“Enough.” Stephanie patted his shoulder in warning. He couldn’t see Annette’s expression, but he’d be able to sense her darkening thoughts. “Look, we’re just going to go, all right.”
Annette turned and spat into the trench. “You know what’s down there? Its something called napalm. Soi Hon told us about it, and Milne made up the formula. There’s tons of the stuff; lying down there, in squirt bombs, loaded into flame throwers. So when the serjeants come over, it’s going to be barbecue time. And that’s just this section. We’ve got a shitload of grief rigged up for them around this town. Every street they walk down is going to cost them in bodies. Hell, we’re even running a sweepstake, see how many we can take with us.”
“I hope you win.”
“The point is, Stephanie, if you leave now, you don’t come back. I mean that. If you desert us, your own kind, then you’re our enemy just as much as the non-possessed are. You’re going to be trapped out there between the serjeants and me. They’ll shove you into zero-tau, I’ll have you strung up on a crucifix and fried. So you see, it’s not me that makes the choices. In the end, it’s down to you.”
Stephanie gave her a sad smile. “I choose to leave.”
“You stupid bitch.” For a moment, Stephanie thought the woman was going to launch a bolt of white fire straight at her. Annette was fighting very hard to control her fury.
“Okay,” she snapped. “Get out. Now.”
Praying that Cochrane would keep his mouth shut, Stephanie tugged Moyo gently. “Use one of the spikes,” she murmured to McPhee and Rana. They both began to concentrate. The nearest spike started to droop, lowering itself like a drawbridge across a moat. When its tip touched the other side, the metal flattened out, producing a narrow walkway.
Tina was over first; shaking and subdued at the naked hostility radiating from Ekelund and imitated by her troops. Franklin guided Moyo over. Stephanie waited until the other three were on the far side before using it herself. When she turned round, Annette was already marching back down the road into Ketton. Soi Hon and a couple of others walked behind her, taking care not to come too close. The remaining troops stared hard over the trench. Several of them primed the pump action mechanism on their guns.
“Yo, nooo problem, dudes,” Cochrane crooned anxiously. “We’re outta here. Like yesterday.”
* * *
It was midday, the sun blazed down on them like a visible X-ray laser, and the mist had gone long ago. Three miles ahead, the rumpled foothills of the valley wall rose up out of the sluggish quagmires. The serjeants were strung out across the slopes, forming a solid line of dark blobs standing almost shoulder to shoulder. Larger groups were arranged at intervals behind the front line, reserves ready to assist with any sign of resistance.
A couple of miles behind, the air shimmered silver, twisting lightbeams giddily around Ketton. Dry mud creaked and crumbled under their feet as they tramped along the gently undulating road. They weren’t going particularly fast. It wasn’t just hunger draining their bodies. Apathy was coming on strong.
“Oh hell,” Stephanie said abruptly. “Look, I’m sorry.”
“What for?” McPhee asked. There was bravado in his voice, but not his thoughts.
“Oh come on!” She stopped and flung her arms out, turning full circle on a heel. “I was wrong. Look at this place. We’re snowflakes heading straight for hell.”
McPhee gave a grudging look around the flat, featureless valley floor. During the few days they’d rested in Ketton the mud had claimed just about every fallen tree and bush. Even the long pools between the quagmires were evaporating away. “Not much in the way of ground cover, granted.”
She gave the big Scot an admonitory stare. “You’re very sweet, and I’m really glad that you’re with me. But I goofed. There’s no way we can avoid the serjeants out here. And I do think Ekelund was serious when she said we wouldn’t be allowed back in.”
“Yeah,” Cochrane said. “That’s the impression I got, too. You know, that bug is shoved so far up, it’s going to be flapping its way out of her mouth any day now.”
“I don’t understand,” Tina said miserably. “Why don’t we just stick to Cochrane’s original idea, and dig in?”
