Day after day the news companies had been broadcasting sensevises from rover reporters covering the build up of Liberation forces. Everybody knew somebody who was connected to somebody who was involved in some way; from hauling equipment out to Fort Forward to serving drinks to Edenists in spaceport bars. Speculation on the current affairs programmes was deliberately vague about specific dates and precise numbers, even the communication net gossips were showing restraint in naming the day. Hearsay aside, the evidence was pretty solid.
The type of cargoes raining down on the planet had changed. Combat gear was slowly being replaced by heavy-duty civil engineering equipment, ready to repair the expected damage to Mortonridge and provide additional support infrastructure for the occupying forces. The personnel arriving at Fort Forward were also subject to a shift in professions. Just under a million serjeants had been sent from Jupiter, along with nearly a quarter of a million marines and mercenaries from across the Confederation. The Liberation army was essentially complete. So now it was the medical teams being ferried down from orbit, civilian volunteers complementing entire mobile military hospitals. Estimated casualty figures (both military and civilian) were strictly classified. But everyone knew the twelve thousand medical staff were going to suffer a heavy workload. Eighty voidhawks had already been assigned evac duties, spreading the wounded around facilities in the Kingdom and its allies.
Throughout the seventh day following Princess Kirsten’s visit, Ralph Hiltch and his command staff studied the figures and displays provided by the AI. The neuroiconic image which accumulated in his mind kept expanding as more information was correlated. By late afternoon, his conscious perception point seemed to be hanging below a supergalaxy of multicoloured stars, which threatened to make him giddy as he tried to examine it in all directions at once. Despite its coherence, what he really wanted was more training time, more transport, more supplies, and definitely more intelligence assessments of the terrain ahead. But essentially, his army was as ready as it would ever be. He gave the order for final stage deployment to begin.
Over half of the serjeants and their back-up brigades had already left Fort Forward. The previous two days had been spent mustering at their preliminary positions offshore. Nearly a hundred islands around Mortonridge’s coast had been taken over as temporary depots; from reefs which barely showed above the waves to resort atolls dotted with luxury hotels. Where there were no convenient scraps of land, huge cargo ships had been hurriedly converted into floating docks, and anchored thirty kilometres from the shore.
For the first stage of the coastal assault, the army was scheduled to use boats. They were actually going to storm ashore, wading through the waves and up onto the sand, almost in homage to a great many of the incarnations from the past they were facing. Ralph wasn’t prepared to risk flying even the simplest of aircraft into the energistic environment over Mortonridge, not until after they’d dealt with the red cloud at least.
The remainder of the Liberation ground forces emptied out of Fort Forward in massive convoys, spreading out along the firebreak in thousands of multi-terrain vehicles. There was no attempt at secrecy, no hugging the cover behind ridges and hills. The squads drove through the encroaching twilight and into the night; the nimbus of their massed headlight beams creeping like an anaemic dawn along the horizon paralleling the firebreak.
Across Xingu, a civil curfew order was enacted once again, with the police put on full alert. Although they were fairly sure no possessed were left outside Mortonridge, the continent’s authorities were taking Annette Ekelund’s threat of sabotage very seriously. When dawn arrived, no civilian would be allowed out onto the streets. People grumbled and groaned, and datavised protests to local news shows, remembering what a nuisance the curfew had been last time. It was almost a bravado show of defiance. In the main, they just settled back and accessed the show.
High above the planet, the Strategic Defence centre on Guyana began coordinating the Royal Navy’s part of the assault. Thrusters flared on low orbit weapons platforms, refining their new orbits. A flotilla of three hundred voidhawks also began to accelerate, synchronizing their distortion fields to rise away from the planet in a long curve.
The psychic pressure mounting against Mortonridge shifted from faint intimation to blatantly unmistakable.
To casual observation, Chainbridge was still a busy town. When Annette Ekelund reached a slight ridge a couple of kilometres from the outskirts, she stopped the sturdy country rover she was driving and looked back over her shoulder. Hundreds of lighted windows shone out across the lame farmland, burning steady against the flickering crimson waves scattered down from the lumbering cloud roof. The buildings were warm, too, warm enough to fool any perfunctory sensor scans into believing they were occupied. But no one was left there, her command group was the last to leave.
