“Fuck you. We’ve got to eat. We’ve got a right to eat.”
“I remember you now,” Luca said. “You were one of Dexter’s people. Real devout arse licker. Do you miss him?”
Bruce Spanton stabbed a finger at Luca. “I’m going to remember you, shithead. And you’re going to wish I fucking hadn’t.”
“Learn the rules when you go abroad,” Luca said forcefully. “And then live by them. Now either you climb back on your pathetic little cartoon mean machine and leave. Or, you stay and find yourself a useful job, and earn a living like everybody else. Because we’re not in the business of supporting worthless parasite scum like you.”
“Get a jo . . .” disbelief and rage made Bruce Spanton splutter to a halt. “What the hell is this?”
“For you, exactly that: Hell. Now get out of our county before we run you out.” Luca heard several cheers from behind him.
The sound made Bruce Spanton look up. He glanced round the crowd, sensing their mood, the belligerence and resentment focusing on him. “You fuckers are crazy. You know that? Crazy! We’ve just escaped from all this shit. And you’re trying to bring it back.”
“All we’re doing is building ourselves a life as best we can,” Luca said. “Join in, or fuck off.”
“Oh we’ll be back,” Bruce Spanton said, tight lipped. “You’ll see. And people will join us, not you. Know why? Because it’s easier.” He stomped off back to the train.
Marcella grinned at his back. “We won. We showed the bastards, eh? Not such a bad combination, you and me. We won’t be seeing them again.”
“This is a small island on a small planet,” Luca said, more troubled than he wanted to be by Spanton’s parting shot.
Sinon’s serjeant body had been divested of its last medical package just five hours before the Catalpa flew out of its wormhole terminus above Ombey. The voidhawk’s crew toroid was overcrowded, carrying thirty-five of the hulking serjeants and their five-strong biomedical supervisory team in addition to the usual crew. Heavy dull-rust coloured bodies stood almost shoulder to shoulder as they performed lumbering callisthenics all around the central corridor, discovering for themselves the parameters of their new physiques.
There was no fatigue in the fashion of a genuinely human body, the tiredness and tingling aches. Instead blood sugar depletion and muscle tissue stress registered as mental warning tones within the neural array housing the controlling personality. Sinon thought they must be similar to a neural nanonic display, but grey and characterless rather than the full-spectrum iconographic programs which Adamists enjoyed. Interpreting them was simple enough, thankfully.
He was actually quite satisfied with the body he now possessed (even though it was unable to smile at that particular irony for him). The deep scars of the serjeant’s assembly surgery were almost healed. What minimal restriction they imposed on his movements would be gone within a few more days. Even his sensorium was up to the standard of an Edenist body. Michael Saldana certainly hadn’t skimped on the design of the bitek construct’s genetic sequence.
Acclimatisation to his new circumstances had twinned a growing confidence throughout the flight. A psychological boost similar to a patient recovering from his injuries as more and more of the medical packages became redundant. In this case shared with all the other serjeant personalities who were going through identical emotional uplifts, the general affinity band merging their emerging gratification into synergistic optimism.
Despite a total lack of hormonal glands, Sinon was hot for the Mortonridge Liberation campaign to begin. He asked the Catalpa to share the view provided by its sensor blisters as the wormhole terminus closed behind them. The external image surged into his mind; featuring Ombey as a silver and blue crescent a hundred and twenty thousand kilometres ahead. Several settled asteroids swung along high orbits, grubby brown specks muffled by a fluctuating swirl of silver stardust as their industrial stations deflected spears of raw sunlight. Larger, more regular motes of light swarmed around Catalpa , its cousins emerging from their termini and accelerating in towards the planet.
This particular squadron was comprised of just over three hundred of the bitek starships. It wasn’t even the first to arrive at the Kingdom principality today. The Royal Navy’s strategic defence centre on Guyana had combined its flight management operations and sensors with civil traffic control to guide the torrent of arriving starships into parking orbits.
