“This one’s a walker.â€
The news of Trafalgar was whispered through the beyond until it reached Monterey, whereupon it sparked jubilation in some quarters.
“We beat the bastards,â€
The uniform sheet of light which appeared above Norfolk to signify daytime wasn’t quite as glaring now. Although still several weeks away, the onset of autumn was plain to see for those who knew their weather lore.
Luca Comar stood at his bedroom window, looking out over the wolds as he’d done every morning at daybreak since . . . Well, every morning. There was a particularly thick mist covering the estate today. Beyond the lawns (unmown for weeks now, damn it), all he could see were the old cedars, great grey shadows guarding Cricklade’s orchards and pastures. Gravely reassuring in their size and familiarity.
It was completely still outside. A morning so insipid it couldn’t even coax native animals out of their burrows. Dewdrops cloaked every leaf, their weight bending branches out of alignment, making it seem as though every bush and tree was sagging from apathy.
“For heaven’s sake come back to bed,â€
Quinn used simple timing rather than risk sending his orders out through London’s communication net. No matter how innocuous the message, there was always a chance the supercops would pick up the chain. Even though they thought they’d eliminated him in the Parsonage Heights strike, they would be watching for signs of other possessed in the arcology. Standard procedure. Quinn would have done the same in their place. However, their paranoia had been quenched amid the flames and death engulfing the tower’s penthouse. With that came a slight relaxation of effort, falling back to established routine rather than determined proactive searches. It gave him the interlude he desired.
By necessity, London was now destined to be the capital of His empire on Earth. Such honour would be visited upon the ancient city and its outlying domes only by using possessed as disciples to deliver His doctrine. But there were inherent problems recruiting them. Even they were reluctant to follow the gospel of God’s Brother to its exacting, painful letter. As he’d learned on Jesup, violent coercion was often required to obtain the wholehearted cooperation of non-sect members. Even Quinn was limited in the number of people
he could intimidate at once. And without that strict adherence to His cause, the possessed would do what they always did and snatch this world from the universe. Quinn couldn’t allow that, so he’d adopted a more tactical strategy, borrowing heavily from Capone’s example, exploiting the hostility and avarice most possessed exhibited on their return to the universe.
The possessed from the Lancini had been carefully and stealthily scattered throughout the arcology and provided with very detailed instructions. Speed was the key. Come the appointed hour, each one would enter a preselected building and open the night staff to possession. When the day workers arrived, they would be possessed one by one, jumping the numbers up considerably but stopping short of exponential expansion. Quinn wanted about 15,000 by ten o’clock in the morning.
After that had been achieved, they would surge out of their buildings and physically disperse across the arcology. By then, there would be little the authorities could do. It took an average of five to ten well-armed police officers to eliminate one possessed. Even if they could track them via electronic glitches, they simply didn’t have the manpower available to deal with them. Quinn was gambling that Govcentral wouldn’t use 15,000 SD strikes against London. The rest of the population would be his hostages.
While that was going on, Quinn himself would be establishing a core of loyalists who would venture forth to exert a little discipline: again, a hierarchy based on the Organization. The newly emerged possessed would be taught that they had to maintain the status quo, and encouraged to target the police and local government personnel—anyone who could organize resistance. A second stage would see them shutting down the transport routes, then going on to seize power, water, and food production centres. A hundred new
fiefdoms would emerge, whose only obligation was obedience and tribute to the new Messiah.
With his empire founded, Quinn intended to put the non-possessed technicians to work on secure methods of transport that would enable him to carry the crusade of God’s Brother to fresh arcologies. Eventually, they would gain access to the O’Neill Halo. From there, it was only a matter of time until His Night fell across this whole section of the galaxy.
The night after the Parsonage Heights incident, patrol constables Appleton and Moyles were cruising their usual route in central Westminster. It was quiet at two o’clock in the morning when their car passed the old Houses of Parliament and turned down Victoria Street. There were few pedestrians to be seen walking along outside the blank glass facades of the government agency office buildings which transformed the start of the street into a deep canyon. The constables were used to that; this was a bureaucrat district after all, with few residents or nightlife to attract anyone after the shops and offices closed.
