“What were they?” Stephanie asked. It seemed incredible that they were still in their bodies. Surely that kind of violence
would wipe them out?
“Some kind of orbital bombardment,” Moyo said. “It must have been aimed at Ekelund’s troops.” He didn’t sound too convinced.
“Aimed? It was everywhere.”
“Then why didn’t it hit us?” Rana asked. Moyo just shrugged. That was when the roar of the impact reached them, a drawn out
rumble loud enough to swallow any words.
Stephanie covered her ears, and looked up again. The cloud was in torment, its rumpled underbelly foaming violently. Ghostly
billows of luminescent purple air left behind by the harpoons snaked around the tightly packed whorls; the two of them flowing
against each other, yet never merging, like liquids with different densities. She frowned, blinking upwards as the light dimmed.
A thick slate-grey haze was emerging, oozing out of the cloud to swallow both the lightning and the tattered sheets of ion
vapour. It was expanding fast, darkening.
“Inside,” she said in a small voice as the last echoes of the explosion reverberated across the valley. They all turned to
look at her. The big drops of rain had returned. A breeze arose to stroke their clothes. “Get inside. It’s going to rain.”
They glanced up at the descending haze, awed and fearful as understanding reached them.
______
“Nothing!” Annette screamed furiously at the processor block. The primitive schematic displayed on its screen proved it was
functioning, yet nobody was answering her calls. “We’re cut off.”
Soi Hon studied the display on his block. “All the lines are down, from what I can see,” he said.
“Don’t be absurd, you can’t knock out an entire net,” Annette protested. Doubt stung. “It’s not possible.”
“I imagine that was the idea behind the bombardment,” Soi Hon replied, unperturbed. “It was rather spectacular, after all.
They wouldn’t expend that much effort for no reason. And we didn’t have the whole net functioning in the first place, only
the critical links.”
“Damn it, how the hell am I going to organize our resistance now?”
“Everyone has their original orders, and they have no choice but to fight. All this means is that you are no longer in charge
of the possessed.”
Even his complacency soured at the look she gave him.
“Oh really?” she asked dangerously.
The light began to fade outside. Annette strode across to the big front window. She’d taken over a folksy restaurant called
the Black Bull in the middle of Cold Overton, giving her a commanding position at the end of the broad main street. Fifty
vehicles were parked on the stone slabs of the market square outside, waiting for the troops who’d taken refuge in the nearby
shops and cafÉs. Milne and a few of his engineers were walking about, inspecting the equipment. There didn’t seem to be any
damage, though several of the harpoons had fallen just outside the village.
“Soi,” she said. “Take a couple of squads and check the roads. I want to know how quickly we can get out of here.”
“As you wish.” He nodded briskly, and made for the door.
“There’s a big group of us in Ketton,” she said, almost to herself. “That’s only ten kilometres west of here. We’ll link up
with them. Should be able to convince some civilians to join up, too. After that we can move on to the next group.”
“We could use runners to carry messages,” Delvan suggested. “That’s what we did back in my time. Communications were always
pretty damn poor close to the front.”
There was very little light left now. Annette saw Milne and the others running. There was no fear in their minds, just urgency.
Raindrops splattered against the window. Within seconds the whole of Main Street was awash. Gutters started to fill up, with
small whirlpools forming over the drains.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Soi Hon exclaimed, raising his voice against the noise. He was standing in the
open doorway, a waterproof poncho forming round his shoulders. The drumming sound of the huge drops was easily as loud as
the red cloud’s thunder had been. “And we saw some storms round the Pacific in my day, believe me.”
A rivulet of dirty water began to seep in around his feet, trickling round the tables. Annette couldn’t see anything outside
now, the rain was battering heavily against the glass, producing the kind of spume that normally topped ocean waves. Behind
that, there was only blackness.
Delvan moved up beside him to get a better look. “Nobody’s going anywhere in this.”
“Yes,” Annette agreed shakily. “You’d better wait.”
“How long, though?” Delvan muttered. “We didn’t think about this when we drew the cloud over us.”
