Mortonridge was bleeding away into the ocean, a prolonged and arduous death. It was as though all the pain, the torment, the misery from a conflict that could never be anything other than excruciatingly bitter had manifested itself as mud. Slimy, insidious, limitless, it rotted the resolve of both sides in the same way it ravaged their physical environment. The peninsula’s living skin of topsoil had torn along the spine of the central mountain range to slither relentlessly down-slope into the coastal shallows. All the rich black loam built up over millennia as the rainforests regenerated themselves upon the decayed trunks of timelost past generations was sluiced away within two days by the unnatural rain. Reduced to supersaturated sludge, the precious upper few metres containing abundant nitrates, bacteria, and aboriginal earthworm-analogues had become an unstoppable landslip. Hill-sized moraines of mire were pushed along valleys, bulldozed by the intolerable pressure exerted by cubic kilometres of more ooze behind.
The mud tides scoured every valley, incline, and hollow; exposing the denser substrata. A compacted mix of gravel and clay, as sterile as asteroid regolith. There were no seeds or spores or eggs hidden tenaciously in its clefts to sprout anew. And precious few nutrients to succour and support them even if there had been.
Ralph used the SD sensors to watch the thick black stain expanding out across the sea. The mouth of the Juliffe had produced a similar discoloration in Lalonde’s sea, he remembered. But that was just one small blemish. This was an ecological blight unmatched since the worst of Earth’s dystopic Twenty-first Century. Marine creatures were dying in the plague of unnatural dark waters, choking beneath the uncountable corpses of their mammalian cousins.
“She was right, you know,” he told Cathal at the end of the Liberation’s first week.
“Who?”
“Annette Ekelund. Remember when we met her at the Firebreak roadblock? She said we’d have to destroy the village in order to save it. And I stood there and told her that I’d do whatever I had to, whatever it took. Dear God.” He slumped back in the thickly cushioned chair behind his desk. If it hadn’t been for the staff in the Ops Room on the other side of the glass wall he would probably have put his head in his hands.
Cathal glanced into the sparkling light of the desktop AV pillar. The unhealthy smear around Mortonridge’s coast had grown almost as a counterbalance to the shrinking cloud. It was still raining over the peninsula, of course, but not constantly. The cloud had almost reverted to a natural weather formation, there were actual gaps amid the thick dark swirls now. “Chief, they did it to themselves. You’ve got to stop punishing yourself over this. No one who’s been de-possessed in zero-tau is blaming you for anything. They’re gonna give you a fucking medal once this is over.”
Medals, ennoblement, promotions; they’d all been mentioned. Ralph hadn’t paid a lot of attention. Such things were the trappings of state, government trinkets of no practical value whatsoever. Saving people was what really counted; everything else was just an acknowledgement, a method of reinforcing memory. He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted that. Mortonridge would never recover, would never grow back to what it was. Maybe that was the best memorial, a decimated land was something that could never be overlooked and ignored by future generations. A truth that remained unsusceptible to the historical revisionists. The Liberation, he had decided some while ago, wasn’t a victory over Ekelund, at best he’d scored a few points off her. She’d be back for the next match.
Acacia rapped lightly on the open door, and walked in, followed by Janne Palmer. Ralph waved at them to sit, and datavised a codelock at the door. The sensenviron bubble room closed about them. Princess Kirsten and Admiral Farquar were waiting around the oval table for the daily progress review. Mortonridge itself formed a three dimensional relief map on the tabletop, small blinking symbols sketching in the state of the campaign. The number of purple triangles, indicating clusters of possessed, had increased dramatically over the last ten days as the cloud attenuated allowing the SD sensors to scan the ground. Invading forces were green hexagons, an unbroken line mimicking the coastline, sixty-five kilometres inland.
Admiral Farquar leant forwards, studying the situation with a despondent expression. “Less than ten kilometres a day,” he said sombrely. “I’d hoped we would be a little further along by now.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you’d tried walking through that devilsome mud,” Acacia said. “The serjeants are making excellent progress.”
“It wasn’t a criticism,” the admiral said hastily. “Given the circumstances, they’ve performed marvellously. I simply wish we could have one piece of luck on our side, everything about these conditions seems to swing in Ekelund’s favour.”
“It’s starting to swing back,” Cathal said. “The rain and the mud have triggered just about every booby trap they left in wait for us. And we’ve got their locations locked down now. They can’t escape.”
“I can see the actual campaign is advancing well on the ground,” Princess Kirsten said. “I have no complaint about the way you’re handling that. However, I do have a problem with the number of casualties we’re incurring, on both sides.”
The relevant figures stood in gold columns at the top of the table. Ralph had done his best to ignore them. Not that he could forget. “The suicide rate among the possessed is increasing at an alarming rate,” he conceded. “Today saw it reaching eight per cent; and there’s very little we can do about it. They’re doing it quite deliberately. It’s an inhibiting tactic. After all, what have they got to lose? The whole purpose of the campaign is to free the bodies they’ve captured; if they can deny us that opportunity then they will weaken our resolve, both on the ground and in the political arena.”
“If that’s their reasoning, then they’re badly mistaken,” Princess Kirsten said. “One of the main reasons for the Kingdom’s strength is because my family can take tough decisions when the need arises. This Liberation continues until the serjeants meet up on Mortonridge’s central mountain. However, I would like some options on how to reduce casualties.”
“There’s only one,” Ralph said. “And it’s by no means perfect. We slow the front line’s advance and use the time to concentrate our forces around the possessed. At the moment we’re using almost the minimum number of serjeants against each nest of them we encounter. That means the serjeants have to use a lot of gunfire to subdue them. When the possessed realize they’ve lost, they stop resisting the bullets. Bang, we lose. Another of our people dies, and the lost souls in the beyond have another recruit.”
“If we increase the number of serjeants for each encounter, what sort of reduction do you expect us to be looking at?”
“At the moment, we try to have at least thirty per cent more serjeants than possessed. If we could reach double, then we think we can hold the suicide rate down to a maximum of fifteen per cent each time.”
“Of course, the ratio will improve naturally as the length of the front line contracts and the number of possessed decreases,” Admiral Farquar said. “It’s just that right now we’re about at maximum stretch. The serjeants haven’t got far enough inland to decrease the length of the front line appreciably, yet they’re encountering a lot of possessed.”
“That entire situation is going to change over the next three to four days,” Cathal said. “Almost all the possessed are on the move. They’re retreating from the front line as fast as they can wade. The advance is going to speed up considerably, so the length will reduce anyway.”
“They’re running for now,” Janne Palmer said. “But there’s a lot of heavy concentrations of them fifty kilometres in from the front line. If they’ve got any sense, they’ll regroup.”
“The more of them there are, the stronger they get, and the more difficult they’ll be to subdue. Especially in light of the suicides,” Acacia said. “I’ve had the AI drawing up an SD strike pattern to halt their movements. I don’t think they should be allowed to retreat any further. We’re worried that we’ll wind up with a solid core at the centre which will be just about impossible to crack without large scale casualties.”
“I really don’t want to wait three to four days for an improvement,” Princess Kirsten said. “Ralph, what do you think?”
“Denying them the ability to congregate is my primary concern, ma’am. They’ve already got a lot of people in Schallton, Ketton, and Cauley, I do not want to see that increase any further. But if we prevent them from moving from their present locations, and then switch our tactics to a slower advance, you’re looking at almost doubling the estimated time of the campaign.”
“But with significantly reduced casualties?” the Princess asked.
Ralph looked over at Acacia. “Only among the people who’ve been possessed. Trying to subdue them with a larger number of serjeants using less firepower will significantly increase the risk to the serjeants.”
“We volunteered for this knowing the risks would be great,” Acacia said. “And we are prepared for that. However, I feel I should tell you that a significant number of serjeants are suffering from what I can only describe as low morale. It’s not something we were expecting, the animating personalities were supposed to be fairly simple thought routines with basic personalities. It would appear they are evolving into quite high-order mentalities. Unfortunately, they lack the kind of sophistication which would allow them to appreciate their full Edenist heritage. Normally we can mitigate one person’s burden by sharing and sympathising. However, here the number of suffering is far in excess of the rest of us, which actually places quite a strain on us. We haven’t known a scale of suffering like this since Jantrit.”
“You mean they’re becoming real people?” Janne Palmer asked.
“Not yet. Nor do we believe they ever will do. Ultimately they are limited by the capacity of the serjeant processor array, after all. What I am telling you is that they’re progressing slightly beyond simplistic bitek servitors. Do not expect machine levels of efficiency in future. There are human factors involved which will now need to be taken into account.”
“Such as?” the Princess asked.
“They will probably need time to recuperate between assaults. Duties will have to be rotated between platoons. I’m sorry,” she said to Ralph. “It adds considerable complications to the planning. Especially if you want them to prevent the possessed suicides.”
“I’m sure the AI can cope,” he said.
“It looks like the campaign is going to take a lot longer whatever option we go for,” Admiral Farquar said.
“That does have one small benefit,” Janne Palmer said.
“I’d love to hear it,” the Princess told her.
“Reducing the flow of de-possessed is going to alleviate some of the pressure on our medical facilities.”
Back in her private office, Kirsten shuddered, a movement not reproduced inside the bubble room. That, out of all the other horrors revealed by the Liberation, had upset her the most. Cancers were such a rarity in this day and age, that to see several bulging from a person’s skin like inflated blisters was a profound shock. And there were very few depossessed who didn’t suffer from them. To inflict such an incapacitating disease for what was apparently little more than vanity was hubris at an obscene level. That it might also be simple blind ignorance was almost as bad. “I have requested aid from the Kingdom and our allies as a matter of urgency,” she said. “We should start to receive shipments of medical nanonic packages over the next few days. Every hospital and clinic on the planet is being used, and civilian ships are being deployed to fly people out to asteroid settlements in the system—not that they have many beds or staff, but every little bit helps. I just wish we could ferry people out-system, but at the moment I can’t break the quarantine for that. In any event, my Foreign Minister has cautioned me that there would be some reservation from other star systems about accepting our medical cases. They’re worried about infiltration by the possessed, and I can’t say I blame them.”
“Capone’s new lunacy doesn’t help ease the paranoia,” Admiral Farquar grunted. “Damn that bastard.”
“So you would prefer the slow down scenario?” Kirsten asked.
“Very much so, ma’am,” Janne Palmer said. “It’s not just a question of providing medical support, there are transport bottlenecks as well. It’s improved slightly now we can land aircraft at the coastal ports, but we have to get the de-possessed there first, and they need care which my occupation forces really aren’t geared up to provide.”
“General Hiltch, what do you favour?”
“I don’t like slowing down the advance, ma’am. With all respect to Admiral Farquar’s SD officers, I don’t think they’ll be able to prevent the possessed from congregating. Slow their movements, maybe, but halt them no. And once that happens, we’ll be in a real mess. The kind of firepower we’re going to need to break open Ketton at the moment is way in excess of any assault so far. We have to prevent it from turning into a runaway situation. At the moment we’re dictating the pace of events to them, I’d hate to abandon that level of control. It’s our one big advantage.”
“I see. Very well, you’ll have my decision before dawn local time.”
The sensenviron ended with its usual abruptness, and Kirsten blinked irritably, allowing her eyes to register the familiar office. Touching base with normality. Necessary, now. These nightly reviews were becoming a considerable drain. Not even the Privy Council Grand Policy Conclaves back in the Apollo Palace had quite the same impact, they implemented policies that would take decades to mature. The Liberation was all so now. Something the Saldanas were not accustomed to. In any modern crisis, the major decision would be whether or not to dispatch a fleet. After that, everything was down to the admiral in charge.
