Blinded by the Blast: A MechWarrior Pursuit

[00:00:00]The particle bolt came out of the white and turned the world to knives.

[00:00:06]Calder felt it pass a meter from his cockpit, close enough to taste, and the glass beneath his Locust shattered into a thousand screaming reflections.

[00:00:19]His threat board lit with 40 contacts, and not one of them could be trusted.

[00:00:25]His hands moved before his mind did, hauling the light machine sideways across a surface that offered no grip and no mercy.

[00:00:35]One of those ghosts wanted him dead.

[00:00:38]He could not see which.

[00:00:40]He kept the throttle high and his eyes higher, off the instruments, out through the ferroglass at the blinding flat of the world.

[00:00:48]The Locust skated, recovered, ran. Every footfall was a negotiation with a surface that did not want to be walked on.

[00:00:57]And twice in the last minute, the gyro had tried to throw him onto his face.

[00:01:03]A fall here would be the end.

[00:01:05]He knew that the way he knew his own name.

[00:01:08]20 tons of reconnaissance machine, the lightest thing in any line of battle, and the only thing keeping him alive was that he was small and fast and hard to hit.

[00:01:22]Take away the speed and he was a coffin with legs.

[00:01:26]The desert took away the speed.

[00:01:28]That was the cruelty of it.

[00:01:31]He risked one glance down at the tactical display and wished he hadn't.

[00:01:36]The screen was a riot of false returns, contact markers blooming and dying across the grid like sparks off a grinder.

[00:01:45]His radar pulses went out into the world and came back lying, bouncing off the fused silica floor at angles no honest surface would ever produce, painting phantom enemies a kilometer out and a meter behind and everywhere between.

[00:02:01]The thermal overlay was worse. The glass had drunk a full day of sun and now threw it all back up at the sky. A sheet of white heat from horizon to horizon and against that furnace glow, a 75-ton war machine registered as exactly nothing. His optics, his sensors, every clever instrument the Free Worlds League had bolted into this cockpit to help him see.

[00:02:27]All of it was blind and worse than blind because blindness at least knew it could not see.

[00:02:35]His machines insisted they could. They simply could not tell the truth. So, he flew on raw eyes through the glare, squinting until his head ached and he trusted nothing the locusts told him.

[00:02:50]His name was Ren Calder and 3 days ago he had been a scout with a lance and future, Lieutenant, third Marik Militia, a recon element so far behind the Lyran advance that the front was a rumor.

[00:03:06]Four-light machines slipping through the broken country of a contested world, listening, mapping, staying small. That was the whole art of it. You did not fight. You saw and you carried what you saw home and the seeing was worth more than any kill. Calder had been good at it. He had told himself in the quiet hours that being good at it was a kind of honor even if no one ever sang about the man who came back with the answer instead of the trophy. He had the answer now. He had it locked in a sealed data core slotted behind his command couch and it was is to get a great many people killed if he could not carry it across this dead and shining plane. The world was called Vera, a marginal border holding that it changed hands twice in living memory and would change hands again before the war was done. The Lyran Commonwealth had come for it three weeks ago in strength, a full assault landing, hammer and anvil, and the Free Worlds garrison had bent and given ground the way garrisons did. That much was expected.

[00:04:22]That much was the war as everyone understood it, but Calder's lance had gone deep, deeper than the planners intended, and out past the staging fields they had found the thing that was not supposed to be there.

[00:04:36]The Lyran force on Vera was too small, loud and visible and burning fuel and ammunition like a much larger army, but too small.

[00:04:47]Calder had counted the dropships on the ground and counted the MechBases and done the arithmetic a hundred times, and the arithmetic kept coming back wrong.

[00:04:57]Vera was a faint. The real Lyran fist was clenched somewhere else, aimed at a target that mattered, and every garrison the Free Worlds League rushed to save this worthless rock was a garrison that would not be standing where the blow actually fell.

[00:05:15]His lance had pulled the intercepts to prove it. Staging orders, a jump schedule, a single careless transmission that named the true objective in the clear. It was all in the core behind his couch. Get it to the relay.

[00:05:32]Get it onto a dropship, and a deception that had cost the Commonwealth months of planning would die in an afternoon. The Lyrans knew the lance had been there.

[00:05:43]They had known within hours, and they had come hunting because intelligence like this was not the kind of thing you let walk home. They caught the Lances dusk in a dry riverbed 40 km back and it had not been a battle so much as an execution. A Lyran heavy company waiting in ambush and four light machines with nowhere to run.

