them, a light-absorbing void distending across the ocean.
Keep going,was the decision concurred by the rest of the Edenists and General Hiltch’s command group. Every boat in the Liberation armada rammed its engines to full, and met the stormfront head on.
It wasn’t rain they faced, not in the ordinary sense. The deluge crashing down over them was like standing under a waterfall. As the clouds rampaged overhead, so the waves rose, as if seeking to bridge the gap. The landing boats were thrown around pitilessly. Sometimes Sinon had to hold himself against a deck that was lifting over thirty degrees to the vertical. The jeeps secured along the centre of the hold strained against their restraint cables as their weight was flung about in directions the designers had never anticipated. Bilge pumps were wailing plaintively, to little effect. Sinon clung to a guard rail as the cold water mounted steadily against his legs, sloshing between the hull walls. He was worried he’d get tossed overboard. He was worried his newly assembled body would split along surgical lines as he strained muscles and tendons to hold on. He worried that a jeep would break free and crush him. He worried they wouldn’t reach the beach before the rain and waves filled the hold and sunk them.
Not even sharing the anxiety in the Edenist fashion did much to alleviate it. There was way too much distress bubbling through the aether as the armada battled for shore. The Edenists in secondary support roles, safe away from the megastorm, along with the voidhawks and their crews overhead, did their best to offer what reassurance and comfort they could to their beleaguered kinsmen. But they all felt the death toll rising, compounding the alarm. Landing boats collapsed, pitched over, individual serjeants lost their grip to drown amid the monster waves. Voidhawks laboured tirelessly to absorb the fresh memories of the dying serjeant personalities.
A nausea suppression program went primary as an aghast Ralph watched the nightmare unfurling. Neatly tabulated icons blinked up inside his mind, indicating the woeful progress the boats were making. Some were even being driven backwards as the gales howled out from the land. He did what he could. For all it was worth. Ordering the ground forces along the firebreak to stay put and dig in. Putting the medical teams on immediate standby. Designating search patrols for the aircraft, ready for the time when it became feasible to fly.
Diana Tiernan and the AI couldn’t give him any estimate when that would be. There was no way of knowing the true weight of water powering the storm. Radar scans from the SD sensor satellites to discover the depth and density were badly distorted by the tremendous electrical discharges still churning madly over Mortonridge. All they could do was wait.
“We couldn’t have known,” Janne Palmer said. “Dealing with the possessed is one giant unknown.”
“We should have guessed,” Ralph answered bitterly. “At least considered it.”
“Best information we had was that the cloud was a couple of hundred metres thick,” Diana said. “That’s all it was on Lalonde and every other planet they took over. But this blasted thing, it must be kilometres deep. They must have sucked every gram of water from the air. There may even be some kind of osmotic process involved, siphoning it up out of the sea.”
“Damn those bastards,” Ralph spat.
“They are afraid,” Acacia said calmly. “They built the thickest, highest wall they could to keep us out. It’s human nature.”
Ralph couldn’t bring himself to answer the Edenist. It was Acacia’s people who were taking the brunt of the calamity. And it was his plan, his orders, which had put them there. Anything he said would be pathetically inadequate.
Outside, the rain had reached Fort Forward, and was doing its best to wash the city’s programmable silicon structures into the nearby river. Fast rivulets were gouging the soil away from their base anchors. Ops Room staff glanced round nervously as banshee winds pummelled away at the walls. Fifty minutes after the kinetic harpoon barrage, the landing boats started to reach the beaches.
“They’re coming through,” Acacia said. The first strands of confidence were starting to emerge within the combined Edenist psyche as serjeants exported the feeling of sand crunching underfoot. Proof that success was possible, the sense of relief which accompanied it. “It’s going to be okay, we’re going to make it.”
“Right,” Ralph croaked. One icon gleamed darkly at the centre of his woeful thoughts: 3129. The number of dead so far. And we’re the only ones shooting.
An immense wave smacked the landing craft down on the beach with an almighty crunch. The blow sent Sinon skidding back along the hold on his arse, limbs flailing. Water slowed his momentum quickly. He came to rest in a jumble of other serjeants, all struggling to disentangle themselves. The three at the bottom were completely immersed. Affinity was supremely useful in coordinating their movements, like unpicking a three dimensional puzzle.
They’d just got free when the next wave clobbered the side of the landing boat. It lacked the brutality of the previous one, simply shoving the hull further up the beach, and twisting them at an angle.
Dry land!choma cried triumphantly.
Well . . . land, anyway,sinon acknowledged dutifully as he sloshed forwards back up the hold. The rain here was even worse than out at sea. Visibility was down to maybe fifteen metres, and that was with the boat’s powerful lights shining down.
Sometimes, I think you have completely the wrong attitude for this.
Sinon sent a smile image at his friend. He carried on searching through the water for pieces of his kit lost during the last portion of the voyage.
The squad began to assess their position. Five had been injured seriously enough to disqualify them from the campaign altogether. Several more had suffered minor cracking in their exoskeletons, which the medical nanonics could cope with. (Surprisingly, the medical nanonics were working reasonably well.) The beach they’d wound up on was three kilometres south of their designated landing point, Billesdon. The truck at the back of the hold was so badly flooded it’d require a complete maintenance overhaul. The landing boat was wedged into the shingle, and would need towing off at high tide before it could return to the resort island for the marines.
On the plus side, the forward ramp worked, allowing the three functional jeeps out. Most of their armament was intact. All the other landing boats containing their regiment had made it ashore, though they were spread out along the coast. After a brief discussion with their Ops Room liaison, they agreed to make their way to Billesdon and regroup there. According to their original plan, the back-up forces and supplies would use the town’s harbour as their disembarkation point. But it still had to be secured.
By the time the boat’s forward ramp came down it was technically dawn. Hunched down in the almost nonexistent shelter provided by the starboard hull, Sinon couldn’t notice any difference. The only way he knew the jeeps were lumbering out was by using his affinity to see out through the driver’s eyes.
Looks like we’re on,choma said.
They rose to their feet, and checked their kit one last time. Sinon’s squad took up position by the second jeep. Intense headlight beams pierced ten metres through the deluge before the grey water defeated them. It was slow going. Their feet sank deep into the saturated shingle. Twice they had to push the jeep when its wide tyres dug themselves into axle-high ruts.
The squad was totally dependent on their guidance blocks. Satellite images taken before the possession provided them with a high-resolution picture of the cove, and the single narrow track leading away from it into the forest at the rear. Inertial guidance designated their position to within ten centimetres. Supposedly. There was no way of checking. Satellite sensors still couldn’t penetrate the cloud to give them a verified location reference. They just had to hope the bitek processors hadn’t been glitched since they loaded them back on the island.
Shingle gave way to tacky mud. Laggard waves of the yellow slough were creeping down the beach from the land behind. Clumps of grass and small bushes were being trawled along with it.
