I gave the kid my hat, shoving it onto his head as he caught up and opened the bubble to his trike for us to cram into. My jacket had enough wards hidden beneath the leather to last me a gunfight, and Hao was somewhat protected, but Tomlin was bare. I didn’t want him to get shot. The wards in the stockman wouldn’t cover him entirely, and the brim hung down low enough to obscure his vision, but at least his head and torso wouldn’t be flesh waiting for a stray hit.

  “Stay behind us,” I told him. “That mageshield won’t save you from a full burst, but it might deflect a bullet or two.”

  The tunnels sped by, gray walls blurring as the trike swerved to avoid rockfalls and holes. Tomlin tried to key his com while driving.

  “Hands on the handlebars,” I barked, and he followed my orders. It would be stupid to die in a vehicle crash on our way to a battle.

  I shoved my Chimer at Hao, handing her two spare magazines despite her objections.

  “You don’t bring a crowbar to a gunfight,” I said. “Just point it in the general direction and fire. If nothing else, you might distract someone.”

  She looked doubtful.

  Tomlin braked, making the trike skid on the stone floor. The maneuver flung me forward, my breath steaming up the bubble’s scratched polymer. For a second I thought the trike would turn over, but then Tomlin pulled on the handlebar and it twisted, bouncing high in the low gravity, and stabilized.

  It ground to a stop outside a small tunnel opening.

  It was small in Jacksonian terms, but still big enough to drive Hao’s loader into. A string of old, worn light strips hung from the ceiling.

  “Leave it,” I said, as Tomlin tried to key his com again. “Yours too,” I told Hao.

  She tossed her com into the trike without comment. Tomlin didn’t, so I grabbed his com, ripping it off his arm, and tossed it in, too.

  “Anything traceable stays,” I said. “But get the med kit. How far to the silo?”

  “About six hundred meters,” Tomlin said. He was pale, his breath rapid and shallow, but the worn leather of my stockman gave him a determined cast as he dug into the trike’s storage, coming up with a small, orange chest. Too small, if there had been an actual battle.

  “We go nice and slow,” I said. “There’s no gunfire, so whatever happened, happened. No sense getting ourselves ambushed trying to prevent the past.”

  Tomlin looked like he was about to argue, but Hao stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

  We jogged forward, a compromise of carefulness and speed. I reached out to activate my life ward, then remembered that I hadn’t replaced it. It’d run out while I was warding my sheet.

  As we moved up the tunnel, the smell of dry sand and ammonia in the tunnel gained a sour, metallic tang, and a hint of ozone. The smells of a battlefield – chemical gunpowder and charged-ion rounds. I slowed down when the smell became more like rusted iron.

  Blood. Enough of it to taint the air.

  In front of us, where the tunnel ended in a half-open vault door, someone was coughing – a dry, raspy sound.

  I pulled out a steel ward-light and crouched beside the door, putting it around the corner. The shiny metal showed me a reflection of the red-green ceiling I’d seen in Tomlin’s reader. The light strip was still on. Dust hung in the air.

  The floor was littered with old junk, metal crates, rusted steel sheets, broken machinery. A lot of it spotted fresh bullet holes. In the middle of the open area near the door lay two bodies.

  Tomlin’s boot landed beside me – the kid was about to rush in – but Hao pulled him back, hissing at him to stay quiet.

  We waited for what felt like a minute or two. Probably, it was around thirty seconds, judging by the tempo of the coughs. My heart banged in my chest, the air in the tunnel inadequate for my slow, measured breaths.

  I gave Hao a ready signal, then remembered that she didn’t know the Marine code.

  “I’m going in,” I whispered. “Stay here.”

  I didn’t tell her to cover me. I didn’t want either of them to expose themselves in case I had to trigger a razor ward or a flame storm. I had both, sewn into my jacket for emergencies. The kind of emergencies from which you hoped your mageshield would save you, because a razor ward would cut you to pieces just as readily as the other guy. If your mageshield broke, the razor ward was nothing but post-mortem revenge. I took a last breath, and slid past the open door, my Hurmer on burst mode.

