t carry out. Nell had a fire going and water on before anyone asked. Mira went round every joint on the water line with her chalk to see what three tonnes of impact had done to it, and found two.

It was full dark before anyone stopped, and Mira sat down next to me on the trench lip with two cups of something hot and didn’t offer either of them for a while.

"Greyhaven’s still safer," she said at last.

"It is."

"In the abstract." She turned the cup in both hands. "It’s eleven thousand people, a wall, a militia and a market. It’s also a room we’d be assigned and a queue we’d stand in, and whatever work they’ve got left over for thirteen strangers with nothing to trade but a broken wagon."

I waited. She was building to something and she was doing it carefully.

"There’s a working water system here," she said. "There’s tanks, and land, and a fence I’ve now got opinions about. Sefton’s already cut the gate posts to length for tomorrow. Some of us have started fixing things, and it turns out that’s a hard habit to walk away from." She looked at me sideways. "So. What would it mean to stay for longer than one night?"