The rain started at eight o’clock in the morning while Tim Beard was downstairs having breakfast. There were three choices for breakfast at Fort Forward: tray A, tray B, and tray C. He always tried to get down in time to grab a tray A from the pile by the door, which was the most filling, so he didn’t have to eat lunch; trays D, E, and F violated all kinds of human rights declarations.
He pushed the tray into its slot in the oven and set the timer for thirty seconds. Drizzle pattered down in the big open doorway. Tim groaned in dismay. It would make the humidity hellish for the rest of the day, and if he travelled down into Mortonridge itself he’d have to used the anti-fungal gel that evening—again. Another day in the clutches of decay, watching a decaying Liberation. The oven bleeped and ejected his tray. The wrapping had split, mixing his porridge with his tomatoes.
There were a couple of chairs left at one of the tables. He sat down next to Donrell, from News Galactic, nodding at Hugh Rosler, Elizabeth Mitchell, and the others.
“Anyone know where we’re cleared for today?” he asked.
“Official Stonys are taking us down to Monkscliff,” Hugh said. “They want to show us some medical team just in from Jerusalem, got a new method of cramming protein back into the malnutrition cases. Direct blood supplement, slam protein back into your cells. Hundred per cent survival rate. It’s going to be real useful when the last sieges end.”
“I want to try and get back down to Chainbridge,” Tim said. “The army set up a big field hospital there. There’s been some Gimmie suicides. They couldn’t handle being saved.”
“Gimmie the winning side,” Elizabeth muttered. “God damn typical, or what.”
“No,” Donrell said complacently. He smiled round at his colleagues. “You don’t want any of that, you want to visit Urswick.”
Tim hated the smug tone, but Donrell was one of the best at ferreting information. A neural nanonics check told him Urswick was a siege town that had been liberated yesterday afternoon. “Any reason?”
Donrell grinned and made a show of lowering a triangle of toast into his mouth. “They ran out of food over a week ago. That means they had to eat something different to last out so long.” He licked his lips.
“Oh Jesus,” Tim winced. He shoved his breakfast tray away. But it would make one fantastic story.
“Who the hell told you that?” Elizabeth asked; there was a disturbing eagerness in her voice.
Tim was preparing a disapproving look for her when he saw Hugh look up suddenly.
“One of the mercs I know,” Donrell said. “She had a buddy in the Urswick support troop. At the start of the siege the infrared sweep showed a hundred and five people in there. The serjeants liberated ninety-three.”
Hugh was glancing round the hall, frowning, as if his name was being called.
“Could be some of your basket cases, Tim,” Elizabeth suggested. “They couldn’t handle the memory.”
Hugh Rosler stood up and walked towards the open door. Donrell gave a rough laugh. “Hey, Hugh, you want some of my sausage? Tastes kinda strange.”
Tim gave him an annoyed look, and hurried off after Hugh.
“Something I said?” Donrell shouted after them. The whole table was chuckling.
Tim caught up with Hugh just outside. He was ignoring the rain, walking purposefully across the mesh road.
“What is it?” Tim asked. “You know something, don’t you? One of your local contacts datavise you?”
Hugh gave Tim a slight sideways smile. “Not quite, no.”
Tim scampered along at his side. “Is it hot? Come on, Hugh! I pool, don’t I? Your best sensevises are down to me.”
“I think you just got your story back.” Hugh slowed, then turned quickly and started jogging along the gap between a couple of barracks.
“Christ’s sake,” Tim muttered. He was soaking, but nothing would make him give up now. Hugh might be a provincial hick working for a nothing agency, but he was always on the level.
There was a four-lane motorway on the other side of the barracks, with a junction right in front of them. Two loops of mesh road led round to one of Fort Forward’s hospitals. Hugh hurried out onto the motorway, right in front of an automated ten-tonne truck.
“Hugh!” Tim screamed.
Hugh Rosler didn’t even look at the truck. He held up a hand and clicked his fingers.
The truck stopped.
Tim gaped, not believing. It didn’t brake. It didn’t skid to a halt. It just stopped. Dead. In the middle of the road. Fifty kilometres an hour to zero in an instant.
“Oh mother of God,” Tim croaked. “You’re one of them.”
“No I’m not,” Hugh said. “I’m the same as you, I’m a reporter. It’s just that I’ve been doing it a lot longer. You pick a few useful things up.”
“But . . .” Tim hung back on the edge of the motorway. All of the traffic was slowing to a halt, red hazard strobes flashing brightly.
“Come on,” Hugh said cheerfully. “Trust me, you don’t want to miss this. Start recording.”
Tim belatedly opened a neural nanonics memory cell. He stepped out onto the motorway. “Hugh? How did you do that, Hugh?”
“Transferred the inertia through hyperspace. Don’t worry about it.”
“Fine.” Tim froze. A glimmer of emerald light was shining in the air behind Hugh. He gurgled a warning and raised his hand to point.
Hugh turned to face the light, smiling broadly. It expanded rapidly to a pillar five metres wide, twenty tall. Raindrops sparkled as they fell around it, acquiring their own verdure corona.
“What is that?” Tim asked, too fascinated to be frightened.