  Bodies, crates, dust.

  I ducked behind one of the crates, sinking low for cover. Stupid. Sheet metal wouldn’t protect me. I moved. Another body behind the crate, this one moving. Old man, gray skin, blood on the shoulder, the chest, the thigh.

  No gun. I left him behind.

  Sweeping right, I found two more bodies: one man, one woman, both old. The woman held a hand-cannon-sized revolver. The man lay crumpled over an old Milo assault rifle, copper casings littering the ground around him.

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  I moved past a bloody spot with drag marks leading away. Someone had gotten shot, and been carried away by his buddies. One of Baylen’s troops, presumably.

  Someone coughed to my left, and I swung, my finger tightening on the Hurmer’s trigger.

  Old guy, leaning against a starship-scale cogwheel, his dark gray shirt stained with even darker blood. He coughed again. I moved forward, kicking away the bolt-action rifle that lay on the ground beside him, but left him where he was.

  I found Ma Tomlin behind a stack of rusted iron girders thick as my torso. There was a still smoking Chimer Novum pellet auto-gun beside her, red polymer casings scattered on the floor and girders. The Novum was a crud weapon, better suited to hunting birds than men, but it could fill an enclosed space with a wall of micro-sized lead pellets in seconds. I bent down, keeping out of her line of fire.

  Ma Tomlin jerked, a wheezing breath escaping her lips.

  “Stay here,” I said quietly, putting a hand on her shoulder.

  Her eyes were glassy, and she was shaking, but she gave me a shallow nod. Either that, or she was having trouble holding her head upright.

  I completed the circle, finding two more old-timers, one dead, one alive, and three more blood trails where bodies had been dragged away.

  Nine to four in Baylen’s favor. Not too bad for a bunch of old-timers with outdated rifles, against trained troops.

  And if the goons Da Baylen had brought with him to the inn were any indication, they were trained.

  “Clear,” I yelled to Hao and Tomlin. “Get in here, and bring me that med kit.”

  Triage was quick. Three savable, assuming access to a decent med bay, one waiting for a knife in the heart. Neither Tomlin nor Hao looked ready to give it to him.

  “This one’s a goner,” I said. “Give him a painkiller and send him on his way.”

  Tomlin followed the first part of my order. I dug into his med kit and got working on his mom.

  Cracked skull, broken ribs, no response from the legs. Looked like a broken back. She’d need some serious med tech in order to walk again. I hoped they had a full neural cloning vat on Jackson, not just the skin-and-muscle graft type.

  The painkiller from Tomlin’s med kit gave her eyes an even glossier cast. The wake-me-up made her twitch all over. I put a sensor pad over her heart, just in case. No sense in letting her die if I could help it.

  “Where is the hatchling?” I asked.

  She blinked, too slowly, looking like she was about to faint. Then she jerked awake.

  “Wha—” she said.

  “The animal you took from my ship,” I said. “The big black one.”

  “Was nice,” Ma Tomlin said. “Thought it’d be cold. Was warm.”

  “Yes, they’re warm-blooded, unless they cloak,” I said. “Where is he?”

  “Baylen took ‘m,” slurred Ma Tomlin. “I’m sorry.”

  “Where?” I said. “Where’d they go?”

  “Thought a mage wud get ‘im,” Ma Tomlin said. “Sure you’d burn ‘im like he burned my husban’.”

  “Ma!” Tomlin yelled, barreling past me and almost knocking into his mother. He sank to his knees, sobbing, digging in the med kit. I grabbed his arm.

  “Let her be,” I said. “She’s stable. Just broken bones.”

  “Inside,” he sobbed, “she’s hurt inside.”

  Which she might be. I debated whether to waste a ward on checking. I should have been furious with Ma Tomlin, but found myself admiring her courage. Raiding a mage’s ship, setting up a local warlord. All with a bunch of old miners. That took some guts.

