One of the stables was a burnt-out hulk, with long sootmarks lashing up over the stone above each empty window. The centre of its slate roof had collapsed inwards. Carmitha whistled silently. Louise hadn’t been lying. Several groups of field labourers were sheltering from the radiant sky in open doorways. They were munching on big sandwiches and baguettes, passing bottles round. Carmitha could feel every pair of eyes on her as Luca took her over to the remaining stable.
“You can put Olivier in here,” he said. “I think the stalls are big enough. And there’s oats in the sacks at the far end. The hose is working as well, if you want to wash him down first.” It was something of which he seemed quite proud.
Carmitha could well imagine Grant’s Kavanagh’s reaction if the hose hadn’t been working. “Thank you, I’ll do that.”
“Okay. Are you going to sleep in the caravan?”
“I think that’s for the best, don’t you?”
“Sure. When you’re ready, go into the kitchen and ask for Susannah. She’ll find something for you to do.” He started to walk away.
“Grant . . . I mean Luca.”
“Yeah.”
Carmitha held her hand out. Light sparked sharply off the diamond ring. “She gave it to me.”
Luca stared at it in shocked recognition, and took a couple of fast paces towards her. He grabbed her hand and brought it up in front of his face. “Where are they?” he demanded hotly. “Damnit, where did they go? Are they safe?”
“Louise told me about the last time she saw you,” Carmitha said coolly. She glanced pointedly at the burnt out stable.
Luca clenched his fists, his face contorted in anguish. Every thought in his head was suffused with shame. “I didn’t . . . I wasn’t . . . Oh, shit! Goddamn it. Where are they? I promise you, I swear, I am not going to hurt them. Just tell me.”
“I know. It was a crazy time. You’re ashamed and sorry, now. And you’d never harm a hair on their heads.”
“Yes.” He made an effort to regain control. “Look, we did terrible things. Brutal, inhuman things. To people, women, children. I know it was wrong. I knew the whole time I was doing it, and I still kept on doing them. But you don’t understand what was driving me. Driving all of us.” He shook an accusing finger, shouting. “You’ve never died. You’ve never been that insanely fucking desperate. Lucifer’s deal would have been the most blessed relief from that place we were imprisoned. I would have done that. I would have walked right through the gates of hell and begged to be let in if I’d just been given the chance. But we never were.” He crumpled, energy withering from his body. “Damnit. Please? I just want to know if they’re all right. Look, we’ve got some other non-possessed here, kids; and there’s more in the town. We look after them. We’re not total monsters.”
Carmitha looked round the courtyard, almost embarrassed. “Are you letting Grant know all this?”
“Yes. Yes, I am. I promise.”
“Okay. I don’t know exactly where they are. I left the pair of them at Bytham, they took the aeroambulance. I saw it fly away.”
“Aeroambulance?”
“Yes. It was Genevieve’s idea. They were trying to reach Norwich. They thought they’d be safe there.”
“Oh.” He held his horse tightly, almost as though he would fall without its support. His face brimmed with regret. “It would take me months to reach the city. That’s if there’s a ship that’ll take me. Damn!”
She put a tentative hand on his arm. “Sorry I’m not much more help. But that Louise is one tough girl. If anyone is going to avoid possession, it’ll be her.”
He stared at her incredulously, then gave a bitter laugh. “My Louise? Tough? She can’t even sugar her own grapefruit for breakfast. God, what a stupid bloody way to bring up children. Why did you do that? Why don’t you let them see the world for what it really is? Because they’re born to be ladies, our society protects them. I protect them, as every father should. I give them everything that’s right and decent in the world. Your society is shit , worthless, irrelevant; it doesn’t even qualify as a society; you’re playing out a medieval pageant, not living. Being pathetic and insignificant isn’t a way of defending yourself and everyone you love. People have to face up to what’s outside their own horizon. Nothing was outside, not until you demon freaks came and ruined the universe. We have lived here for centuries and made ourselves a good respectable home. And you scum ruined that. Ruined! You stole it from us, and now you’re trying to rebuild everything you say you hate. You’re not even bloody savages, you’re below that. No wonder hell didn’t want you.”