A body fell silently out of the black sky above the lighting arches to smash into the road thirty metres ahead of Appleton and Moyles. The patrol car’s controlling processor automatically reversed power to the wheel hub motors, and turned the vehicle sharply to the right. They braked to a halt almost directly beside the battered body. Blood was flowing out of the jump-suit’s sleeves and trouser legs to spread in big puddles across the carbon-concrete surface.
Appleton datavised a priority alert to his precinct station, requesting back-up; while Moyles ordered Victoria Street’s route and flow processors to divert all traffic away from them. They emerged from the patrol car with their static-bullet carbines held ready, holding position behind the armoured doors. Retinal implants scanned round in all
spectrums, motion detector programs in primary mode. There was nobody on the pavements within a hundred metres. No immediate ambush potential.
Cautiously, they started scanning the sheer cliffs of glass and concrete on either side, hunting for the open window from which the body had come. There wasn’t one.
“The roof?â€
Right from the start, Al knew it was going to be a bad day.
First it was the body. Al was hardly a stranger to blood, he’d seen and been responsible for enough slaughter in his time, but this was turning his stomach. It had been a while before anyone noticed poor old Bernhard Allsop was missing. Who was going to care that the little weasel wasn’t getting underfoot like usual? It was only when he skipped a couple of duty details that Leroy finally got round to asking where he was. Even then, it wasn’t an urgent request. Bernhard’s processor block didn’t respond to datavises, so everyone assumed he was goofing off. A couple of guys were asked to keep an eye out. After another day, Leroy was concerned enough to bring it up at a meeting of senior lieutenants. A search was organized.
The security cameras found him eventually. At least, they located the mess. Confirming first what, then who it was had to be done in person.
There was a quite extraordinary amount of blood smearing the floor, walls, and ceiling. So much so, Al figured that more than one person had been whacked. But Emmet Mordden said the quantity was about right for a single adult male.
Al lit a cigar, puffing heavily. Not for pleasure; the smoke
covered the smell of decaying flesh. Patricia’s face was creased up in dismay as they stood around the corpse. Emmet held a handkerchief over his nose as he examined the remains.
The face was recognisably Bernhard. Though even now Al remained slightly doubtful. It was as though the skin had been roughly rearranged into Bernhard’s features. A caricature rather than a natural face. Al had seen doctored photos before, this was the body equivalent.
“You’re sure?â€
The STNI-986M was a basic VTOL utility jet (unimaginatively nicknamed Stony); subsonic, with a blunt-tube fuselage which could carry either twenty tonnes of cargo or a hundred passengers. Seven New Washington Navy (NWN) Transport Command squadrons of the durable little vehicles had been flown to Ombey when the President answered their ally’s call for military assistance to liberate Mortonridge. Ever since General Hiltch authorized aircraft to fly over secured areas of Mortonridge, they’d become a familiar sight to the occupation troops. After Ketton, they’d been invaluable in supporting the new frontline advance policy which had spread the serjeants dangerously thin over the ground as they divided the peninsula into confinement zones. Outbound from Fort Forward they would deliver food, equipment, and ammunition to the upcountry stations; on the return they invariably evacuated the most serious body-abuse cases of ex-possessed for medical treatment.
Even on airframes intended for rugged duty, full-time usage was producing maintenance problems. Spare parts were also scarce; Ombey’s indigenous industries were already struggling to keep frontline equipment and the Royal Marine
engineering brigades going. All the Stony squadrons had experienced mid-flight emergency landings and unexplained powerdowns. The rover reporters covering the Liberation knew all about the STI-986M’s recent shortcomings, though it was never mentioned in their official reports. Not good for civilian morale. There was no outright censorship, but they all knew they were part of the Liberation campaign, helping to convince people that the possessed could be beaten. Standard wartime compromise, reporting what was in the army’s interest in order to get the maximum amount of information.
