The Naked God - Flight nd-5

by Peter F. Hamilton

  It made them into a unit for her, however unwieldy and unreliable. That was when Chainbridge resembled a provincial town under occupation by foreign troops with unlimited expense accounts. Not a bad analogy. There were parties and dances every evening, and other people began to hang around, if for no other reason than the army made damn sure they had full access to Mortonridge’s dwindling food supplies. It was a happy town kept in good order, Annette even established the hub of Mortonridge’s downgraded communication net in the old town hall, which was commandeered as her command post. The net allowed her to retain a certain degree of control over the peninsula, keeping her in touch with the councils she’d left in charge of the towns her forces had taken over. There wasn’t much she could do to enforce her rule, short of complete overkill and send in a brigade of her troops, but in the main she’d created a small society which worked. That was before any of the inhabitants really believed that the Kingdom would break its word and invade with the express intention of ripping body from usurping soul.

  Now Chainbridge’s parties had ended. The few inhabited buildings had lost their ornate appearance in favour of a bleakly oppressive, fortress-like solidity. Non-combatants, the good-timers and hangers on, had left, drifting away into the countryside. The town was preparing for war.

  From her office window in the town hall, she could look down on the large cobbled square below. The fountains were off, their basins dry and duned by clumps of litter. Vehicles were parked in neat ranks under the rows of leghorn trees that circled the outer edge of the square. They were mostly manual-drive cars and four-wheel drive farm rovers, as per her instructions. None of them wore any kind of illusory image. Engineers were working on several of them, readying them for the coming ordeal.

  Annette came back to the long table where her ten senior officers were sitting. Delvan and Milne had taken the chairs on either side of hers; the two people she relied on the most. Delvan claimed to have been an officer in the First World War; while Milne had been an engineer’s mate during Earth’s steamship era, which made him a wizard with all things mechanical, though he freely admitted to knowing very little about electronics. Beyond them, sat Soi Hon, who was a veteran of early-Twenty-first Century bush wars, an ecological agitator, he called himself. Annette gathered his battles hadn’t been fought along national lines, but rather corporate ones. Whatever he wanted to describe himself as, his tactical know-how in the situation they faced was invaluable. The rest of them were just divisional commanders, gaining the loyalty of their troops through personality or reputation. Just how much loyalty, was a moot point.

  “What are today’s figures?” Annette asked.

  “Nearly forty deserted last night,” Delvan said. “Little shits. In my day they would have been shot for that kind of cowardice.”

  “Fortunately, we’re not in your day,” Soi Hon said. “When I fought the desecrators who stole my land I had legions of the people who did what they had to because our cause was just. We needed no military police and prisons to enforce the orders of our commanders then, nor do we here. If in their hearts people do not want to fight, then forcing them will not make them good soldiers.”

  “God is on the side of the big battalions,” Delvan sneered. “Owning your claptrap nobility doesn’t guarantee victory.”

  “We are not going to win.” Soi Hon smiled peacefully. “You do understand that, don’t you?”

  “We’ll have a damn good try, and to hell with your defeatist talk. I’m surprised you didn’t leave with the rest of them.”

  “I think that’ll do,” Annette said. “Delvan, you know Soi Hon is right, you’ve felt what the Kingdom is gathering to fling against us. The King would never commit his forces against us unless he was convinced of the outcome. And he has the backing of the Edenists, who even more than he, won’t engage in a foolhardy venture. This is a showpiece war; they intend to demonstrate to the Confederation’s general public that we are beatable. They cannot afford to lose, no matter what it costs them.”

  “So what the hell do you want us to do, then?” Delvan asked.

  “Make that cost exorbitant,” Soi Hon said. “Such people always assign a value to everything in monetary terms. We might not be able to defeat them on Mortonridge, but we can certainly prevent any further Liberation campaigns after this one.”

  “Their troops will have reporters with them,” Annette said. “They’ll want to showcase their triumphs. This war will be fought on two fronts, the physical one here, and the emotional one broadcast by the media across the Confederation. That is the important one, the one we have to win. Those reporters must be shown the terrifying price of opposing us. I believe Milne has been making some preparations.”

  “Not doing so bad on that front, lass,” Milne said. He sucked on a big clay pipe for emphasis, every inch the solid reliable NCO. “I’ve been training up a few lads, teaching them tricks of trade, like. We can’t use electrical circuits, of course, not our type. So we’ve gone back to basics. I’ve come up with a nice little mix of chemicals for an explosive; we’re shoving it into booby traps as fast as we can make ’em.”

  “What kind of booby traps?” Delvan asked.

  “Anti-personnel mines, ground vehicle snares, primed buildings, spiked pits; that kind of thing. Soi’s been showing us what he used to rig up when he was fighting. Right tricky stuff, it is, too. All with mechanical triggers, so their sensors won’t pick them up, even if they can get them working under the red cloud. I’d say we’re due to give Hiltch’s boys a load of grief once they cross the firebreak. We’ve also rigged bridges to blow, as well as the major junction flyovers along the M6. That ought to slow the buggers down.”

