The Naked God - Flight nd-5

by Peter F. Hamilton

  There was no fatigue in the fashion of a genuinely human body, the tiredness and tingling aches. Instead blood sugar depletion and muscle tissue stress registered as mental warning tones within the neural array housing the controlling personality. Sinon thought they must be similar to a neural nanonic display, but grey and characterless rather than the full-spectrum iconographic programs which Adamists enjoyed. Interpreting them was simple enough, thankfully.

  He was actually quite satisfied with the body he now possessed (even though it was unable to smile at that particular irony for him). The deep scars of the serjeant’s assembly surgery were almost healed. What minimal restriction they imposed on his movements would be gone within a few more days. Even his sensorium was up to the standard of an Edenist body. Michael Saldana certainly hadn’t skimped on the design of the bitek construct’s genetic sequence.

  Acclimatisation to his new circumstances had twinned a growing confidence throughout the flight. A psychological boost similar to a patient recovering from his injuries as more and more of the medical packages became redundant. In this case shared with all the other serjeant personalities who were going through identical emotional uplifts, the general affinity band merging their emerging gratification into synergistic optimism.

  Despite a total lack of hormonal glands, Sinon was hot for the Mortonridge Liberation campaign to begin. He asked the Catalpa to share the view provided by its sensor blisters as the wormhole terminus closed behind them. The external image surged into his mind; featuring Ombey as a silver and blue crescent a hundred and twenty thousand kilometres ahead. Several settled asteroids swung along high orbits, grubby brown specks muffled by a fluctuating swirl of silver stardust as their industrial stations deflected spears of raw sunlight. Larger, more regular motes of light swarmed around Catalpa , its cousins emerging from their termini and accelerating in towards the planet.

  This particular squadron was comprised of just over three hundred of the bitek starships. It wasn’t even the first to arrive at the Kingdom principality today. The Royal Navy’s strategic defence centre on Guyana had combined its flight management operations and sensors with civil traffic control to guide the torrent of arriving starships into parking orbits.

  The voidhawks headed down towards the planet, merging into a long line as they spiralled into alignment over the equator. They shared the five hundred kilometre orbit with their cousins and Adamist starships from every star system officially allied to the Kingdom. Military and civil transports unloaded their cargo pods into fleets of flyers and spaceplanes; Confederation Navy assault cruisers had brought an entire battalion of marines, and even the voidhawks were eager to see the huge Kulu Royal Navy Aquilae-class starships.

  After reaching low orbit, the Catalpa had to wait a further eight hours before its spaceplane received clearance to ferry the first batch of serjeants down to Fort Forward. Sinon was on it as the night-shadowed ocean fled past underneath the glowing fuselage. Their little craft had aerobraked down to mach five when Xingu’s western coastline rose over the horizon ahead. The red cloud was just visible to the sensors, a slice of curving red light, as if the fissure between land and sky had been rendered in gleaming neon. Then their altitude dropped, and it sank away.

  They must know we’re here,choma said. With ten thousand spaceship flights hyperbooming across the ocean every day, they’ll hear us arriving if nothing else.in the twenty-fifth century, choma had been an astroengineering export manager based at Jupiter. Although he’d readily admitted to the other serjeant personalities that his personal knowledge-base of obsolete deep space startracker sensors was not very relevant to the Liberation, his main interest was strategy games, combined with the odd bit of role-playing. For himself and his fellow quirky enthusiasts, the kind of simulation arenas available to Edenists through perceptual reality environments were anathema. They wanted authentic mud, forests, rock faces, redoubts, heavy backpacks, heat, costumes, horse riding, marches, aching joints, flagons of ale, making love in the long grass, and songs around the campsite. To the amusement of the other inhabitants, they would take over vast tracts of habitat parkland for their contests; it was quite a faddish activity at the time. All of which made Choma the closest thing Sinon’s squad had to an experienced soldier.

  A lot of the old strategy game players had come out of the multiplicity to animate serjeant bodies. Slightly surprisingly, very few ex-intelligence agency operatives had joined them, the people whose genuine field operations experience would really have been valuable.

