Chapter 147: Sanctuary

I climbed up the top of the south tower at six in the morning, and the moment I did, the cold found the one gap between my collar and my neck.

Nia had said it last night with the wind in the trees behind her voice, "a very different story~", and she’d been right, which she usually is when the thing ends with people dying, so I hauled the M110A2 up the last of the stairs in one hand with a coffee in the other, sat down on the walkway with my back against three meters of concrete I’d paid for, and looked at what four and three-quarter million credits had actually bought me.

Honestly? They bought me a lot.

The wall was grey in the morning light, and it ran the whole fence line without a single break, north tower to south tower with the gate at the bottom of the drive between them, and behind it was forty-one acres of farm with a house and two greenhouses already fogged up from the inside and a pond steaming in the cold and a medical bay with the light already on in it, and thirty-one women who three weeks ago had been locked in shipping containers under a mafia building and now had a fortress.

I put the rifle across my knees and ran the numbers again. My brain doesn’t have an off switch for that, and I gave up looking for one a long time ago.

[Forty-three... Five dead in the yard. Three dead on the road. One’s in the barn with a knee that’s never gonna work again. That’s thirty-four left... That Hallam dude had noticed his guys weren’t coming back. So Hallam’s got two moves. He sits behind his trailers and waits for me to come to him, or he comes here.]

I looked down the state road, south, at nothing.

[I need him to come here. All at once... Every rig, every rifle, every guy who can hold one. Because if he comes in pieces, Nia picks the pieces off and he learns, and a dude who learns is a problem I don’t have time for... we still gotta hurry up to Leo’s place. But if he comes all at once, he hits this wall... he either breaks on it, or runs home.]

I smiled into my coffee and meant it.

[And home has Nia in it.]

"Morning." Ruth came up the tower stairs with the shotgun in one hand and no coffee, and looked at the road before she looked at me.

"Morning."

"You sleep?" Her eyes stayed on the road.

"A little."

"How little?"

"Enough." I took a sip so I wouldn’t have to say anything else.

"That means no." She sat down next to me on the freezing concrete without so much as a flinch, and for a while neither of us said anything, then she looked down at the rifle on my knees. "You planning on shooting somebody before breakfast?"

"Hopefully after."

"That sounds more reasonable." She nodded at that, and I’m pretty sure she’d expected worse.

"I try."

She looked over at the greenhouses, where a light was already on behind the fogged glass at six in the morning, and she smiled like she does right before she complains about somebody she likes.

"Bill’s awake."

"Of course she is."

"She says the tomatoes are growing too fast."

"She planted System seeds, Ruth. That’s what they do."

"I know what they do. I’m telling you what Bill said." She stood, grabbed the shotgun, and looked at me sitting there with my rifle and my coffee. "Breakfast in twenty minutes."

"Coffee first." I held the mug up at her.

She stared at me for a good long while.

"You’re strange."

"I’ve been told."

She went back down, and I looked at the road again, and there was still nothing on it.

[Not yet.]

At seven, I opened the Base Building Module on the wall and started on my second draft. The second draft was small, and small felt really good after the first one had been four million seven hundred and fifty-five thousand. This one was basically a rounding error next to that, and I still winced when the number came up, because I’m me.

-Ding!

{

Centralized Resource Exchange and Distribution Interface Terminal (C.R.E.D.I.T.)

Base Building Module: Defensive Supplementary Works

Tower Floodlight System (×2), high-output, directional, independent control from CCTV room: 84,000 Credits

Internal Gate Chicane, reinforced concrete barriers, anti-ram configuration: 72,000 Credits

Walkway Defensive Positions (×14), ballistic sandbag construction: 51,000 Credits

Medical Bay Security Door, reinforced steel, internal lock: 30,000 Credits

Gate Footing Reinforcement, stabilization of existing foundation: 51,000 Credits

Site Integration / Certification: 30,000 Credits

TOTAL: 318,000 Credits

}

[Three hundred and eighteen grand to make the four million actually work... still one of the cheaper things I’ve bought all week...]

"Wizard’s doing another one," Bill announced, walking past the blue field with a tray of seedlings held out in front of her with both hands, and she didn’t stop, she didn’t even look properly, and nobody else did either. Yesterday thirty-one women had stood in the snow and touched a blue wall, and today a blue wall was furniture.

