The type of cargoes raining down on the planet had changed. Combat gear was slowly being replaced by heavy-duty civil engineering equipment, ready to repair the expected damage to Mortonridge and provide additional support infrastructure for the occupying forces. The personnel arriving at Fort Forward were also subject to a shift in professions. Just under a million serjeants had been sent from Jupiter, along with nearly a quarter of a million marines and mercenaries from across the Confederation. The Liberation army was essentially complete. So now it was the medical teams being ferried down from orbit, civilian volunteers complementing entire mobile military hospitals. Estimated casualty figures (both military and civilian) were strictly classified. But everyone knew the twelve thousand medical staff were going to suffer a heavy workload. Eighty voidhawks had already been assigned evac duties, spreading the wounded around facilities in the Kingdom and its allies.
Throughout the seventh day following Princess Kirsten’s visit, Ralph Hiltch and his command staff studied the figures and displays provided by the AI. The neuroiconic image which accumulated in his mind kept expanding as more information was correlated. By late afternoon, his conscious perception point seemed to be hanging below a supergalaxy of multicoloured stars, which threatened to make him giddy as he tried to examine it in all directions at once. Despite its coherence, what he really wanted was more training time, more transport, more supplies, and definitely more intelligence assessments of the terrain ahead. But essentially, his army was as ready as it would ever be. He gave the order for final stage deployment to begin.
Over half of the serjeants and their back-up brigades had already left Fort Forward. The previous two days had been spent mustering at their preliminary positions offshore. Nearly a hundred islands around Mortonridge’s coast had been taken over as temporary depots; from reefs which barely showed above the waves to resort atolls dotted with luxury hotels. Where there were no convenient scraps of land, huge cargo ships had been hurriedly converted into floating docks, and anchored thirty kilometres from the shore.
For the first stage of the coastal assault, the army was scheduled to use boats. They were actually going to storm ashore, wading through the waves and up onto the sand, almost in homage to a great many of the incarnations from the past they were facing. Ralph wasn’t prepared to risk flying even the simplest of aircraft into the energistic environment over Mortonridge, not until after they’d dealt with the red cloud at least.
The remainder of the Liberation ground forces emptied out of Fort Forward in massive convoys, spreading out along the firebreak in thousands of multi-terrain vehicles. There was no attempt at secrecy, no hugging the cover behind ridges and hills. The squads drove through the encroaching twilight and into the night; the nimbus of their massed headlight beams creeping like an anaemic dawn along the horizon paralleling the firebreak.
Across Xingu, a civil curfew order was enacted once again, with the police put on full alert. Although they were fairly sure no possessed were left outside Mortonridge, the continent’s authorities were taking Annette Ekelund’s threat of sabotage very seriously. When dawn arrived, no civilian would be allowed out onto the streets. People grumbled and groaned, and datavised protests to local news shows, remembering what a nuisance the curfew had been last time. It was almost a bravado show of defiance. In the main, they just settled back and accessed the show.
High above the planet, the Strategic Defence centre on Guyana began coordinating the Royal Navy’s part of the assault. Thrusters flared on low orbit weapons platforms, refining their new orbits. A flotilla of three hundred voidhawks also began to accelerate, synchronizing their distortion fields to rise away from the planet in a long curve.
The psychic pressure mounting against Mortonridge shifted from faint intimation to blatantly unmistakable.
To casual observation, Chainbridge was still a busy town. When Annette Ekelund reached a slight ridge a couple of kilometres from the outskirts, she stopped the sturdy country rover she was driving and looked back over her shoulder. Hundreds of lighted windows shone out across the lame farmland, burning steady against the flickering crimson waves scattered down from the lumbering cloud roof. The buildings were warm, too, warm enough to fool any perfunctory sensor scans into believing they were occupied. But no one was left there, her command group was the last to leave.
“It’ll keep the blighters tied up for a while,” Delvan assured her. He was sitting in the passenger seat beside her, clad in his old khaki uniform, a discreet row of scarlet and gold ribbons on his chest.
In the back seat, Soi Hon veiled a sneer. He, too, had reverted to type: dark jungle fatigues and a felt bush-ranger hat. “For at least a quarter of an hour.”
“Would you like to return to the beyond fifteen minutes early?” Delvan enquired lightly.
“Any time we delay them is good time,” Annette told the pair of them. She took the brake off, and accelerated down the secondary road. They were heading for Cold Overton, a small village eighty kilometres away. Their field command centre; picked virtually at random by Soi Hon, central but not strategically so, adequate road links, surrounded by thick forest. It was as good as any, not that they’d be staying long. Fluid tactics was the key to this campaign.
Soi Hon clapped Delvan on the shoulder. “And this is our time, eh? You and I both. Onward to death and glory.”
“There is no glory here.” Delvan spoke so quietly, the others could only just hear him against the bass grumble of thunder.
“Don’t tell me you’re having second thoughts?”
“I heard my men wailing at night,” the old soldier replied emotionlessly. “The ones left out in No Man’s Land, left behind to drown in puddles of their own blood; the ones that weren’t vomiting their lungs up from that devilish gas. Screaming for us to help them, more frightened at being alone than they were of being shot.”
“You Christians, you always take life so personally. We’re here by accident, not design. Nothing is ordained, you are only what you make of yourself. You can never go back, the past doesn’t change. Stop thinking about it. The only part of history which matters is the future.”
“It broke my heart, not being able to help them. Good, decent men; boys a lot of them. I swore I’d never get involved in such madness again. They called it total war. But it wasn’t, it was total bloody murder. Insanity had become a disease, and we all caught it. Twice in my lifetime my nation sent its youth out to die for a just cause, to protect ourselves and our way of life.” He smiled frigidly at the eco warrior. “And now here I am once again. Seven bloody centuries later. Seven hundred years, and nothing has changed. Not one damn thing. I’m fighting to preserve myself and my new life. A righteous war with me on the side of the angels, even though they’ve become fallen angels. And I can already hear the screams, God help me.”
“All I hear is our victory song,” Soi Hon said. “The voice of the land is louder and stronger than any human cry. This is our place, we are at one with it. We belong here. We have a right to exist in this universe.”
Delvan closed his eyes and tipped his head back. “Lord forgive me I am such a fool. Here we all are, embarking on a crusade to storm the very gates of Heaven Itself in our desperation. What a monumental folly. I shall smite at the dark angels massed against us, crying for death, for only in death will we ever find peace. Yet You have already revealed that death is not our destiny, nor ever can be.”