[00:06:06]Cass had died first. Her stinger opening up like a struck match when the auto cannon fire found her ammunition. Then Maddox, then the kid whose name Calder was already ashamed to find slipping away from him. A boy of 19 in a wasp who had jumped straight into a particle cannon's mouth because he didn't know any better and there hadn't been time to teach him.

[00:06:28]Calder had lived because the others had bought him the seconds with their lives screaming at him over the lance channel to run, run, get it out and he had run.

[00:06:39]He had left them burning and he had run and he would carry that for whatever was left of his life. However short that turned out to be.

[00:06:48]The relay was on the far coast.

[00:06:51]The extraction was a leopard called the Hadrian star. A small dropship that could carry his locust and three others that no longer existed. And the Hadrian star had a launch window.

[00:07:03]It was not a generous window.

[00:07:05]Lyran Aero space fighters were tightening their hold on Vera's skies by the hour. And once that net closed the leopard would not be able to lift of all.

[00:07:15]And the core behind Calder's couch would be a thing he died holding.

[00:07:20]Around the long way through the passes was a full day's march.

[00:07:25]He did not have a full day. He had until the window closed and the only road that fit inside that time ran straight across the one piece of ground in all the world that a sane man would walk around. The locals called it the mirror. On the maps it was a hundred square kilometers of fused glass, a flat and gleaming nothing where the soil itself had been turned to molten silica and frozen smooth, but the maps did not tell you what it was to look at. It was beautiful and [clears throat] it was wrong, a sea that did not move, a floor you could see your own machine reflected in, upside down and walking with you step for step, your shadow's twin in a buried world. It had been made, the story went, in the bad years when the succession wars were young and savage and no convention restrained the great houses from anything.

[00:08:24]A warship had hung in orbit over Vera and emptied its weapons into the ground.

[00:08:30]Not at an army, but at the land, to deny it, to punish it, to make a point that no one now remembered the shape of. The fire had come down in a column and the desert had simply ceased to be a desert.

[00:08:45]Whatever had been alive on that hundred square kilometers had become part of the glass.

[00:08:51]The old people of Vera spoke of it the way men everywhere speak of the places their grandparents would not name. Both houses had condemned it afterward.

[00:09:02]Both houses had sworn it was the other.

[00:09:05]It did not matter. The glass remembered and the glass kept its dead. And now the war had come to Vera again. And a man was running across the grave to keep one more from being added to it. He had been on the mirror for 90 minutes when the heavy machine found him.

[00:09:25]>> He had felt it before he saw it, a pressure at the back of the neck that every scout learned to trust, the sense of a thing watching. Then, the first particle bolt had split the white.

[00:09:38]And now he ran, and the hunter ran behind him, and the mirror lay between them and the far shore like a promise neither of them had made.

[00:09:49]The comm crackled.

[00:09:51]It was an open channel, a general hail, and the voice that came through was calm in a way that made Calder's skin crawl.

[00:10:01]Free Worlds Scout. This is Hauptmann Reinhard Drexler, 11th Lyran Guards.

[00:10:08]Unhurried, almost courteous, a man with no reason to rush.

[00:10:14]You are carrying something my Archon would very much like to keep buried.

[00:10:19]I am told you are good. I have no doubt you are, but you are in a Locust and I am in a Marauder, and we are both standing on the most honest battlefield in the Inner Sphere.

[00:10:31]Out here, the machine that lies to its master kills him. So, let us find out which of us listens to his lies.

[00:10:40]A pause.

[00:10:41]There is no shore you can reach faster than I can put a bolt through your reactor.

[00:10:46]Stop running. It will be cleaner.

[00:10:49]Calder did not answer. He had nothing to say that would not give Drexler something, a bearing, a state of mind, a tremor in the voice.

[00:10:59]Silence was the only armor the desert hadn't stripped off him. He keyed the channel closed and put both hands back on the work of staying upright. But the Hauptmann was right about one thing, and Calder hated that he was right.

[00:11:15]Out here, the instruments killed you.

[00:11:18]Whoever broke first and believed his screen would die believing them.

[00:11:23]He found the Marauder with his eyes a moment later, and the size of it stopped his breath.

[00:11:29]It was a long way back, more than half a kilometer.

[00:11:33]A squat and brutal silhouette walking out of the glare on the reflected plane.

[00:11:39]75 tons of it.

[00:11:41]The thing had no head where a head should be.

[00:11:45]The cockpit sat low and forward in the hull between two enormous arm-mounted weapons, giving it the look of some deep-sea thing, a crab or a hunting beetle, all forward menace and no face.

[00:11:59]12 m of armored malice.

