The tactical maps urged on them by the army liaison officers had changed considerably from the original swathe of incriminating pink stretching across Mortonridge which delineated the possessed territory. At first the borders had contracted noose-style, then geographical contours showed up along the rim of pinkness, interfering with the rate of advance. After Ketton it had changed again. The serjeants had been deployed in spearhead thrusts, carving corridors through the possessed territories. Separation and isolation, General Hiltch’s plan to prevent the possessed from collecting in the kind of density which would kick off another Ketton incident. The current tactical map showed Mortonridge covered in slowly shrinking pink blotches separating from each other like evaporating puddles. Of course, no one actually knew what that critical number was which had to be avoided at all costs. So the serjeants toiled on relentlessly, guided by numerical simulations based on someone’s best guess. And there were no more harpoon deluges to make the job easier, nor even SD laser fire to soften up a strongly defended position. The front line was back to clearing the land in the hardest way possible.
Tim’s retinas tracked keenly along the carbon-concrete ribbon which the Stony was following. Royal Marine mechanoids had bulldozed entire swamps of saturated soil from the road as the army swept down the spine of the peninsula. At times the single cleared carriageway was twenty metres below the tops of the new banks, as if it was some kind of cooled lava river confined to steep heat-erosion valleys. The sidewalls were solidified by chemical cement, bonding the slush together in artificial molecular clusters that traded their initial strength with a limited lifespan. Sunlight shimmered off them in vast sapphire and emerald defraction patterns as the Stony whisked by overhead. All the original bridges had been swept away, leaving destitute towers protruding from the mud at precarious angles. Of their replacements, no two were the same. Small gullies had simple scaffolding archways of monobonded silicon curving over their sluggish streams. Beautiful single-span suspension bridges leapt across gaps half a kilometre wide, their gossamer cables glinting like thin icicles in the clear dawn air. Programmable silicon pontoons carried the mesh-carpet road across broad valley floors in heroic relay.
“The financial cost of this recaptured motorway is roughly ten million Kulu pounds per kilometre,” Tim said. “Thirty times the price of the original, and it hasn’t even got electronic traffic control. It will probably be the Liberation’s most enduring physical memorial, even though thirty-eight per cent of it is classed as a temporary structure. Ground troops know it as the road to the other side of hell.”
“You could always take the optimistic view,” Hugh Rosler said.
Tim put the narrative track memory on pause. “If I could find one, I would. It’s not as if I’m rooting for the possessed. Being positive after all this time is flat-out impossible. We have to tell the truth occasionally.”
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.