The east service path was not designed for twelve people moving quickly with full packs.
It had been designed, over several generations of practical use, for one or two people moving at their own pace with a moderate load, using the specific advantages of a route that went through the ridge's interior structure rather than down its face. The advantages were: cover from aerial observation if the Empire had aerial observation capacity, which it didn't but might in the future; a route that was entirely invisible from the ridge's exterior face where the perimeter was being established; and a guaranteed exit at a point on the far side of the ridge that emerged into a section of deep Fracture Lands terrain that no Imperial survey had adequately mapped.
The disadvantages, for twelve people with full packs moving quickly, were: the path was ninety centimeters wide at its narrowest, which was two-thirds of the way through the interior traverse; it required specific route choices at eleven junctions that only made sense if you knew why you were making them; and it went through three sections that required active crystal management, where the formations had grown into the path over the past several decades and had been partially cleared but not fully, leaving gaps that required careful navigation to pass without contacting the crystals directly.
For Kael, the crystal contact prohibition had a specific and immediate relevance that it did not have for the rest of the company.
Ress led them. She moved through the path with the specific quality of someone for whom this route was as familiar as a corridor, navigating the junctions and the crystal sections with the efficiency of ingrained knowledge. He followed second, because the path was narrow enough that ordering mattered and because following Ress directly gave him the best view of the crystal sections before he needed to navigate them.
He managed.
Not easily. The inner traverse was higher saturation than the outer ridge, because it was at the core of the formation and because the service path ran adjacent to several of the richest Echo-Blood veins in the ridge structure. The containment protocol, running at full maintenance configuration, held. Oma's device, re-calibrated the previous night for the combined suppression field's dominant frequency, was providing its seven-percent equivalent. The Architecture, at ninety-one percent and past the threshold that Vyrath had named, held with the quality of something that was now structural rather than maintained.
He moved through the service path with the measured economy of someone who had been practicing economic movement for six weeks.
* * *
Syrenne was fifth in the line, because she had placed herself there: not first, where the leader went, not second, where the most vulnerable asset was positioned, but fifth, which was the position from which she could cover the most ground in both directions with the minimum movement, which was, he had learned, how she thought about positions generally. She placed herself where she had the most options.
He was aware of her throughout the traverse in the way he was aware of everything now, with the full perceptive complement that the four contacts and six weeks of development had built. In the service path, with the high saturation and the concentrated Echo-Blood in the adjacent veins, the awareness was more acute than usual. The architectural perception that Vel's domain provided catalogued the vein structures through the rock. The structural clarity from Korrath's domain read the path's load-bearing points and the places where the crystal formations were most fragile.
And Sorn's anchor and the living anchor, the two invariant systems that Oma had measured and confirmed, operated at the background of all of it, the center that didn't move.
He found that in the service path's interior, with the perimeter being established outside and the fourteen Imperial signatures moving across the coherence detector's memory in his awareness, the background invariance of those two anchors was the most practically useful thing he had.
The perimeter's eastern extent will reach the service path exit approximately thirty minutes after you emerge. They're moving faster on the east than Vorath projected.
He relayed this in a low voice to Ress, who adjusted the pace by exactly the right amount, the pace of someone who had heard an updated timeline and was incorporating it with the efficiency of long experience.
"Twenty minutes to the exit," Ress said, in the equally low voice of interior-traverse communication.
"Can we do it in fifteen," he said.
She looked back at him briefly. "Fifteen is aggressive in the crystal sections."
"I can manage the crystal sections."
"The others."
"Tell them the pace." He paused. "They'll manage."
She turned forward and increased the pace to something that was no longer comfortable and was still within the range that twelve professional people with full packs could maintain in a ninety-centimeter corridor if they were the specific kind of people who had chosen to be in a service path inside a Fracture Lands ridge with an Imperial perimeter closing on the exit.
They were those people. They managed.
The crystal sections required his full attention at the new pace, the specific combination of Korrath's structural clarity and his own trained precision identifying the gaps through which passage was possible without contact, moving through them with the kind of accuracy that had been built by six weeks of daily practice in an environment that required accuracy and punished its absence.
He moved through all three crystal sections without contact.
He emerged from the service path into the Fracture Lands deep terrain fourteen minutes and thirty seconds after Ress had set the new pace.
The company assembled behind him in two minutes, the last person through being Vorath, who emerged from the path with the specific controlled breathing of someone who had been moving at their physical limit and was declining to show it.
"How far," Vorath said. He was looking at the ridge behind them, at the service path exit that was a shadow in the stone face and was invisible from any angle that wasn't directly in front of it.
Oma checked the coherence detector. "The perimeter's eastern extent is forty minutes from this position. We have a forty-minute lead."
"Then we move," Solen said. "And we don't stop for the forty minutes."
They moved.