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"Don't."

"Two people who couldn't agree about a lift." He taps the map. "Turns out that's the whole trick. Where are we going?"

I put my finger on Hub Seven. Water for four districts. Eleven days of reserve when it fell, and it fell yesterday.

"Here," I say. "They die of thirst before they suffocate."

CHAPTER 22

DARIUS

You cannot fight for a hub. It is the first thing I must teach forty people, and most of them do not want it.

A hub is a distribution chamber, full of pipe and manifold and control lens, and the moment you exchange fire inside one you have destroyed what you came for, and no factory in explored space will make another. So we don't fight for them. We take the corridors around, make holding it pointless, and walk in afterward.

I build eleven mobile units. Six people each: two Alzohn structural, two safety, one atmospheric, one runner. Each carries shoring, a cutting rig, a spares crate, and no ambition. Their job isn't to win. It's to restore a system while somebody shoots at the wall, and Alzohn engineers suit that work, because we are trained from apprenticeship to finish a task at the speed it requires and no faster.

Tomas takes the security envelope, Claire runs tasking from Tier Three, and we go for Seven on day forty-five.

Hub Seven sits under District Twelve, terminus of a war-era service bore, and over the final stretch we know they are ready, because the bore is dark and should not be.

Then the first handler rounds the bend.

I have watched these units clear a collapse in under half an hour and drain a flooded transit section without thanks. This one has its cutting arm extended and a modern remote yoke bolted to its dorsal frame with four bad welds, and a man behind it working a control slate, and it comes up the bore at running speed.

Two of mine go down in eleven seconds.

After that we stop being engineers. It is a narrow bore with nine mercenaries at the far end driving ninety-century-old machinery like a battering ram, Tomas holding from behind a crate of spares, and me with a bar doing the one thing a man can do in a tunnel, which is drop it.

Four charges on the bore ribs, thirty meters back from the hub face. The roof lets go, takes the lead handler with it, and cuts their nine off from any retreat.

It costs us the bore. Three weeks to clear. I'll sign that report.

Claire arrives behind the collapse forty minutes later by capillary with Ovel and two units, because they never mapped those and never will, and while Tomas holds the far end of the chamber, which still has men in it, she goes to work.

This is what I will remember.

Hub Seven has been held four days by people who couldn't read it. Pulled lenses, cut feeds, two manifolds forced with a hydraulic jack. Less sabotage than vandalism, performed by men convinced the machine had a steering wheel somewhere.

Claire kneels in it, soot on her face, talking to the Custodian through a cracked lens and a field cell, and I stand between her and the chamber mouth for fifty-one minutes.

Twice somebody comes through. Twice they do not continue.

A round goes through the outside of my left thigh at the forty-minute mark. I don't mention it, because mentioning it would move her, and she cannot be moved for another eleven minutes.

At 16:42 the manifolds turn over.

Water pressure in District Eleven at 15:04. Twelve at 15:20. Thirteen and Fourteen inside the hour. Four hundred thousand people who woke to dry taps and a rationing broadcast, and by evening the standpipes in Twelve have queues, because nobody believes it and everybody wants to see.

The footage does it. Somebody films a street tap in Twelve running clean, and by midnight eleven seconds of a woman filling a bucket has played on every district feed there is.

They put a camera on us at the surface access. Neither of us agreed to it; Helena's press officer arranged it four hours earlier.

I have something short ready. Claire steps up and takes it off me.

"Before anybody asks me anything," she says, "I want the record straight, because I've watched two days get reported wrong. I didn't take Hub Seven. I turned a valve at the end of it. Hub Seven was taken by Alzohn structural crews who shored a live bore under fire, by Tomas Halek's officers, by an atmospheric tech named Ovel who has no business being brave and was anyway, and by Engineer Darius, who worked out that a hub can't be fought for, built the units that proved it, then stood in a doorway fifty-one minutes so I could do the easy part."

Somebody asks her something. She talks over it.