At first Stephanie had ignored them, employing a kind of bravado that was almost entirely alien to her. Everybody had, once
they’d reached the shelter (and
dryness
!) of the barn. The building didn’t amount to much, set on a gentle hillock, with a low wall of stone acting as a base for
composite panelling walls and a shallow roof. They’d stumbled across it five horrendous hours after setting out from the end
of the valley. McPhee claimed that proved they were following the road. By then, nobody was arguing with him. In fact, nobody
was speaking at all. Their limbs were trembling from exertion, not even reinforcing them with energistic strength helped much.
They’d long since discovered such augmentation had to be paid for by the body in the long run.
The barn had come pretty much at the end of their endurance. There’d been no discussion about using it. As soon as they saw
its dark, bleak outline through the pounding rain they’d trudged grimly towards it. Inside there was little respite from the
weather at first. The wind had torn innumerable panels off the carbotanium frame, and the concrete floor was lost beneath
a foot of mud. That didn’t matter, in their state, it was pure salvation.
Their energistic power renovated it. Mud flowed up the walls, sealing over the lost panels and turning to stone. The rain
was repelled, and the howl of the wind muted. Relief united them again, banishing the misery of the retreat from the valley.
It was an emotion which produced an overreaction of confidence and defiance. Now, they found it possible to ignore the occasional
mind-scream of anguish as another soul was wrenched from its possessed body by the peril of zero-tau. They cooperated gamely
in searching round outside for food, adopting a campfire jollity as they cleaned and cooked the dead fish and mud-smeared
vegetables.
Then the rain eased off, and the serjeants crunched forwards remorselessly. Food became very scarce. A week after the Liberation
began, they left the barn, tramping along the melted contour line which McPhee still insisted was the road. Even living through
the deluge under a flimsy roof hadn’t prepared them for the scale of devastation wrought by the water. Valleys were completely
impassable. Huge rivers of mud slithered along, murmuring and burbling incessantly as they sucked down and devoured anything
that protruded into their course.
Progress was slow, even though they’d now fashioned themselves sturdy hiking attire (even Tina wore strong leather boots).
Two days spent trying to navigate through the buckled, decrepit landscape. They kept to the high ground, where swathes of
dark-green aboriginal grass were the only relief from the overlapping shades of brown. Even they were sliced by deep flash
gorges where the water had found a weak seam of soil. There was no map, and no recognizable features to apply one against.
So many promising ridges ended in sharp dips down into the mud, forcing them to backtrack, losing hours. But they always knew
which way to travel. It was simple: away from the serjeants. It was also becoming very difficult to stay ahead. The front
line seemed to move at a constant pace, unfazed by the valleys and impossible terrain, while Stephanie and her group spent
their whole time zigzagging about. What had begun forty-eight hours ago as a nine mile gap was down to about two, and closing
steadily.
“Oh, hey, you cats,” Cochrane called. “You like want the good news or the bad news first?” He had taken point duty, striding
out ahead of the others. Now he stood atop a dune of battered reeds, looking down the other side in excitement.
“The bad,” Stephanie said automatically.
“The legion of the black hats is speeding up, and there’s like this stupendously
huge
amount of them.”
“What’s the good?” Tina squealed.
“They’re speeding up because there’s like a road down here. A real one, with tarmac and stuff.”
The others didn’t exactly increase their pace to reach the bedraggled hippie, but there was a certain eagerness in their stride
that’d been missing for some time. They clambered up the incline of the dune, and halted level with him.
“What’s there?” Moyo asked. His face was perfect, the scars and blisters gone; eyes solid and bright. He was even able to
smile again, doing so frequently during the last few days they’d spent in the barn. That he could smile, yet still refuse
to let them see what lay underneath the illusory eyeballs worried Stephanie enormously. A bad form of denial. He was acting
the role of himself; and it was a very thin performance.
“It’s a valley,” she told him.
He groaned. “Oh hell, not again.”
“No, this is different.”
The dune was actually the top of a steepish slope which swept down several hundred yards to the floor of Catmos Vale, a valley
that was at least twenty miles wide. Drizzle and mist made the far side difficult to see. The floor below was a broad flat
expanse whose size had actually managed to defeat the massive discharges of mud. Its width had absorbed the surges that coursed
out of the narrower ravines along either side; spreading them wide and robbing them of their destructive power. The wide,
boggy river channel which meandered along the centre had siphoned the bulk of the tide away, without giving it a chance to
amass in dangerously unstable colloidal waves.