The voidhawks headed down towards the planet, merging into a long line as they spiralled into alignment over the equator. They shared the five hundred kilometre orbit with their cousins and Adamist starships from every star system officially allied to the Kingdom. Military and civil transports unloaded their cargo pods into fleets of flyers and spaceplanes; Confederation Navy assault cruisers had brought an entire battalion of marines, and even the voidhawks were eager to see the huge Kulu Royal Navy Aquilae-class starships.
After reaching low orbit, the Catalpa had to wait a further eight hours before its spaceplane received clearance to ferry the first batch of serjeants down to Fort Forward. Sinon was on it as the night-shadowed ocean fled past underneath the glowing fuselage. Their little craft had aerobraked down to mach five when Xingu’s western coastline rose over the horizon ahead. The red cloud was just visible to the sensors, a slice of curving red light, as if the fissure between land and sky had been rendered in gleaming neon. Then their altitude dropped, and it sank away.
They must know we’re here,choma said. With ten thousand spaceship flights hyperbooming across the ocean every day, they’ll hear us arriving if nothing else.in the twenty-fifth century, choma had been an astroengineering export manager based at Jupiter. Although he’d readily admitted to the other serjeant personalities that his personal knowledge-base of obsolete deep space startracker sensors was not very relevant to the Liberation, his main interest was strategy games, combined with the odd bit of role-playing. For himself and his fellow quirky enthusiasts, the kind of simulation arenas available to Edenists through perceptual reality environments were anathema. They wanted authentic mud, forests, rock faces, redoubts, heavy backpacks, heat, costumes, horse riding, marches, aching joints, flagons of ale, making love in the long grass, and songs around the campsite. To the amusement of the other inhabitants, they would take over vast tracts of habitat parkland for their contests; it was quite a faddish activity at the time. All of which made Choma the closest thing Sinon’s squad had to an experienced soldier.
A lot of the old strategy game players had come out of the multiplicity to animate serjeant bodies. Slightly surprisingly, very few ex-intelligence agency operatives had joined them, the people whose genuine field operations experience would really have been valuable.
Very likely,sinon agreed. Dariat demonstrated his perceptive ability to the Kohistan Consensus; no doubt the combined faculty of the Mortonridge possessed will provide them with some foreknowledge.
That and the ring of starships overhead. The convoys aren’t exactly unobtrusive.
But they are obscured by the red cloud.
Don’t count on it.
Does that worry you?sinon asked.
Not really. Surprise was never going to be our strategic high-ground. Best we could hope for is the scale of the Liberation being a nasty shock to Ekelund and her troops.
I wish I had experience of the combat situations we will be facing rather than theoretical memories.
I expect that experience is going to be one thing you’ll be collecting plenty of, in a very short timespan.
The Catalpa ’s spaceplane landed at Fort Forward’s new spaceport, racing along one of the three prefabricated runways laid out in parallel. Another was touching down forty-five seconds behind it; that managed to spark a Judeo of concern in Sinon’s mind. Even with an AI in charge of slotting the traffic together, margins were being stretched. Ion field flyers were landing and launching vertically from pads on the other side of the spaceport’s control tower at a much faster rate than the runways could handle spaceplanes.
For the moment, the spaceport’s principal concern was to offload cargo and send it on to Fort Forward. The hangars were frantically busy, heavy-lift mechanoids and humans combining to keep the flow of pods going; any delay here would have a knock on effect right back up to orbit. Nearly all of the Liberation’s ground vehicles were assigned to carry cargo. Passenger vehicles were still up in orbit.
Sinon and the others were given a static charge test by Royal Marines as they got to the bottom of the spaceplane’s stairs. That it was perfunctory was understandable, but Sinon was satisfied to see they did test everybody. As soon as they were cleared the spaceplane taxied away, joining a queue of similar craft waiting to take off. Another one rolled into place, extending its airstair. The Marine squad moved forward again.
