It was like getting clotheslined. I’d stormed in, all ready to be assertive and stubborn and make it absolutely clear that something needed to change, and suddenly Lady Halflance was… crying? Or at least she had been. For as much as I knew that she was a relentless politician, as much as I had seen her executing defeated foes before my very eyes, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of sympathy.
“We need to talk,” I said. “About the plan for this raid.”
Halflance slipped the little portrait back into one of her cabinet drawers. That stout wooden thing, alongside a simple table, was doing the job of a writing desk in this makeshift office. Halflance then straightened up and wiped at her face, clearly realizing that she still looked like a mess. If she thought that she was going to be able to make herself look composed that easily, she was wrong.
“What is there to talk about? What are you doing here, Emma?”
“There’s no other way to put this,” I said as I crossed the room. “If this plan is reliant on stealth at all, we need to fix that immediately. I’m almost certain Tersine knows.”
Halflance sighed and rolled her eyes, spending several seconds staring down at the wood of her desk and taking deep, miserable breaths. “Well, spill it out.”
“So, first of all, I read a newspaper today. Most of it was about the attack on Fanggard—did you know that we’re at war now, by the way?—but in the middle, the reporter paused to editorialize about the police buildup in the city. The reporters know something is happening, Halflance. And then, not all that long after that, I caught someone following me. I don’t know who it was, I didn’t exactly get a good look at them, but it must have been someone fast for her to keep up with me. It could have easily been one of Tersine’s wolves.”
Halflance continued to stare blankly in my general direction. “Is that all?”
“Is that all? Lady Halflance, we are almost certainly compromised! Tersine knows we’re coming!”
More empty stares. Lady Halflance could be dismissive, obviously, but this was… this was different. Usually she would at least put forward an argument explaining why she thought I was stupid. It was like she was only half there, like she’d been hollowed out. I gritted my teeth, questioning if I was seriously going to have to go therapist-mode on her.
“What’s wrong?”
“I thought you were here to explain that to me.”
“I mean what’s wrong with you. You’re not acting normal.”
Halflance scowled. “There is nothing wrong with me. I am not so easily wounded.”
“Why do I even… fine. If nothing’s wrong with you, then at least go to the trouble of actually focusing on what I have to say, please?”
“Of course,” Halflance said. “How can you be so certain that Tersine knows?”
“I can’t be entirely certain,” I said. “I’ve learned my lesson about that. But you have to admit, between the fact that the newspapers know something is going down, and the fact that someone was definitely following me, it has to be a serious possibility.”
“And what do you want me to do about it?” Halflance said.
“You and… what’s her name, the police chief or whomever…”
“Sir Bernardine,” Halflance deadpanned.
“You both have some kind of plan for how this is going to happen, right?” I said, giving Halflance a moment to respond. When she didn’t, I continued, “We need to make sure—I need to make sure that that plan is ready for what happens if I’m right and Doctor Tersine knows we’re coming.”
Lady Halflance gave a rueful chuckle. “If Tersiněvka knows that we’re coming, then she’ll have fled the city.”
“She’s too vindictive for that, too vicious. If she knows that we’re coming, she’ll set a trap.” I paused. “Remember what I told you about what happened in the desert? She wasn’t even fully certain that we were following her, but she still came up with an ambush that very nearly cost Laura, and Anna, and Unity, and all of us our lives.”
“Fine,” said Lady Halflance. “Wait right here. I’ll get the map.”
Lady Halflance stood up and, without another word, walked out of the room. I took up a position on her desk, arms folded, trying very hard to focus on the matter at hand. If she had returned on a reasonable timeframe, I might have actually been able to hold myself to that. As it was, she was gone for somewhere over half an hour. About twenty minutes into that span I realized something.
I circled around Lady Halflance’s table, to the chest that she’d been using for storage. It had a lock on it, hanging uselessly in the “open” position, and the hinge on it barely creaked at all. Inside was a huge collection of things that Lady Halflance apparently found necessary to have, including medication bottles, notebooks, a box of revolver bullets, and sure enough, a tiny framed photograph.
I recognized two of the people in the photograph, those being Lady Sarah Halflance and her wife, Colonel Sir Margaret Halflance. They both looked incredibly young, but it was obviously them. And standing in front of them was a young girl, maybe three years old, standing proudly in her skirts. It was a family photo, obviously, just the three of them… which meant that it was almost certainly taken before the birth, or even the conception, of Laura’s younger sister Felicia.
I set the portrait back down and gave up entirely on trying to focus on the matter of the raid. Lady Halflance had obviously been very upset about something family-related, almost definitely Laura-related to be more specific, but that left another question: why? What could Halflance possibly be so upset about? She’d gotten what she’d wanted, hadn’t she, her eldest daughter forced back into her arms. I was almost glad that she was feeling even one-tenth of the suffering that she’d inflicted on her eldest child over the years, but for the life of me I couldn’t guess what was going on inside of her head.
