Small flickers of lightning arose to dance along the bottom, slashing down into the waves. Steam plumes screwed upwards from the discharges.
Then the lightning streamers were coming together into massive dazzling rivers, rising up, following the steep curve of the cloud to arch inland.
The red glow faded, taking less then five seconds to die completely. Its disappearance startled Sinon and the other serjeants. The victory was too sudden. This was not the epic struggle they’d been preparing for. The crawling webs of lightning more than made up for the absence; blazing bright right across the horizon.
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Choma wasn’t the only one to reach that conclusion. They could already feel the boat slowing as the captain reduced power to the engines. A precaution repeated simultaneously by the entire armada.
“Recommendations?” Ralph asked.
“Shut down the SD assault,” Acacia said. “The landing boats are already slowing. They can’t penetrate that kind of lightning storm.”
“Diana?”
“I think so. If the red light is an indication of the possessed’s control, then we’ve already routed them.”
“That’s a very big if,” Admiral Farquar protested.
“We don’t have a lot of choice,” the elderly technology advisor said.
“The landing boats clearly can’t get through, nor can the ground vehicles, for that matter. We have to let the energy discharge itself naturally. If the red light returns when they’re inside, we can resume the electron beam attack until the cloud itself starts to break up.”
“Do it,” Ralph ordered. “Acacia, get the serjeants as close as they can to the cloud, then as soon as the lightning’s finished, I want them through.”
“Yes, General.”
“Diana, how long is it going to take to dissipate that electricity?”
“A good question. We’re not sure how deep or dense that cloud is.”
“Answer me.”
“I’m afraid I can’t. There are too many variables.”
“Oh great. Acacia, is the lightning going to affect the harpoons?”
“No. The cloud’s too low for that, and they’re going too fast. Even if one took a direct hit from a lightning bolt, the trajectory won’t be altered by more than a couple of metres at best.”
The voidhawk flotilla was only one and a half thousand kilometres from the surface of Ombey. Mortonridge filled their sensor blister coverage, changing from a red smear to a seething mass of blue-white streamers, more alive than ever before. There was just time for one last query.
<
All three hundred voidhawks reached the apex of their trajectory. Their bone-crushing eight-gee acceleration ended briefly. Each one flung a swarm of five thousand kinetic harpoons from its weapons cradles. Then power surged through their patterning cells again, reversing the previous direction of the distortion field. The punishing intensity was unchanged, still eight gees, pushing them desperately away from the planet with its dangerous gravity field.
Far below, the delicate filigree of shimmering lightning vanished beneath an incandescent corona as the upper atmosphere ignited. The plasma wake left by one and a half million kinetic harpoons had merged together into a single photonic shockwave. It hit the top of the cloud, puncturing the churning grey vapour with such speed there was little reaction. At first.
Acacia was quite right, the cloud for all its bulk and animosity could not deflect the harpoons from their programmed targets.
No human could draw up that list, it was the AI in Pasto that ultimately designated their impact points. They descended in clumps of three, giving a ninety-seven per cent probability of a successful hit. Mortonridge’s communication net was the main target.
Urban legend dictated that modern communication nets were annihilation proof. With hundreds of thousands of independent switching nodes spread over an entire planet, and millions of cables linking them, backed up by satellite relays, their anarchistic-homogeneous nature made them immune to any kind of cataclysm. No matter how many nodes were taken out, there was always an alternative route for the data. You’d have to physically wipe out a planet before its data exchange was stalled.
But Mortonridge was finite, its net isolated from the redundancy offered by the rest of the planet. The location of every node was known to within half a metre. Unfortunately, ninety per cent of them were proscribed, because they were inside a built up urban area. If kinetic harpoons started dropping amid the buildings, resulting casualties would be horrendous. That left the cables out in the open countryside. A lot of them followed roads, nestled in utility conduits along the side of the carbon concrete, but many more took off across the land, laid by mechanoids tunnelling through forests and under rivers, with nothing on the surface to indicate their existence.
Long-inactive files of their routes had been accessed and analysed by the AI. Strike coordinates were designated, with the proscription that there should be no habitable structure within three quarters of a kilometre.
Given the possessed’s considerable ability to defend themselves on a physical level, it was considered a reasonable safe distance.
Stephanie Ash lay quivering on the floor even after her mind had recoiled from the communion with other souls. The loss hurt her more than any pain from the electron beam attack against the cloud. That simple act of union had given her hope. As long as people went on supporting each other, she knew, despite everything else, they remained human to some small degree.
Now even that fragile aspiration had been wrenched from them.
“Stephanie?” Moyo called. His hand was shaking her shoulder gently.
“Stephanie, are you all right?”
The fear and concern in his voice triggered her own guilt. “God, no.” She opened her eyes. The bedroom was lit solely by a small bluish flame coming from his thumb. Outside the window, blackness swarmed the whole world. “What did they do?” She could no longer sense the psychic weight pressing against her from the other side of the firebreak. Only the valley was apparent.
