The STNI-986M was a basic VTOL utility jet (unimaginatively nicknamed Stony); subsonic, with a blunt-tube fuselage which could
carry either twenty tonnes of cargo or a hundred passengers. Seven New Washington Navy (NWN) Transport Command squadrons of
the durable little vehicles had been flown to Ombey when the President answered their ally’s call for military assistance
to liberate Morton-ridge. Ever since General Hiltch authorized aircraft to fly over secured areas of Mortonridge, they’d become
a familiar sight to the occupation troops. After Ketton, they’d been invaluable in supporting the new frontline advance policy
which had spread the serjeants dangerously thin over the ground as they divided the peninsula into confinement zones. Outbound
from Fort Forward they would deliver food, equipment, and ammunition to the upcountry stations; on the return they invariably
evacuated the most serious body-abuse cases of ex-possessed for medical treatment.
Even on airframes intended for rugged duty, full-time usage was producing maintenance problems. Spare parts were also scarce;
Ombey’s indigenous industries were already struggling to keep frontline equipment and the Royal Marine engineering brigades
going. All the Stony squadrons had experienced mid-flight emergency landings and unexplained powerdowns. The rover reporters
covering the Liberation knew all about the STI-986M’s recent shortcomings, though it was never mentioned in their official
reports. Not good for civilian morale. There was no outright censorship, but they all knew they were part of the Liberation
campaign, helping to convince people that the possessed could be beaten. Standard wartime compromise, reporting what was in
the army’s interest in order to get the maximum amount of information.
So Tim Beard cut back on his physiological input when the Stony carrying him and Hugh Rosler lifted from Fort Forward at dawn.
He wanted to give the accessors back home a small feeling of excitement as the plane swept low across the endless steppes
of dried mud, which meant toning down his body’s instinctive unease. It helped that he was sitting so close to Hugh, the pair
of them wedged in a gap between a couple of composite drums full of nutrient soup for the serjeants. Hugh always seemed perfectly
at ease; even when Ketton ripped itself free of the planet he’d stood up squarely, regarding the spectacle with a kind of
amused awe while the rest of the rovers were crouched down on the quaking ground, heads buried between their legs. He also
had a neat eye for trouble. There were a couple of occasions when the rover corps had been clambering over ruins when he’d
spotted booby traps missed by the serjeants and Marine engineers. Not the greatest conversationalist, but Tim felt safe around
him.
It was one of the reasons he’d asked Hugh to come along. This wasn’t a flight organized for them by the army, but the story
was too good to wait for the liaison officer to get round to it. And good stories about the Liberation were becoming hard
to find. But Tim had been covering military stories for twenty years now: he knew how to find his way round the archaic chain
of command, which people to cultivate. Pilots were good material, and useful, almost as much as serjeants.
Finding a ride on the early flight among the crates and pods was easy enough.
The Stony curved away from Fort Forward and headed south, following the remnants of the M6. Once they’d settled into their
two hundred metre operational altitude, Tim eased the buckle back on what was laughingly called his safety strap, and crouched
down by the door port. Enhanced retinas zoomed in on the road below. He’d dispatched a hundred fleks back to the studio with
the same view; by now the start of the M6 around the old firebreak was as familiar to the average Confederation citizen as
the road outside their own home. But with each trip he progressed a little further along the road, deeper into the final enclaves
of the possessed. In the first couple of weeks, it was astounding progress indeed. None of the rovers had to manufacture the
optimistic buzz that pervaded their recordings. It was different today, there was progress, still, but it was difficult to
capture the essence just by panning a shot from horizon to horizon.
The tactical maps urged on them by the army liaison officers had changed considerably from the original swathe of incriminating
pink stretching across Mortonridge which delineated the possessed territory. At first the borders had contracted noose-style,
then geographical contours showed up along the rim of pinkness, interfering with the rate of advance. After Ketton it had
changed again. The serjeants had been deployed in spearhead thrusts, carving corridors through the possessed territories.