I make political decisions, not military ones.
But the Liberation had changed all that, blurring the distinction badly. Military decisions were political ones.
She stood up, stretching, then went over to Allie’s bust. Her hand touched his familiar, reassuringly sober features. “What would you do?” she murmured. Not that she would ever be accused of making the wrong choice. Whatever it was, the family would support her. Her equerry, Sylvester Geray, scrambled to his feet in the reception room, the chair legs scraping loudly on the tushkwood floor as Kirsten came out of her office.
“Tired?” she asked lightly.
“No ma’am.”
“Yes you are. I’m going back to my quarters for a few hours. I won’t need you before seven o’clock. Have a sleep, or at least a rest.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” He bowed deeply as she walked out.
There were few staff about in the private apartments, which was how she liked them. With the rooms all dark and quiet, it was almost how she imagined a normal home would be late in the evening. An assistant nanny and a maid were on duty, sitting up chatting quietly in the lounge next to the children’s bedrooms. Kirsten stood outside for a moment, listening; the nanny’s fiancй was in the Royal Navy, and hadn’t called her for a couple of days. The maid was sympathising.
Everyone, Kirsten thought, this has touched and involved every one of us. And the Liberation is only the beginning. So far the Church had been noticeably unsuccessful in quelling people’s fears of the beyond. Though Atherstone’s Bishop reported that attendance was high in every parish on the planet, greater than Christmas Eve, he’d said almost in indignation.
She opened the door to Edward’s study without knocking, only realising her mistake once she was well inside. There was a girl with him on the leather settee; his current mistress. Kirsten remembered the security file Jannike Dermot had provided: minor nobility, her father owned an estate and some kind of transport company. Pretty young thing, in her early twenties, with classic delicate bonework. Tall with very long legs; as they all invariably were with Edward. She stared at Kirsten in utter consternation, then frantically tried to adjust her evening dress to a more modest position. Not that she could achieve much modesty with so little fabric, Kirsten thought in amusement. The girl’s wine glass went flying from trembling fingers.
Kirsten frowned at that. The antique carpet was Turkish, a beautiful red and blue weave; she’d given it to Edward as a birthday present fifteen years ago.
“Ma’am,” the girl squeaked. “I . . . We . . .”
Kirsten merely gave her a mildly enquiring glance.
“Come along, my dear,” Edward said calmly. He took her arm and escorted her to the door. “Affairs of state. I’ll call you in the morning.” She managed a strangled whimper in response. A butler, responding to Edward’s datavise, appeared and gestured politely to the by-now thoroughly frightened and bewildered girl. Edward shut the study door behind her, and sighed.
Kirsten started laughing, then put her hand over her mouth. “Oh Edward, I’m sorry. I should have let you know I was coming.”
He spread his hands wide. “C’est la vie.”
“Poor thing looked terrified.” She knelt down and picked the wine glass up, dabbing at the carpet. “Look what she did. I’d better get a valet mechanoid, or it’ll stain.” She datavised the study’s processor.
“It’s a rather good Chablis, actually.” He picked the bottle out of its walnut cooler jacket. “Shame to waste it, would you like some?”
“Lovely, thank you. It has been a very bad day at the office.”
“Ah.” He went over to the cabinet and brought her a fresh glass.
Kirsten sniffed at the bouquet after he’d poured. “She was jolly gorgeous. Slightly young, though. Wicked of you.” She brushed at imaginary dust on his lapel. “Then again, I can see why she’s so obliging. You always did look rather splendid in uniform.”
Edward glanced down at his Royal Navy tunic. There were no Royal crests, just three discreet medal ribbons—earned long ago. “I’m just doing my bit. Though they are all depressingly young at the base. I think they regard me as some kind of mascot.”
“Oh poor Edward, the indignity. But not to worry, Zandra and Emmeline are terribly impressed.”
He sat on the leather settee and patted the cushion. “Come on, sit down and tell me what’s wrong.”
“Thank you.” She stepped round the small mechanoid that was sniffing at the wine stain, and sat beside him, welcoming his arm around her shoulders. The secret of a successful royal marriage: don’t have secrets. They were both intelligent people, which had allowed them to work out the grounds of a sustainable domestic arrangement a long time ago. In public and in private he was the perfect companion, a friend and confidant. All she required was loyalty, which he supplied admirably. In return he was free to gather whatever perks his position presented—and it wasn’t just girls; he was an avid art collector and bon viveur. They even still slept together occasionally.
“The Liberation is not progressing as well as could be,” he said. “That much is obvious. And the net is overloading with speculation.”
Kirsten sipped some of the chablis. “Progress is the key word, yes.” She told him about the decision she was faced with.
After she’d finished, he poured some more wine for himself before answering. “The serjeants developing advanced personalities? Humm. How intriguing. I wonder if they’ll refuse to go back into their habitat multiplicities when the campaign is over.”
“I have no idea; Acacia never ventured an opinion. And to be honest, that part is not my problem.”
“It might be if they all start applying for citizenship afterwards.”
“Oh God.” She snuggled up closer. “No. I’m not even going to consider that right now.”
“Wise lady. You want my opinion?”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“You can’t ignore the serjeant situation. We are utterly dependent on them to liberate Mortonridge, and there’s a hell of a way to go yet.”
“A hundred and eighty thousand people de-possessed, seventeen thousand dead, so far; that leaves us with one-point-eight-million left to save.”
“Exactly. And we’re about to enter the phase which will see the heaviest fighting. If they keep advancing at their current rate, the front line will reach the first areas where the possessed are concentrated the day after tomorrow. If you slow them now, the serjeants are going to start taking heavy losses just before that. Not good. I’d say, keep things as they are until the front line hits those concentrations, then shift to General Hiltch’s outnumbering tactics.”
“That’s a very logical solution.” She stared at the wine. “If only all I had to consider were numbers. But they’re depending on me, Edward.”
“Who?”
“The people who’ve been possessed. Even locked away in their own bodies, they know the Liberation is coming now; a practical salvation from this obscenity. They have faith in me, they trust me to deliver them from this evil. And I have a duty to them. That duty is one of the few true burdens placed on the family by our people. Now I know there is a way of reducing the number of my subjects killed, I cannot in all conscience ignore it for tactical convenience. That would be a betrayal of trust, not to mention an abdication of duty.”
“The two impossibles for a Saldana.”
“Yes. We have had it easy for an awful long time, haven’t we?”
“Shall we say: moderately difficult.”
“Yet if I want to reduce the death rate, I’m going to have to ask the Edenists to take it on the chin for us. You know what bothers me most about that? People will expect it. I’m a Saldana, they’re Edenists. What could be simpler?”
“The serjeants aren’t quite Edenists.”
“We don’t know what the hell they are, not any more. Acacia was hedging her bets very thoroughly. If they’re worried enough to bring the problem to me, then it has to be a substantial factor. One I cannot discount from the humanist equation. Damn it, they were supposed to be automatons.”
“The Liberation is a very rushed venture. I’m sure if Jupiter’s geneticists had been given enough time to design a dedicated soldier construct then this would never have arisen. But we had to borrow from the Lord of Ruin. Look, General Hiltch was given overall command of the Liberation. Let him make the decision, it’s what he’s paid for.”
“Get thee behind me,” she muttered. “No, Edward, not this time. I’m the one who insisted on reducing the fatalities. It is my responsibility.”
“You’ll be setting a precedent.”
“Hardly one that’s likely to be repeated. All of us are sailing into new, and very stormy territory; that requires proper leadership. If I cannot provide that now, then the family will ultimately have failed. We have spent four hundred years engineering ourselves into this position of statesmanship, and I will not duck the issue when it really counts. It stinks of cowardice, and that is one thing I will never allow the Saldanas to stand accused of.”
He kissed her on the side of her head. “Well you know you have my support. If I could make one final observation. The personalities in the serjeants are all volunteers. They came here knowing what their probable fate would be. That purpose remains at their core. In that, they are like every pre-Twenty-first Century army; reluctant, frightened even, but committed. So give them the time they need to gather their nerve and resolution, and then use them for the purpose for which they were created: saving genuine human lives. If they are truly capable of emotion, then their only hope of gaining satisfaction will come from achieving that.”
Ralph was eating a cold snack in Fort Forward’s command complex canteen when he received the datavise.
“Slow the assault,” Princess Kirsten told him. “I want that suicide figure reduced as low as you can practically achieve.”
“Yes ma’am. I’ll see to it. And thank you.”
“This is what you wanted?”
“We’re not here to recapture land, ma’am. The Liberation is about people.”
“I know that. I hope Acacia will forgive us.”
“I’m sure she will, ma’am. The Edenists understand us pretty well.”
“Good. Because I also want the serjeant platoons given as much breathing space between assaults as they require.”
“That will reduce the rate of advance even further.”
“I know, but it can’t be helped. Don’t worry about political and technical support, General, I’ll ensure you get that right to the bitter end.”
“Yes ma’am.” The datavise ended. He looked round at the senior staff eating with him, and gave a slow smile. “We got it.”
High above the air, cold technological eyes stared downwards, unblinking. Their multi-spectrum vision could penetrate clean through Mortonridge’s thinning strands of puffy white cloud to reveal the small group of warm figures trekking across the mud. But that was where the observation failed. Objects around them were perfectly clear, the dendritic tangle of roots flaring from fallen trees, a pulverised four-wheel-drive rover almost devoured by the blue-grey mud, even the shape of large stones ploughed up and rolled along by thick runnels of sludge. In contrast, the figures were hazed by shimmering air; infrared blobs no more substantial than candle flames. No matter which combination of discrimination filters it applied to the sensor image, the AI was unable to determine their exact number. Best estimate, taken from the width of the distortion and measuring the thermal imprint of the disturbed mud they left behind, was between four and nine.
Stephanie could feel the necklace of prying satellites as they slid relentlessly along their arc from horizon to horizon. Not so much their physical existence; that kind of knowledge had vanished along with the cloud and the possessed’s mental unity. But their avaricious intent was forever there, intruding upon the world’s intrinsic harmonies. It acted as a reminder for her to keep her guard up. The others were the same. Messing with the sight on a level which equated to waving a hand at persistent flies. Not that satellites were their problem. A far larger note of discord resonated from the serjeants, now just a couple of miles away. And coming closer, always closer. Machine-like in their determination.
At first Stephanie had ignored them, employing a kind of bravado that was almost entirely alien to her. Everybody had, once they’d reached the shelter (and dryness !) of the barn. The building didn’t amount to much, set on a gentle hillock, with a low wall of stone acting as a base for composite panelling walls and a shallow roof. They’d stumbled across it five horrendous hours after setting out from the end of the valley. McPhee claimed that proved they were following the road. By then, nobody was arguing with him. In fact, nobody was speaking at all. Their limbs were trembling from exertion, not even reinforcing them with energistic strength helped much. They’d long since discovered such augmentation had to be paid for by the body in the long run.
The barn had come pretty much at the end of their endurance. There’d been no discussion about using it. As soon as they saw its dark, bleak outline through the pounding rain they’d trudged grimly towards it. Inside there was little respite from the weather at first. The wind had torn innumerable panels off the carbotanium frame, and the concrete floor was lost beneath a foot of mud. That didn’t matter, in their state, it was pure salvation.
Their energistic power renovated it. Mud flowed up the walls, sealing over the lost panels and turning to stone. The rain was repelled, and the howl of the wind muted. Relief united them again, banishing the misery of the retreat from the valley. It was an emotion which produced an overreaction of confidence and defiance. Now, they found it possible to ignore the occasional mind-scream of anguish as another soul was wrenched from its possessed body by the peril of zero-tau. They cooperated gamely in searching round outside for food, adopting a campfire jollity as they cleaned and cooked the dead fish and mud-smeared vegetables.