  Very likely,sinon agreed. Dariat demonstrated his perceptive ability to the Kohistan Consensus; no doubt the combined faculty of the Mortonridge possessed will provide them with some foreknowledge.

  That and the ring of starships overhead. The convoys aren’t exactly unobtrusive.

  But they are obscured by the red cloud.

  Don’t count on it.

  Does that worry you?sinon asked.

  Not really. Surprise was never going to be our strategic high-ground. Best we could hope for is the scale of the Liberation being a nasty shock to Ekelund and her troops.

  I wish I had experience of the combat situations we will be facing rather than theoretical memories.

  I expect that experience is going to be one thing you’ll be collecting plenty of, in a very short timespan.

  The Catalpa ’s spaceplane landed at Fort Forward’s new spaceport, racing along one of the three prefabricated runways laid out in parallel. Another was touching down forty-five seconds behind it; that managed to spark a Judeo of concern in Sinon’s mind. Even with an AI in charge of slotting the traffic together, margins were being stretched. Ion field flyers were landing and launching vertically from pads on the other side of the spaceport’s control tower at a much faster rate than the runways could handle spaceplanes.

  For the moment, the spaceport’s principal concern was to offload cargo and send it on to Fort Forward. The hangars were frantically busy, heavy-lift mechanoids and humans combining to keep the flow of pods going; any delay here would have a knock on effect right back up to orbit. Nearly all of the Liberation’s ground vehicles were assigned to carry cargo. Passenger vehicles were still up in orbit.

  Sinon and the others were given a static charge test by Royal Marines as they got to the bottom of the spaceplane’s stairs. That it was perfunctory was understandable, but Sinon was satisfied to see they did test everybody. As soon as they were cleared the spaceplane taxied away, joining a queue of similar craft waiting to take off. Another one rolled into place, extending its airstair. The Marine squad moved forward again.

  An Edenist liaison officer they never even saw told them that they were going to have to get to Fort Forward on foot. They were part of a long line of serjeants and marines marching along a road of freshly unrolled micro-mesh composite next to the new six-lane motorway. After they got underway, Sinon realized that it wasn’t only Confederation Marines who made up the human contingent of the Liberation’s ground forces. He walked over to a boosted mercenary taller than himself. The mercenary’s brown skin had exactly the same texture as leather, long buttress ropes of muscle were clumped round the neck, supporting a nearly-globular skull armoured with silicolithium like an all-over helmet. In place of a nose and mouth, there was an oval cage grill at the front, and the saucer eyes were set very wide apart, giving little overlap, normal apart from the blue-green irises, which appeared to be multifaceted.

  When Sinon asked, she said her name was Elana Duncan. “Excuse me for inquiring,” he said. “But what exactly are you doing here?”

  “I’m a volunteer,” Elana Duncan replied with an overtly feminine voice. “We’re part of the occupation force. You guys take the ground from those bastards, we’ll hold on to it for you. That’s the plan. Listen up, I know you Edenists don’t approve of my kind. But there aren’t enough marines to secure the whole of Mortonridge, so you’ve got to use us. That, and I had some friends on Lalonde.”

  “I don’t disapprove. If anythi
ng I’m rather glad there’s someone here who has actually been under fire before. I wish I had.”

  “Yeah? Now, see, that’s what I don’t get. You’re cannon fodder, and you know you’re cannon fodder. But it doesn’t bother you. Me, I know I’m taking a gamble, that’s a life-choice I made a long time ago.”

  “It doesn’t bother me, because I’m not human, just a very sophisticated bitek automaton. I don’t have a brain, just a collection of processors.”

  “But you got a personality, dontcha?”

  “This is only an edited copy of me.”

  “Ha. You must be very confident about that. A life is a life, after all.” She broke off, and tipped her head back, neck muscles flexing like heavy deltoids. “Now there’s a sight which makes all this worthwhile. You can’t beat those old warships for blunt spectacle.”