“It’ll keep the blighters tied up for a while,” Delvan assured her. He was sitting in the passenger seat beside her, clad in his old khaki uniform, a discreet row of scarlet and gold ribbons on his chest.
In the back seat, Soi Hon veiled a sneer. He, too, had reverted to type: dark jungle fatigues and a felt bush-ranger hat. “For at least a quarter of an hour.”
“Would you like to return to the beyond fifteen minutes early?” Delvan enquired lightly.
“Any time we delay them is good time,” Annette told the pair of them. She took the brake off, and accelerated down the secondary road. They were heading for Cold Overton, a small village eighty kilometres away. Their field command centre; picked virtually at random by Soi Hon, central but not strategically so, adequate road links, surrounded by thick forest. It was as good as any, not that they’d be staying long. Fluid tactics was the key to this campaign.
Soi Hon clapped Delvan on the shoulder. “And this is our time, eh? You and I both. Onward to death and glory.”
“There is no glory here.” Delvan spoke so quietly, the others could only just hear him against the bass grumble of thunder.
“Don’t tell me you’re having second thoughts?”
“I heard my men wailing at night,” the old soldier replied emotionlessly. “The ones left out in No Man’s Land, left behind to drown in puddles of their own blood; the ones that weren’t vomiting their lungs up from that devilish gas. Screaming for us to help them, more frightened at being alone than they were of being shot.”
“You Christians, you always take life so personally. We’re here by accident, not design. Nothing is ordained, you are only what you make of yourself. You can never go back, the past doesn’t change. Stop thinking about it. The only part of history which matters is the future.”
“It broke my heart, not being able to help them. Good, decent men; boys a lot of them. I swore I’d never get involved in such madness again. They called it total war. But it wasn’t, it was total bloody murder. Insanity had become a disease, and we all caught it. Twice in my lifetime my nation sent its youth out to die for a just cause, to protect ourselves and our way of life.” He smiled frigidly at the eco warrior. “And now here I am once again. Seven bloody centuries later. Seven hundred years, and nothing has changed. Not one damn thing. I’m fighting to preserve myself and my new life. A righteous war with me on the side of the angels, even though they’ve become fallen angels. And I can already hear the screams, God help me.”
“All I hear is our victory song,” Soi Hon said. “The voice of the land is louder and stronger than any human cry. This is our place, we are at one with it. We belong here. We have a right to exist in this universe.”
Delvan closed his eyes and tipped his head back. “Lord forgive me I am such a fool. Here we all are, embarking on a crusade to storm the very gates of Heaven Itself in our desperation. What a monumental folly. I shall smite at the dark angels massed against us, crying for death, for only in death will we ever find peace. Yet You have already revealed that death is not our destiny, nor ever can be.”
“Wake up, old man. We’re not fighting God, we’re fighting an unjust
universe.”
For the first time since his return from the beyond, Delvan smiled. “You think there’s a difference?”
The island was enchanting, its botany and geology combining into the kind of synergistic idyll which was the grail of Edenist habitat designers. Inland, there were craggy rocks hosting long white waterfalls, and thick lush forests choked with sweet-scented flowers. The shore comprised cove after cove, their pale gold sands gleaming under the azure sky; except for one, where the offshore reef crumbled under the foaming breakers to give the sands an exquisite fairydust coating of pink coral. It appealed to humans on a primal level, urging them to slow down and spend time just soaking in nature. As a reward for their worship, time itself would expand and become almost meaningless.
Even in his current existence, Sinon wished he was staying longer than their eighteen-hour stopover. Five thousand serjeants had descended on this tiny jewel of land glinting in the ocean, along with their equipment and support personnel. Marines were camped ten to a room in the resort hotels; gardens and tennis courts had been requisitioned as landing pads; and the coves were harbours for a hundred of the regiment’s landing boats. All day, the boats had taken their turn to nuzzle the shore, extending their forward ramps so that jeeps and light trucks could drive on board. Now, in the evening, the serjeants were finally embarking.