  “All very good,” Delvan said. “But with respect, I don’t think a few scraps of rubble will make much difference to their transport. I remember the tanks we used to have, great big brutes, they were. But by heaven they could crunch across almost every surface; and the engineers have had seven centuries to improve on that.”

  “Ruining the road junctions might not make a huge impact, but it will certainly have some effect,” Soi Hon said impassively. “We know how large this Liberation army is, even in these times that makes it unwieldy. They will use the M6, if not for front line troops, then certainly for their supplies and auxiliaries. If we delay them even by an hour a day, we add to the cost. Slowing them down will also give us time to respond and retaliate. It is a good tactic.”

  “Okay, I’m not arguing with you. But these booby traps and blown bridges are a passive response. Come on man, what’ve you got that’ll allow us to attack them?”

  “My lads have found quite a few light engineering factories and the like in Chainbridge,” Milne said. “The machine tools still work if you switch ’em to manual. Right now, I’ve got ’em churning out parts for a high velocity hunting rifle. I don’t know what the hell that sparky machine gun is that the souls have seen Hiltch’s boys practising with. But I reckon my rifle’s got an easy twice the range of ’em.”

  “They’ll be wearing armour,” Delvan warned.

  “Aye, I know that. But Soi’s told me about kinetic enhanced impact bullets. Our armourers are doing their best to produce them, you’ll have a decent stock in another few days. We’ll be able to inflict a lot of damage with them, you see if we don’t.”

  “Thanks, Milne,” Annette said. “You’ve done a great job, considering what you’ve had to work with, and what we’re facing.”

  Milne cocked his pipe at her. “We’ll put up a good account of ourselves, lass, no worries.”

  “I’m sure.” She gazed round at the rest of her commanders. There was a good range of emotions distributed among them, from clear nerves to stupid over-confidence. “Now we know roughly what our own capabilities are, we need to start working out how we’re going to deploy. Delvan, you’re probably the best strategist we have . . .”

  “Butt-headed traditionalist,” Soi Hon muttered sotto voce.

  Annette raised a warning eyebrow and the o
ld guerrilla made a conciliatory shrug. “What is Hiltch likely to do?” she asked.

  “Two things,” Delvan said, ignoring Soi. “Firstly, their initial assault is going to be a lulu. He’ll throw everything he’s got at us, on as many fronts as he can afford to open. We’ll be facing massive troop incursions, this wretched space warship bombardment, aircraft carpet bombing, artillery. The aim is to demoralise us right from the start, make it quite clear from the scale of the Liberation that we’ll lose, drumming it home in a fashion we can’t possibly ignore. I’d recommend that we actually pull back a little way from the borders of the peninsula; don’t give him an easy target. Leave it to Milne’s booby traps to snarl up his timetable, and stall any immediate visible success he wants to lay on for the reporters.”

  “Okay, I can cope with that. What’s his second likely objective?”

  “His target missions. If he’s got any sense, he’ll go for our population centres first. Our power declines with our numbers, which will make his mopping up operation a damn sight easier.”

  “Population centres,” Annette exclaimed in annoyance. “What population centres? People are deserting the towns in droves. The councils are reporting we’re now down to less than half the numbers we had in urban areas when we took over Mortonridge. They’re like our deserters, heading for the hills. Right now we’re spread over this land thinner than a pigeon’s fart.”

  “It’s not the hills they’re after,” Soi said, his soft tone a rebuke. “It’s the farms. Which was only to be expected. You are well aware of the food situation across the peninsula. Had your efforts been directed at developing our civil infrastructure instead of our military base, it would be a different story.”

  “Is that a criticism?”

  His gentle laugh was infuriating, mockingly superior. “A plea for industrialisation, from me? Please! I regard the land and the people as integral. Nature provides us with our true state. It is our towns and cities with their machines and hunger, which have birthed the corruption that has contaminated human society for millennia. The defence of people who chose to live with the land is paramount.”

  “Okay, thanks for the party manifesto. But it doesn’t alter what I said. We haven’t got that many population centres to lure Hiltch’s forces into ambush.”

  “We will have. I suspect Delvan is correct when he says Hiltch will want to open with a grand gesture. That should work in our favour. As always when a land is invaded, its people pull together. They’ll see that as individuals they can offer no resistance to the Liberation forces, and they’ll flee their isolation in search of group sanctuary. We will gather ourselves together as a people again. Then the battle will be joined in full.”

  Annette’s growing smile was a physical demonstration of the satisfaction spreading through her thoughts. “Remember Stephanie Ash, what I told her about having to decide whose side she was on? That self-righteous cow just stood there smiling politely the whole time, knowing her world view was the real thing and that I’d come round to her way of thinking in the end. Looks like I’ll have the last laugh after all—even if it is only a short one. Damn, I’m going to enjoy that almost as much as I am bollixing up my dear old friend Ralph’s campaign.”

  “You really think we’ll be able to start recruiting into the regiments again?” Delvan asked Soi Hon.

  “Can you think of nothing but your own position and power? It is not the regiments which will inflict the worst casualties, but the united people. Group ten of us together, and the destructive potential of our energistic power is an order of magnitude greater than any artillery the Liberation forces can bring to bear.”