Vast low-lying sections of the floor had turned directly into quagmire from the rain and overspill. Entire forests had subsided,
their trunks keeling over to lean against each other. Now they were slowly sinking deeper and deeper as the rapidly expanding
subsurface water level gnawed away at the stability of the loam. Watched over the period of a day or two, it was almost as
if they were melting away.
Small hillocks and knolls formed a vast archipelago of olive-green islands amid the ochre sea. Hundreds of distressed and
emaciated aboriginal animals scurried about over each of them, herds of kolfrans (a deer-analogue) and packs of the small
canine ferrangs were trampling the surviving blades of grass into a sticky pulp. Birds scuttled among them, their feathers
too slick with mud for them to fly.
Many of the islands just below the foot of the slope had sections of road threaded across them. The eye could stitch them
together into a single strand leading along the valley. It led towards a small town, just visible through the drizzle. Most
of it had been built on raised land, leaving its buildings clear of the mud; as if the entire valley had become its moat.
There was a church near the centre, its classic grey stone spire standing defiantly proud. Some kind of scarlet symbols had
been painted around the middle.
“That’s got to be Ketton,” Franklin said. “Can you sense them?”
“Yes,” Stephanie said uncomfortably. “There’s a lot of us down there.” It would explain the condition of the buildings. There
wasn’t a tile missing from the neat houses, no sign of damage. Even the little park was devoid of puddles.
“I guess that’s why these guys are like so anxious to reach it.” Cochrane jerked a thumb back down the valley.
It was the first time they’d actually seen the Liberation army. Twenty jeeps formed a convoy along the road. Whenever the
carbon-concrete surface left the islands to dip under the mud, they slowed slightly, cautiously testing the way. The mud couldn’t
have been very deep or thick, barely coming over the wheels. A V-shaped phalanx of serjeants followed on behind the jeeps,
big dark figures lumbering along quite quickly considering none of them was on the road. On one side of the carbon-concrete
strip, their line stretched out almost to the central river of mud; on the other it extended up the side of Catmos Vale’s
wall. A second train of vehicles, larger than the jeeps, was turning into the valley several miles behind the front line.
“Ho-lee shit,” Franklin groaned. “We can’t make that sort of speed, not over this terrain.”
McPhee was studying the rugged land behind them. “I cannot see them up here.”
“They’ll be there,” Rana said. “They’re on the other side of the river as well, look. That line is kept level. There’s no
break in it. They’re scooping us up like horse shit.”
“If we stay up here we’ll be nailed before sunset.”
“If we go down, we can keep ahead of them on the road,” Stephanie said. “But we’ll have to go through the town. I have a bad
feeling about that. The possessed there know the serjeants are coming, yet they’re staying put. And there’s a lot of them.”
“They’re going to make a stand,” Moyo said.
Stephanie glanced back at the ominous line moving towards them. “They’ll lose,” she said, morosely. “Nothing can resist that.”
“We’ve no food left,” McPhee said.
Cochrane used an index finger to prod his purple sunglasses up along the bridge of his nose. “Plenty of water, though, man.”
“There’s nothing to eat up here,” Rana said. “We have to go down.”
“The town will hold them off for a while at least,” Stephanie said. She resisted glancing at Moyo, though he was now her principal
concern. “We could use the time to take a break, rest up.”
“Then what?” Moyo grunted.
“Then we move on. We keep ahead of them.”
“Why bother?”
“Don’t,” she said softly. “We try and live life as we always wanted to, remember? Well I don’t want to live like this; and
there might be something different up ahead, because there certainly isn’t anything behind. As long as we keep going, there’s
hope.”
His face compressed to a melancholic expression. He held one arm out, moving his hand round to try and find her. She gripped
his fingers tightly, and he hugged her against him. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” she murmured. “Hey, you know what? The way we’re heading, it takes us right up to the central mountain range.
You can show me what mountain gliding is like.”
Moyo laughed gruffly, his shoulders trembling. “Look, guys, I hate to fuck up my karma any more by breaking up your major
love-in scene here, but we have to decide where we’re like going. Like
now
. This is one army that doesn’t take time out, you dig?”