“Hey!” Carmitha shook him hard. “Hey, snap out of it.”
“Don’t touch me!” he screamed. His whole body was trembling violently. “Oh God.” He sank to his knees, hands pressed into his face. A wretched voice burbled out between clawed fingers. “I’m him, I’m him. There’s no difference any more. This isn’t what we wanted. Don’t you understand? This isn’t how life’s supposed to be here. This was meant to be paradise.”
“No such place.” She rubbed the top of his spine, trying to ease some of the badly knotted muscles. “You’ve just got to make the best of it. Like everybody else.”
His head bobbed weakly in what Carmitha supposed was acknowledgement. She decided this probably wasn’t the best time to tell him his dear precious Louise was pregnant.
Chapter 10
Mortonridge was bleeding away into the ocean, a prolonged and arduous death. It was as though all the pain, the torment, the misery from a conflict that could never be anything other than excruciatingly bitter had manifested itself as mud. Slimy, insidious, limitless, it rotted the resolve of both sides in the same way it ravaged their physical environment. The peninsula’s living skin of topsoil had torn along the spine of the central mountain range to slither relentlessly down-slope into the coastal shallows. All the rich black loam built up over millennia as the rainforests regenerated themselves upon the decayed trunks of timelost past generations was sluiced away within two days by the unnatural rain. Reduced to supersaturated sludge, the precious upper few metres containing abundant nitrates, bacteria, and aboriginal earthworm-analogues had become an unstoppable landslip. Hill-sized moraines of mire were pushed along valleys, bulldozed by the intolerable pressure exerted by cubic kilometres of more ooze behind.
The mud tides scoured every valley, incline, and hollow; exposing the denser substrata. A compacted mix of gravel and clay, as sterile as asteroid regolith. There were no seeds or spores or eggs hidden tenaciously in its clefts to sprout anew. And precious few nutrients to succour and support them even if there had been.
Ralph used the SD sensors to watch the thick black stain expanding out across the sea. The mouth of the Juliffe had produced a similar discoloration in Lalonde’s sea, he remembered. But that was just one small blemish. This was an ecological blight unmatched since the worst of Earth’s dystopic Twenty-first Century. Marine creatures were dying in the plague of unnatural dark waters, choking beneath the uncountable corpses of their mammalian cousins.
“She was right, you know,” he told Cathal at the end of the Liberation’s first week.
“Who?”
“Annette Ekelund. Remember when we met her at the Firebreak roadblock? She said we’d have to destroy the village in order to save it. And I stood there and told her that I’d do whatever I had to, whatever it took. Dear God.” He slumped back in the thickly cushioned chair behind his desk. If it hadn’t been for the staff in the Ops Room on the other side of the glass wall he would probably have put his head in his hands.
Cathal glanced into the sparkling light of the desktop AV pillar. The unhealthy smear around Mortonridge’s coast had grown almost as a counterbalance to the shrinking cloud. It was still raining over the peninsula, of course, but not constantly. The cloud had almost reverted to a natural weather formation, there were actual gaps amid the thick dark swirls now. “Chief, they did it to themselves. You’ve got to stop punishing yourself over thi
s. No one who’s been de-possessed in zero-tau is blaming you for anything. They’re gonna give you a fucking medal once this is over.”
Medals, ennoblement, promotions; they’d all been mentioned. Ralph hadn’t paid a lot of attention. Such things were the trappings of state, government trinkets of no practical value whatsoever. Saving people was what really counted; everything else was just an acknowledgement, a method of reinforcing memory. He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted that. Mortonridge would never recover, would never grow back to what it was. Maybe that was the best memorial, a decimated land was something that could never be overlooked and ignored by future generations. A truth that remained unsusceptible to the historical revisionists. The Liberation, he had decided some while ago, wasn’t a victory over Ekelund, at best he’d scored a few points off her. She’d be back for the next match.
