There was a shout from below, and as the arc-lamps came on we saw that the tooks were charging. The city was now on the bridge.

Suddenly, there was a loud explosion and a gush of flame against the side of the city. An instant later a second explosion occurred on the bridge itself, and flames spread across the dry timber of the rail-way.

“Reserve force, ready!” I stood up, and waited for the order. I was no longer frightened, and the tension of the waiting hours had disappeared. “Advance!”

The arc-lamps on the city were still burning, and we could see the tooks clearly. Most of them were engaged in a hand-to-hand battle with the main defence, but several more were crouched on the ground, taking careful aim at the superstructure of the city. Two of the arc-lamps were hit, and they went out.

The flames on the bridge and against the side of the city were spreading.

I saw a took near the bank of the river, swinging his arm back in preparation to throw a metal cylinder. I was no more than twenty yards from him. I aimed, released the bolt… and hit the man in his chest. The incendiary bomb fell a few yards away from him, and exploded in a burst of heat and flame.

Our counter-attack had, as anticipated, taken the enemy by surprise. We managed to hit three more of the men… but suddenly they broke off and ran towards the east, disappearing into the shadows of the valley.

There was considerable confusion for a minute or two. The city was on fire, and beneath it the bridge was burning fiercely in two separate places. One concentration of flame was directly beneath the city, but the other was a few yards behind it. It was obviously urgent to deal with the fires, but no one was certain that all the tooks had retreated.

The city continued to winch forward, but where the bridge burned large sections of timber were falling away into the river.

Order was restored quickly. A Militia officer shouted orders, and the men formed into two groups. One group renewed the defensive position around the tracks; I joined the second group sent out on to the bridge to fight the fire.

After the second attack — in which incendiaries had been used for the first time — fire-points had been fitted to the outside of the city. The nearest of these had been damaged in one of the explosions, and water was gushing away from it uselessly. We found a second one, and unravelled the short length of hose.

The intensity of the track-fire was too great, and it was almost hopeless to try to fight it. Although the city had now passed over the worst of the damage there were still three of the main runner-wheels to roll over the burning timber… and as we fought in the dense smoke and billowing flames I saw the rail beginning to twist under the combined forces of heat and weight.

There was a roar, and another section of timber fell away. The smoke was too thick. Choking, we had to back out from under the city.

The fire in the superstructure was still blazing, but a fire-crew inside the city was attempting to deal with it. The winches turned… the city crept slowly towards the comparative safety of the northern bank.

2

In the morning light the damage was assessed. In terms of lost human life, the city had not fared too badly. Three of the militiamen had been killed in the shooting, and fifteen had been injured. Inside the city, one man had been seriously wounded in one of the incendiary explosions, and a dozen more men and women had been overcome by smoke in the ensuing fires.

The physical damage to the city itself was extensive. A whole section of administrative offices had been gutted by the fire, and some of the accommodation section was uninhabitable because of fire or water damage.

Beneath the city there was more damage. Although the main base of the city was steel, much of the construction was timber, and there were whole sections which had been burnt out. The rear ruiiner-wheels on the right outer track had been derailed, and one of the great wheels had sustained a structural crack. It could not be replaced: it would have to be discarded.

After the city had reached the northern bank, the bridge had continued to burn and was now a total loss. With it had gone several hundred yards of our irreplaceable rails, warped and twisted by the heat.

After two days outside the city, working with the track-crews who were salvaging what there was of the rails on the southern bank of the river, I was summoned to see Clausewitz.

Apart from an hour or two spent inside the city when I first returned, I had not reported formally to any of my senior guildsmen. As far as I could determine, the normal protocol of the guilds had been abandoned for the duration of the emergency, and as I myself could see no end to the serious situation — the attacks had caused inevitable delays, and the optimum was ever further away — I had not expected anyone to call me off my work outside.

There was a disturbing mood amongst those men who were outside — half-way between despair and desperation. The work continued on laying the tracks towards the pass, but the relaxed energy of my early days outside the city seemed to be a long way behind us. Now the tracks were being built in spite of the situation with the tooks, rather than in the way I now understood the motivation of the city to be derived, from an internal need to survive in a strange environment.

The talk among the track-crews, the Militia, the Traction men was all centred in one way or another around the attacks. No longer was there talk of gaining ground on the optimum, or what dangers lay down past. The city was in a crisis, and this was reflected in everyone’s attitude.

When I went inside the city the change was apparent here too.

Gone was the light, aseptic appearance of the corridors, gone was the general atmosphere of workaday routines.

The elevator was no longer working. Many of the main doors in the corridors were locked, and at one point an entire wall had been torn away — presumably as a result of one of the fires — so that anyone walking through that part of the city could see what was outside. I remembered Victoria’s frustrations of old, and reflected that whatever secrecy the guilds might have tried to maintain in the past, no longer was such a system possible.

Thought of Victoria pained me; I still did not realize fully what had happened. In what seemed to me to be the passage of a few days, she had abandoned all the tacit understandings of the marriage between us, and gone to pursue another life without me.

I had not seen her since my return, though I had made sure that she would have known I was back in the city. Under the conditions of the external threat it had not been possible to see her anyway, but that aspect of my life was one I needed time to consider before meeting her. The news of her pregnancy by another man — I was told he was an education administrator named Yung — had not hit me too hard at first, simply because I had just not believed it. Such a situation could not possibly have developed in the time I knew I had been away from the city.

I found my way to the first-order guild area with some difficulty. The interior of the city had changed in many ways.

There seemed to be people, noise, and dirt everywhere. Every spare yard of space had been given over to emergency sleeping-room, and even in some of the corridors lay wounded men from outside. Several walls and partitions had been taken down, and just outside the first-order quarters — where there had been a series of pleasantly appointed recreation rooms for the guildsmen — an emergency kitchen had been placed.

The smell of burnt wood was everywhere.

I knew a fundamental change was coming over the city. I could feel the old structure of the guilds crumbling away. The roles of many people had already changed; working with the track-crews I’d met several men for whom it was the first time outside the city, men who until the attacks had worked on food synthesis, or education, or domestic administration. Took labour was now obviously impossible, and all hands had to be called to move the city. Why at this moment Clausewitz had summoned me I could not imagine.