The fields went up over the gate, along the walkway, under both towers, and on the medical bay’s door, and the whole lot took under an hour, and when they dropped there were seventeen sandbagged positions along the walkway and two floodlights up on the towers the size of car bonnets, aimed straight down the drive, and a row of concrete blocks just inside the gate that zigzagged so nothing on wheels could take a straight run at it.

Leo came over at the fastest speed two cracked ribs and a Healing Stim allowed, which is slow whether he likes it or not, and he stood and looked at the blocks for a while with his head on one side.

"What’s that for?"

"So if a rig gets through the gate, it can’t get a straight run at the house." I walked the zigzag for him. "They’d have to stop and turn twice, and anybody stopping and turning twice inside my wall is a target."

He looked at it a bit longer, and I could see him putting it away in his head somewhere it wouldn’t get lost.

"Right." That was all, and he walked off toward the house at his own pace, and I’d bet money I’ll see that zigzag again in a village with one road in.

At eight I went to the small barn, where the guy from the yard was awake and lying on a cot with his leg up on a feed sack, and Mr. Norton was changing the dressing on a knee that looked like somebody had gone at it with a hammer, which, to be fair, somebody basically had.

The guy’s face tightened up the second he saw me in the door.

"You..."

"Yeah, me." I leaned on the frame.

"He’ll live." Norton didn’t look up from the bandage. "He’ll walk with a stick in a week... but he’ll never run again, and what you do with him after that is not medicine, so I would rather not be in the room for it."

He tied the dressing off, packed his bag, and left, and the guy watched him go and then looked back at me and waited to get shot.

"What happens now?" His voice cracked on the last word.

"You stay here."

"For how long?"

"Until I decide."

"You’re keeping me prisoner?" He said it slowly, double-checking.

"Yeah."

"...At least you’re honest." His head dropped back against the wall.

"I’ve had a busy week." I pulled a chair over and sat down so he’d know I wasn’t in a hurry. "You saw the wall yesterday... You saw the women. You saw the guns, and you saw what happened to your five friends in about three seconds."

His jaw locked up, and he looked at the ceiling instead of me. "Yeah."

"Good. Then you know exactly what’s coming up that road for Hallam, and you’re gonna sit in here and think about it while it happens... That’s it. Nobody’s touching you until Hallam’s dead..."

He turned his head. "He’ll wanna know where I am."

"He won’t find out."

"He’ll send somebody."

"He’s sent nine guys up this road in total for nothing." I looked at the barn door, and past it, at the road. "... He’ll come looking himself soon enough... That’s kind of the whole idea."

At nine, all thirty-one of them were in the yard in front of the house with the wall behind them, and fourteen were wearing plates and helmets that had come off Harlan’s soldiers three days ago and carbines that had come off the same guys.

They weren’t soldiers, not even close, but they weren’t thirty-one helpless women anymore either, and nobody in that yard was pretending otherwise.

I stood on the tailgate of the pickup and handed out the war.

"Fourteen on the wall, one sandbag each, seven a side." I pointed as I went. "Vera runs the north half, because she called targets at the junction and nobody else did... Ruth’s on the south tower with the DMR and the light switch. Bill’s on the north tower with the other DMR."

Bill did not move an inch from where she was standing.

"Bill."

"Yes." All pleasant.

"Tower."

"I know."

"Then why are you holding a tray of seedlings?"

She looked down, and she was, in fact, holding a tray of seedlings, ankle-high ones that had been seeds in a tray yesterday afternoon, and she looked at them and then at me and did not see the problem.

"They’re ready to go in."

"Put them down."

"They’ll wilt, Nikki." She pulled the tray a little closer to her chest.

"Bill..."

She sighed from the bottom of her lungs and handed the tray to Marcy, who took it in both arms, careful, and Bill climbed the north tower with the DMR over her shoulder, muttering the whole way up.

"Everyone else is inside at the upstairs windows, with the rifles from the junction and your own... That’s the last line. I don’t expect you to need it." I looked for the tall one with the scar through her eyebrow and found her at the back, arms folded, telling the woman next to her this was the part where it all went wrong. "You. What’s your name?"

"Dana."

"Dana, you’re in the CCTV room. You watch the cameras and the drone feed, and you say what you see on the intercom, and you’re not allowed to predict anything. Just what you see."

"Understood."

I was pretty sure she was pleased about it.

"Mr. Norton’s in the medical bay behind the steel door, and anybody who gets hit goes to him and nowhere else."

Then I got to the three of them, standing together at the front, and this was the part I’d been turning over since the tower.

