Dimensional Summoner: Infinite Growth in a Leveling Apocalypse

Nineteen.

It shed the bank like a dog shaking water — layered armour, dusted grey with cured resin, two thick digging blades where the scouts had those delicate combs. Its head was a wedge. Its whole body was a wedge. It had been built to go under things rather than at them, and it had just proved it.

"Uphill," Deyra said. "All of it. Nobody separates, nobody stops, Ivo between Vasse and Corran. Go."

The cutter got up out of the wreck of the bypass and rejoined the scouts, which I noticed and did not enjoy.

For the next eight minutes, we moved as fast as the ground allowed.

The slope above the culvert is wet scrub over fractured concrete, and it goes up in a series of benches with drainage cuts between them, and every single metre of it was a decision. Deyra set the pace and kept it slow enough for Ivo. Vasse and Corran worked the flanks in turns, one moving while the other stood, keeping the scouts off the sides.

I called the ground. Feline Senses told me where sounds originated, but the tapping kept moving. Twice it came from directly beneath the line Deyra had chosen.

"Not the left bench. There's hollow under it — go three metres right and take the concrete."

"How certain?" Deyra asked, already moving right.

"Certain enough that I'd rather be wrong and slow."

Rhea ran laps around all of us, and had to.

"I need line," she shouted, on the second bench. "Straight line, thirty metres, anything — I can't build anything doing this."

"There isn't thirty metres anywhere on this hill."

"Then this is going to be deeply unimpressive."

She managed anyway. She used the drainage cuts as running lanes, hooked concrete remnants to change direction without bleeding off what she'd stored, and put down two scouts in four minutes by arriving at them sideways at speed. Amber flickered along her reels and went out and came back.

The scouts began adapting to her within three minutes, which was the most unpleasant thing that happened all afternoon.

They stopped standing near anything she could hook. Two of them worked along the third bench cutting the exposed roots she'd been using as anchors, methodically, while a third feinted at Vasse to hold our attention. They started spacing themselves so that any pivot she made brought her into the reach of a second one.

"They're taking my anchors," Rhea said, dropping in beside me behind a concrete stub, breathing hard.

"They watched you use them."

"They've known me eleven minutes."

"They sealed my exit four hours after watching me walk past it once."

She looked at me. "That's a horrible thing to say to somebody."

Then the Bankbreaker came round the base of the second bench, and she stopped talking, and I saw the humour go out of her face for the first time.

We were on loose fill with nothing to hook and nowhere to run straight, and it was accelerating along a line it had already broken up, and she had to stand still and wait for Deyra's call.

She stood with her jaw tight, opening and closing her fingers around the chain grip. It was the longest she had been silent since arriving, and I understood it better than another joke.

"Left," I said when the ground told me. "Left and down, now. That whole bench is undercut—"

She moved when Deyra did, her attention fixed on the ground behind us.

The bench she'd been standing on dropped four seconds later — not spectacularly, just a slump of two metres of fill into a hollow that had been dug out from underneath at some point in the last hour.

Rhea looked at the hole. Then at me.

"How did you know that?"

"Water was draining too fast off it."

"Right." She wiped her face. "I'm listening to you now. That's — consider that a policy change."

Halfway up the fourth bench, the route ahead got easy.

That's exactly how it presented itself. A clear channel of firm ground running up between two banks of scrub, no debris in it, no scouts on it, an obvious line all the way to the open hillside.

I stopped.

"Deyra. Don't take that."

She stopped the party without asking why first, which is the single best thing about working with her.

"Reason."

"Four of them." I crouched. "There's resin filament at ankle height under the scrub on both sides — I can see two strands from here and I'd bet on more. The rainwater's draining off that channel too fast, same as the bench that just went, which means hollows underneath. The scouts are pressuring our flanks and they have not once put anything in the middle of it. And that thing" — I nodded downslope at the Bankbreaker, which had slowed to a walk — "has stopped chasing us."

"Which means?"

"Which means it doesn't need to. That's my reading of the evidence and I can't prove intent. But every piece of it fits a channel prepared to be walked into, and none of it fits a route that's genuinely open."

Deyra looked at the easy ground for about three seconds.

"Reverse," she said. "Downslope, past the collapse, along the line they've been pushing us away from all afternoon. Vasse, take point. Ivo, on Corran's belt."

That reversal was the hardest movement of the day and Rhea made it possible.

She hooked the top of a standing concrete remnant, swung around it, and came out of the turn faster. For once, she had enough space to use her ability properly. She hit the two scouts closing the downhill line before they finished arriving.

The militia went back by bounds, one covering, one moving, Ivo hauled bodily between them.

I found the strip — a metre and a half of compacted original ground beside the collapsed culvert where the old service track had been, firm all the way, because somebody had rolled it eighty years ago.

And a scout got through the flank and reached Ivo.

Rhea took it. She caught the back of his pack harness and pulled. Ivo was a grown man in wet boots; she went over backward with him as the scout's comb-limbs passed through the space where his neck had been.

She came up holding her right shoulder.

"That's not good," she said, and flexed the reel, and the chain went out fine and came back in three jerks and jammed at half retraction. "That's also not good."

We reached the culvert.

What was left of it was a broken span with the crown fractured across the middle and the whole thing sagging over the buried outpost we'd been looking at four hours ago. There was no crossing it. There was no going round it — the collapse had taken the downhill side and the trench had taken the bypass.

Behind us, the Bankbreaker turned onto the service strip and began to accelerate along ground it had already weakened once.

Ivo, of all people, got there first.

"Stop," he said. "Stop—look at the crown."

"Ivo, we haven't—"

"The remaining span is carrying its whole load through one cracked support and that length of exposed reinforcement." He pointed with a shaking hand, but his voice had gone steady. "It's not stable. It's balanced. If something with that mass commits its weight onto the exterior crown, and that support goes—"

Deyra's head came round. "You want me to collapse a structure over an unknown connected passage. I refused that this morning."

"This is not that." Ivo was already moving toward the anchor point. "I'm not proposing we seal or map the deep burrow, because we can't. I'm proposing the exterior crown and the shallow chamber fail, which they're going to do anyway inside a year. It's an escape measure, not a containment operation."

"And it drops that thing into the hole," said Rhea.

"It might. It'll certainly drop it lower than us."

Deyra took two seconds.

"Do it."

Rhea walked to the edge and looked at the cracked support with her jammed reel hanging off her arm.

"Can you break it?" I asked.

She watched the Bankbreaker gathering speed along the strip.

"No," Rhea said. "But your ugly friend can."

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