“One way to find out,” McPhee said vigorously. He struck out for the road with confident strides. Mud sloshed away slowly
from his legs as he ploughed across. “Come on, ye great bunch of woofters. It’s not like
we
can drown.” Cochrane and Rana gave each other a reluctant glance, then started in.
“It’s going to be all right,” Stephanie said. She kept a tight grip on Moyo’s hand, and they waded in together. Tina held
on to Franklin’s hand as they went in. The action drew a lecherous grin from Cochrane.
Stephanie was right about it not being particularly deep, but the mud was soon up to her knees. After a couple of attempts
to clear a trench through it with her energistic power, she gave up. The mud responded so sluggishly it would have taken at
least an hour for them to reach the road by such a method. This had to be crossed the hard way, and the level of exertion
needed to keep going placed a terrible strain on already fatigued muscles. All of them diverted their energistic power to
force recalcitrant legs forward against mud that seemed to exert an equal pressure against them. Their efforts were given
an extra edge by the onward march of the army. They were travelling almost at right angles to the front line, losing precious
separation distance with every minute.
Stephanie kept telling herself that as soon as they made the road they’d be able to build it back up again. But even using
the road, there was a lot of mud to surmount before Ketton, and her body was already approaching its physical limit. She could
hear Cochrane wheezing loudly, a sound which carried a long way over the quagmire.
“They’re right ahead of us now,” Moyo said. He’d opened the front of his oilskin jacket in an attempt to cool himself. The
drizzle was seeping through his energistic barrier, combining with sweat to soak his shirt. “Two of them. And they’re not
happy with us.”
Stephanie glanced up, trying to distinguish the source of the animus thoughts. The slight rise carrying the road was seventy
yards in front. Badly mangled grass and a few straggly bushes gleaming dully in the grizzly skin of rainwater. Dozens of ferrangs
were pelting about excitedly, running together in packs of six or seven. Their cohesive motion reminded her of fish schools,
every movement enacted in unison.
“I can’t see anyone,” McPhee grunted. “Hey, shitheads,” he shouted. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Oh groovy,” Cochrane said. “Way to go, dude. That’ll make them real friendly. I mean it’s not like we’re in cosmically deep
shit at this point and need help, or anything.”
Tina let out a miserable gasp as she slipped. “I hate this fucking mud!”
“You tell it as it is, babe.” Franklin helped her up, and the two of them leant against each other as they forced their way
onwards. Stephanie glanced back down the length of Catmos Vale, and sucked in a fast breath. The jeeps were barely half a
mile away. Fifty yards to solid ground.
“We’re not going to make it.”
“What?” Moyo asked.
“We’re not going to make it.” She was panting heavily now. Not bothering with clothes, appearance, any energistic frippery—even
the satellites would be able to see her now. She didn’t care. All that mattered was maintaining the integrity of her boots
and shoving near-useless legs one in front of the other. Muscle spasms were shaking her calves and thighs.
Rana stumbled, falling to her knees. Mud squelched obscenely as it closed over her legs. She blew heavily, her face radiant,
glistening with sweat. Cochrane sloshed over and put his arm under her shoulders, dragging her up. The glutinous mud was reluctant
to let go. “Hey, man, give me a hand here,” he yelled at the land ahead. “Come on, you guys, quit fooling around. This is
like bigtime serious.”
The ferrang packs dodged round each other as they wheeled about aimlessly. Whoever the people were up ahead, they chose not
to reveal themselves. A slight single-tone mechanical whine was becoming audible. The jeep engines.
“Get me to her,” Moyo hissed.
He and Stephanie staggered over to the faltering couple. McPhee had come to a halt twenty yards from the land, staring back
at them. “Keep going,” Stephanie yelled at him. “Go on. Somebody’s got to get out of this.”
With her help, Moyo took some of Rana’s weight from Cochrane. They slung her between them, and kicked their way forward again.
“My legs,” Rana groaned miserably. “I can’t keep them going. They’re like fire. God damn it, this shouldn’t happen, I can
move mountains with my mind.”
“No matter,” Cochrane said through gritted teeth. “We got you now, sister.” The three of them stumbled forwards. McPhee had
reached the land, standing just above the mud to urge them on. Tina and Franklin were almost there. The pair of them were
plainly exhausted. Only the big Scot seemed to have any stamina left.
