They’d actually stopped recording interviews with the newly reprieved. Ombey’s population was becoming increasingly antagonised by their fellow citizens’ lack of gratitude.
Two hundred and fifty kilometres south of the old firebreak line, a big staging area had been laid out at the side of the M6, as if a batch of liquid carbon-concrete had squirted out from the edge of the motorway to stain the mud before solidifying. A single small road broke away from it to head out across the open country. There could have been an original feed road down below the hardening mires, but the Royal Marine engineering brigade had chosen to ignore it in favour of running their own route directly over newly surveyed ground, sticking to the most stable regions. Similar staging areas were strung along the whole length of the M6, flinging off side roads which mimicked the original branch roads. They were the supply lines for the army as it overran the towns; not so much for the benefit of the frontline serjeants, but the support teams and occupation forces which came in their wake.
This staging area was empty, though covered in mud-tracks showing just how many vehicles had been assembled here at one time. The Stony banked sharply above it, and swept away to chase along the supply road. A couple of minutes later they were circling the remnants of Exnall.
The occupation station’s landing field was a broad sheet of micro-mesh composite spread out across a flat patch of land on the (official) edge of town, with chemical concrete injected into the soil underneath. Mud still percolated through in patches where the chemicals hadn’t reached.
None of the cargo crew were surprised when Tim and Hugh jumped down out of the Stony’s open hatch. They just grinned as the two rovers strained to lift their feet from the sticky mud.
Tim opened a new memory cell file for his report, and quickly reduced his olfactory sensitivity. Most of the dead plant and animal life had been swallowed by the mud, but the peninsula’s constant natural showers kept uncovering them. Fortunately, the smell wasn’t anything like as bad as it had been to start with.
They hitched a lift on the back of a jeep into the occupation station which had been set up in the square at the end of Maingreen.
“Where was the DataAxis office?” Tim asked.
Hugh stared around, trying to make sense of the alien territory. “Not sure; I’d have to check with a guidance block. This is as bad as Pompeii the morning after.”
Tim kept recording as they splashed along the deep ruts in the mire, preserving Hugh’s comments about the few landmarks of his old town which he could recognize. The deluge had hit arboreal Exnall hard. Mud had toppled the big harandrid trees onto the buildings they’d once overhung so gracefully; crumpling the shops and houses even before the foundations were undermined. Sloping roofs constructed out of carbon hyperfilament beams had sheered off to twirl away across the currents of mud, momentum snapping them through the surviving pickets of tree stumps. A whole cluster of them had come to rest at the end of Maingreen, making it look as though half of the town’s buildings had been buried together up to their rafters. Facades had drifted about freely like architectural rafts until the gradually hardening mud began to anchor them fast. Where they lay across the roads, jeeps and trucks had driven straight over them, crunching parallel tyre tracks of bricks and planking deeper into the dehydrating march. Only the foundations and stubby, splintered remnants of ground-floor walls indicated the town’s outline, along with slumbering humps of mud-smothered harandrid.
Programmable silicon halls and igloos had been set up in the central civic district to serve as the occupation station; neither the town hall nor the police station remained intact. Army traffic sped along the narrow lanes through the new structures, while squads of serjeants and occupation troops marched between them. Tim and Hugh left the jeep to look around.
Hugh eyed the various slopes rumpling the landscape and consulted his guidance block. “This is about where it happened,” he said. “The crowd gathered here after Finnuala’s blanket datavise.”
Tim panned round the gloomy panorama. “What price victory?” he said softly. “This isn’t even the eye of the storm.” He zoomed in on several stagnant pools, examining the bent grass and weeds struggling at the edge. If vegetation was to return to this peninsula, it would spread out from fresh water, he reasoned. But these filthy, sodden blades served only to play host for a variety of brown fungal blooms which thrived in the humidity. He doubted they would last much longer.