“I don’t know. But it’s not good.” He helped her to her feet.
“Are the others all right?” She could sense their minds, spread out through the farmhouse, embers of worry and pain.
“Same as us, I guess.” A bright flash from outside silenced him. They both went to the window and peered out. Huge shafts of lightning skidded along the underbelly of the cloud.
Stephanie shivered uncomfortably. What had successfully shielded them from the open sky was now an intimidatingly large mass far too close overhead.
“We’re not in charge of it anymore,” Moyo said. “We let go.”
“What’s going to happen to it?”
“It’ll rain, I guess.” He shot her an anxious look. “And that’s a lot of cloud up there. We just kept adding to it, like a baby’s security blanket.”
“Maybe we should get the animals in.”
“Maybe we should get the hell out of here. The Princess’s army will be coming.”
She smiled sadly. “There’s nowhere to go. You know that.”
The frequency of the lightning had increased dramatically by the time they rounded up Cochrane, Rana, and Franklin to help chase after the chickens and lambs that normally ambled round inside the farmyard. The first few big drops of water began to patter down.
Moyo stuck his hand out, palm up. As if confirmation was really needed.
“Told you,” he said
smugly.
Stephanie turned her cardigan into a slicker, even though she didn’t hold out much hope of staying dry. The drops were larger than any she’d ever known. All the chickens were running through the open gate, the lambs had already vanished into the atrocious night. She was just about to suggest they didn’t bother trying to catch them when daylight returned to Mortonridge.
Cochrane gaped up at the sky. The clouds had turned into translucent veils of grey silk, allowing the light to pour through. “Wow! Who switched the sun back on, man?” The bottom of the clouds detonated into incandescent splinters, searing down through the air. Vivid star-tips pulling down a hurricane cone of violet mist after them. Stephanie had to shield her eyes, they were so bright.
“It’s the end of the world, kids,” Cochrane cried gleefully.
All one and a half million harpoons struck the ground within a five second period. A clump of them were targeted on a cable four kilometres from the farm valley, their terrible velocity translated into a single devastating blast of heat. The radiant orange flash silhouetted the valley rim, lasting just long enough to reveal the debris plume boiling upwards.
“Ho shit,” Cochrane grunted. “That Mr. Hiltch really doesn’t like us.”
“What were they?” Stephanie asked. It seemed incredible that they were still in their bodies. Surely that kind of violence would wipe them out?
“Some kind of orbital bombardment,” Moyo said. “It must have been aimed at Ekelund’s troops.” He didn’t sound too convinced.
“Aimed? It was everywhere.”
“Then why didn’t it hit us?” Rana asked. Moyo just shrugged. That was when the roar of the impact reached them, a drawn out rumble loud enough to swallow any words.
Stephanie covered her ears, and looked up again. The cloud was in torment, its rumpled underbelly foaming violently. Ghostly billows of luminescent purple air left behind by the harpoons snaked around the tightly packed whorls; the two of them flowing against each other, yet never merging, like liquids with different densities. She frowned, blinking upwards as the light dimmed. A thick slate-grey haze was emerging, oozing out of the cloud to swallow both the lightning and the tattered sheets of ion vapour. It was expanding fast, darkening.
“Inside,” she said in a small voice as the last echoes of the explosion reverberated across the valley. They all turned to look at her. The big drops of rain had returned. A breeze arose to stroke their clothes. “Get inside. It’s going to rain.”
They glanced up at the descending haze, awed and fearful as understanding reached them.
“Nothing!” Annette screamed furiously at the processor block. The primitive schematic displayed on its screen proved it was functioning, yet nobody was answering her calls. “We’re cut off.”
Soi Hon studied the display on his block. “All the lines are down, from what I can see,” he said.
“Don’t be absurd, you can’t knock out an entire net,” Annette protested.
Doubt stung. “It’s not possible.”
“I imagine that was the idea behind the bombardment,” Soi Hon replied, unperturbed. “It was rather spectacular, after all. They wouldn’t expend that much effort for no reason. And we didn’t have the whole net functioning in the first place, only the critical links.”
“Damn it, how the hell am I going to organize our resistance now?”
“Everyone has their original orders, and they have no choice but to fight. All this means is that you are no longer in charge of the possessed.”
Even his complacency soured at the look she gave him.
“Oh really?” she asked dangerously.
The light began to fade outside. Annette strode across to the big front window. She’d taken over a folksy restaurant called the Black Bull in the middle of Cold Overton, giving her a commanding position at the end of the broad main street. Fifty vehicles were parked on the stone slabs of the market square outside, waiting for the troops who’d taken refuge in the nearby shops and cafés. Milne and a few of his engineers were walking about, inspecting the equipment. There didn’t seem to be any damage, though several of the harpoons had fallen just outside the village.
“Soi,” she said. “Take a couple of squads and check the roads. I want to know how quickly we can get out of here.”
