Stephanie made her way over to them, putting the road a quarter of a mile behind her. The ground around the sagging boughs
was deeply wrinkled, producing dozens of small meandering pools of brackish water. She threaded her way through them, into
the small dapple of shade thrown by the leaves, and sank down with a heavy sigh. The others sat down around her, equally relieved
to be off their feet.
“I’m amazed we didn’t step on a mine,” Moyo said. “Ekelund must have rigged that road. It’s too tempting not to.”
“Hey guys, let’s like turn her into an unperson, please,” Cochrane said. “I don’t want to spend my last remaining hours in
this body talking about that bitch.”
Rana leant back against a tree trunk, closed her eyes and smiled. “Well well, we finally agree on something.”
“I wonder if we get a chance to talk to the reporters,” McPhee said. “There’s bound to be some covering the attack.”
“Peculiar last wish,” Rana said. “Any particular reason?”
“I still have some family left alive on Orkney. Three kids. I’d like to… I don’t know. Tell them I’m all right I suppose.
What I’d really like to do is see them again.”
“Nice thought,” Franklin said. “Maybe the serjeants will let you record a message, especially if we cooperate with them.”
“What about you?” Stephanie asked.
“I’d go traditional,” Franklin said. “A meal. You see, I used to like eating, trying new stuff, but I never really had much
money. So, I’ve done most everything else I want to. I’d have the best delicacies the universe can offer, cooked by the finest
chef in the Confederation, and Norfolk Tears to go with it.”
“Mine’s easy,” Cochrane said. “That’s like apart from the obvious. I wanna re-live Woodstock. Only this time I’d listen to
the music more. Man, I can like only remember about five hours of it. Can you dig that? What a bummer.”
“I want to be on the stage,” Tina said breathlessly. “A classical actress, in my early twenties, while I’m so beautiful that
poets swoon at the sight of me. And when my new play opens, it would be The event of the year, and all the Society people
in the world are fighting to buy tickets.”
“I’d like to walk through Elisea woods again,” Rana said. She gave Cochrane a suspect look, but he was listening politely.
“It was on the edge of my town when I was growing up, and the Slandau flowers grew there. They had chromatactile petals; if
you touched one, it would change colour. When the breeze blew through the trees it was like standing inside a kaleidoscope.
I used to spend hours walking along the paths. Then the developers came, and cleared the site to make room for a factory park.
It didn’t matter what I said to anyone, how many petitions I organized; the mayor, the local senator, they didn’t care how
beautiful the woods were and how much people enjoyed them. Money and industry won every time.”
“I think I’d just say sorry to my parents,” Moyo said. “My life was such a waste.”
“The children,” Stephanie said. She grinned knowingly at McPhee. “I want to see my children again.”
They fell silent then, content to daydream what could never be.
The sky suddenly brightened. Everyone apart from Moyo looked up, and he caught their agitation. Ten kinetic harpoons were
descending, drawing their distinctive dazzling plasma contrails behind them. It was a conical formation, gradually expanding.
A second batch of ten harpoons appeared above the first. Sunglasses automatically materialized on Stephanie’s face.
“Oh shit,” McPhee groaned. “It’s yon kinetic harpoons, again.”
“They’re coming down all around Ketton.”
“Strange pattern,” Franklin said. “Why not fire them down all at once?”
“Does it matter?” Rana said. “It’s obviously the signal to start the attack.”
McPhee was eyeing the harpoons dubiously. The first formation was still expanding, while the blazing, ruptured air around
their nose cones was growing in intensity.
“I think we’d better get down.” Stephanie said. She rolled over, and imagined a sheet of air hardening protectively above
her. The others followed her example.
The harpoons Ralph had chosen to deploy against Ketton were different to the marque he’d used to smash Mortonridge’s communication
net at the start of the Liberation. These were considerably heavier and longer, a design which helped focus their inertia
forwards. On impact, they penetrated clean through the damp, unresisting soil. Only when they struck the bedrock below did
their tremendous kinetic energy release its full destructive potential. The explosive blast slammed out through the soft soil.
