Dean and Will came in with him, expressions informing any serjeant they’d love it to try taking them on. It was read by the
room’s sole occupant, who was sitting passively behind a table. Ralph sat down opposite.
“Hello, Annette.”
“Ralph Hiltch. General, sir. You are becoming a depressing recurrent feature in my life.”
“Yes. And it is a life now, isn’t it? How does that feel, coming back from the dead as a real person?”
“This is what I always wanted. So I can’t complain. Though I expect I’ll eventually become ungrateful about the lack of this
body’s sexuality.”
“You’ll be even more unhappy if I fail, and the possessed come marching over the horizon to capture your fine new body for
a lost soul to host.”
“Don’t be so modest. You won’t fail here on Ombey, Ralph. You’re too good at your job. You love it. How many sieges are left
now?”
“Five hundred and thirty-two.”
“And falling, I believe. That was a good strategy, Ralph. A good response to Ketton. But I still would have loved to see your
face when we took that chunk of landscape out from under your nose.”
“Where did that stunt get you? What did you achieve?”
“I got a body, didn’t I. I’m alive again.”
“Only by chance. And you didn’t help a lot from what I hear.”
“Yes yes, Saint bloody Stephanie the hero of the flying isle. Is the Pope going to give her an audience? I’d like to see that,
a bitek abomination with a soul that’s escaped from purgatory having tea at the Vatican.”
“No. The Pope’s not seeing anybody anymore. Earth is falling to possession.”
“Shit! Are you serious?”
“Yes. Last I heard, there were four arcologies infested. It might even have fallen by now. So you see, I won, but you were
right after all. This will never be decided here.”
The serjeant sat up straighter, its recessed eyes never moving from Ralph. “You look tired, General. This Liberation is really
wearing you down, isn’t it?”
“You and I both know there is no paradise now, no immortality. The possessed can never have what they wanted. What will they
do, Annette? What will happen to Earth when it arrives in that sanctuary realm and none of their food synthesis machinery
works? What then?”
“They’ll die. Permanently. Their suffering will end.”
“Is that what you’d call a final settlement? Problem over.”
“No. I had that opportunity. I didn’t take it.”
“The beyond is preferable to death?”
“I’m back, aren’t I? Would you prefer me to be on my knees?”
“I’m not here to gloat, Annette.”
“Then what are you here for?”
“I am the supreme commander of the Liberation forces. For the moment that gives me an extraordinary degree of power, and not
just in military terms. You tell me if there’s any point to my being here. Can this be settled on Mortonridge, or has everything
we’ve both endured all been for nothing?”
“You’re in charge of a weary army facing a dying enemy, Ralph; that’s not a platform for revolution. You’re still trying to
validate your glorious war by searching for a noble conclusion. There is none. We are a sideshow. An incredibly expensive,
fabulously dramatic entertainment for the accessing masses. We distracted their attention while the real men and women of
power decided what our fate was going to be. Political policies determine how the human race confronts this crisis. War doesn’t
have that ability. War has only one outcome. War is stupid, Ralph. It is the desecration of the human spirit, martyring yourself
for someone else’s dream. It is for people who do not believe in themselves. It is for you, Ralph.”
______
The security level one sensenviron conference room never changed. Princess Kirsten was already seated at one end of the oval
table as the image of white nothingness walls formed around Ralph, seating him at the other end. Nobody else was present.
“Well, what a day,” Kirsten said. “Not only do we get all our people back safely, we wind up with fewer lost souls to plague
the living.”
“I want to stop it,” Ralph said. “We’ve won. What we’re doing now has become utterly pointless.”
“There are still over quarter of a million possessed on my planet. My subjects are their victims. I don’t think it’s over.”
“We have them confined. As a threat they’ve been neutralized. Of course we’ll maintain their isolation, but I’m asking that
we stop the actual conflict.”
“Ralph, this was your idea. The sieges have stopped all the shooting.”
“And replaced them with Urswick. Is that what you want, your subjects eating each other?”
The image of the Princess showed no emotional response. “The longer they remain possessed, the bigger their cancers grow.
