Chapter 10

Mortonridge was bleeding away into the ocean, a prolonged and arduous death. It was as though all the pain, the torment, the misery from a conflict that could never be anything other than excruciatingly bitter had manifested itself as mud. Slimy, insidious, limitless, it rotted the resolve of both sides in the same way it ravaged their physical environment. The peninsula’s living skin of topsoil had torn along the spine of the central mountain range to slither relentlessly down-slope into the coastal shallows. All the rich black loam built up over millennia as the rainforests regenerated themselves upon the decayed trunks of timelost past generations was sluiced away within two days by the unnatural rain. Reduced to supersaturated sludge, the precious upper few metres containing abundant nitrates, bacteria, and aboriginal earthworm-analogues had become an unstoppable landslip. Hill-sized moraines of mire were pushed along valleys, bulldozed by the intolerable pressure exerted by cubic kilometres of more ooze behind.

The mud tides scoured every valley, incline, and hollow; exposing the denser substrata. A compacted mix of gravel and clay, as sterile as asteroid regolith. There were no seeds or spores or eggs hidden tenaciously in its clefts to sprout anew. And precious few nutrients to succour and support them even if there had been.

Ralph used the SD sensors to watch the thick black stain expanding out across the sea. The mouth of the Juliffe had produced a similar discoloration in Lalonde’s sea, he remembered. But that was just one small blemish. This was an ecological blight unmatched since the worst of Earth’s dystopic Twenty-first Century. Marine creatures were dying in the plague of unnatural dark waters, choking beneath the uncountable corpses of their mammalian cousins.

“She was right, you know,” he told Cathal at the end of the Liberation’s first week.

“Who?”

“Annette Ekelund. Remember when we met her at the Firebreak roadblock? She said we’d have to destroy the village in order to save it. And I stood there and told her that I’d do whatever I had to, whatever it took. Dear God.” He slumped back in the thickly cushioned chair behind his desk. If it hadn’t been for the staff in the Ops Room on the other side of the glass wall he would probably have put his head in his hands.

Cathal glanced into the sparkling light of the desktop AV pillar. The unhealthy smear around Mortonridge’s coast had grown almost as a counterbalance to the shrinking cloud. It was still raining over the peninsula, of course, but not constantly. The cloud had almost reverted to a natural weather formation, there were actual gaps amid the thick dark swirls now. “Chief, they did it to themselves. You’ve got to stop punishing yourself over this. No one who’s been de-possessed in zero-tau is blaming you for anything. They’re gonna give you a fucking medal once this is over.”

Medals, ennoblement, promotions; they’d all been mentioned. Ralph hadn’t paid a lot of attention. Such things were the trappings of state, government trinkets of no practical value whatsoever. Saving people was what really counted; everything else was just an acknowledgement, a method of reinforcing memory. He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted that. Mortonridge would never recover, would never grow back to what it was. Maybe that was the best memorial, a decimated land was something that could never be overlooked and ignored by future generations. A truth that remained unsusceptible to the historical revisionists. The Liberation, he had decided some while ago, wasn’t a victory over Ekelund, at best he’d scored a few points off her. She’d be back for the next match.

Acacia rapped lightly on the open door, and walked in, followed by Janne Palmer. Ralph waved at them to sit, and datavised a codelock at the door. The sensenviron bubble room closed about them. Princess Kirsten and Admiral Farquar were waiting around the oval table for the daily progress review. Mortonridge itself formed a three dimensional relief map on the tabletop, small blinking symbols sketching in the state of the campaign. The number of purple triangles, indicating clusters of possessed, had increased dramatically over the last ten days as the cloud attenuated allowing the SD sensors to scan the ground. Invading forces were green hexagons, an unbroken line mimicking the coastline, sixty-five kilometres inland.

Admiral Farquar leant forwards, studying the situation with a despondent expression. “Less than ten kilometres a day,” he said sombrely. “I’d hoped we would be a little further along by now.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you’d tried walking through that devilsome mud,” Acacia said. “The serjeants are making excellent progress.”

“It wasn’t a criticism,” the admiral said hastily. “Given the circumstances, they’ve performed marvellously. I simply wish we could have one piece of luck on our side, everything about these conditions seems to swing in Ekelund’s favour.”

“It’s starting to swing back,” Cathal said. “The rain and the mud have triggered just about every booby trap they left in wait for us. And we’ve got their locations locked down now. They can’t escape.”

“I can see the actual campaign is advancing well on the ground,” Princess Kirsten said. “I have no complaint about the way you’re handling that. However, I do have a problem with the number of casualties we’re incurring, on both sides.”

The relevant figures stood in gold columns at the top of the table. Ralph had done his best to ignore them. Not that he could forget. “The suicide rate among the possessed is increasing at an alarming rate,” he conceded. “Today saw it reaching eight per cent; and there’s very little we can do about it. They’re doing it quite deliberately. It’s an inhibiting tactic. After all, what have they got to lose? The whole purpose of the campaign is to free the bodies they’ve captured; if they can deny us that opportunity then they will weaken our resolve, both on the ground and in the political arena.”

“If that’s their reasoning, then they’re badly mistaken,” Princess Kirsten said. “One of the main reasons for the Kingdom’s strength is because my family can take tough decisions when the need arises. This Liberation continues until the serjeants meet up on Mortonridge’s central mountain. However, I would like some options on how to reduce casualties.”

“There’s only one,” Ralph said. “And it’s by no means perfect. We slow the front line’s advance and use the time to concentrate our forces around the possessed. At the moment we’re using almost the minimum number of serjeants against each nest of them we encounter. That means the serjeants have to use a lot of gunfire to subdue them. When the possessed realize they’ve lost, they stop resisting the bullets. Bang, we lose. Another of our people dies, and the lost souls in the beyond have another recruit.”

“If we increase the number of serjeants for each encounter, what sort of reduction do you expect us to be looking at?”

“At the moment, we try to have at least thirty per cent more serjeants than possessed. If we could reach double, then we think we can hold the suicide rate down to a maximum of fifteen per cent each time.”

“Of course, the ratio will improve naturally as the length of the front line contracts and the number of possessed decreases,” Admiral Farquar said. “It’s just that right now we’re about at maximum stretch. The serjeants haven’t got far enough inland to decrease the length of the front line appreciably, yet they’re encountering a lot of possessed.”

“That entire situation is going to change over the next three to four days,” Cathal said. “Almost all the possessed are on the move. They’re retreating from the front line as fast as they can wade. The advance is going to speed up considerably, so the length will reduce anyway.”