He wasn’t going to achieve anything here. Perhaps he should have hiked straight out of town? And it still wasn’t too late, if he started now.
As he turned around and started to push his way through the press of aggrieved people, he thought he saw a large flyer curving through the sky above the western edge of town. Trees and the wayward streetlights swiftly cut it from his view, but there wasn’t much else that gold-haze blob could be. And the size could only mean a military transport of some kind.
He grinned secretively. The government was doing something positive. Perhaps all was not lost after all.
Then he heard the sirens. Patrol cars were racing along Maingreen, approaching the crowd from both ends. Those people around him were straining to catch a glimpse of the latest distraction.
“LEAVE THE AREA,” an amplified voice bellowed from the police station. “THE TOWN IS NOW UNDER MARTIAL LAW. RETURN HOME AND REMAIN THERE UNTIL YOU RECEIVE FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.”
Eben was sure the distorted voice belonged to Neville Latham.
The first patrol cars braked dangerously close to people on the edge of the main crowd, as if their safety systems had somehow become uncoupled. Several jumped clear hurriedly, two or three lost their footing and fell over. One man was struck by a patrol car, sending him cannoning into a woman. They both went sprawling.
A deluge of boos were directed at the patrol cars. Eben didn’t like the mood which was emerging among his fellow citizens. These weren’t the usual peaceable Exnall residents. And the police reaction was unbelievably provocative. A lifelong law abider, Eben was shocked by their actions.
“LEAVE THE AREA NOW. THIS IS AN ILLEGAL ASSEMBLY.”
A single lump of stone tumbled through the air above the bobbing heads of the crowd. Eben never did see the arm which flung it. One thing remained certain, though, it was thrown with incredible force. When it hit the patrol car it actually managed to fracture the bonded silicon windscreen.
Several taunting cheers went up. Suddenly the air was thick with improvised missiles raining down on the patrol cars.
The response was predictable, and immediate. A couple of assault mechanoids emerged from the rear of each patrol car. Sense-overload ordnance shot out, red flares slicing brilliant ephemeral archways across the stars.
They should have been warning shots. The mechanoids had a direct-attack prohibition loaded into their processors which only Neville Latham could cancel.
The ordnance activated two metres above the compressed bustle of bodies at the heart of the crowd. The effect was almost as bad as if live ammunition had been fired straight at them.
Eben saw men and women keel over as though they’d been electrocuted. Then his eyes were streaming from intolerable light and wickedly acidic gas. Human screams vanished beneath a hyper-decibel whistle. His neural nanonics sensorium filter programs were unable to cope (as the ordnance designers intended), leaving him blind, deaf, and virtually insensate. Heavy bodies thudded into him, sending him spinning, stumbling for balance. Pinpricks of heat bloomed across his bare skin, turning to vicious stings. He felt his flesh ballooning, body swelling to twice, three times its normal size. Joints were seizing up.
Eben thought he was screaming. But there was no way to tell. The solid sensations, when they started to return, were crude ones. His bare legs scraping over damp grass. Limp arms banging against his side. He was being dragged along the ground by his collar.
When he’d regained enough rationality to look around, the scenes of suffering on Maingreen outside the police station made him want to weep with rage and helplessness. The crazed assault mechanoids were still pummelling people with their ordnance from point-blank range. A direct hit brought instant death, for those nearby the activation it was outright torture.
“Bastards,” Eben rasped. “You bastards.”
“Pigs are always the same.”
He looked up at the man who was pulling him away from the melee. “Christ, thanks, Frank. I could have died if I’d stayed in there.”
“Yeah, I suppose you could have,” Frank Kitson said. “Lucky I came along, really.”
The police hypersonic landed next to the five big marine troop flyers. They were strung out along the link road which connected Exnall to the M6; a quintet of dark, menacingly obese arachnids whose landing struts had dinted the carbon concrete. The start of the town’s harandrid forest was two hundred metres away, a meticulous border where the aboriginal trees finished and the cultivated citrus groves began.
As he came down the hypersonic’s airstairs, Ralph’s suit sensors showed him the marine squads fanning out along the edge of the trees. Some kind of barrier had already been thrown across the road itself. So far a perfect deployment.
The marine colonel, Janne Palmer, was waiting for Ralph in the command cabin of her flyer. It was a compartment just aft of the cockpit with ten communications operatives, and three tactical interpretation officers. Even though it was inside and well protected, the colonel was wearing a lightweight armour suit like the rest of her brigade. Her shell helmet was off, showing Ralph a surprisingly feminine face. The only concession to military life appeared to be her hair, which was shaved down to a two-millimetre stubble of indeterminable colour. She gave him a fast nod of acknowledgement as he was escorted in by a young marine.
“I accessed a recording of the operation at Moyce’s,” she said. “These are one tough set of people we’ve got here.”
“I’m afraid so. And it looks like Exnall is the worst infestation out of all the four Mortonridge towns.”
She glanced into an AV pillar’s projection. “Nice assignment. Let’s hope my brigade can handle it. At the moment I’m trying to establish a circular perimeter roughly fifteen hundred metres outside the town. We should have it solid in another twenty minutes.”
“Excellent.”
“That forest’s going to be a bitch to patrol. The SD sensor sats can’t see shit below the trees, and you’re telling me I can’t rely on our usual observation systems.”
“ ’Fraid not.”
“Pity. Aerovettes would be exceptionally handy in this case.”
“I must advise against using them. The possessed can really screw our electronics. You’re far better off without them. At least that way you know the information you’re receiving is accurate, even though there isn’t much of it.”
“Interesting situation. Haven’t handled anything like this since tac school, if then.”
“Diana Tiernan told me the AIs have got very few datalinks left into Exnall. We’ve definitely lost most of the town’s communications net. Even the police architecture has failed now. So the exact situation inside is unknown.”
“There was some kind of fight outside the police station which finished a couple of minutes ago. But even if that crowd which gathered along Maingreen have all been possessed, that still leaves us with a lot of the population which have escaped so far. What do you want to do about them?”
“Same as we originally planned. Wait until dawn, and send in teams to evacuate everyone. But I wish to Christ that curfew had held. It did in all the other towns.”
“Wishes always wind up as regrets in this game, I find.”
Ralph gave her a speculative look, but she was concentrating on another AV projection. “I think our main concern right now is to contain the possessed in Exnall,” he said. “When it’s light we can start worrying about getting the rest out.”
“Absolutely.” Janne Palmer stared straight at the ESA operative, and gave him a regretful grin. “And come dawn I’m going to need the best information I can acquire. A lot of lives are going to depend on me getting it right. I don’t have any special forces types in my brigade. This was a rush operation. But what I do have now is you and your G66 troops. I’d like you to go in and make that assessment for me. I believe you’re the best qualified, in all respects.”
“You don’t happen to know Jannike Dermot, do you?”
“Not personally, no. Will you go in for me? I can’t order you to; Admiral Farquar made it quite plain you’re here to advise, and I have to take that advice.”