“The satellites can see us, lass,” McPhee said. “Aye, they don’t know how many of us there are, exactly, or what we’re doing. But they know where we are. If we stop moving and suddenly vanish, then the serjeants will come and investigate. They’ll realize what we’ve done and excavate us.”
“We could split up,” Franklin said. “If we walk about at random and keep crossing each other’s tracks, then one or two of us could vanish without them realizing. It’d be like a giant-sized version of the shell game.”
“But I don’t want us to split up,” Tina said.
“We’re not splitting up,” Stephanie told her. “We’ve been through too much together for that. I say we face them together with dignity and pride. We have nothing to be ashamed of. They’re the ones who have failed. That huge, wonderful society with all its resources, and all it can do is fall back on violence instead of trying to find an equitable solution for all of us. They’ve lost, not us.”
Tina sniffed, and dabbed at her eyes with a small handkerchief. “You say the most beautiful things.”
“Certainly do, sister.”
“I’ll face the serjeants with you, Stephanie,” McPhee said. “But it might be a good idea to get off this road first. I’ll give you good odds our friends behind have got it in their mortar sights.”
* * *
Ralph waited until there were twenty-three thousand serjeants deployed at Catmos Vale before giving the go ahead to take the town. The AI estimated at least eight thousand possessed were trapped inside Ketton. He wasn’t going to be responsible for unleashing a massacre. There would be enough serjeants to overcome whatever lay ahead.
As soon as the first mortar attack had finished, the AI had pulled the front line back. Then the flanks, up in the high ground above the valley, had been directed forwards again. By the time the sun fell, Ketton was surrounded. To start with, the circle was simply there to prevent individual possessed from trying to sneak out. Any large group that tried their luck would be warned off with SD lasers in a repeat of the firebreak protocol across the neck of the peninsula.
Very few did attempt to run the gauntlet. Whatever method of discipline Ekelund was using to keep her people in check, it was impressive. The perimeter was progressively reinforced as planes and trucks brought in fresh squads. Occupation forces were also assembled and dispatched around the front line, ready to handle the captured possessed. Medical facilities were organized to cope with the predicted influx of new, unhealthy bodies (though shortages of equipment and qualified personnel were still acute). The AI had exhaustively analysed every possible weapon from history which the possessed could have constructed, and computed appropriate counter-measures.
Ralph was quietly pleased to see that the simplest policy was amongst the oldest: the best defence is a good offence. He might not be able to employ saturation bombardment against the town, or melt it down into the bedrock. But he could certainly rattle the doors of Ekelund’s precious sanctum, a quite severe rattling, in fact. “Quake them,” he datavised.
Two thousand kilometres above Ombey, a lone voidhawk began its deployment swoop.
Ralph waited beside the rectangular headquarters building with Acacia and Janne Palmer standing beside him. They all stared along Catmos Vale at the sliver of dense mangled air at the far end which marked the town. Maybe he should have been back at the Fort Forward Ops Room, but after visiting the camp he realized how restricted and isolated he was sitting in his office. Out here, at least he had the illusion of being involved.
* * *
It was one of the larger patches of land above the lagoons and mires that cluttered the valley floor. Plenty of aboriginal grass poked up through the solidifying cloak of mud, as yet untrampled by animals. There were even some trees surviving n
ear the centre; they’d fallen down, their lower branches stabbing into the soft ground; but the trunks were held off the ground, and their battered leaves were slowly twisting to face the sky.
Stephanie made her way over to them, putting the road a quarter of a mile behind her. The ground around the sagging boughs was deeply wrinkled, producing dozens of small meandering pools of brackish water. She threaded her way through them, into the small dapple of shade thrown by the leaves, and sank down with a heavy sigh. The others sat down around her, equally relieved to be off their feet.
“I’m amazed we didn’t step on a mine,” Moyo said. “Ekelund must have rigged that road. It’s too tempting not to.”
“Hey guys, let’s like turn her into an unperson, please,” Cochrane said. “I don’t want to spend my last remaining hours in this body talking about that bitch.”