[00:12:02]Each of those arms ended in a particle projection cannon, a weapon that could reach out across 500 m of open ground and boil a man in his cockpit. And mounted in a dorsal housing atop its right torso was a standard autocannon that could do the same with hammered metal instead of lightning.

[00:12:22]Against that, Calder had a single medium laser that ran dry of menace past 270 m and two machine guns that meant nothing at all unless he was close enough to count the rivets. The Marauder outranged him at every distance there was.

[00:12:40]It outgunned him at every distance there was.

[00:12:44]The only number where Calder won was speed, and the glass had taken his speed away.

[00:12:51]The Marauder ran at 64.8 km an hour at its absolute best, slow and patient and sure. Calder's Locust could touch 129 on open ground, nearly twice as fast, and on open ground this would have been no contest at all. He would simply have left the heavy machine standing and been a memory before it cleared its weapons.

[00:13:16]But the glass would not let him open the throttle. Every time he pushed past a careful lope, the surface slid out from under him and the gyro shrieked and the whole machine tried to die. His legs were not built for this. The Locust's designers had given it speed, and given it almost nothing else. And the engineers' notes that Calder had read as a cadet had words like weak legs and cramped cockpit, polite ways of saying that this machine fell down easily, and that a fall for a Locust was very often the last thing that happened to it. So, he could not run.

[00:13:55]He could only skate and shuffle and pick his footing like a man crossing a frozen lake at a dead sprint. And at that pace, the gap between him and the Marauder did not open the way it should. It held.

[00:14:08]Sometimes, when the footing turned bad, it closed.

[00:14:12]The bolts kept coming. Drexler fired in measured pairs, both cannons at once, and each time the world to one side of Calder erupted in white fire and fine glass. The Hauptmann was a good shot, but Calder was a small and jittering target half a kilometer out, weaving without pattern, and a Locust at speed was one of the hardest things in the universe to hit. The particle fire went wide and struck the mirror, and that was when Calder learned the next cruelty of the place. The bolts ricocheted. A particle stream that should have spent itself harmlessly in sand instead skipped off the glass like a stone off water, splitting, glancing away at a flat angle, carving a glowing scar across the surface and racing off into the white to die somewhere a kilometer distant. The glass did not absorb energy. It threw energy back, the same way it threw back light and radar and heat. And for one heart-stopping instant, Calder watched a deflected bolt skitter past his own leg from a shot that had been aimed nowhere near him.

[00:15:26]The desert was trying to kill him with the hunter's misses.

[00:15:30]He filed it away with the cold part of his mind that was still doing his job.

[00:15:36]Everything out here lied. Everything out here turned on you. If he was going to live, he would have to make the lying work for him instead. He angled toward the only feature the mirror offered.

[00:15:50]Far out across the plain, breaking the perfect flat, stood a field of shapes.

[00:15:56]He had seen them on the way in and steered well clear. But now they were cover. And cover was worth more than caution.

[00:16:05]As he drew closer, the shapes resolved and his stomach turned over because they were machines.

[00:16:13]Old machines. The dead of the bombardment. The war engines that had been standing on this ground the day the sky came down, caught and held by the glass at the instant the world melted around them.

[00:16:28]A battle mech's arm reached up out of the surface, fingers spread, frozen mid-grasp at something it would never reach. A torso jutted from the plain at an angle, half submerged, its cockpit a blind socket.

[00:16:43]The fused slumped wreck of an old tank, its shape gone soft and wrong like a candle that had stood too near a flame.

[00:16:52]They stood across a square kilometer of the mirror, these drowned soldiers, a hundred of them or more. And the living machines wove in among them now, the small one fleeing and the large one hunting. Two more soldiers come to join the dead. Kalder used them. He put a frozen torso between himself and the marauder and felt the relief of a particle bolt splashing against the dead metal instead of his own.

[00:17:20]He cut hard around a reaching arm, the Locust's reflection sliding across the glass beneath him, and for a few seconds he was out of the Hauptmann's line, and the bolt stopped, and there was only the ragged sound of his own breathing in the helmet, and he felt the heat.

[00:17:38]Not from his weapons.

[00:17:40]That was the strange mercy of his little machine. And he blessed it now. The Locust ran cool, almost laughably cool.

[00:17:50]10 heat sinks for a reactor that barely strained them.

[00:17:54]And he could fire his single laser and run flat out and still climb no higher than a comfortable warmth.

[00:18:02]The Locust would never cook him from the inside.

