"The Naked God - Flight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Peter F.)

Chapter 07

You didn’t have to be attuned to the land like a possessed to know it was about to happen. Most of Ombey’s population was aware the time had come.

Day after day the news companies had been broadcasting sensevises from rover reporters covering the build up of Liberation forces. Everybody knew somebody who was connected to somebody who was involved in some way; from hauling equipment out to Fort Forward to serving drinks to Edenists in spaceport bars. Speculation on the current affairs programmes was deliberately vague about specific dates and precise numbers, even the communication net gossips were showing restraint in naming the day. Hearsay aside, the evidence was pretty solid.

The type of cargoes raining down on the planet had changed. Combat gear was slowly being replaced by heavy-duty civil engineering equipment, ready to repair the expected damage to Mortonridge and provide additional support infrastructure for the occupying forces. The personnel arriving at Fort Forward were also subject to a shift in professions. Just under a million serjeants had been sent from Jupiter, along with nearly a quarter of a million marines and mercenaries from across the Confederation. The Liberation army was essentially complete. So now it was the medical teams being ferried down from orbit, civilian volunteers complementing entire mobile military hospitals. Estimated casualty figures (both military and civilian) were strictly classified. But everyone knew the twelve thousand medical staff were going to suffer a heavy workload. Eighty voidhawks had already been assigned evac duties, spreading the wounded around facilities in the Kingdom and its allies.

Throughout the seventh day following Princess Kirsten’s visit, Ralph Hiltch and his command staff studied the figures and displays provided by the AI. The neuroiconic image which accumulated in his mind kept expanding as more information was correlated. By late afternoon, his conscious perception point seemed to be hanging below a supergalaxy of multicoloured stars, which threatened to make him giddy as he tried to examine it in all directions at once. Despite its coherence, what he really wanted was more training time, more transport, more supplies, and definitely more intelligence assessments of the terrain ahead. But essentially, his army was as ready as it would ever be. He gave the order for final stage deployment to begin.

Over half of the serjeants and their back-up brigades had already left Fort Forward. The previous two days had been spent mustering at their preliminary positions offshore. Nearly a hundred islands around Mortonridge’s coast had been taken over as temporary depots; from reefs which barely showed above the waves to resort atolls dotted with luxury hotels. Where there were no convenient scraps of land, huge cargo ships had been hurriedly converted into floating docks, and anchored thirty kilometres from the shore.

For the first stage of the coastal assault, the army was scheduled to use boats. They were actually going to storm ashore, wading through the waves and up onto the sand, almost in homage to a great many of the incarnations from the past they were facing. Ralph wasn’t prepared to risk flying even the simplest of aircraft into the energistic environment over Mortonridge, not until after they’d dealt with the red cloud at least.

The remainder of the Liberation ground forces emptied out of Fort Forward in massive convoys, spreading out along the firebreak in thousands of multi-terrain vehicles. There was no attempt at secrecy, no hugging the cover behind ridges and hills. The squads drove through the encroaching twilight and into the night; the nimbus of their massed headlight beams creeping like an anaemic dawn along the horizon paralleling the firebreak.

Across Xingu, a civil curfew order was enacted once again, with the police put on full alert. Although they were fairly sure no possessed were left outside Mortonridge, the continent’s authorities were taking Annette Ekelund’s threat of sabotage very seriously. When dawn arrived, no civilian would be allowed out onto the streets. People grumbled and groaned, and datavised protests to local news shows, remembering what a nuisance the curfew had been last time. It was almost a bravado show of defiance. In the main, they just settled back and accessed the show.

High above the planet, the Strategic Defence centre on Guyana began coordinating the Royal Navy’s part of the assault. Thrusters flared on low orbit weapons platforms, refining their new orbits. A flotilla of three hundred voidhawks also began to accelerate, synchronizing their distortion fields to rise away from the planet in a long curve.

The psychic pressure mounting against Mortonridge shifted from faint intimation to blatantly unmistakable.

To casual observation, Chainbridge was still a busy town. When Annette Ekelund reached a slight ridge a couple of kilometres from the outskirts, she stopped the sturdy country rover she was driving and looked back over her shoulder. Hundreds of lighted windows shone out across the lame farmland, burning steady against the flickering crimson waves scattered down from the lumbering cloud roof. The buildings were warm, too, warm enough to fool any perfunctory sensor scans into believing they were occupied. But no one was left there, her command group was the last to leave.

“It’ll keep the blighters tied up for a while,” Delvan assured her. He was sitting in the passenger seat beside her, clad in his old khaki uniform, a discreet row of scarlet and gold ribbons on his chest.

In the back seat, Soi Hon veiled a sneer. He, too, had reverted to type: dark jungle fatigues and a felt bush-ranger hat. “For at least a quarter of an hour.”

“Would you like to return to the beyond fifteen minutes early?” Delvan enquired lightly.

“Any time we delay them is good time,” Annette told the pair of them. She took the brake off, and accelerated down the secondary road. They were heading for Cold Overton, a small village eighty kilometres away. Their field command centre; picked virtually at random by Soi Hon, central but not strategically so, adequate road links, surrounded by thick forest. It was as good as any, not that they’d be staying long. Fluid tactics was the key to this campaign.

Soi Hon clapped Delvan on the shoulder. “And this is our time, eh? You and I both. Onward to death and glory.”

“There is no glory here.” Delvan spoke so quietly, the others could only just hear him against the bass grumble of thunder.

“Don’t tell me you’re having second thoughts?”

“I heard my men wailing at night,” the old soldier replied emotionlessly. “The ones left out in No Man’s Land, left behind to drown in puddles of their own blood; the ones that weren’t vomiting their lungs up from that devilish gas. Screaming for us to help them, more frightened at being alone than they were of being shot.”

“You Christians, you always take life so personally. We’re here by accident, not design. Nothing is ordained, you are only what you make of yourself. You can never go back, the past doesn’t change. Stop thinking about it. The only part of history which matters is the future.”

“It broke my heart, not being able to help them. Good, decent men; boys a lot of them. I swore I’d never get involved in such madness again. They called it total war. But it wasn’t, it was total bloody murder. Insanity had become a disease, and we all caught it. Twice in my lifetime my nation sent its youth out to die for a just cause, to protect ourselves and our way of life.” He smiled frigidly at the eco warrior. “And now here I am once again. Seven bloody centuries later. Seven hundred years, and nothing has changed. Not one damn thing. I’m fighting to preserve myself and my new life. A righteous war with me on the side of the angels, even though they’ve become fallen angels. And I can already hear the screams, God help me.”

“All I hear is our victory song,” Soi Hon said. “The voice of the land is louder and stronger than any human cry. This is our place, we are at one with it. We belong here. We have a right to exist in this universe.”

Delvan closed his eyes and tipped his head back. “Lord forgive me I am such a fool. Here we all are, embarking on a crusade to storm the very gates of Heaven Itself in our desperation. What a monumental folly. I shall smite at the dark angels massed against us, crying for death, for only in death will we ever find peace. Yet You have already revealed that death is not our destiny, nor ever can be.”

“Wake up, old man. We’re not fighting God, we’re fighting an unjust universe.”

For the first time since his return from the beyond, Delvan smiled. “You think there’s a difference?”

The island was enchanting, its botany and geology combining into the kind of synergistic idyll which was the grail of Edenist habitat designers. Inland, there were craggy rocks hosting long white waterfalls, and thick lush forests choked with sweet-scented flowers. The shore comprised cove after cove, their pale gold sands gleaming under the azure sky; except for one, where the offshore reef crumbled under the foaming breakers to give the sands an exquisite fairydust coating of pink coral. It appealed to humans on a primal level, urging them to slow down and spend time just soaking in nature. As a reward for their worship, time itself would expand and become almost meaningless.

Even in his current existence, Sinon wished he was staying longer than their eighteen-hour stopover. Five thousand serjeants had descended on this tiny jewel of land glinting in the ocean, along with their equipment and support personnel. Marines were camped ten to a room in the resort hotels; gardens and tennis courts had been requisitioned as landing pads; and the coves were harbours for a hundred of the regiment’s landing boats. All day, the boats had taken their turn to nuzzle the shore, extending their forward ramps so that jeeps and light trucks could drive on board. Now, in the evening, the serjeants were finally embarking.

Syrinx would like this place,sinon told choma. I must tell her about it.he was two thirds of the way along a line of serjeants who were wading out to their landing boat. There wasn’t enough room on this particular beach to berth more than three boats at a time, so the other eleven were anchored a hundred metres offshore. A column of serjeants snaked out to each one, making slow time through the water. The big constructs were laden with backpacks, carrying their weapons above their heads to stop them getting wet. Groups of Royal Marines milled about on the bluff, watching the process. If all went well, they’d be doing the same thing next morning.

Now there’s good healthy optimism,choma replied.

What do you mean?

I’ve been working out our probable casualty rate. Would you like to know how many of our squad are likely to survive the entire campaign?

Not particularly. I have no intention of becoming a statistic.

Where have I heard that before? In any case, it’s two. Two out of ten.

Thank you very much.sinon reached the landing boat. it was an ugly, rugged affair, one design serving the entire Liberation armada. A carbosilicon hull mass produced over on Esparta, with power cells and an engine that could have come from any of a dozen industrialized star systems allied to the Kingdom. Hard-pressed navy engineers had plugged the standard components together, completing several hundred each day. The three on the beach were still being worked on by technicians.

Honesty is supposed to be our culture’s strength,choma said, mildly irked by the negative reaction.

We’re a long way from Eden now.sinon slung his rifle high on his shoulder, and started climbing the ladder up the side of the boat. When he reached the top of the gunnel he looked back to shore. The sun was sinking into the sea, leaving a rosy haze line above the darkening water. Parodying that, on the opposite horizon, the glow of the red cloud was visible, a narrow fracture separating water and air.

Last chance, Sinon told himself. The other serjeants were all climbing down into the boat, their mind-tones subdued but still resolute. Rationally, he was buying the Confederation time to find a genuine answer. And Consensus itself had approved this course of action. He swung his legs over the rail, and put a hand down to help Choma. Come on, let’s go storm the Dark Lord’s citadel.

The Royal Marine ion field flyer was a lone spark of gold shimmering high in the night sky, brighter than any star. It flew across the top of the Mortonridge peninsula, keeping parallel to the firebreak, twenty-five kilometres to the north, and holding a steady fifteen kilometre altitude.

Ralph Hiltch sat in the flyer’s cabin as Cathal Fitzgerald piloted them above the northern end of the mountain range which formed the peninsula’s spine. Eight hours of neural nanonics enforced sleep had left him feeling fresh, but emotionally dead. His mind had woken immune to the human consequences of the Liberation. Whether it was numb from the torrent of information which had been bullying his brain for weeks, or guilty at the enormity of what he’d organized, he wasn’t sure.

It meant that now he was hooked into the flyer’s sensor suite, he could view the last stages of the deployment with god-like dispassion. Which was probably for the best, he thought. Accepting personal responsibility for every casualty would drive anyone insane within the first two minutes. Even so, he’d wanted this one last overview. To convince himself it was genuine if nothing else. The last insecurity, that all the data and images he’d handled had been transformed to physical reality.

There could be doubt. The army spread out below him, his army, was flowing over the black land in streamers of fluid light, bending and curling round hills and valleys. Individual vehicles expressed as twinkles of light, barely different to icons blipping their way across a map. Except here there was no colour, just the white headlight beams contrasting the funeral ground.

It was after midnight, and two-thirds of the ground deployment was complete. Both flanks were established, now there was only the centre to set up, the most difficult aspect. His main spearhead was going to drive right along the M6, allowing the huge supply and back-up convoys an easy ride. Using the motorway was a disturbingly obvious strategy, but essential if they were to complete in a minimum timescale.