“It has to be down to Ketton,” Stephanie said briskly. She eyed the long slope below. It would be slippery, but with their
energistic power they ought to cope. “We can get there ahead of the army.”
“Only just ahead,” Franklin said. “We’ll be trapped in the town. If we stay up here, we can still keep ahead of them.”
“Not by much,” McPhee said.
“And you’ll not have time to gather any food,” Rana said. “I don’t know about you, but I know I can’t keep this pace up for
much longer without eating a full meal. We must consider the practicalities of the situation. My calorie intake has been very
low over the last couple of days.”
“It’s a permanent downer,” Cochrane said. “Your practical problem is that you don’t eat properly anyway.”
She glared at him. “I really hope you aren’t going to suggest I should eat dead flesh.”
“Oh brother,” he raised his arms heavenwards. “Here we go again. Check it out: no meat, no smoking, no gambling, no sex, no
loud music, no bright lights, no dancing, no fucking fun.”
“I’m going down to Ketton,” Stephanie said, overriding the pair of them. She started to walk down the slope, her hand holding
on to Moyo’s fingers. “If anyone else wants to come, you’d better do it now.”
“I’m with you,” Moyo said. He moved his feet along cautiously. Rana shrugged lightly, and started to follow. A reefer slid
up out of Cochrane’s fist and the tip ignited. He stuck it in his mouth and went after Rana.
“Sod it!” Franklin said wretchedly. “All right. But we’re giving up by going down there. There’ll be no way out of that town.”
“You can’t keep ahead of them up here,” McPhee said. “Look at the bastards. It’s like they can walk on mud.”
“All right, all right.”
Tina gave Rana a desperate look. “Darling, those
things
will simply demolish the town. And we’ll be in it.”
“Maybe. Who knows? The military always makes ludicrously extravagant propaganda claims about their macho prowess. Reality
invariably lags behind.”
“Yo, Tina.” Cochrane proffered the reefer. “Come with us, babe. You and me, we could like have our last night on this world
together. Fucking-A way to go, huh?”
Tina shuddered at the grinning hippie. “I’d rather be captured by those beastly things.”
“That’s a no, is it?”
“No it is not. I don’t want us to split up. You’re my friends.”
Stephanie had turned to watch the little scene. “Tina, make up your mind.” She started off down the slope again, leading Moyo.
“Oh
heavens
,” Tina said. “You simply never give me time to decide anything. It’s so unfair.”
“Bye, doll,” Cochrane said.
“Don’t go so fast. I can’t keep up.”
Stephanie made a deliberate effort to expel the woman’s whining from her mind. Concentrating solely on navigating her way
down the slope. She had to take quite a shallow angle, constantly reinforcing the slippery soil below her boot soles with
energistic power. Even then her progress was marked by long skid marks.
“I can sense a lot of possessed below us,” Moyo said when they were a hundred yards above the quagmires of the valley floor.
“Where?” Stephanie asked without thinking. She hadn’t been paying attention to what waited below, traversing the tricky slope
required her complete attention. Now she looked up, she could see the convoy of jeeps was barely a mile behind them. The sight
gave her heart a cold squeeze.
“Not far.” His free hand pointed out across the valley. “Over there.”
Stephanie couldn’t see anyone. But now she scrutinized the mental whispers around the edge of her perception she was aware
of rising anticipation in many minds.
“Hey, Moyo, man, good call.” Cochrane was scanning the valley. “Those cats are like
low
in the mud. I can’t see anyone.”
“Come on,” Stephanie said. “Lets find out what’s happening.”
The last section of the slope started to flatten out, allowing them to increase their speed. Stephanie was tempted just to
keep to the undulating foothills that ran along the valley wall. They could certainly make good time on the reasonably dry
ground. Except it curved gradually away from Ketton. One of the visible sections of road was about three hundred yards away
across a perfectly flat expanse of slough. Stephanie stood on the edge, mud oozing round her ankles. Her boots kept her feet
dry, but as a precaution she made the leather creep up her shins towards her knees. The silence down here was unnerving, it
was as if the mud had some kind of anti-sound property. “I don’t think it’s very deep,” she ventured.