Somewhere there is screaming. The cough and sputter of engines. The scent of smoke. No gunfire, though: her half-functioning brain makes a note of this, saying only, Possibly not combat.
Then a flash, a crash, a bang. She’s slapped with rain, and awakes.
She is lying on wet earth. Rain patters her back. She remembers, slowly, that she has limbs. She turns herself over, shoulders complaining, and looks up.
Voortya is gone. A driving rain hammers the clifftops, runlets of water carving through the moist grass to go spiraling off into the sea.
She hears more shouting, the groan of machinery. She sits up—her whole body hurts as if she’s just fallen out of the sky—and looks behind her.
A thick plume of smoke is rising from the earth a few miles west of Fort Thinadeshi. It takes her no time at all to realize it’s the thinadeskite mine.
There are shouts, screams, cries. Automobile lights slash through the swirling dust and smoke. She can see figures sprinting back and forth, pointing, waving their arms. Machinery being set, started, juddering into action. It all has the look of a disaster to her.
She looks around and sees her carousel lying in a mound of bracken. She picks it up, fingers still dull and stupid, and confirms that it’s empty: she fired all five rounds. She feels the barrels—still warm—which means she fired them recently.
Though the question remains, she thinks, looking back at the sea, fired them into what?
She holsters the carousel, stands, and staggers toward the thinadeskite mine, her feet sloshing in the wet earth. As she gets closer she sees there’s an immense hole in the ground, like a sinkhole after a torrential rain, dozens of feet deep. The wire fences have collapsed, allowing her to cross through. One of the figures running around the rim of the hole is unusually agitated, pointing, screaming orders, darting back and forth with their hands clasped around their head. She doesn’t need to get close to know it’s Lieutenant Prathda, head boy of the thinadeskite project.
“No, no!” he’s crying. “That stone there! It’s clearly blocking the aperture! No, not that one, the one with the orthoclase striations, on the left!”
One of the soldiers working at the machinery turns to look at Prathda, bewildered.
“The granite, Private!” he shrieks at the soldier. “The granite slab! Move it, move it!”
Mulaghesh wipes rain out of her eyes as she approaches. “What the hells happened here?” It looks like someone’s just carved a gigantic trench in the earth. There’s no sign at all that this was once a functioning mine.
Prathda does a double take. “Where did you come from? The mine’s caved in somehow, the whole damnable mine has just caved in! In the middle of the night! With no warning!”
“It collapsed?”
“Yes! Yes! And damned if I know how! We’d done countless integrity reports, brought in all kinds of mining experts to analyze the density of the soil, and now this! This, when we need it least! It’ll flood in minutes if the rain keeps up!”
“Was anyone inside?”
“Of course there were! We’d be fools to leave this place unguarded! But…” He looks back at the ruined mine.
Mulaghesh understands what he’s thinking. “The odds are slim that they’re alive.”
She steps back to let the emergency crews by and takes stock of her surroundings, doing all she can to defy her whirling head and capture every possible detail. Lightning flickers in the sky, giving her a sliver of illumination. She tries to imagine what could have done this. The only thing she’s ever seen in her life create this kind of destruction is an artillery shell.
“I guess that solves it,” says a voice over her shoulder.
She looks around to find Biswal sitting on a stone nearby, staring into the chaos.
“What?” asks Mulaghesh.
“The collapse. It answers the question that’s weighed so heavily on my mind.” Biswal still hasn’t made eye contact with her: he just watches as the crews try to haul rubble out of the way. There’s something off-putting about his expression, as if he always expected this calamity, or perhaps some calamity; and now that he’s been proven right, it fills him with a strange energy. “What were the insurgents going to do with all those stolen explosives?”
“You think they bombed the mine?”
“You heard Prathda. He’s right. They did countless studies when constructing this thing, took every measure of safety. The only reason it’d collapse is if someone forced it to. And all the damage is in a straight line. That’s no coincidence, and this is no collapse.”
“Why would they attack the mines?”
“Why does a rabid dog attack a bull? Don’t give these people too much credit, Turyin. They don’t have strategies, they don’t have goals. That’s why they seem to win.” One of his lieutenants waves to him. Biswal watches him for a moment, his eyes heavy-lidded and face inscrutable. Then he stands. “Whatever happened here, it’s not over yet.” He brushes off his pants and strides away into the chaos.
Mulaghesh watches him go, then turns to look at the collapsed mine. Then she walks away, climbs a nearby hill, and looks down on the damage.
It is all in a line, as Biswal said. But somehow she gets the impression the destructive force did not come from within but rather from above, as if a tremendous weight struck the earth above the mine with enough power to crack through yards and yards of soil and stone.
She remembers the sight of Voortya, and the huge sword glinting in her hand.
Did a Divinity climb up on these cliffs, she wonders, lift her sword high, and bring it down on the mine?
She jumps down and starts walking toward the cliffs, searching for some sign of a Divinity’s passage, or really anything’s passage. She finds nothing. And besides, this region is covered with patrols, any one of which would have noticed a ten-story metal woman walking around with a sword, which is the kind of thing you mention to your CO.
She looks back at the mines. If it was indeed Voortya herself who stood here and looked out at all of Voortyashtan, what went through her giant, steel head?
If she did destroy the mines, why? Why bother with them at all? Wouldn’t Fort Thinadeshi be a much better target for the Divinity of war, sitting there upon the hill, huge and lit up and covered in cannons?