Those bodies will die unless we actively intervene and rescue them.”
“Ma’am, I am going to issue an order that food and basic medical supplies are handed over to the possessed currently under
siege. I will not rescind it. If you do not want it issued, then you will have to relieve me of my duty.”
“Ralph, what the hell is this? We’re winning. Forty-three sieges collapsed today. Another ten days, a fortnight at the most,
and it’ll all be over.”
“It is over here, ma’am. Persecuting the possessed that remain is… disgusting. You listened to me before—God, that’s how this
whole thing began. Please give the same consideration to what I’m saying now.”
“You’re saying nothing, Ralph. This is a media war, a propaganda exercise, that’s what it always was. With your cooperation,
I might add. We must have total victory.”
“We already have it. This is more. We found out today that it’s possible to open a gateway to the realm where the possessed
flee to. Nobody understands it, the physics behind it; but we know it’s possible now. We will be able to replicate the effect
ourselves some day. The possessed can’t hide away from us any more. That’s our victory. We can make them face up to what they
are, what their limits are. That way we can go on to find a solution.”
“Expand that for me.”
“We now have the power of life and death over the possessed under siege, especially now the Confederation navy is working
on anti-memory. By concluding the sieges with their capitulation, we’re wasting our position, our tactical advantage. Ekelund
said this crisis will never be decided here on Ombey, by us. I used to believe her. But today changed that. We are in a unique
position to force the possessed to cooperate and help us find a solution. There
is
a solution—the Kiint found one, the crystal entities found one, we even think the Laymil found one—not that mass suicide
would be valid for humans. So give the remaining possessed food, let them recover, and then start negotiating. We can use
the Ketton island veterans to go in and open up a dialogue for us.”
“You mean the serjeants, the ex-possessors?”
“Who better. They have first-hand experience that the sanctuary realm is nothing of the sort. If anybody can convince them,
those serjeants can.”
“Good God. First you want the kingdom to adopt bitek, now you’d have me allied with the lost souls themselves.”
“We know what being antagonistic to them brings us. A fifth of a continent devastated, thousands of deaths, hundreds of thousands
of cancer victims. This has been suffering on a scale we’ve not had since the Garissa genocide. Make it mean something, ma’am,
make some good come out of it. If it’s possible, if there is the slightest chance that this might work, you cannot ignore
it.”
“Ralph, you are going to be the death of my senior advisors.”
“Then they can come back from the beyond and persecute me. Am I free to give the order?”
“If any of these possessed use this as an opportunity to try and break out, I want them in zero-tau within a day.”
“Understood.”
“Very well, General Hiltch, give your order.”
______
Al had moved to a suite a couple of floors up the Hilton where all the utilities still worked. The doctors needed a reliable
electrical supply, fancy phone lines, clean air, that kind of crap. They’d turned the new suite’s bedroom into a treatment
room, raiding Monterey’s hospital for equipment and medical packages. More stuff had been flown up from San Angeles. Stuff
that gave Al the creeps: bits of other people, living organs and muscles and veins and skin. Emmet had run a planet-wide search
for a pair of compatible eyes, eventually tracking them down to a storage vault in Sunset Island. A priority flight had brought
them up to Monterey.
The doctors said it was going well. Jez was out of danger. They’d replaced her blood and grafted on skin and tissue where
Kiera had burned down to the bone, implanted the new eyes. Once the operations were over, they’d covered her in medical packages.
Now it was just a question of time until she healed over, they’d assured him.
They didn’t like Al visiting too much. Jez looked so helpless smothered in that green plastic substance he got all worked
up, which screwed up the packages. So he didn’t get too near, just hung out by the door and watched over her. Like a guy should
do for his dame. It gave him time to think a lot.
Mickey, Emmet, and Patricia came into the suite’s lounge. Al had one of the stewards hand round drinks as they sat round the
low brass and marble table, then ordered everyone else out of the room.
“Okay, Emmet, how long till they get here?”
“I figure some time in the next ten hours, Al.”
“Fair enough.” Al lit a Havana and blew a long trail of smoke at the high ceiling. “On the level, can we fight them off?”
