The last thing I remembered before going under was the mechanic pointing at a rusted flywheel the size of a supply cart and telling me it needed forty turns before the central redoubt’s gate ratchet would hold tension on its own.
Forty turns of a crank built for someone twice my mass, done by hand, in under six minutes, or the whole assembly would slip its catch during the assault and drop dead weight straight onto the gears we needed later.
That was a job for Programming.
Repetitive, mechanical, no judgment calls required beyond not breaking my own spine.
I set the parameters, closed my eyes, and let the subroutine take the wheel.
Literally.
I woke up on my knees in front of the flywheel, both hands still gripping the crank handle, my shoulder screaming in a way that told me the strain had definitely happened but at least hadn’t torn anything new.
A folded scrap of paper sat tucked under my belt where I always found the pilot’s notes.
Forty-one turns completed.
Ratchet holds.
Recommend you don’t test it by leaning on it.
Left knee took uneven load on turn thirty-two, favor it for the next hour if you can afford to.
Woke you five minutes early because motor sequence is complete and I don’t like keeping you under longer than the task requires.
Five minutes early.
Long enough to hear the first horn.
The horn meant the wave had crossed the outer marker, and the outer marker meant we had somewhere between four and seven minutes before it hit the first of our three remaining wheels.
I shoved the note into my coat, got my legs under me, and went looking for the gunner.
I found him already braced against the turret housing, one hand on the elevation crank, the other flat against the barrel like he was checking a patient for fever.
He didn’t look over when I slid into the loading position beside him.
“Feed’s on you,” he said.
“Halvek’s got triage sorted, so don’t waste breath asking him to spot for us. When I call a number, that’s charge weight, not range. You give me the wrong shell and we lose the whole housing to backpressure, you understand?”
“I understand I’m not guessing,” I said.
“You call it, I load it. That’s the whole arrangement.”
“Good. Machines that guess get people killed. So do men who think they know better than the machine.”
I didn’t ask if that was a general philosophy or a specific grudge.
There wasn’t time, and also I suspected I already knew the answer.
Behind us, in the stretch of open floor that used to be a receiving yard for the district’s freight lines, Halvek had turned three overturned wagons and a stack of insurance filing cabinets we hadn’t managed to move earlier into something that actually resembled an orderly casualty line.
He wasn’t shouting.
He was pointing, calm as a man directing traffic at a farmers’ market, sending the walking wounded to one wagon and the ones who needed carrying to another, and somehow the chaos of it kept resolving into two neat columns instead of one screaming mess.
“Left side first, they’re closer to the exit corridor,” he called to nobody in particular, and somebody obeyed him anyway.
The horn sounded twice more before the first bodies crested the ridge of collapsed masonry that used to be a wall.
I don’t know what they’d been before the show got its claws into them.
I’d stopped asking that question somewhere around the third city.
What mattered was that there were a lot of them, and they moved with the same jerking, indifferent hunger as everything else that had come at us since Vhaldrèche, and the gunner started calling numbers before I’d even finished bracing the first shell.
“Six! Give me a six!”
The turret bucked, the sound of it slamming into my teeth even through the housing, and a chunk of the ridge simply stopped existing along with whatever had been standing on it.
“Four now, don’t overcorrect on me!”
I gave him a four.
This went on for longer than I could track in any unit that meant something, minutes bleeding into each other through smoke and the particular stink of scorched propellant, until my hands knew the rhythm of the loading tray better than my head did and I stopped needing to think about anything except whether the next crate had four-weight or six-weight markings burned into the casing.
It was somewhere in the middle of that rhythm that the second wheel seized.
I heard it before I understood it, a grinding shriek from the western redoubt that didn’t belong with any of the sounds the turrets were supposed to make, and then a runner was skidding into our position with blood on one sleeve and panic doing a poor job of hiding behind his voice.
“Outer wheel’s locked, the traverse gear stripped, we can’t bring the barrel to bear on the breach, they’re pouring through the collapsed section by the old freight gate—”
The gunner’s face did something complicated and then went flat; he locked in.
“How long to clear the gear?”
“Too long. We need power to the backup traverse motor and the main line’s already bled dry keeping this turret firing.”
Nobody said anything for about two seconds, which is a long time when people are dying somewhere you can hear but not see.
“The accumulator,” I said.
I grabbed the iron release lever bolted to the casing, feeling the faint, rhythmic shudder humming through the metal from the weighted springs coiled tight beneath our boots.
When the mechanic had pinned the descent cable to the falling outer gate, every ton of collapsing masonry had wound those internal springs down to their absolute stop, trapping all that violent momentum inside an iron box until somebody pulled the pin.
“That’s a one-shot reserve,” the gunner said, his voice tightening over the thunder of the breach.
“You drain it for the western traverse, it’s gone. No backup, no second try.”
“Then we get one shot right,” I said.
“Because the alternative is they’re already through the gate.”