Then the rain eased off, and the serjeants crunched forwards remorselessly. Food became very scarce. A week after the Liberation began, they left the barn, tramping along the melted contour line which McPhee still insisted was the road. Even living through the deluge under a flimsy roof hadn’t prepared them for the scale of devastation wrought by the water. Valleys were completely impassable. Huge rivers of mud slithered along, murmuring and burbling incessantly as they sucked down and devoured anything that protruded into their course.
Progress was slow, even though they’d now fashioned themselves sturdy hiking attire (even Tina wore strong leather boots). Two days spent trying to navigate through the buckled, decrepit landscape. They kept to the high ground, where swathes of dark-green aboriginal grass were the only relief from the overlapping shades of brown. Even they were sliced by deep flash gorges where the water had found a weak seam of soil. There was no map, and no recognizable features to apply one against. So many promising ridges ended in sharp dips down into the mud, forcing them to backtrack, losing hours. But they always knew which way to travel. It was simple: away from the serjeants. It was also becoming very difficult to stay ahead. The front line seemed to move at a constant pace, unfazed by the valleys and impossible terrain, while Stephanie and her group spent their whole time zigzagging about. What had begun forty-eight hours ago as a nine mile gap was down to about two, and closing steadily.
“Oh, hey, you cats,” Cochrane called. “You like want the good news or the bad news first?” He had taken point duty, striding out ahead of the others. Now he stood atop a dune of battered reeds, looking down the other side in excitement.
“The bad,” Stephanie said automatically.
“The legion of the black hats is speeding up, and there’s like this stupendously huge amount of them.”
“What’s the good?” Tina squealed.
“They’re speeding up because there’s like a road down here. A real one, with tarmac and stuff.”
The others didn’t exactly increase their pace to reach the bedraggled hippie, but there was a certain eagerness in their stride that’d been missing for some time. They clambered up the incline of the dune, and halted level with him.
“What’s there?” Moyo asked. His face was perfect, the scars and blisters gone; eyes solid and bright. He was even able to smile again, doing so frequently during the last few days they’d spent in the barn. That he could smile, yet still refuse to let them see what lay underneath the illusory eyeballs worried Stephanie enormously. A bad form of denial. He was acting the role of himself; and it was a very thin performance.
“It’s a valley,” she told him.
He groaned. “Oh hell, not again.”
“No, this is different.”
The dune was actually the top of a steepish slope which swept down several hundred yards to the floor of Catmos Vale, a valley that was at least twenty miles wide. Drizzle and mist made the far side difficult to see. The floor below was a broad flat expanse whose size had actually managed to defeat the massive discharges of mud. Its width had absorbed the surges that coursed out of the narrower ravines along either side; spreading them wide and robbing them of their destructive power. The wide, boggy river channel which meandered along the centre had siphoned the bulk of the tide away, without giving it a chance to amass in dangerously unstable colloidal waves.
Vast low-lying sections of the floor had turned directly into quagmire from the rain and overspill. Entire forests had subsided, their trunks keeling over to lean against each other. Now they were slowly sinking deeper and deeper as the rapidly expanding subsurface water level gnawed away at the stability of the loam. Watched over the period of a day or two, it was almost as if they were melting away.
Small hillocks and knolls formed a vast archipelago of olive-green islands amid the ochre sea. Hundreds of distressed and emaciated aboriginal animals scurried about over each of them, herds of kolfrans (a deer-analogue) and packs of the small canine ferrangs were trampling the surviving blades of grass into a sticky pulp. Birds scuttled among them, their feathers too slick with mud for them to fly.
Many of the islands just below the foot of the slope had sections of road threaded across them. The eye could stitch them together into a single strand leading along the valley. It led towards a small town, just visible through the drizzle. Most of it had been built on raised land, leaving its buildings clear of the mud; as if the entire valley had become its moat. There was a church near the centre, its classic grey stone spire standing defiantly proud. Some kind of scarlet symbols had been painted around the middle.
“That’s got to be Ketton,” Franklin said. “Can you sense them?”
“Yes,” Stephanie said uncomfortably. “There’s a lot of us down there.” It would explain the condition of the buildings. There wasn’t a tile missing from the neat houses, no sign of damage. Even the little park was devoid of puddles.
“I guess that’s why these guys are like so anxious to reach it.” Cochrane jerked a thumb back down the valley.
It was the first time they’d actually seen the Liberation army. Twenty jeeps formed a convoy along the road. Whenever the carbon-concrete surface left the islands to dip under the mud, they slowed slightly, cautiously testing the way. The mud couldn’t have been very deep or thick, barely coming over the wheels. A V-shaped phalanx of serjeants followed on behind the jeeps, big dark figures lumbering along quite quickly considering none of them was on the road. On one side of the carbon-concrete strip, their line stretched out almost to the central river of mud; on the other it extended up the side of Catmos Vale’s wall. A second train of vehicles, larger than the jeeps, was turning into the valley several miles behind the front line.
“Ho-lee shit,” Franklin groaned. “We can’t make that sort of speed, not over this terrain.”
McPhee was studying the rugged land behind them. “I cannot see them up here.”
“They’ll be there,” Rana said. “They’re on the other side of the river as well, look. That line is kept level. There’s no break in it. They’re scooping us up like horse shit.”
“If we stay up here we’ll be nailed before sunset.”
“If we go down, we can keep ahead of them on the road,” Stephanie said. “But we’ll have to go through the town. I have a bad feeling about that. The possessed there know the serjeants are coming, yet they’re staying put. And there’s a lot of them.”
“They’re going to make a stand,” Moyo said.
Stephanie glanced back at the ominous line moving towards them. “They’ll lose,” she said, morosely. “Nothing can resist that.”
“We’ve no food left,” McPhee said.
Cochrane used an index finger to prod his purple sunglasses up along the bridge of his nose. “Plenty of water, though, man.”
“There’s nothing to eat up here,” Rana said. “We have to go down.”
“The town will hold them off for a while at least,” Stephanie said. She resisted glancing at Moyo, though he was now her principal concern. “We could use the time to take a break, rest up.”
“Then what?” Moyo grunted.
“Then we move on. We keep ahead of them.”
“Why bother?”
“Don’t,” she said softly. “We try and live life as we always wanted to, remember? Well I don’t want to live like this; and there might be something different up ahead, because there certainly isn’t anything behind. As long as we keep going, there’s hope.”
His face compressed to a melancholic expression. He held one arm out, moving his hand round to try and find her. She gripped his fingers tightly, and he hugged her against him. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” she murmured. “Hey, you know what? The way we’re heading, it takes us right up to the central mountain range. You can show me what mountain gliding is like.”
Moyo laughed gruffly, his shoulders trembling. “Look, guys, I hate to fuck up my karma any more by breaking up your major love-in scene here, but we have to decide where we’re like going. Like now. This is one army that doesn’t take time out, you dig?”
“It has to be down to Ketton,” Stephanie said briskly. She eyed the long slope below. It would be slippery, but with their energistic power they ought to cope. “We can get there ahead of the army.”
“Only just ahead,” Franklin said. “We’ll be trapped in the town. If we stay up here, we can still keep ahead of them.”
“Not by much,” McPhee said.
“And you’ll not have time to gather any food,” Rana said. “I don’t know about you, but I know I can’t keep this pace up for much longer without eating a full meal. We must consider the practicalities of the situation. My calorie intake has been very low over the last couple of days.”
“It’s a permanent downer,” Cochrane said. “Your practical problem is that you don’t eat properly anyway.”
She glared at him. “I really hope you aren’t going to suggest I should eat dead flesh.”
“Oh brother,” he raised his arms heavenwards. “Here we go again. Check it out: no meat, no smoking, no gambling, no sex, no loud music, no bright lights, no dancing, no fucking fun.”
“I’m going down to Ketton,” Stephanie said, overriding the pair of them. She started to walk down the slope, her hand holding on to Moyo’s fingers. “If anyone else wants to come, you’d better do it now.”
“I’m with you,” Moyo said. He moved his feet along cautiously. Rana shrugged lightly, and started to follow. A reefer slid up out of Cochrane’s fist and the tip ignited. He stuck it in his mouth and went after Rana.
“Sod it!” Franklin said wretchedly. “All right. But we’re giving up by going down there. There’ll be no way out of that town.”
“You can’t keep ahead of them up here,” McPhee said. “Look at the bastards. It’s like they can walk on mud.”
“All right, all right.”
Tina gave Rana a desperate look. “Darling, those things will simply demolish the town. And we’ll be in it.”
“Maybe. Who knows? The military always makes ludicrously extravagant propaganda claims about their macho prowess. Reality invariably lags behind.”
“Yo, Tina.” Cochrane proffered the reefer. “Come with us, babe. You and me, we could like have our last night on this world together. Fucking-A way to go, huh?”
Tina shuddered at the grinning hippie. “I’d rather be captured by those beastly things.”
“That’s a no, is it?”
“No it is not. I don’t want us to split up. You’re my friends.”
Stephanie had turned to watch the little scene. “Tina, make up your mind.” She started off down the slope again, leading Moyo.
“Oh heavens ,” Tina said. “You simply never give me time to decide anything. It’s so unfair.”
“Bye, doll,” Cochrane said.
“Don’t go so fast. I can’t keep up.”
Stephanie made a deliberate effort to expel the woman’s whining from her mind. Concentrating solely on navigating her way down the slope. She had to take quite a shallow angle, constantly reinforcing the slippery soil below her boot soles with energistic power. Even then her progress was marked by long skid marks.
“I can sense a lot of possessed below us,” Moyo said when they were a hundred yards above the quagmires of the valley floor.
“Where?” Stephanie asked without thinking. She hadn’t been paying attention to what waited below, traversing the tricky slope required her complete attention. Now she looked up, she could see the convoy of jeeps was barely a mile behind them. The sight gave her heart a cold squeeze.
“Not far.” His free hand pointed out across the valley. “Over there.”
Stephanie couldn’t see anyone. But now she scrutinized the mental whispers around the edge of her perception she was aware of rising anticipation in many minds.
“Hey, Moyo, man, good call.” Cochrane was scanning the valley. “Those cats are like low in the mud. I can’t see anyone.”
“Come on,” Stephanie said. “Lets find out what’s happening.”
The last section of the slope started to flatten out, allowing them to increase their speed. Stephanie was tempted just to keep to the undulating foothills that ran along the valley wall. They could certainly make good time on the reasonably dry ground. Except it curved gradually away from Ketton. One of the visible sections of road was about three hundred yards away across a perfectly flat expanse of slough. Stephanie stood on the edge, mud oozing round her ankles. Her boots kept her feet dry, but as a precaution she made the leather creep up her shins towards her knees. The silence down here was unnerving, it was as if the mud had some kind of anti-sound property. “I don’t think it’s very deep,” she ventured.
“One way to find out,” McPhee said vigorously. He struck out for the road with confident strides. Mud sloshed away slowly from his legs as he ploughed across. “Come on, ye great bunch of woofters. It’s not like we can drown.” Cochrane and Rana gave each other a reluctant glance, then started in.
“It’s going to be all right,” Stephanie said. She kept a tight grip on Moyo’s hand, and they waded in together. Tina held on to Franklin’s hand as they went in. The action drew a lecherous grin from Cochrane.