Rana leant back against a tree trunk, closed her eyes and smiled. “Well well, we finally agree on something.”
“I wonder if we get a chance to talk to the reporters,” McPhee said. “There’s bound to be some covering the attack.”
“Peculiar last wish,” Rana said. “Any particular reason?”
“I still have some family left alive on Orkney. Three kids. I’d like to . . . I don’t know. Tell them I’m all right I suppose. What I’d really like to do is see them again.”
“Nice thought,” Franklin said. “Maybe the serjeants will let you record a message, especially if we cooperate with them.”
“What about you?” Stephanie asked.
“I’d go traditional,” Franklin said. “A meal. You see, I used to like eating, trying new stuff, but I never really had much money. So, I’ve done most everything else I want to. I’d have the best delicacies the universe can offer, cooked by the finest chef in the Confederation, and Norfolk Tears to go with it.”
“Mine’s easy,” Cochrane said. “That’s like apart from the obvious. I wanna re-live Woodstock. Only this time I’d listen to the music more. Man, I can like only remember about five hours of it. Can you dig that? What a bummer.”
“I want to be on the stage,” Tina said breathlessly. “A classical actress, in my early twenties, while I’m so beautiful that poets swoon at the sight of me. And when my new play opens, it would be The event of the year, and all the Society people in the world are fighting to buy tickets.”
“I’d like to walk through Elisea woods again,” Rana said. She gave Cochrane a suspect look, but he was listening politely. “It was on the edge of my town when I was growing up, and the Slandau flowers grew there. They had chromatactile petals; if you touched one, it would change colour. When the breeze blew through the trees it was like standing inside a kaleidoscope. I used to spend hours walking along the paths. Then the developers came, and cleared the site to make room for a factory park. It didn’t matter what I said to anyone, how many petitions I organized; the mayor, the local senator, they didn’t care how beautiful the woods were and how much people enjoyed them. Money and industry won every time.”
“I think I’d just say sorry to my parents,” Moyo said. “My life was such a waste.”
“The children,” Stephanie said. She grinned knowingly at McPhee. “I want to see my children again.”
They fell silent then, content to daydream what could never be.
The sky suddenly brightened. Everyone apart from Moyo looked up, and he caught their agitation. Ten kinetic harpoons were descending, drawing their distinctive dazzling plasma contrails behind them. It was a conical formation, gradually expanding. A second batch of ten harpoons appeared above the first. Sunglasses automatically materialized on Stephanie’s face.
“Oh shit,” McPhee groaned. “It’s yon kinetic harpoons, again.”
“They’re coming down all around Ketton.”
“Strange pattern,” Franklin said. “Why not fire them down all at once?”
“Does it matter?” Rana said. “It’s obviously the signal to start the attack.”
McPhee was eyeing the harpoons dubiously. The first formation was still expanding, while the blazing, ruptured air around their nose cones was growing in intensity.
“I think we’d better get down.” Stephanie said. She rolled over, and imagined a sheet of air hardening protectively above her. The others followed her example.
The harpoons Ralph had chosen to deploy against Ketton were different to the marque he’d used to smash Mortonridge’s communication net at the start of the Liberation. These were considerably heavier and longer, a design which helped focus their inertia forwards. On impact, they penetrated clean through the damp, unresisting soil. Only when they struck the bedrock below did their tremendous kinetic energy release its full destructive potential. The explosive blast slammed out through the soft soil. Directly above the impact point, the whole area heaved upwards as if a new volcano was trying to tear its way skywards. But the major impetus of the shockwaves radiated outwards. Then the second formation of harpoons hit. They formed a ring outside the first, with exactly the same devastating effect.