“As you wish.” He nodded briskly, and made for the door.
“There’s a big group of us in Ketton,” she said, almost to herself.
“That’s only ten kilometres west of here. We’ll link up with them. Should be able to convince some civilians to join up, too. After that we can move on to the next group.”
“We could use runners to carry messages,” Delvan suggested. “That’s what we did back in my time. Communications were always pretty damn poor close to the front.”
There was very little light left now. Annette saw Milne and the others running. There was no fear in their minds, just urgency. Raindrops splattered against the window. Within seconds the whole of Main Street was awash. Gutters started to fill up, with small whirlpools forming over the drains.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Soi Hon exclaimed, raising his voice against the noise. He was standing in the open doorway, a waterproof poncho forming round his shoulders. The drumming sound of the huge drops was easily as loud as the red cloud’s thunder had been. “And we saw some storms round the Pacific in my day, believe me.”
A rivulet of dirty water began to seep in around his feet, trickling round the tables. Annette couldn’t see anything outside now, the rain was battering heavily against the glass, producing the kind of spume that normally topped ocean waves. Behind that, there was only blackness.
Delvan moved up beside him to get a better look. “Nobody’s going anywhere in this.”
“Yes,” Annette agreed shakily. “You’d better wait.”
“How long, though?” Delvan muttered. “We didn’t think about this when we drew the cloud over us.”
“Don’t worry,” Soi Hon said. “Nobody’s going to do any fighting for a while. It’s just as bad for them. And at least we’re inside.”
The landing boat surged forwards as soon as the dazzling corona from the kinetic harpoons lit up the sky. Sinon used the voidhawks’ vantage point to observe the giant splash of plasma sink into the dark mantle of cloud.
<
Vast cyclonic spirals of cloud were stirring across the upper surface.
Washed by Ombey’s pale moonlight, the movement appeared almost majestic.
Primeval forces had awoken. Along the edges of the cloud, gargantuan tornadoes began to spin away, careering off over the sea.
<
Sinon shared a shiver of consternation with the other serjeants; not just in his boat. All of them were facing the same onslaught. He stared out over the prow, watching mountains of water on the move. A wind had risen from nowhere to blow straight at him.
<
Sinon’s hand patted his lifebelt, seeking reassurance. The massif of cloud seemed to be hurtling towards them, a light-absorbing void distending across the ocean.
<
It wasn’t rain they faced, not in the ordinary sense. The deluge crashing down over them was like standing under a waterfall. As the clouds rampaged overhead, so the waves rose, as if seeking to bridge the gap.
The landing boats were thrown around pitilessly. Sometimes Sinon had to hold himself against a deck that was lifting over thirty degrees to the vertical. The jeeps secured along the centre of the hold strained against their restraint cables as their weight was flung about in directions the designers had never anticipated. Bilge pumps were wail
ing plaintively, to little effect. Sinon clung to a guard rail as the cold water mounted steadily against his legs, sloshing between the hull walls. He was worried he’d get tossed overboard. He was worried his newly assembled body would split along surgical lines as he strained muscles and tendons to hold on. He worried that a jeep would break free and crush him. He worried they wouldn’t reach the beach before the rain and waves filled the hold and sunk them.
Not even sharing the anxiety in the Edenist fashion did much to alleviate it. There was way too much distress bubbling through the aether as the armada battled for shore. The Edenists in secondary support roles, safe away from the megastorm, along with the voidhawks and their crews overhead, did their best to offer what reassurance and comfort they could to their beleaguered kinsmen. But they all felt the death toll rising, compounding the alarm. Landing boats collapsed, pitched over, individual serjeants lost their grip to drown amid the monster waves. Voidhawks laboured tirelessly to absorb the fresh memories of the dying serjeant personalities.
A nausea suppression program went primary as an aghast Ralph watched the nightmare unfurling. Neatly tabulated icons blinked up inside his mind, indicating the woeful progress the boats were making. Some were even being driven backwards as the gales howled out from the land. He did what he could. For all it was worth. Ordering the ground forces along the firebreak to stay put and dig in. Putting the medical teams on immediate standby. Designating search patrols for the aircraft, ready for the time when it became feasible to fly.
Diana Tiernan and the AI couldn’t give him any estimate when that would be. There was no way of knowing the true weight of water powering the storm. Radar scans from the SD sensor satellites to discover the depth and density were badly distorted by the tremendous electrical discharges still churning madly over Mortonridge. All they could do was wait.
“We couldn’t have known,” Janne Palmer said. “Dealing with the possessed is one giant unknown.”
“We should have guessed,” Ralph answered bitterly. “At least considered it.”
“Best information we had was that the cloud was a couple of hundred metres thick,” Diana said. “That’s all it was on Lalonde and every other planet they took over. But this blasted thing, it must be kilometres deep. They must have sucked every gram of water from the air. There may even be some kind of osmotic process involved, siphoning it up out of the sea.”
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