"Leo, Nora, Kara. You’re on the wall too at the main gate. One sandbag each, with the fourteen."

Nora’s head snapped up. Leo didn’t move. Kara looked at me for a long second, then said what everyone in that yard was thinking.

"And you?"

"I’m gonna watch."

Nobody said anything for a second, so I gave them the rest of it, because they deserved the rest of it.

"I’ve done more for this place in three days than anybody else would’ve, or could’ve. There’s a wall and water and a medical bay and fourteen sets of mil-spec gear with enough ammo to last a lifetime, and I’m the reason for all of it." I looked at the women, not at my own people. "... But I leave in two days. And if I win this one for you tonight, then the next time somebody comes up that road, you’ll be standing there waiting for me to come back and do it again. And I won’t be there. So you gotta win your wars yourselves... starting with this one."

Ruth, from the tower, didn’t say anything, but she nodded, once, which from Ruth is a paragraph.

"And the three of you," I turned back to Kara and Leo and Nora, "You’re on that wall because you need the practice. You’ll soon have a village to hold... I’m not gonna be next to you every time somebody shoots at you, and the sooner you find that out on a wall this good, the better."

Leo thought about it for a second, and then nodded.

"Right."

Kara didn’t nod. She looked at me with a flat face for a while, then put it to me: "And if it goes wrong," and it wasn’t a question.

"You deal with it."

That landed on her, and I had no idea what it was, only that she looked at me a second longer than she needed to before she picked up the Gen-12 and walked to the wall without another word, and Nora went after her, and I’d got what I wanted and felt like garbage about it, which is how you know it was the right call.

Nora stopped halfway up the walkway steps and turned around, SR-25 over her shoulder and the drone controller hanging off her belt.

"Don’t get brave," I told her.

"I won’t."

"Don’t improvise."

"I won’t." She had a death grip on the rifle sling.

"Don’t-"

"I’m twenty, Nikki." She said it to the steps, not to me.

"I know exactly how old you are."

"You’re giving me a war."

"I’m giving you a sandbag."

"Same thing."

"Not even close."

She finally smiled at that and went up.

The drill ran an hour, and Leo ran it from the sandbag nearest the gate, sitting on a crate behind it with the Spear across his knees, and his voice carried further than I’d ever heard it carry, and it was the first time I’d ever seen him give an order and the first time I’d seen thirty women take one.

"Nobody fires until the lights come on..." He looked down the whole length of the walkway to make sure it landed. "We wait for them to approach... we wait until they’re close before opening fire. Once the shooting starts and Dana has confirmed they’re concentrating at the main gate, the ones who were positioned to the other side of the wall will rush to our support..."

Nora put all four drones up, one at a time, and on the fourth there was a longer pause, and then her voice came over the intercom with real wonder in it.

"...I can see nine kilometers."

"That’s far..." Ruth, from the tower, with her hand up shading her eyes as though she could see it too.

"It’s a drone."

"I know what a drone is, Nora."

"I’ve got the truck stop." Nora’s voice had gone flat and careful. "Eleven rectangles... Roofs... And a lot of smoke."

A pause, and then the voice bounced right back up. "Also. The station callsign is Sanctuary. I decided yesterday."

Ruth stared down at me from the tower with a look I could feel from the yard.

"She labeled the drones. She can label the station." I shrugged.

"...Fine."

At one in the afternoon, the chest set crackled, and Nia’s voice came through, wind behind it.

"Your boys are moving. One truck, two guys, hunting rifles, north on the state road."

"How far up do they get before they can see the wall?" I was already walking toward the CCTV room.

"There’s a bend at three k. After that it’s a straight shot, and they’d see it."

"Then they don’t get past the bend."

"Wasn’t planning on letting them~"

"Don’t sound so proud of yourself."

"I’m very proud of myself." A minute went by, and then her voice came back sharper. "Wait."

I waited, and Dana beside me in the CCTV room had the drone’s thermal feed up by then: a pickup on the state road four kilometers out, and then the pickup slowing, and then stopping short of the bend.

"They’ve stopped. They’re... yeah. They’re looking at a map." Nia went quiet for a second. "I’ll go help them with it~"

"Nia."

"Don’t wait up~" She clicked off.

A beat later, on the thermal, we saw a heat signature moving like no human ever could, before stopping right behind a tree some twenty meters away, and the next second two little blips of heat flashed from that signature before-

-Kizzt-

"Done... " Nia’s voice crackled through the radio, "... for the record, those were headshots."