Stephanie was right about it not being particularly deep, but the mud was soon up to her knees. After a couple of attempts to clear a trench through it with her energistic power, she gave up. The mud responded so sluggishly it would have taken at least an hour for them to reach the road by such a method. This had to be crossed the hard way, and the level of exertion needed to keep going placed a terrible strain on already fatigued muscles. All of them diverted their energistic power to force recalcitrant legs forward against mud that seemed to exert an equal pressure against them. Their efforts were given an extra edge by the onward march of the army. They were travelling almost at right angles to the front line, losing precious separation distance with every minute.
Stephanie kept telling herself that as soon as they made the road they’d be able to build it back up again. But even using the road, there was a lot of mud to surmount before Ketton, and her body was already approaching its physical limit. She could hear Cochrane wheezing loudly, a sound which carried a long way over the quagmire.
“They’re right ahead of us now,” Moyo said. He’d opened the front of his oilskin jacket in an attempt to cool himself. The drizzle was seeping through his energistic barrier, combining with sweat to soak his shirt. “Two of them. And they’re not happy with us.”
Stephanie glanced up, trying to distinguish the source of the animus thoughts. The slight rise carrying the road was seventy yards in front. Badly mangled grass and a few straggly bushes gleaming dully in the grizzly skin of rainwater. Dozens of ferrangs were pelting about excitedly, running together in packs of six or seven. Their cohesive motion reminded her of fish schools, every movement enacted in unison.
“I can’t see anyone,” McPhee grunted. “Hey, shitheads,” he shouted. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Oh groovy,” Cochrane said. “Way to go, dude. That’ll make them real friendly. I mean it’s not like we’re in cosmically deep shit at this point and need help, or anything.”
Tina let out a miserable gasp as she slipped. “I hate this fucking mud!”
“You tell it as it is, babe.” Franklin helped her up, and the two of them leant against each other as they forced their way onwards. Stephanie glanced back down the length of Catmos Vale, and sucked in a fast breath. The jeeps were barely half a mile away. Fifty yards to solid ground.
“We’re not going to make it.”
“What?” Moyo asked.
“We’re not going to make it.” She was panting heavily now. Not bothering with clothes, appearance, any energistic frippery—even the satellites would be able to see her now. She didn’t care. All that mattered was maintaining the integrity of her boots and shoving near-useless legs one in front of the other. Muscle spasms were shaking her calves and thighs.
Rana stumbled, falling to her knees. Mud squelched obscenely as it closed over her legs. She blew heavily, her face radiant, glistening with sweat. Cochrane sloshed over and put his arm under her shoulders, dragging her up. The glutinous mud was reluctant to let go. “Hey, man, give me a hand here,” he yelled at the land ahead. “Come on, you guys, quit fooling around. This is like bigtime serious.”
The ferrang packs dodged round each other as they wheeled about aimlessly. Whoever the people were up ahead, they chose not to reveal themselves. A slight single-tone mechanical whine was becoming audible. The jeep engines.
“Get me to her,” Moyo hissed.
He and Stephanie staggered over to the faltering couple. McPhee had come to a halt twenty yards from the land, staring back at them. “Keep going,” Stephanie yelled at him. “Go on. Somebody’s got to get out of this.”
With her help, Moyo took some of Rana’s weight from Cochrane. They slung her between them, and kicked their way forward again. “My legs,” Rana groaned miserably. “I can’t keep them going. They’re like fire. God damn it, this shouldn’t happen, I can move mountains with my mind.”
“No matter,” Cochrane said through gritted teeth. “We got you now, sister.” The three of them stumbled forwards. McPhee had reached the land, standing just above the mud to urge them on. Tina and Franklin were almost there. The pair of them were plainly exhausted. Only the big Scot seemed to have any stamina left.
Stephanie brought up the rear. The jeeps were seven hundred yards away now, on a stretch of dry road. Picking up speed. “Shit,” she whispered. “Oh shit oh shit.” Even if McPhee started sprinting right now, he’d never make it to Ketton; they’d overhaul him easily. Perhaps if the rest of them started flinging white fire at the serjeants . . . What a ridiculous thought, she told herself. And I don’t have any to spare. I must focus on channelling my energistic power.
Ten yards to go.
I won’t put up a fight. It wouldn’t be the slightest good, and it might damage the body. I owe her that much.
At the heart of her mind she could feel the captive host stirring in anticipation. All four of them staggered up out of the mud, and simply collapsed on the soggy ground next to Tina and Franklin. And she still couldn’t see the owners of the two minds impinging so strongly on her perception.
“Stephanie Ash,” a woman’s voice said from the empty air. “I see your timing is as fucking atrocious as always.”
“Any second now,” an unseen man announced.
Both of their minds were hot with eagerness. Somewhere nearby, the slow-motion wheeze of bagpipes started up, swirling to a level piercing tone. Stephanie raised her head. Halfway between her and the jeeps, a lone Scottish piper stood facing the vehicles. Dressed in a kilt of Douglas tartan, black leather boots shining, he seemed totally oblivious of the mortal foe riding towards him. His fingers moved sedately as he played “Amazing Grace.” One of the serjeants in the front vehicle was standing up to get a clear look in over the mud-caked windscreen.
“I like it,” McPhee hooted.
“Our call to arms,” the concealed man replied. “It has a certain je ne sais quoi , no?”
Stephanie glanced round urgently, trying to pin down the voice. “Call to arms?”
An explosion sounded in the distance, rumbling fast over the quagmires and stagnant pools smothering Catmos Vale. A mine had detonated under the leading jeep, punching the front of the chassis into the air. It crashed down, spilling serjeants across the road. Blue white smoke billowed out from the crater in the concrete. Lumps of debris rained down. The other jeeps braked sharply. Serjeants froze all along the front line, crouching down.
The piper finished, and bowed solemnly at his enemies. There was a dull, potent thock , loud enough to quiver Stephanie’s gullet. Then another. A whole barrage started up, the individual thumps merging into a single soundwave. Tina squealed in fright.
“Ho shit,” Cochrane growled. “Those are mortars.”
“Well done,” said the woman. “Now keep down.”
It was, the Liberation’s coordinating AI acknowledged, a classic ambush, and executed perfectly. The jeeps were confined to one of the narrowest strips of land in the valley, unable to veer away. A sleet of mortar shells fell upon them, ranged precisely. High explosives detonated in a near constant bombardment, pulverizing the stalled vehicles, and shredding the serjeants riding them. Smoke, flame, and spumes of superfine mud belched out, obliterating the carnage from view.
The AI could do absolutely nothing to prevent it. Radar pulses from the SD sensor satellites swept the length of the valley, but they required several seconds to acquire lock on. The first bombardment lasted for ninety seconds, then the mortar operators switched to airburst shells, and changed elevation. Dense black clouds burst open above the line of serjeants as they toiled desperately through the quagmire. Broad circles of mud erupted into cyclones of beige foam as the shrapnel slashed down, obliterating the struggling figures.
Only then did the SD radars finish backtracking the mortar trajectories. The AI launched its counterstrike. Incandescent scarlet beams stabbed down in retaliation, vaporising the possessed and their weapons in micro-seconds. Over a dozen patches of dry land were targeted. Supersonic torrents of steam flared out from the base of each impact. When they gusted away, the mortar sites had been reduced to shallow craters of hardbaked clay, their centres still radiant. They chittered softly as the drizzle fell, prizing open millions of tiny heat stress fractures.
The empty silence returned. Swirls of smoke drifted over the valley floor, dissipating slowly to reveal the burning wrecks of the jeeps. Spread out across the quagmire, the ruptured bodies of the serjeants were gradually claimed by the mud’s tireless embrace. Within an hour, there would be little left to hint at the conflict.
Stephanie found herself clawing into the soft soil, every muscle locked solid to resist the laser pulse. It never came. She let out a wretched sob, surrendering to the severe shaking that claimed her limbs. Two of the ferrang packs crept towards Stephanie and her friends. They dissolved into a pair of human figures dressed in dark grey and green combat fatigues. Annette Ekelund and Soi Hon looked down at them with anger and contempt.
“You idiots could have got us blown back into the beyond by blundering about like that,” Annette said. “What if dear Ralph considered you to be part of this operation? They would have zeroed this patch of ground for sure.”
Cochrane lifted his head, mud dribbling down his face to saturate his wild beard. His dead reefer was squashed against his lips. He spat it out. “Well like fuck me gently with a chainsaw, sister. I’m real sorry to cause you any inconvenience.”
Not even Lalonde’s oppressive climate prepared Ralph for the awesome humidity when he stepped out of the Royal Marine hypersonic transport plane. It prickled his skin at the same time as it siphoned away vital body energies. Just breathing it in was exhausting.
With the last strands of cloud at last gusting out to sea, the tropical sun could finally exert its full strength against poor malaised Mortonridge. Thousands of square kilometres of mud began to effervesce, thickening the air with hot cloying vapour. Looking round from the top of the airstair, Ralph could see long ribbons of tenuous white cloud flowing with oily tenacity around the hummocks and foothills of the broad valley. More mist was percolating up from the highlands on either side, with long snow-white streamers spilling out through clefts in the valley walls to slither down the slope like slow-motion waterfalls.
He sniffed at the air. Threaded through the blanket of clean moisture were the traces of corruption. The peninsula’s dead biomass was starting to rot and ferment. In another few days the stench would be formidable, and no doubt extremely unhealthy. One more factor to consider. Though it was a long way down on the priority list.
Ralph hurried down the aluminium stairs, with Brigadier Palmer and Cathal just behind him. For once there was no Marine detail waiting to guard him. They’d landed outside the staging camp established in the mouth of Catmos Vale. Hundreds of programmable silicon igloos had sprung up in rows like giant powder-blue mushrooms, a miniature recreation of Fort Forward. The only people here were serjeants, occupation troops, and medical case de-possessed. Plus a handful of rover reporters; all officially authorized Liberation correspondents, with a pair of Royal Marine information officers shepherding them.
When he looked up the valley, the loose smears of mist blurred into a single featureless white sheet carpeting the floor. His enhanced retinas zoomed in on the only visible feature, the slim greyish spire of Ketton’s church rising out of the mist. Just by looking at it, Ralph could sense the possessed mustering in the town, a replay of the gentle mental pressure they’d all known in the days of the red cloud.
“She’s here,” he murmured. “The Ekelund woman. She’s in Ketton.”
“Are you sure?” Cathal asked.
“I can feel her, just like before. In any case, she’s one of their leaders, and this bunch are well organized.” Cathal gave the distant spire a dubious glance.
The camp’s commander, Colonel Anton Longhurst, was waiting at the bottom of the airstairs. He saluted Ralph. “Welcome to Catmos Vale, sir.”
“Thank you, Colonel. Looks like you’ve got yourself an interesting command here.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll show you round. That’s after . . .” he indicated the reporters.
“Ah yes.” Ralph kept his ire under control. They’d probably all be using audio discrimination programs, the bastards never missed a trick.
The information officers signalled the all clear, and the rover reporters closed in. “General Hiltch, Hugh Rosler with DataAxis; can you please tell us why the front line has stalled?”
Ralph gave a wan, knowing smile to the plain-looking man in a check shirt and sleeveless jacket who’d asked the question. An in-your-face transmission of the cordial public persona he’d developed and deployed for the last few weeks. “Oh come on, guys. We’re consolidating the ground we’ve already recovered. There’s a lot more to the Liberation than just rushing forward at breakneck pace. We have to be sure, and I mean absolutely sure, that none of the possessed has managed to sneak through. Don’t forget, it was just one possessed who got into Mortonridge that was responsible for this in the first place. You don’t want a repeat of that, do you?”
“General, Tim Beard, Collins; is it true the serjeants simply can’t hack it anymore now that the possessed have started to put up real resistance?”