Acacia rapped lightly on the open door, and walked in, followed by Janne Palmer. Ralph waved at them to sit, and datavised a codelock at the door. The sensenviron bubble room closed about them. Princess Kirsten and Admiral Farquar were waiting around the oval table for the daily progress review. Mortonridge itself formed a three dimensional relief map on the tabletop, small blinking symbols sketching in the state of the campaign. The number of purple triangles, indicating clusters of possessed, had increased dramatically over the last ten days as the cloud attenuated allowing the SD sensors to scan the ground. Invading forces were green hexagons, an unbroken line mimicking the coastline, sixty-five kilometres inland.
Admiral Farquar leant forwards, studying the situation with a despondent expression. “Less than ten kilometres a day,” he said sombrely. “I’d hoped we would be a little further along by now.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you’d tried walking through that devilsome mud,” Acacia said. “The serjeants are making excellent progress.”
“It wasn’t a criticism,” the admiral said hastily. “Given the circumstances, they’ve performed marvellously. I simply wish we could have one piece of luck on our side, everything about these conditions seems to swing in Ekelund’s favour.”
“It’s starting to swing back,” Cathal said. “The rain and the mud have triggered just about every booby trap they left in wait for us. And we’ve got their locations locked down now. They can’t escape.”
“I can see the actual campaign is advancing well on the ground,” Princess Kirsten said. “I have no complaint about the way you’re handling that. However, I do have a problem with the number of casualties we’re incurring, on both sides.”
The relevant figures stood in gold columns at the top of the table. Ralph had done his best to ignore them. Not that he could forget. “The suicide rate among the possessed is increasing at an alarming rate,” he conceded. “Today saw it reaching eight per cent; and there’s very little we can do about it. They’re doing it quite deliberately. It’s an inhibiting tactic. After all, what have they got to lose? The whole purpose of the campaign is to free the bodies they’ve captured; if they can deny us that opportunity then they will weaken our resolve, both on the ground and in the political arena.”
“If that’s their reasoning, then they’re badly mistaken,” Princess Kirsten said. “One of the main reasons for the Kingdom’s strength is because my family can take tough decisions when the need arises. This Liberation continues until the serjeants meet up on Mortonridge’s central mountain. However, I would like some options on how to reduce casualties.”
“There’s only one,” Ralph said. “And it’s by no means perfect. We slow the front line’s advance and use the time to concentrate our forces around the possessed. At the moment we’re using almost the minimum number of serjeants against each nest of them we encounter. That means the serjeants have to use a lot of gunfire to subdue them. When the possessed realize they’ve lost, they stop resisting the bullets. Bang, we lose. Another of our people dies, and the lost souls in the beyond have another recruit.”
“If we increase the number of serjeants for each encounter, what sort of reduction do you expect us to be looking at?”
“At the moment, we try to have at least thirty per cent more serjeants than possessed. If we could reach double, then we think we can hold the suicide rate down to a maximum of fifteen per cent each time.”
“Of course, the ratio will improve naturally as the length of the front line contracts and the number of possessed decreases,” Admiral Farquar said. “It’s just that right now we’re about at maximum stretch. The serjeants haven’t got far enough inland to decrease the length of the front line appreciably, yet they’re encountering a lot of possessed.”
“That entire situation is going to change over the next three to four days,” Cathal said. “Almost all the possessed are on the move. They’re retreating from the front line as fast as they can wade. The advance is going to speed up considerably, so the length will reduce anyway.”
“They’re running for now,” Janne Palmer said. “But there’s a lot of heavy concentrations of them fifty kilometres in from the front line. If they’ve got any sense, they’ll regroup.”