Ekelund would have sabotaged the road, but bridges could be repaired, blockades shunted aside, and gorges filled. The combat engineering corps were ready for that. At least the possessed didn’t have air power. Though occasionally he had images of propeller biplanes roaring overhead and strafing the jeeps. Victory rolls with the pilot’s white silk scarf flapping jauntily in the slipstream. Stupid.

Ralph switched the suite’s focus to the red cloud. Its edges were still arched down to the ground, sealing the peninsula away from the rest of the planet. Dusky random wave shadows rolled across the pulpy surface. He thought they might be more restless than usual, though that could well be his imagination. Thankfully, there was no sign of that peculiar oval formation which he’d seen once before. The one he absolutely refused to call an eye. All he really wanted was one glimpse through; to reassure himself the peninsula was still there, if nothing else. They’d had no data of any kind from inside since the day Ekelund had brought the cloud down. No links with the net could be established; no non-possessed had managed to sneak out. A final sweep with the flyer’s sensors revealed nothing new.

“Take us back,” he told Cathal.

The flyer performed a fast turn, curving round to line up on Fort Forward. Ahead of it, the giant Thunderbirds continued to swoop down out of the western sky, delta heatshields glowing a dull vermilion against the starfield backdrop. That aspect of the build up, at least, remained unchanged. Cathal landed them inside the secure command complex, along the southern side of the new city. Ralph trotted down the airstair, ignoring the armed Marine escort which fell in around him. The trappings of his position had ceased to register as special some time ago, just another aspect of this extraordinary event.

Brigadier Palmer (the first person Ralph had promoted) was waiting outside the door to the Ops Room. “Well?” she asked, as they walked in.

“I didn’t see anyone waving a white flag.”

“We’d know if they wanted to.” Like a lot of people involved with the Liberation, especially those who’d been on Mortonridge since the start, she considered herself to have a connection with the possessed hidden behind the red cloud, an awareness of attitude. Ralph wasn’t convinced, although he acknowledged the possessed exerted some kind of psychic presence.

The Ops Room was a long rectangular chamber with glass walls separating it from innumerable specialist planning offices. Completing electronic systems integration and connecting their architecture with Ombey’s military communication circuits was another triumph for the overworked Royal Marine engineering corps, though its rushed nature was evident in the bundled cables hanging between consoles and open ceiling panels, air conditioning which was too chilly, and raw carbon-concrete corner pillars. Its floor-space was taken up by cheap corporate-style desks holding consoles, AV projectors, and communication gear. Right now, it was full to capacity; over fifty officers from the Royal Navy were collaborating with an equal number of Edenists; the next largest contingent was the Confederation Navy with twenty; while the remainder were drawn from various participating allies.

They were going to be the coordinators of the Liberation, the human analysis and liaison between the ground forces and the controlling AI back in Pasto. A failsafe against the maxim: No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Every one of them stood up as Ralph Hiltch entered. That, he did notice. Together they had spent the past few weeks planning this together, arguing, pleading, contributing ideas, working miracles. They’d learned to cooperate and coordinate their fields of expertise, putting aside old quarrels so they melded into a unified, dedicated team. He was proud of them and what they’d accomplished.

Their show of respect rekindled several of his suppressed emotions. “I’ll keep this short,” he told the hushed chamber. “We can’t pretend this is going to solve the problem possession poses to the Confederation, but it’s a damn sight more important than a propaganda war, which is what some reporters have been calling it. We’re fighting to free two million people, and we’re battling to bring hope into the lives of an awful lot more. To me, that’s more than worthwhile, it’s essential. So let’s make our contribution a good one.”

Amid scattered applause, he made his way to his office at the far end. His desk gave him a view down the whole length of the Ops Room, providing he craned his neck over the stack of processor block peripherals connected to his main desktop console. While he was datavising the array for strategic updates, his executive command group joined him. As well as Janne Palmer who was the Chief of the occupying forces, there was Acacia, the Edenist liaison, an elderly woman who had served as ambassador to Ombey for five years. He’d also drafted in Diana Tiernan to act as the army’s technical advisor, helping to filter the scientific reports on the possessed which were flooding in from across the Confederation. Cathal completed the gathering, still holding his post as Ralph’s assistant, but now with the rank of lieutenant commander.

When the glass door slid shut, isolating them from the noise from outside, Ralph requested a security level one sensenviron conference. Princess Kirsten and Admiral Farquar joined them around the white bubble room’s table. “The deployment’s going remarkably well,” Ralph said. “All our principal front line divisions will be in place at zero-hour.”

“My occupation troops are effectively ready,” Janne said. “There are a few minor hitches, mostly logistical. But given the amount of materiel involved, and the different groupings we’re attempting to coordinate, I’m happy. We’re well within estimated parameters. The AI should have the bugs knocked out by morning.”

“The serjeants are also ready,” Acacia reported. “Again, there are some hitches, mainly with transport equipment, but we are committed.”

“Admiral Farquar?” Kirsten asked.

“All space based assets are functional. Platform orbits are synchronized, and the voidhawks are reaching apogee. It looks good.”

“Very well,” Kirsten said. “God help me for this, but they’ve left us with no alternative. General Hiltch, you now have full command authority for Ombey’s military forces. Engage the enemy, Ralph, evict them from my planet.”

Standard military doctrine was, somewhat inevitably, fairly unimaginative. Every kind of tactic and counter-tactic had been attempted, practised, and refined by generals, warlords, and emperors down the centuries until there was little room for mistake. So even though Mortonridge was unique from a philosophical standpoint, it could be defined in military terms as a large scale hostage/siege scenario. Given that assessment, the method of resolving it was clear cut.

Ralph wanted to isolate the possessed in small groups. They were vulnerable like that, capable of being overwhelmed. To achieve it, their communications should be broken, denying them the ability to regroup and mount any kind of counter-attack. Harassment should be constant, wearing them down. And, if possible, he wanted them deprived of the cover provided by their red cloud. In summary: divide and conquer. An ancient principle, but now aided by the kind of firepower which only modern technology could provide.

Ombey had four and a half thousand low orbit Strategic Defence platforms. Their orbital vectors were orchestrated to provide a constant barrier above the surface, similar to the way electrons pirouetted around their nucleus. For the Liberation, all that had changed. Navy starships had taken over the low orbit protection duty, leaving the platforms free for an altogether different task. Their elaborate inclinations had been shifted, ion thrusters firing for hours at a time to clump them into flocks of twenty-five. Now they formed a single chain around the planet, with an inclination tilted at just a couple of degrees to the equator. One flock would pass over Mortonridge every thirty seconds.

Sensor satellites had been manoeuvred into the gaps between the platforms, ready to provide the Liberation Forces with an unparalleled coverage of the peninsula once the red cloud had been broken apart. Admiral Farquar used them to watch the dawn terminator sliding over the ocean towards the lowering band of red cloud. Tactical overlays showed him the positions of the landing boats heading in for the beaches. Far overhead, the flotilla of voidhawks had passed apogee, and were now hurtling downwards, accelerating at eight gees.

In one hour, dawn would reach Mortonridge’s eastern seaboard. The Admiral datavised his command authority code to Guyana’s SD control centre. “Fire,” he ordered.

Though they never knew it, the Liberation forces very nearly won in the first ninety seconds. The initial flock of SD platforms sent seventy-five electron beams slamming down through the upper atmosphere to strike the red cloud. They were aimed along the north/south axis of the peninsula, and defocused, so that at the point of impact they were over fifty metres across. The intention wasn’t to pierce the red cloud, just to pump it full of electrical energy, the possessed’s one known Achilles Heel. Each beam began scanning from side to side, in gigantic ten second sweeps that took them from coast to coast.

Then the second flock of platforms slid up over the horizon and into range. Another seventy-five beams speared down. There was a ten second overlap before the first flock was out of range.

Annette Ekelund let out a single shriek of agony, and dropped helplessly to her knees. The pain was incredible. A shaft of blue-star sunlight flung down from a height greater than heaven lanced clean through her skull. It didn’t just burn her stolen brain, it set fire to her very thoughts. That part of her spirit which communed so gladly with the others on Mortonridge was the treacherous conductor. The part which created the shield of cloud and gave them all a subliminal sense of community. Her belief in whatever humanity has survived the incarceration of the beyond. And now it was killing her.

She abandoned it in its entirety. Her scream twisting from pain to wretchedness. All around her, the other souls were shrinking away from each other, withdrawing into self. The last sob burbled out from her lips, and she flopped limply onto her back. Her body was freezing, shaking in shock. Delvan and Soi Hon were scrabbling in the dirt somewhere nearby, she could hear their whimpers. She couldn’t see either of them, the world had gone completely black.

Every possessed across the Confederation was instantly aware of the strike. Pain and shock reverberated through the beyond. Wherever they were, whatever they were doing, they felt it.

Al Capone was underneath Jezzibella when it happened, adopting a complicated position so that her breasts were pushed into his face while he could still bend his knees for the leverage to give her a damn good shafting. Her laugh was halfway between a giggle and a moan when the mental impact knocked him with the force of a wild hockey puck. He convulsed, shouting in pained panic.

Jezzibella cried out as his frantic motion twisted her arm, nearly dislocating her shoulder. “Al! Fuck. That fucking hurts, you fucking dickhead. I told you I don’t do that sado shit, fuck you.”

Al grunted in confused dismay, shaking his head to clear the weird dizziness foaming inside. He was so disoriented, he fell off the side of the bed.

For the first time, Jezzibella actually caught a glimpse of Brad Lovegrove’s natural features beneath the illusion. Not too different to Al, they could almost be brothers. Her anger faded at the sight of him grimacing, limbs twitching in disarray. “Al?”

“Fuck,” he gasped. “What the fuck was that?”

“Al, you okay, baby? What happened?”

“God damn! I don’t know.” He looked round the bedroom, expecting to see some kind of bomb damage, G-men storming through the door. . . . “I ain’t got a clue.”

For Jacqueline Couteur the invisible shockwave almost proved fatal. Strapped onto the examination table in the demon trap she couldn’t move when her muscles spasmed. Her vital signs monitor alerted the staff to some kind of seizure, at which point her conscious defence against the electric current they were shunting through her body began to crumble. Fortunately, one of the more alert team members shut the power off before she was genuinely electrocuted. It took her five or six minutes to recover her normal antagonism, and prowess.

On patrol a million kilometres above New California, Rocio Condra lost control of the distortion field, letting it flare and contract wildly. The big hellhawk tumbled crazily, its bird-form imploding in a cloud of dark scintillations. Gravity inside the life-support cabin vanished along with the quaint steamship interior. Jed, Beth, Gerald and the three kids suddenly found themselves in freefall. Then gravity returned in a rush, far too strong, and in the wrong direction, making one of the bulkhead walls the floor. The surface swatted them hard, then the gravity failed again to send them flying across the cabin in a tangle of limbs and screams. Stars gyrated savagely beyond the viewport. Another wash of gravity sucked them down onto the ceiling.

In Quinn Dexter’s case, it was his first setback on Earth. He had just arrived at Grand Central Station to take a vac-train to Paris. Not the original station building on Manhattan, the island itself was actually abandoned and flooded, but New Yorkers were sentimental about such things. This was the third such edifice to carry the name. Buried nearly a kilometre below the centre of dome five, it formed the hub of the arcology’s intercontinental train network.

Once more he had secluded himself within the ghost realm to avoid any risk of detection. That was when he began to notice just how many ghosts haunted the station and other subterranean sections of the vast arcology. Hundreds of them drifted mournfully amid the unseeing streams of commuters. They were drab despondent figures, staring round at the faces that rushed past. There was so much longing and desperation in their expressions, as if every one of them was searching for some long lost child. They were aware of Quinn, gazing at him in bewilderment as he strode through the main concourse on his way to the platforms. In turn, he ignored them, worthless creatures incapable of either aiding or hindering his crusade. They really were as good as dead.