“No, it is categorically not true. And if you show me the person who said that, I’ll give them a personal and private demonstration of my contempt for such a remark. I flew in here today, and you people drove in from the coast.” He waved a hand back at the mud-covered land. “They walked the whole way from the beaches, engaged in tens of thousands of separate combat incidents. And on the way they’ve rescued nearly three hundred thousand people from possession. Now does that really sound as though they can’t hack it to you, because it doesn’t to me.”
“So why isn’t the front line continuing its advance?”
“Because we’ve reached a new stage of the campaign. Forgive me for not broadcasting our gameplan before, but this kind of reinforcement manoeuvre was inevitable. As you can see, we’ve reached Ketton, which has a large number of well organized and hostile possessed in residence—and this is just one of several such assemblies around Mortonridge. The army is simply redeploying accordingly. When we have sufficient resources assembled, then the serjeants will take the town. But I have no intention of committing them until I’m convinced such an operation can be achieved with the minimum of loss on both sides. Thank you.” He started to walk forwards.
“General, Elizabeth Mitchell, Time Warner; one final question, please.” Her voice was authoritative and insistent, impossible to ignore. “Have you got any comment about the defeat in the valley?”
Trust the owner of that voice to ask something he’d really rather avoid, Ralph thought. “Yes, I have. In hindsight advancing down Catmos Vale so fast was a tactical error, a very bad one; and I take full responsibility for that. Although we knew the possessed are equipped with hunting rifles we weren’t expecting them to have artillery. Mortars are about the crudest kind of artillery it’s possible to build; but even so, very effective given certain situations. This was one of them. Now we know what the possessed are capable of, it won’t happen again. Every time they use a new weapon or tactic against us, we can analyse it and guard against it in future. And there are only a very limited number of these moves they can play.” He moved on again, more determined this time. A fast datavise to the two information officers, and there were no more shouted questions.
“Sorry about them,” Colonel Longhurst said.
“Not a problem for me,” Ralph replied.
“You shouldn’t play up to scenes like that,” Cathal said in annoyance as they made their way to the camp’s headquarters. “It’s undignified. At least you could hold a proper press conference with vetted questions.”
“This is as much propaganda as it is physical war, Cathal,” Ralph said. “Besides, you’re still thinking like an ESA officer: tell nobody, and tell them nothing. The public wants to see authority in action on this campaign. We have to provide that.”
Convoys of supply trucks were still arriving at the camp, Colonel Longford explained as he took them on an inspection tour. The Royal Marine engineering squads had little trouble securing the programmable silicon igloos; this section of land was several metres above the mud of the valley floor. But there were logistics problems with supplying the troops.
“It’s taking the trucks fifteen hours to get here from the coast,” he said. “The engineers have virtually had to rebuild the damn road as they went along. Even now there are some sections that are just lines of marker beacons in the mud.”
“I can’t do anything about the mud,” Ralph said. “Believe me, we’ve tried. Solidifying chemicals, SD lasers to bake it; they’re no good on the kind of scale we’re dealing with here.”
“What we really need is air support. You flew out here.”
“This was the first inland flight,” Janne Palmer said. “And your landing field could barely accommodate the hypersonic. You’ll never be able to handle cargo planes.”
“There’s plenty of clear high ground nearby, we can build a link road.”
“I’ll look into authorizing it,” Ralph said. “We should certainly consider flying in the serjeants ready for the assault on the town.”
“Appreciate that,” the colonel said. “Things out here are a little different than the AI says they should be.”
“That’s one of the reasons I’m here, to see how you’re coping.”
“We are now. It was bedlam the first day. Could certainly have done with the planes to evac the injured and the depossessed out. That ride back to the coast isn’t doing them any good.”
They came to the big oval hall where Elana Duncan and her team had set up shop. The massive boosted mercenary greeted Ralph with a casual salute of her arm, clicking her claws together. “Not much ceremony in here, General,” she said. “We’re rather too crowded for that right now. Go see whatever you want, but don’t bother my people, please, they’re kind of busy right now.”
Ten zero-tau pods were lined up down the centre of the hall, all of them active. The big machines with their thick power cables and compact mosaic of components looked strangely out of place. Or it could be out of era, Ralph acknowledged. The rest of the hall was given over to cots for the serjeants, a field hospital whose primitiveness dismayed him. Elana’s mercenaries were carrying large plastic bottles and rolls of disposable paper towels, doing their rounds along the dark bitek constructs. There was a strong chemical smell in the air which Ralph couldn’t place. He had some distant memory of it, but certainly not one indexed by his neural nanonics, nor a didactic memory—although they were notoriously inaccurate when it came to imparting smells.
Ralph went over to the first serjeant. The construct was sucking quietly at the tube of a clear polythene bag containing its nutrient syrup, a liquid like thin honey. “Did you get hit by the mortars?”
“No, General,” Sinon said. “I wasn’t here for the Catmos Vale incident. I am, I believe, one of the lucky ones. I have participated in six assaults which resulted in a possessed being captured, and received only minor injuries during the course of those actions. Unfortunately, that means I have walked the whole way here from the coast.”
“So what happened?”
“Moisture exposure, General. Impossible to avoid, I’m afraid. As I said, I was slightly injured previously, resulting in small cracks within my exoskeleton. Although they are not in themselves dangerous, such hairline fissures are ideal anchorages for several varieties of aboriginal fungal spores.” He indicated his legs.
Now that he knew what he was looking for, Ralph could see the long lead-grey blotches crisscrossing round the serjeant’s lower limbs; they were slightly fuzzy, like thin velvet. When he glanced along the row of cots, he could see some serjeants where the fungus was full grown, smothering their legs in a thick furry carpet, like soggy coral.
“My God. Does that . . .”
“Hurt?” Sinon enquired. “Oh no. Please don’t be concerned, General. I don’t feel pain, as such. I am aware of the fungus’s presence, of course. It does itch rather unpleasantly. The major problem is derived from its effect on my blood chemistry. If left unchecked the fungus would extrude a quantity of toxins that my organs will be unable to filter out.”
“Is there a treatment?”
“Funnily enough, yes. An alcohol rub to eradicate the bulk of the fungus, followed with iodine, appears to be effective in eliminating the growth. Of course, further exposure to these conditions will probably reintroduce the spores, especially as they appear to thrive in this current humidity.”
“Iodine,” Ralph said. “I thought I knew that smell. Some of the Church clinics on Lalonde used the stuff.” The incongruity of the situation was starting to nag at him. He could hardly be playing the role of older officer giving comfort to a young trooper. If Sinon followed usual Edenist lines, he must have been at least a hundred and fifty when he died. Older than Ralph’s grandfather.
“Ah, Lalonde. I never visited. I used to be a voidhawk crew member.”
“You were lucky; I was posted there for years.”
Somebody started wailing, a piteous gasping cry of bitterness. Ralph looked up to see a couple of the boosted mercenaries helping a man out of a zero-tau pod. He was wrapped in tattered grey clothes, almost indistinguishable from the folds of pale vein-laced flesh drooping from his frame. It was as if his skin had started to melt off him.
“Aww shit,” Elana Duncan snapped. “Excuse me, General, looks like we’ve got another crash course anorexic.” She hurried over to help her colleagues. “Okay, let’s gets some protein infusers on him pronto.” The de-possessed man was puking a thin greenish liquid on the floor, an action which was almost choking him.
“Come on,” Ralph said. “We’re just in the way here.” He led the others out of the hall; ashamed that the most helpful thing he personally could do was run away.
Stephanie went out on to the narrow balcony and sat in one of the cushioned deck chairs next to Moyo. From there she could look both ways along Ketton’s high street where squads of Ekelund’s guerrilla army marched about. All signs of the mud deluge had been ruthlessly eradicated from the town, producing a pristine vision of urban prosperity. Even the tall scarlet trees lining the streets and central park were in good health, sprouting a thick frost of topaz flowers.
They had been billeted in a lovely mock-Georgian town house, with orange brick walls and carved white stone window lintels. The iron-railed balcony ran along the front, woven with branches of blue and white wisteria. It was one of a whole terrace of beautiful buildings just outside the central retail sector. They shared it with a couple of army squads. Not quite house arrest, but they were certainly discouraged from wandering round and interfering. Much to Cochrane’s disgust.
But Ekelund and her ultra-loyalists controlled the town’s diminishing food supply, and with that came the power to write the rules.
“I hate it here,” Moyo said. He was slumped down almost horizontally in his chair, sipping a margarita. Four empty glasses were already lined up on the low table beside him, their salt rims melting in the condensation. “The whole place is wrong, a phoney. Can’t you sense the atmosphere?”
“I know what you mean.” She watched the men and women thronging the road below. It was the same story all over Ketton. The army gearing up to defend the town from the serjeants massing outside. Fortifications were first conceived as ghostly sketches in the air, and then made real by an application of energistic strength. Small factories around the outskirts had been placed under Delvan’s command. He had his engineers working round the clock to churn out weapons. Everybody here moved with a purpose. And by doing so, they gave each other confidence in their joint cause.
“This is fascist efficiency,” she said. “Everybody beavering away as they’re told for her benefit, not their own. There’s going to be so much destruction here when the serjeants come in. And it’s all so pointless.”
His hand wavered in the air until he found her arm. Then he gripped tight. “It’s human nature, darling. They’re afraid, and she’s tapped into that. The alternative to putting up a fight is total surrender. They’re not going to go for that. We didn’t go for that.”
“But the only reason they’re in this position is because of her. And we weren’t going to fight. I wasn’t.”
He took a large drink. “Ah, forget about it. Another twenty-four hours, and it won’t matter any more.”
Stephanie plucked the margarita from his hand and set it down on the table. “Enough of that. We’ve rested here quite long enough. Time we were moving on.”
“Ha! You must be drunker than me. We’re surrounded. I know that, and I’m fucking blind. There’s no way out.”
“Come on.” She took his hand and pulled him up from the chair.
Muttering and complaining, Moyo allowed himself to be led inside. McPhee and Rana were in the lounge, sitting round a circular walnut table with a chess game in front of them. Cochrane was sprawled along a settee, surrounded by a haze of smoke from his reefer. A set of bulky black and gold headphones were clamped over his ears, buzzing loudly as he listened to a Grateful Dead album. Tina and Franklin came in from one of the bedrooms when they were called. Cochrane chortled delightedly at the sight of Franklin tucking his shirt in. He only stopped at that because Stephanie caught his eye.
“I’m going to try and get out,” Stephanie told them.
“Interesting objective,” Rana said. “Unfortunately, la Ekelund is holding all the cards, not to mention the food. She’s hardly given us enough to live on, let alone build our strength back to a level where we can contemplate hiking through the mud again.”
“I know that. But if we stay in the town we’re going to get captured by the serjeants for sure. That’s if we survive the assault. Both sides are upping their weapons hardware by an alarming degree.”
“I told you this would happen,” Tina said. “I said we should have stayed above the valley. But none of you listened.”
“So what’s the plan?” Franklin asked.
“I haven’t got one,” Stephanie said. “I just want to change the odds, that’s all. The serjeants are about five miles away from the outskirts. That leaves a lot of land between us and them.”
“So?” McPhee asked.
“We can use that space. It certainly improves our chances from staying here. Maybe we can sneak through the line in all the confusion when they advance. We could try disguising ourselves as kolfrans; or we could hide out somewhere until they pass by us. It’s got to be worth a try.”
“A non-aggressive evasion policy,” Rana said thoughtfully. “I’m certainly with you on that.”