So Tim Beard cut back on his physiological input when the Stony carrying him and Hugh Rosler lifted from Fort Forward at dawn. He wanted to give the accessors back home a small feeling of excitement as the plane swept low across the endless steppes of dried mud, which meant toning down his body’s instinctive unease. It helped that he was sitting so close to Hugh, the pair of them wedged in a gap between a couple of composite drums full of nutrient soup for the serjeants. Hugh always seemed perfectly at ease; even when Ketton ripped itself free of the planet he’d stood up squarely, regarding the spectacle with a kind of amused awe while the rest of the rovers were crouched down on the quaking ground, heads buried between their legs. He also had a neat eye for trouble. There were a couple of occasions when the rover corps had been clambering over ruins when he’d spotted booby traps missed by the serjeants and Marine engineers. Not the greatest conversationalist, but Tim felt safe around him.
It was one of the reasons he’d asked Hugh to come along. This wasn’t a flight organized for them by the army, but the story was too good to wait for the liaison officer to get round to it. And good stories about the Liberation were becoming hard to find. But Tim had been covering military stories for twenty years now: he knew how to find his way round the archaic chain of command, which people to cultivate. Pilots were good material, and useful, almost as much as serjeants.
Finding a ride on the early flight among the crates and pods was easy enough.
The Stony curved away from Fort Forward and headed south, following the remnants of the M6. Once they’d settled into their two hundred metre operational altitude, Tim eased the buckle back on what was laughingly called his safety strap, and crouched down by the door port. Enhanced retinas zoomed in on the road below. He’d dispatched a hundred fleks back to the studio with the same view; by now the start of the M6 around the old firebreak was as familiar to the average Confederation citizen as the road outside their own home. But with each trip he progressed a little further along the road, deeper into the final enclaves of the possessed. In the first couple of weeks, it was astounding progress indeed. None of the rovers had to manufacture the optimistic buzz that pervaded their recordings. It was different today, there was progress, still, but it was difficult to capture the essence just by panning a shot from horizon to horizon.
The tactical maps urged on them by the army liaison officers had changed considerably from the original swathe of incriminating pink stretching across Mortonridge which delineated the possessed territory. At first the borders had contracted noose-style, then geographical contours showed up along the rim of pinkness, interfering with the rate of advance. After Ketton it had changed again. The serjeants had been deployed in spearhead thrusts, carving corridors through the possessed territories. Separation and isolation, General Hiltch’s plan to prevent the possessed from collecting in the kind of density which would kick off another Ketton incident. The current tactical map showed Mortonridge covered in slowly shrinking pink blotches separating from each other like evaporating puddles. Of course, no one actually knew what that critical number was which had to be avoided at all costs. So the serjeants toiled on relentlessly, guided by numerical simulations based on someone’s best
guess. And there were no more harpoon deluges to make the job easier, nor even SD laser fire to soften up a strongly defended position. The front line was back to clearing the land in the hardest way possible.
Tim’s retinas tracked keenly along the carbon-concrete ribbon which the Stony was following. Royal Marine mechanoids had bulldozed entire swamps of saturated soil from the road as the army swept down the spine of the peninsula. At times the single cleared carriageway was twenty metres below the tops of the new banks, as if it was some kind of cooled lava river confined to steep heat-erosion valleys. The sidewalls were solidified by chemical cement, bonding the slush together in artificial molecular clusters that traded their initial strength with a limited lifespan. Sunlight shimmered off them in vast sapphire and emerald defraction patterns as the Stony whisked by overhead. All the original bridges had been swept away, leaving destitute towers protruding from the mud at precarious angles. Of their replacements, no two were the same. Small gullies had simple scaffolding archways of monobonded silicon curving over their sluggish streams. Beautiful single-span suspension bridges leapt across gaps half a kilometre wide, their gossamer cables glinting like thin icicles in the clear dawn air. Programmable silicon pontoons carried the mesh-carpet road across broad valley floors in heroic relay.