“No, it is categorically not true. And if you show me the person who said that, I’ll give them a personal and private demonstration
of my contempt for such a remark. I flew in here today, and you people drove in from the coast.” He waved a hand back at the
mud-covered land. “They walked the whole way from the beaches, engaged in tens of thousands of separate combat incidents.
And on the way they’ve rescued nearly three hundred thousand people from possession. Now does that really sound as though
they can’t hack it to you, because it doesn’t to me.”
“So why isn’t the front line continuing its advance?”
“Because we’ve reached a new stage of the campaign. Forgive me for not broadcasting our gameplan before, but this kind of
reinforcement manoeuvre was inevitable. As you can see, we’ve reached Ketton, which has a large number of well organized and
hostile possessed in residence—and this is just one of several such assemblies around Mortonridge. The army is simply redeploying
accordingly. When we have sufficient resources assembled, then the serjeants will take the town. But I have no intention of
committing them until I’m convinced such an operation can be achieved with the minimum of loss on both sides. Thank you.”
He started to walk forwards.
“General, Elizabeth Mitchell, Time Warner; one final question, please.” Her voice was authoritative and insistent, impossible
to ignore. “Have you got any comment about the defeat in the valley?”
Trust the owner of that voice to ask something he’d really rather avoid, Ralph thought. “Yes, I have. In hindsight advancing
down Catmos Vale so fast was a tactical error, a very bad one; and I take full responsibility for that. Although we knew the
possessed are equipped with hunting rifles we weren’t expecting them to have artillery. Mortars are about the crudest kind
of artillery it’s possible to build; but even so, very effective given certain situations. This was one of them. Now we know
what the possessed are capable of, it won’t happen again. Every time they use a new weapon or tactic against us, we can analyse
it and guard against it in future. And there are only a very limited number of these moves they can play.” He moved on again,
more determined this time. A fast datavise to the two information officers, and there were no more shouted questions.
“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 de-possessed
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 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 serjeants 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.”