Negotiating with Steel

A heavy stirrup crossbow at five paces leaves very little room for debate.

Brono Kraznik kept his hands spread at waist height, palms open, the cold stone of the drainage altar pressing against his shoulder blades. Three cocked weapons were aimed at his chest. Dravko stood in the center, his scarred jaw tight, while his two cutthroats flanked him in the narrow corridor.

"You have five seconds to drop that satchel, Captain," Dravko said. The iron string of his weapon vibrated with enough tension to put a four-inch broadhead through a boar's skull. "Then I put a hole through your liver, take your boots, and go skin your seven recruits at the pylon."

Brono evaluated the threat with the cold arithmetic of a man whose entire command ran on expired salt pork and unpaid promises. A punctured liver was a remarkably messy way to default on garrison payroll, and Brezinya would certainly invoice his corpse for the wasted uniform.

"You could," Brono said, his voice flat and measured. "Or you could read the charter for the Dreg-Ward crossing and realize you're undercutting your own margins by seventy percent."

Dravko's left eye twitched. "You think I give a damn about a border charter?"

"You give a damn about twenty-four silver bits," Brono replied. With slow, deliberate precision, he reached his left hand down to the canvas pack at his hip. He didn't touch the hilt of his service broadsword. He simply slipped the flap open and pulled out one of the heavy imperial copper conduit sleeves he had sheared in the maintenance galley.

The burnished imperial alloy caught the dim phosphor glow of the junction. It was dense, thick-walled, and completely unoxidized.

The flanker on Dravko's right, a wiry man with grease on his leather brigandine, leaned forward half an inch. Greed pulled at his mouth.

"That's three pounds of conduit grade," Brono said, holding the sleeve in his palm. "I've got three of them in the bag. Eighteen silver at the smelter wagons outside, clean melt. Plus the standard watch voucher for legitimate salvagers, which waives the garrison's forty percent transit tariff."

"The garrison doesn't own this tunnel," Dravko growled, but the crossbow didn't lower.

"The garrison controls the pylon gate you have to walk through to reach the wagon train," Brono said. "You shoot me, my seven men outside lock the perimeter chains. You drag three heavy sleeves and an iron altar key up the dry trench, and Kostya puts a pike through your throat before you see daylight. Or, you take two sleeves as an official sector transit fee, let me keep the third for my armory ledger, and walk out with clean receipts."

Dravko scoffed, stepping forward. "You're bargaining with dead man's coin, Captain. I take all three. And your sword. And whatever you just pried out of that altar."

He took another half-pace forward.

His right boot came down three inches to the left of the fifth flagstone.

Brono tracked the boots with his peripheral vision, his heightened Perception mapping the floor inch by inch. Beneath that fifth slab lay the hair-trigger fulcrum of the junction's secondary drop-hammer trap. The moment he had heard boots scraping in the outer corridor after unlocking the altar, Brono had jammed his cold chisel beneath the rocker plate, looping a fine thread of waxed watchmaker twine from the tool's eyelet to the corner of his scabbard before backing against the brass dais.

The chisel was resting on a hairline ridge. A single four-pound pull would jerk the steel wedge free. Without the wedge, the rocker plate required less than ten pounds of downward force to release the overhead ceiling counterweight.

"Two sleeves," Brono repeated, letting a tremor of false hesitation enter his tone. "That leaves you with twelve silver and safe passage. Push further, and nobody walks out."

"Pah. Give me the bag, you bankrupt bastard," Dravko spat. He signaled the wiry flanker. "Goran. Grab the sack. If he twitches, gut him."

The wiry cutthroat stepped past Dravko, eager to lay his hands on the copper. Watching a man prioritize three pounds of conduit metal over inspecting the flagstones was a textbook lesson in border survival. Yevzkov would have called it natural selection; Brono just considered it remarkably convenient.

Brono didn't reach for his sword. Instead, he tossed the three-pound copper sleeve straight under Goran's feet.

The heavy cylinder rolled across the uneven stones with a ringing metallic clatter, wobbling directly across the center seam of the fifth flagstone.

Goran instinctively lunged forward to stomp his boot on the rolling metal before it could careen into the drainage grating.

At the exact same instant, Brono stepped back into the recessed alcove of the brass altar and snapped his hips back, wrenching the scabbard.

The waxed twine pulled taut. The cold chisel popped cleanly out from beneath the fulcrum plate with a sharp iron click.

Goran's boot slammed down onto the rolling copper sleeve right over the unblocked rocker.

CLACK-CHUNK.

The subterranean chamber groaned as two tons of slotted imperial iron released from the ceiling vault directly above the corridor throat.

"Wait—" Dravko screamed, looking up.

The iron drop-hammer came down with the sound of a falling guillotine.

The impact was absolute. The massive slab pulverized Goran and the second flanker instantly against the flagstones, spraying shattered bone and sheared iron crossbow limbs across the corridor. Dravko, caught half under the edge of the descending weight, was smashed down into the stone floor, his chest caved in beneath six hundred pounds of sheared granite coping.

The sheer kinetic shock of the two-ton deadweight hitting the decayed foundation didn't stop at the floor.

Cracks raced along the mortar of the drainage galley. The ancient imperial archways, weakened by centuries of frost and essence seepage, buckled under the violent vibration.

The System’s blue banner flashed across Brono's vision with its usual bureaucratic cheer, tallying the dead with zero regard for the fact that two tons of kinetic deadweight were currently demolishing the entire conduit ceiling.

A deafening roar filled the tunnel as the entire twenty-pace stretch of the conduit corridor collapsed inward. Tons of ceiling masonry, dry mortar, and crushed bedrock rained down, sealing the passage behind the drop-hammer in a suffocating avalanche of gray dust and broken granite.

Brono threw his arms over his head, crouching deep inside the reinforced alcove of the brass altar as shockwaves pelted his leather coat with grit.

When the thunder finally died, silence settled over the junction.

The air was thick with blinding limestone powder. Brono coughed into his collar, wiping grit from his eyelashes, and stood up.

The corridor back to the Sector 04 surface was gone. A solid wall of jagged, interlocking boulders and pulverized stone blocked the passage from floor to ceiling. No pickaxe or shovel was getting through that collapse from this side.

At his feet, poking out from beneath the edge of the fallen slab, lay Dravko's heavy stirrup crossbow and an undamaged wooden quarrel case containing twelve hardened iron bolts.

Brono reached down, pulled the weapon and quarrel case free from the rubble, and checked the span. The stirrup was forged steel, the prod undamaged.

He slung the weapon over his shoulder, knelt to pry the dented but salvageable copper sleeve from the rubble beside Goran's crushed boots, and returned it to his pack alongside the other two. He pressed a hand over his inner tunic, confirming the hard, reassuring ridge of the Imperial Resonator Pin remained secure.

Behind him, the heavy iron drainage sluice sat locked in the darkness, illuminated only by the faint green phosphor runes pulsing around its keyhole. The surface route was dead. The only path left led straight down into the unmapped depths of Sector 09.