“No way,” McPhee said. “Look, I’m sorry Stephanie, but we’ve seen the way the serjeants move forwards. You couldn’t slide a gnat between them. And that was before the mortar attack. They’re wise to us using the ferrangs as camouflage now. If we go out there, we’re just going to be the first to be de-possessed.”
“No, no, wait a minute,” Cochrane said. He swung his feet off the settee and walked over to the table. “Our funky sister might be on to something here.”
“Thanks,” Stephanie grunted sarcastically.
“Listen, you cats. The black hats and their UFOs are like scoping the ground out with microscopes, right? So if we like cooperate with each other and dig ourselves a nice cozy bunker out in the wilderness, we could sit tight down there until they’ve invaded the town and moved off.”
Several surprised looks were passed round. “It could work,” Franklin said. “Hot damn!”
“Hey, am I like the man , or what?”
Tina sneered. “Definitely a what.”
“I keep expecting to be asked for my ident disk,” Rana said as the seven of them walked down Ketton’s main street.
They were the only people not wearing military fatigues. Ekelund’s army gave them suspicious glances as they passed by. Cochrane’s tinkling bells and cheery, insulting waves didn’t contribute to making them inconspicuous. When they walked out of the house, Stephanie considered junking her dress and adopting the same jungle combat gear style. Then she thought to hell with that. I’m not hiding my true self anymore. Not after what I’ve been through. I have a right to be me.
Near the outskirts, the road led between two rows of houses. Nothing as elaborate as the Georgian town house, but comfortably middle-class. The barrier between town and country was drawn by a deep vertical-walled ditch, with thick iron spikes driven into the soil along the top. Some kind of sludge trickled along the bottom of the trench, stinking of petrol. The arrangement wasn’t terribly practical, it was more a statement than a physical danger.
Annette Ekelund was waiting for them, lounging casually against one of the big spikes. Several dozen of her army were ranged beside her. Stephanie was quite sure the hulking guns they had slung over their shoulders would be impossible to lift without energistic power fortifying their muscles. Three-day stubble seemed compulsory for the men, and everyone wore ragged sweatbands.
“You know, I’m getting a bad case of dйjа vu here,” Annette said with ersatz pleasantry. “Except this time you haven’t got a good cause to tug my heartstrings. In fact, this is pretty close to treachery.”
“You’re not a government,” Stephanie said. “We don’t have loyalties.”
“Wrong. I am the authority here. And you do have obligations. I saved your pathetic little arse, and all these sad bunch of losers you have trailing round with you. I took you in, protected you, and fed you. Now I think that entitles me to a little loyalty, don’t you?”
“I’m not going to argue this with you. We don’t want to fight. We won’t fight. That gives you three choices, you either kill us here on the spot, imprison us which will take up valuable manpower, or let us go free. That’s the only issue, here.”
“Well that’s actually only two choices then, isn’t it? Because I’m not diverting anybody from their assigned duty to watch over ingrate shits like you.”
“Fine, then make your choice.”
Annette shook her head, genuinely puzzled. “I don’t get you, Stephanie, I really don’t. I mean, where the fuck do you think you’re going to go? They do have us surrounded, you know. An hour walking down that road, and you’re straight into zero-tau. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. And you will never ever get out of jail again for the rest of time.”
“We might be able to dodge them in open ground.”
“That’s it? That’s your whole game plan? Stephanie, that’s pitiful even for you.”
Stephanie pressed closer to Moyo, unnerved by the level of animosity running free in Annette’s thoughts. “So what’s your alternative?”
“We fight for our right to exist. It’s what people have been doing for a very long time. If you weren’t such a small-town imbecile you’d see that nothing easy ever comes free; life is cash on delivery.”
“I’m sure it is, but you haven’t answered my question. You know you’re going to lose, what’s the point in fighting?”
“Let me explain,” Soi Hon said. Annette flashed him a look of pure anger, then nodded permission.
“The purpose of our action is to inflict unacceptable losses on the enemy,” Soi Hon said. “The serjeants are almost unstoppable here on the ground, but the political structure behind them is susceptible to a great many forces. We might not win this battle, but our cause will ultimately triumph. That triumph will come sooner once the Confederation leadership is forced to retreat from ventures like this absurd Liberation. Their victory must be as costly as we can make it. I ask you to reconsider your decision to leave us. With your help, the time we have to spend in the beyond will be reduced by a considerable margin. Just think, the serjeant you exterminate today may well be the one that breaks the camel’s back.”
“You lived before Edenism matured, didn’t you?” Moyo asked.
“The habitat Eden was germinated while I was alive. I didn’t survive long after that.”
“Then I have to tell you, what you’re talking is total bullshit. The political ideologies you’re basing your justifications on are centuries out of date—just like all of us. Edenism has a resolution which is frightening in its totality.”
“All human resolve can be broken in the end.”
Moyo turned his perfect, unseeing eyes to Stephanie, and twisted his lips in a humble grimace. “We’re doomed. You can’t reason with a psychopath and a demented ideologue.”
“You should tell your boyfriend to watch his lip,” Annette said.
“Or what?” Moyo laughed. “You said it, psycho mamma, you told Ralph Hiltch all those weeks ago: the possessed don’t lose. It doesn’t matter how many bodies of mine you blast away. I will always be back. Learn to live with me, because you can never escape. For all of eternity you have to listen to me whining on and on and on and on . . . How do you like that, you dumb motherfucker?”
“Enough.” Stephanie patted his shoulder in warning. He couldn’t see Annette’s expression, but he’d be able to sense her darkening thoughts. “Look, we’re just going to go, all right.”
Annette turned and spat into the trench. “You know what’s down there? Its something called napalm. Soi Hon told us about it, and Milne made up the formula. There’s tons of the stuff; lying down there, in squirt bombs, loaded into flame throwers. So when the serjeants come over, it’s going to be barbecue time. And that’s just this section. We’ve got a shitload of grief rigged up for them around this town. Every street they walk down is going to cost them in bodies. Hell, we’re even running a sweepstake, see how many we can take with us.”
“I hope you win.”
“The point is, Stephanie, if you leave now, you don’t come back. I mean that. If you desert us, your own kind, then you’re our enemy just as much as the non-possessed are. You’re going to be trapped out there between the serjeants and me. They’ll shove you into zero-tau, I’ll have you strung up on a crucifix and fried. So you see, it’s not me that makes the choices. In the end, it’s down to you.”
Stephanie gave her a sad smile. “I choose to leave.”
“You stupid bitch.” For a moment, Stephanie thought the woman was going to launch a bolt of white fire straight at her. Annette was fighting very hard to control her fury.
“Okay,” she snapped. “Get out. Now.”
Praying that Cochrane would keep his mouth shut, Stephanie tugged Moyo gently. “Use one of the spikes,” she murmured to McPhee and Rana. They both began to concentrate. The nearest spike started to droop, lowering itself like a drawbridge across a moat. When its tip touched the other side, the metal flattened out, producing a narrow walkway.
Tina was over first; shaking and subdued at the naked hostility radiating from Ekelund and imitated by her troops. Franklin guided Moyo over. Stephanie waited until the other three were on the far side before using it herself. When she turned round, Annette was already marching back down the road into Ketton. Soi Hon and a couple of others walked behind her, taking care not to come too close. The remaining troops stared hard over the trench. Several of them primed the pump action mechanism on their guns.
“Yo, nooo problem, dudes,” Cochrane crooned anxiously. “We’re outta here. Like yesterday.”
It was midday, the sun blazed down on them like a visible X-ray laser, and the mist had gone long ago. Three miles ahead, the rumpled foothills of the valley wall rose up out of the sluggish quagmires. The serjeants were strung out across the slopes, forming a solid line of dark blobs standing almost shoulder to shoulder. Larger groups were arranged at intervals behind the front line, reserves ready to assist with any sign of resistance.
A couple of miles behind, the air shimmered silver, twisting lightbeams giddily around Ketton. Dry mud creaked and crumbled under their feet as they tramped along the gently undulating road. They weren’t going particularly fast. It wasn’t just hunger draining their bodies. Apathy was coming on strong.
“Oh hell,” Stephanie said abruptly. “Look, I’m sorry.”
“What for?” McPhee asked. There was bravado in his voice, but not his thoughts.
“Oh come on!” She stopped and flung her arms out, turning full circle on a heel. “I was wrong. Look at this place. We’re snowflakes heading straight for hell.”
McPhee gave a grudging look around the flat, featureless valley floor. During the few days they’d rested in Ketton the mud had claimed just about every fallen tree and bush. Even the long pools between the quagmires were evaporating away. “Not much in the way of ground cover, granted.”
She gave the big Scot an admonitory stare. “You’re very sweet, and I’m really glad that you’re with me. But I goofed. There’s no way we can avoid the serjeants out here. And I do think Ekelund was serious when she said we wouldn’t be allowed back in.”
“Yeah,” Cochrane said. “That’s the impression I got, too. You know, that bug is shoved so far up, it’s going to be flapping its way out of her mouth any day now.”
“I don’t understand,” Tina said miserably. “Why don’t we just stick to Cochrane’s original idea, and dig in?”
“The satellites can see us, lass,” McPhee said. “Aye, they don’t know how many of us there are, exactly, or what we’re doing. But they know where we are. If we stop moving and suddenly vanish, then the serjeants will come and investigate. They’ll realize what we’ve done and excavate us.”
“We could split up,” Franklin said. “If we walk about at random and keep crossing each other’s tracks, then one or two of us could vanish without them realizing. It’d be like a giant-sized version of the shell game.”
“But I don’t want us to split up,” Tina said.
“We’re not splitting up,” Stephanie told her. “We’ve been through too much together for that. I say we face them together with dignity and pride. We have nothing to be ashamed of. They’re the ones who have failed. That huge, wonderful society with all its resources, and all it can do is fall back on violence instead of trying to find an equitable solution for all of us. They’ve lost, not us.”
Tina sniffed, and dabbed at her eyes with a small handkerchief. “You say the most beautiful things.”
“Certainly do, sister.”
“I’ll face the serjeants with you, Stephanie,” McPhee said. “But it might be a good idea to get off this road first. I’ll give you good odds our friends behind have got it in their mortar sights.”
Ralph waited until there were twenty-three thousand serjeants deployed at Catmos Vale before giving the go ahead to take the town. The AI estimated at least eight thousand possessed were trapped inside Ketton. He wasn’t going to be responsible for unleashing a massacre. There would be enough serjeants to overcome whatever lay ahead.
As soon as the first mortar attack had finished, the AI had pulled the front line back. Then the flanks, up in the high ground above the valley, had been directed forwards again. By the time the sun fell, Ketton was surrounded. To start with, the circle was simply there to prevent individual possessed from trying to sneak out. Any large group that tried their luck would be warned off with SD lasers in a repeat of the firebreak protocol across the neck of the peninsula.
Very few did attempt to run the gauntlet. Whatever method of discipline Ekelund was using to keep her people in check, it was impressive. The perimeter was progressively reinforced as planes and trucks brought in fresh squads. Occupation forces were also assembled and dispatched around the front line, ready to handle the captured possessed. Medical facilities were organized to cope with the predicted influx of new, unhealthy bodies (though shortages of equipment and qualified personnel were still acute). The AI had exhaustively analysed every possible weapon from history which the possessed could have constructed, and computed appropriate counter-measures.
Ralph was quietly pleased to see that the simplest policy was amongst the oldest: the best defence is a good offence. He might not be able to employ saturation bombardment against the town, or melt it down into the bedrock. But he could certainly rattle the doors of Ekelund’s precious sanctum, a quite severe rattling, in fact. “Quake them,” he datavised.
Two thousand kilometres above Ombey, a lone voidhawk began its deployment swoop.