He looked at me for exactly as long as it took to decide arguing wasn’t worth the seconds it would cost, then he was already moving toward the accumulator housing, shouting for the runner to relay the tap sequence to the western crew.
I hauled the release lever with him, both of us leaning our full weight into a mechanism that groaned like it resented being asked to give anything back, and somewhere across the district I imagined the western turret’s traverse motor lurching awake on borrowed momentum that used to be a wall.
The horn that followed wasn’t the warning horn.
It was a different note entirely, one I hadn’t heard before, and I found out later it was the signal for a confirmed seal.
The western barrel had swung, found its angle, and put a shell straight through the collapsed gate section seconds before the breach would have opened wide enough for the wave to pour through unchecked.
One shot.
No second try, exactly as promised.
It didn’t need a second one.
Somewhere in an implant, or a screen, or wherever Vassago kept whatever passed for her attention, the network noticed.
“Folks, if you’re just tuning in, Odrance’s city planning board is having what we in the industry call a rough quarter,” she said, her voice carrying that particular cheer reserved for describing disasters she found personally delightful.
“Seven walls down, four residential blocks reclassified as, quote, permanent open-air memorial space, and a filing archive that’s going to need a very understanding insurance adjuster. The silver lining? Incredible renovation footage. Really gets the aerial drone package humming. Somebody give the demolition crew a bonus, they earned it.”
Nobody around the turret laughed.
The gunner didn’t even look up from resetting the elevation crank.
I didn’t blame him.
Somewhere under that flat delivery was a fact I already knew and didn’t need repeated back to me with a joke attached: those blocks weren’t coming back.
Validation didn’t rebuild anything; it just meant the counting stopped.
And the counting did stop, not long after.
I felt it more than saw it, a pressure lifting off the back of my skull that I hadn’t fully registered until it was gone, and a notification bloomed across my HUD in the clean, bloodless font the network used for anything it considered an administrative milestone.
MUNICIPAL OBJECTIVE VALIDATED — ODRANCE. Get faster updates on g.com.
Defense timers confirmed across three redoubts.
Survivor threshold exceeded.
Structural loss: catastrophic.
City status: locked, non-restorable.
Sector unlock pending.
Non-restorable.
I read that word twice and decided I didn’t want to think about what it meant for the people whose homes were now permanently filed under scenic ruin.
The turret had gone quiet.
The horn hadn’t sounded in what felt like an hour, though it was probably closer to ten minutes.
Smoke sat over the western ridge in a flat gray sheet that the wind wasn’t bothering to stir.
A woman found me while I was still leaning against the loading tray, catching my breath and doing a mental inventory of which parts of me hurt worse than they had that morning.
She had a kid balanced on her hip and a bandage on her forearm that Halvek had clearly done in a hurry, and she just stood there for a second before she managed to get words out.
“You’re the one who moved the cabinets,” she said.
“From the workshop. My husband wouldn’t leave without them.”
“Wasn’t just me,” I said, because it hadn’t been, and because taking credit for other people’s backs felt like a bad habit to start.
“He’s alive because someone made him leave,” she said.
“That’s you. Thank you.”
I nodded, said something forgettable, and she moved on toward the evacuation line before I could figure out whether I meant it.
My wristband chose that exact moment to buzz against my forearm, the little screen flashing the amber pattern I’d come to associate with nothing good.
SWAP PAIRING CONFIRMED.
Origin: Odrance.
Destination: Kharvoss, Winch Station 5.
Transfer window: five seconds.
Five seconds.
I looked at the gunner, who was already watching the readout with the kind of resigned expression that suggested he’d seen this exact notification steal a dozen useful people out from under him before.
“Barrel’s still hot,” I told him, nodding at the turret.
“Don’t let anyone touch the breech housing for at least twenty minutes; it’ll take a hand off. And check the western traverse motor before you trust it with anything heavier than a spotting shot—it ran that seal on fumes.”
“Noted,” he said, already turning back to his crew.
“Go on, then. Not like you get a vote.”
I didn’t.
The five seconds ran out somewhere in the middle of me trying to decide if I should say anything else, and the world folded sideways the way it always did, taking the smell of scorched propellant and replacing it with something colder and sharper that I didn’t recognize yet.
Across the fold, in the same instant, a man named Sorn opened his eyes standing exactly where I’d been, one hand still resting on a turret breech that was too hot for comfort, staring at a gunner he’d never met and a horizon full of ruined skyline he definitely hadn’t signed up for.
“You’re relief,” the gunner said, already sliding a dataslate into his hands.
“Orders came through with the swap. Odrance is done here, next validation’s queued for Vosseline. Get your bearings fast, because command wants bodies moving toward the transit corridor within the hour.”
Sorn looked down at the slate, then at the turret, then at the gray column of smoke sitting over the ridge like it had nowhere better to be, and didn’t say anything at all.