“Sorry about them,” Colonel Longhurst said.
“Not a problem for me,” Ralph replied.
“You shouldn’t play up to scenes like that,” Cathal said in annoyance as they made their way to the camp’s headquarters. “It’s undignified. At least you could hold a proper press conference with vetted questions.”
“This is as much propaganda as it is physical war, Cathal,” Ralph said. “Besides, you’re still thinking like an ESA officer: tell nobody, and tell them nothing. The public wants to see authority in action on this campaign. We have to provide that.”
Convoys of supply trucks were still arriving at the camp, Colonel Longford explained as he took them on an inspection tour. The Royal Marine engineering squads had little trouble securing the programmable silicon igloos; this section of land was several metres above the mud of the valley floor. But there were logistics problems with supplying the troops.
“It’s taking the trucks fifteen hours to get here from the coast,” he said. “The engineers have virtually had to rebuild the damn road as they went along. Even now there are some sections that are just lines of marker beacons in the mud.”
“I can’t do anything about the mud,” Ralph said. “Believe me, we’ve tried. Solidifying chemicals, SD lasers to bake it; they’re no good on the kind of scale we’re dealing with here.”
“What we really need is air support. You flew out here.”
“This was the first inland flight,” Janne Palmer said. “And your landing field could barely accommodate the hypersonic. You’ll never be able to handle cargo planes.”
“There’s plenty of clear high ground nearby, we can build a link road.”
“I’ll look into authorizing it,” Ralph said. “We should certainly consider flying in the serjeants ready for the assault on the town.”
“Appreciate that,” the colonel said. “Things out here are a little different than the AI says they should be.”
“That’s one of the reasons I’m here, to see how you’re coping.”
“We are now. It was bedlam the first day. Could certainly have done with the planes to evac the injured and the depossessed out. That ride back to the coast isn’t doing them any good.”
They came to the big oval hall where Elana Duncan and her team had set up shop. The massive boosted mercenary greeted Ralph with a casual salute of her arm, clicking her claws together. “Not much ceremony in here, General,” she said. “We’re rather too crowded for that right now. Go see whatever you want, but don’t bother my people, please, they’re kind of busy right now.”
Ten zero-tau pods were lined up down the centre of the hall, all of them active. The big machines with their thick power cables and compact mosaic of components looked strangely out of place. Or it could be out of era, Ralph acknowledged. The rest of the hall was given over to cots for the serjeants, a field hospital whose primitiveness dismayed him. Elana’s mercenaries were carrying large plastic bottles and rolls of disposable paper towels, doing their rounds along the dark bitek constructs. There was a strong chemical smell in the air which Ralph couldn’t place. He had some distant memory of it, but certainly not one indexed by his neural nanonics, nor a didactic memory—although they were notoriously inaccurate when it came to imparting smells.
Ralph went over to the first serjeant. The construct was sucking quietly at the tube of a clear polythene bag containing its nutrient syrup, a liquid like thin honey. “Did you get hit by the mortars?”
“No, General,” Sinon said. “I wasn’t here for the Catmos Vale incident. I am, I believe, one of the lucky ones. I have participated in six assaults which resulted in a possessed being captured, and received only minor injuries during the course of those actions. Unfortunately, that means I have walked the whole way here from the coast.”
“So what happened?”
“Moisture exposure, General. Impossible to avoid, I’m afraid. As I said, I was slightly injured previously, resulting in small cracks within my exoskeleton. Although they are not in themselves dangerous, such hairline fissures are ideal anchorages for several varieties of aboriginal fungal spores.” He indicated his legs.
Now that he knew what he was looking for, Ralph could see the long lead-grey blotches crisscrossing round the serjeant’s lower limbs; they were slightly fuzzy, like thin velvet. When he glanced along the row of cots, he could see some serjeants where the fungus was full grown, smothering their legs in a thick furry carpet, like soggy coral.
“My God. Does that . . .”
“Hurt?” Sinon enquired. “Oh no. Please don’t be concerned, General. I don’t feel pain, as such. I am aware of the fungus’s presence, of course. It does itch rather unpleasantly. The major problem is derived from its effect on my blood chemistry. If left unchecked the fungus would extrude a quantity of toxins that my organs will be unable to filter out.”
“Is there a treatment?”
“Funnily enough, yes. An alcohol rub to eradicate the bulk of the fungus, followed with iodine, appears to be effective in eliminating the growth. Of course, further exposure to these conditions will probably reintroduce the spores, especially as they appear to thrive in this current humidity.”
“Iodine,” Ralph said. “I thought I knew that smell. Some of the Church clinics on Lalonde used the stuff.” The incongruity of the situation was starting to nag at him. He could hardly be playing the role of older officer giving comfort to a young trooper. If Sinon followed usual Edenist lines, he must have been at least a hundred and fifty when he died. Older than Ralph’s grandfather.
“Ah, Lalonde. I never visited. I used to be a voidhawk crew member.”
“You were lucky; I was posted there for years.”