Ralph waited beside the rectangular headquarters building with Acacia and Janne Palmer standing beside him. They all stared along Catmos Vale at the sliver of dense mangled air at the far end which marked the town. Maybe he should have been back at the Fort Forward Ops Room, but after visiting the camp he realized how restricted and isolated he was sitting in his office. Out here, at least he had the illusion of being involved.
It was one of the larger patches of land above the lagoons and mires that cluttered the valley floor. Plenty of aboriginal grass poked up through the solidifying cloak of mud, as yet untrampled by animals. There were even some trees surviving near the centre; they’d fallen down, their lower branches stabbing into the soft ground; but the trunks were held off the ground, and their battered leaves were slowly twisting to face the sky.
Stephanie made her way over to them, putting the road a quarter of a mile behind her. The ground around the sagging boughs was deeply wrinkled, producing dozens of small meandering pools of brackish water. She threaded her way through them, into the small dapple of shade thrown by the leaves, and sank down with a heavy sigh. The others sat down around her, equally relieved to be off their feet.
“I’m amazed we didn’t step on a mine,” Moyo said. “Ekelund must have rigged that road. It’s too tempting not to.”
“Hey guys, let’s like turn her into an unperson, please,” Cochrane said. “I don’t want to spend my last remaining hours in this body talking about that bitch.”
Rana leant back against a tree trunk, closed her eyes and smiled. “Well well, we finally agree on something.”
“I wonder if we get a chance to talk to the reporters,” McPhee said. “There’s bound to be some covering the attack.”
“Peculiar last wish,” Rana said. “Any particular reason?”
“I still have some family left alive on Orkney. Three kids. I’d like to . . . I don’t know. Tell them I’m all right I suppose. What I’d really like to do is see them again.”
“Nice thought,” Franklin said. “Maybe the serjeants will let you record a message, especially if we cooperate with them.”
“What about you?” Stephanie asked.
“I’d go traditional,” Franklin said. “A meal. You see, I used to like eating, trying new stuff, but I never really had much money. So, I’ve done most everything else I want to. I’d have the best delicacies the universe can offer, cooked by the finest chef in the Confederation, and Norfolk Tears to go with it.”
“Mine’s easy,” Cochrane said. “That’s like apart from the obvious. I wanna re-live Woodstock. Only this time I’d listen to the music more. Man, I can like only remember about five hours of it. Can you dig that? What a bummer.”
“I want to be on the stage,” Tina said breathlessly. “A classical actress, in my early twenties, while I’m so beautiful that poets swoon at the sight of me. And when my new play opens, it would be The event of the year, and all the Society people in the world are fighting to buy tickets.”
“I’d like to walk through Elisea woods again,” Rana said. She gave Cochrane a suspect look, but he was listening politely. “It was on the edge of my town when I was growing up, and the Slandau flowers grew there. They had chromatactile petals; if you touched one, it would change colour. When the breeze blew through the trees it was like standing inside a kaleidoscope. I used to spend hours walking along the paths. Then the developers came, and cleared the site to make room for a factory park. It didn’t matter what I said to anyone, how many petitions I organized; the mayor, the local senator, they didn’t care how beautiful the woods were and how much people enjoyed them. Money and industry won every time.”
“I think I’d just say sorry to my parents,” Moyo said. “My life was such a waste.”
“The children,” Stephanie said. She grinned knowingly at McPhee. “I want to see my children again.”
They fell silent then, content to daydream what could never be.
The sky suddenly brightened. Everyone apart from Moyo looked up, and he caught their agitation. Ten kinetic harpoons were descending, drawing their distinctive dazzling plasma contrails behind them. It was a conical formation, gradually expanding. A second batch of ten harpoons appeared above the first. Sunglasses automatically materialized on Stephanie’s face.
“Oh shit,” McPhee groaned. “It’s yon kinetic harpoons, again.”
“They’re coming down all around Ketton.”
“Strange pattern,” Franklin said. “Why not fire them down all at once?”
“Does it matter?” Rana said. “It’s obviously the signal to start the attack.”
McPhee was eyeing the harpoons dubiously. The first formation was still expanding, while the blazing, ruptured air around their nose cones was growing in intensity.
“I think we’d better get down.” Stephanie said. She rolled over, and imagined a sheet of air hardening protectively above her. The others followed her example.
The harpoons Ralph had chosen to deploy against Ketton were different to the marque he’d used to smash Mortonridge’s communication net at the start of the Liberation. These were considerably heavier and longer, a design which helped focus their inertia forwards. On impact, they penetrated clean through the damp, unresisting soil. Only when they struck the bedrock below did their tremendous kinetic energy release its full destructive potential. The explosive blast slammed out through the soft soil. Directly above the impact point, the whole area heaved upwards as if a new volcano was trying to tear its way skywards. But the major impetus of the shockwaves radiated outwards. Then the second formation of harpoons hit. They formed a ring outside the first, with exactly the same devastating effect.
Seen from above, the twenty separate shockwaves spread out like ripples in a pond. But it was the one very specific interference pattern they formed as they intersected which was the goal of the bombardment. Colossal energies clashed and merged in peaks and troughs that mimicked the surface of a choppy sea, channelling the direction in which the force was expended. Outside the two strike rings, the newly formatted shockwaves rushed off across the valley floor, becoming progressively weaker until they sank away to nothing more than a tremble which lapped against the foothills. Inside the rings, they merged into a single contracting undulation, which swept in towards Ketton, building in height and vigour.
Annette Ekelund and the troops manning the town’s perimeter defences watched in stupefaction as the newborn hill thundered towards them from all directions. The surviving network of local roads leading away from the outskirts were ripped to shreds as the swelling slope flung them aside. Boulders went spinning through the air in long lazy arcs. Mud foamed turbulently at the crest while mires and pools avalanched down the sides, engulfing the frenzied herds of kolfrans and ferrangs.
It grew higher and higher, a tsunami of soil. The leading edge reached Ketton’s outlying buildings, trawling them up its precarious ever-shifting slope. Defence trenches either slammed shut or split wide as though they were geological fault lines, their napalm igniting in third-rate imitation of lava streams. People diverted every fraction of their energistic strength to reinforcing their bodies, leaving them to bounce and roll about like human tumbleweed as the demented ground trampolined beneath them. Without the possessed to maintain them, the prim, restored houses and shops burst apart in scattergun showers of debris. Bricks, fragments of glass, vehicles, and shattered timbers took flight to clot the air above the devastation.
And still the quake raced on, hurtling into the centre of the town. Its contraction climaxed underneath the charming little church, culminating in a solid conical geyser of ground fifty metres high. A grinding vortex of soil erupted from its pinnacle, propelling the entire church into the sky. The elegant structure hung poised above the cataclysm for several seconds before gravity and sanity returned to claim it. It broke open like a ship on a reef, scattering pews and hymn books over the blitzed land below. Then as the quake’s pinnacle ebbed, shrinking down, the church tumbled over, walls disintegrating into a deluge of powdered bricks. Yet still, somehow, the spire remained almost intact. Twisting through a hundred and eighty degrees, with its bell clanging madly, it plunged down to puncture the tormented crater of raw soil that now marked the quake’s epicentre. Only then, did its structural girders crumple, reducing it to a pile of ruined metal and fractured carbon-concrete.
Secondary tremors withdrew from the focal point, weaker than the incoming quake, but still resulting in substantial quivers amid the pulverised ruins. The quake’s accompanying ultrasound retreated, only to echo back off the valley walls. In ninety seconds, Ketton had been abolished from Mortonridge; leaving a two-mile-wide smear of treacherously loose soil as its sole memorial. Spears made from building rafters jabbed up out of the rumpled black ground, ragged lumps of concrete were interspersed with the mashed up remnants of furniture, every fragment embedded deep into the loam. Rivulets of flaming napalm oozed along winding furrows, belching out black smoke. A curtain of dust thick enough to blot out the sun swirled overhead.
Annette raised herself to her elbows, fighting the mud’s suction; and swung her head slowly from side to side, examining the remains of her proud little empire. Her energistic strength had protected her body from broken bones and torn skin, though she knew that there was going to be heavy bruising just about everywhere. She remembered being about ten metres in the air at one point, cartwheeling slowly as a single storey cafй did a neat somersault beside her to land on its flat roof, power cables and plastic water pipes trailing from a wall to lash about like bullwhips.
Strangely enough, through her numbness, she could admire the quake; there was a beautiful precision to it. Strong enough to wreck the town, yet pitched at a level that enabled the possessed to protect themselves from its effects. As dear Ralph had known they would. Self preservation is the strongest human instinct; Ketton’s buildings and fortifications would be discarded instantly in the face of such a lethal threat.
She laughed hysterically, choking on the filthy dust. “Ralph? I told you, Ralph, you had to destroy the village first. There was no need to take it so fucking literally, you shit!” There was nothing left now to defend, no banner or cause around which she could rally her army. The serjeants were coming. Unopposed. Unstoppable.
Annette flopped onto her back, expelling grit from her eyes and mouth. Her mouth puffed away, eager for much needed oxygen. She had never been so utterly terrified before. It was an emotion shining at the core of every mind littered around her in the decimated town. Thousands of them. The one aspect they had left in common.
The trees had stood up and danced during the quake. They left the cloying mud behind with loud sucking sounds and pirouetted about while the ground rearranged itself. It was probably an impressive sight. But only from a distance.
Stephanie had screamed constantly as she wriggled frantically underneath the carouselling boughs, ducking the smaller branches that raked the ground. She’d been struck several times, slapped through the air as if by a giant bat. Only the energistic power binding her body’s cells together had saved her from being snapped in two.
Tina hadn’t been so fortunate. As the ground started to calm, one of the trees had fallen straight on top of her. It pushed her deep into the soaking loam, leaving only her head and an arm sticking out. She was whimpering softly as the others gathered round. “I can’t feel anything,” she whispered. “I can’t make myself feel.”
“Just melt the wood away,” McPhee said quickly, and pointed. “Here to here. Come on, concentrate.”
They held hands, imagining the scarlet bark parting, the hard dark wood of the trunk flowing like water. A big chunk of the trunk turned to liquid and splattered down on the mud. Franklin and McPhee hurried forward and pulled Tina out from the mud. Her hips and legs were badly crushed, blood was running out of several deep wounds, splintered bones protruded through the skin.
She looked down at her injuries and wailed in fear. “I’m going to die! I’m going to go back to the beyond.”
“Nonsense, babe,” Cochrane said. He knelt down beside her and passed his hand over one of the abdominal cuts. The torn flesh sealed over, melding together. “See? Don’t give me none of this loser shit.”
“There’s too much damage.”
“Come on, guys,” Cochrane looked up at the rest of the group. “Together we can do it. Each take a wound.”
Stephanie nodded quickly and sank down beside him. “It’ll be all right,” she promised Tina. The woman had lost an awful lot of blood, though.
They circled her, and laid on their hands. Power was exerted, transmuted by the wish to heal and cleanse. That was how Sinon’s squad found them, kneeling as if in prayer around one of their own. Tina was smiling up placidly, her pale hand gripping Rana, their fingers entwined.
Sinon and Choma approached cautiously through the jumbled trees, and levelled their machine guns at the devout-seeming group. “I want all of you to lie down flat, and put your hands behind your head, now,” Sinon said. “Do not attempt to move or apply your energistic power.”
Stephanie turned to face him. “Tina’s hurt, she can’t move.”
“I will accept that claim for the moment, providing you do not try to resist. Now, the rest of you lie down.”
Moving slowly, they backed away from Tina and lowered themselves onto the mushy loam.
You can come forward,sinon told the rest of the squad. They appear to be compliant.