  A CK500-090 Thunderbird spaceplane was coming in to land. The giant delta-wing craft was at least twice the size of any of the civil cargo spaceplanes using the runways. Air thundered turbulently in its wake as it slipped round to line up on its approach path, large sections of the trailing edges bending with slow agility to alter the wing camber. Then a bewildering number of hatches were sliding open all across its fuselage belly; twelve sets of undercarriage bogies dropped down. The Thunderbird hit the runway with a roar louder than a sonic boom. Chemical rockets in the nose fired to slow it, dirty ablation smoke was pouring out of all ninety-six brake drums.

  “God damn,” Elana Duncan murmured. “I never thought I’d ever see an operation like this, never mind be a part of it. A real live land army on the move. I’m centuries after my time, you know, I belong back in the Nineteen and Twentieth Centuries, marching on Moscow with Napoleon, or struggling across Spain. I was born for war, Sinon.”

  “That’s stupid. You know you have a soul now. You shouldn’t be risking it like this. You have invented a crusade for yourself to follow rather than achieve anything as an individual. That is wrong.”

  “It’s my soul, and in a way I’m no different to Edenists.”

  Sinon felt a rush of real surprise. “How so?”

  “I’m perfectly adjusted to what I am. The fact that my goals are different to those of your society doesn’t matter. You know what I think? Edenists don’t get caught in the beyond because you’re cool enough under pressure to figure your way out. Well, me too, pal. Laton said there was a way out. I believe him. The Kiint found it. Just knowing that it’s possible is my ticket to exit. I’ll be happy searching because I know it’s not pointless, I won’t suffer like those dumbasses that wound up trapped. They’re losers, they gave up. Not me. That’s why I’m signed up on this mad Liberation idea, it’s just part of getting ready for the big battle. Good training, is all.”

  She gave his shoulder an avuncular pat with a hand whose fingers had been replaced by three big claws, and marched off.

  That’s an excess of fatalism,choma remarked. What a strange psychology.

  She is content,sinon answered. I wish her well in that.

  A large quantity of love had been invested in constructing the farmhouse. Even the Kulu aristocracy with their expensive showy buildings employed modern materials in their fabric. And Mortonridge was a designated rapid growth area, with government subsidies to help develop the farms. A resolutely middle-class province. Their buildings were substantial, but cheap: assembled from combinations of carbon concrete, uniform-strength pulpwood planks, bricks made from grains of clay cemented by geneered bacteria, spongesteel structural girders, bonded silicon glass. For all their standardisation, such basic components afforded a wealth of diversity to architects.

  But this was unmistakable and original. Beautifully crude. A house of stone, quarried with an industrial fission blade from a local outcrop; large cubes making the walls thick enough to repel the equatorial heat and keep the rooms cool without air conditioning. The floor and roof beams were harandrid timbers, sturdy lengths dovetailed and pegged together as only a master carpenter could manage. Inside, they’d been left uncovered, the gaps between filled with reed and plaster, then whitewashed. It was as historic as any of the illusions favoured by the possessed, not that anyone could mistake something so solid for an ephemeral aspiration.

  There was a barn attached at the end, also stone, forming one side of the farmyard. Its big wooden doors were swinging open in the breeze the day the Karmic Crusader pulled up outside. Stephanie Ash had been tired and fed up by the time they pulled off the main road and drove along the unmarked dirt track. Investigating it had been Moyo’s idea.

  “The road must lead somewhere,” he insisted. “This land was settled recently. Nothing’s had time to fall into disuse yet.”

  She hadn’t bothered to argue with him. They’d driven a long way down the M6 after handing the children over, a journey which meant having to pass back through Annette Ekelund’s army. This time they’d been pointedly ignored by the troops billeted in Chainbridge. After that they’d zigzagged from coast to coast looking for a refuge, somewhere self-sufficient where they could rest up and wait for the grand events beyond Mortonridge to play themselves out. But the towns in the northern section of the peninsula were still occupied, though there was a steady drift out to farms. They were unwelcome there; the possessed were learning to guard their food stocks. Every unoccupied farm they’d visited had been ransacked for food and livestock. It was a monotonous trend, and finding a functional power supply to recharge the Karmic Crusader was becoming more difficult.