Stephanie brought up the rear. The jeeps were seven hundred yards away now, on a stretch of dry road. Picking up speed. “Shit,”
she whispered. “Oh shit oh shit.” Even if McPhee started sprinting right now, he’d never make it to Ketton; they’d overhaul
him easily. Perhaps if the rest of them started flinging white fire at the serjeants… What a ridiculous thought, she told
herself. And I don’t have any to spare. I must focus on channelling my energistic power.
Ten yards to go.
I won’t put up a fight. It wouldn’t be the slightest good, and it might damage the body. I owe her that much.
At the heart of her mind she could feel the captive host stirring in anticipation. All four of them staggered up out of the
mud, and simply collapsed on the soggy ground next to Tina and Franklin. And she still couldn’t see the owners of the two
minds impinging so strongly on her perception.
“Stephanie Ash,” a woman’s voice said from the empty air. “I see your timing is as fucking atrocious as always.”
“Any second now,” an unseen man announced.
Both of their minds were hot with eagerness. Somewhere nearby, the slow-motion wheeze of bagpipes started up, swirling to
a level piercing tone. Stephanie raised her head. Halfway between her and the jeeps, a lone Scottish piper stood facing the
vehicles. Dressed in a kilt of Douglas tartan, black leather boots shining, he seemed totally oblivious of the mortal foe
riding towards him. His fingers moved sedately as he played “Amazing Grace.” One of the serjeants in the front vehicle was
standing up to get a clear look in over the mud-caked windscreen.
“I like it,” McPhee hooted.
“Our call to arms,” the concealed man replied. “It has a certain
je ne sais quoi
, no?”
Stephanie glanced round urgently, trying to pin down the voice. “Call to arms?”
An explosion sounded in the distance, rumbling fast over the quagmires and stagnant pools smothering Catmos Vale. A mine had
detonated under the leading jeep, punching the front of the chassis into the air. It crashed down, spilling serjeants across
the road. Blue white smoke billowed out from the crater in the concrete. Lumps of debris rained down. The other jeeps braked
sharply. Serjeants froze all along the front line, crouching down.
The piper finished, and bowed solemnly at his enemies. There was a dull, potent
thock
, loud enough to quiver Stephanie’s gullet. Then another. A whole barrage started up, the individual thumps merging into a
single soundwave. Tina squealed in fright.
“Ho shit,” Cochrane growled. “Those are mortars.” “Well done,” said the woman. “Now keep down.” It was, the Liberation’s coordinating
AI acknowledged, a classic ambush, and executed perfectly. The jeeps were confined to one of the narrowest strips of land
in the valley, unable to veer away. A sleet of mortar shells fell upon them, ranged precisely. High explosives detonated in
a near constant bombardment, pulverizing the stalled vehicles, and shredding the serjeants riding them. Smoke, flame, and
spumes of superfine mud belched out, obliterating the carnage from view.
The AI could do absolutely nothing to prevent it. Radar pulses from the SD sensor satellites swept the length of the valley,
but they required several seconds to acquire lock on. The first bombardment lasted for ninety seconds, then the mortar operators
switched to airburst shells, and changed elevation. Dense black clouds burst open above the line of serjeants as they toiled
desperately through the quagmire. Broad circles of mud erupted into cyclones of beige foam as the shrapnel slashed down, obliterating
the struggling figures.
Only then did the SD radars finish backtracking the mortar trajectories. The AI launched its counterstrike. Incandescent scarlet
beams stabbed down in retaliation, vaporising the possessed and their weapons in micro-seconds. Over a dozen patches of dry
land were targeted. Supersonic torrents of steam flared out from the base of each impact. When they gusted away, the mortar
sites had been reduced to shallow craters of hardbaked clay, their centres still radiant. They chittered softly as the drizzle
fell, prizing open millions of tiny heat stress fractures.
The empty silence returned. Swirls of smoke drifted over the valley floor, dissipating slowly to reveal the burning wrecks
of the jeeps. Spread out across the quagmire, the ruptured bodies of the serjeants were gradually claimed by the mud’s tireless
embrace. Within an hour, there would be little left to hint at the conflict.