Thirty serjeants emerged from the tangle of branches and twigs, making remarkably little sound. Their machine guns were all trained on the prone figures.
“You will now leave your captured bodies,” Sinon said.
“We can’t,” Stephanie said. She could feel the misery and fear in her friends, the same as that found in her own mind. It was turning her voice to a piteous croak. “You should know by now not to ask that of us.”
“Very well.” Sinon took his holding stick out.
“You don’t have to use those things, either,” Stephanie said. “We’ll go quietly.”
“Sorry, procedure.”
“Look, I’m Stephanie Ash. I’m the one that brought the children out. That must count for something. Check with Lieutenant Anver of the Royal Kulu marines, he’ll confirm who I am.”
Sinon paused, and used his processor block to query Fort Forward’s memory core. The image of the woman certainly appeared to match, and the man with flamboyant clothes and a mass of hair was unmistakable.
We can’t rely on what they look like,choma said. They can forge any appearance they want.
Providing they cooperate, there is no reason to use unnecessary force. So far they have obeyed, and they know they cannot escape.
You’re far too trusting.
“You will get up one at a time when instructed,” Sinon told them. “We will escort you back to our field camp where you will be placed in zero-tau. Three machine guns will be trained upon you at all times. If any order is refused, we use the holding sticks to neutralize your energistic ability. Do you understand?”
“That’s very clear,” Stephanie said. “Thank you.”
“Very well. You first.”
Stephanie climbed cautiously to her feet, making sure every motion was a slow one. Choma flicked the nozzle of his machine gun, indicating the small track through the collapsed trees. “Let’s go.” She started walking. Behind her, Sinon was telling Franklin to get up.
“Tina will need a stretcher,” Stephanie said. “And someone will have to guide Moyo, he’s damaged his eyes.”
“Don’t worry,” Choma said gruffly. “We’ll make sure you all get to the camp okay.”
They emerged from the trees. Stephanie looked at where Ketton had been. A dense cloud of dark-grey dust churned over the annihilated town. Small fires burned underneath it, muted orange coronas shining weakly. Twenty slender purple lines glowed faintly in the air above, linking the cloud with the top of the atmosphere. Streaks of lightning discharged along them intermittently.
“Bloody hell,” she murmured. Thousands of serjeants were walking along the valley floor towards the silent, murky ruins. The possessed cowering within knew they were coming. Raw fear was spilling out of the dust cloud like gaseous adrenaline. Stephanie’s heart started to beat faster. Cold shivers ran along her legs and up her chest. She faltered.
Choma nudged her with his machine gun. “Keep going.”
“Can’t you feel it? They’re frightened.”
“Good.”
“No, I mean really frightened. Look.”
Glimmers of burgundy light were escaping through gaps in the dust cloud. Billowing tendril-like wisps around the edges were flattening out, becoming smooth and controlled. The shield against the open sky was returning.
“I didn’t think you were stupid enough to try that again,” Choma said. “General Hiltch won’t permit you to hide.”
Even as he spoke an SD electron beam stabbed down through the clear air. A blue-white pillar two hundred metres wide that struck the apex of the seething roof of dust. It sprayed apart with a plangent boom, sending out broad lightning forks that roamed across the boiling surface to skewer into the mud. This time, the possessed resisted. Ten thousand minds concentrated within a couple of square miles, all striving for the same effect. To be free.
The random discharges of the SD beam were slowly tamed. Jagged forks compressing into garish rivers of electrons that formed a writhing cage above the dust. Carmine light brightened underneath. Fear turned to rapture, followed swiftly by determination. Stephanie stared across at the clamorous spectacle, her mouth open in astonishment, and pride. Their old unity was back. And with it came a formidable sense of purpose: to achieve the safety that so many other possessed had obtained. To be gone.
The red light in the cloud strengthened to a lambent glare, then began to stain the ground of the valley floor. A bright circular wave spreading out through the mud and sluggish water.
“Run,” Stephanie told the confounded serjeants. “Get clear. Please. Go!” She braced herself as the redness charged towards her. There was no physical sensation other than a near-psychosomatic tingle. Then her body was glowing along with the ground, the air, her friends, and the hulking bodies of the serjeants.
“All right!” Cochrane whooped. He punched the air. “Let’s go for it, you crazyass mothers.”
The earth trembled, dispatching all of them to their knees again. Sinon tried to keep his machine gun lined up on the nearest captive, but the ground shook again, more violently this time. He abandoned that procedure, and flattened himself. All the serjeants in the Ketton assault linked their minds through general affinity, clinging to each other mentally with a determination that matched their grip on the ground.
“What is happening?” he bellowed.
“We’re like outta here, man,” Cochrane shouted back. “You’re on the last bus out of this universe.”
Ralph watched the red light inflate out of the dust cloud. Datavises from SD sensors and local occupation forces spread around Catmos Vale relayed the image from multiple angles, granting him complete three hundred and sixty degree coverage. He knew what it looked like from the air, from the ground, even (briefly) as it engulfed marines who were following close behind the serjeants. But most of all, he just stared ahead as it poured out across the valley.
“Oh my God,” he breathed. It was going to be bad. He knew that. Very bad.
“Do you want a full SD strike?” Admiral Farquar asked.
“I don’t know. It looks like it’s slowing.”
“Confirmed. Roughly circular, twelve kilometres across. And they’ve got two thirds of the serjeants in there.”
“Are they still alive?” Ralph asked Acacia.
“Yes, General. Their electronics have collapsed completely, but they’re alive and able to use affinity.”
“Then what—” The ground shifted abruptly below his feet. He landed painfully on his side. The programmable silicon buildings of the camp were jittering about. Everywhere, people were on their knees or spread-eagled.
“Shit!” Acacia shouted.
A sheer cliff was rising up vertically right across the valley floor, corresponding to the edge of the red light. Huge cascades of mud and boulders were tumbling down its face. The red light followed them down, pervading the rock, and growing brighter.
Ralph refuted his instinct. What he was seeing was just too much, even though he knew they’d done this to entire planets. “They can’t,” he cried.
“But they are, General,” Acacia replied. “They’re leaving.”
The cliff was still ascending. Two hundred metres now, lifting with increasing confidence and speed. It was becoming difficult to look at as the light turned scarlet, casting long shadows across the valley. Three hundred metres high, and Ralph’s neural nanonics had crashed in the backwash of the blossoming reality dysfunction. On the ground around him, the battered blades of grass were wriggling their way back upwards again, shedding their cloak of mud to turn the camp into a verdant parkland. Fallen trees bent their trunks like the spine of an old man rising from his chair, cranking themselves upright again.
The vivid red light began to diminish. When Ralph squinted against it, he could see the cliff retreating from him. It was five hundred metres high, moving away with the majestic serenity of an iceberg. Except it wasn’t moving, he realized. It was shrinking, the red light contracting in on itself, enveloping the island of rock which the possessed had uprooted from Mortonridge to sail away into another universe. As it left he could see its entire shape, a flat-topped inverted cone wrapped with massive curving stress ridges that spiralled down to its base, as if it had unscrewed itself from the peninsula.
Air was roaring hard overhead, sucked into the space the island was vacating. It still hovered in the centre of the valley, but now it was becoming insubstantial as well as small. The light around it turned a dazzling monochrome white, obliterating details. Within minutes it had evaporated down to a tiny star. Then it winked out. Ralph’s neural nanonics came back on line.
“Cancel the other two assaults,” he datavised to the AI. “And halt the front line. Now.”
He scrambled cautiously to his feet. The reinvigorated grass was withering all around him, shrivelling back to dry brown flakes that crumbled away in the howling wind. Images from the SD sensors showed him the full extent of the massive crater. Its edges had already begun to subside, mountain-sized landslides were skidding downwards, taking a very long time to reach the bottom. Waiting for them five kilometres down was a medieval orange glow that fluctuated in no comprehensible rhythm. He frowned at that, not understanding what it could be. Then the vivid area ruptured, and a vast fountain of radiant lava soared upwards.
“Whoever’s left, get them back,” he shouted desperately at Acacia. “Get them as far away from the lip as possible.”
“They’re already retreating,” she said.
“What about the others? The ones on the island? Can your affinity still reach them?”
Her forlorn look was all the answer he needed.
Stephanie and her friends looked at the serjeants, who stared back with equal uncertainty. For the first time in what her dazed thoughts insisted must have been hours, the ground had stopped oscillating beneath her. When she looked up, the sky was a starless ultradeep blue. White light flooded down from nowhere she could see—but felt right, what she wanted. Her gaze tracked round to where the other side of the valley had been. The blank sky came right down to the ground, and the true size of their island became apparent. A tiny circle of land edged with a crinkled line of hillocks, adrift in its own eternal universe.
“Oh no,” she murmured in despair. “I think we screwed up.”
“Are we free?” Moyo asked.
“For now.” She started describing their new home to him.
Sinon and the other serjeants used the general affinity band to call to each other. There were over twelve thousand of them spread out around the island. Their guns worked, their electronics and medical nanonics didn’t (several had been injured in the waves of quakes), affinity was unaffected, and there were new senses available. Almost a derivative of affinity, allowing him to sense the minds of the possessed. And there was also the energistic power. He picked a stone from the mud and held it in his palm. It slowly turned transparent, and began to sparkle. Not that a kilogram of diamond was a lot of use here.
“Could you dudes like give this heavy military scene a break now?” Cochrane asked.
It would appear our original purpose is invalid in this environment,sinon told his comrades. he shouldered his machine gun. “very well. what do you propose we do next?” he asked the hippie.
“Wow, man, don’t look at me. Stephanie’s in charge around here.”
“I’m not. And anyway, I haven’t got a clue what happens now.”
“Then why did you bring us here?” Choma asked.
“Because it’s not Mortonridge,” Moyo said. “That’s all. Stephanie told you, we were frightened.”
“And this is the result,” Rana said. “You must now face the consequences of your physical aggression.”
We should regroup and pool our physical resources,choma said. It may even be possible for us to use the energistic power to return to the universe.
Their minds flashed together into a mini-consensus and agreed to the proposal. An assembly area was designated.
“We are going to join up with our comrades,” Sinon told Stephanie. “You would be very welcome to come with us. I expect your views on the situation could prove valuable.”
That last image of Ekelund popped up annoyingly in Stephanie’s mind. The woman had banished them from Ketton. But Ketton no longer existed. Surely they wouldn’t be excluded now? Somehow she couldn’t convince herself. And the only other alternative was staying by themselves. Without food. “Thank you,” she said.
“Wait wait,” Cochrane said. “You guys have like got to be kidding. Look, the end of the world is maybe half a mile away. Aren’t you even curious what’s out there?”
Sinon looked to where the island’s crumpled surface ended. “That’s a good suggestion.”
Cochrane grinned brightly. “You cats’ll have to get used to them if you’re going to hang with me.”
The breeze picked up considerably as they approached the edge of the island. Blowing outward, which troubled the serjeants. Air had become a finite commodity. Long rivulets of mud were sliding gently to the edge and spilling over, dribbling down the cliff like ribbons of candle wax. There was nothing else to see. No break in the uniformity of the midnight blue boundary of the universe that might indicate another object, micro or macro. The realization they were on their own percolated through all of them, growing stronger as they approached the rim.
It was only Cochrane who inched his way cautiously right up to the edge and peered down into the murky void of infinity which buoyed them along. He spread his arms wide and threw his head back, letting the breeze flowing over the island blow his hair around. “WAAAAAHOOOO.” His feet jigged about crazily as he cried out ecstatically: “I’m on a fucking flying island. Can you believe this? Here be dragons, mom! And they’re GROOVY.”