“You and I both know there is no paradise now, no immortality. The possessed can never have what they wanted. What will they do, Annette? What will happen to Earth when it arrives in that sanctuary realm and none of their food synthesis machinery works? What then?”

“They’ll die. Permanently. Their suffering will end.”

“Is that what you’d call a final settlement? Problem over.”

“No. I had that opportunity. I didn’t take it.”

“The beyond is preferable to death?”

“I’m back, aren’t I? Would you prefer me to be on my knees?”

“I’m not here to gloat, Annette.”

“Then what are you here for?”

“I am the supreme commander of the Liberation forces. For the moment that gives me an extraordinary degree of power, and not just in military terms. You tell me if there’s any point to my being here. Can this be settled on Mortonridge, or has everything we’ve both endured all been for nothing?”

“You’re in charge of a weary army facing a dying enemy, Ralph; that’s not a platform for revolution. You’re still trying to validate your glorious war by searching for a noble conclusion. There is none. We are a sideshow. An incredibly expensive, fabulously dramatic entertainment for the accessing masses. We distracted their attention while the real men and women of power decided what our fate was going to be. Political policies determine how the human race confronts this crisis. War doesn’t have that ability. War has only one outcome. War is stupid, Ralph. It is the desecration of the human spirit, martyring yourself for someone else’s dream. It is for people who do not believe in themselves. It is for you, Ralph.”

The security level one sensenviron conference room never changed. Princess Kirsten was already seated at one end of the oval table as the image of white nothingness walls formed around Ralph, seating him at the other end. Nobody else was present.

“Well, what a day,” Kirsten said. “Not only do we get all our people back safely, we wind up with fewer lost souls to plague the living.”

“I want to stop it,” Ralph said. “We’ve won. What we’re doing now has become utterly pointless.”

“There are still over quarter of a million possessed on my planet. My subjects are their victims. I don’t think it’s over.”

“We have them confined. As a threat they’ve been neutralized. Of course we’ll maintain their isolation, but I’m asking that we stop the actual conflict.”

“Ralph, this was your idea. The sieges have stopped all the shooting.”

“And replaced them with Urswick. Is that what you want, your subjects eating each other?”

The image of the Princess showed no emotional response. “The longer they remain possessed, the bigger their cancers grow. Those bodies will die unless we actively intervene and rescue them.”

“Ma’am, I am going to issue an order that food and basic medical supplies are handed over to the possessed currently under siege. I will not rescind it. If you do not want it issued, then you will have to relieve me of my duty.”

“Ralph, what the hell is this? We’re winning. Forty-three sieges collapsed today. Another ten days, a fortnight at the most, and it’ll all be over.”

“It is over here, ma’am. Persecuting the possessed that remain is . . . disgusting. You listened to me before—God, that’s how this whole thing began. Please give the same consideration to what I’m saying now.”

“You’re saying nothing, Ralph. This is a media war, a propaganda exercise, that’s what it always was. With your cooperation, I might add. We must have total victory.”

“We already have it. This is more. We found out today that it’s possible to open a gateway to the realm where the possessed flee to. Nobody understands it, the physics behind it; but we know it’s possible now. We will be able to replicate the effect ourselves some day. The possessed can’t hide away from us any more. That’s our victory. We can make them face up to what they are, what their limits are. That way we can go on to find a solution.”

“Expand that for me.”

“We now have the power of life and death over the possessed under siege, especially now the Confederation navy is working on anti-memory. By concluding the sieges with their capitulation, we’re wasting our position, our tactical advantage. Ekelund said this crisis will never be decided here on Ombey, by us. I used to believe her. But today changed that. We are in a unique position to force the possessed to cooperate and help us find a solution. There is a solution—the Kiint found one, the crystal entities found one, we even think the Laymil found one—not that mass suicide would be valid for humans. So give the remaining possessed food, let them recover, and then start negotiating. We can use the Ketton island veterans to go in and open up a dialogue for us.”

“You mean the serjeants, the ex-possessors?”

“Who better. They have first-hand experience that the sanctuary realm is nothing of the sort. If anybody can convince them, those serjeants can.”

“Good God. First you want the kingdom to adopt bitek, now you’d have me allied with the lost souls themselves.”

“We know what being antagonistic to them brings us. A fifth of a continent devastated, thousands of deaths, hundreds of thousands of cancer victims. This has been suffering on a scale we’ve not had since the Garissa genocide. Make it mean something, ma’am, make some good come out of it. If it’s possible, if there is the slightest chance that this might work, you cannot ignore it.”

“Ralph, you are going to be the death of my senior advisors.”

“Then they can come back from the beyond and persecute me. Am I free to give the order?”

“If any of these possessed use this as an opportunity to try and break out, I want them in zero-tau within a day.”

“Understood.”

“Very well, General Hiltch, give your order.”

Al had moved to a suite a couple of floors up the Hilton where all the utilities still worked. The doctors needed a reliable electrical supply, fancy phone lines, clean air, that kind of crap. They’d turned the new suite’s bedroom into a treatment room, raiding Monterey’s hospital for equipment and medical packages. More stuff had been flown up from San Angeles. Stuff that gave Al the creeps: bits of other people, living organs and muscles and veins and skin. Emmet had run a planet-wide search for a pair of compatible eyes, eventually tracking them down to a storage vault in Sunset Island. A priority flight had brought them up to Monterey.

The doctors said it was going well. Jez was out of danger. They’d replaced her blood and grafted on skin and tissue where Kiera had burned down to the bone, implanted the new eyes. Once the operations were over, they’d covered her in medical packages. Now it was just a question of time until she healed over, they’d assured him.

They didn’t like Al visiting too much. Jez looked so helpless smothered in that green plastic substance he got all worked up, which screwed up the packages. So he didn’t get too near, just hung out by the door and watched over her. Like a guy should do for his dame. It gave him time to think a lot.

Mickey, Emmet, and Patricia came into the suite’s lounge. Al had one of the stewards hand round drinks as they sat round the low brass and marble table, then ordered everyone else out of the room.

“Okay, Emmet, how long till they get here?”

“I figure some time in the next ten hours, Al.”

“Fair enough.” Al lit a Havana and blew a long trail of smoke at the high ceiling. “On the level, can we fight them off?”

Emmet took a sip of the bourbon and replaced the glass on the table, studying it keenly. “No, Al, we’re going to lose. Even if they only use the same level of force as they did against Arnstat, we’ll lose. And they’ll be carrying enough combat wasps to fire two or three times as many at us. Everything in orbit above New California will be wiped out. The ships can jump away. But they’ve got nowhere to go except for the last couple of planets we infiltrated. And I’m not too sure they’ll even manage that. We think the Navy’s voidhawks pursued a lot of our guys from Arnstat and blew them up after they’d jumped away. There weren’t too many made it back here.”