[00:18:05]But the mirror would. The glare came up through the floor and in through the canopy and beat against the hull from every side at once. A hundred suns reflected off a hundred square kilometers of mirror, and the cockpit had become an oven. Sweat ran into his eyes, and he could not spare a hand to wipe it. The temperature readout climbed steadily, not from anything he was doing, but from the world he was standing in, and his life support labored against an enemy it had never been designed to fight. He was being slowly baked alive inside a machine that was not even warm. There was a grim joke in that somewhere. He did not have the breath to laugh at it. The Hauptmann, Kholler realized, had the opposite problem. And that thought arrived like the first cold water in days.

[00:18:59]He had watched the Marauder fire. He knew that machine the way every MechWarrior knew the great chassis, the famous killers, the silhouettes that haunted the recognition manuals. Two particle cannons, the most feared long-range battery a heavy could carry, and the most punishing to its own master because each of those cannons dumped a furnaces worth of heat into the mech with every shot, and the Marauder's 16 heat sinks could not drink it fast enough. Fire both cannons, and the needle climbed. Fire both cannons again, and it climbed faster than the sinks could pull it down. Keep firing in the heat of a chase on a plane that was already an oven for both of them, and sooner or later the Marauder would redline. And a Marauder at the red was a Marauder in trouble because slung in its left torso behind armor that colder might just be able to reach, sat a ton of autocannon ammunition, and high heat made ammunition do terrible things.

[00:20:05]Every gunner in the inner sphere knew the Marauder's secret shame.

[00:20:10]Push it hot enough, and it killed itself.

[00:20:13]Drexler had to manage his heat. Colder had to manage the sun.

[00:20:19]Two men fighting two different fires, and the difference between them was that Colder's fire could not make him explode. He did not have a plan yet, but he had the shape of one.

[00:20:33]He stopped fleeing for the first time, and he did it on purpose.

[00:20:39]It went against everything, but the cold part of him had done the arithmetic, and the arithmetic was sound. He could not outrun the cannons forever. Sooner or later a bolt would find his reactor or his gyro, and that would be the end.

[00:20:55]Stripped down a piece at a time exactly as Drexler intended. He needed the Marauder hurt. He needed it afraid of its own heat. And there was one place on the whole battlefield where those terrible particle cannons could not reach him at all, and it was the last place in the world a fleeing man would go. It was directly in the Hauptmann's lap. A particle projection cannon was a long weapon built to kill at half a kilometer, and like every weapon of its kind, it had a blind spot at its own feet.

[00:21:31]Get inside 90 m of it, and the great bolts went wild. The targeting fouled.

[00:21:38]The cannon is good as useless at a range it was never made to fight.

[00:21:43]Calder knew it the way he knew the rest of his trade.

[00:21:48]So, he used the wreck field one more time, and this time not to run from the hunter, but to reach him.

[00:21:56]He cut hard around the frozen torso, broke the Marauder's line of fire, and instead of fleeing the cover, he double backed into it, sliding the Locust between the drowned machines on a curve that took him not away from the hunter, but around and in.

[00:22:15]For 3 seconds, he was nowhere, lost in the glass forest, and Drexler's cannons hunted empty air where a running scout should have been.

[00:22:26]Then Calder came out of the wrecks at a flat skating rush from the Marauder's open flank, far closer than the Hauptmann had ever let him come, well inside the blind range of those cannons, close enough to see the long scars the kilometers had worn in the heavy machine's armor, and the heat shimmer rising off its hull in waves.

[00:22:49]He put his medium laser into the Marauder's left side and held it there.

[00:22:55]The beam walked across the warm plating of the ammunition bay, boiling it, gouging a black trench through armor that had already given too much. It was not a killing hit. He had known it could not be. A single medium laser against a marauder was a bee against a bull, but it was a wound in exactly the place a marauder could least afford one. The armor over its own ammunition thinned and cracked and weakened, peeled back toward the structure beneath, and he raked it for as long as he dared. A medium laser stabbed back at him, close and vicious, and missed by a hand. The autocannon coughed, and the heavy rounds went wide as Drexler fought to track a target that was suddenly impossibly right on top of him and moving like something half its weight. For one heartbeat, the hunter was the hunted, off balance, his best weapons blinded by their own length, 75 tons of war machine dragged into a knife fight it had never wanted and could not win cleanly.

[00:24:05]And Calder saw in that heartbeat the thing he had gambled on. The heat shimmer over the marauder's hull was fierce, the air above it bending like the air over a forge, a machine running hot and getting hotter, a hunter already paying for every bolt he had thrown across the mirror.

[00:24:27]Then Calder broke away because to stay was to die.

[00:24:34]The particle fire chased him out, and as he broke for open ground, it found him properly.