It stopped mattering when Lady Halflance shoved through the curtains around her so-called office, and I suddenly remembered that I’d been waiting there for almost forty minutes.
“What the hell took you so long?”
Lady Halflance didn’t dignify that question with a response. Instead, she shooed me off of her table and placed down the enormous map that had apparently taken her so long to find. It was an industrial plan of some description, and it took me several seconds of examination to piece together that it was a crude attempt to illustrate in 3-D space the layout of a large mine. Judging by the Diamond Salt Corporation logo, this was the one.
“These are the most recent plans, as certified by the Office of Industrial Architecture here in Grantval. They’re about ten months old, so there’s almost certain to have been further digging.”
“Not to mention, if Diamond is a Cassandran front, there’s almost certainly something being hidden.”
“Precisely. Difficult to account for, though.”
I nodded, examining the map a little more closely. I remembered from vague trivia that salt mines could become absolutely massive as the huge machines pursued seemingly-endless veins of salt, and thankfully for us this wasn’t one of those. Indeed, there seemed to be only a handful of major chambers. One, a long, high gallery, made up a sort of entrance hall, connected to the outdoors by a huge pair of double doors, and to the rest of the mine by a pair of gently sloping corridors. None of those corridors led directly into another large chamber; instead, they split and merged, producing a wriggling maze that eventually terminated in more domed chambers. It reminded me almost of city streets, the way they wiggled from side to side, sometimes crossing or splitting but always remaining a distance apart.
I tapped on the map. “What are those for?”
“Pumps, fans, and lighting. The entire mine is electrified, with a large generator on the surface and battery-powered boosters down below. It’s the only way to dig that deep without killing every single woman down there.”
I snorted. “A mining company, caring about their workers? Clearly they’re being used for something nefarious.”
“Even a mining company has to worry about running out of available workers in the city, eventually. And yes, before you ask: they would make excellent ambush points. This is why we bring shotguns.”
“Of course,” I said. “So, what is the plan of attack, exactly? I’m guessing that if Tersine has a lab going, it’s going to be down here in one of the larger chambers, but these passageways seem… dangerous.”
“Indeed,” said Lady Halflance. “Each one is only wide enough for three women to walk side-by-side, which means that almost anybody could form a barricade.”
“I assume you have a way of getting around that, then?”
“Indeed. Firstly, we divide our forces as little as possible. Once the entry hall has been cleared, one-half will remain there to ensure nobody escapes, while the other half go down below.”
“Laura and I will be in the half that goes in,” I said. It wasn’t a question.
“And I will remain near the surface, yes.”
“So we move through, sweeping the whole mine with shotguns and hoping to either find Tersine directly or else drive her to the surface and into the waiting arms of the second group,” I said. “I suppose that ought to work fairly well for any human muscle. Might even work against the wolves, assuming you can put enough lead to properly dismember. Do the officers know about that, that they’re going up against an enemy that can regenerate?”
Halflance blinked at me, as if she had momentarily forgotten where she was and what we were doing. Her eyes flickered over to the cabinet where she’d put the portrait. “Yes, they know.”
I glared at her, wondering what sort of revenge would even be justified if she was lying about that. “Good. So we have a basic plan of action. Now, what are we going to do if something goes wrong?”
“If it’s too dangerous to go down into the mine itself, we can hold onto the entrance and force a siege. Tersine cannot hole up inside there forever.”
“Assuming that Tersine can’t break out.”
Halflance shook her head. “The entrance hall will become a shooting range. We have access to an experimental machine rifle.”
“Good, good. Now, what’s the plan for if Tersine pulls out something unexpected? Hell, what’s the plan for dealing with Falem? You know, Tersine’s second in command who as far as I can tell is fully bulletproof? Let alone anything else she might have prepared for us that we don’t know about yet.”
“You are aware that you’re asking for me to prepare for that which, by definition, we are unable to predict?”
“Because if we don’t, we’ll be unprepared when she springs it on us,” I said. “I’m not asking for much. I’m just asking for an acknowledgement of the fact that Tersine isn’t some common criminal that you and your buddies in the police can barrel right through because you have bigger guns.”
Lady Halflance moved around the desk, sitting down once again to stare right through the map taking up almost the entirety of its surface. “This has nothing to do with my preparedness or lack thereof, does it?”
“What?” I said. “No. We’re not doing this.”
“You walk into my office, demanding that I do the impossible, and I am to believe that this is merely a reasonable concern? Consider that perhaps your innate biases are showing through.”
