A hand clamped down on his shoulder. Mickey’s nerves were so shot they fired his leg muscles to jump. The hand prevented any actual movement, holding him fast with abnormal strength. “What is this?” he squawked with fake indignation. “Don’t you know who I am?”

“I don’t care who you are,” Gerald Skibbow said. “Tell me where Kiera is.”

Mickey tried to size up his . . . well, not assailant, exactly—questioner. Unnervingly powerful, and zero sense of humour. Not a good combination. “The bitch showed us a clean pair of heels. A hellhawk took her off. Now let me have my shoulder back, man. Jesus!”

“Where did it take her?”

“Where did . . . Oh, like you’re going after them?” Mickey sneered.

“Yes.”

Mickey didn’t like the way this was speedballing downhill. He dropped the sarcasm approach. “The Orion Nebula, okay. Can I go now, thank you.”

“Why would she go there?”

“What is it to you, pal?” a voice asked.

Gerald let go of Mickey and turned to face Al Capone. “Kiera is possessing our daughter. We want her back.”

Al nodded thoughtfully. “You and I need to talk.”

Rocio watched the taxi roll across the docking ledge towards him. Its elephant trunk airlock tube lifted up and fastened onto his hatch.

“We’ve got a visitor,” he announced to Beth and Jed.

Both of them hurried along the main corridor to the airlock. The hatch was already open, framing a familiar figure. “Bugger me,” she grunted. “Gerald!”

He smiled wearily at her. “Hello. I brought some decent grub. Figured I owe you that much.” There was a huge pile of boxes on the floor of the taxi behind him.

“What happened, mate?” Jed asked. He was peering round the old loon, trying to read the labels.

“I rescued my husband.” Loren manifested her own face over Gerald’s, and smiled at the two youngsters. “I must thank you for taking care of him. God knows it’s not easy at the best of times.”

“Rocio!” Beth yelled.

A shocked Jed was stumbling backwards. “He’s possessed! Run!”

Rocio’s face appeared in one of the brass-rimmed portholes. “It’s all right,” he assured them. “I cut a deal with Al Capone. We’re taking the Skibbows with us, and tracking down my murderous old friend Etchells. In return, the Organization supplies the hellhawks with every technical assistance they need securing Almaden, and then leaves them alone.”

Beth gave Gerald a nervous glance, not at all trustful, no matter who was possessing him. “Where are we going?” she asked Rocio.

“The Orion Nebula. To start with.”

The STNI-986M was a basic VTOL utility jet (unimaginatively nicknamed Stony); subsonic, with a blunt-tube fuselage which could carry either twenty tonnes of cargo or a hundred passengers. Seven New Washington Navy (NWN) Transport Command squadrons of the durable little vehicles had been flown to Ombey when the President answered their ally’s call for military assistance to liberate Mortonridge. Ever since General Hiltch authorized aircraft to fly over secured areas of Mortonridge, they’d become a familiar sight to the occupation troops. After Ketton, they’d been invaluable in supporting the new frontline advance policy which had spread the serjeants dangerously thin over the ground as they divided the peninsula into confinement zones. Outbound from Fort Forward they would deliver food, equipment, and ammunition to the upcountry stations; on the return they invariably evacuated the most serious body-abuse cases of ex-possessed for medical treatment.

Even on airframes intended for rugged duty, full-time usage was producing maintenance problems. Spare parts were also scarce; Ombey’s indigenous industries were already struggling to keep frontline equipment and the Royal Marine engineering brigades going. All the Stony squadrons had experienced mid-flight emergency landings and unexplained powerdowns. The rover reporters covering the Liberation knew all about the STI-986M’s recent shortcomings, though it was never mentioned in their official reports. Not good for civilian morale. There was no outright censorship, but they all knew they were part of the Liberation campaign, helping to convince people that the possessed could be beaten. Standard wartime compromise, reporting what was in the army’s interest in order to get the maximum amount of information.

So Tim Beard cut back on his physiological input when the Stony carrying him and Hugh Rosler lifted from Fort Forward at dawn. He wanted to give the accessors back home a small feeling of excitement as the plane swept low across the endless steppes of dried mud, which meant toning down his body’s instinctive unease. It helped that he was sitting so close to Hugh, the pair of them wedged in a gap between a couple of composite drums full of nutrient soup for the serjeants. Hugh always seemed perfectly at ease; even when Ketton ripped itself free of the planet he’d stood up squarely, regarding the spectacle with a kind of amused awe while the rest of the rovers were crouched down on the quaking ground, heads buried between their legs. He also had a neat eye for trouble. There were a couple of occasions when the rover corps had been clambering over ruins when he’d spotted booby traps missed by the serjeants and Marine engineers. Not the greatest conversationalist, but Tim felt safe around him.

It was one of the reasons he’d asked Hugh to come along. This wasn’t a flight organized for them by the army, but the story was too good to wait for the liaison officer to get round to it. And good stories about the Liberation were becoming hard to find. But Tim had been covering military stories for twenty years now: he knew how to find his way round the archaic chain of command, which people to cultivate. Pilots were good material, and useful, almost as much as serjeants. Finding a ride on the early flight among the crates and pods was easy enough.

The Stony curved away from Fort Forward and headed south, following the remnants of the M6. Once they’d settled into their two hundred metre operational altitude, Tim eased the buckle back on what was laughingly called his safety strap, and crouched down by the door port. Enhanced retinas zoomed in on the road below. He’d dispatched a hundred fleks back to the studio with the same view; by now the start of the M6 around the old firebreak was as familiar to the average Confederation citizen as the road outside their own home. But with each trip he progressed a little further along the road, deeper into the final enclaves of the possessed. In the first couple of weeks, it was astounding progress indeed. None of the rovers had to manufacture the optimistic buzz that pervaded their recordings. It was different today, there was progress, still, but it was difficult to capture the essence just by panning a shot from horizon to horizon.

The tactical maps urged on them by the army liaison officers had changed considerably from the original swathe of incriminating pink stretching across Mortonridge which delineated the possessed territory. At first the borders had contracted noose-style, then geographical contours showed up along the rim of pinkness, interfering with the rate of advance. After Ketton it had changed again. The serjeants had been deployed in spearhead thrusts, carving corridors through the possessed territories. Separation and isolation, General Hiltch’s plan to prevent the possessed from collecting in the kind of density which would kick off another Ketton incident. The current tactical map showed Mortonridge covered in slowly shrinking pink blotches separating from each other like evaporating puddles. Of course, no one actually knew what that critical number was which had to be avoided at all costs. So the serjeants toiled on relentlessly, guided by numerical simulations based on someone’s best guess. And there were no more harpoon deluges to make the job easier, nor even SD laser fire to soften up a strongly defended position. The front line was back to clearing the land in the hardest way possible.