[00:24:39]A bolt caught the Locust's left arm at the shoulder and the machine gun there, and the cockpit filled with the shriek of damage alarms as the entire limb was vaporized in a flash of man-made lightning. The arm was simply gone. The machine gun was dead. A third of his pitiful armament obliterated in a tenth of a second and the carryover energy scarring his torso, but he had not slowed and he had not fallen and the data core behind his couch was untouched and so by the only measure that mattered he was still winning.

[00:25:12]He pushed the failing arm out of his mind.

[00:25:15]He had no use for the machine guns out here anyway. They had never been going to matter. He weaved and skated and ran.

[00:25:24]The far shore was a smudge on the horizon that did not seem to grow.

[00:25:28]Drexler walked behind him relentless, unhurried, a patient 75 tons that did not need to catch him so long as it could keep him in front of those cannons and chip him down a piece at a time and colder began in earnest.

[00:25:46]The only work that could save him. He began to read the glass.

[00:25:51]He had nearly died learning the lesson.

[00:25:54]20 minutes earlier before the marauder, he had put a foot wrong and felt the surface give beneath it. A sudden softness where the floor should have been hard and the locust had plunged ankle deep before he hauled it back and threw himself clear.

[00:26:11]He had not understood then.

[00:26:14]He understood now.

[00:26:16]The mirror was not solid all the way down. When the bombardment melted the desert, it had melted it over pockets of trapped gas and shifting sand and as the glass cooled and the centuries passed, some of those pockets had collapsed and some had not leaving voids beneath the skin of fused silica that might be a meter thick or might be a finger's width. From above, the screens could not tell the difference. Radar read solid ground because the surface was solid.

[00:26:49]The void below was invisible to it.

[00:26:52]Thermal read nothing at all. There was exactly one instrument on Vera that could find the thin places, and it was the human eye, and only in the right light.

[00:27:04]Because the thin glass looked different.

[00:27:07]Kolder had begun to see it without knowing he was seeing it.

[00:27:12]A faint difference in the sheen.

[00:27:14]A place where the reflected sun pulled a shade too bright.

[00:27:19]A subtle paleness, as though the surface there were holding its breath.

[00:27:24]Where the glass was deep and solid, it threw the light back hard and true.

[00:27:30]Where it stretched thin over a hollow, it went a little milky, a little soft, the way ice goes pale over open water.

[00:27:39]By eye, in the low gold light of a sun now sliding toward the horizon, a man who knew to look could trace the safe ground from the treacherous, like a path drawn on the plain.

[00:27:53]By instrument, it was all the same flat lie.

[00:27:57]Drexler, in his command machine bristling with sensors, was reading his screams.

[00:28:04]Kolder, in his blind and battered scout, was reading the world. The chase found a rhythm after that, a slow and terrible clockwork.

[00:28:15]Drexler fired in pairs, both cannons together, and then he had to wait.

[00:28:21]Kolder learned to feel the waiting.

[00:28:24]After each double bolt came a span of seconds in which no fire chased him.

[00:28:29]The helpman's needle climbed too high to risk another pull, the great machine bleeding heat into a sky that gave it nowhere to put it. And in those spans, Kolder stole what he could, a few meters of distance, a breath, a glance ahead at the ground he had to cross, then the cannons would speak again, the white erupting at his flank, and the count would begin once more.

[00:28:56]Fire and wait. Fire and wait. A man could set his watch by a marauder's heat if he lived long enough to learn the beat of it.

[00:29:07]He used the lulls to read the glass.

[00:29:10]Twice in those minutes it merely took him a soft pale patch he caught a half second too late, the locust's foot already dropping toward a milky sheen that meant a hollow beneath.

[00:29:22]Both times some new sense, half instinct and half hard-bought knowledge, hold the foot aside before it committed. And the machine skated wide and stayed upright.

[00:29:35]He was learning the language of the surface, the only way the mirror taught it, a word at a time, each lesson one misstep from being his last.

[00:29:46]Pale meant hollow.

[00:29:48]Bright meant deep. The milky breath-held sheen meant death, a finger's width down. He read it as he ran, and he did not fall, and slowly, without letting himself believe it, he began to think he had found the one thing on Vera the Hopman's screens could not. The Hopman's voice came again, and there was the first thin edge of something under the calm now. The smallest fray.

[00:30:17]You are quick, Lieutenant. I will give you that, but you are running out of desert, and your little machine is coming apart, and I have all the time and all the cooling I need. A lie, that last part, and Cold as smiled in the heat to hear it, because a man who has to claim he has all the cooling he needs is a man watching his heat needle climb.

[00:30:40]Stop now, and I will make it fast. Make me chase you to the shore, and I will make it slow. I am offering you a courtesy. Few in your position get one.

[00:30:52]Calder keyed the channel and spoke for the first and only time.