Somebody started wailing, a piteous gasping cry of bitterness. Ralph looked up to see a couple of the boosted mercenaries helping a man out of a zero-tau pod. He was wrapped in tattered grey clothes, almost indistinguishable from the folds of pale vein-laced flesh drooping from his frame. It was as if his skin had started to melt off him.
“Aww shit,” Elana Duncan snapped. “Excuse me, General, looks like we’ve got another crash course anorexic.” She hurried over to help her colleagues. “Okay, let’s gets some protein infusers on him pronto.” The de-possessed man was puking a thin greenish liquid on the floor, an action which was almost choking him.
“Come on,” Ralph said. “We’re just in the way here.” He led the others out of the hall; ashamed that the most helpful thing he personally could do was run away.
* * *
Stephanie went out on to the narrow balcony and sat in one of the cushioned deck chairs next to Moyo. From there she could look both ways along Ketton’s high street where squads of Ekelund’s guerrilla army marched about. All signs of the mud deluge had been ruthlessly eradicated from the town, producing a pristine vision of urban prosperity. Even the tall scarlet trees lining the streets and central park were in good health, sprouting a thick frost of topaz flowers.
They had been billeted in a lovely mock-Georgian town house, with orange brick walls and carved white stone window lintels. The iron-railed balcony ran along the front, woven with branches of blue and white wisteria. It was one of a whole terrace of beautiful buildings just outside the central retail sector. They shared it with a couple of army squads. Not quite house arrest, but they were certainly discouraged from wandering round and interfering. Much to Cochrane’s disgust.
But Ekelund and her ultra-loyalists controlled the town’s diminishing food supply, and with that came the power to write the rules.
“I hate it here,” Moyo said. He was slumped down almost horizontally in his chair, sipping a margarita. Four empty glasses were already lined up on the low table beside him, their salt rims melting in the condensation. “The whole place is wrong, a phoney. Can’t you sense the atmosphere?”
“I know what you mean.” She watched the men and women thronging the road below. It was the same story all over Ketton. The army gearing up to defend the town from the ser
jeants massing outside. Fortifications were first conceived as ghostly sketches in the air, and then made real by an application of energistic strength. Small factories around the outskirts had been placed under Delvan’s command. He had his engineers working round the clock to churn out weapons. Everybody here moved with a purpose. And by doing so, they gave each other confidence in their joint cause.
“This is fascist efficiency,” she said. “Everybody beavering away as they’re told for her benefit, not their own. There’s going to be so much destruction here when the serjeants come in. And it’s all so pointless.”
His hand wavered in the air until he found her arm. Then he gripped tight. “It’s human nature, darling. They’re afraid, and she’s tapped into that. The alternative to putting up a fight is total surrender. They’re not going to go for that. We didn’t go for that.”
“But the only reason they’re in this position is because of her. And we weren’t going to fight. I wasn’t.”
He took a large drink. “Ah, forget about it. Another twenty-four hours, and it won’t matter any more.”
Stephanie plucked the margarita from his hand and set it down on the table. “Enough of that. We’ve rested here quite long enough. Time we were moving on.”
“Ha! You must be drunker than me. We’re surrounded. I know that, and I’m fucking blind. There’s no way out.”
“Come on.” She took his hand and pulled him up from the chair.
Muttering and complaining, Moyo allowed himself to be led inside. McPhee and Rana were in the lounge, sitting round a circular walnut table with a chess game in front of them. Cochrane was sprawled along a settee, surrounded by a haze of smoke from his reefer. A set of bulky black and gold headphones were clamped over his ears, buzzing loudly as he listened to a Grateful Dead album. Tina and Franklin came in from one of the bedrooms when they were called. Cochrane chortled delightedly at the sight of Franklin tucking his shirt in. He only stopped at that because Stephanie caught his eye.
“I’m going to try and get out,” Stephanie told them.
“Interesting objective,” Rana said. “Unfortunately, la Ekelund is holding all the cards, not to mention the food. She’s hardly given us enough to live on, let alone build our strength back to a level where we can contemplate hiking through the mud again.”
“I know that. But if we stay in the town we’re going to get captured by the serjeants for sure. That’s if we survive the assault. Both sides are upping their weapons hardware by an alarming degree.”
“I told you this would happen,” Tina said. “I said we should have stayed above the valley. But none of you listened.”
“So what’s the plan?” Franklin asked.
“I haven’t got one,” Stephanie said. “I just want to change the odds, that’s all. The serjeants are about five miles away from the outskirts. That leaves a lot of land between us and them.”
“So?” McPhee asked.
“We can use that space. It certainly improves our chances from staying here. Maybe we can sneak through the line in all the confusion when they advance. We could try disguising ourselves as kolfrans; or we could hide out somewhere until they pass by us. It’s got to be worth a try.”
“A non-aggressive evasion policy,” Rana said thoughtfully. “I’m certainly with you on that.”
“No way,” McPhee said. “Look, I’m sorry Stephanie, but we’ve seen the way the serjeants move forwards. You couldn’t slide a gnat between them. And that was before the mortar attack. They’re wise to us using the ferrangs as camouflage now. If we go out there, we’re just going to be the first to be de-possessed.”
