Page 47 of Kavan

"What have you done?"

"I opened the doors for the civilians." I turn around and face her, which I have wanted to do since she started talking. "That's all. I can't shoot you, I can't fight you, and I'm not fast enough to run. So I sent the people who could."

"Turn the housings back on."

"No."

"Doctor Larkin⁠—"

"You have four people and a dead extraction plan and you're standing on a bridge inside a machine that will sterilize this system in about an hour," I say. "Point that at me all you like. It doesn't change the number of things I can do about it, which is one, and I've already done it."

And then, from somewhere down the walkway, in a voice I have heard give twenty people a job when they were too frightened to have one, Kavan Orrek says my name.

He's on his feet.

I can't account for it. Vesk can't either; he tells me afterward that he was holding him under the arms and then he simply wasn't. One arm, no eyebrows, burn up his neck, fifteen days without sleep, and he comes down that walkway toward four armed people fast enough to turn Brant all the way around.

"Get away from her," he says.

CHAPTER 28

KAVAN

Iwon't pretend it was a fight.

Two of them go down before Brant understands what is happening, because they're watching the walkway and Vesk isn't on the walkway, Vesk is under the rail with his good arm and nine years of habit. The third turns toward him and I reach her first.

Brant is faster than the others and better trained and she puts a round through the meat of my left thigh at three meters. Then I have her wrist in my one working hand, and from there it's only weight, and I have plenty of it.

It takes four seconds. She wasn't built for a Vakutan at close quarters. Nobody is.

And then Cassian Rourke comes over the aperture lip.

He isn't the man from the platform an hour ago. The coat is gone. Burn scarring covers the left side of his face from the housing that vented on both of us, his prosthetic is fused at the wrist, and he comes up onto the deck of the seat with a blade and no plan I can identify, which makes him more dangerous rather than less.

"Marshal."

"Rourke."

"Have you understood what she's done?" His voice has gone somewhere unpleasant. "She's flagged the housings. That's an inspection hold. That's a maintenance clause." He laughs, and it isn't performance either. "Eleven specialists. Nine years. I have three hundred million in Precursor artifacts in a warehouse on Kessic and this woman beat me with a form."

"Yes."

"I want to see it finished."

"You won't."

He comes at me and I meet him, and for about nine seconds it's the closest thing to an even contest I've had in nineteen years, because I have one arm and a hole in my leg and he has twenty years of getting out of rooms.

Then the sphere starts to come apart.

Not the sphere. The bridge, the eleven meters of pale material between the walkway and the console platform, which has stood twenty millennia and which Marchant put two hundred grams of shaped charge next to at the socket. It has been standing on damage since. What finishes it is the fortress itself, some vast reallocation deep in the structure, and the whole span drops forty centimeters and stops with a sound I feel in my teeth.

There are four people on it.

Enwright, carrying a wounded man. Obuya. Bee Halloran, who is helping Obuya because Obuya won't put down a case of archive shards even now.

They're a long way out over open air, and the span is going.