[00:30:58]His voice came out rougher than he meant it to, scoured by the heat and the fear and the grief he had not had time to feel.

[00:31:06]"You're hot, old man," he said. "I can hear it. Keep shooting." He closed the channel before Drexler could answer, and he hoped the silence after would do more damage than any bolt.

[00:31:19]He had a plan now.

[00:31:21]It had been assembling itself in the back of his mind for kilometers, and the shape of it frightened him almost as much as the Marauder did, because it asked him to do the one thing every instinct in his body screamed against.

[00:31:36]It asked him to stop running away. The far edge of the mirror, where the glass met the rising ground of the coast, was the worst stretch of all. Calder could see it now, finally close enough to read, and what he read made his mouth go dry. Near the shore, the bombardment had struck deepest, melted widest, and the voids beneath the surface there were not pockets, but a buried lake of hollow, a vast soft expanse where the glass spanned emptiness like a frozen film over a drained well.

[00:32:10]He could see it in the light, a whole pale field of milky, breath-holding sheen, a quarter kilometer of it, lying directly across the only line to the shore.

[00:32:21]Solid ground bracketed it on either side, but going around meant exposing his flank to the cannons for a long, slow, fatal minute, and Drexler would not miss a flank.

[00:32:33]But a man could cross the thin glass if he were light enough and careful enough and willing to gamble his life on the difference between 20 tons and 75.

[00:32:45]That was the whole of it. That was the entire plan, naked and terrible. Kaelen weighed 20 tons spread across two broad feet, and if he crossed the pale field slow and smooth and light, distributing his weight, never stamping, never letting the gyro slam him down, the skin might just bear him. Drexler weighed 75, almost four times as much on a machine built to crush and hold, and Drexler was reading a screen that told him the ground ahead was as solid as a parade square. The Hauptmann trusted his instruments. He had said so himself in that calm and certain voice. Out here, the machine that lies to its master kills him. Kaelen was going to hand the man his own words and watch the desert collect, if it worked, if the skin held him. If it didn't, there would be two more soldiers in the glass and no one would ever know Vera was a faint and a real Lyran fist would land on a world full of people who never saw it coming.

[00:33:55]The whole war for one careful crossing.

[00:33:59]Kaelen breathed and steadied his hands and turned his battered locust toward the pale field and did the thing that felt like dying.

[00:34:10]He slowed down.

[00:34:12]It was the hardest movement of his life.

[00:34:16]Every nerve he had was wired to run, to weave, to stay fast and small and impossible to hit, and he throttled it all back to a crawl with a hunter's cannons at his spine.

[00:34:30]The Marauder behind him noticed at once.

[00:34:34]It had to.

[00:34:35]A locust slowing on open ground was a gift. A target finally holding still.

[00:34:42]And Calder heard the change in the air as Drexler brought both cannons to bear, and he made himself not flinch. Made himself keep his feet light on the singing glass. Made himself cross the safe ground at the edge of the pale field. At a walk while a Hauptmann lined up the easiest shot of the day. The particle bolts came together. And one of them hit.

[00:35:06]It caught the locust in the right torso and the world went white and sideways.

[00:35:11]Armor sheared away in a spray of molten droplets. Alarms drowned everything and the machine staggered. The gyro fighting. The whole 20 tons tipping toward the fall that would end it.

[00:35:24]Calder caught it. He did not know how.

[00:35:27]Some animal part of him worked the controls in a blur while the thinking part hung frozen and screaming. And the locust came back upright with its right side laid open to the structure and its balance hanging by a thread. And he kept walking. He kept walking onto the pale glass.

[00:35:47]Behind him he heard or imagined he heard Drexler's grunt of satisfaction.

[00:35:53]The sound of a hunter who knows the next shot is the last one.

[00:35:58]But the next shot did not come right away. And Calder understood why.

[00:36:04]And the understanding was the first warm thing in a cold hour.

[00:36:08]Drexler was hot.

[00:36:11]The Hauptmann had been firing those cannons for kilometers across an oven of a battlefield. Pair after pair.

[00:36:18]And now his needle was deep in the red.

[00:36:21]And his heat sinks were drowning. And if he fired again, he risked the shutdown.

[00:36:27]The long terrible seconds of a dead machine.

[00:36:30]Or worse.

[00:36:32]The ammunition in his left torso going off like the inside of the sun.

[00:36:37]So, Drexler held his fire to cool.

[00:36:40]Just for a moment. Just for a breath.

[00:36:44]And in that breath he did the thing that killed him.

[00:36:48]He came forward.