An Edenist liaison officer they never even saw told them that they were going to have to get to Fort Forward on foot. They were part of a long line of serjeants and marines marching along a road of freshly unrolled micro-mesh composite next to the new six-lane motorway. After they got underway, Sinon realized that it wasn’t only Confederation Marines who made up the human contingent of the Liberation’s ground forces. He walked over to a boosted mercenary taller than himself. The mercenary’s brown skin had exactly the same texture as leather, long buttress ropes of muscle were clumped round the neck, supporting a nearly-globular skull armoured with silicolithium like an all-over helmet. In place of a nose and mouth, there was an oval cage grill at the front, and the saucer eyes were set very wide apart, giving little overlap, normal apart from the blue-green irises, which appeared to be multifaceted.
When Sinon asked, she said her name was Elana Duncan. “Excuse me for inquiring,” he said. “But what exactly are you doing here?”
“I’m a volunteer,” Elana Duncan replied with an overtly feminine voice. “We’re part of the occupation force. You guys take the ground from those bastards, we’ll hold on to it for you. That’s the plan. Listen up, I know you Edenists don’t approve of my kind. But there aren’t enough marines to secure the whole of Mortonridge, so you’ve got to use us. That, and I had some friends on Lalonde.”
“I don’t disapprove. If anything I’m rather glad there’s someone here who has actually been under fire before. I wish I had.”
“Yeah? Now, see, that’s what I don’t get. You’re cannon fodder, and you know you’re cannon fodder. But it doesn’t bother you. Me, I know I’m taking a gamble, that’s a life-choice I made a long time ago.”
“It doesn’t bother me, because I’m not human, just a very sophisticated bitek automaton. I don’t have a brain, just a collection of processors.”
“But you got a personality, dontcha?”
“This is only an edited copy of me.”
“Ha. You must be very confident about that. A life is a life, after all.” She broke off, and tipped her head back, neck muscles flexing like heavy deltoids. “Now there’s a sight which makes all this worthwhile. You can’t beat those old warships for blunt spectacle.”
A CK500-090 Thunderbird spaceplane was coming in to land. The giant delta-wing craft was at least twice the size of any of the civil cargo spaceplanes using the runways. Air thundered turbulently in its wake as it slipped round to line up on its approach path, large sections of the trailing edges bending with slow agility to alter the wing camber. Then a bewildering number of hatches were sliding open all across its fuselage belly; twelve sets of undercarriage bogies dropped down. The Thunderbird hit the runway with a roar louder than a sonic boom. Chemical rockets in the nose fired to slow it, dirty ablation smoke was pouring out of all ninety-six brake drums.
“God damn,” Elana Duncan murmured. “I never thought I’d ever see an operation like this, never mind be a part of it. A real live land army on the move. I’m centuries after my time, you know, I belong back in the Nineteen and Twentieth Centuries, marching on Moscow with Napoleon, or struggling across Spain. I was born for war, Sinon.”
“That’s stupid. You know you have a soul now. You shouldn’t be risking it like this. You have invented a crusade for yourself to follow rather than achieve anything as an individual. That is wrong.”
“It’s my soul, and in a way I’m no different to Edenists.”
Sinon felt a rush of real surprise. “How so?”
“I’m perfectly adjusted to what I am. The fact that my goals are different to those of your society doesn’t matter. You know what I think? Edenists don’t get caught in the beyond because you’re cool enough under pressure to figure your way out. Well, me too, pal. Laton said there was a way out. I believe him. The Kiint found it. Just knowing that it’s possible is my ticket to exit. I’ll be happy searching because I know it’s not pointless, I won’t suffer like those dumbasses that wound up trapped. They’re losers, they gave up. Not me. That’s why I’m signed up on this mad Liberation idea, it’s just part of getting ready for the big battle. Good training, is all.”
She gave his shoulder an avuncular pat with a hand whose fingers had been replaced by three big claws, and marched off.
That’s an excess of fatalism,choma remarked. What a strange psychology.