Syrinx would like this place,sinon told choma. I must tell her about it.he was two thirds of the way along a line of serjeants who were wading out to their landing boat. There wasn’t enough room on this particular beach to berth more than three boats at a time, so the other eleven were anchored a hundred metres offshore. A column of serjeants snaked out to each one, making slow time through the water. The big constructs were laden with backpacks, carrying their weapons above their heads to stop them getting wet. Groups of Royal Marines milled about on the bluff, watching the process. If all went well, they’d be doing the same thing next morning.
Now there’s good healthy optimism,choma replied.
What do you mean?
I’ve been working out our probable casualty rate. Would you like to know how many of our squad are likely to survive the entire campaign?
Not particularly. I have no intention of becoming a statistic.
Where have I heard that before? In any case, it’s two. Two out of ten.
Thank you very much.sinon reached the landing boat. it was an ugly, rugged affair, one design serving the entire Liberation armada. A carbosilicon hull mass produced over on Esparta, with power cells and an engine that could have come from any of a dozen industrialized star systems allied to the Kingdom. Hard-pressed navy engineers had plugged the standard components together, completing several hundred each day. The three on the beach were still being worked on by technicians.
Honesty is supposed to be our culture’s strength,choma said, mildly irked by the negative reaction.
We’re a long way from Eden now.sinon slung his rifle high on his shoulder, and started climbing the ladder up the side of the boat. When he reached the top of the gunnel he looked back to shore. The sun was sinking into the sea, leaving a rosy haze line above the darkening water. Parodying that, on the opposite horizon, the glow of the red cloud was visible, a narrow fracture separating water and air.
Last chance, Sinon told himself. The other serjeants were all climbing down into the boat, their mind-tones subdued but still resolute. Rationally, he was buying the Confederation time to find a genuine answer. And Consensus itself had approved this course of action. He swung his legs over the rail, and put a hand down to help Choma. Come on, let’s go storm the Dark Lord’s citadel.
The Royal Marine ion field flyer was a lone spark of gold shimmering high in the night sky, brighter than any star. It flew across the top of the Mortonridge peninsula, keeping parallel to the firebreak, twenty-five kilometres to the north, and holding a steady fifteen kilometre altitude.
Ralph Hiltch sat in the flyer’s cabin as Cathal Fitzgerald piloted them above the northern end of the mountain range which formed the peninsula’s spine. Eight hours of neural nanonics enforced sleep had left him feeling fresh, but emotionally dead. His mind had woken immune to the human consequences of the Liberation. Whether it was numb from the torrent of information which had been bullying his brain for weeks, or guilty at the enormity of what he’d organized, he wasn’t sure.
It meant that now he was hooked into the flyer’s sensor suite, he could view the last stages of the deployment with god-like dispassion. Which was probably for the best, he thought. Accepting personal responsibility for every casualty would drive anyone insane within the first two minutes. Even so, he’d wanted this one last overview. To convince himself it was genuine if nothing else. The last insecurity, that all the data and images he’d handled had been transformed to physical reality.
There could be doubt. The army spread out below him, his army, was flowing over the black land in streamers of fluid light, bending and curling round hills and valleys. Individual vehicles expressed as twinkles of light, barely different to icons blipping their way across a map. Except here there was no colour, just the white headlight beams contrasting the funeral ground.
It was after midnight, and two-thirds of the ground deployment was complete. Both flanks were established, now there was only the centre to set up, the most difficult aspect. His main spearhead was going to drive right along the M6, allowing the huge supply and back-up convoys an easy ride. Using the motorway was a disturbingly obvious strategy, but essential if they were to complete in a minimum timescale.
Ekelund would have sabotaged the road, but bridges could be repaired, blockades shunted aside, and gorges filled. The combat engineering corps were ready for that. At least the possessed didn’t have air power. Though occasionally he had images of propeller biplanes roaring overhead and strafing the jeeps. Victory rolls with the pilot’s white silk scarf flapping jauntily in the slipstream. Stupid.
