Chapter 255: The Queen Reverses [Bonus]
The plan was good. Jin still thought so afterward, which was the annoying part.
He gave the avatars different jobs, because they were different animals and pretending otherwise got them killed.
Flicker took the eastern side: the long gallery, the loose scree, the noise. Her job was to be found, to stay findable, and to stay ahead. Glitch went in from the northern ridge along the route Jin had marked — down the second-level ledge, along the rubble ridge, then the eleven meters of open floor to the chamber mouth.
Flicker started it by putting a foot deliberately wrong on a scree slope.
The stone slid. Below her, in the galleries, the answer came up through the rock, and Glitch — flat against the ridge two hundred meters west with his belly on the stone — read it arriving.
Pulse. Pause. Pulse.
The eastern gallery emptied. Workers poured out along the wall in a long dark line, and then, better than Jin had hoped, two of the heavy guards peeled off the inner approach and went with them.
There it is.
Flicker stayed ahead of them without effort, changing levels, letting them almost close and then not letting them close.
Glitch moved.
He took the ledge in a fast controlled slide, hit the rubble ridge, and went along it at a heavy run, and for eleven glorious seconds the approach in front of him was as empty as Jin had ever seen it. He got past the ridge. He got onto the open floor. He got four meters closer to the chamber mouth than he had managed in his entire first attempt.
Then the queen changed her mind about all of it.
The pulse that came through the stone was different — longer, doubled, sent twice. Jin registered it in Glitch’s feet before he understood it, and by then the western gallery, the one nobody had touched, the one that had been quiet all morning, was already emptying.
Behind him.
She’s not recalling the first group. She’s spending a second one.
"Back," Jin said, and pushed the whole route reversed down the bond in one shape. "Back to the ridge, now—"
The ridge came apart.
Not randomly. Four workers hit the same weakened shoulder of stone in sequence, and the rubble ridge Glitch had run in along folded down into the lower gallery in a grinding slump that took his retreat with it.
He was on open floor with guards ahead, a fresh group closing behind, and no way back the way he came.
Harden sheeted over him. He put his shoulder into the first worker that reached him and threw it into the wall, and the second one opened three lines across his flank, and the third got underneath and nearly took his back leg out from under him.
Jin’s hand was steady on the phone. His jaw was not.
Not the fruit. Get out.
He could have sent him forward. Eleven meters, into the chamber, one grab — and then eight tonnes of colony between the avatar and any exit, and a corpse holding a fruit that would drop right back onto the shelf.
Possession was the entire point. Touching it was worth nothing.
Flicker changed direction on the eastern side without being told twice. She abandoned her pursuit line, cut back inside the gallery she’d just baited empty, and went for the fractured pillar Jin had marked as a maybe on the first pass — struck it, kept going, and brought a section of the second-level floor down across the western group’s path in a spill of grey dust.
It bought about six seconds.
Glitch used all of them. He put his head down, took a guard’s charge on the plating rather than turning to avoid it, felt his way through the settling rubble by weight rather than sight, and hauled himself up the collapsed slope with his claws tearing lines in the stone.
Both avatars cleared the rim.
No fruit.
[Extraction complete.]
[Objective failed.]
Jin ran the replay four times before he let himself think about it.
The first three passes he only watched the stone. He set the Tremor Sense trace beside the visual record and marked every pulse the queen sent, then marked every moment a group actually changed what it was doing.
The gap was there in all of them.
Eastern group, first pulse: signal at 0:41, formation broke at 0:47.
Second guard detachment: signal at 1:12, movement at 1:17.
The western reversal — the one that had nearly cost him the avatar — signal at 2:03. The gallery mouth cleared at 2:09.
Six seconds. Five. Six.
Not stupidity. Not a limit on how many groups she could hold. She could send another order the moment the first one landed, and she would. But an order still had to travel through a hundred meters of quarry, reach a group that was busy doing something else, and get that group turned around and moving.
Between the command and the execution, there was a hole.
Jin wrote it down.
She controls everything. She doesn’t control it instantly.
Which meant the answer was not a better decoy. A single decoy just meant she spent one group and kept the rest. The answer was to make her spend two — two disturbances, far enough apart that she had to commit the guards off the inner approach and then commit somebody else somewhere else — and then cross the open floor inside the window while her newest order was still in transit.
And then keep going. Whatever came out of that chamber wasn’t going to have time to turn around and come back the way it went in. It needed a second exit on the far side, mapped in advance.
He wrote that down too, and then he wrote the last line, which he liked considerably less.
Eleven meters of open floor. Five to six seconds.
He pulled up the avatar’s recorded crossing speed from the failed run and did the arithmetic twice, hoping to have made an error.
Eight and a half. He needs eleven meters in five, and he does it in eight and a half.
He went back to the corridor that night because there was nowhere else to go. Seven more failures raised the counter without clearing the sequence.
[Attempts: 38]
Attempt thirty-nine got him past the false left opening without a flicker of hesitation. Attempt forty-one got him through the early-acceleration gate for the first time, into a section Jin had never seen, and then straight into a wall.
Attempt forty-four reached the end.
The final stretch was a long converging line of gates, all of them closing, all of them on the same rhythm, and there was no correction available anywhere in it. Glitch went in at full commitment and got two-thirds of the way down before the timing beat him and the run ended.
[Trial Failed — commitment window expired at 27.6m]
[Attempts: 44]
Jin looked at the number for a while.
He knew what the corridor was for now. It had been telling him for four days, in the flattest voice imaginable, and he’d been too busy failing to hear it.
The Line wasn’t teaching Glitch to run a corridor.
It was teaching him to cross a distance he couldn’t currently cross.