Unlike the Princess, Ralph didn’t have the luxury of glancing round his people for signs of support. He could well imagine Janne Palmer’s opinion—she’d be right too.
“We can begin preliminary deployment in another three days,” he said. “That way we’ll be able to start the actual Liberation in eight days’ time.”
“All right, Ralph. You have another eight days’ grace. No more.”
“Yes ma’am. Thank you.”
“Have you actually managed to test one of the static guns on a possessed yet?”
“I’m afraid not, ma’am, no.”
“Isn’t that taking a bit of a chance? Surely you need to know their effectiveness, if any?”
“They’ll either work, or not; and we don’t want to give Ekelund’s people any advance warning just in case they can devise a counter. We’ll know if they’re any use within seconds of our first encounter. If they don’t, then the ground troops will revert to ordinary light arms. I just hope to God they don’t have to, we’ll inflict a hell of a lot of damage on the bodies we’re trying to recover. But the theory’s perfect, and the machinery’s all so beautifully simple as well. Cathal and Dean dreamed up the concept. It should have been obvious from the start. I should have come up with it.”
“I think you’ve worked enough miracles, Ralph. All the family wants from you now is a mundane little victory.”
He nodded his thanks, and stared out over the training ground again. It was changeover time, hundreds of grubby-red serjeants were on the move, along with a good number of ordinary troops. Though ordinary was a relative term when referring to the boosted mercenaries.
“One question,” Leonard DeVille said; he sounded apologetic, if not terribly sincere about it. “I know this isn’t quite what you want to hear right now, Ralph. But you have allocated room for the rover reporters to observe the action during the assault, haven’t you? The AI does know that’s a requirement?”
Ralph grinned. This time he gave Palmer a direct look before locking eyes with the Home Office Minister. The Princess was diplomatically focused on the returning serjeants.
“Oh yes. We’re putting them right in the front line for you. You’ll get sensevises every bit as hot as the one Kelly Tirrel produced on Lalonde. This is going to be one very public war.”
Chainbridge was different now. When Annette Ekelund had first arrived here, she’d transformed it into a simple headquarters and garrison town. Close enough to the firebreak to deploy her irregulars if the Kingdom sent any of its threatened “punishment” squads over to snatch possessed. Far enough away so that it was outside the range of any inquisitive sensors—incidentally making it reasonably safe from SD fire. So she’d gathered her followers to her, and allowed them their illusion of freedom. A genuine rabble army, with a licence to carouse and cavort for ninety per cent of the time, with just a few of her orders to follow the morning after. Something to do, something vaguely exciting and heroic-seeming, gave them a sense of identity and purpose. For that, they stayed together.
It made them into a unit for her, however unwieldy and unreliable. That was when Chainbridge resembled a provincial town under occupation by foreign troops with unlimited expense accounts. Not a bad analogy. There were parties and dances every evening, and other people began to hang around, if for no other reason than the army made damn sure they had full access to Mortonridge’s dwindling food supplies. It was a happy town kept in good order, Annette even established the hub of Mortonridge’s downgraded communication net in the old town hall, which was commandeered as her command post. The net allowed her to retain a certain degree of control over the peninsula, keeping her in touch with the councils she’d left in charge of the towns her forces had taken over. There wasn’t much she could do to enforce her rule, short of complete overkill and send in a brigade of her troops, but in the main she’d created a small society which worked. That was before any of the inhabitants really believed that the Kingdom would break its word and invade with the express intention of ripping body from usurping soul.
Now Chainbridge’s parties had ended. The few inhabited buildings had lost their ornate appearance in favour of a bleakly oppressive, fortress-like solidity. Non-combatants, the good-timers and hangers on, had left, drifting away into the countryside. The town was preparing for war.
From her office window in the town hall, she could look down on the large cobbled square below. The fountains were off, their basins dry and duned by clumps of litter. Vehicles were parked in neat ranks under the rows of leghorn trees that circled the outer edge of the square. They were mostly manual-drive cars and four-wheel drive farm rovers, as per her instructions. None of them wore any kind of illusory image. Engineers were working on several of them, readying them for the coming ordeal.
Annette came back to the long table where her ten senior officers were sitting. Delvan and Milne had taken the chairs on either side of hers; the two people she relied on the most. Delvan claimed to have been an officer in the First World War; while Milne had been an engineer’s mate during Earth’s steamship era, which made him a wizard with all things mechanical, though he freely admitted to knowing very little about electronics. Beyond them, sat Soi Hon, who was a veteran of early-Twenty-first Century bush wars, an ecological agitator, he called himself. Annette gathered his battles hadn’t been fought along national lines, but rather corporate ones. Whatever he wanted to describe himself as, his tactical know-how in the situation they faced was invaluable. The rest of them were just divisional commanders, gaining the loyalty of their troops through personality or reputation. Just how much loyalty, was a moot point.
“What are today’s figures?” Annette asked.
“Nearly forty deserted last night,” Delvan said. “Little shits. In my day they would have been shot for that kind of cowardice.”
“Fortunately, we’re not in your day,” Soi Hon said. “When I fought the desecrators who stole my land I had legions of the people who did what they had to because our cause was just. We needed no military police and prisons to enforce the orders of our commanders then, nor do we here. If in their hearts people do not want to fight, then forcing them will not make them good soldiers.”
“God is on the side of the big battalions,” Delvan sneered. “Owning your claptrap nobility doesn’t guarantee victory.”
“We are not going to win.” Soi Hon smiled peacefully. “You do understand that, don’t you?”
“We’ll have a damn good try, and to hell with your defeatist talk. I’m surprised you didn’t leave with the rest of them.”
“I think that’ll do,” Annette said. “Delvan, you know Soi Hon is right, you’ve felt what the Kingdom is gathering to fling against us. The King would never commit his forces against us unless he was convinced of the outcome. And he has the backing of the Edenists, who even more than he, won’t engage in a foolhardy venture. This is a showpiece war; they intend to demonstrate to the Confederation’s general public that we are beatable. They cannot afford to lose, no matter what it costs them.”
“So what the hell do you want us to do, then?” Delvan asked.
“Make that cost exorbitant,” Soi Hon said. “Such people always assign a value to everything in monetary terms. We might not be able to defeat them on Mortonridge, but we can certainly prevent any further Liberation campaigns after this one.”
“Their troops will have reporters with them,” Annette said. “They’ll want to showcase their triumphs. This war will be fought on two fronts, the physical one here, and the emotional one broadcast by the media across the Confederation. That is the important one, the one we have to win. Those reporters must be shown the terrifying price of opposing us. I believe Milne has been making some preparations.”