Even slumped over a desk and red-eyed from whatever emotional disturbance she was going through, Lady Halflance’s glares of utter disdain were still second to none.
“Well, fuck you too, then,” I said as I turned around. “I hope you get over whatever family bullshit is dragging you down before the highly dangerous operation tomorrow.”
Lady Halflance and I didn’t see each other again for the rest of that day. I made sure of it. I didn’t even eat in the main room with the rest of the cops when food was served, instead waiting until it was all over to bring some scraps up to Laura. The sense of impending doom was growing with each passing minute, but what was I going to do about it, go in alone? I didn’t even know where the salt mine was, let alone what I would do about it.
Lady Halflance and Sir Bernardine really thought, right up to the very end, that they could make this raid into a total surprise. Not that Lady Halflance seemed to be much involved at all; even at dawn the next morning, when everyone was being woken up, she still looked to be in an emotional fugue state. Fortunately, of course, it was Sir Bernardine who was the one with experience commanding police actions, so it mostly worked out.
The Diamond Corporation Salt Mine was a couple of miles outside of Grantval itself, which you would think would make stealth impossible, but they’d apparently found a way. There was, along the road, a small falt ranch, whose owner had been convinced to allow its use as a staging ground. We would go from the precinct to the ranch, one steam carriage at a time, until everyone was in one place, at which point we’d clear the last half-mile in one extended push on foot.
Laura and I forced our way onto the first carriage, so most of that waiting time was spent on the ranch, covered in dust and surrounded by the scent of falt, the big rodent-like mammals that are the primary form of riding animal on Selene. And while we waited for the final moment, a new thought came to me: were all of these cops about to find out about my regeneration? Had Lady Halflance already told them?
The fact that I was functionally immortal, to the point of severed limbs and my head being able to instantly reattach if given the opportunity, was something of a sensitive piece of information. Trying to create beings like me was, after all, Doctor Tersine’s primary goal, and had been for decades. If the police found out, if the story that there was an immortal alraune working with Lady Halflance spread around the government, it could easily entice Bluerose to start repeating Tersine’s experiments. I had to avoid that by any means possible, at least until I could confer with Halflance about it.
Of course, that led to a second problem of how, exactly, I was going to do anything without anybody finding out I was immortal. It was sort of my trump card in combat. And if Tersine’s wolves were in play, which I had to assume that they were, then the only method I had that could even hurt them was to get some of my blood on my blade, which would end up making use of my regeneration whether I wanted it to or not. Laura and I ended up leaving the ranch house itself, with all of its tight quarters and echoing, to instead discuss the matter out on the field. I also got to pet a falt, which while not the most pet-able of animals, was nonetheless a soothing experience in the lead-up to a deadly battle.
The sound of a whistle indicated that we were about to be off. The cops all had some sort of elaborate formation they were operating under, a big marching block in the back with small units forward and to the side acting as wings, but for Lady Halflance, Sir Bernardine, Laura, and myself, we just had to keep pace.
For about ten minutes, there was no sound but the crunch of dirt and grass under the boots of all the cops around us. The steel fence around the mine loomed larger and larger in the distance, until it was suddenly right there, and a stocky woman in overalls was asking us what we were doing. Sir Bernardine made a single quick gesture, and two officers grabbed the gate-guard, threw her to the ground, and bound her hands behind her back. They failed to cover her mouth quickly enough to stop her from screaming, so all hell promptly broke loose.
From that moment on, it was a race against time to get to the mine entrance. Shouts of alarm and yelled commands to stand down echoed across the hillside, officers of Grantval law enforcement moving in packs to secure each of the lumber shacks containing the various outbuildings. One contingent of them moved to secure the single largest external structure, the enormous electrical generator, while the main core continued their move towards the huge steel doors.
There was no real combat against anything other than the clock, no resistance besides running around in panic. I began to wonder if somehow this was all some enormous mistake, if we were engaged in police brutality against a bunch of innocent mine workers with no connection to Tersine or the Cassandran Empire. As Sir Bernardine broke into the door control chamber, using the business end of her revolver to force the woman inside to open the gates, I was fully ready to see more of the same. The fermenting guilt that had built up in my stomach about the whole affair rose to the surface. The engine controlling the doors rumbled to life, and the two slabs of steel began, inch by inch, to move apart. I was about to turn and tell Sir Bernardine to tone it down, when out of the corner of my eye I saw what was on the other side of the widening crack in the doors.
I spun around, searching for Laura, who was on the other side of me and either hadn’t seen it yet or was moving too slowly to react. Faster than any normal human, I ran into her at full-tilt, shoving her to the ground. It wasn’t a moment too soon; Laura hadn’t even hit the dirt yet when a storm of bullets emerged from the doors and absolutely ventilated me.