Separation and isolation, General Hiltch’s plan to prevent the possessed from collecting in the kind of density which would
kick off another Ketton incident. The current tactical map showed Mortonridge covered in slowly shrinking pink blotches separating
from each other like evaporating puddles. Of course, no one actually knew what that critical number was which had to be avoided
at all costs. So the serjeants toiled on relentlessly, guided by numerical simulations based on someone’s best guess. And
there were no more harpoon deluges to make the job easier, nor even SD laser fire to soften up a strongly defended position.
The front line was back to clearing the land in the hardest way possible.
Tim’s retinas tracked keenly along the carbon-concrete ribbon which the Stony was following. Royal Marine mechanoids had bulldozed
entire swamps of saturated soil from the road as the army swept down the spine of the peninsula. At times the single cleared
carriageway was twenty metres below the tops of the new banks, as if it was some kind of cooled lava river confined to steep
heat-erosion valleys. The sidewalls were solidified by chemical cement, bonding the slush together in artificial molecular
clusters that traded their initial strength with a limited lifespan. Sunlight shimmered off them in vast sapphire and emerald
defraction patterns as the Stony whisked by overhead. All the original bridges had been swept away, leaving destitute towers
protruding from the mud at precarious angles. Of their replacements, no two were the same. Small gullies had simple scaffolding
archways of monobonded silicon curving over their sluggish streams. Beautiful single-span suspension bridges leapt across
gaps half a kilometre wide, their gossamer cables glinting like thin icicles in the clear dawn air. Programmable silicon pontoons
carried the mesh-carpet road across broad valley floors in heroic relay.
“The financial cost of this recaptured motorway is roughly ten million Kulu pounds per kilometre,” Tim said. “Thirty times
the price of the original, and it hasn’t even got electronic traffic control. It will probably be the Liberation’s most enduring
physical memorial, even though thirty-eight per cent of it is classed as a temporary structure. Ground troops know it as the
road to the other side of hell.”
“You could always take the optimistic view,” Hugh Rosler said.
Tim put the narrative track memory on pause. “If I could find one, I would. It’s not as if I’m rooting for the possessed.
Being positive after all this time is flat-out impossible. We have to tell the truth occasionally.”
Hugh nodded through the rectangular port. “Gimmie convoy, look.”
A long snake of trucks and buses was winding its way north along the reclaimed road. The buses meant it would be mostly civilians,
ex-possessed being carried away to safety. “Gimmies” was the term which the rovers had privately evolved for them. Every interview
when they came staggering out of the zero-tau pods was the same litany of demands: give me medical treatment, give me clothes,
give me food, give me the rest of my family, give me somewhere safe to live, give me my life back. And why did it take you
so long to save me?
They’d actually stopped recording interviews with the newly reprieved. Ombey’s population was becoming increasingly antagonised
by their fellow citizens’ lack of gratitude.
Two hundred and fifty kilometres south of the old firebreak line, a big staging area had been laid out at the side of the
M6, as if a batch of liquid carbon-concrete had squirted out from the edge of the motorway to stain the mud before solidifying.
A single small road broke away from it to head out across the open country. There could have been an original feed road down
below the hardening mires, but the Royal Marine engineering brigade had chosen to ignore it in favour of running their own
route directly over newly surveyed ground, sticking to the most stable regions. Similar staging areas were strung along the
whole length of the M6, flinging off side roads which mimicked the original branch roads. They were the supply lines for the
army as it overran the towns; not so much for the benefit of the frontline serjeants, but the support teams and occupation
forces which came in their wake.
This staging area was empty, though covered in mudtracks showing just how many vehicles had been assembled here at one time.
The Stony banked sharply above it, and swept away to chase along the supply road. A couple of minutes later they were circling
the remnants of Exnall.
The occupation station’s landing field was a broad sheet of micro-mesh composite spread out across a flat patch of land on
the (official) edge of town, with chemical concrete injected into the soil underneath. Mud still percolated through in patches
where the chemicals hadn’t reached.
None of the cargo crew were surprised when Tim and Hugh jumped down out of the Stony’s open hatch. They just grinned as the
two rovers strained to lift their feet from the sticky mud.