“The more of them there are, the stronger they get, and the more difficult they’ll be to subdue. Especially in light of the suicides,” Acacia said. “I’ve had the AI drawing up an SD strike pattern to halt their movements. I don’t think they should be allowed to retreat any further. We’re worried that we’ll wind up with a solid core at the centre which will be just about impossible to crack without large scale casualties.”
“I really don’t want to wait three to four days for an improvement,” Princess Kirsten said. “Ralph, what do you think?”
“Denying them the ability to congregate is my primary concern, ma’am. They’ve already got a lot of people in Schallton, Ketton, and Cauley, I do not want to see that increase any further. But if we prevent them from moving from their present locations, and then switch our tactics to a slower advance, you’re looking at almost doubling the estimated time of the campaign.”
“But with significantly reduced casualties?” the Princess asked.
Ralph looked over at Acacia. “Only among the people who’ve been possessed. Trying to subdue them with a larger number of serjeants using less firepower will significantly increase the risk to the serjeants.”
“We volunteered for this knowing the risks would be great,” Acacia said. “And we are prepared for that. However, I feel I should tell you that a significant number of serjeants are suffering from what I can only describe as low morale. It’s not something we were expecting, the animating personalities were supposed to be fairly simple thought routines with basic personalities. It would appear they are evolving into quite high-order mentalities. Unfortunately, they lack the kind of sophistication which would allow them to appreciate their full Edenist heritage. Normally we can mitigate one person’s burden by sharing and sympathising. However, here the number of suffering is far in excess of the rest of us, which actually places quite a strain on us. We haven’t known a scale of suffering like this since Jantrit.”
“You mean they’re becoming real people?” Janne Palmer asked.
“Not yet. Nor do we believe they ever will do. Ultimately they are limited by the capacity of the serjeant processor array, after all. What I am telling you is that they’re progressing slightly beyond simplistic bitek servitors. Do not expect machine levels of efficiency in future. There are human factors involved which will now need to be taken into account.”
“Such as?” the Princess asked.
“They will probably need time to recuperate between assaults. Duties will have to be rotated between platoons. I’m sorry,” she said to Ralph. “It adds considerable complications to the planning. Especially if you want them to prevent the possessed suicides.”
“I’m sure the AI can cope,” he said.
“It looks like the campaign is going to take a lot longer whatever option we go for,” Admiral Farquar said.
“That does have one small benefit,” Janne Palmer said.
&nbs
p; “I’d love to hear it,” the Princess told her.
“Reducing the flow of de-possessed is going to alleviate some of the pressure on our medical facilities.”
Back in her private office, Kirsten shuddered, a movement not reproduced inside the bubble room. That, out of all the other horrors revealed by the Liberation, had upset her the most. Cancers were such a rarity in this day and age, that to see several bulging from a person’s skin like inflated blisters was a profound shock. And there were very few depossessed who didn’t suffer from them. To inflict such an incapacitating disease for what was apparently little more than vanity was hubris at an obscene level. That it might also be simple blind ignorance was almost as bad. “I have requested aid from the Kingdom and our allies as a matter of urgency,” she said. “We should start to receive shipments of medical nanonic packages over the next few days. Every hospital and clinic on the planet is being used, and civilian ships are being deployed to fly people out to asteroid settlements in the system—not that they have many beds or staff, but every little bit helps. I just wish we could ferry people out-system, but at the moment I can’t break the quarantine for that. In any event, my Foreign Minister has cautioned me that there would be some reservation from other star systems about accepting our medical cases. They’re worried about infiltration by the possessed, and I can’t say I blame them.”
“Capone’s new lunacy doesn’t help ease the paranoia,” Admiral Farquar grunted. “Damn that bastard.”
“So you would prefer the slow down scenario?” Kirsten asked.
“Very much so, ma’am,” Janne Palmer said. “It’s not just a question of providing medical support, there are transport bottlenecks as well. It’s improved slightly now we can land aircraft at the coastal ports, but we have to get the de-possessed there first, and they need care which my occupation forces really aren’t geared up to provide.”
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