They wandered through the occupation station, capturing random images of the army reorganising itself. Serjeant casualties lying in rows of cots in a field hospital. Engineers and mechanoids working on all types of equipment. The unending flow of trucks that trundled past, their hub engines humming angrily as they fought for traction in the mud.
“Hey, you two!” Elana Duncan shouted from across the road. “What the hell are you doing?”
They crossed over to her, dodging a pair of jeeps. “We’re rovers,” Tim told her. “Just looking round.”
Claws closed around his upper arm, preventing him from moving. He was pretty sure that if she wanted to, she could have snipped clean through the bone. She touched a sensor block to his chest. Not gently, either.
“Okay, now you.” Hugh submitted to the procedure without complaint.
“There aren’t any rover reporters scheduled to come out here today,” Elana said. “The colonel hasn’t cleared Exnall yet.”
“I know,” Tim said. “I just wanted to get ahead of the pack.”
“Typical,” Elana grunted. She retreated back into the hall where twenty bulky zero-tau pods had been set up. All of them had active infinite-black surfaces.
Tim followed her. “This your department?”
“You got it, sonny. I get to perform the final act of liberation on these great people we’re here to rescue. That’s why I wanted to know who you were. You’re not army, and you’re too healthy to be ex-possessed. I got to recognize that, it’s like second nature now.”
“Glad someone’s alert.”
“Knock it off.” Her head rocked up and down as she examined them. “If you want to ask questions, ask. I’m bored enough that I’ll probably answer. You’re here because this is Exnall, right?”
Tim grinned. “Well, this is where it all started. That gives me a legitimate interest. Showing the accessors that it’s been retaken and sanitised makes for a good piece.”
“Typical rover, put the story before anything else, like mundane security and common-sense safety. I should have just shot you.”
“But you didn’t. That means you’ve got confidence in the serjeants?”
“Could be. I know I couldn’t do what they’re doing. Still doing. Thought I could when I came here, but this whole Liberation is one big learning curve, for all of us, right? We just don’t do war like this any more, if we ever did. Even if a conflict goes on for a couple of years, individual battles are supposed to be brutal and fast. Soldiers take a break from the front, have some R & R, grab some stims and some ass before they go back. One side makes a few gains, the other knocks them back. That’s the way it goes, but this—it never stops, not for one second. Have you ever captured that in your sensevises? The real essence of what this is about? One serjeant loses concentration for one second, and one of those bastards will slip through. It’ll start up all over again on another continent. One mistake. One. This isn’t a human war. The weapon which is going to win this is perfection. The possessed? They have to commit to being a hundred per cent treacherous devious sons of bitches, never let up trying to sneak one of their kind past us. Our serjeants, now they have to be eternally vigilant, never ever walk along the wrong side of the road because the mud isn’t so deep and vile there. You’ve got no idea what that takes.”
“Determination,” Tim ventured.
“Not even close. That’s an emotion. That’s a way in to your heart, weakening you. That can’t be allowed here. Human motivations have to be abandoned. Machines are what we need.”
“I thought
that’s what the serjeants are.”
“Oh yeah, they’re good. Not bad at all for a first generation weapon. But the Edenists have got to improve on them, build some real mean mothers for the next Liberation. Something like us boosted, and with even less personality than the serjeants. I’ve got to know a few of them, and they’re still too human for this.”
“You think there’s going to be another Liberation?”
“Sure. Nobody’s come up with another method of kicking the bastards out of the bodies they’ve stolen. Until that happens, we’ve got to keep them on the run. I told you: show no weakness. Pick another planet, maybe one of those Capone infiltrated, and start rescuing it before they take it away. Let them know we’ll never let up chasing their asses out of our universe.”
“Would you join that next Liberation?”
“Not a chance. I’ve done my bit, and learned my lesson. This is too long. You wanted a story about what Exnall was like, you came a day too late. We still had some of the possessed around yesterday, waiting for zero-tau. They’re the ones you should have talked to.”