He was twenty metres short of the wave elevator for platform fifty-two when the flashback from the Liberation reached him. The impact wasn’t actually too great, he’d withstood far worse at Banneth’s hands, it was the suddenness of it all which shocked him. Without warning he was yelling as streaks of pain flared out from the centre of his brain to infect his body. Edmund Rigby’s captive thoughts writhed in agony, transfixed by the blast of torment.

Quinn panicked, frightened by the unknown. Until this moment he believed he was virtually omnipotent. Now some witchery was attacking him in a method he couldn’t fathom. Souls in the beyond were screaming in terror. The ghosts around him began wailing, clasping their hands together in prayer. His control over the energistic power faltered as his thoughts dissolved into chaos.

Bud Johnson never saw where the guy came from. One second he was hurrying to the wave elevator, on his way to catch a San Antonio connection—the next, some man in a weird black robe was kneeling on all fours on the polished marble floor at his feet. That was almost impossible, everyone who grew up on Earth and lived in the arcologies had an instinctive awareness of crowds, the illogical tides and currents of bodies which flowed through them. He always knew where people were in relation to himself, alert to any possible collision. Nobody could just appear.

Bud’s momentum kept his torso going forwards, while his legs were completely blocked. He went flying, pivoting over the man’s back to crash onto the cool marble. His wrist made a nasty snapping sound, firing hot pain up his arm. And his neural nanonics did nothing. Nothing! There were no axon blocks, no medical display. Bud let out a howl of pain, blinking back tears as he looked up.

Those tears might have accounted for two or three of the curious faces peering down at him. Pale and distressed, wearing extremely odd hats. When he blinked the salty fluid clear, they’d gone. He clutched at his injured wrist. “Sheesh, dear God, that hurts.” A murmur of surprise rattled over his head, a strong contrast to the screams breaking out across the rest of the station. No one seemed particularly concerned about him.

“Hey, my neural nanonics have failed. Someone call me a medic. I think my wrist’s broken.”

The man he’d fallen over was now rising to his feet. Bud was acutely conscious of the silence that had closed around him, of people backing away. When he looked up, any thoughts of shouting curses on the clumsy oaf vanished instantly. There was a face inside the large hood, barely visible. Bud was suddenly very thankful for the robe’s shadows. The expression of fury and malice projected by the features he could see was quite bad enough. “Sorry,” he whispered.

Fingers closed around his heart. He could actually feel them, individual joints hinging inwards, fingernails digging into his atriums. The hand twisted savagely. Bud choked silently, his arms flapping wildly. He was just aware of people closing in on him again. This time, they registered concern. Too late, he tried to tell them, far too late. The aloof devil turned casually and faded from his sight. Then so did the rest of the world.

Quinn observed Bud’s soul snake away from his corpse, vanishing into the beyond, adding his screams to the beseeching myriad. There was a big commotion all around, people shoving and jostling to get a good view of whatever was going down. Only a couple of them had gasped as he returned himself to the ghost realm, fading out right in front of them. At least he’d retained enough composure not to use the white fire. Not that it mattered now. He’d been seen, and not just by people with glitched neural nanonics; the station’s security sensors would have captured the event.

Govcentral knew he was here.

Tucked down in the central hold of the landing boat, Sinon couldn’t physically see the rest of the squadron closing on the shore. Affinity made it unnecessary; all the Edenist minds on and orbiting Ombey were linked together, providing him with more information than General Hiltch had available. He was aware of his personal position, as well as that of his comrades, even the Liberation’s overall situation was available to him. The voidhawk flotilla revealed the red cloud beneath them. Huge lightning bolts were writhing across the upper surface as the SD platforms continued their electron barrage. At the centre, along the spine of hills, the glow was fading, allowing pools of darkness to ripple outward.

Along with all the other serjeants, Sinon craned forwards for a look. The barrier of red cloud had grown steadily through the night as the boats headed in for the beach. From ten kilometres offshore, it stretched right across the water, solid and resolute like the wall at the end of the world.

Small flickers of lightning arose to dance along the bottom, slashing down into the waves. Steam plumes screwed upwards from the discharges. Then the lightning streamers were coming together into massive dazzling rivers, rising up, following the steep curve of the cloud to arch inland. The red glow faded, taking less then five seconds to die completely. Its disappearance startled Sinon and the other serjeants. The victory was too sudden. This was not the epic struggle they’d been preparing for. The crawling webs of lightning more than made up for the absence; blazing bright right across the horizon.

You know, that is actually a very big cloud,sinon said. The brilliant flashes were near-continuous now, keeping the dark mass illuminated prominently.

You noticed that,choma retorted.

Yes. Which could be a problem. It was rather nicely contained while the possessed were using it as a shield. As such, we tended to disregard its physical properties; it was, after all, primarily a psychological barrier.

Psychological or not, we can’t cruise straight through with all that electrical activity.

Choma wasn’t the only one to reach that conclusion. They could already feel the boat slowing as the captain reduced power to the engines. A precaution repeated simultaneously by the entire armada.

“Recommendations?” Ralph asked.

“Shut down the SD assault,” Acacia said. “The landing boats are already slowing. They can’t penetrate that kind of lightning storm.”

“Diana?”

“I think so. If the red light is an indication of the possessed’s control, then we’ve already routed them.”

“That’s a very big if,” Admiral Farquar protested.

“We don’t have a lot of choice,” the elderly technology advisor said. “The landing boats clearly can’t get through, nor can the ground vehicles, for that matter. We have to let the energy discharge itself naturally. If the red light returns when they’re inside, we can resume the electron beam attack until the cloud itself starts to break up.”

“Do it,” Ralph ordered. “Acacia, get the serjeants as close as they can to the cloud, then as soon as the lightning’s finished, I want them through.”

“Yes, General.”

“Diana, how long is it going to take to dissipate that electricity?”

“A good question. We’re not sure how deep or dense that cloud is.”

“Answer me.”

“I’m afraid I can’t. There are too many variables.”

“Oh great. Acacia, is the lightning going to affect the harpoons?”

“No. The cloud’s too low for that, and they’re going too fast. Even if one took a direct hit from a lightning bolt, the trajectory won’t be altered by more than a couple of metres at best.”

The voidhawk flotilla was only one and a half thousand kilometres from the surface of Ombey. Mortonridge filled their sensor blister coverage, changing from a red smear to a seething mass of blue-white streamers, more alive than ever before. There was just time for one last query.

We’re still go,acacia assured them.

All three hundred voidhawks reached the apex of their trajectory. Their bone-crushing eight-gee acceleration ended briefly. Each one flung a swarm of five thousand kinetic harpoons from its weapons cradles. Then power surged through their patterning cells again, reversing the previous direction of the distortion field. The punishing intensity was unchanged, still eight gees, pushing them desperately away from the planet with its dangerous gravity field.

Far below, the delicate filigree of shimmering lightning vanished beneath an incandescent corona as the upper atmosphere ignited. The plasma wake left by one and a half million kinetic harpoons had merged together into a single photonic shockwave. It hit the top of the cloud, puncturing the churning grey vapour with such speed there was little reaction. At first. Acacia was quite right, the cloud for all its bulk and animosity could not deflect the harpoons from their programmed targets.

No human could draw up that list, it was the AI in Pasto that ultimately designated their impact points. They descended in clumps of three, giving a ninety-seven per cent probability of a successful hit. Mortonridge’s communication net was the main target.

Urban legend dictated that modern communication nets were annihilation proof. With hundreds of thousands of independent switching nodes spread over an entire planet, and millions of cables linking them, backed up by satellite relays, their anarchistic-homogeneous nature made them immune to any kind of cataclysm. No matter how many nodes were taken out, there was always an alternative route for the data. You’d have to physically wipe out a planet before its data exchange was stalled.

But Mortonridge was finite, its net isolated from the redundancy offered by the rest of the planet. The location of every node was known to within half a metre. Unfortunately, ninety per cent of them were proscribed, because they were inside a built up urban area. If kinetic harpoons started dropping amid the buildings, resulting casualties would be horrendous. That left the cables out in the open countryside. A lot of them followed roads, nestled in utility conduits along the side of the carbon concrete, but many more took off across the land, laid by mechanoids tunnelling through forests and under rivers, with nothing on the surface to indicate their existence.

Long-inactive files of their routes had been accessed and analysed by the AI. Strike coordinates were designated, with the proscription that there should be no habitable structure within three quarters of a kilometre. Given the possessed’s considerable ability to defend themselves on a physical level, it was considered a reasonable safe distance.

Stephanie Ash lay quivering on the floor even after her mind had recoiled from the communion with other souls. The loss hurt her more than any pain from the electron beam attack against the cloud. That simple act of union had given her hope. As long as people went on supporting each other, she knew, despite everything else, they remained human to some small degree. Now even that fragile aspiration had been wrenched from them.

“Stephanie?” Moyo called. His hand was shaking her shoulder gently. “Stephanie, are you all right?”

The fear and concern in his voice triggered her own guilt. “God, no.” She opened her eyes. The bedroom was lit solely by a small bluish flame coming from his thumb. Outside the window, blackness swarmed the whole world. “What did they do?” She could no longer sense the psychic weight pressing against her from the other side of the firebreak. Only the valley was apparent.

“I don’t know. But it’s not good.” He helped her to her feet.

“Are the others all right?” She could sense their minds, spread out through the farmhouse, embers of worry and pain.

“Same as us, I guess.” A bright flash from outside silenced him. They both went to the window and peered out. Huge shafts of lightning skidded along the underbelly of the cloud.

Stephanie shivered uncomfortably. What had successfully shielded them from the open sky was now an intimidatingly large mass far too close overhead.

“We’re not in charge of it anymore,” Moyo said. “We let go.”

“What’s going to happen to it?”

“It’ll rain, I guess.” He shot her an anxious look. “And that’s a lot of cloud up there. We just kept adding to it, like a baby’s security blanket.”

“Maybe we should get the animals in.”

“Maybe we should get the hell out of here. The Princess’s army will be coming.”

She smiled sadly. “There’s nowhere to go. You know that.”

The frequency of the lightning had increased dramatically by the time they rounded up Cochrane, Rana, and Franklin to help chase after the chickens and lambs that normally ambled round inside the farmyard. The first few big drops of water began to patter down.

Moyo stuck his hand out, palm up. As if confirmation was really needed. “Told you,” he said smugly.

Stephanie turned her cardigan into a slicker, even though she didn’t hold out much hope of staying dry. The drops were larger than any she’d ever known. All the chickens were running through the open gate, the lambs had already vanished into the atrocious night. She was just about to suggest they didn’t bother trying to catch them when daylight returned to Mortonridge.

Cochrane gaped up at the sky. The clouds had turned into translucent veils of grey silk, allowing the light to pour through. “Wow! Who switched the sun back on, man?” The bottom of the clouds detonated into incandescent splinters, searing down through the air. Vivid star-tips pulling down a hurricane cone of violet mist after them. Stephanie had to shield her eyes, they were so bright.

“It’s the end of the world, kids,” Cochrane cried gleefully.

All one and a half million harpoons struck the ground within a five second period. A clump of them were targeted on a cable four kilometres from the farm valley, their terrible velocity translated into a single devastating blast of heat. The radiant orange flash silhouetted the valley rim, lasting just long enough to reveal the debris plume boiling upwards.

“Ho shit,” Cochrane grunted. “That Mr Hiltch really doesn’t like us.”

“What were they?” Stephanie asked. It seemed incredible that they were still in their bodies. Surely that kind of violence would wipe them out?

