Tarq: "On me. Right now, everyone on me"
Corporal Tarq was not the highest-ranking soldier remaining. He was not the most decorated, the most experienced, or the one anyone would have pointed to in advance as a natural leader. He was twenty-two years old, broad-shouldered, with a burn scar along the left side of his jaw from an incident in the third week of deployment that he had never explained to anyone.
But he was standing. And he was loud. And in the particular vacuum that follows the death of a leader, those two qualities are sometimes enough.
Tarq: "Form up on me, keep your weapons raised, stay together. Don't scatter, whatever you do, do not scatter. Together we are a target he has to deal with one at a time. Scattered, we are nothing"
It was not a sophisticated military strategy. But it worked well enough that the soldiers who had been running slowed down, and some of them turned back, and the complete dissolution of the unit paused long enough for something resembling a formation to coalesce around Tarq's position.
On the opposite end of the field, pressed against the rocky outcrop that served as the unit's eastern cover, a soldier named Dav was doing something very different.
Dav was a scout, which meant his instincts ran toward observation rather than action. He pressed himself flat against the stone and watched Above All with the focused, still attention of someone cataloguing rather than reacting, his eyes moving from the figure in the air to the formation below it and back again.
Dav: "Nobody fire again. Not yet. Listen to me, everyone who can hear me, do not fire. He is reading us. Every time we shoot, he learns something. Stop giving him information"
Tarq's head turned toward him.
Tarq: "Then what do we do"
Dav: "We watch. We wait. Something will change. It always changes. Watch him, not the sky around him. Watch what he looks at"
What Above All was looking at, in that precise moment, was a face.
And it had already changed everything.
The command post was a converted freight container stripped to its functional bones, fitted with screens and maps and the accumulated smell of cold coffee and too many hours without sleep. Colonel Ruh stood at its centre with her arms crossed and watched the live feed with the expression of someone who had already run the numbers and found them personally offensive.
Ruh was twenty-six years old, which was younger than anyone in her position was supposed to be, and she had spent every day of the past three years making sure that fact was the last thing anyone thought about when they looked at her. She was slim, with the particular stillness of someone who has learned to conserve everything, dark eyes that moved across a room with quiet, constant assessment, and features that under different circumstances might have invited a second look for entirely different reasons. In the command post, they invited a second look because she was almost always the person in the room who had already seen what everyone else was still noticing.
She had not slept more than three hours consecutively in eleven days.
She watched the feed. Above All descended. The soldiers froze. She said nothing, because the feed was saying everything that needed to be said.
Ruh: "Sergeant Orin is down. Which means the opening phase is over and we have gained nothing from it except fewer soldiers. We need to move the special units now, before he finishes working through what is left on that field"
The General, a large man in his late fifties named Vish, kept his eyes on the feed.
General Vish: "Not yet"
Ruh: "General, with respect, we are watching our people die on a live screen"
General Vish: "We are watching our strategy execute, Colonel. The entire point of this phase was to present Aryavarta's forces as depleted. No powered units. No surprises left. When Above All believes this field is already decided, when his attention is distributed, that is when the special unit strikes. Not before. If we deploy early, we show our hand before the timing is right"
Commander Arth: "The General is correct. The bait must look like it is working"
Ruh's jaw tightened. She looked at the Commander. He was a careful man, methodical in the particular way of people who had survived long careers by never overextending. She respected him. She disagreed with him approximately sixty percent of the time.
Ruh: "The bait is also our people, Commander. If Above All decides to stop toying with them and simply end the field, our special unit deploys into nothing. And those boys out there are not bait. They are soldiers"
General Vish: "They are soldiers performing a function that may save Aryavarta. That is the highest use of a soldier, Colonel, and I will not apologize for deploying them in it"
Ruh: "Then explain to me how we justify the function when they are all dead and Above All is still standing"
The General looked at her for a long moment.
General Vish: "We hold the position. That is an order"
Ruh turned back to the feed.
She did not agree. She noted that she did not agree, filed it in the part of herself that kept that kind of accounting, and held the position.
On the feed, something happened that none of them had planned for.
Orin got back up.
Ruh watched him do it, each stage of it, and felt something shift in her chest that she did not immediately have a name for.
Commander Arth: "He cannot possibly"
He did.
The scream crossed the feed's audio with enough force that the speakers briefly distorted. The soldiers erupted. The field, which had been dissolving, snapped back into something that resembled a unit.
And then Above All ended him.
And then a corporal named Tarq started shouting, and a scout named Dav started reasoning, and the unit held together in the particular improvised way that units sometimes hold together when the structure they were given is gone and what is left is only the people.
And then Above All stopped moving.
Ruh leaned forward slightly.
Ruh: "What is he looking at"
Commander Arth: "Hard to tell from this angle. One of the privates, it looks like"
Ruh: "Zoom the feed"
The feed zoomed.
Ruh looked at the private that Above All was looking at.
She looked for a long time.
She did not say what she was thinking, which was: why him. She did not say it because she did not yet have an answer, and Ruh did not speak hypotheses aloud. She stored them and watched.
Above All moved toward the private directly. Not the way he had moved toward Orin, which had been efficient and final. This was different. Slower. More careful, in a way that made no sense from a tactical standpoint.
General Vish: "He is taking a prisoner. He wants someone for interrogation, perhaps. It does not change"
Ruh: "It changes everything, General. He stopped the field for one private. That does not happen. That has never happened. Something is different about that soldier"
She was already moving toward the door.
Commander Arth: "Colonel. The order was to hold position"
Ruh: "I am not deploying the special unit. I am making a call"
She was already outside.
The call connected on the second ring.
Ruh: "I need you right now. I don't care what orders you are currently operating under, I need you on the field. There is a private down there that Above All just personally stopped a military operation to take, and I need you to get him out before we lose him and whatever he represents. Go now. Do not wait for me to explain"
She did not wait to hear the response. She already knew what it would be.
Back inside, the General and Commander were watching the feed in silence.
On the screen, Above All had the private by the face, and they were rising into the sky together, and the soldiers below were firing uselessly at nothing, and Tarq was shouting, and Dav was watching, and somewhere in the pale light above the Ashveld Wastes, something was happening that none of them had the framework to understand yet.
Ruh stood in the doorway and watched.
She had learned, a long time ago, that the moments which changed everything rarely announced themselves. They arrived looking like other moments. They arrived looking like coincidences, or accidents, or just another piece of chaos in an already chaotic situation.
She had also learned to recognize them.