Emmet took a sip of the bourbon and replaced the glass on the table, studying it keenly. “No, Al, we’re going to lose. Even
if they only use the same level of force as they did against Arnstat, we’ll lose. And they’ll be carrying enough combat wasps
to fire two or three times as many at us. Everything in orbit above New California will be wiped out. The ships can jump away.
But they’ve got nowhere to go except for the last couple of planets we infiltrated. And I’m not too sure they’ll even manage
that. We think the Navy’s void-hawks pursued a lot of our guys from Arnstat and blew them up after they’d jumped away. There
weren’t too many made it back here.”
“Thanks, Emmet, I appreciate you being straight with me. Mickey, Patricia, what’s the word among the soldiers?”
“They’re getting jumpy, Al,” Patricia said. “No two ways about it. There’s been enough time for what that bitch Kiera said
to start registering. The Organization’s put us on top, but that makes us a target. We know we can’t take over another planet
again, New California is all we’ve got. A lot of them want to go down there.”
“But we’re holding them, Al,” Mickey said. His nervous tic was palpitating away. “I don’t take no shit from any of my people.
They’re loyal. You made us, Al, we’ll stay with you.”
His blind enthusiasm made Al smile faintly. “I ain’t asking no one to commit suicide for me, Mickey. They wouldn’t do it anyway;
they all came out of the beyond, remember. They ain’t gonna go back just because I ask nice. Party’s over, guys. We had fun
for a while, but we’ve reached the end of the road. I got a bum rap from history once, I ain’t having that again. This time
people are gonna say I did the best for everyone. They’re gonna show me some genuine respect.”
“How?” Patricia asked.
“Because we’re going out in style. It’s gonna be me who stops the slaughter. I’m gonna make the Navy an offer they can’t refuse.”
______
The
Ilex
was one of the voidhawks who had taken up an observation position two million kilometres out from New California in the wake
of the mass hellhawk defection from the Organization. The Yosemite Consensus had soon found out about Almaden. Hellhawks had
been delivering non-possessed survivors to the habitats, a repatriation deal for rebuilding the asteroid’s nutrient refinery,
they said. Consensus hadn’t finished reviewing the implications of that yet; it seemed unlikely that they could maintain the
machinery for more than a few years. However, that the hellhawks so actively sought to avoid combat was a particularly welcome
development. Capone’s actual motives for allowing and even assisting such an action were highly questionable.
Whatever the true reason, it left Yosemite with an excellent opportunity to re-establish its observation of New California
and the Organization fleet.
Ilex
had been assigned to review the low-orbit SD network in preparation for the arrival of Admiral Kolhammer’s attack force.
They deployed their spyglobes and waited for them to complete the long fall down below geostationary orbit. There was still
an hour to go before the little sensors started to return useful data when a communication beam from Monterey was aligned
on them.
“I wanna talk to the captain,” Al Capone said.
Auster immediately informed the Yosemite habitats. Their Consensus came together, reviewing the situation through his eyes
and ears. “This is Captain Auster. What can I do for you, Mr Capone?”
Al grinned, and turned to someone out of view. “Hey, you got that on the dime, they’re as prissy as the Limeys. Okay, Auster,
we all reckon that the Navy is due here any minute now. Right?”
“I can neither confirm nor deny such an event.”
“Bullshit, they’re on their way.”
“What do you want, Mr Capone?”
“I need to talk to the guy in charge, the admiral. And I need to do that before he starts shooting. Can you fix that for me?”
“What do you wish to talk to him about?”
“Hey, that’s between me and him, pal. Now can you set that up, or do you wanna sit back and let a whole load of people get
slaughtered? I thought that was against your religion or something.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
______
Illustrious
emerged in the centre of the voidhawk defence sphere formation, 300,000 kilometres above New California. Admiral Kolhammer
waited impatiently for the tactical display, cursing the delay while the warship’s sensors deployed.
Lieutenant Commander Kynea, the voidhawk liaison staff leader, called out: “Sir, local voidhawks have received a communications
request. Al Capone wants to talk to you.”