“Some kind of orbital bombardment,” Moyo said. “It must have been aimed at Ekelund’s troops.” He didn’t sound too convinced.

“Aimed? It was everywhere.”

“Then why didn’t it hit us?” Rana asked. Moyo just shrugged. That was when the roar of the impact reached them, a drawn out rumble loud enough to swallow any words.

Stephanie covered her ears, and looked up again. The cloud was in torment, its rumpled underbelly foaming violently. Ghostly billows of luminescent purple air left behind by the harpoons snaked around the tightly packed whorls; the two of them flowing against each other, yet never merging, like liquids with different densities. She frowned, blinking upwards as the light dimmed. A thick slate-grey haze was emerging, oozing out of the cloud to swallow both the lightning and the tattered sheets of ion vapour. It was expanding fast, darkening.

“Inside,” she said in a small voice as the last echoes of the explosion reverberated across the valley. They all turned to look at her. The big drops of rain had returned. A breeze arose to stroke their clothes. “Get inside. It’s going to rain.”

They glanced up at the descending haze, awed and fearful as understanding reached them.

“Nothing!” Annette screamed furiously at the processor block. The primitive schematic displayed on its screen proved it was functioning, yet nobody was answering her calls. “We’re cut off.”

Soi Hon studied the display on his block. “All the lines are down, from what I can see,” he said.

“Don’t be absurd, you can’t knock out an entire net,” Annette protested. Doubt stung. “It’s not possible.”

“I imagine that was the idea behind the bombardment,” Soi Hon replied, unperturbed. “It was rather spectacular, after all. They wouldn’t expend that much effort for no reason. And we didn’t have the whole net functioning in the first place, only the critical links.”

“Damn it, how the hell am I going to organize our resistance now?”

“Everyone has their original orders, and they have no choice but to fight. All this means is that you are no longer in charge of the possessed.”

Even his complacency soured at the look she gave him.

“Oh really?” she asked dangerously.

The light began to fade outside. Annette strode across to the big front window. She’d taken over a folksy restaurant called the Black Bull in the middle of Cold Overton, giving her a commanding position at the end of the broad main street. Fifty vehicles were parked on the stone slabs of the market square outside, waiting for the troops who’d taken refuge in the nearby shops and cafйs. Milne and a few of his engineers were walking about, inspecting the equipment. There didn’t seem to be any damage, though several of the harpoons had fallen just outside the village.

“Soi,” she said. “Take a couple of squads and check the roads. I want to know how quickly we can get out of here.”

“As you wish.” He nodded briskly, and made for the door.

“There’s a big group of us in Ketton,” she said, almost to herself. “That’s only ten kilometres west of here. We’ll link up with them. Should be able to convince some civilians to join up, too. After that we can move on to the next group.”

“We could use runners to carry messages,” Delvan suggested. “That’s what we did back in my time. Communications were always pretty damn poor close to the front.”

There was very little light left now. Annette saw Milne and the others running. There was no fear in their minds, just urgency. Raindrops splattered against the window. Within seconds the whole of Main Street was awash. Gutters started to fill up, with small whirlpools forming over the drains.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Soi Hon exclaimed, raising his voice against the noise. He was standing in the open doorway, a waterproof poncho forming round his shoulders. The drumming sound of the huge drops was easily as loud as the red cloud’s thunder had been. “And we saw some storms round the Pacific in my day, believe me.”

A rivulet of dirty water began to seep in around his feet, trickling round the tables. Annette couldn’t see anything outside now, the rain was battering heavily against the glass, producing the kind of spume that normally topped ocean waves. Behind that, there was only blackness.

Delvan moved up beside him to get a better look. “Nobody’s going anywhere in this.”

“Yes,” Annette agreed shakily. “You’d better wait.”

“How long, though?” Delvan muttered. “We didn’t think about this when we drew the cloud over us.”

“Don’t worry,” Soi Hon said. “Nobody’s going to do any fighting for a while. It’s just as bad for them. And at least we’re inside.”

The landing boat surged forwards as soon as the dazzling corona from the kinetic harpoons lit up the sky. Sinon used the voidhawks’ vantage point to observe the giant splash of plasma sink into the dark mantle of cloud.

It’s expanding,acacia announced. Confirm that, we’re tracking it.

Vast cyclonic spirals of cloud were stirring across the upper surface. Washed by Ombey’s pale moonlight, the movement appeared almost majestic. Primeval forces had awoken. Along the edges of the cloud, gargantuan tornadoes began to spin away, careering off over the sea.

The whole damn thing’s breaking up,choma said.

Sinon shared a shiver of consternation with the other serjeants; not just in his boat. All of them were facing the same onslaught. He stared out over the prow, watching mountains of water on the move. A wind had risen from nowhere to blow straight at him.

We can’t turn back,choma said. It’ll catch us on the open water. Best head for shore.

Sinon’s hand patted his lifebelt, seeking reassurance. The massif of cloud seemed to be hurtling towards them, a light-absorbing void distending across the ocean.

Keep going,was the decision concurred by the rest of the Edenists and General Hiltch’s command group. Every boat in the Liberation armada rammed its engines to full, and met the stormfront head on.

It wasn’t rain they faced, not in the ordinary sense. The deluge crashing down over them was like standing under a waterfall. As the clouds rampaged overhead, so the waves rose, as if seeking to bridge the gap. The landing boats were thrown around pitilessly. Sometimes Sinon had to hold himself against a deck that was lifting over thirty degrees to the vertical. The jeeps secured along the centre of the hold strained against their restraint cables as their weight was flung about in directions the designers had never anticipated. Bilge pumps were wailing plaintively, to little effect. Sinon clung to a guard rail as the cold water mounted steadily against his legs, sloshing between the hull walls. He was worried he’d get tossed overboard. He was worried his newly assembled body would split along surgical lines as he strained muscles and tendons to hold on. He worried that a jeep would break free and crush him. He worried they wouldn’t reach the beach before the rain and waves filled the hold and sunk them.

Not even sharing the anxiety in the Edenist fashion did much to alleviate it. There was way too much distress bubbling through the aether as the armada battled for shore. The Edenists in secondary support roles, safe away from the megastorm, along with the voidhawks and their crews overhead, did their best to offer what reassurance and comfort they could to their beleaguered kinsmen. But they all felt the death toll rising, compounding the alarm. Landing boats collapsed, pitched over, individual serjeants lost their grip to drown amid the monster waves. Voidhawks laboured tirelessly to absorb the fresh memories of the dying serjeant personalities.

A nausea suppression program went primary as an aghast Ralph watched the nightmare unfurling. Neatly tabulated icons blinked up inside his mind, indicating the woeful progress the boats were making. Some were even being driven backwards as the gales howled out from the land. He did what he could. For all it was worth. Ordering the ground forces along the firebreak to stay put and dig in. Putting the medical teams on immediate standby. Designating search patrols for the aircraft, ready for the time when it became feasible to fly.

Diana Tiernan and the AI couldn’t give him any estimate when that would be. There was no way of knowing the true weight of water powering the storm. Radar scans from the SD sensor satellites to discover the depth and density were badly distorted by the tremendous electrical discharges still churning madly over Mortonridge. All they could do was wait.

“We couldn’t have known,” Janne Palmer said. “Dealing with the possessed is one giant unknown.”

“We should have guessed,” Ralph answered bitterly. “At least considered it.”

“Best information we had was that the cloud was a couple of hundred metres thick,” Diana said. “That’s all it was on Lalonde and every other planet they took over. But this blasted thing, it must be kilometres deep. They must have sucked every gram of water from the air. There may even be some kind of osmotic process involved, siphoning it up out of the sea.”

“Damn those bastards,” Ralph spat.

“They are afraid,” Acacia said calmly. “They built the thickest, highest wall they could to keep us out. It’s human nature.”

Ralph couldn’t bring himself to answer the Edenist. It was Acacia’s people who were taking the brunt of the calamity. And it was his plan, his orders, which had put them there. Anything he said would be pathetically inadequate.

Outside, the rain had reached Fort Forward, and was doing its best to wash the city’s programmable silicon structures into the nearby river. Fast rivulets were gouging the soil away from their base anchors. Ops Room staff glanced round nervously as banshee winds pummelled away at the walls. Fifty minutes after the kinetic harpoon barrage, the landing boats started to reach the beaches.

“They’re coming through,” Acacia said. The first strands of confidence were starting to emerge within the combined Edenist psyche as serjeants exported the feeling of sand crunching underfoot. Proof that success was possible, the sense of relief which accompanied it. “It’s going to be okay, we’re going to make it.”

“Right,” Ralph croaked. One icon gleamed darkly at the centre of his woeful thoughts: 3129. The number of dead so far. And we’re the only ones shooting.

An immense wave smacked the landing craft down on the beach with an almighty crunch. The blow sent Sinon skidding back along the hold on his arse, limbs flailing. Water slowed his momentum quickly. He came to rest in a jumble of other serjeants, all struggling to disentangle themselves. The three at the bottom were completely immersed. Affinity was supremely useful in coordinating their movements, like unpicking a three dimensional puzzle.

They’d just got free when the next wave clobbered the side of the landing boat. It lacked the brutality of the previous one, simply shoving the hull further up the beach, and twisting them at an angle.

Dry land!choma cried triumphantly.

Well . . . land, anyway,sinon acknowledged dutifully as he sloshed forwards back up the hold. The rain here was even worse than out at sea. Visibility was down to maybe fifteen metres, and that was with the boat’s powerful lights shining down.

Sometimes, I think you have completely the wrong attitude for this.

Sinon sent a smile image at his friend. He carried on searching through the water for pieces of his kit lost during the last portion of the voyage.

The squad began to assess their position. Five had been injured seriously enough to disqualify them from the campaign altogether. Several more had suffered minor cracking in their exoskeletons, which the medical nanonics could cope with. (Surprisingly, the medical nanonics were working reasonably well.) The beach they’d wound up on was three kilometres south of their designated landing point, Billesdon. The truck at the back of the hold was so badly flooded it’d require a complete maintenance overhaul. The landing boat was wedged into the shingle, and would need towing off at high tide before it could return to the resort island for the marines.

On the plus side, the forward ramp worked, allowing the three functional jeeps out. Most of their armament was intact. All the other landing boats containing their regiment had made it ashore, though they were spread out along the coast. After a brief discussion with their Ops Room liaison, they agreed to make their way to Billesdon and regroup there. According to their original plan, the back-up forces and supplies would use the town’s harbour as their disembarkation point. But it still had to be secured.

By the time the boat’s forward ramp came down it was technically dawn. Hunched down in the almost nonexistent shelter provided by the starboard hull, Sinon couldn’t notice any difference. The only way he knew the jeeps were lumbering out was by using his affinity to see out through the driver’s eyes.

Looks like we’re on,choma said.

They rose to their feet, and checked their kit one last time. Sinon’s squad took up position by the second jeep. Intense headlight beams pierced ten metres through the deluge before the grey water defeated them. It was slow going. Their feet sank deep into the saturated shingle. Twice they had to push the jeep when its wide tyres dug themselves into axle-high ruts.

The squad was totally dependent on their guidance blocks. Satellite images taken before the possession provided them with a high-resolution picture of the cove, and the single narrow track leading away from it into the forest at the rear. Inertial guidance designated their position to within ten centimetres. Supposedly. There was no way of checking. Satellite sensors still couldn’t penetrate the cloud to give them a verified location reference. They just had to hope the bitek processors hadn’t been glitched since they loaded them back on the island.

Shingle gave way to tacky mud. Laggard waves of the yellow slough were creeping down the beach from the land behind. Clumps of grass and small bushes were being trawled along with it.

Great,sinon said as he waded in. At this rate, it’s going to take a week to get there.he was aware of other squads encountering similar difficulties all along the coast.