  “Which is less than one per cent of the lowest powered maser on a Strategic Defence platform, and that’s before we get into the heavy duty systems like their X-ray lasers,” Annette said, tired of their bickering. “It’s not our numbers which matter, but our ability to communicate and organise. That’s what we have to safeguard until the last of us is shoved into zero-tau.”

  “I agree,” Delvan said. “The whole war is going to be an extremely fluid situation from the start. Lightning strikes, hit the bastards and run, are what we should be planning for.”

  “Exactly, that’s where I expect you two to combine for me. Your overall strategy, Delvan, combined with Soi’s tactics. It’s a lethal alliance, the equivalent of the Kingdom and the Edenists.”

  “An inspired comparison,” Soi chuckled.

  “My pleasure. All right, let’s start looking at the map, and see who we’re going to send where.”

  It was Emmet Mordden, again, who was on duty in the operations centre when the Organization fleet started to emerge above New California. The hellhawks were first, their wormholes opening more or less in the official emergence zone, a hundred thousand kilometres above Monterey. That gave them some warning that the Adamist craft were en route. Emmet quickly called in five more operatives to monitor their rag-tag arrival. They certainly aimed for the emergence zone, but with possessed officers on board aiming and hitting were increasingly separate concepts. Event horizons started to inflate across a vast section of space around the planet; the only thing regular about them was the timing. One every twenty seconds.

  The big flight trajectory holoscreens ringing the centre had to change perspective several times, clicking down through their magnification to encompass space right out to Requa, New California’s fourth moonlet. Black icons started to erupt across the screen as if it was being struck by dirty rain.

  The AI began to absorb the swarm of information datavised in from the SD sensor platforms, and started plotting the starships’ erratic trajectories. Multiple vector lines sprang up on every console display. The operators studied them urgently, opening communication circuits to verify the ships were still under Organization control. Emmet got so carried along by the pandemonium of the first few minutes it took a while before he began to realize something was badly wrong with the whole episode. Firstly, they were too early, Admiral Kolhammer’s task force couldn’t possibly have arrived at Tranquillity yet. Secondly, there were too many ships. Even if the ambush had been a massive success, some ships would have been lost. Of all Capone’s lieutenants, he had the most pragmatic view of just how effective the fleet ships were.

  Those two ugly facts were just beginning to register, when he sensed the dismay bubbling up among Jull von Holger’s thoughts, as the hellhawk liaison man communicated with his colleagues.

  “What the hell is it?” Emmet demanded. “Why are they back here? Did they lose, chicken out, or what?”

  Jull von Holger shook his head in bewilderment, most reluctant to be the messenger of bad news. “No. No, they didn’t lose. Their target . . . Tranquillity jumped away.”

  Emmet frowned at him.

  “Look, just call Luigi, okay. I don’t understand it myself.”

  Emmet gave him a long dissatisfied look, then turned to his own console. He ordered it to find the Salvatore ’s transponder, and open a channel to the flagship. “What’s going on?” he asked when a fuzzy picture of Luigi Balsamo appeared in the corner of his display.

  “She tricked us,” Luigi shouted angrily. “That Saldana bitch ran away. Christ knows how she managed it, but the whole thing vanished down a wormhole. Nobody told us a habitat could do that. You never warned us, did you? You’re supposed to be the Organization’s technical whiz kid. Why the fuck didn’t you say something?”

  “About what? What do you mean it went down a wormhole? What went down a wormhole?”

  “Why don’t you listen , shitbrain? The habitat! The habitat vanished in front of us!”

  Emmet stared at the image, refusing to believe what he’d heard. “I’m calling Al,” he said eventually.

  It was the first time Luigi had ever been intimidated by the big double doors of the Nixon suite. There were a couple of soldiers on duty outside, wearing their standard fawn-brown double-breasted suits, big square-jawed guys with a dark rasp of stubble, glossy Thompson machine guns held promine
ntly. He could sense several people milling about inside, their familiar thoughts dull and unhappy as they waited for him. He thought of all the punishments and reprimands he’d attended in his own capacity as one of the Organization’s elite lieutenants. The omens weren’t good.

  One of the soldiers opened the doors, a superior in-the-know grin on his face. He didn’t say anything, just made a mocking gesture of welcome. Luigi resisted the urge to smash his face to pulp, and walked in.

  “What the fuck happened?” Al bellowed.

  Luigi glanced round at the semicircle of erstwhile friends as the doors closed behind him. Patricia was there, as was Silvano, Jezzibella, Emmet, Mickey, and that little bitch Kiera. All of them going with the tide that was sweeping him away to drown.

  “We were given some very bad information.” He looked pointedly at Patricia. “Perez sold us a dummy. And you bought it.”

  “He didn’t,” she snapped. “He possessed one of the First Admiral’s top aids in Trafalgar. Kolhammer was heading straight for Tranquillity.”

  “And we would have got him, too. If somebody had just warned me. I mean, Jesus H Christ, an entire goddamn habitat flitting off. Do you have any idea how big that thing was?”

  “Who cares?” Al said. “The habitat wasn’t your main target. You were there to blow up Kolhammer’s ships.”