Ralph switched the suite’s focus to the red cloud. Its edges were still arched down to the ground, sealing the peninsula away from the rest of the planet. Dusky random wave shadows rolled across the pulpy surface. He thought they might be more restless than usual, though that could well be his imagination. Thankfully, there was no sign of that peculiar oval formation which he’d seen once before. The one he absolutely refused to call an eye. All he really wanted was one glimpse through; to reassure himself the peninsula was still there, if nothing else. They’d had no data of any kind from inside since the day Ekelund had brought the cloud down. No links with the net could be established; no non-possessed had managed to sneak out. A final sweep with the flyer’s sensors revealed nothing new.
“Take us back,” he told Cathal.
The flyer performed a fast turn, curving round to line up on Fort Forward. Ahead of it, the giant Thunderbirds continued to swoop down out of the western sky, delta heatshields glowing a dull vermilion against the starfield backdrop. That aspect of the build up, at least, remained unchanged. Cathal landed them inside the secure command complex, along the southern side of the new city. Ralph trotted down the airstair, ignoring the armed Marine escort which fell in around him. The trappings of his position had ceased to register as special some time ago, just another aspect of this extraordinary event.
Brigadier Palmer (the first person Ralph had promoted) was waiting outside the door to the Ops Room. “Well?” she asked, as they walked in.
“I didn’t see anyone waving a white flag.”
“We’d know if they wanted to.” Like a lot of people involved with the Liberation, especially those who’d been on Mortonridge since the start, she considered herself to have a connection with the possessed hidden behind the red cloud, an awareness of attitude. Ralph wasn’t convinced, although he acknowledged the possessed exerted some kind of psychic presence.
The Ops Room was a long rectangular chamber with glass walls separating it from innumerable specialist planning offices. Completing electronic systems integration and connecting their a
rchitecture with Ombey’s military communication circuits was another triumph for the overworked Royal Marine engineering corps, though its rushed nature was evident in the bundled cables hanging between consoles and open ceiling panels, air conditioning which was too chilly, and raw carbon-concrete corner pillars. Its floor-space was taken up by cheap corporate-style desks holding consoles, AV projectors, and communication gear. Right now, it was full to capacity; over fifty officers from the Royal Navy were collaborating with an equal number of Edenists; the next largest contingent was the Confederation Navy with twenty; while the remainder were drawn from various participating allies.
They were going to be the coordinators of the Liberation, the human analysis and liaison between the ground forces and the controlling AI back in Pasto. A failsafe against the maxim: No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Every one of them stood up as Ralph Hiltch entered. That, he did notice. Together they had spent the past few weeks planning this together, arguing, pleading, contributing ideas, working miracles. They’d learned to cooperate and coordinate their fields of expertise, putting aside old quarrels so they melded into a unified, dedicated team. He was proud of them and what they’d accomplished.
Their show of respect rekindled several of his suppressed emotions. “I’ll keep this short,” he told the hushed chamber. “We can’t pretend this is going to solve the problem possession poses to the Confederation, but it’s a damn sight more important than a propaganda war, which is what some reporters have been calling it. We’re fighting to free two million people, and we’re battling to bring hope into the lives of an awful lot more. To me, that’s more than worthwhile, it’s essential. So let’s make our contribution a good one.”
Amid scattered applause, he made his way to his office at the far end. His desk gave him a view down the whole length of the Ops Room, providing he craned his neck over the stack of processor block peripherals connected to his main desktop console. While he was datavising the array for strategic updates, his executive command group joined him. As well as Janne Palmer who was the Chief of the occupying forces, there was Acacia, the Edenist liaison, an elderly woman who had served as ambassador to Ombey for five years. He’d also drafted in Diana Tiernan to act as the army’s technical advisor, helping to filter the scientific reports on the possessed which were flooding in from across the Confederation. Cathal completed the gathering, still holding his post as Ralph’s assistant, but now with the rank of lieutenant commander.
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