We need to get to higher ground,choma said. his affinity indicated a point on the guidance block image. That should give us better terrain to traverse.

The squad concurred, and changed direction slightly.

Any news on when this rain’s going to end?sinon queried their liaison.

No.

Not even Cochrane could be bothered to maintain the Karmic Crusader’s outlandish appearance. The rain was eroding their spirits at the same rate it ate into the valley’s soil. Three hours so far, without ever slackening.

Flares of lightning revealed what it was doing to their beautiful circular valley. Water cascaded over the lip, turning the orderly terraces into long curving waterfalls. At each stage it grew muckier and more glutinous as it carried the rich cultivated black soil with it. Avalanches of crops and sturdy young fruit trees were plunging down the ever-steepening slopes to sink without trace into the expanding lake. The lawn at the rear of the farmhouse was slowly submerged, bringing the water up to the ornate iron-framed patio doors.

By that time they were already loading the Karmic Crusader with their cases. Wind had ripped countless slates from the roof, letting the rain in to soak through the ceiling plaster.

“Just bear in mind, there’s only one road out of this valley,” McPhee said when the first rivulet came churning down the stairs into the living room. “And that runs above the river. If we’re going to get out of here, it’s got to be soon.”

Nobody had argued. They splashed their way upstairs to pack while he and Cochrane brought the bus out of the barn. Moyo was driving, keeping their speed to little more than walking pace. The dirt track along the side of the winding valley was crumbling at an alarming rate as sheets of filthy water poured down out of the trees above them, foaming round trunks and raking out the tangled undergrowth. His mind concentrated on giving the bus broader tyres in an attempt to gain some kind of traction on the quagmire surface. It was difficult; he had to get Franklin and McPhee to collaborate with him, meshing their thoughts together.

A tree crashed onto the track twenty metres ahead of them, uprooted by the relentless water. Moyo stamped down on the brakes, but the bus just kept slithering forwards. Not even the full focus of his energistic ability could affect the motion. An untimely reminder about his acute lack of omnipotence. He just managed to shout: “Hold on to something,” before the bus’s front collision buffer hit the trunk. The windscreen turned white, bulging inwards to absorb as much of the impact as it could before finally disintegrating into a hail of tiny plastic spheres. A fat bulb of twigs and spiky topaz leaves burst through the rent. Moyo tried to duck, but the seat straps held him fast. Instinct took over, and a stupendous ball of white fire engulfed the twigs. He screeched as his eyebrows smouldered and his hair shrivelled into black frazzled ash. The skin on his face went dead.

Steam belched along the interior as the Karmic Crusader juddered to a halt. Stephanie loosened her grip on the seat back in front of her, leaving deep indentations in the composite. The floor was tilted at quite an incline. What with the rain drumming on the roof, and the water from the slope pouring round them she could only just distinguish the stressed creaking coming from the bodywork. There was no way of telling what was causing it. Even her eldritch sense was cluttered with confusing shadowforms, the rain was equivalent to strong static interference.

Then water came gurgling eagerly along the aisle, pushing a fringe of filthy scum ahead of it. It glided over her shoes. She made an effort to banish the cloying steam, trying to make out the gloomy interior.

“My eyes!” It was just a whisper, but poignant enough to carry the length of the aisle. Everyone swung round towards the front of the bus.

“Oh god, my eyes. My eyes. Help me! My eyes !”

Stephanie had to hang on to the overhead racks, swinging one hand in front of the other, to make her way forwards. Moyo was still sitting in the driver’s seat, his body rigid. The incinerated remains of the tree’s branch cluster loomed centimetres from his face like some fabulously delicate charcoal sculpture. His hands were held close to his cheeks, trembling from the fear of what he’d find if he actually touched himself.

“It’s all right,” she said automatically. Her mind played traitor, fright and revulsion at what she saw surging to the surface of her thoughts. His skin had roasted away, taking most of his nose and all of his eyelids with it. Blood was dribbling out of the fissures between scabs of crisped corium layers. Both eyes had broiled, turning septic yellow as creamy fluids percolated out in a mockery of tears.

“I can’t see,” he cried. “Why can’t I see?”

She reached out and grasped both his hands. “Shush. Please, darling. It’ll be all right. You just got scorched by the flame, that’s all.”

“I can’t see!”

“Of course you can. You’ve got your sixth sense until your eyes recover. You know I’m here, don’t you?”

“Yes. Don’t go. ”

She put her arms round him. “I won’t.” He began shaking violently. Cold sweat was prickling his undamaged skin.

“He’s in shock,” Tina said. The others were gathering round, as much as the cramped aisle would permit. Their thoughts tempered by the sight of Moyo’s injuries.

“He’s all right,” Stephanie insisted in a brittle tone.

“It’s very common with major burn cases.”

Stephanie glared at her.

“Yo, man, give him a drag on this,” Cochrane said. He held out a fat reefer, sickly sweet smoke seeping from its glowing tip.

“Not now!” Stephanie hissed.

“Actually, yes, darling,” Tina said. “For once the ape man’s right. It’s a mild sedative, which is just what he needs right now.” Stephanie frowned suspiciously at the unaccustomed authority in Tina’s voice. “I used to be a nurse,” the statuesque woman continued, gathering in her black diamante shawl with a contemptuous dignity. “Actually.”

Stephanie took the reefer, and eased it gently into Moyo’s lips. He coughed weakly as he inhaled.

The bus groaned loudly. Its rear end shifted a couple of metres, sending them all grabbing for support. McPhee ducked his head to peer through the broken windscreen. “We’re not going anywhere in this,” he said. “We’d better get out before we get washed away.”

“We can’t move him,” Stephanie protested. “Not for a while.”

“The river’s nearly up level with this track, and we’ve got at least another kilometre and a half to go before we’re out of the valley.”

“Level? It can’t be. We were twenty metres above the valley floor.”

The Karmic Crusader’s headlights were out, so she sent a slender blade of white fire arching over the track. It was as if the land had turned to water. She couldn’t actually see any ground, slopes and hollows were all submerged under several centimetres of flowing yellow-brown water. Just below the flattish section which marked the track, a cavalcade of flotsam was sweeping along the valley. Mangled branches, smashed trunks, and snarled up mats of vegetation were all cluttered together; their smooth progress was ominous, nothing stood in their way. As she watched, another of the trees from the slope above slid down past the bus, staying vertical the whole time until it reached the river.

She didn’t like to think how many more trees were poised just above them. “You’re right,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Cochrane retrieved his reefer. “Feel better?” Moyo simply twitched. “Hey, no need for the downer. Just like grow them back, man. It’s easy.”

Moyo’s answering laugh was hysterical. “Imagine I can see? Oh yes, oh yes. It’s easy, it’s so fucking easy.” He started to sob, tapping his fingertips delicately over his ruined face. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“You stopped the bus,” Stephanie said. “You saved all of us. There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

“Not you !” he screamed. “Him! I’m saying sorry to him. It’s his body, not mine. Look what I’ve done to it. Not you. Oh god. Why did all this happen? Why couldn’t we all just die?”

“Get me the first-aid kit,” Tina told Rana. “Now!”

Stephanie had her arm round Moyo’s shoulder again, wishing there was some aspect of energistic power that could manifest raw comfort. McPhee and Franklin tried opening the door. But it was jammed solid, beyond even their enhanced physical strength’s ability to shift. They looked at each other, gripped hands, and closed their eyes. A big circular section of the front bodywork spun off into the bedlam outside. Rain spat down the aisle like a damp shotgun blast. Rana struggled forwards with the first-aid kit case, fiddling with the clips.

“This is no use,” Tina wailed. She plucked out a nanonic package, face wrinkled in dismay. The thick green strip dangled from her hand like so much wobbly rubber.

“Come on! There must be something in it you can use,” Stephanie said.

Tina rummaged through. The case contained several strips of nanonic package, diagnostic blocks—all useless. Even the phials of biochemicals and drugs used infuser patches, the dosage regulated by a diagnostic block. There was no non-technological method of getting the medication into his bloodstream. She shook her head weakly. “Nothing.”

“Damn it—”

The bus groaned, shifting again. “No more time,” McPhee said. “This is it. Out. Now.”

Cochrane clambered out of the hole, splashing down on the track next to the fallen tree. Keeping his footing was obviously difficult. The water came halfway up his shin. Rana followed him down. Stephanie gripped the seat straps holding Moyo in, and forced them to rot in her palms. She and Franklin hauled him up, and guided him through the hole. Tina followed them through, letting out martyred squeals as she struggled to find footholds.

“Lose those bloody heels, ye moron,” McPhee yelled at her.

She glared back at him petulantly, but her scarlet stilettos faded into ordinary pumps with flat soles. “Peasant. A girl has to look her best at all times, you know.”

“This is real you stupid cow, not a fucking disaster movie set. You’re no’ being filmed.”

She ignored him, and turned to help Stephanie with Moyo. “Let’s try and bandage his face, at the very least,” she said. “I’ll need some cloth.”

Stephanie tore a strip off the bottom of her saturated cardigan. When she passed it over to Tina it had become a dry, clean strip of white linen.

“I suppose that’ll be all right,” Tina said dubiously. She started to wrap it round Moyo’s eyes, making sure the stub remains of his nose were also covered. “Do try and think of your face as being normal, darling. It’ll all grow back, then, you’ll see.”

Stephanie said nothing, she didn’t doubt Moyo could repair the burns to his cheeks and forehead, but actually growing eyeballs back . . .

Franklin landed with a heavy splash, the last out of the bus. Nobody fancied trying to salvage their luggage. The boot was at the rear, and not even energistic power would help much clambering over the tree. Blasting the trunk to shreds would only send the bus spinning over the edge.

They spent a couple of minutes sorting themselves out. First priority was fending off the rain; their collective imagination produced a transparent hemisphere, like a giant glass umbrella floating in the air above them. Once that was established, they set about drying off their clothes. There wasn’t anything they could do about the water coursing across the track, so they gave themselves sturdy knee-high wellingtons.

Thus protected, they set off down the track, taking turns to guide and support a shivering Moyo. A bright globe of ball lightning bobbed through the air ahead and slightly to the side of them, hissing as raindrops lashed against it, but lighting the way and hopefully giving them some warning of any more falling trees. Apart from that, their only worry was making it out of the valley before the river rose up over the track. The driving rain and roaring wind meant they never knew when another tree slithered down the slope into the dark and battered Karmic Crusader, sending it plunging into the engorged river.

Billesdon was a cheery little town, tucked into the lee of a large granite headland on Mortonridge’s eastern coast. Sheltered from the worst of the breakers to come rolling in off the ocean, it was a natural harbour. District planners took advantage of that, quarrying the abundant rock to build a long curving quay opposite the headland, enclosing a wide deepwater basin with a modest beach at the back. The majority of boats which used it were trawlers and sandrakers, their operators earning a good living from Ombey’s plentiful fish and crustacean species. Even the local seaweed was exported to restaurants across the peninsula.

It also proved a haven for pleasure boats, with several sport fishing and yachting clubs setting up shop. With so many boats to service, the marine engineering companies and supply industries were quick to seize upon the commercial opportunities available and open premises in the town. Houses, apartment blocks, shops, hotels, entertainment halls, and industrial estates were thrown up all the way back along the shallow valley behind the headland. Villas and groves began to blossom along the slopes above, next to golf courses and holiday complexes.

Billesdon became the sort of town, beautiful and economically successful, that was presented as the Kingdom’s ideal, every citizen’s entitlement. Sinon’s squad reached the outskirts around midday. A trivial glimmer of light was penetrating the clouds, giving the world a lacklustre opacity. Visibility had risen to a few hundred yards.