Directly above the impact point, the whole area heaved upwards as if a new volcano was trying to tear its way skywards. But
the major impetus of the shockwaves radiated outwards. Then the second formation of harpoons hit. They formed a ring outside
the first, with exactly the same devastating effect.
Seen from above, the twenty separate shockwaves spread out like ripples in a pond. But it was the one very specific interference
pattern they formed as they intersected which was the goal of the bombardment. Colossal energies clashed and merged in peaks
and troughs that mimicked the surface of a choppy sea, channelling the direction in which the force was expended. Outside
the two strike rings, the newly formatted shockwaves rushed off across the valley floor, becoming progressively weaker until
they sank away to nothing more than a tremble which lapped against the foothills. Inside the rings, they merged into a single
contracting undulation, which swept in towards Ketton, building in height and vigour.
Annette Ekelund and the troops manning the town’s perimeter defences watched in stupefaction as the newborn hill thundered
towards them from all directions. The surviving network of local roads leading away from the outskirts were ripped to shreds
as the swelling slope flung them aside. Boulders went spinning through the air in long lazy arcs. Mud foamed turbulently at
the crest while mires and pools avalanched down the sides, engulfing the frenzied herds of kolfrans and ferrangs.
It grew higher and higher, a tsunami of soil. The leading edge reached Ketton’s outlying buildings, trawling them up its precarious
ever-shifting slope. Defence trenches either slammed shut or split wide as though they were geological fault lines, their
napalm igniting in third-rate imitation of lava streams. People diverted every fraction of their ener-gistic strength to reinforcing
their bodies, leaving them to bounce and roll about like human tumbleweed as the demented ground trampolined beneath them.
Without the possessed to maintain them, the prim, restored houses and shops burst apart in scattergun showers of debris. Bricks,
fragments of glass, vehicles, and shattered timbers took flight to clot the air above the devastation.
And still the quake raced on, hurtling into the centre of the town. Its contraction climaxed underneath the charming little
church, culminating in a solid conical geyser of ground fifty metres high. A grinding vortex of soil erupted from its pinnacle,
propelling the entire church into the sky. The elegant structure hung poised above the cataclysm for several seconds before
gravity and sanity returned to claim it. It broke open like a ship on a reef, scattering pews and hymn books over the blitzed
land below. Then as the quake’s pinnacle ebbed, shrinking down, the church tumbled over, walls disintegrating into a deluge
of powdered bricks. Yet still, somehow, the spire remained almost intact. Twisting through a hundred and eighty degrees, with
its bell clanging madly, it plunged down to puncture the tormented crater of raw soil that now marked the quake’s epicentre.
Only then, did its structural girders crumple, reducing it to a pile of ruined metal and fractured carbon-concrete.
Secondary tremors withdrew from the focal point, weaker than the incoming quake, but still resulting in substantial quivers
amid the pulverised ruins. The quake’s accompanying ultrasound retreated, only to echo back off the valley walls. In ninety
seconds, Ketton had been abolished from Mortonridge; leaving a two-mile-wide smear of treacherously loose soil as its sole
memorial. Spears made from building rafters jabbed up out of the rumpled black ground, ragged lumps of concrete were interspersed
with the mashed up remnants of furniture, every fragment embedded deep into the loam. Rivulets of flaming napalm oozed along
winding furrows, belching out black smoke. A curtain of dust thick enough to blot out the sun swirled overhead.
Annette raised herself to her elbows, fighting the mud’s suction; and swung her head slowly from side to side, examining the
remains of her proud little empire. Her energis-tic strength had protected her body from broken bones and torn skin, though
she knew that there was going to be heavy bruising just about everywhere. She remembered being about ten metres in the air
at one point, cartwheeling slowly as a single storey cafÉ did a neat somersault beside her to land on its flat roof, power
cables and plastic water pipes trailing from a wall to lash about like bullwhips.
Strangely enough, through her numbness, she could admire the quake; there was a beautiful precision to it. Strong enough to
wreck the town, yet pitched at a level that enabled the possessed to protect themselves from its effects. As dear Ralph had
known they would. Self preservation is the strongest human instinct; Ketton’s buildings and fortifications would be discarded
instantly in the face of such a lethal threat.
