Oh-three-fifty. Ten minutes to the near face, if the ground held the pace Osei had set on the map.
The last of the stars were still out, thin and cold above the ridge's black outline, and the air carried the specific chill of ground that hadn't seen sun in hours. Behind them, invisible now, the main force waited in the valley for a signal that hadn't been earned yet. Ahead, Aldern Ridge held the same dark, unreadable outline it had shown from forward staging the night before, no more forthcoming now than it had been then about what was actually dug into it.
Third Squad moved in a loose file below the ridgeline, rifles slung tight against their bodies to keep the slings from ticking against gear, boots finding the ground before they committed weight to it. No lights. No radio chatter beyond what the earpieces carried in short bursts, coded down to single words. The liaison had stayed behind at the staging tents, where Ferro's order had put her — forward cargo had no lane up a ridge in the dark, and she hadn't argued the point.
He carried the loaner rifle low, in the order Osei had drilled into all of them on the rehearsal slope, and matched Ilsen's spacing without needing to think about it anymore. The Core-suppression charge sat cold and unremarkable against his kit strap. He'd stopped feeling its weight sometime in the last hour, the same way a body stops registering a held breath once it's committed to holding one.
The listening post came up out of the dark where the scout report had put it — a shallow dugout, sandbagged on three sides, empty.
Cade cleared it first, weapon up, then lowered it and gave a short shake of his head. Confirmed. Hollis checked the near approach anyway, found nothing, and fell back into the file without a word. The post held no bodies, no equipment, nothing but a cold firepit and boot-prints leading away down the far slope — the same tracks the scout had reported, now simply real under their own feet instead of a line in someone else's account.
Osei signaled the advance. Third Squad pushed past the empty post, toward the crest, on schedule.
Hollis fell in beside him for the length of one switchback, close enough that the gesture read as deliberate rather than accidental — the same quiet habit from the rehearsal slope, still uninterpreted, still neither confirmed as softening nor dismissed as simple discipline. Neither of them wrote anything about it. There wasn't room in the hour for a conversation that small.
* * *
The plan, as briefed, was simple enough to hold in one hand: take the near-slope high ground, confirm it clear, signal the main force staged in the valley below to begin its own climb. Third Squad wasn't fighting for this ground. It was meant to belong to nobody, and to stay that way for the twenty minutes it would take the rest of the operation to catch up.
The climb toward the crest ran through scrub and broken rock, cover enough to move through but not enough to disappear into. Wren took point on the left flank, Ilsen the right, both of them moving like this wasn't the first ridge either had climbed in the dark. Osei kept the center, map folded away now, running the route from memory. Every fifty meters she raised a fist and held it there until she'd counted heads, then dropped it and kept moving.
There was nothing up here for the Sight to read — no faces close enough to touch, nothing living but the six of them and whatever animal had left the scat Cade stepped carefully around. Just the climb, and a quiet that hadn't decided yet whose ground this actually was.
He logged that quiet same as he logged most things that told him nothing useful yet — kept it, in case it turned out to matter later — and kept climbing.
The rock underfoot changed texture twice, loose scree giving way to a harder shelf, and Osei slowed the pace to match it without needing to signal why. He felt the climb settle into a rhythm his body kept without him: three steps, check the dark ahead, three more. A plain rhythm, doing plain work, the kind of thing his body did now without asking him to think about it.
Somewhere behind him, Ilsen's boots found the same rhythm and kept it, close enough that he could hear the man's breathing settle into an even count. Cade brought up the rear in total silence, same as always. Nobody spoke. There was nothing left to brief that the climb itself wasn't explaining better than words would have.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Fifty meters short of the crest, the ground leveled into a shelf wide enough for the whole squad to cross in the open for a five-second stretch. Osei called the pace down, not the advance — five seconds, she signaled, nothing that should matter.
A light went up on the far side of the shelf, white and sudden, not one of theirs.
* * *
The first rounds came before the flare had finished falling.
Muzzle flash stitched a line along a ridge of rock nobody had marked on any approach diagram — a fortified position dug into the near slope itself, close enough to the crest that whoever built it had clearly meant to watch this exact approach, and recently enough that no prior overflight had caught it. It sat lower than the listening post had, angled to cover the one stretch of open shelf a squad moving up this face would eventually have to cross.