“Some sort of gateway. I don’t actually understand its compositional dynamic, which is pretty remarkable in itself.”
Tim gathered up his reporter’s discipline and focused on the cold light in front of him. There were shadows moving deep inside. They grew larger, more distinct. A serjeant stepped out onto the glistening road. Tim upped his sensorium reception, waiting in awe.
“Urgh,” the puissant serjeant exclaimed in a shrill voice. “What a simply awful homecoming, darling. It’s absolutely weeing down.”
Ralph got out to one of the seven emerald gateways ninety minutes after they opened. The between time was a frantic rush to make sense of what was happening and respond appropriately. It saw the Ops Room brought back to full strength as officers ran in from all over the building to take up their stations.
That the radiant green columns were some form of wormholes was easy enough to establish. The exact status of the people walking out of them was more problematical.
“The serjeants do not contain Edenist personalities,” Acacia exclaimed. “General affinity is a babble of voices, they declaim without adherence to simple convention. Clarity has become impossible.”
“Then who are they?”
“I believe they are ex-possessors.”
By then several serjeants with their original Edenist personalities had come through the gateways, helping to clarify the situation, telling every Edenist in or orbiting Ombey that they were the refugees from Ketton island. Even so, Ralph activated the incursion strategy, drawn up in the weeks preceding the liberation in case a wild foray by the possessed penetrated Fort Forward’s perimeter. All ground and air traffic across the camp was shut down, all personnel confined to barracks. Duty marines were rushed to the gateways. The one thing he had to confirm was that the possessors now in serjeant bodies hadn’t retained their energistic power. Once that was proven, he allowed the full-alert status to drop a level. Both he and Admiral Farquar agreed that the SD platforms would continue targeting the gateways. They might be benign now, but who was to say that would last.
For all its strangeness, the situation was a problem of logistics again. The humans who came staggering out of the gateways were in the same kind of physical condition as every other ex-possessed, badly in need of medical treatment and decent food. It couldn’t be coincidence that each gat
eway had opened just outside a hospital; but their numbers and rate of arrival were putting a severe strain on the immediate medical resources.
As to the serjeants, the one contingency Ralph and his staff had never planned for was acquiring over twelve thousand ex-possessors in non-threatening guise. Ralph initially classified them as prisoners of war, and the AI reassigned three empty blocks of barracks as their accommodation. Marines and mercenaries on leave at the camp were formed into guard squads, confining them to the buildings.
It was a stall manoeuvre; Ralph didn’t know what else to do with them. They had to be guilty of more than just being in the enemy army. Other charges would have to be brought, surely? Kidnap and grievous bodily harm, at least. And yet, they were the victims of circumstance—as any lawyer would be bound to argue.
But just for once, the problem of what to do with them afterwards wouldn’t be his. He didn’t envy Princess Kirsten that decision.
Dean and Will reported to the Ops Room to act as Ralph’s escort when he was finally ready for his inspection. The closest gateway was less than a kilometre from the headquarters building itself. Even with the marine squads orchestrated by the AI, the area around it was predictably chaotic. Huge crowds of spectators from all over the camp, including every rover reporter, milled round the gateways to snatch a byte of the action. Dean and Will had to elbow people aside to let Ralph through. At least some degree of order had been established by the time they reached the gateway. The marine captain in charge had established a hundred-metre perimeter. Inside that, marines were deployed to form two distinct passages to shepherd the returnees away. One led back to the nearby hospital entrance, the other finished up at the parking lot, where trucks waited to drive serjeants away to their detention centres. As soon as a figure walked out of the shimmering green light, an assessment team decided which passage they were destined for, a decision backed up by nervejam sticks. All protests were simply ignored.
“Even our remaining original serjeants are going to the detention barracks,” Acacia told Ralph as they shoved their way through the perimeter. “It makes things easier. We can sort them out from the ex-possessors later on.”
“Tell them, thanks. I appreciate it. We need to keep things flowing here.”
The marine captain squelched over to Ralph’s little group and saluted. Rainwater dripped steadily off his skull helmet.
“How’s it going, Captain?” Ralph asked.
“Good, sir. We’ve got a valid supervision routine up and running here now.”
“Well done. You get back, do your job. We’ll try not to get in the way.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Ralph spent a couple of minutes watching quietly as the people and serjeants came flooding out of the green light. Despite the humidity and warm rain, he felt cold trickling through his chest.
Strange, I can accept a wormhole or ZTT jump across light-years as perfectly normal, but a portal leading out of this universe is like a phobia. Is this too divine for me, physical proof of a realm where celestials exist? Or the opposite, proof that even the human soul and omnipotent creatures have a rational basis? I’m looking at the end of religions, the fact that we were never visited by any messenger from any creator god. A fact presented in a fashion I can never ignore. The loss of our race’s spiritual innocence.
He could see that the ex-possessed humans that came through were surprised, a dim-witted confusion present on every face as the dreary rain started to soak their clothes. The serjeants lumbered out, their bewilderment less obtrusive, but none of them seemed in full control of their moments during the initial few moments.
