It lasted less than half a heartbeat, yet on the frost-glazed stone of the northern ridge, half a heartbeat was the entire distance between life and death. When the leather grip-strap around Commander Keth Or’s three leftover right-hand fingers slipped past the crossguard lug under the doubled torque of the returning plane, Keth’s mind knew he had reached the pullback mark he had stated inside the dark rock recess.
In the dry shelter of the cave, it had been easy for a forty-five-year-old veteran to say aloud that he would drop to his knees and slide back if his maimed wrist gave out. Out in the screaming white glare of the eastern ditch, however, twenty winters of Retrieval Division conditioning rose up in Keth Or’s spine like a rigor mortis reflex. For two decades he had been the officer who stood upright at the front of the line while younger men ducked. For two decades the Aperture Court had drilled into his bones that a commander who dropped to his knees under fire—especially after losing two fingers of his sword hand—was a broken tool fit only for the scrap heap.
More than pride, a fierce, misplaced guilt held Keth’s boots upright for that fatal half-second. He looked fifty inches to his left. He saw Vaska Ren’s cut horsehide glove-fingers still smoking under the bronze spike at the junction box where the former Chief Judge had just paid two fingers of his own hand to buy this four-breath window. He looked…