She laughed hysterically, choking on the filthy dust. “Ralph? I told you, Ralph, you had to destroy the village first. There
was no need to take it so fucking literally, you shit!” There was nothing left now to defend, no banner or cause around which
she could rally her army. The serjeants were coming. Unopposed. Unstoppable.
Annette flopped onto her back, expelling grit from her eyes and mouth. Her mouth puffed away, eager for much needed oxygen.
She had never been so utterly terrified before. It was an emotion shining at the core of every mind littered around her in
the decimated town. Thousands of them. The one aspect they had left in common.
______
The trees had stood up and danced during the quake. They left the cloying mud behind with loud sucking sounds and pirouetted
about while the ground rearranged itself. It was probably an impressive sight. But only from a distance.
Stephanie had screamed constantly as she wriggled frantically underneath the carouselling boughs, ducking the smaller branches
that raked the ground. She’d been struck several times, slapped through the air as if by a giant bat. Only the energistic
power binding her body’s cells together had saved her from being snapped in two.
Tina hadn’t been so fortunate. As the ground started to calm, one of the trees had fallen straight on top of her. It pushed
her deep into the soaking loam, leaving only her head and an arm sticking out. She was whimpering softly as the others gathered
round. “I can’t feel anything,” she whispered. “I can’t make myself feel.”
“Just melt the wood away,” McPhee said quickly, and pointed. “Here to here. Come on, concentrate.”
They held hands, imagining the scarlet bark parting, the hard dark wood of the trunk flowing like water. A big chunk of the
trunk turned to liquid and splattered down on the mud. Franklin and McPhee hurried forward and pulled Tina out from the mud.
Her hips and legs were badly crushed, blood was running out of several deep wounds, splintered bones protruded through the
skin.
She looked down at her injuries and wailed in fear. “I’m going to die! I’m going to go back to the beyond.”
“Nonsense, babe,” Cochrane said. He knelt down beside her and passed his hand over one of the abdominal cuts. The torn flesh
sealed over, melding together. “See? Don’t give me none of this loser shit.”
“There’s too much damage.”
“Come on, guys,” Cochrane looked up at the rest of the group. “Together we can do it. Each take a wound.”
Stephanie nodded quickly and sank down beside him. “It’ll be all right,” she promised Tina. The woman had lost an awful lot
of blood, though.
They circled her, and laid on their hands. Power was exerted, transmuted by the wish to heal and cleanse. That was how Sinon’s
squad found them, kneeling as if in prayer around one of their own. Tina was smiling up placidly, her pale hand gripping Rana,
their fingers entwined.
Sinon and Choma approached cautiously through the jumbled trees, and levelled their machine guns at the devout-seeming group.
“I want all of you to lie down flat, and put your hands behind your head, now,” Sinon said. “Do not attempt to move or apply
your energistic power.”
Stephanie turned to face him. “Tina’s hurt, she can’t move.”
“I will accept that claim for the moment, providing you do not try to resist. Now, the rest of you lie down.”
Moving slowly, they backed away from Tina and lowered themselves onto the mushy loam.
You can come forward,
Sinon told the rest of the squad.
They appear to be compliant
.
Thirty serjeants emerged from the tangle of branches and twigs, making remarkably little sound. Their machine guns were all
trained on the prone figures.
“You will now leave your captured bodies,” Sinon said.
“We can’t,” Stephanie said. She could feel the misery and fear in her friends, the same as that found in her own mind. It
was turning her voice to a piteous croak. “You should know by now not to ask that of us.”
“Very well.” Sinon took his holding stick out.
“You don’t have to use those things, either,” Stephanie said. “We’ll go quietly.”
“Sorry, procedure.”
“Look, I’m Stephanie Ash. I’m the one that brought the children out. That must count for something. Check with Lieutenant
Anver of the Royal Kulu marines, he’ll confirm who I am.”
Sinon paused, and used his processor block to query Fort Forward’s memory core. The image of the woman certainly appeared
to match, and the man with flamboyant clothes and a mass of hair was unmistakable.
We can’t rely on what they look like,
Choma said.
They can forge any appearance they want.