[00:36:50]He could not shoot. So, he closed the distance to be sure of the kill when his cannons came back online.

[00:36:58]To herd his crippled prey. To finish this on the shore as promised.

[00:37:03]He drove 75 tons of Marauder onto the pale field.

[00:37:08]Kalder was a third of the way across by then.

[00:37:12]Moving like a man on river ice. Light and smooth. The skin crazing faintly beneath each footfall, but holding.

[00:37:21]Holding. He felt the Marauder come on behind him through the soles of his own machine.

[00:37:27]A deep tremor in the glass.

[00:37:30]The heavy resonant tread of a thing that did not know it was walking on a held breath. He did not look back. He could not. He needed every scrap of attention for the next step. And the next. For keeping his weight even. And his feet flat. And his ruined balance from dropping him through. The pale glass talked under him. A high singing crackle. The sound of something deciding. He kept walking. The shore crept closer. Gold rock against a gold sky.

[00:38:05]Close now. Close. Behind him the glass made a different sound. It was a long deep splitting groan.

[00:38:15]The sound of a great sheet of something failing all at once.

[00:38:20]And Kalder felt it through his before he heard it through his ears, a sudden drop in the tension of the world.

[00:38:30]He looked back then.

[00:38:32]He could not help it.

[00:38:35]The Marauder was going down.

[00:38:37]The skin had given beneath it the way the mirror had been waiting decades to give. A whole section of the pale field collapsing inward, and a great machine was pitching forward into the dark mouth of the void. It's squat hole tilting, one massive leg already gone through to the hip. The other scrabbling for purchase on glass that was folding away beneath it like wet paper.

[00:39:01]The particle cannon swung wildly, reaching for a sky that could not help.

[00:39:06]For one instant, Calder saw the cockpit, low and forward in the hole, and he thought of the man inside it. The calm and certain voice, the courtesy. The hunter who had read his screen and believed it. The Marauder slid and caught, half in and half out of the collapsing glass. It's torso wrenched up at an angle. It's left side rolled toward the sky.

[00:39:32]It's left side.

[00:39:34]The torso laid open and exposed by the twist of the fall.

[00:39:39]The armor there already worn by the kilometers, and now turned up to face him.

[00:39:45]And behind that armor, Calder knew sat a ton of auto cannon ammunition in a machine that was red lined and overheating, and one spark from disaster.

[00:39:56]He had stopped walking.

[00:39:58]He was standing on solid ground at the field's near edge, the void between them. His battered locust swaying on its feet, his right side hanging open.

[00:40:09]And he had a choice.

[00:40:11]And he had perhaps 3 seconds to make it.

[00:40:14]He could run.

[00:40:16]The Marauder was crippled and trapped and might never claw itself free.

[00:40:21]He could turn and cross the last of the shore and let the desert have the Hauptmann slow.

[00:40:26]That was the safe choice.

[00:40:29]That was the survivor's choice.

[00:40:31]But a trapped Marauder was still a Marauder and its cannons still worked and Drexler was still alive in there.

[00:40:40]And a man who had executed a lance in a riverbed 40 km back would shoot him in the back the instant the cannons cooled.

[00:40:49]Calder thought of Cass and the kid whose name was gone.

[00:40:53]And the boy in the wasp who had not known any better.

[00:40:57]He thought of the core behind his couch and the world that would burn if he was wrong about any of this. And he made the other choice, the one the cold part of him had been building towards since the first bolt split the white. He brought his single medium laser to bear on the Marauder's exposed left torso and he fired. The laser was a small weapon. It would have been nothing against a healthy Marauder. A scratch, an insult.

[00:41:27]But this Marauder was not healthy.

[00:41:30]It was twisted open and redlined and full of heat with no way to bleed it and the laser found the worn armor over the ammunition bay and burned through the last of it into the structure beneath, into a magazine sitting at the ragged edge of cooking off on its own. And Calder gave it the one push it needed.

[00:41:49]The Marauder came apart from the inside.

[00:41:52]The autocannon ammunition went all at once. A tearing white flash deep in the machine's chest. And the heavy hull simply ruptured.

[00:42:02]The left side blowing outward. The whole 75 tons convulsing on the broken glass.

[00:42:09]The particle cannons fell still.

[00:42:12]The cockpit, low and forward, vanished in the same instant the magazine let go, and Calder did not let himself imagine the inside of it, then or ever.

