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‘Then I’ll go!’

‘You ain’t in no state to save anyone. And this bridge could be comin’ down any moment.’

He put his arm under her to take her weight, but she fought him. ‘Colden!’ she called over his shoulder.

‘I’ll go,’ said Malvery.

‘He ain’t one of us,’ Silo said again, firmly.

But Malvery had that look on his face, a look that Silo knew well. Like a man who just had to do a thing.

Samandra gazed at the doctor with feverish hope. ‘Please!’

‘I’ll go,’ said Malvery again, hefting his shotgun.

Silo knew there was no more to be said. He wouldn’t order the man. Malvery wouldn’t obey if he did. There was only so much responsibility you could take for another man’s life; after that, it was all down to them.

‘We’ll wait for you at the pad, long as we can,’ he said.

‘See you there,’ said Malvery, and headed off.

Silo lifted Samandra’s weight again, more roughly than he needed to. He was suddenly angry with her. For getting injured, for asking Malvery to save her companion, for putting one of the crew in danger.

‘Satisfied now, Miss Bree?’ he said. ‘Now get movin’, or you gonna end up down there with your partner if this bridge goes.’

For once, Samandra Bree had no comeback. She leaned on him and hopped alongside, white-faced and silent.

Forty-Seven

A Long Walk – Foreign Object – The Boulevard – Malvery versus the Crew

Malvery huffed and puffed as he scrambled down an incline of vines and rubble. It had taken him longer than he’d thought to find a way back to the street under the bridge. While he’d been following Silo, he hadn’t paid attention to how complex and strange these Azryx paths were. He was already wondering if he’d be able to find his way back.

Not too far away, there was a huge explosion from the power station, loud in the night. He cast a worried glance at it and hurried onward.

If Colden hadn’t been obliterated in the blast – which, to be honest, he probably had – then he’d have fallen into the foliage beneath the bridge. It was a long way down, but branches and vines made for a better landing than most surfaces. While there was a chance, Malvery had to look.

He had no special love for the man. In fact, he barely knew him, and Grudge had been an enemy as often as an ally. But that didn’t matter. There was a rightness to what he was doing, a certainty of purpose that propelled him forward. That man was a Century Knight, one of the Archduke’s loyal elite. The cream of Vardic warriors. And he was damned if he’d leave a soldier of his country behind.

He stopped to catch his breath. If only he didn’t drink quite so bloody much. If only he’d stayed in shape. But all those soft years in Thesk had made him sluggardly, and in the years that followed he’d been more interested in booze than exercise.

Well, he might have the body of a fat bastard, but he had the heart of a young man. A young man who’d gone to war for his country once. A young man who’d been betrayed by the old man that succeeded him.

Angered by that thought, he stormed on, calling Colden’s name. A Sammie soldier burst out of the undergrowth, attracted by the noise, waving his rifle. He was a young man too, and he seemed startled to find an overweight Vard with a flowing white moustache and round, green-lensed glasses perched on his nose. Maybe he’d never seen one before. His hesitation meant he never got a chance to see one again.

Malvery cranked a new round into his shotgun and walked on. The bridge was almost overhead now. Despite Silo’s misgivings, it hadn’t collapsed yet. The Juggernaut was still somewhere nearby, ripping up the city. Malvery did his best to ignore it.

Out on the battlefield, you couldn’t think about all the dangers around you. If you did, you’d be paralysed. Every man knew they might be hit by a shell or nailed by a sniper at any moment, and they’d never see it coming. It didn’t matter how careful you were, or how highly trained. It was blind bloody chance. You just had to get on with it.

He found Grudge at the foot of a tree, barely suspended in a cradle of vines, a dark shape in the moon-shadows. There were broken branches all around him, and his autocannon lay nearby. Malvery put fingers to his throat and felt for a pulse.

‘Blimey,’ he said.

He checked him over for broken bones, but all he found was a lump on his head the size of an egg, buried beneath his shaggy hair. He tilted Grudge’s head towards the silvery light and peeled back the eyelids, looking for blood in the whites. Then he slapped him a couple of times to see if it would get any reaction.

Head trauma. Possible skull fracture. He might wake up in a minute, or never. Maybe he’s already dead, but his heart and lungs ain’t worked it out yet.

‘Let’s get you out of all that armour, then,’ he said. ‘ ’Cause you can bet your arse I ain’t carryin’ you in that.’

Armour or no armour, he hadn’t gone far before he realised exactly how heavy a man who stood over two metres tall could be. Malvery had always been strong, with a bulk that belied the delicacy of his profession, but he suspected that he’d overestimated himself this time. He’d been taken with visions of pulling a Century Knight’s fat out of the fire, just like he’d done with those soldiers in the First Aerium War. Belatedly he remembered that he’d been in his prime back then, fit from Army training, and those men he’d saved had all been a good sight smaller than Grudge.

His legs burned. His back ached. He’d barely gone a hundred metres.

Gonna be a long walk.

There was no point backtracking; he’d never catch up with Silo. He decided to make his own way.

The streets were confusing, always curving, sloping, splitting into different levels. The Azryx seemed frustratingly fond of dead ends. Malvery kept having to readjust his heading, navigating by glimpses of the landing pad between the buildings. The Juggernaut was still nearby, but thankfully its attention seemed to be focused in another direction. The sound of collapsing walls was an almost constant background noise, and Malvery tensed every time he heard the steadily climbing squeal that heralded another blast from the cannon. Gunfire floated up from the streets as the Sammies fought back.

He put his head down and kept going. All he could do was put one foot in front of the other and hope no one – no thing – noticed him.

After a short time, which seemed like an age, he found himself standing on the edge of an enormous plaza. He knew this place; he’d seen it earlier. It was the Samarlan base camp, where dozens of tents had been set up as barracks, command centres and the like. The hub of the Sammies’ operation.

Where there had once been orderly rows of tents, now there were only smoking rags, flapping in the rising thermals. The burnt-pork stink of cooked human flesh was thick in the air. The debris of a military encampment was everywhere: blackened stoves, melted weaponry, scorched foot lockers. To either side of the plaza was a trench olapping inf rubble that cut through the surrounding buildings, marking the path of the Juggernaut’s beam.

Malvery stared for a moment, rocked by the raw power of the thing.

The author of the devastation was lumbering across his path, several streets away, searching for new targets. Its smooth white armour sparked now and then as bullets bounced off it. Beyond it, a short way upslope, was the landing pad, rising like some ancient tree above the city.

He deliberated a moment, catching his breath, then struck out across the plaza. To go around would be a detour he wasn’t sure he could manage. He was hot and damp and red-faced, every muscle hurt, and he didn’t know how much he had left in his legs. It frightened him to be so exposed with that thing nearby, but there it was. No help for it.

He just had to hope the damned thing didn’t look his way.

He staggered on through the wreckage of the camp. The smell of burnt bodies seeped its way down the back of his throat. They lay bundled up among the tatters of the tents, curled in on themselves or clawing grotesquely at the sky. There must have been a lot of Sammies here when it got hit.