Chapter 164: Where It Has to Land
It was, Jin thought, a completely fair question.
Cassia Venn was not being unpleasant. He had spent enough time around students who were being unpleasant to know the difference, and this was something else. She had a gate exercise in nine days, she had been given a mixed-class group instead of the First Class squad she was used to, and she was looking at her roster trying to work out what each piece could do.
She had reached his piece and could not make it fit.
"Three problems," she said, before he answered, ticking them off without malice. "He can’t engage anything airborne. He can’t reliably cover a teammate on the other side of the line. And he can’t do anything to anyone until they’re inside his reach, which means he only works if the enemy agrees to come to him."
"That’s accurate."
She raised an eyebrow. "You’re not going to argue?"
"No, those are the three problems," said Jin. "I’ve had them for four months."
Cassia’s mouth did something that was not quite a smile.
"So what am I supposed to do with him?"
"Put him where the thing has to land."
The Razorquill Porcupine’s demonstration made her side of the argument for her.
The handlers released one of the controlled attackers, a hawk-analogue on a tether harness, and the porcupine tracked it across ninety meters of sky and put three quills through the airspace ahead of it in under two seconds. The hawk broke off and climbed.
"Accurate to a hundred and twenty meters," Cassia said. "Forty quills. It regrows about six a day, so I get forty in an exercise and then I have a slow beast with no ammunition standing in front of a gate."
"How slow?"
"Slower than that lizard. Considerably." She said it without embarrassment. "Anything that closes to eight meters is a problem for me. That’s the trade. I own the sky and I do not own the ground I’m standing on."
Jin looked at the field for a moment.
She’s already told me the answer. She just thinks she’s describing a weakness.
"He doesn’t need to reach it while it’s circling," Jin said. "He can’t. That’s real. But a dive isn’t a circle. Once it commits to a line, it’s got mass and speed and about a second and a half where it can’t meaningfully change direction, and at the end of that line it’s coming to a specific point on the ground."
"And you want to be standing on the point."
"I want to be standing on the point about a second before it gets there."
Cassia looked at him for a moment.
"Show me," she said, and told the handlers to run it live.
The first four attempts were bad.
Attempt one, Glitch went for the hawk. He saw it drop, he had an opinion about it, and he moved toward the descending shape at speed, which put him about six meters behind where it landed and gave the marked "casualty" a tap on the shoulder from a padded talon.
"He chased it," said Cassia.
"He chased it."
Attempt two, Jin corrected too hard and held Glitch still, and the hawk picked a different target and Glitch was standing in the wrong place doing nothing at all.
Attempt three, he got the target right and the timing wrong, and Glitch arrived a half-second late.
Attempt four, he got both roughly right and Glitch broke position anyway, because a thing was flying at him and every instinct in a predator says to meet that.
Jin crouched down between attempts and put his hand on Glitch’s head. He acknowledged the hot, unrepentant urge to charge, then pressed three shapes through the bond as clearly as he could: the other student, the marked position, and the line in the air. Glitch had to hold until the threat came to him.
Glitch found this deeply unsatisfying and did it anyway, which was, Jin had come to understand, the actual definition of a contract.
Between runs, Jin’s attention kept slipping beyond their lane. One defender repeatedly drifted far enough from the line to leave a gap beside him. Another student’s beast was slowing after every sprint, while a girl in reserve kept stepping clear of the group for a better view. He noted each problem, then turned back to the hawk.
By attempt nine they had something. Jin watched for the moment its target became clear, moved Glitch toward the descent line, and fought the urge to send him early.
Appraisal helped and did not solve it. It gave him the attacker’s registered measurements and visible condition. Jin estimated its current height and speed against the marked field, and watched for the moment its head oriented and stopped scanning. The talent did not tell him which student had been selected. He worked that out by noticing who was isolated, who had their back to open ground, and who had just done something to attract attention.
The successful run was the eleventh, and the handlers made it harder on purpose.
The hawk came in high on the eastern side and oriented on a Fourth Class boy near the gate, and Jin read it and moved Glitch. At forty meters out, the hawk shifted and picked a different target entirely—a girl on the reserve line who had stepped four meters clear of everyone else to get a better angle.
The dive line changed. The commitment did not.
Jin saw the new line and stopped thinking about the hawk.
"Glitch—her. Go."
Glitch went. He did not look up. He crossed eighteen meters of open ground with his eyes on a student who had no idea anything was happening, put himself between her and the open field, and turned.
[Harden — Active]
The hawk arrived at the bottom of its arc into an obsidian shoulder that had been waiting there for three-quarters of a second, and the impact took it sideways and down and knocked the wind out of it in a spray of dust.
The girl screamed, about a second late.
The handlers recovered the hawk, which was fine, and marked the run.
Cassia walked over and stood looking at the scuff marks on the ground for a while.
"He didn’t beat it," she said.
"No. It flew into him."
"Which is the same result and a completely different sentence." She glanced at Glitch, who was radiating enormous satisfaction and pretending not to. "If my quills force something to commit early, and he’s standing where it has to finish—"
"Then he owns the space you can’t defend," said Jin. "And you own the space he can’t reach."
Cassia did not say good. She did not say anything complimentary at all.
She said, "Run it again with two attackers," and walked back to her position.
They ran it eleven more times and failed four of them.
The gate assignments went up at the end of the session.
[GATE 4 — Commander: VENN, C.]
[Main line: 6 students]
[Reserve: 5 students]
[Reserve coordination: ASTOR, J.]
Jin read it twice.
"Venn."
She did not look up from her slate. "Yes."
"Reserve coordination."
"You watched the whole field for four hours," Cassia said. "Everyone else in this group watched their own beast. That’s not a compliment, it’s an observation about what you’re apparently incapable of not doing." She kept writing. "You’ll track who’s tiring, where the pressure is, and where I can afford to spend somebody. You give short objectives. You do not command my gate."
"Understood."
"And you’ll tell me when you’re not sure."
"That part I’ve had practice with."
She looked up briefly at that, then went back to the slate.
Jin walked off the field with Glitch beside him and turned the title over in his head.
Reserve coordinator.
He knew what it meant when the evaluation went well: nothing, because the commander’s name was on the gate.
And he knew exactly what it meant when something came through from an unexpected direction at 1400 on exercise day and hit a position that nobody had covered.
It means the reserves were in the wrong place, and there’s precisely one person whose job that was.