  “Move over, kid,” I said, pulling Tomlin away.

  I pulled a sense ward out of one of the long slash pockets on the inside of my armored jacket. It turned a cold green when I activated it. Moving it over Ma Tomlin, I let it amplify and focus the threads of force I conjured.

  Multiple broken ribs, three crushed lumbar vertebrae. Surprisingly enough, no serious internal bleeding. No punctures either. Blood beneath her skull, pressing against her brain. I took out my small warding drill and applied it to her head. The bit whirred, scraping against bone. Tomlin looked like he wanted to punch me. Instead, he kept squeezing his hands together until blood oozed out of the drill hole. The ward went dark, the pressure in Ma Tomlin’s head lessening.

  While the sensing ward was active, I checked on the other two old-timers. One had serious internal damage, an unstable flechette having shredded his intestines. Crudmucking nasty weapons. I downgraded his chances to just above knife-in-the-heart levels.

  “Think anyone will come if you call for help?” I asked Tomlin.

  He got a hard look on his face. “They’d better,” he said.

  I keyed my com, showing him the list of addresses I had ripped from his own. He keyed three of them, spoke in a low voice. The connection was poor, as if the nearby network amplifiers were down, but my com is military grade. A lot more power than the civilian ones the Jacksonians used.

  “They’re coming,” Tomlin said.

  “Who is?” I asked.

  “Everyone,” he answered. “We’re going to show Baylen what happens if you mess with Jackson.”

  “He’ll shred you with his engines, and shoot whoever is left,” Hao said. She’d been attending to the wounded with silent efficiency, as if they were machines in need of repair, doing decent work. She wasn’t a combat medic, but she definitely had training.

  “What engines?” I asked.

  “Da Baylen dismantled his ship when he got to Jackson,” Hao said. “Had me mount his engines on the main runs leading up to his complex.”

  For a moment, I wondered why someone would do a stupid thing like that. Then I realized what it meant.

  “He’s built himself a warpstone ripper,” I said.

  Hao nodded.

  “Poor man’s riot cannon,” she said. “The engines are Rexards, old but powerful. He’ll bring the entire run down when he torches them.”

  Ma Tomlin had had the right of it. The Jacksonians didn’t stand a chance against something like that. A good ripper could take down a tank, or a mech, assuming you managed to get it to touching distance. Rippers have lousy range and poor digging ability, but they’re great at shifting space just enough to shatter and crush everything in front of them. There is a reason warpstone engines have recommended safety distances.

  “Don’,” whispered Ma Tomlin, and I bent down to hear her. “Don’t let my boy get kilt.”

  Her twitching had gotten worse, and I could see more white in her eyes than not.

  “I’ll try,” I said, more to keep her calm than anything, but found myself believing in it. I would need to hit Baylen and get my hatchling before he contacted the Syndicate or any other friends he might have.

  “Is there another way in?” I asked Hao.

  “Not that I know of,” she said. “Da Baylen is pretty strict with his security.”

  “Figures,” I said. I rose and grabbed my stockman from Tomlin, the leather smooth against my hand. “Sorry, kid,” I told him. “I’ll need that. Take care of your ma until help gets here.”

  Tomlin bobbed his head, his eyes wet with unshed tears. He was tougher than I’d given him credit for. It was easy to forget that he’d grown up with all the people now lying dead around him.

  “You want out?” I asked Hao.

  She glanced at the corpses littering the floor, then shook her head.

  “Still your crew,” she said. “And the Baylens might need putting down.”

  She bent to pick up the dead man’s assault rifle, but I stopped her.

  “Take the pellet gun,” I said, nudging Ma Tomlin’s Novum with my boot. “It’s better for someone who can’t hit crud.”

  She obeyed, grabbing the meter-long gun. Tomlin handed her his ma’s shoulder bag, bloody but clinking with spare magazines.

  We were about to enter the syndicate’s lair.