More bizarre was the fact that the generator was undefended except by four Eel servitors. They were armed with lasers, but so far their fire hadn’t penetrated Kel defenses.
Cheris knew the current formation was losing effectiveness when the air went cold and gray. She was having difficulty breathing, and while she had an emergency air supply, they all did, she suspected this was just the beginning. Sure enough, it also became harder and harder to move.
Her first attempts at repairing the formation only resulted in a colder wind, a grayer world. Gritting her teeth – winter, entropy, it was time to get out but they were so close – she tried another configuration. It was hard to think, hard to make herself breathe. She thought she heard the song of snow.
“I need your computational allocations,” Cheris told her lieutenants. They were so close to the weather generator, and the Eels were broken and peeling away behind them. They just had to grab the wretched thing and hold on until pickup arrived. But to hold it they had to have a working formation. It was enough to make her long for the days of straightforward bullets and bombs.
She liked the thought of stripping her soldiers’ computational resources as much as they did, which was to say not at all. But they weren’t in camp, where they could instantiate a more powerful grid. They had no access to the larger, more powerful grid of a friendly voidmoth transport or a military base. She had to use the field grid because it was all they had.
Cheris gave her company a second to understand what was going to happen, then diverted their allocated resources to herself. She ignored the protests, most reflexive, some less so: can’t see, lost coordinates, it was so cold, a scatter of profanities. Verab was saying something to the other lieutenants, but hadn’t flagged the conversation for her attention, so she assumed he’d take care of it.
She formulated her question so a computational attack might give her an answer in a reasonable amount of time. The company’s grid was not sentient in the way of military-grade servitors, but if you knew how to talk to the system, it was capable of nuanced responses. As the world faded toward black, the grid informed her that she should proceed by a particular series of approximations. She authorized the computation and added some constraints designed to speed the exploration of likely solutions.
The problem was easy to see: not only did the storm generator rely on heretical mechanics, which also explained the weather-eaters’ difficulties, it was itself a disruption to the high calendar. Cheris wasn’t looking forward to reporting this to her superiors.
Green-black fire washed around them, the dregs of Eel resistance. Cheris silently entreated the formation to hold long enough for the field grid to chew through the computations. Faster, she thought, feeling so cold that she was certain that her teeth were icicles and that her fingers had frozen into arthritic twigs.
“The generator’s ours, sir!” Verab cried as his platoon took out a last sputtering knot of Eels. They were clear for the moment.
“Well done,” she said, meaning it. “Now we have to hang on.”
The computations were taking their toll. Through the relay, Cheris discovered that Kel Zro in Squadron Three had offloaded more of her situational awareness functions into the relay than was strictly advisable, and was paying for it now. The soldier to Zro’s right shouted a warning, and she corrected her position barely in time to avoid being splashed by Eelfire. Zro wasn’t the only one having difficulties. Even people who used their relays with the usual precautions were desynchronizing.
Cheris asked the grid for a summary of preliminary results and skimmed through them. Nothing, nothing, nothing – aha. As the sky waned, she tapped in her suggestions and waited some more.
“Sir,” Lieutenant Ankat from Platoon Three said, “I have this hunch someone’s rallying the Eels to rush us. You know, the smart thing for them to do.”
“I can’t make the grid compute faster,” Cheris said. “We’re Kel. They’re not. If we have to bite them off our heels with our teeth, we’ll do it that way.”
At last the system came up with a working model of the conditions they were suffering. She swallowed an involuntary hiss of relief and rapped out the orders with a tongue that might have been a lump of coal after the last spark’s dying.
Like a machine dismembered into creaking components, the company moved in response. Cheris adjusted in response to the paths of Platoons One and Two, and had the rear platoons change front to deal with the Eel remnants. Gradually, as they found their proper positions, the last of the entropic cold summered away. Being able to breathe normally again was a relief.
Cheris allowed herself a second to contemplate the corpses of the Eels nearest them. Some had weathered into statues of murky ice. Others were puddling into mysterious colors, forgetting the proper hues of flesh, eyes, hair. She estimated casualties and recorded it for later comparison with the Sparrows’ observations. It was important to acknowledge numbers, especially when the dead were dead by your doing.
She and the lieutenants reorganized the company to better defend the storm generator, using a formation that bore a disturbing resemblance to the Pyre Burns Inward, which was on the proscribed list. Then she sent a burst transmission informing orbital command that they had gained a tenuous foothold in Eel territory. With any luck it would go through.
For a moment she didn’t recognize the command signature on the incoming call because she wasn’t expecting it, not so soon after the transmission.
The voice was shockingly clear and biting after the buzzing haze of relay chatter. “Captain Kel Cheris, Heron Company, 109-229th Battalion, acknowledge,” it said. She recognized the voice as belonging to Brigadier General Kel Farosh, who was in charge of the expedition.
Keeping an eye on the situation, Cheris responded on the same channel using the appropriate key. “Captain Cheris, General. We’re securing the objective.”
“Immaterial,” Farosh said: not the response Cheris had expected. “Prepare for extraction in twenty-six minutes. You’ll be leaving the generator. We’ve knocked out the Eels’ local air defenses for the moment.”
Cheris glanced over her shoulder at the generator, not sure she had heard correctly. The generator was surrounded by a coruscating knot of blue-violet light. The sight of it made her bones ache with remembered chill. “The generator, sir?”
“It’s a job well-done,” Farosh said, “but it’s someone else’s problem now. Leave it where you found it.” She clicked out.
Cheris passed along the notification.
“You’ve got to be kidding, sir,” was Verab’s response. “We’re here right now, let us finish the job.”
“We could always volunteer to stay,” Ankat said dryly. “You know how much Kel Command loves volunteers.”
“It was clear that they want us out of here,” Cheris said. But she shared their frustration. They had expected to drive the Eels out of their hiding places so the hexarchate’s enforcers could reprogram the survivors to rejoin civilization. It was peculiar for the expedition to be cut short like this. Why send them to retrieve the storm generator if they weren’t going to take it with them after all?
The youngest soldier – Kel Dezken, scarcely out of academy – slipped out of position trying to share a bad joke with a comrade, and died to a last Eel bullet. Cheris noted it in passing. Terrible timing, but Kel luck was frequently bad.