“No, no, wait a minute,” Cochrane said. He swung his feet off the settee and walked over to the table. “Our funky sister might be on to something here.”
“Thanks,” Stephanie grunted sarcastically.
“Listen, you cats. The black hats and their UFOs are like scoping the ground out with microscopes, right? So if we like cooperate with each other and dig ourselves a nice cozy bunker out in the wilderness, we could sit tight down there until they’ve invaded the town and moved off.”
Several surprised looks were passed round. “It could work,” Franklin said. “Hot damn!”
“Hey, am I like the man, or what?”
Tina sneered. “Definitely a what.”
* * *
“I keep expecting to be asked for my ident disk,” Rana said as the seven of them walked down Ketton’s main street.
They were the only people not wearing military fatigues. Ekelund’s army gave them suspicious glances as they passed by. Cochrane’s tinkling bells and cheery, insulting waves didn’t contribute to making them inconspicuous. When they walked out of the house, Stephanie considered junking her dress and adopting the same jungle combat gear style. Then she thought to hell with that. I’m not hiding my true self anymore. Not after what I’ve been through. I have a right to be me.
Near the outskirts, the road led between two rows of houses. Nothing as elaborate as the Georgian town house, but comfortably middle-class. The barrier between town and country was drawn by a deep vertical-walled ditch, with thick iron spikes driven into the soil along the top. Some kind of sludge trickled along the bottom of the trench, stinking of petrol. The arrangement wasn’t terribly practical, it was more a statement than a physical danger.
Annette Ekelund was waiting for them, lounging casually against one of the big spikes. Several dozen of her army were ranged beside her. Stephanie was quite sure the hulking guns they had slung over their shoulders would be impossible to lift without energistic power fortifying their muscles. Three-day stubble seemed compulsory for the men, and everyone wore ragged sweatbands.
“You know, I’m getting a bad case of déjà vu here,” Annette said with ersatz pleasantry. “Except this time you haven’t got a good cause to tug my heartstrings. In fact, this is pretty close to treachery.”
“You’re not a government,” Stephanie said. “We don’t have loyalties.”
“Wrong. I am the authority here. And you do have obligations. I saved your pathetic little arse, and all these sad bunch of losers you have trailing round with you. I took you in, protected you, and fed you. Now I think that entitles me to a little loyalty, don’t you?”
“I’m not going to argue this with you. We don’t want to fight. We won’t fight. That gives you three choices, you either kill us here on the spot, imprison us which will take up valuable manpower, or let us go free. That’s the only issue, here.”
“Well that’s actually only two choices then, isn’t it? Because I’m not diverting anybody from their assigned duty to watch over ingrate shits like you.”
“Fine, then make your choice.”
Annette shook her head, genuinely puzzled. “I don’t get you, Stephanie, I really don’t. I mean, where the fuck do you think you’re going to go? They do have us surrounded, you know. An hour walking down that road, and you’re straight into zero-tau. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. And you will never ever get out of jail again for the rest of time.”
“We might be able to dodge them in open ground.”
“That’s it? That’s your whole game plan? Stephanie, that’s pitiful even for you.”
Stephanie pressed closer to Moyo, unnerved by the level of animosity running free in Annette’s thoughts. “So what’s your alternative?”
“We fight for our right to exist. It’s what people have been doing for a very long time. If you weren’t such a small-town imbecile you’d see that nothing easy ever comes free; life is cash on delivery.”
“I’m sure it is, but you haven’t answered my question. You know you’re going to lose, what’s the point in fighting?”
“Let me explain,” Soi Hon said. Annette flashed him a look of pure anger, then nodded permission.
“The purpose of our action is to inflict unacceptable losses on the enemy,” Soi Hon said. “The serjeants are almost unstoppable here on the ground, but the political structure behind
them is susceptible to a great many forces. We might not win this battle, but our cause will ultimately triumph. That triumph will come sooner once the Confederation leadership is forced to retreat from ventures like this absurd Liberation. Their victory must be as costly as we can make it. I ask you to reconsider your decision to leave us. With your help, the time we have to spend in the beyond will be reduced by a considerable margin. Just think, the serjeant you exterminate today may well be the one that breaks the camel’s back.”
“You lived before Edenism matured, didn’t you?” Moyo asked.
“The habitat Eden was germinated while I was alive. I didn’t survive long after that.”
“Then I have to tell you, what you’re talking is total bullshit. The political ideologies you’re basing your justifications on are centuries out of date—just like all of us. Edenism has a resolution which is frightening in its totality.”
“All human resolve can be broken in the end.”
Moyo turned his perfect, unseeing eyes to Stephanie, and twisted his lips in a humble grimace. “We’re doomed. You can’t reason with a psychopath and a demented ideologue.”
“You should tell your boyfriend to watch his lip,” Annette said.
“Or what?” Moyo laughed. “You said it, psycho mamma, you told Ralph Hiltch all those weeks ago: the possessed don’t lose. It doesn’t matter how many bodies of mine you blast away. I will always be back. Learn to live with me, because you can never escape. For all of eternity you have to listen to me whining on and on and on and on . . . How do you like that, you dumb motherfucker?”
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