Hugh nodded through the rectangular port. “Gimmie convoy, look.”
A long snake of trucks and buses was winding its way north along the reclaimed road. The buses meant it would be mostly civilians, ex-possessed being carried away to safety. “Gimmies” was the term which the rovers had privately evolved for them. Every interview when they came staggering out of the zero-tau pods was the same litany of demands: give me medical treatment, give me clothes, give me food, give me the rest of my family, give me somewhere safe to live, give me my life back. And why did it take you so long to save me?
They’d actually stopped recording interviews with the newly reprieved. Ombey’s population was becoming increasingly antagonised by their fellow citizens’ lack of gratitude.
Two hundred and fifty kilometres south of the old firebreak line, a big staging area had been laid out at the side of the M6, as if a batch of liquid carbon-concrete had squirted out from the edge of the motorway to stain the mud before solidifying. A single small road broke away from it to head out across the open country. There could have been an original feed road down below the hardening mires, but the Royal Marine engineering brigade had chosen to ignore it in favour of running their own route directly over newly surveyed ground, sticking to the most stable regions. Similar staging areas were strung along the whole length of the M6, flinging off side roads which mimicked the original branch roads. They were the supply lines for the army as it overran the towns; not so much for the benefit of the frontline serjeants, but the support teams and occupation forces which came in their wake.
This staging area was empty, though covered in mud-tracks showing just how many vehicles had been assembled here at one time. The Stony banked sharply above it, and swept away to chase along the supply road. A couple of minutes later they were circling the remnants of Exnall.
The occupation station’s landing field was a broad sheet of micro-mesh composite spread out across a flat patch of land on the (official) edge of town, with chemical concrete injected into the soil underneath. Mud still percolated through in patches where the chemicals hadn’t reached.
None of the cargo crew were surprised when Tim and Hugh jumped down out of the Stony’s open hatch. They just grinned as the two rovers strained to lift their feet from the sticky mud.
Tim opened a new memory cell file for his report, and quickly reduced his olfactory sensitivity. Most of the dead plant and animal life had been swallowed by the mud, but the peninsula’s constant natural showers kept uncovering them. Fortunately, the smell wasn’t anything like as bad as it had been to start with.
They hitched a lift on the back of a jeep into the occupation station which had been set up in the square at the end of Maingreen.
“Where was the DataAxis office?” Tim asked.
Hugh stared around, trying to make sense of the alien territory. “Not sure; I’d have to check with a guidance block. This is as bad as Pompeii the morning after.”
Tim kept recording as they splashed along the deep ruts in the mire, preserving Hugh’s comments about the few landmarks of his old town which he could recognize. The deluge had hit arboreal Exnall hard. Mud had toppled the big harandrid trees onto the buildings they’d once overhung so gracefully; crumpling the shops and houses even before the foundations were undermined. Sloping roofs constructed out of carbon hyperfilament beams had sheered off to twirl away across the currents of mud, momentum snapping them through the surviving pickets of tree stumps. A whole cluster of them had come to rest at the end of Maingreen, making it look as though half of the town’s buildings had been buried together up to their rafters. Facades had drifted about freely like architectural rafts until the gradually hardening mud began to anchor them fast. Where they lay across the roads, jeeps and trucks had driven straight over them, crunching parallel tyre tracks of bricks and planking deeper into the dehydrating march. Only the foundations and stubby, splintered remnants of ground-floor walls indicated the town’s outline, along with slumbering humps of mud-smothered harandrid.
Programmable silicon halls and igloos had been set up in the central civic district to serve as the occupation station; neither the town hall nor the police station remained intact. Army traffic sped along the narrow lanes through the new structures, while squads of serjeants and occupation troops marched between them. Tim and Hugh left the jeep to look around.
Hugh eyed the various slopes rumpling the landscape and consulted his guidance block. “This is about where it happened,” he said. “The crowd gathered here after Finnuala’s blanket datavise.”
Tim panned round the gloomy panorama. “What price victory?” he said softly. “This isn’t even the eye of the storm.” He zoomed in on several stagnant pools, examining the bent grass and weeds struggling at the edge. If vegetation was to return to this peninsula, it would spread out from fresh water, he reasoned. But these filthy, sodden blades served only to play host for a variety of brown fungal blooms which thrived in the humidity. He doubted they would last much longer.
They wandered through the occupation station, capturing random images of the army reorganising itself. Serjeant casualties lying in rows of cots in a field hospital. Engineers and mechanoids working on all types of equipment. The unending flow of trucks that trundled past, their hub engines humming angrily as they fought for traction in the mud.
“Hey, you two!” Elana Duncan shouted from across the road. “What the hell are you doing?”
They crossed over to her, dodging a pair of jeeps. “We’re rovers,” Tim told her. “Just looking round.”
Claws closed around his upper arm, preventing him from moving. He was pretty sure that if she wanted to, she could have snipped clean through the bone. She touched a sensor block to his chest. Not gently, either.
“Okay, now you.” Hugh submitted to the procedure without complaint.
“There aren’t any rover reporters scheduled to come out here today,” Elana said. “The colonel hasn’t cleared Exnall yet.”
“I know,” Tim said. “I just wanted to get ahead of the pack.”
“Typical,” Elana grunted. She retreated back into the hall where twenty bulky zero-tau pods had been set up. All of them had active infinite-black surfaces.
Tim followed her. “This your department?”
“You got it, sonny. I get to perform the final act of liberation on these great people we’re here to rescue. That’s why I wanted to know who you were. You’re not army, and you’re too healthy to be ex-possessed. I got to recognize that, it’s like second nature now.”
“Glad someone’s alert.”
“Knock it off.” Her head rocked up and down as she examined them. “If you want to ask questions, ask. I’m bored enough that I’ll probably answer. You’re here because this is Exnall, right?”
Tim grinned. “Well, this is where it all started. That gives me a legitimate interest. Showing the accessors that it’s been retaken and sanitised makes for a good piece.”
“Typical rover, put the story before anything else, like mundane security and common-sense safety. I should have just shot you.”
“But you didn’t. That means you’ve got confidence in the serjeants?”
“Could be. I know I couldn’t do what they’re doing.
“Determination,” Tim ventured.
“Not even close. That’s an emotion. That’s a way in to your heart, weakening you. That can’t be allowed here. Human motivations have to be abandoned. Machines are what we need.”
“I thought that’s what the serjeants are.”
“Oh yeah, they’re good. Not bad at all for a first generation weapon. But the Edenists have got to improve on them, build some real mean mothers for the next Liberation. Something like us boosted, and with even less