Several members of the science investigatory team were wandering round the gateway, waving sensor blocks at it. Most of the army’s scientific staff were down on the peninsula, trying to make sense of the energistic ability. Diana Tiernan was one of the few people content with the sieges, explaining how it gave the physicists a chance to study the power outside the laboratory. Ralph had left her back in the headquarters building, desperately trying to arrange for instruments and personnel to be flown back to Fort Forward.
“That’s Sinon,” Acacia exclaimed. “He’s an original.”
Ralph saw a serjeant who lacked the unsteadiness of the others. The assessment team of marines and medics pointed him at the passage of armoured marine troopers. “You sure?” Ralph queried.
“Yes.”
Ralph hurried up to the assessment team. “Okay, we’ll take this one.”
The marine captain’s exasperation was throttled back at the interference. “Yes sir.”
A thoroughly chastised Ralph led Sinon away. They wound up standing between the gateway and the perimeter ring of marines. His own staff gathered round. “This crystal entity you encountered back there, did it tell you how we could solve the overall problem?” Ralph asked.
“I’m sorry, General. It took the same attitude as the Kiint. We must generate our own solution.”
“Damnit! But it was willing to help de-possess bodies.”
“Yes. It said it judged us by our own ethics, and that such a theft was wrong.”
“Okay, what kind of conditions were you facing in that realm? Did you see any of the other planets?”
“The conditions were what we made of them; the reality dysfunction ability was paramount. Unfortunately, even wishes have limits. We were cast out alone on that island, without any fresh air or food. Nothing could change that. The entity implied that our planets would be considerably more fortunate, not that we saw any. That realm is too vast for any chance encounter. The entity even hinted it may be more extensive than our own universe, though not necessarily in its physical dimensions. It is an explorer, it went there because it believed it would expand its own knowledge.”
“So it’s not paradise?”
“Definitely not. The possessed are wrong about that. It’s a refuge, that’s all. There’s nothing there which you don’t bring to it yourself.”
“So it is entirely natural?”
“I believe so, yes.”
After the burst of confusion at the start of the exodus, the marines exerted complete control over everyone who came through the gateways. They were on top of the situation, and stayed there right up until the last four serjeants came through. The marines immediately ushered them towards the trucks waiting in the parking lot as they’d done with all the others.
“No way,” Moyo said. “We’re waiting for her.”
“Who?” the marine captain asked.
“Stephanie. She must have gone back somehow.”
“Sorry, no exceptions.”
“Yo, dude,” Cochrane said. “She’s like our righteous leader; and she’s doing her last good deed. So where do you cats come off acting like colonel asswipe?”
The captain wanted to protest, but somehow the sight of a serjeant wearing slim purple sunglasses and a paisley-patterned backpack stopped the words from coming out.
“I mean, she’s like out there all alone battling the last and greatest of the hobgoblin queens, to save your soul. The least you can do is act thankful.”
“It’s closing,” McPhee shouted.
The gateway was contracting, shrinking back to a small sliver of emerald shimmering a metre above the surface of the road. The physicists shouted excitedly, datavising fresh instructions to the considerable sensor array they’d assembled round the transplanetary rift.
“Stephanie!” Moyo yelled.
“Wait,” Cochrane said. “It’s not shutting down completely. See?”
A small remnant of green light continued to burn steadily.
“She’s still there,” Moyo said desperately. “She can still make it. Please!” he appealed to the marine captain. “You have to let us wait for her.”
“I can’t.”
“Hang on in there,” Cochrane said. “I maybe know someone who can help here.” Ever since he’d arrived back on Ombey there had been a thousand alien voices whispering away to each other at the back of his
mind. Sinon,he yelled at them. Hey, big dude, you around these parts? It’s me, your ol’ buddy Cochrane. We like need some high-powered help right now. Stephanie’s being cosmically stupid again.
Acacia took the problem directly to Ralph. He might have been firm about it, but the Edenist mentioned Annette Ekelund.
“Let them wait,” Ralph datavised to the marine captain. “We’ll set up a watching brief.”
An hour and twenty minutes later the gateway expanded briefly to let three humanoid figures stagger out. Stephanie and Annette, in their serjeant bodies, supported a trembling Angeline Gallagher between them. They handed her over to the small medical team, who rushed her into the hospital.
Moyo raced over and flung his arms around Stephanie, his mind leaking a torrent of distress into the general affinity band.
“I thought I’d lost you,” he cried. “After all that, I couldn’t stand it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. A physical embrace was almost impossible, their hard skulls clacked together loudly as they attempted to kiss.
The rover reporters who’d hung on to the bitter end dodged round the marine guard to close on the strange party.
“Hi there you dudes, I’m Cochrane, one of the like superheroes who got the kids out across the firebreak. That’s Cochrane. C-O-C-H . . .”
It was quiet in the detention barracks. Not that the serjeants slept, they didn’t need to. They were lying on their bunks or walking round the hall downstairs, being interviewed by the rovers, catching up on AV news shows (mainly featuring themselves). Most of all, they were getting used to the fact they were back in genuine bodies, and owned them one hundred per cent. Apprehension and marvel at their latest turn in fortune had left them stupefied.
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