“Don’t worry,” Soi Hon said. “Nobody’s going to do any fighting for a while. It’s just as bad for them. And at least we’re
inside.”
______
The landing boat surged forwards as soon as the dazzling corona from the kinetic harpoons lit up the sky. Sinon used the voidhawks’
vantage point to observe the giant splash of plasma sink into the dark mantle of cloud.
It’s expanding,
Acacia announced.
Confirm that, we’re tracking it.
Vast cyclonic spirals of cloud were stirring across the upper surface. Washed by Ombey’s pale moonlight, the movement appeared
almost majestic. Primeval forces had awoken. Along the edges of the cloud, gargantuan tornadoes began to spin away, careering
off over the sea.
The whole damn thing’s breaking up,
Choma said.
Sinon shared a shiver of consternation with the other serjeants; not just in his boat. All of them were facing the same onslaught.
He stared out over the prow, watching mountains of water on the move. A wind had risen from nowhere to blow straight at him.
We can’t turn back,
Choma said.
It’ll catch us on the open water. Best head for shore.
Sinon’s hand patted his lifebelt, seeking reassurance. The massif of cloud seemed to be hurtling towards them, a light-absorbing
void distending across the ocean.
Keep going,
was the decision concurred by the rest of the Edenists and General Hiltch’s command group. Every boat in the Liberation armada
rammed its engines to full, and met the stormfront head on.
It wasn’t rain they faced, not in the ordinary sense. The deluge crashing down over them was like standing under a waterfall.
As the clouds rampaged overhead, so the waves rose, as if seeking to bridge the gap. The landing boats were thrown around
pitilessly. Sometimes Sinon had to hold himself against a deck that was lifting over thirty degrees to the vertical. The jeeps
secured along the centre of the hold strained against their restraint cables as their weight was flung about in directions
the designers had never anticipated. Bilge pumps were wailing plaintively, to little effect. Sinon clung to a guard rail as
the cold water mounted steadily against his legs, sloshing between the hull walls. He was worried he’d get tossed overboard.
He was worried his newly assembled body would split along surgical lines as he strained muscles and tendons to hold on. He
worried that a jeep would break free and crush him. He worried they wouldn’t reach the beach before the rain and waves filled
the hold and sunk them.
Not even sharing the anxiety in the Edenist fashion did much to alleviate it. There was way too much distress bubbling through
the aether as the armada battled for shore. The Edenists in secondary support roles, safe away from the megastorm, along with
the voidhawks and their crews overhead, did their best to offer what reassurance and comfort they could to their beleaguered
kinsmen. But they all felt the death toll rising, compounding the alarm. Landing boats collapsed, pitched over, individual
serjeants lost their grip to drown amid the monster waves. Voidhawks laboured tirelessly to absorb the fresh memories of the
dying serjeant personalities.
______
A nausea suppression program went primary as an aghast Ralph watched the nightmare unfurling. Neatly tabulated icons blinked
up inside his mind, indicating the woeful progress the boats were making. Some were even being driven backwards as the gales
howled out from the land. He did what he could. For all it was worth. Ordering the ground forces along the firebreak to stay
put and dig in. Putting the medical teams on immediate standby. Designating search patrols for the aircraft, ready for the
time when it became feasible to fly.
Diana Tiernan and the AI couldn’t give him any estimate when that would be. There was no way of knowing the true weight of
water powering the storm. Radar scans from the SD sensor satellites to discover the depth and density were badly distorted
by the tremendous electrical discharges still churning madly over Mortonridge. All they could do was wait.
“We couldn’t have known,” Janne Palmer said. “Dealing with the possessed is one giant unknown.”
“We should have guessed,” Ralph answered bitterly. “At least considered it.”
“Best information we had was that the cloud was a couple of hundred metres thick,” Diana said. “That’s all it was on Lalonde
and every other planet they took over. But this blasted thing, it must be kilometres deep. They must have sucked every gram
of water from the air. There may even be some kind of osmotic process involved, siphoning it up out of the sea.”
“Damn those bastards,” Ralph spat.