Third Squad scattered for what cover the shelf offered, which was not much. Osei's voice cut through the earpiece feed, flat and immediate. "Contact, contact, near-slope emplacement, unmarked" — the same word the hand signal for it had never once needed to mean, back on a quiet ridge road that felt, now, like it belonged to somebody else's deployment entirely.
He went to ground behind a low shelf of broken rock, rifle up, and found the position by muzzle flash rather than sight — a fixed weapon, cycling faster and steadier than anything a rifle answered to, its report landing in his chest before his ears had finished registering the sound. Somebody had dug this in on purpose, stocked and manned before Third Squad had ever left the staging camp, sited with knowledge of exactly where this approach forced an open crossing.
They already knew we'd have to cross here. The thought arrived flat, immediate, and entirely without room for anything softer around its edges. That isn't a guess. That's a map somebody had.
He didn't have the space to follow the thought any further. Wren was still moving.
He put three rounds of his own into the dark where the muzzle flash kept originating, felt the rifle answer wrong in his hands — too light, too easy, a tool built for a fight this position had decided how to survive. Beside him, Osei was shouting a bearing to the rest of the squad, voice pitched to carry over the weapon's steady, patient cycling.
* * *
She'd been mid-crossing when the light went up, too far into the open to reach either edge of the shelf before the first burst found the ground around her. She went down behind the only cover available — a knee-high outcrop, barely wide enough to shrink behind, nowhere near wide enough to actually stop what was being fired at it.
Ilsen laid suppressing fire across the emplacement's face and burned through half a magazine before he gave up, cursing once, flat — the position sat low and angled well enough that his rounds found rock instead of the gap the weapon fired through. Hollis tried next from a different line and got the same result, a spray of chips off stone that never once made the gun on the far side stop cycling. Cade covered the squad's rear, watching for a second position that hadn't shown itself yet and might.
"Pinned," Osei said into the feed, tighter now than the first call had been. "She's pinned and I don't have anything that reaches that gap."
He watched Wren press herself flatter behind rock that was losing the argument. Each burst walked a little closer to the angle that would finally clear the outcrop's edge — six inches, then four, the gun's operator adjusting with a patience that had nothing rushed in it at all.
Osei called the heavy element trailing the main force. Twenty minutes out, the answer came back, maybe less if they pushed it — useless at the range this was happening at, and both of them knew it before she'd finished asking.
With no second position showing itself, Cade broke off rear security and tried the flank instead, working left along the shelf's edge toward whatever dead ground the terrain offered. He made it four meters before a second burst — closer, correcting fast — drove him back behind the same rock he'd started from. Whoever manned that position wasn't dividing attention between two threats. They'd decided which one mattered and committed to it fully, the same patience Ocular Bypass had read into the gun's steady cycling. A smoke round might have bought Wren the half-second she needed to move, if Third Squad had carried one; nobody had briefed for a fortified position on ground the whole operation had been told was empty.
Ocular Bypass found Wren's face for half a second between bursts, low and desperate as the read was. Not fear in its usual shape — something narrower than that: a person counting how many more seconds the rock would hold, and coming up short each time she ran the number.
The rules, when he called them up, were as plain as Dray had made them sound in the command tent. Calibration usable in direct defense of himself or another Meridian soldier, once conventional means had failed or clearly would. Two magazines spent into a gap neither had reached. A heavy element twenty minutes out on ground that wouldn't survive two.
He watched the next burst take a fist-sized bite out of the rock a hand's width from where Wren's shoulder had been a half-second earlier, and understood, with a clarity that left nothing behind it to argue against, where the document's threshold now stood.
Behind them. Already behind them, and closing on the last few inches of rock still doing its job.
Osei's voice found him through the earpiece, pitched for him specifically for the first time since the shelf had lit up. "Whatever you've got that isn't a rifle — now would be the time command meant when they wrote the rule."
He set the loaner down against the stone, slowly — a tool that had finished being useful, and nothing more.