The Night's Dawn Trilogy (365 page)

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 void-hawks 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.”

“Wake up, old man. We’re not fighting God, we’re fighting an unjust universe.”

For the first time since his return from the beyond, Del-van smiled. “You think there’s a difference?”

______

The island was enchanting, its botany and geology combining into the kind of synergistic idyll which was the grail of Edenist
habitat designers. Inland, there were craggy rocks hosting long white waterfalls, and thick lush forests choked with sweet-scented
flowers. The shore comprised cove after cove, their pale gold sands gleaming under the azure sky; except for one, where the
offshore reef crumbled under the foaming breakers to give the sands an exquisite fairydust coating of pink coral. It appealed
to humans on a primal level, urging them to slow down and spend time just soaking in nature. As a reward for their worship,
time itself would expand and become almost meaningless.

Even in his current existence, Sinon wished he was staying longer than their eighteen-hour stopover. Five thousand serjeants
had descended on this tiny jewel of land glinting in the ocean, along with their equipment and support personnel. Marines
were camped ten to a room in the resort hotels; gardens and tennis courts had been requisitioned as landing pads; and the
coves were harbours for a hundred of the regiment’s landing boats. All day, the boats had taken their turn to nuzzle the shore,
extending their forward ramps so that jeeps and light trucks could drive on board. Now, in the evening, the serjeants were
finally embarking.

Syrinx would like this place,
Sinon told Choma.
I must tell her about it.
He was two thirds of the way along a line of serjeants who were wading out to their landing boat. There wasn’t enough room
on this particular beach to berth more than three boats at a time, so the other eleven were anchored a hundred metres offshore.
A column of serjeants snaked out to each one, making slow time through the water. The big constructs were laden with backpacks,
carrying their weapons above their heads to stop them getting wet. Groups of Royal Marines milled about on the bluff, watching
the process. If all went well, they’d be doing the same thing next morning.

Now there’s good healthy optimism,
Choma replied.

What do you mean?

I’ve been working out our probable casualty rate. Would you like to know how many of our squad are likely to survive the entire
campaign?

Not particularly. I have no intention of becoming a statistic.

Where have I heard that before? In any case, it’s two. Two out of ten.

Thank you very much.
Sinon reached the landing boat. It was an ugly, rugged affair, one design serving the entire Liberation armada. A carbosilicon
hull mass produced over on Esparta, with power cells and an engine that could have come from any of a dozen industrialized
star systems allied to the Kingdom. Hard-pressed navy engineers had plugged the standard components together, completing several
hundred each day. The three on the beach were still being worked on by technicians.

Honesty is supposed to be our culture’s strength,

Choma said, mildly irked by the negative reaction.

We’re a long way from Eden now.
Sinon slung his rifle high on his shoulder, and started climbing the ladder up the side of the boat. When he reached the
top of the gunnel he looked back to shore. The sun was sinking into the sea, leaving a rosy haze line above the darkening
water. Parodying that, on the opposite horizon, the glow of the red cloud was visible, a narrow fracture separating water
and air.

Last chance, Sinon told himself. The other serjeants were all climbing down into the boat, their mind-tones subdued but still
resolute. Rationally, he was buying the Confederation time to find a genuine answer. And Consensus itself had approved this
course of action. He swung his legs over the rail, and put a hand down to help Choma.
Come on, let’s go storm the Dark Lord’s citadel.

______

The Royal Marine ion field flyer was a lone spark of gold shimmering high in the night sky, brighter than any star. It flew
across the top of the Mortonridge peninsula, keeping parallel to the firebreak, twenty-five kilometres to the north, and holding
a steady fifteen kilometre altitude.

Ralph Hiltch sat in the flyer’s cabin as Cathal Fitzgerald piloted them above the northern end of the mountain range which
formed the peninsula’s spine. Eight hours of neural nanonics enforced sleep had left him feeling fresh, but emotionally dead.
His mind had woken immune to the human consequences of the Liberation. Whether it was numb from the torrent of information
which had been bullying his brain for weeks, or guilty at the enormity of what he’d organized, he wasn’t sure.

It meant that now he was hooked into the flyer’s sensor suite, he could view the last stages of the deployment with god-like
dispassion. Which was probably for the best, he thought. Accepting personal responsibility for every casualty would drive
anyone insane within the first two minutes. Even so, he’d wanted this one last overview. To convince himself it was genuine
if nothing else. The last insecurity, that all the data and images he’d handled had been transformed to physical reality.

There could be doubt. The army spread out below him,
his
army, was flowing over the black land in streamers of fluid light, bending and curling round hills and valleys. Individual
vehicles expressed as twinkles of light, barely different to icons blipping their way across a map. Except here there was
no colour, just the white headlight beams contrasting the funeral ground.

It was after midnight, and two-thirds of the ground deployment was complete. Both flanks were established, now there was only
the centre to set up, the most difficult aspect. His main spearhead was going to drive right along the M6, allowing the huge
supply and back-up convoys an easy ride. Using the motorway was a disturbingly obvious strategy, but essential if they were
to complete in a minimum timescale.

Ekelund would have sabotaged the road, but bridges could be repaired, blockades shunted aside, and gorges filled. The combat
engineering corps were ready for that. At least the possessed didn’t have air power. Though occasionally he had images of
propeller biplanes roaring overhead and strafing the jeeps. Victory rolls with the pilot’s white silk scarf flapping jauntily
in the slipstream. Stupid.