“What did they tell you?”
“That they hate the Liberation the same way we do. It’s wearing them down, they haven’t got enough food, the rain doesn’t stop, the mud climbs into bed with them each night. And ever since Ketton took that Ekelund bitch away, their organized resistance folded in. Now it’s just gone back to instinct, that’s why they fight. They’re losing it, because they’re human. They came back here because they were determined to end their suffering, right? That’s the ultimate human motivator. Anything to escape the beyond. But now they’re here, where they thought they wanted to be, they’ve got all their old flaws back. As soon as they became human again, it becomes possible to beat them.”
“Until they take their whole planet out of the universe,” Tim protested.
“Fine by me. That removes them from interfering with us any more. A stalemate in this war means we have won. Our purpose is to prevent them from spreading.”
“But even the war isn’t an end to this,” Hugh said. “Have you forgotten you have a soul? That you will die one day?”
Elana’s claws clacked irritably. “No, I haven’t forgotten. But right now I have a job to do. That’s what matters, that’s what’s important. When I die, I’ll confront the beyond fair and square. All this philosophising and moralising and agonising we’re doing, it’s all bullshit. When it comes down to it, you’re on your own.”
“Just like life,” Hugh said with a gentle smile.
Tim frowned at him. It was most unlike Hugh to offer any comment on death and the beyond; the one subject he (strangely) always avoided.
“You got it,” Elana boomed approvingly.
Tim said goodbye, and left her monitoring the zero-tau pods. “Live death like you live life, huh?” he chided Hugh when they were far enough away to be outside the range of the mercenary’s enhanced auditory senses.
“Something like that,” Hugh responded solemnly.
“Interesting person, our Elana,” Tim said. “The interview will need some tight editing, though. She’ll depress the hell out of anyone who hears her ranting on like that.”
“Perhaps you should let her speak. She’s been exposed to the possessed for a long time. Whether she admits it or not, that’s influenced her thinking. Don’t slant that.”
“I do not slant my reports.”
“I’ve accessed your pieces, you dumb everything down for your audience. They’re just a compilation of highlights.”
“Keeps them accessed, doesn’t it? Have you seen our ratings?”
“There’s more to news than marketing points. You have to include substance occasionally. It balances and emphasises those highlights you worship.”
“Shit, how did you ever wind up in this business?”
“I was made for it,” Hugh said, which he apparently found hilarious.
Tim gave him a bewildered glance. Then his neural nanonics reported his communications block was receiving a priority call from the Fort Forward studio chief. It was the news that the Confederation Navy had attacked Arnstat.
“Holy shit,” Tim muttered. All around him, marines and mercenaries were cheering and calling out to each other. Trucks and jeeps sounded their horns in continual blasts.
“That’s not good,” Hugh said. “They knew what the effect would be.”
“Damnit, yes,” Tim said. “We’ve lost the story.”
“An entire planet snatched away to another realm, and all that concerns you is the story?”
“Don’t you see?” Tim swept his arms round extravagantly, encompassing the occupation station in one gesture. “This was the story, the only one: we were on the front line against the possessed. What we saw and said mattered. Now it doesn’t. Just like that.” His neural nanonics astronomy program found him the section of dark azure sky where Avon’s star shone unseen. He glared at it in frustration. “Someone up there is changing Confederation policy, and I’m stuck down here. I can’t find out why.”
Cochrane saw it first. Naturally, he called it Tinkerbell.
Not quite limber enough to stay in a full lotus position for hours on end, the hippie was sprawled bonelessly on a leather beanbag, facing the direction Ketton island was flying in. With a Jack Daniels in one hand and his purple sunglasses in place he possibly wasn’t as alert as he should have been. But then, none of the other ten people sharing the top of the headland with him saw it.
They were, as McPhee complained later, looking out for something massive, a planet or a moon, or perhaps even Valisk. An object that would appear as a small dark patch amid the vanishing-point glare and slowly swell in size as the island drew closer.
