“What the hell . . . ?” the man grunted as the serjeant closed the clamp round his neck.
“This restraint has a dead-man function. If I let go, or I’m made to let go, it will fire ten thousand volts into you. If you resist or refuse to obey any instruction, I will shove a current into you and keep turning it up until your energistic ability is neutralised. Do you understand?”
“You’re gonna die one day, you’re going to join us.”
The serjeant switched on a two hundred volt current.
“Jesus wept,” the man squealed.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes. Yes, fuck. Turn it off. Off!”
“Very well. You will now leave this body.”
“Or what, asshole? If you zap me too hard we both die. Me and my host.”
“If you do not leave of your own volition, you will be placed in zero-tau.”
“Fuck. I can’t go back there.” He started sobbing. “Don’t you understand? I can’t. Not there.
“I’m sorry. That is not an option. Leave now.”
“I can’t.”
The serjeant pulled on the holding stick, forcing the possessed to his feet. “This way.”
“What now?”
“Zero-tau.”
The cheering in the Ops Room was deafening. Ralph actually grinned out at them from his office, the image of the captured possessed being led away lingering in his mind. It might work, he thought. It just might. He remembered walking out of Exnall, the girl crying limply in his arms, Ekelund’s mocking laughter in the air.
“Enjoy your victory with the girl,” she’d sneered. His only personal success in that entire frightful night.
“Two down,” Ralph whispered. “Two million to go.”
The fish were dying. Stephanie thought that the oddest thing. This rain should be their chance to take over the whole world. Instead the ever-thickening mud was clogging up their gills, preventing them from breathing. They lay on the surface, being pushed along by the leisurely waves of water, their bodies flapping madly.
“We should like hollow out some logs, man, use them as canoes. That’s what our ancestors used to do, and those cats were like really in tune with nature,” Cochrane suggested when they cleared the end of the valley.
They’d only just made it, the sluggish river was leaking over the top of the track. At times it seemed as if the whole surface of the valley was on the move. They stood above the gurgling edge of the flow, and watched the gargantuan outpouring spread out to surge on across the lowlands.
“Fat lot of use that would be,” Franklin muttered grimly. “Everything’s heading down to the coast, and that’s where
“You are such a downer. I want some wheels, man. I have like totally had it with tramping through this shit.”
“I thought cars were spawned by the capitalist Establishment to promote our greed and distance us from nature,” Rana said sweetly. “I’m sure I heard somebody say that recently.”
Cochrane kicked at the fish flopping about round his feet. “Get off my back, prickly sister. Okay? I’m thinking of Moyo. He can’t handle this.”
“Just . . . quiet,” Stephanie said. Even she was waspish, fed up with the pettiness they were all displaying. The ordeal of the bus and then the track had stretched everyone’s nerves. “How are you?” she asked Moyo.
His face had returned to normal, the illusion swallowing his bandage and shielding his scabbed tissue from sight. Even his eyeballs appeared to dart about naturally. But he’d taken a lot of cajoling and encouragement to walk along the track. His thoughts had contracted, gathering round a centre of sullen self-pity. “I’ll be okay,” he mumbled. “Just get me out of this rain. I hate it.”
“Amen to that,” Cochrane chirped.
Stephanie looked round the shabby landscape. Visibility was still pretty ropy on the other side of their protective umbrella, though it was definitely lighter now. It was hard to believe this eternal featureless mire was the same vigorous green countryside they’d travelled across in the Karmic Crusader. “Well we can’t go that way,” she gestured at the cataract of muddy water rumbling away into the distance. “So I guess we’ll have to stick to this side. Anyone remember roughly where the road is?”
“Along there, I think,” McPhee said. Neither voice or mind-tone suggested much confidence in the claim. “There’s definitely a flat ledge. See? The carbon-concrete must have held up.”
“Till the foundation gets washed out from under it,” Franklin said.
Stephanie couldn’t honestly see any difference in the mud where he was pointing. “All right, we’ll go for it.”
“How far?” Tina demanded querulously. “And how long will it take to get there?”
“Depends where you’re heading, babe,” Cochrane said.
“Well I don’t know, do I? I wouldn’t ask if I did.”
“Any kind of building will do,” Stephanie said. “We can reinforce it against the weather ourselves. I just want us out of this. We can think what to do next when we’re rested up. Come on.” Stephanie gripped Moyo’s hand and began to walk in the direction the road was supposed to be. Fish tails slapped pitifully at her wellingtons.
“Oh man, it don’t make no difference what we decide. We know what’s like gonna happen.”
“Then stay here and let it,” Rana told the miserable hippie. She started off after Stephanie.
“I didn’t say I was in a rush.” The edge of the invisible shield moved towards Cochrane, and he scrambled after them.
“There was a village called Ketton on this road,” McPhee said. “I remember going through it before we turned off up to the farm.”
“How far?” Tina asked, her voice rising in hope.
Cochrane smiled happily. “Miles and miles, it’ll probably take us like about ten—twenty days.”
A ferocious jet of white fire squirted into the wall two metres above Sinon’s head. He flattened himself into the mud below as paint ignited and carbon-concrete blistered.
Coming from the shops, seventy metres right.it was hard to see with all the smoke mingling with the rain, but his retinas had a long purple after image scorched across them.
Got it,kerrial answered.
The white fire expanded into a thin circular sheet, rivulets trickled down, their tips wriggling purposefully towards Sinon. “Shit.” If he stayed the fire would get him, if he moved he’d lose the cover which the wall provided. And there must be several of them in the shops; two other serjeants were under attack as well.
Eayres was a nothing village in the guidance block’s memory. A cluster of houses clumped round a road junction, its population mostly employed by the local marble quarry. Who would expect the possessed to make a stand here? Expect the unexpected, Choma had chanted happily when the white fireballs burst open amid the squad.
Sinon saw Kerrial swing himself into position, bringing his machine gun to bear on the shops in the middle of the village. Bullet craters slammed across the brickwork in front of him. Then his body was being flung back, nerve channels shutting down. Blackness. Kerrial’s memories arose from his neural array to be absorbed by an orbiting voidhawk.
They’ve got guns!sinon broadcast.