  After the joy and accomplishment of evacuating the children, the comedown to excluded refugee status was hard. Stephanie hadn’t exactly lost faith, but the narrow road was no different to any of the dozens they’d driven down the last few days. Hope rebutted unfailingly each time.

  The road took the bus through a small forest of aboriginal trees, then dipped into a shallow, lightly-wooded valley which meandered extravagantly. A stream bubbled along the lush grassy floor, its speed revealing they were actually travelling up at quite an angle. After four kilometres, the valley ended by opening out into a nearly circular basin. It was so regular, Stephanie suspected it was an ancient impact crater. A lacework of silver brooks threaded their way down the sides, feeding a lake at the centre, which was the origin of the valley’s stream. The farmhouse stood above the shore, separated from the rippling water by a neatly trimmed lawn. Behind it, someone had converted the north-facing walls of the basin into stepped terraces, making a perfect sun-trap. The levels were cultivated with dozens of terrestrial fruit and vegetable plants; from citrus tree groves to lettuce, avocados to rhubarb. Almost all the aboriginal vegetation had been removed; even the south side looked as if it was covered in terrestrial grass. Goats and sheep were wandering around grazing peacefully.

  They all piled out of the Karmic Crusader, smiling like entranced children.

  “There’s nobody here,” Rana said. “Can you sense it? This whole place is empty.”

  “Oh goodness,” Tina exclaimed nervously. She took the last step off the bus’s stairs, her scarlet stilettos sinking awkwardly into the road’s loose-packed gravel surface. “Do you really think so? This is simply paradise. It’s just what we all deserve after everything we’ve done for others. I couldn’t bear us being thrown out by someone else claiming they were here first. It would be excruciating.”

  “There are no vehicles left,” McPhee grunted. “The owners probably received the Kingdom’s warning and cleared out before Ekelund’s people arrived in these parts.”

  “Lucky for them,” Rana said.

  “More so for us,” Moyo said. “It’s absolutely bloody perfect.”

  “I think the irrigation system is screwed,” McPhee said. He was shielding his eyes with a hand as he squinted up at the terraces. “There, see? There must be channels to divert the brooks so that each level receives a decent supply. But it’s spilling over like a waterfall. The plants will drown.”

  “No they won’t,” Franklin Quigly said. “It’s not broken. The power’s off
, and there’s no one here to manage it. That’s all. We could get it fixed inside of a day. That’s if we’re staying.”

  They all turned to look at Stephanie. She was amused rather than gratified by the compliment. “Oh I think so.” She smiled at her ragged little band. “We’re not going to find anywhere better.”

  They spent the rest of the day wandering round the farmhouse and the terraces. The basin was an intensive-cultivation market garden; there were no cereal crops on any of the terraces. There were signs of a hurried departure all through the building, drawers pulled out, clothes spilled on the shiny floorboards, a tap left running, two old suitcases abandoned half-packed in one of the bedrooms. But there was a lot of basic foodstuffs left in the pantry, flour, jams, jellied fruit, eggs, whole cheeses; a big freezer was filled with fish and joints of meat. Whoever the farm belonged to, they didn’t believe in modern sachets and readymade meals.

  Tina took one look inside the kitchen with its simple array of shining copper pots and pans, and sniffed with emphatic disapproval. “You can take the worship of all things rustic too far, you know.”

  “It’s appropriate to what we are now,” Stephanie told her. “The consumer convenience society cannot exist in our universe.”

  “Well just don’t expect me to give up silk stockings, darling.”

  Moyo, Rana, and McPhee scrambled up to the top of the basin to a small building they assumed was a pumphouse for the irrigation system. Stephanie and the rest started clearing out the farmhouse. By the third day, they’d got the terrace irrigation equipment working again. Not perfectly, their presence still glitched some of the management processors; but there was a manual back-up control panel in the pumphouse. Even the clouds’ gloomy claret illumination had grudgingly brightened as they established themselves and began exterting their influence. It wasn’t the pure sunlight which shone upon towns and larger groups of possessed, but the plants gleefully absorbed the increased rain of photons, and perked up accordingly.