Revenant Slaves Chapter 46: Chapter 45: Ash

Read chapter 46 of Revenant Slaves by Zee on NovelPedia.

Chapter 45: Ash As they slowly descended on Cinderwake, Ash saw at once that the city was not doing well. The tall steel walls around it had collapsed in multiple places. Whole sections had caved in or twisted out of shape. The floodlights mounted along the walls were all dead, and from where Ash stood, he could not see a single major light source still functioning inside the city. There was no industrial glow, no sweeping search beams, no heavy illumination from the temple district. Whatever the rebels had done to the power grid before escaping Cinderwake, they had done it thoroughly. Ash was glad for that. He looked ahead to the two figures walking toward the checkpoint before the rest of their force. One was Warden Orson. The other, trudging beside him with clear resentment in every step, was Sovereign Bentlix. “Diplomacy first,” Maya had said. While the two men approached the checkpoint, the rest of their force remained spread out. Two smaller teams had already broken off and circled around the city. One was moving toward the breach the rebels had blasted open during their first escape. The other had gone to the train stations on the other side of the city. That mattered more to Ash than whatever words were about to be exchanged at the gate. The train stations needed to be secured first. The rest of his people would be arriving soon, by train; they wouldn’t miss this brief respite they had gotten from the quakes. If diplomacy worked, then good, they would unload into a city already under surrender. If it failed, then they still wanted the stations under firm control before the first shot was fired. Maya crouched on one knee nearby, watching the checkpoint through the long scope of her weapon. Ash still did not know what that thing was properly called. It had a barrel longer than any blaster he had ever seen, a thick reinforced body, mounted canisters or pumps on the side, and a long scope fixed along the top. It looked too heavy for a normal person to even hold right, but Maya handled it with ease. The exosuit helped, of course, but Ash still found the thing strange. “They’ve made contact,” Maya said. Ash narrowed his eyes and followed her line of sight. Someone had come out from the checkpoint to meet Orson and Bentlix. Guards, probably. Sovereign soldiers by the look of their clothes. Ash’s fingers twitched over the grip of his blaster. He would have preferred it if things had gone badly. He would have liked a reason. Just one. Anything that would let him and his people vent the grief and rage of the last several days into the sovereign forces. But no shots came. No alarm was raised. No ambush sprang shut around them. To Ash’s disappointment, Maya stood a little later and called for the rest of them to move in. “Form up,” she ordered. “Orderly lines. Half of you will approach with me, while the rest of you provide cover from here until my signal.” So they did. More than a thousand people descended on Cinderwake through the ash and dust. Even Ash had to admit the sight of it stirred something in him. They had come out of storms, collapses, and the death of whole settlements looking half-buried and half-broken, armed with stolen weapons, patched gear, rebel equipment, industrial tools, and a kind of fury that seemed strong enough to walk through the end of a world. If the sovereign soldiers inside had been planning anything, the sight of them should have given them pause. As soon as they began moving, the ground shook beneath them. It was only a mild tremor, much weaker than the ones they had endured in the last week, but no one ignored it. The whole column paused just long enough to steady itself, then kept moving. In the last two days alone, the tracks between the refining fields of the caldera and Cinderwake had been repaired four or five times after tremors damaged or misaligned them. Every time, workers and rebels had gone back out and fixed them again. The trains were their best way to move through Mortrum, given all