The gear block sat in the middle of the machine room like a monument to someone else’s bad planning, a slab of toothed iron easily as tall as I was, its inner teeth cut in a spiral that matched nothing I’d ever operated back when my biggest mechanical decision was whether to replace a jammed stapler.
The mechanic tracing his finger along the tooth pattern kept saying “elegant” as if that word were going to make the next ninety seconds less terrifying.
“Elegant,” I repeated, watching the drone chatter crawl up the tunnel behind us on the motion board bolted to the wall.
Three contacts, closing.
“Sure. Let’s hope elegant also means quick.”
“Slot the block, rotate it a quarter turn clockwise, drop the pin, and the wheel should catch again. If it doesn’t, we’re pushing this thing by hand for an hour while those things chew through the door.”
Behind us, the blast door had started its slow, automated crawl shut, some safety routine deciding that a hallway full of drones was reason enough to seal the room and everyone in it away from help.
Salkhe didn’t wait for anyone to debate the merits of that decision.
She yanked her arrow case off her back, the long lacquered box that held every shaft she owned, and jammed it into the door track with the sole of her boot.
“That’s not going to hold,” the mechanic said.
“It doesn’t need to hold,” Salkhe said.
“It needs to buy you people room to work while I put arrows into anything that gets curious.”
I appreciated the confidence more than I appreciated the math.
An arrow case wedged into a foot of sliding armored steel was not what anyone would call a load-bearing solution, but it beat standing in a sealed room arguing about tooth patterns while the door finished doing its job for the enemy.
I turned back to the gear block, and to the small, useless fact that none of what came next was actually going to involve me.
Not the me who argues with door mechanisms and reads gear diagrams as though they’re written in a foreign alphabet.
The other one.
The one who apparently knew, somewhere in whatever training or memory he carried, exactly how a drive wheel this old behaved when someone forced a quarter turn on a burred axle.
I keyed the routine the same way I always did, laying it out plain and short because plain and short was the only thing that had never gotten anyone killed.
Twenty seconds.
Slot the block, seat the pin, restart the wheel.
Hands on the control levers only.
No pursuit of anything past the doorframe, no matter what came through it, no matter how tempting a clean shot looked.
I was handing over a body in a room with active hostiles nearby, and I had exactly one rule that mattered more than the gear: don’t go looking for a fight I hadn’t asked for.
“Twenty seconds,” I said out loud, mostly for Salkhe’s benefit, since she was the one who’d have to live with whatever I did in that window.
“Levers only. If something comes through that door, that’s your problem, not mine.”
“Wonderful,” she said, already nocking an arrow.
“Go be unconscious somewhere useful.”
I went.
The room folded away into the gray nothing I’d stopped being afraid of somewhere around the third time it happened, and then it came back all at once, sound first, then the ache settling into my shoulders like I’d spent the last twenty seconds hauling something with my whole back instead of standing still.
That was the first thing I noticed, the low grinding hum of gears finally meshing after however long they’d sat locked.
The second thing I noticed was the hole in the wall where a turret mount used to be, its base plate sheared clean, cables dangling and sparking against the floor like something out of a demolition reel.
“There he is,” the mechanic said, not looking especially impressed, which after everything I’d seen from these people felt about right.
“Good instincts, whoever’s driving. Wish I could put that on a resume.”
“What happened to the turret?” I asked, though some part of me already suspected the answer wasn’t going to be flattering.
“Your hands cut it loose. Bolts, coupling, the works, right before the block would’ve crushed two of my engineers against the housing.” He pointed at the space where the mount used to sit, now just a scorched outline and a coil of severed cable.
“Block was coming down faster than the clearance allowed. Either the turret goes, or Jenda and Ovrik go with it. Whoever’s in there made the call in about half a second.”
I didn’t need him to spell out which side of that math he thought was correct.
I already agreed with it, and honestly, hearing someone praise the decision like it was some flash of genius sat a little strangely with me.
It wasn’t genius.
It was the only decision that didn’t end with two more names added to the casualty count on a board I hadn’t even seen yet.
The tactical display near the door chose that exact moment to remind me that other people’s math wasn’t going nearly as well.