Tim opened a new memory cell file for his report, and quickly reduced his olfactory sensitivity. Most of the dead plant and
animal life had been swallowed by the mud, but the peninsula’s constant natural showers kept uncovering them. Fortunately,
the smell wasn’t anything like as bad as it had been to start with.
They hitched a lift on the back of a jeep into the occupation station which had been set up in the square at the end of Maingreen.
“Where was the DataAxis office?” Tim asked.
Hugh stared around, trying to make sense of the alien territory. “Not sure; I’d have to check with a guidance block. This
is as bad as Pompeii the morning after.”
Tim kept recording as they splashed along the deep ruts in the mire, preserving Hugh’s comments about the few landmarks of
his old town which he could recognize. The deluge had hit arboreal Exnall hard. Mud had toppled the big harandrid trees onto
the buildings they’d once overhung so gracefully; crumpling the shops and houses even before the foundations were undermined.
Sloping roofs constructed out of carbon hyperfilament beams had sheered off to twirl away across the currents of mud, momentum
snapping them through the surviving pickets of tree stumps. A whole cluster of them had come to rest at the end of Maingreen,
making it look as though half of the town’s buildings had been buried together up to their rafters. Facades had drifted about
freely like architectural rafts until the gradually hardening mud began to anchor them fast. Where they lay across the roads,
jeeps and trucks had driven straight over them, crunching parallel tyre tracks of bricks and planking deeper into the dehydrating
march. Only the foundations and stubby, splintered remnants of ground-floor walls indicated the town’s outline, along with
slumbering humps of mud-smothered harandrid.
Programmable silicon halls and igloos had been set up in the central civic district to serve as the occupation station; neither
the town hall nor the police station remained intact. Army traffic sped along the narrow lanes through the new structures,
while squads of serjeants and occupation troops marched between them. Tim and Hugh left the jeep to look around.
Hugh eyed the various slopes rumpling the landscape and consulted his guidance block. “This is about where it happened,” he
said. “The crowd gathered here after Finnuala’s blanket datavise.”
Tim panned round the gloomy panorama. “What price victory?” he said softly. “This isn’t even the eye of the storm.” He zoomed
in on several stagnant pools, examining the bent grass and weeds struggling at the edge. If vegetation was to return to this
peninsula, it would spread out from fresh water, he reasoned. But these filthy, sodden blades served only to play host for
a variety of brown fungal blooms which thrived in the humidity. He doubted they would last much longer.
They wandered through the occupation station, capturing random images of the army reorganising itself. Serjeant casualties
lying in rows of cots in a field hospital. Engineers and mechanoids working on all types of equipment. The unending flow of
trucks that trundled past, their hub engines humming angrily as they fought for traction in the mud.
“Hey, you two!” Elana Duncan shouted from across the road. “What the hell are you doing?”
They crossed over to her, dodging a pair of jeeps. “We’re rovers,” Tim told her. “Just looking round.”
Claws closed around his upper arm, preventing him from moving. He was pretty sure that if she wanted to, she could have snipped
clean through the bone. She touched a sensor block to his chest. Not gently, either.
“Okay, now you.” Hugh submitted to the procedure without complaint.
“There aren’t any rover reporters scheduled to come out here today,” Elana said. “The colonel hasn’t cleared Exnall yet.”
“I know,” Tim said. “I just wanted to get ahead of the pack.”
“Typical,” Elana grunted. She retreated back into the hall where twenty bulky zero-tau pods had been set up. All of them had
active infinite-black surfaces.
Tim followed her. “This your department?”
“You got it, sonny. I get to perform the final act of liberation on these great people we’re here to rescue. That’s why I
wanted to know who you were. You’re not army, and you’re too healthy to be ex-possessed. I got to recognize that, it’s like
second nature now.”
“Glad someone’s alert.”
“Knock it off.” Her head rocked up and down as she examined them. “If you want to ask questions, ask. I’m bored enough that
I’ll probably answer. You’re here because this is Exnall, right?”