[00:42:24]The dying Marauder lurched, lost the last of its hold on the failing glass, and slid backward into the dark of the void it had broken open. The mirror took it the way it had taken all the others, all the drowned soldiers of the old war, folding the glass closed over the wreck in a slow grinding collapse until there was nothing on the surface where the hunter had been but a scar of churned and milky silica, settling, going quiet, going flat. The plane was still. The sun touched the horizon, and Calder stood alone on the edge of the mirror, 20 tons of ruined locust, one arm dead and one side open, and the heat, finally, slowly beginning to ebb as the angry sun went down and stopped reflecting hell up into his cockpit. He did not feel triumph.

[00:43:26]He waited for it, and it did not come.

[00:43:30]He felt the great shaking emptiness that comes after the body finally believes it is going to live, and under that, he felt the dead, all of them, the Lance in the riverbed and the man in the glass, a weight that settled onto him and that he understood in that moment he was going to carry the rest of the way.

[00:43:57]That was the cost. That was always the cost for the man who came back with the answer.

[00:44:04]He turned the locust toward the shore.

[00:44:07]The last quarter kilometer of the mirror was solid and in the failing light it gave up its thin places easily to his tired eyes. And he crossed it at a careful walk and felt the glass give way to honest rock beneath his feet for the first time in two hours.

[00:44:26]The change of it nearly buckled his knees inside the cockpit. Ground that did not lie. Ground that held you up and did not throw the sun in your face and did not hide a void beneath a held breath. He had not known how much the mirror had been costing him until he stepped off it. The relay station sat in the hills above the shore. A low cluster of prefabricated buildings and beyond it on a scorched landing field crouched the Hadrian's star. Its drives already warming. The heat shimmer of an imminent burn rising off its hull. Coldus comm crackled and this time the voice was a friend's. A woman's voice tight with the strain of a launch officer watching a window close. Locust on the shore. This is Hadrian's star actual. We have got you. We have got about nine minutes before the Lyran fighters close the lid and we are gone with you or without you.

[00:45:29]Can you make the field? I can make it, Coldus said. His own voice sounded strange to him far away. I've got the core. It's intact. The whole package is intact. A pause on the channel and then her voice changed. The strain breaking open into something fierce. Say again Locust. You have the package.

[00:45:52]Vera's a faint.

[00:45:54]He was walking the failing Locust up the rising ground now. The relay buildings growing ahead. The warm and waiting bulk of the dropship beyond.

[00:46:04]The whole landings are faint. The real thrust's already staging. It's all here, every transmission, the jump schedule, the objective in the clear.

[00:46:15]Get it to the relay. Get it up to the jumpship before you burn. It doesn't matter if I make the field. The core matters. Get the core up. You're going to make the field, Lieutenant. She said, and there was a thing in her voice that he would remember for a long time, the sound of a stranger deciding he mattered. You did not cross that thing for nothing. Bring it home yourself.

[00:46:41]He made the field with 4 minutes to spare. Techs were running before the locusts' feet touched the scorched concrete. Swarming the broken machine, and Coldar popped the hatch, and the cool evening air came in over him like absolution, and he handed the data core down into a tech's waiting hands, with arms that had stopped shaking only because they had nothing left to shake with.

[00:47:08]He watched them run it up the ramp.

[00:47:10]He watched a Free Worlds officer's face change as the core went into a reader, watched the disbelief, and then the cold understanding, watched a transmission go out and up to a jumpship waiting at the jump point with the truth of the whole Lyran campaign riding the signal.

[00:47:30]The deception was dead.

[00:47:33]Whatever was coming, the Free Worlds League would see it coming now because four light machines had gone too deep, and three of them had died, and one of them had crossed the mirror.

[00:47:46]The Hadrian star lifted as the first Lyran fighter streaked across the dusk and made its burn and was gone into the dark before the net closed.

[00:47:57]Colder watched the world fall away in the viewport, Vera shrinking, the long gleaming scar of the mirror catching the last of the light far below, a sheet of frozen fire holding its dead.

[00:48:12]Somewhere in that glass now was a man named Drexler, who had been good and certain and courteous and who had trusted the machine when it lied.

[00:48:25]The mirror kept him.

[00:48:27]The mirror kept them all.

[00:48:30]Colder closed his eyes and let the ship carry him up out of the gravity well.

[00:48:35]And he thought about the lance in the riverbed.

[00:48:38]And he did not look away from any of it.

[00:48:42]The answer was delivered.

[00:48:44]The seeing had been worth the price.

[00:48:47]It always was, and the price was always too high.

[00:48:51]And that was the whole of a scout's war, the thing no one ever sang about.

[00:48:57]He had come back with the answer.

[00:49:00]He was the only one who had. Outside the viewport, the stars came on, hard and clean and honest, and the dead world fell away behind, and Wren Colder carried his ghosts up into the black where, for the first time in 3 days, nothing at all was lying to him.