Sinon wished it hadn’t bothered. They were poised just outside the town, not far above the sea. Cover was ostensibly provided by a spinney of fallen Fellots. None of the sturdy aboriginal trees remained standing; their dense fan-shaped branches had cushioned the way the trunks fell, leaving them at crazy angles. Rain kept their upper sections clean from the cloying mud, giving the cerise bark a glossy sheen. Choma was pressed up against a fat trunk at the edge of the spinney, waving a sensor block slowly ahead of him. The whole squad hooked in to the block’s bitek processor, examining the buildings ahead through a variety of wavelengths.

Not even the money lavished on Billesdon’s infrastructure had saved it from the rain. The terraces and groves above had dissolved, sending waves of mud slithering down into the prim streets, clogging the drains within minutes. Water raced along the roads and pavements, submerging tarmac and grass alike before it poured over the quayside wall. There were no boats left in the harbour; every single craft had been used to evacuate the population before Ekelund’s invasion reached the coast. In theory, that left the basin clear for the Liberation’s landing boats to bring the occupation troops and support materiel ashore.

Seems deserted,choma said.

Nothing moving,sinon agreed, but infrared’s useless in all this rain. There could be thousands of them tucked up nice and dry waiting for us.

Look on the bright side, the water should foul up that white fire of theirs.

Maybe, but that still leaves them with a whole load of options to use against us.

That’s good, keep thinking like that. Paranoia keeps you on your toes.

Thank you.

So what do you want to do now?

Simple. We’re going to have to go in and check it out one house at a time.

Okay, that’s what I signed up for.

They discussed it with the other squads encircling the town. Search areas were designated, tactics coordinated, blockades established on the main roads. Guyana was alerted that they were going in, and readied the low orbit SD platforms to provide groundstrike support if called for.

The outskirts ahead of Sinon were modest houses overlooking the harbour, home to the fishing families. They had large gardens, which had been completely washed away. Long tongues of mud-slimed debris were stretched down the slope, with small streams running down their centres where the water had gouged a channel into the sandy soil. Cover between the spinney and the first house was nonexistent, so the squad moved forwards with long gaps between each member. If the white fire did burst down on them, it would never be able to reach more than one at a time. Hopefully.

Sinon was third in the line. He held his machine gun ready, crouched low to provide the smallest possible target. Ever since they came ashore, he’d been thankful that his serjeant body had an exoskeleton; the rain didn’t bother him as much as it would if he had ordinary skin. Body armour had been considered and rejected, it had never been any good against the white fire before. The one concession they all made were shoes, a kind of sandal with deep-tread soles to give them traction.

Even so, it was hard to keep his feet from slipping as he hurried forward through the mud. The first house was ten metres ahead of him: a white box with long silvered windows and a large first floor balcony at the rear. Water poured out of the sagging guttering, diluting the slow-moving sludge that percolated round the base of the walls. He kept sweeping the machine gun nozzle across the facing wall, alert for any sign of motion from inside. Out in the open, wind was driving the rain straight at him. Even his body was aware of how cold it was; not that it was affecting his performance, not yet. Sensor blocks dangled from his belt, unused and redundant as he urged himself on. His training was his one and only defence now.

Choma had already reached the house ahead of him, ducking down to crawl under the windows. Sinon reached the back wall, and started to follow his friend along the side of the house. It was important to keep moving, not clump together. Palm fronds and limp knots of grass wrapped themselves round his ankles, slowing him. When he reached the largest window, he took one of the sensor blocks from his belt, and gingerly pressed it to the pane. The block relayed a slightly misty image of the room inside. A lounge, cosy, with worn furniture and framed family holograms on the wall. Water was spraying out of the ceiling’s central light fitting; the floor was invisible under a layer of mud which had pushed in from the hallway. An infrared scan showed no hot-spots.

Clean downstairs,he said. And my ELINT block is clear. Looks like nobody’s home.

We need to be sure,choma replied. Check out the upper floor. I’ll back you.

Sinon stood up, shouldering the machine gun. He took out a fission blade and sliced through the window frame, cutting out the lock. Raindrops sizzled on the glowing blade. The next two serjeants in his squad had already reached the house when he slipped inside. He pushed out a heavy breath from his lungs, the nearest he could get to a sigh. Actually out of the rain. Its impact was diminished to a dull drum roll on the roof. Choma splashed down into the thin mire beside him.

Hell, that’s better.

Affinity made Sinon aware of the rest of the squad; two of them were in the neighbouring houses, while the rest had started to spread out along the street. My ELINT’s still clear,he said.

Choma looked up at the ceiling, pointing his machine gun at it cautiously. Yes. I’m pretty sure there’s nobody up there, but we’ve still got to check.

Sinon made his way out into the hall, machine gun held ready. How can you be sure? You don’t know what’s up there.

Instinct.

Crazy.he put his foot on the first step, sandal sole making a squelching sound against the sodden carpet. We’ve barely got imagination operating inside these neural arrays, let alone an intuitive function.

Then I suggest you work one up fast, you’re going to need it.

Sinon turned so he could cover the landing as he ascended. Nothing moved except for the unending water, glistening as it ran down walls, curdling across carpets and tile floors, dripping from furniture. He reached the main bedroom, its door ajar. His foot kicked it hard, dinting the wood. The door slammed back amid a shower of droplets. Choma was right: it was empty. In every room, the signs of panicked departure. Drawers ransacked, clothes scattered about.

Nobody here,sinon reported to the squad when they cleared the front bedroom. Other house searches across the town were also proving negative as the squads moved in.

Ghost town,choma said, chortling.

I think you could find a better phrase.he looked down through the window, seeing squad members scuttling along the road outside. They were going against the flow of mud, their legs churning up deep eddies. Things were trundling along the street, carried along by the relentless current. Bulges in the smooth mud; there was no way of telling if they were stones or crumpled twigs. All of them moved at the same speed.

He held up a sensor block, panning it round in search of anomalous hot-spots. The image was overlapping his actual field of view, which meant he was looking straight at the house on the other side of the street when it exploded.

A serjeant had cut through the lock on a side door and crept cautiously inside, machine gun held ready. The ground floor must have been clear, because a second serjeant followed him in. Thirty seconds later four explosions detonated simultaneously. They were carefully placed, one at each corner of the house. Long flakes of concrete and lumps of stone shot out of the billowing flame. The whole house trembled: then, its crucial support destroyed, it collapsed vertically. Windows all along the street blew out under the impact of the blast wave. Sinon just managed to twist away in time, allowing his backpack to take the brunt of the flying shards.

The affinity bond boiled with hard, frantic thoughts. Both serjeants in the house were hammered by the explosions, their bodies wrecked. But the tough exoskeleton withstood the searing pressure for a few moments, long enough for the controlling personalities to instinctively begin the transfer. One of the orbiting voidhawks accepted their thoughts; then the house descended on their already weakened skulls.

“Shit!” Sinon yelled. He was curled up on the bedroom floor, aware of something being wrong with his left forearm. When he brought it up to his face, the exoskeleton was cracked in a small star pattern. Blood was seeping out of the centre. Rain lashed in through the empty window, washing the crimson stain away.

Are you all right?choma asked.

Yes . . . Yes, I think so. What happened?he stood up, peering down circumspectly onto the street. The mud and rain had swallowed almost all the immediate signs of the explosion. There was no smoke, no dust cloud. Just a pancake of rubble where the house had stood moments before. The tide of mud was already frothing round it, bubbling eagerly into cracks.

Choma pointed his machine gun along the street, radiating satisfaction that the squad had merged with the scenery. He knew where they were, but they weren’t easily visible. Where are they? Did anyone see where the white fire came from?

He was answered with a chorus of: No’s.

I don’t think it was white fire,sinon said. he ordered his block to replay the memory. The gouts of flame spearing out of each corner were orange, and they came from inside the house.

Sabotage?choma said.

Could be. They were perfectly placed for demolition.

They were on their way down the stairs when the second house exploded. It was on the far side of town, being examined by one of the other squads. One serjeant was killed, another two were injured beyond any field medic’s ability to patch up; they needed immediate evacuation. The rest of Sinon’s squad stood back as he clambered up over the mound of stone and girders which had been the house. When he was clear of the mud he ran a sensor pad over the exposed rubble close to one of the corners. The rain was washing the mess clean, but the chemical analysis still had enough residual molecules to work with.

Not good,he announced. This wasn’t white fire. There’s a definite trace of trinitrotoluene here.

Sod it!choma exclaimed. The bastards have booby trapped the whole town.

Parts of it. I doubt they’ve got the resources to rig every building.

But you can bet they’ve done the critical ones, as well as picking on houses at random,he said grudgingly. It’s what I would’ve done.

If you’re right, we’re going to have to treat each building as potentially hazardous. And we don’t even know what the trigger is.

I doubt it’ll be electronic. Our sensors would spot active processors, and the possessed wouldn’t be able to set them up in the first place. We’ll have to get some of the marine engineers in here to find out what kind of mechanism they’re employing.

Sinon’s response was lost amid a burst of anguish within the communal affinity band. Both of them instinctively turned to the west. The death of another two serjeants was all too clear. A warehouse in a town called Holywell had just exploded.

It’s not just here,choma said. Ekelund’s people have been busy.

Confirmation that most major towns around the periphery of Mortonridge were booby trapped came in to the Ops Room throughout the afternoon. Ralph sat in his office assessing the reports in a state of weary disbelief. Progress schematics were being revised on a fifteen minute basis by the AI. Their original timetable was constantly rearranged, targets being pushed further and further back.

“Truly amazing,” he told Princess Kirsten during the evening’s briefing. “We’re fifteen hours in, and already twenty behind schedule.”

“Conditions are pretty foul under there,” Admiral Farquar said. “I don’t see Ekelund’s people having a better time of it.”

“How would we know? Fifteen hours, and we haven’t had a single encounter with a live possessed. Christ, I mean I know no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, but no one ever said anything about it disintegrating before we even catch sight of them.”

“General Hiltch,” the Princess said sharply. “I’d like you to give me some positive factors, please. Have all the possessed simply vanished into this other realm they long for?”

“We don’t think so, no, ma’am. Pulling back from the coast and the firebreak is a logical move. They obviously worked it out in advance, hence the booby traps.”

“There’s circumstantial evidence that they’re still in the centre of Mortonridge,” Diana said. “Our satellite sensor scans are at their worst there. Radar and UV laser is beginning to break through the fringes, but when we try to probe the centre we get the same kind of hazing effect the possessed have always generated. QED, they’re still there.”

“That’s something, I suppose.”

“I also think the worst of the rain should be over by midday tomorrow. Results from the sensors we can rely on show us the cloud is thinning out. A lot of it is simply blowing out to sea now they’re no longer containing it. And of course, it’s falling, bigtime.”

“It certainly is,” Acacia said. She shuddered at the on-the-ground impressions affinity had delivered to her. “You’re going to have real problems with Mortonridge’s vegetation when this is all over. I doubt there’s a tree standing on the whole peninsula. I didn’t know rain like that could exist.”

“It can’t, normally,” Diana said. “This whole meteorology situation is highly artificial. The dispersal will influence the planet’s weather patterns for the rest of the year. However, it certainly isn’t sustainable; as I said, the heaviest falls will be over by midday tomorrow. After that, the serjeants will be able to make decent progress.”

“Over open country, possibly,” Ralph said. “But we’re going to have to vector in these booby traps.”

“Do we know what they are, yet?” the Princess asked.

“The majority so far are good old fashioned TNT,” Ralph told her. “Easily produced from the kind of chemicals available in most of our urban zones. We managed to get some marine engineers in to the afflicted towns to examine what they could. There’s no standard trigger mechanism, naturally enough. The possessed are using everything from trip wires to wired up door knobs. There’s just no quick way to deal with them. The whole point of the front line serjeants is to clear every metre of ground as they advance. Knowing you’re in danger just by walking in to a building is going to be very stressful for the entire army, I’m afraid. Doing the job properly is going to slow us down considerably.”

