“So why isn’t the front line continuing its advance?”

“Because we’ve reached a new stage of the campaign. Forgive me for not broadcasting our gameplan before, but this kind of reinforcement manoeuvre was inevitable. As you can see, we’ve reached Ketton, which has a large number of well organized and hostile possessed in residence—and this is just one of several such assemblies around Mortonridge. The army is simply redeploying accordingly. When we have sufficient resources assembled, then the serjeants will take the town. But I have no intention of committing them until I’m convinced such an operation can be achieved with the minimum of loss on both sides. Thank you.” He started to walk forwards.

“General, Elizabeth Mitchell, Time Warner; one final question, please.” Her voice was authoritative and insistent, impossible to ignore. “Have you got any comment about the defeat in the valley?”

Trust the owner of that voice to ask something he’d really rather avoid, Ralph thought. “Yes, I have. In hindsight advancing down Catmos Vale so fast was a tactical error, a very bad one; and I take full responsibility for that. Although we knew the possessed are equipped with hunting rifles we weren’t expecting them to have artillery. Mortars are about the crudest kind of artillery it’s possible to build; but even so, very effective given certain situations. This was one of them. Now we know what the possessed are capable of, it won’t happen again. Every time they use a new weapon or tactic against us, we can analyse it and guard against it in future. And there are only a very limited number of these moves they can play.” He moved on again, more determined this time. A fast datavise to the two information officers, and there were no more shouted questions.

“Sorry about them,” Colonel Longhurst said.

“Not a problem for me,” Ralph replied.

“You shouldn’t play up to scenes like that,” Cathal said in annoyance as they made their way to the camp’s headquarters. “It’s undignified. At least you could hold a proper press conference with vetted questions.”

“This is as much propaganda as it is physical war, Cathal,” Ralph said. “Besides, you’re still thinking like an ESA officer: tell nobody, and tell them nothing. The public wants to see authority in action on this campaign. We have to provide that.”

Convoys of supply trucks were still arriving at the camp, Colonel Longford explained as he took them on an inspection tour. The Royal Marine engineering squads had little trouble securing the programmable silicon igloos; this section of land was several metres above the mud of the valley floor. But there were logistics problems with supplying the troops.

“It’s taking the trucks fifteen hours to get here from the coast,” he said. “The engineers have virtually had to rebuild the damn road as they went along. Even now there are some sections that are just lines of marker beacons in the mud.”

“I can’t do anything about the mud,” Ralph said. “Believe me, we’ve tried. Solidifying chemicals, SD lasers to bake it; they’re no good on the kind of scale we’re dealing with here.”

“What we really need is air support. You flew out here.”

“This was the first inland flight,” Janne Palmer said. “And your landing field could barely accommodate the hypersonic. You’ll never be able to handle cargo planes.”

“There’s plenty of clear high ground nearby, we can build a link road.”

“I’ll look into authorizing it,” Ralph said. “We should certainly consider flying in the serjeants ready for the assault on the town.”

“Appreciate that,” the colonel said. “Things out here are a little different than the AI says they should be.”

“That’s one of the reasons I’m here, to see how you’re coping.”

“We are now. It was bedlam the first day. Could certainly have done with the planes to evac the injured and the depossessed out. That ride back to the coast isn’t doing them any good.”

They came to the big oval hall where Elana Duncan and her team had set up shop. The massive boosted mercenary greeted Ralph with a casual salute of her arm, clicking her claws together. “Not much ceremony in here, General,” she said. “We’re rather too crowded for that right now. Go see whatever you want, but don’t bother my people, please, they’re kind of busy right now.”

Ten zero-tau pods were lined up down the centre of the hall, all of them active. The big machines with their thick power cables and compact mosaic of components looked strangely out of place. Or it could be out of era, Ralph acknowledged. The rest of the hall was given over to cots for the serjeants, a field hospital whose primitiveness dismayed him. Elana’s mercenaries were carrying large plastic bottles and rolls of disposable paper towels, doing their rounds along the dark bitek constructs. There was a strong chemical smell in the air which Ralph couldn’t place. He had some distant memory of it, but certainly not one indexed by his neural nanonics, nor a didactic memory—although they were notoriously inaccurate when it came to imparting smells.

Ralph went over to the first serjeant. The construct was sucking quietly at the tube of a clear polythene bag containing its nutrient syrup, a liquid like thin honey. “Did you get hit by the mortars?”

“No, General,” Sinon said. “I wasn’t here for the Catmos Vale incident. I am, I believe, one of the lucky ones. I have participated in six assaults which resulted in a possessed being captured, and received only minor injuries during the course of those actions. Unfortunately, that means I have walked the whole way here from the coast.”

“So what happened?”

“Moisture exposure, General. Impossible to avoid, I’m afraid. As I said, I was slightly injured previously, resulting in small cracks within my exoskeleton. Although they are not in themselves dangerous, such hairline fissures are ideal anchorages for several varieties of aboriginal fungal spores.” He indicated his legs.

Now that he knew what he was looking for, Ralph could see the long lead-grey blotches crisscrossing round the serjeant’s lower limbs; they were slightly fuzzy, like thin velvet. When he glanced along the row of cots, he could see some serjeants where the fungus was full grown, smothering their legs in a thick furry carpet, like soggy coral.

“My God. Does that . . .”

“Hurt?” Sinon enquired. “Oh no. Please don’t be concerned, General. I don’t feel pain, as such. I am aware of the fungus’s presence, of course. It does itch rather unpleasantly. The major problem is derived from its effect on my blood chemistry. If left unchecked the fungus would extrude a quantity of toxins that my organs will be unable to filter out.”

“Is there a treatment?”

“Funnily enough, yes. An alcohol rub to eradicate the bulk of the fungus, followed with iodine, appears to be effective in eliminating the growth. Of course, further exposure to these conditions will probably reintroduce the spores, especially as they appear to thrive in this current humidity.”

“Iodine,” Ralph said. “I thought I knew that smell. Some of the Church clinics on Lalonde used the stuff.” The incongruity of the situation was starting to nag at him. He could hardly be playing the role of older officer giving comfort to a young trooper. If Sinon followed usual Edenist lines, he must have been at least a hundred and fifty when he died. Older than Ralph’s grandfather.

“Ah, Lalonde. I never visited. I used to be a voidhawk crew member.”

“You were lucky; I was posted there for years.”

Somebody started wailing, a piteous gasping cry of bitterness. Ralph looked up to see a couple of the boosted mercenaries helping a man out of a zero-tau pod. He was wrapped in tattered grey clothes, almost indistinguishable from the folds of pale vein-laced flesh drooping from his frame. It was as if his skin had started to melt off him.

“Aww shit,” Elana Duncan snapped. “Excuse me, General, looks like we’ve got another crash course anorexic.” She hurried over to help her colleagues. “Okay, let’s gets some protein infusers on him pronto.” The de-possessed man was puking a thin greenish liquid on the floor, an action which was almost choking him.