The last thing anyone expected was a pebble-sized crystal with a splinter of sunlight entombed at its centre arrowing in out of the bright void ahead. But that’s what they got.
“Holy mamma, hey you cats, look at this,” Cochrane whooped. He tried to point, sending Jack Daniels sloshing across his flares.
The crystal was sliding over the cliff edge, its multifaceted surface stabbing out thin beams of pure white light in every direction. It swooped in towards Cochrane and his fellow watchers, keeping a level four metres off the ground. By then Cochrane was on his feet dancing and waving at it. “Over here, man. We’re here. Here boy, come on, come to your big old buddy.”
The crystal curved tightly, circling over their heads to their gasps and excited shouts.
“Yes!” Cochrane yelled. “It knows we’re here. It’s alive, gotta be, man; look at the way it’s buzzing about, like some kind of inter-cosmic fairy.” Slivers of light from the crystal flashed across his sunglasses. “Yoww, that’s bright. Hey, Tinkerbell, tone it down, baby.”
Delvan stared at their visitor in absolute awe, a hand held in front of his face to shield him from the dazzling light. “Is it an angel?”
“Naw,” Cochrane chortled. “Too small. Angels are huge great mothers with flaming swords. Tinkerbell, that’s who we’ve got here.” He cupped his hands round his mouth. “Yo, Tinks, how’s it hanging?”
Choma’s dark, weighty hand tapped Cochrane’s shoulder. The hippie flinched.
“I don’t wish to be churlish,” the serjeant said. “But I believe there are more appropriate methods with which to open communications with an unknown xenoc species.”
“Oh yeah?” Cochrane sneered. “Then how come you’re already boring her away?”
The crystal changed direction, speeding away to fly over the main headland camp. Cochrane started running after it, yelling and waving.
Sinon, like every other serjeant on the island, had turned to look at the strange pursuit as soon as Choma informed them of the crystal’s arrival. “We have an encounter situation,” he announced to the humans around him.
Stephanie stared at the brilliant grain of crystal leading Cochrane on a merry chase and let out a small groan of dismay. They really shouldn’t have let the old hippie join the forward watching gro
up.
“What’s happening?” Moyo asked.
“Some kind of flying xenoc,” she explained.
“Or probe,” Sinon said. “We are attempting to communicate with affinity.”
The serjeants combined their mental voice into a collective hail. As well as clear ringing words of greeting, mathematical symbols, and pictographics, they produced a spectrum of pure emotional tones. None of it provoked any kind of discernible answer.
The crystal slowed again, drifting over the headland group. There were over sixty humans camping out together now; Stephanie’s initial group had been joined by a steady stream of deserters from Ekelund’s army. They’d broken away over the past week, sometimes in groups, sometimes individually; all of them rejecting her authority and growing intolerance. The word they brought from the old town wasn’t good. Martial law was strictly enforced, turning the whole place into a virtual prison. At the moment, her efforts were focused on recovering as many rifles as possible from the ruins and mounds of loose soil. Apparently she still hadn’t abandoned her plan to rid the island of serjeants and disloyal possessed.
Stephanie stood looking up at the twinkling crystal as it traced a meandering course overhead. Cochrane was still lumbering along thirty metres behind. His annoyed cries carried faintly through the air. “Any reply yet?” she asked.
“None,” the serjeant told them.
People had risen to their feet, gawping at the tiny point of light. It seemed oblivious to all of them. Stephanie concentrated on the folds of iridescent shadow which her mind’s senses were revealing. Human and serjeant minds glowed within it, easily recognizable; the crystal existed as a sharply defined teardrop-filigree of sapphire. It was almost like a computer graphic, a total contrast to everything else she could perceive this way. As it grew closer its composition jumped up to perfect clarity; in a dimension-defying twist the inner threads of sapphire were longer than its diameter.
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