The first soldier came over First Vent’s western wall backward.
Iven caught him before his head struck the service rail. The man was alive, his breastplate crushed at one side, his rifle gone. Beyond the wall, someone shouted the League’s forward call and a heavy portable barrier advanced onto the spur.
Leth rang the local alarm.
The station’s three masts answered in their separate working intervals. This was an attack on a place that had been functioning, not the discovery that every good result had secretly failed.
Iven set the injured soldier behind the thick inner post.
“Keep the operators’ lane open,” he told the guard beside him. “Care comes through here.”
Then he went toward the wall.
He had come up from the Gate to review the new civil escort’s training needs with Cenn. The proposed food agreement was still on its road east. No fourth convoy had been smuggled into the completed bond. Now the guard cooperative’s future appointment could wait. The people already at First Vent needed a defense they could use this minute.