A sector marker on the eastern ring, one I didn’t recognize by name but recognized by the small red pulse that meant occupied, blinked once and went dark.
No fanfare.
No alert tone.
Just gone—the way most bad news in this place tended to arrive, quiet and administrative.
“That’s the third one this hour,” the mechanic said, following my gaze.
“We’re consolidating. Word came down while you were busy not being yourself.”
Before I could ask what consolidating meant in practice, the wall panel above the display lit up with the unmistakable polish of a broadcast overlay, Vassago’s crawler ticking across the bottom of the screen in that bright, cheerful font the network apparently reserved for information nobody wanted.
Breaking savings alert: contestants in Sector Nine-East voluntarily reduce municipal defense overhead by dismantling their own automated turret.
Network accounting thanks you for your continued generosity.
“They’re thanking us,” I said, mostly to myself, “for wrecking our own gun.”
“They’ll thank you for anything that saves them a maintenance invoice,” the mechanic said, already moving to check the drive wheel’s tension.
“Don’t read too much into it. She thanks people for dying stylishly too.”
I decided not to give the panel the satisfaction of a reaction, which was easier said than done given how much I wanted to put my fist straight through the glass.
The loss on the books didn’t bother me nearly as much as the network’s smugness, but dwelling on Vassago’s commentary was a waste of breath when there was still an entire battery line to reset.
“The turret’s replaceable,” I said, more to convince myself than anyone listening.
“Engineers who know this whole system by heart are not.”
Salkhe pulled her arrow case free of the door track once the drones outside gave up probing and fell back to whatever staging point they operated from, and the blast door finally finished its interrupted crawl, sealing shut behind a hiss of hydraulics that sounded almost offended by the delay.
“Three drones, zero casualties, one dead door mechanism,” she reported, checking her case for damage before slinging it back over her shoulder.
“I’d call that a decent trade for a quiver full of arrows I didn’t even need to fire.”
“Wouldn’t complain either way,” I said.
“You held the room. That’s the job.”
The rest of the squad filtered in over the next several minutes, pulled off other stations once word spread that the eastern ring had folded and the defense needed rebuilding around whatever we had left standing.
What emerged, after a rushed conversation over a hand-drawn map someone had chalked directly onto the machine room wall, were three concentric perimeters instead of the original five, each one thinner on personnel but backed by whatever gear stations still had power.
Nobody loved the plan.
Nobody had a better one either, which in my experience was usually the closest thing to consensus this kind of group ever managed.
“Three rings,” the mechanic said, tapping the innermost circle.
“Outer one buys time. Middle one bleeds them. Inner one is where we actually hold.”
“And if the inner one doesn’t hold?” Salkhe asked.
Nobody answered that one, which told me everything I needed to know about how confident they were feeling.
My bracelet buzzed against my wrist before I could weigh in with an opinion nobody had asked for, the swap alert flashing its familiar five-second countdown across the little screen.
I’d stopped hoping for good news whenever that thing lit up, but some habits die slower than others.
LOCATION SWAP INITIATED.
INCOMING: VORSK, SECTOR TWELVE, KHARVOSS.
OUTGOING: VEYR, SECTOR NINE-EAST, ODRANCE.
Five seconds wasn’t a lot of time to hand a stranger everything he needed to not die at a winch station I hadn’t touched since that morning, but five seconds was what I had, so I used it the way I’d learned to use every scrap of borrowed time in this place.
I pulled up the handover log, thumbed through the last notes I’d left tagged to that winch, the ones about cable tension and the timing on the release brake, and appended a single line at the bottom in case Vorsk arrived without the context I had.
Gear’s seated, drive wheel’s running, turret’s gone, don’t ask why.
Three rings holding for now.
Good luck.
The countdown hit zero somewhere between the mechanic asking me a question I never got to answer and the machine room dissolving into that same gray static I’d come to recognize as the only constant in this entire arena.
Wherever Vorsk was standing right now, he’d be reading those exact words off a winch console he’d never operated, in a mission he’d never trained for, trusting a stranger’s typing to keep him alive for the next few minutes.
It wasn’t much of a welcome.
It was, at least, more than most of us ever got.