Stephanie found herself clawing into the soft soil, every muscle locked solid to resist the laser pulse. It never came. She
let out a wretched sob, surrendering to the severe shaking that claimed her limbs. Two of the ferrang packs crept towards
Stephanie and her friends. They dissolved into a pair of human figures dressed in dark grey and green combat fatigues. Annette
Ekelund and Soi Hon looked down at them with anger and contempt.
“You idiots could have got us blown back into the beyond by blundering about like that,” Annette said. “What if dear Ralph
considered you to be part of this operation? They would have zeroed this patch of ground for sure.”
Cochrane lifted his head, mud dribbling down his face to saturate his wild beard. His dead reefer was squashed against his
lips. He spat it out. “Well like fuck me gently with a chainsaw, sister. I’m real sorry to cause you any inconvenience.”
______
Not even Lalonde’s oppressive climate prepared Ralph for the awesome humidity when he stepped out of the Royal Marine hypersonic
transport plane. It prickled his skin at the same time as it siphoned away vital body energies. Just breathing it in was exhausting.
With the last strands of cloud at last gusting out to sea, the tropical sun could finally exert its full strength against
poor malaised Mortonridge. Thousands of square kilometres of mud began to effervesce, thickening the air with hot cloying
vapour. Looking round from the top of the airstair, Ralph could see long ribbons of tenuous white cloud flowing with oily
tenacity around the hummocks and foothills of the broad valley. More mist was percolating up from the highlands on either
side, with long snow-white streamers spilling out through clefts in the valley walls to slither down the slope like slow-motion
waterfalls.
He sniffed at the air. Threaded through the blanket of clean moisture were the traces of corruption. The peninsula’s dead
biomass was starting to rot and ferment. In another few days the stench would be formidable, and no doubt extremely unhealthy.
One more factor to consider. Though it was a long way down on the priority list.
Ralph hurried down the aluminium stairs, with Brigadier Palmer and Cathal just behind him. For once there was no Marine detail
waiting to guard him. They’d landed outside the staging camp established in the mouth of Catmos Vale. Hundreds of programmable
silicon igloos had sprung up in rows like giant powder-blue mushrooms, a miniature recreation of Fort Forward. The only people
here were serjeants, occupation troops, and medical case de-possessed. Plus a handful of rover reporters; all officially authorized
Liberation correspondents, with a pair of Royal Marine information officers shepherding them.
When he looked up the valley, the loose smears of mist blurred into a single featureless white sheet carpeting the floor.
His enhanced retinas zoomed in on the only visible feature, the slim greyish spire of Ketton’s church rising out of the mist.
Just by looking at it, Ralph could sense the possessed mustering in the town, a replay of the gentle mental pressure they’d
all known in the days of the red cloud.
“She’s here,” he murmured. “The Ekelund woman. She’s in Ketton.”
“Are you sure?” Cathal asked.
“I can feel her, just like before. In any case, she’s one of their leaders, and this bunch are well organized.” Cathal gave
the distant spire a dubious glance.
The camp’s commander, Colonel Anton Longhurst, was waiting at the bottom of the airstairs. He saluted Ralph. “Welcome to Catmos
Vale, sir.”
“Thank you, Colonel. Looks like you’ve got yourself an interesting command here.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll show you round. That’s after…” he indicated the reporters.
“Ah yes.” Ralph kept his ire under control. They’d probably all be using audio discrimination programs, the bastards never
missed a trick.
The information officers signalled the all clear, and the rover reporters closed in. “General Hiltch, Hugh Rosler with DataAxis;
can you please tell us why the front line has stalled?”
Ralph gave a wan, knowing smile to the plain-looking man in a check shirt and sleeveless jacket who’d asked the question.
An in-your-face transmission of the cordial public persona he’d developed and deployed for the last few weeks. “Oh come on,
guys. We’re consolidating the ground we’ve already recovered. There’s a lot more to the Liberation than just rushing forward
at breakneck pace. We have to be sure, and I mean absolutely sure, that none of the possessed has managed to sneak through.
Don’t forget, it was just one possessed who got into Mortonridge that was responsible for this in the first place. You don’t
want a repeat of that, do you?”
“General, Tim Beard, Collins; is it true the serjeants simply can’t hack it anymore now that the possessed have started to
put up real resistance?”