“They are afraid,” Acacia said calmly. “They built the thickest, highest wall they could to keep us out. It’s human nature.”
Ralph couldn’t bring himself to answer the Edenist. It was Acacia’s people who were taking the brunt of the calamity. And
it was his plan, his orders, which had put them there. Anything he said would be pathetically inadequate.
Outside, the rain had reached Fort Forward, and was doing its best to wash the city’s programmable silicon structures into
the nearby river. Fast rivulets were gouging the soil away from their base anchors. Ops Room staff glanced round nervously
as banshee winds pummelled away at the walls. Fifty minutes after the kinetic harpoon barrage, the landing boats started to
reach the beaches.
“They’re coming through,” Acacia said. The first strands of confidence were starting to emerge within the combined Edenist
psyche as serjeants exported the feeling of sand crunching underfoot. Proof that success was possible, the sense of relief
which accompanied it. “It’s going to be okay, we’re going to make it.”
“Right,” Ralph croaked. One icon gleamed darkly at the centre of his woeful thoughts: 3129. The number of dead so far. And
we’re the only ones shooting.
______
An immense wave smacked the landing craft down on the beach with an almighty crunch. The blow sent Sinon skidding back along
the hold on his arse, limbs flailing. Water slowed his momentum quickly. He came to rest in a jumble of other serjeants, all
struggling to disentangle themselves. The three at the bottom were completely immersed. Affinity was supremely useful in coordinating
their movements, like unpicking a three dimensional puzzle.
They’d just got free when the next wave clobbered the side of the landing boat. It lacked the brutality of the previous one,
simply shoving the hull further up the beach, and twisting them at an angle.
Dry land!
Choma cried triumphantly.
Well… land, anyway,
Sinon acknowledged dutifully as he sloshed forwards back up the hold. The rain here was even worse than out at sea. Visibility
was down to maybe fifteen metres, and that was with the boat’s powerful lights shining down.
Sometimes, I think you have completely the wrong attitude for this.
Sinon sent a smile image at his friend. He carried on searching through the water for pieces of his kit lost during the last
portion of the voyage.
The squad began to assess their position. Five had been injured seriously enough to disqualify them from the campaign altogether.
Several more had suffered minor cracking in their exoskeletons, which the medical nanonics could cope with. (Surprisingly,
the medical nanonics were working reasonably well.) The beach they’d wound up on was three kilometres south of their designated
landing point, Billesdon. The truck at the back of the hold was so badly flooded it’d require a complete maintenance overhaul.
The landing boat was wedged into the shingle, and would need towing off at high tide before it could return to the resort
island for the marines.
On the plus side, the forward ramp worked, allowing the three functional jeeps out. Most of their armament was intact. All
the other landing boats containing their regiment had made it ashore, though they were spread out along the coast. After a
brief discussion with their Ops Room liaison, they agreed to make their way to Billesdon and regroup there. According to their
original plan, the back-up forces and supplies would use the town’s harbour as their disembarkation point. But it still had
to be secured.
By the time the boat’s forward ramp came down it was technically dawn. Hunched down in the almost nonexistent shelter provided
by the starboard hull, Sinon couldn’t notice any difference. The only way he knew the jeeps were lumbering out was by using
his affinity to see out through the driver’s eyes.
Looks like we’re on,
Choma said.
They rose to their feet, and checked their kit one last time. Sinon’s squad took up position by the second jeep. Intense headlight
beams pierced ten metres through the deluge before the grey water defeated them. It was slow going. Their feet sank deep into
the saturated shingle. Twice they had to push the jeep when its wide tyres dug themselves into axle-high ruts.
The squad was totally dependent on their guidance blocks. Satellite images taken before the possession provided them with
a high-resolution picture of the cove, and the single narrow track leading away from it into the forest at the rear. Inertial
guidance designated their position to within ten centimetres. Supposedly. There was no way of checking. Satellite sensors
still couldn’t penetrate the cloud to give them a verified location reference. They just had to hope the bitek processors
hadn’t been glitched since they loaded them back on the island.