“Get me to her,” Moyo hissed.
He and Stephanie staggered over to the faltering couple. McPhee had come to a halt twenty yards from the land, staring back at them. “Keep going,” Stephanie yelled at him. “Go on. Somebody’s got to get out of this.”
With her help, Moyo took some of Rana’s weight from Cochrane. They slung her between them, and kicked their way forward again. “My legs,” Rana groaned miserably. “I can’t keep them going. They’re like fire. God damn it, this shouldn’t happen, I can move mountains with my mind.”
“No matter,” Cochrane said through gritted teeth. “We got you now, sister.” The three of them stumbled forwards. McPhee had reached the land, standing just above the mud to urge them on. Tina and Franklin were almost there. The pair of them were plainly exhausted. Only the big Scot seemed to have any stamina left.
Stephanie brought up the rear. The jeeps were seven hundred yards away now, on a stretch of dry road. Picking up speed. “Shit,” she whispered. “Oh shit oh shit.” Even if McPhee started sprinting right now, he’d never make it to Ketton; they’d overhaul him easily. Perhaps if the rest of them started flinging white fire at the serjeants . . . What a ridiculous thought, she told herself. And I don’t have any to spare. I must focus on channelling my energistic power.
Ten yards to go.
I won’t put up a fight. It wouldn’t be the slightest good, and it might damage the body. I owe her that much.
At the heart of her mind she could feel the captive host stirring in anticipation. All four of them staggered up out of the mud, and simply collapsed on the soggy ground next to Tina and Franklin. And she still couldn’t see the owners of the two minds impinging so strongly on her perception.
“Stephanie Ash,” a woman’s voice said from the empty air. “I see your timing is as fucking atrocious as always.”
“Any second now,” an unseen man announced.
Both of their minds were hot with eagerness. Somewhere nearby, the slow-motion wheeze of bagpipes started up, swirling to a level piercing tone. Stephanie raised her head. Halfway between her and the jeeps, a lone Scottish piper stood facing the vehicles. Dressed in a kilt of Douglas tartan, black leather boots shining, he seemed totally oblivious of the mortal foe riding towards him. His fingers moved sedately as he played “Amazing Grace.” One of the serjeants in the front vehicle was standing up to get a clear look in over the mud-caked windscreen.
“I like it,” McPhee hooted.
“Our call to arms,” the concealed man replied. “It has a certain
Stephanie glanced round urgently, trying to pin down the voice. “Call to arms?”
An explosion sounded in the distance, rumbling fast over the quagmires and stagnant pools smothering Catmos Vale. A mine had detonated under the leading jeep, punching the front of the chassis into the air. It crashed down, spilling serjeants across the road. Blue white smoke billowed out from the crater in the concrete. Lumps of debris rained down. The other jeeps braked sharply. Serjeants froze all along the front line, crouching down.
The piper finished, and bowed solemnly at his enemies. There was a dull, potent
“Ho shit,” Cochrane growled. “Those are mortars.”
“Well done,” said the woman. “Now keep down.”
It was, the Liberation’s coordinating AI acknowledged, a classic ambush, and executed perfectly. The jeeps were confined to one of the narrowest strips of land in the valley, unable to veer away. A sleet of mortar shells fell upon them, ranged precisely. High explosives detonated in a near constant bombardment, pulverizing the stalled vehicles, and shredding the serjeants riding them. Smoke, flame, and spumes of superfine mud belched out, obliterating the carnage from view.
The AI could do absolutely nothing to prevent it. Radar pulses from the SD sensor satellites swept the length of the valley, but they required several seconds to acquire lock on. The first bombardment lasted for ninety seconds, then the mortar operators switched to airburst shells, and changed elevation. Dense black clouds burst open above the line of serjeants as they toiled desperately through the quagmire. Broad circles of mud erupted into cyclones of beige foam as the shrapnel slashed down, obliterating the struggling figures.
Only then did the SD radars finish backtracking the mortar trajectories. The AI launched its counterstrike. Incandescent scarlet beams stabbed down in retaliation, vaporising the possessed and their weapons in micro- seconds. Over a dozen patches of dry land were targeted. Supersonic torrents of steam flared out from the base of each impact. When they gusted away, the mortar sites had been reduced to shallow craters of hardbaked clay, their centres still radiant. They chittered softly as the drizzle fell, prizing open millions of tiny heat stress fractures.
The empty silence returned. Swirls of smoke drifted over the valley floor, dissipating slowly to reveal the burning wrecks of the jeeps. Spread out across the quagmire, the ruptured bodies of the serjeants were gradually claimed by the mud’s tireless embrace. Within an hour, there would be little left to hint at the conflict.
Stephanie found herself clawing into the soft soil, every muscle locked solid to resist the laser pulse. It never came. She let out a wretched sob, surrendering to the severe shaking that claimed her limbs. Two of the ferrang packs crept towards Stephanie and her friends. They dissolved into a pair of human figures dressed in dark grey and green combat fatigues. Annette Ekelund and Soi Hon looked down at them with anger and contempt.
“You idiots could have got us blown back into the beyond by blundering about like that,” Annette said. “What if dear Ralph considered you to be part of this operation? They would have zeroed this patch of ground for sure.”
Cochrane lifted his head, mud dribbling down his face to saturate his wild beard. His dead reefer was squashed against his lips. He spat it out. “Well like fuck me gently with a chainsaw, sister. I’m real sorry to cause you any inconvenience.”
Not even Lalonde’s oppressive climate prepared Ralph for the awesome humidity when he stepped out of the Royal Marine hypersonic transport plane. It prickled his skin at the same time as it siphoned away vital body energies. Just breathing it in was exhausting.
With the last strands of cloud at last gusting out to sea, the tropical sun could finally exert its full strength against poor malaised Mortonridge. Thousands of square kilometres of mud began to effervesce, thickening the air with hot cloying vapour. Looking round from the top of the airstair, Ralph could see long ribbons of tenuous white cloud flowing with oily tenacity around the hummocks and foothills of the broad valley. More mist was percolating up from the highlands on either side, with long snow-white streamers spilling out through clefts in the valley walls to slither down the slope like slow-motion waterfalls.
He sniffed at the air. Threaded through the blanket of clean moisture were the traces of corruption. The peninsula’s dead biomass was starting to rot and ferment. In another few days the stench would be formidable, and no doubt extremely unhealthy. One more factor to consider. Though it was a long way down on the priority list.
Ralph hurried down the aluminium stairs, with Brigadier Palmer and Cathal just behind him. For once there was no Marine detail waiting to guard him. They’d landed outside the staging camp established in the mouth of Catmos Vale. Hundreds of programmable silicon igloos had sprung up in rows like giant powder-blue mushrooms, a miniature recreation of Fort Forward. The only people here were serjeants, occupation troops, and medical case de-possessed. Plus a handful of rover reporters; all officially authorized Liberation correspondents, with a pair of Royal Marine information officers shepherding them.
When he looked up the valley, the loose smears of mist blurred into a single featureless white sheet carpeting the floor. His enhanced retinas zoomed in on the only visible feature, the slim greyish spire of Ketton’s church rising out of the mist. Just by looking at it, Ralph could sense the possessed mustering in the town, a replay of the gentle mental pressure they’d all known in the days of the red cloud.
“She’s here,” he murmured. “The Ekelund woman. She’s in Ketton.”
“Are you sure?” Cathal asked.
“I can feel her, just like before. In any case, she’s one of their leaders, and this bunch are well organized.” Cathal gave the distant spire a dubious glance.