[Eleven guys he’s sent up this road, and not one of them’s come back to tell him what’s up here. Ten dead, one in my barn... Now he’s got twenty-nine more asking him what he’s gonna do about it.]

At two, Ruth found me and told me there was a problem, and the problem was Bill, and the problem was that Bill would not come out of the greenhouse, and when I went in there the air was warm and wet and smelled like dirt and the rows on both sides of me were green, and the seedlings she’d planted at two yesterday were ankle-high, and the ones from this morning were already up.

At four in the evening, Kara brought me a plate up to the south tower and sat next to me while I ate, and we watched the road, and neither of us said the name Hallam, and that was nice.

"Do you think the fish are gonna survive?" She was looking at the pond, not at me.

"They’re in heated water," I told her with my mouth full.

"That’s not what I asked."

"...No?"

She laughed once, short, and the sound surprised us both. "Tilapia are horrible."

"You said that yesterday."

"They haven’t gotten less horrible overnight." She pulled her knees up, a trace of a giggle still in her voice.

She looked at the pond for a while, and the greenhouses, and then at the wall under us, and she told me my wall looked good, and I said Leo hated it, and she said Leo hated everything, and I said he liked the medical bay, and she said he liked Mr. Norton, and I said everybody liked Mr. Norton, and she smiled, and then the smile went, and she got to the thing she’d actually come up to say.

"You’re really just going to sit up here and watch?"

"Yeah." I put the fork down.

"While they shoot at us..."

"Yeah."

She turned and looked at me properly. "You’re worried."

"Yes."

"You’re not very good at hiding it." She softly chuckled.

"Never hid it."

"You were trying to," she said, watching me look away at the road. "That’s okay."

At five, Ruth stood on the porch steps with the last of the light on the wall behind her and every woman on the property in the yard in front of her, and Leo and Kara and Nora at the foot of the walkway with their rifles, and she gave the only speech I ever heard her give.

"Three days ago we had eleven guns and a fence, and a man sitting at the end of the road every night to remind us..." She didn’t raise her voice, but every woman in that yard heard every word. "Tonight we’ve got a wall, and more than enough rifles, and a wizard who says this one’s ours... There’s nowhere left to run that’s better than this. So nobody runs."

Nobody moved, not one of them.

Then she looked at me, across all of them.

"Nikki."

[Not handsome. Nikki...]

"Ruth." I nodded at her.

"Don’t make me a liar." She held my eyes.

"I won’t."

By six it was full dark. By seven, the walkway had seventeen shapes on it behind seventeen sandbags, and the floodlights were off, and the wall was a black line against the snow, and I was standing in the doorway of the CCTV room behind Dana, who was watching the monitors with her arms folded and saying absolutely nothing.

"Nothing on the road." She didn’t turn around.

"Keep watching."

"I am."

-Kzzzt-!

"Nikki."

"Here." I had the handset up before I’d finished the word.

"They’re rolling." Nia’s voice had no smile in it now. "Eleven rigs... Lights off... In a line. I make it three left behind at the lot to sit on the women."

Dana was already pulling up the thermal feed from the drone Nora had parked two kilometers down the state road, and the screen filled up with black, and then with shapes: one, two, four, eleven warm rectangles in a row, crawling north through the night at around forty kilometers an hour with their lights off, straight at us.

"Your wall’s about to get noticed."

"Good." I heard the grin in my own voice before I felt it on my face.

Nia let a pause sit on the line before she said it. "You’re enjoying this."

"A little."

I looked at the monitors, at Ruth on the south tower with her hand near the switch, at Bill on the north, at Kara and Leo and Nora three sandbags apart on the walkway with Vera’s fourteen either side of them, at the greenhouses glowing behind the house, the pond, the medical bay, and the wall, all of it, on a bank of screens in a farmhouse I’d known for three days.

The first rectangle went under Nora’s drone, two kilometers out, and didn’t slow down.

"Let them," I said, reaching for my rifle.

"...Nikki?" She said it carefully this time.

"Once they’re clear of the lot, take the truck stop."

A pause, and then a small delighted sound came down the line.

"Quietly?"

"Quietly. And when they run, I want their home to already be gone."

"Finally... I’ve been looking at an RV for two days... I’m keeping it after this~"

The radio clicked off, and the room was just the monitors again.

The floodlights stayed dark, and the wall stayed black.

And eleven warm rectangles kept coming.