“So will the mud,” Janne said. “We know where the roads are, but no one’s actually seen a solid surface yet.”

“Progress down the M6 is slow,” Cathal confirmed. “The major bridges are out. We expected that, of course. But the mechanoids are having a lot of trouble erecting the replacements the convoys are carrying, they’re just not designed to operate in this kind of environment.”

“That situation should ease off tomorrow as well,” Diana said.

“The rain, yes; but the mud will still be there.”

“We’re going to have to learn to live with that, I’m afraid. It’s here for the duration.”

Did you know, the original ethnic Eskimos on Earth had several dozen words for snow,sinon said.

Really?choma answered from the other side of the winding ravine they were following.

Apparently so.

Excuse me for having my neural array assembled in too much of a hurry, but I don’t quite see the relevance to our current situation.

I just thought, it might be appropriate if we had an equal number of names for mud.

Oh right. Yes. Let’s see, we could have real crappy mud, bloody awful mud, pain in the ass mud, squeezes inside your exoskeleton and squelches a lot mud, and then there’s always the ultimate: drowning in mud.

You have a much higher emotional context than the rest of us, don’t you? Your jest about neural array assembly might be an unintentional truism.

You are what you bring to yourself.

Quite.sinon stepped over yet another fallen branch. It was mid afternoon of the Liberation’s second day. All the serjeants had received the revised schedule from the Fort Forward Ops Room, they were expected to move across the land at about half the speed originally intended. Very optimistic, Sinon thought.

It had taken until four o’clock in the morning to secure Billesdon. Now they knew they were dealing with TNT, the sensor blocks had been programmed to sniff it out. Given TNT’s relatively unstable nature, there were usually enough molecules left floating round inside the building to provide a positive detection. The damp didn’t help, but by and large, the blocks protected them.

Sinon himself had found two houses that were rigged. They’d learned to tie the blocks to the end of long poles, and push them through windows and doors already forced open by the mud. Each time, he’d designated the buildings, and they were left for the marine engineers to send mechanoids in at some later time. They’d still lost another eight serjeants before the town was cleared.

The landing boats had returned as a feeble dawn broke; carrying their supplies, more jeeps, and the first of the marines troops. The wind had calmed, although the rain was still as intense. And the big harbour basin was now clotting up with mud, hampering their manoeuvring as they docked. But by mid morning, the quayside was thick with activity. A degree of confidence returned to the serjeants. They were getting back on track. With the marines holding Billesdon, the whole battalion began to deploy back out along the coast ready for the push inland.

True to Diana Tiernan’s prediction, the rain did start to slacken by midday. Or at least, they convinced themselves it had; the light perforating the clouds was noticeably brighter. It did nothing to alleviate the misery of the mud. There had never been a landscape like it on any terracompatible Confederation world. Rover reporters stood on the edge of town, starkly silent as their enhanced retinas faithfully delivered the devastation back to the millions of citizens accessing the Liberation. Only the contours of the land remained stable, the mud had claimed everything else. There were no fields, or meadows, or scrubland, just a slick piss-brown coating, undulating and gurgling as it crept inexorably along. Mortonridge had become a single quagmire, extending from the sea to the horizon. Sensors in orbit showed the stain around the coast was already ten kilometres wide, and still spreading incursive fingers hungrily into the calm turquoise ocean.

Along with the rest of his squad, Sinon trudged through the forest, scrambling over the fallen trunks and their even more troublesome roots. Nothing had been left standing upright, although the tide of mud lacked the force to carry the trees with it. Superficially, the area resembled a bayou, although here the fractured wood was razor sharp, lacking the worn rottenness of plants growing in genuine swampland. Real bayous didn’t have so many dead animals, either.

Like the vegetation, Mortonridge’s indigenous creatures had taken a dreadful punishment. Birds and ground animals had drowned in their millions. Their corpses too, were part of the loose detritus carried along by the mud as it slid downwards into the ocean. Except in the forest, where the branches and root webs acted like nets. They were clustered round each tree, anonymous lumps, distending as they started to decompose. Heavy bubbles swelled across them like clumps of inflatable fungus as body gases forced a way out.

His battalion had been arranged in a line eighty kilometres wide, centred around Billesdon and its flanks merging with other battalions. This was the time when the army was stretched to its absolute maximum, completely encircling the entire peninsula. The AI had spaced the serjeants fifty metres apart right along the coast, planning on them yomping forwards together in a giant contracting sweep manoeuvre. If a possessed did try to hide out in the countryside they would never be more than twenty-five metres away from one of the serjeants. A combination of eyesight, infrared, SD satellite observation, and ELINT blocks ought to be able to locate them. Jeeps, trucks and reserve squads trailed behind the front line in columns one kilometre apart, ready to reinforce any section of the line that came under heavy attack. Mustered behind them were the prisoner-handling details.

When the gigantic formation was complete, the serjeants paused, reaffirming their commitment to the Liberation, celebrating the unity and accomplishment. Mortonridge was sealed off ahead of them, and now they were physically in place after all that had befallen, success appeared tangible. Doubt was banished.

“Go,” Ralph ordered.

The pattern started to waver as soon as the serjeants left the coast behind. Mountain roads and tracks had vanished altogether. Valley floors were now deep rivers of mud. No vehicles could plough through the broken remains of the forests. The AI began to guide them round obstacles, always keeping the reserves within optimum distance of the front line. Slowing some sections of the advance, directing extra serjeants to expand the line over steep terrain.

They had their first encounter with a possessed seventy-six minutes after they started. Sinon watched through another set of eyes as the serjeant up near the firebreak fired its machine gun at a heat corona coming from behind an upturned car. Sparkling bullets ripped straight through the composite bodywork. Tendrils of enraged white fire curved over the top in retaliation. Another serjeant opened fire. The entire line halted, waiting to see what would happen.

For a moment there was no effect. Then the white fire faded, turning translucent before the rain smothered it, drops steaming as they fell through. A man staggered out from behind the wrecked car, hands waving madly as the bullets thudded into him. Ripples of purple light blazed out from every impact, swathing his body in a wondrous pyrotechnic display. The serjeant upped the fire rate.

“Stop it!” the man screamed. He crashed to his knees, hands batting feebly to ward off the machine gun. “Stop it for fuck’s sake. I surrender, goddamn it.”

The serjeant eased off the trigger, and walked forwards. “Lie down flat, put your hands behind your head. Do not attempt to move or apply your energistic power.”

“Fuck you,” the man snarled through clenched teeth. His body was shaking badly.

“Down. Now!”

“All right, all right.” He lowered himself into the mud. “Mind if I don’t go any further? Even we can’t breathe mud.”

The serjeant took its holding stick from its belt, a dull silver cylinder half a metre long. It telescoped out to two metres, and a pincer clamp at one end opened wide.

“What the hell . . . ?” the man grunted as the serjeant closed the clamp round his neck.

“This restraint has a dead-man function. If I let go, or I’m made to let go, it will fire ten thousand volts into you. If you resist or refuse to obey any instruction, I will shove a current into you and keep turning it up until your energistic ability is neutralised. Do you understand?”

“You’re gonna die one day, you’re going to join us.”

The serjeant switched on a two hundred volt current.

“Jesus wept,” the man squealed.

“Do you understand?”

“Yes. Yes, fuck. Turn it off. Off!”

“Very well. You will now leave this body.”

“Or what, asshole? If you zap me too hard we both die. Me and my host.”

“If you do not leave of your own volition, you will be placed in zero-tau.”

“Fuck. I can’t go back there.” He started sobbing. “Don’t you understand? I can’t. Not there. Please. Please, if you’ve got an ounce of humanity in you, don’t do this. I’m begging you.”

“I’m sorry. That is not an option. Leave now.”

“I can’t.”

The serjeant pulled on the holding stick, forcing the possessed to his feet. “This way.”

“What now?”

“Zero-tau.”

The cheering in the Ops Room was deafening. Ralph actually grinned out at them from his office, the image of the captured possessed being led away lingering in his mind. It might work, he thought. It just might. He remembered walking out of Exnall, the girl crying limply in his arms, Ekelund’s mocking laughter in the air.

“Enjoy your victory with the girl,” she’d sneered. His only personal success in that entire frightful night.

“Two down,” Ralph whispered. “Two million to go.”

The fish were dying. Stephanie thought that the oddest thing. This rain should be their chance to take over the whole world. Instead the ever-thickening mud was clogging up their gills, preventing them from breathing. They lay on the surface, being pushed along by the leisurely waves of water, their bodies flapping madly.

“We should like hollow out some logs, man, use them as canoes. That’s what our ancestors used to do, and those cats were like really in tune with nature,” Cochrane suggested when they cleared the end of the valley.

They’d only just made it, the sluggish river was leaking over the top of the track. At times it seemed as if the whole surface of the valley was on the move. They stood above the gurgling edge of the flow, and watched the gargantuan outpouring spread out to surge on across the lowlands.

“Fat lot of use that would be,” Franklin muttered grimly. “Everything’s heading down to the coast, and that’s where they are. Besides,” he gestured round extravagantly at the denuded valley. “What trees?”

“You are such a downer. I want some wheels, man. I have like totally had it with tramping through this shit.”

“I thought cars were spawned by the capitalist Establishment to promote our greed and distance us from nature,” Rana said sweetly. “I’m sure I heard somebody say that recently.”

Cochrane kicked at the fish flopping about round his feet. “Get off my back, prickly sister. Okay? I’m thinking of Moyo. He can’t handle this.”

“Just . . . quiet,” Stephanie said. Even she was waspish, fed up with the pettiness they were all displaying. The ordeal of the bus and then the track had stretched everyone’s nerves. “How are you?” she asked Moyo.

His face had returned to normal, the illusion swallowing his bandage and shielding his scabbed tissue from sight. Even his eyeballs appeared to dart about naturally. But he’d taken a lot of cajoling and encouragement to walk along the track. His thoughts had contracted, gathering round a centre of sullen self-pity. “I’ll be okay,” he mumbled. “Just get me out of this rain. I hate it.”

“Amen to that,” Cochrane chirped.

Stephanie looked round the shabby landscape. Visibility was still pretty ropy on the other side of their protective umbrella, though it was definitely lighter now. It was hard to believe this eternal featureless mire was the same vigorous green countryside they’d travelled across in the Karmic Crusader. “Well we can’t go that way,” she gestured at the cataract of muddy water rumbling away into the distance. “So I guess we’ll have to stick to this side. Anyone remember roughly where the road is?”

“Along there, I think,” McPhee said. Neither voice or mind-tone suggested much confidence in the claim. “There’s definitely a flat ledge. See? The carbon-concrete must have held up.”

“Till the foundation gets washed out from under it,” Franklin said.

Stephanie couldn’t honestly see any difference in the mud where he was pointing. “All right, we’ll go for it.”

“How far?” Tina demanded querulously. “And how long will it take to get there?”

“Depends where you’re heading, babe,” Cochrane said.

“Well I don’t know, do I? I wouldn’t ask if I did.”

“Any kind of building will do,” Stephanie said. “We can reinforce it against the weather ourselves. I just want us out of this. We can think what to do next when we’re rested up. Come on.” Stephanie gripped Moyo’s hand and began to walk in the direction the road was supposed to be. Fish tails slapped pitifully at her wellingtons.

“Oh man, it don’t make no difference what we decide. We know what’s like gonna happen.”

“Then stay here and let it,” Rana told the miserable hippie. She started off after Stephanie.