Seen from above, the twenty separate shockwaves spread out like ripples in a pond. But it was the one very specific interference pattern they formed as they intersected which was the goal of the bombardment. Colossal energies clashed and merged in peaks and troughs that mimicked the surface of a choppy sea, channelling the direction in which the force was expended. Outside the two strike rings, the newly formatted shockwaves rushed off across the valley floor, becoming progressively weaker until they sank away to nothing more than a tremble which lapped against the foothills. Inside the rings, they merged into a single contracting undulation, which swept in towards Ketton, building in height and vigour.
Annette Ekelund and the troops manning the town’s perimeter defences watched in stupefaction as the newborn hill thundered towards them from all directions. The surviving network of local roads leading away from the outskirts were ripped to shreds as the swelling slope flung them aside. Boulders went spinning through the air in long lazy arcs. Mud foamed turbulently at the crest while mires and pools avalanched down the sides, engulfing the frenzied herds of kolfrans and ferrangs.
It grew higher and higher, a tsunami of soil. The leading edge reached Ketton’s outlying buildings, trawling them up its precarious ever-shifting slope. Defence trenches either slammed shut or split wide as though they were geological fault lines, their napalm igniting in third-rate imitation of lava streams. People diverted every fraction of their energistic strength to reinforcing their bodies, leaving them to bounce and roll about like human tumbleweed as the demented ground trampolined beneath them. Without the possessed to maintain them, the prim, restored houses and shops burst apart in scattergun showers of debris. Bricks, fragments of glass, vehicles, and shattered timbers took flight to clot the air above the devastation.
And still the quake raced on, hurtling into the centre of the town. Its contraction climaxed underneath the charming little church, culminating in a solid conical geyser of ground fifty metres high. A grinding vortex of soil erupted from its pinnacle, propelling the entire church into the sky. The elegant structure hung poised above the cataclysm for several seconds before gravity and sanity returned to claim it. It broke open like a ship on a reef, scattering pews and hymn books over the blitzed land below. Then as the quake’s pinnacle ebbed, shrinking down, the church tumbled over, walls disintegrating into a deluge of powdered bricks. Yet still, somehow, the spire remained almost intact. Twisting through a hundred and eighty degrees, with its bell clanging madly, it plunged down to puncture the tormented crater of raw soil that now marked the quake’s epicentre. Only then, did its structural girders crumple, reducing it to a pile of ruined metal and fractured carbon-concrete.
Secondary tremors withdrew from the focal point, weaker than the incoming quake, but still resulting in substantial quivers amid the pulverised ruins. The quake’s accompanying ultrasound retreated, only to echo back off the valley walls. In ninety seconds, Ketton had been abolished from Mortonr
idge; leaving a two-mile-wide smear of treacherously loose soil as its sole memorial. Spears made from building rafters jabbed up out of the rumpled black ground, ragged lumps of concrete were interspersed with the mashed up remnants of furniture, every fragment embedded deep into the loam. Rivulets of flaming napalm oozed along winding furrows, belching out black smoke. A curtain of dust thick enough to blot out the sun swirled overhead.
Annette raised herself to her elbows, fighting the mud’s suction; and swung her head slowly from side to side, examining the remains of her proud little empire. Her energistic strength had protected her body from broken bones and torn skin, though she knew that there was going to be heavy bruising just about everywhere. She remembered being about ten metres in the air at one point, cartwheeling slowly as a single storey café did a neat somersault beside her to land on its flat roof, power cables and plastic water pipes trailing from a wall to lash about like bullwhips.
Strangely enough, through her numbness, she could admire the quake; there was a beautiful precision to it. Strong enough to wreck the town, yet pitched at a level that enabled the possessed to protect themselves from its effects. As dear Ralph had known they would. Self preservation is the strongest human instinct; Ketton’s buildings and fortifications would be discarded instantly in the face of such a lethal threat.
She laughed hysterically, choking on the filthy dust. “Ralph? I told you, Ralph, you had to destroy the village first. There was no need to take it so fucking literally, you shit!” There was nothing left now to defend, no banner or cause around which she could rally her army. The serjeants were coming. Unopposed. Unstoppable.
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