“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 reinfo
rce 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 Night's Dawn Trilogy Page 282