“I didn’t say I was in a rush.” The edge of the invisible shield moved towards Cochrane, and he scrambled after them.

“There was a village called Ketton on this road,” McPhee said. “I remember going through it before we turned off up to the farm.”

“How far?” Tina asked, her voice rising in hope.

Cochrane smiled happily. “Miles and miles, it’ll probably take us like about ten—twenty days.”

A ferocious jet of white fire squirted into the wall two metres above Sinon’s head. He flattened himself into the mud below as paint ignited and carbon-concrete blistered.

Coming from the shops, seventy metres right.it was hard to see with all the smoke mingling with the rain, but his retinas had a long purple after image scorched across them.

Got it,kerrial answered.

The white fire expanded into a thin circular sheet, rivulets trickled down, their tips wriggling purposefully towards Sinon. “Shit.” If he stayed the fire would get him, if he moved he’d lose the cover which the wall provided. And there must be several of them in the shops; two other serjeants were under attack as well.

Eayres was a nothing village in the guidance block’s memory. A cluster of houses clumped round a road junction, its population mostly employed by the local marble quarry. Who would expect the possessed to make a stand here? Expect the unexpected, Choma had chanted happily when the white fireballs burst open amid the squad.

Sinon saw Kerrial swing himself into position, bringing his machine gun to bear on the shops in the middle of the village. Bullet craters slammed across the brickwork in front of him. Then his body was being flung back, nerve channels shutting down. Blackness. Kerrial’s memories arose from his neural array to be absorbed by an orbiting voidhawk.

They’ve got guns!sinon broadcast.

Yes,choma said. I saw.

Where did they get them from?

This is the countryside, hunting is a sport here. Besides, did you think we had a monopoly?

The white fire rivulets had reached the ground. Steam roared up as they floated sinuously along the top of the mud towards Sinon. He scrambled to his feet, and jumped forward. The white fire behind him vanished. Another, brighter, spear lanced out of a shop’s fractured window. He hit the mud, rolling desperately as he brought his grenade launcher to bear.

You’ll kill them,choma warned. sinon’s right leg went dead as the white fire engulfed it. He slamfired the launcher, hand pumping the mechanism with cyborg intent.

Grenades thudded into the upper floor of the shop, detonating instantly. The ceiling split open, hurling down a torrent of rubble as the roof caved in. Three radiant lines of machine gun fire poured through the ground floor windows and into the tumult inside. The white fire evaporated into tiny violet wisps, splattering off Sinon’s leg. He scrambled up, and pushed himself hard for the buildings dead ahead, dragging his useless leg along. Crashing through the first door to land in a deserted bar.

Clever,choma said. I think that’s got them cold.

The white fire had gone out everywhere. Serjeants converged on the little row of prim shops, walking forwards steadily, firing their machine guns continually. The squad had responded to the possessed like antibodies reacting to an incursive virus. Flowing in towards the village from both sides, the reserve squad racing forward. A miniature version of the noose contracting around Mortonridge. They had it encircled within minutes. Then began their advance.

Seventeen of them walked through the smoke that whirled along Main Street, impervious to the flames roaring out of the buildings all around. Their gunfire was concentrated on the shops, aiming their vivid bullets through any gap they could find. Weird lights flickered inside, as if someone had activated a nightclub hologram rig. Steam fountained out through windows and cracks in the wall.

“All right. Enough. Enough , God damn it. We’re through.”

The ring of serjeants held their places ten metres from the central shop, feet apart, juddering in time to the roaring guns.

“ENOUGH. We surrender.” The machine guns fell silent.

Lumps of stone stirred on the mound of rubble which had been the shop’s upper floor, spinning down to splash into the ubiquitous mire. Limbs began to emerge amid a welter of coughing. Six possessed squirmed free, holding up their hands and blinking uncomfortably. More serjeants moved forwards to clamp their necks with holding sticks.

Elana Duncan reached Eayres two hours later. The fires were out by then, extinguished by the rain. She whistled appreciatively as she climbed out of the truck, a sound violent enough to make the marines wince. “Must have been a hell of a fight,” she said in envy. The trucks had halted in the village’s main street. Over half of the buildings around her had been flattened into small hillocks of debris; of those that remained, few were left with roofs. Naked, heat-twisted girders skewered up into the gloomy sky. Black soot stains smeared over entire walls were already dissolving under the rain to reveal deep bullet pocks.

Marines began jumping down from the other trucks in the convoy. It was a familiar routine by now. Urban zones, whatever the size, were occupied by a garrison. They served as emergency reserves and staging post; also a transitory field hospital a lot of the time. The possessed weren’t giving up without a fight. The marine lieutenant in charge started shouting orders, and the troops fanned out to secure the perimeter. Elana and the other mercs began unloading their truck with the help of five mud-caked mechanoids.

First off was a programmable multipurpose silicon hall. An oval twenty-five metres long, with open archways along the sides. It was a standard Kulu Royal Marine corps issue, designed for tropical climates, with an overhang in anticipation of heavy showers, and allowing a constant breeze to filter through. Ordinarily ideal for a place like Mortonridge. Now, they were having to direct the mechanoids to bulldoze up a base from soil and stone which they then sealed over with fast-set polymer. It was the only way to keep the hall’s floor above mud level.

Once that was up, they started moving the zero-tau pods in. A double file of serjeants marched down the main street, escorting three possessed. Elana splashed out to greet them. She enjoyed this part of her duty.

One of the possessed had given up, a man in his late sixties. She’d seen that before. Filthy, torn clothes. Not bothering to heal his wounds. Even the rain was allowed to soak him. The other two were more typical. Dignity intact. Clothes immaculate, not a scratch on them. The rain bounced off as if they had a frictionless coating. Elana gave one of them a long look. A woman in a prim antique blue suit, white blouse with a lace collar, and pearl necklace. Her hair was a solid bottle blonde coiffure that could have been carved from rock for all the wind affected it. She gave Elana a single distasteful glance, defiantly arrogant.

Elana nodded affably at the serjeant guarding her, whose leg was wrapped in a medical package tube. “Humm, she’s the third one of these today. And I thought that woman was unique.”

“Excuse me?” the serjeant asked.

“They enjoy historical figures. I’ve been accessing my encylopedia’s history files ever since this campaign started, trying to place them. Hitlers are quite popular, so’s Napoleon and Richard Saldana, then there’s Cleopatra. Somebody called Ellen Ripley is a big favourite with the women, too; but none of my search programs have managed to track her down yet.”

The blue-suited woman looked dead ahead, and smiled a secret smile.

“Okay,” Elana said. “Bring them in.”

The mercenaries were hooking the zero-tau pods up to their power cells, datavising diagnostics through the management processors. Elana’s ELINT block gave a warning bleep. She rounded on the three prisoners, pulling a high-voltage shockrod from her belt. Her voice boomed out from her facial grille, echoing round the hall.

“Cut that out, shitbrains. You lost, and this is the end of the line. Too late to argue about it now. The serjeants might be too honourable and decent to fry your bodies, but I’m not. And this is my part of the operation. Got that?” The ELINT block quietened. “Good. Then we’ll get along just fine in your final minutes in this universe. Any last minute cigarettes, you can indulge yourselves. Otherwise just keep quiet.”

“I see you have found an occupation which obviously suits you.”

“Huh?” She glanced down at serjeant with the injured leg.

“We met at Fort Forward, just after arriving. I am Sinon.”

Her three claws snapped together with a loud click. “Oh yes, the cannon fodder guy. Sorry, you all look alike to me.”

“We are identical.”

“Glad to see you survived. Though God knows how you managed it. Trying to storm ashore through that weather was the dumbest military decision since the Trojans took a shine to that horse.”

“I think you’re being unduly cynical.”

“Don’t give me that crap. You must have a decent dose of it too, if you’ve survived this long. Remember the oldest military rule, my friend.”

“Never volunteer for anything?”

“Generals always fuck up bad.”

The first zero-tau pod opened. Elana pointed her shock-rod at the blue-suited woman. “Okay, Prime Minister, you first.” Sinon kept the holding stick round her neck as she backed in. Metal manacles closed round her limbs, and Elana switched on a mild current. The woman glared out, her face drawn back with the effort of fighting the electricity.

“Just in case,” Elana told Sinon. “We had a few try to break free once they finally realize their number’s up. You can take the holding stick off now.” The clamp sprang open, and Sinon stood clear. “You going to leave all nice and voluntarily?” Elana asked. The front of the zero-tau pod was already swinging shut. The woman spat weakly. “Didn’t think so. Not you.”

The zero-tau pod turned midnight black. Elana heard a hiss of breath from one of the waiting possessed, but didn’t say anything.

“How long do you leave them in there?” Sinon asked.

“Cook them for about fifteen minutes. Then we open up to see if they’re done. If not, it’s just back in for progressively longer periods. I’ve had one hold out for about ten hours before, but that was the limit.”

“That sounds suspiciously like enjoyment to me.”

Elana waved the next possessed into his pod. “Nothing suspicious about it. General Hiltch, God fuck him, says I’m not allowed in the front line. So this is the second best duty as far as I’m concerned. I don’t take marine discipline too good. Sitting with a bunch of those pansy-asses in a place like this counting raindrops would have me thrown off-planet inside of a day. So as I’m technologically competent, me and my friends requested this placement. It works out fine. Army’s short of skilled techs who can also handle the noise if the possessed start to panic: we fit the bill. And this way I get to see the bastards booted out of their bodies. I know it’s happening.”

The second possessed was put in a zero-tau pod. He didn’t resist. Then the third zero-tau pod was activated. Elana aimed the shock rod at the last possessed, the apathetic one. “Hey, cheer up. This is your lucky day, looks like the reserves got called out. You’re on, kid.” He gave her a broken look and grimaced. His features melted, shrinking back to reveal a wizened face with anaemically pale skin.

“Catch him,” Elana yelled. The man’s legs buckled. He pitched forward into her arms. “Thought that one might quit,” she said in satisfaction.

Choma removed the holding stick’s clamp from around his neck. Elana eased him down onto the floor, calling for blankets and some pillows. “Damn it, we haven’t had time to unpack the medical gear yet,” she said. “And we’re going to need it. Those bastards.”

“What’s the matter?” Sinon asked.

Elana’s claw sliced through the man’s raggedy shirt, exposing his chest. There were strange ridges swelling out of his skin, mimicking the lines of muscle a healthy twenty-year-old mesomorph might have. When she prodded one with the tip of a claw, it sagged like a sack of jelly.

“They always go for perfection,” she explained to Sinon and Choma. “Assholes. I don’t know what that energistic power is, but it screws up their flesh real bad under the illusion. Sometimes you get fat deposits building up, that’s pretty harmless; but nine times out of ten, it’s tumours.”

“All of them?” Sinon asked.

“Yep. Never satisfied with what they’ve got. I’m sure it’s a metaphor for something, but I’m buggered if I can figure out what. We’re having to ship everyone who gets de-possessed back to Xingu and into one of the major hospitals. They’re overflowing already, and they don’t have enough nanonic packages to go around. Another week of this, and the entire Ombey system is going to go into medical meltdown. And that’s not taking you guys into account; you’re not exactly emerging unscathed from the Liberation.”

“Can we help?”

“Not a thing you can do, sorry. Now if you could clear out . . . I’ve got to try and organize some sort of transport for this batch. Hell, I wish we had hovercraft, they’re the only things that can travel properly over this swamp. That dickhead Hiltch won’t allow any planes in under the cloud yet.”

Sinon and Choma left her and another couple of mercenaries running medical scanners over the unconscious man.

All of them?sinon repeated gloomily. the prospect kindled a sensation of alarm, in itself a worrying development. He hadn’t configured himself to be waylaid by impulsive emotions. Do you know what that means?

Trouble,choma declared. Real bad trouble.