Soldiers were revving up the engines of the few machines that would be of use on the surface, and checking weapons that seemed in pristine condition. Thorn had slept, despite the cacophony that seemed only to grow since the destruction of the arrays. Then, upon waking to discover Stanton and Jarvellis gone with soldiers to unload Lyric II, he made his way to Lellan's control room where, after the guards finally let him through, he found further frenetic activity.
"You have to understand that we are just as unprepared for this as they are," said Lellan, during a brief pause when people weren't approaching her for orders, explanations, even comfort, as the military machine she had built reconfigured itself for these strange circumstances. "There's a few units of the Theocracy military on the surface, but mostly it's the proctors, and they only possess limited armament."
"The arrays," said Thorn. "What else would they have needed?"
"Exactly," said Lellan, nodding. "On the surface they only have hand weapons, aerofans, a few military carriers and armoured cars, and limited antipersonnel weapons. For more than a century they've had no need for heavy armour, missile launchers, or anything with more punch than a hand grenade. Why bother with anything else when in a minute you can summon a satellite laser strike accurate and powerful enough to take out anything bigger than an aerofan?"
Fethan, who had only then arrived, interjected, "About four of the arrays were accurate enough to target and take out single individuals, but the Theocracy never bothered — it meant using a huge amount of power, and when was there ever a single individual offering a sufficient threat to 'em?"
Thorn glanced at him, noticed the girl Eldene walking a pace behind him, the pulse-rifle hung from a strap over her shoulder, obviously an unfamiliar weight to her. To Lellan he said, "Surely that makes it all a lot easier for you?" He had already guessed the answers Lellan might give him, but wanted confirmation.
"Well," she said, "we never bothered building any armoured vehicles or any launchers that could not be carried by a man, for the same reasons — the arrays could just take them out. All our forces are kitted essentially for guerrilla warfare, and that kit is limited in quantity — we never expected to be in a position to take all our forces to the surface at once."
"Bastards woulda used the arrays at leisure," said Fethan.
"Can you take the surface with what you have?" Thorn asked.
"Yes, only to lose it again," Lellan replied. Thorn studied her queryingly. "Charity," she went on, "is just a great big training camp for the military. It's spun over to one gee, so the fifty thousand active troops there are training in gravity higher than we have down here. So there's them, and they can come down in landers at any time. With the big ships of the fleet down, they can unload launchers and tanks, and in the end, if all else fails, they can bombard us from orbit with atomics."
"Seems no-win," admitted Thorn.
"In the end it's down to Polity intervention, and we've always known that. The guy at the bottom of a well with a bag of rocks is always gonna lose to the guy at the top," said Fethan.
"It's a balancing act," said Lellan. "We want to capture the surface for long enough to get the ballot over eighty per cent, and then to ask for help from the Polity. We need to create enough disorder so that the Polity can justifiably intervene, but not so much that the Theocracy are forced to go nuclear."
"Never clear-cut, is it?" said Thorn.
"No," said Lellan, moving away with the latest group dressed in camouflage fatigues who had demanded her attention. "Always dirty, and infected."
Thorn now turned to Fethan and Eldene. "And probably deeper and dirtier than even she knows," he muttered, stepping past them to Polas, who had been listening in to their conversation whilst keeping half an eye on his consoles and screens. It seemed that most of the tasks required from him at present he was managing to automate.
"I want to see that recording again," Thorn said, resting a hand on the back of Polas's chair.
Polas glanced up from his instrumentation and eyed him dubiously. "They say you're ECS," he said. "Were you sent here to help us, or just make fruitless inquiries?"
"I wasn't sent. I ended up here by accident," Thorn replied.
Polas raised an eyebrow as he opened a box underneath the console and from it removed a computer disc, which he shoved into a slot in the console. Again, on one of the screens before him, the recent events that had occurred above played out.
"Stop it there," said Thorn, and Polas froze on the image of wreckage hurtling away from the dispersing explosion. "Can you move backwards slowly with this set-up?"
"We're not entirely primitive here," said Polas.
Flickering, the image jerked back in frames: wreckage reversed back into a brightening explosion as the laser array re-formed.
"There," said Thorn. "That came out of Dragon."
Polas squinted at the screen, and adjusted the image back, and they saw for certain an object spat from Dragon just before the creature's strike on the laser array. He now moved the image back and forth until the object was at its most visible. "We should be able to close in on that and clean it up a bit," he said. He opened his box of discs and sorted through them. Finally selecting one, he held down two buttons while removing the recording and replacing with the new disc he selected. The image remained in place and a grid flicked up to cover it. Using a ball control, he adjusted the grid to centre the object in one of the grid's squares. Pressing down the control, he called up a target cursor in the corner of the screen, and then zeroed it on that square.
"Here we go," he said, pressing down the control again to select.
The image broke apart, then the one from the selected co-ordinates began to re-form in small squares across the entire screen. After a moment, a blurred and vaguely rectangular shape became evident. With the computer chuntering away, and each of the squares breaking and re-forming into smaller pixels, the image became steadily clearer.
Before it had completely re-formed Polas said, "Military lander."
"Theocracy?" Thorn asked.
Polas nodded.
Thorn studied the image as it continued to clear. "Now what was Dragon doing with that?"
Polas shrugged and, as the computer finished its work, he used the ball control to pull up a menu and save the same image.
"Any idea where it came down?" Thorn asked.
"I might be able to find out," said Polas, gazing down at his open box of discs, "if it crossed any of our viewing stations. It'll take some time, though."
"Please do so — this might be important. I'm sure Lellan would be as interested to know who was in that craft as am I."
Even though it was quite likely Dragon could have snatched a Theocracy craft on the way here, perhaps to seek information, perhaps just for the hell of it, it seemed odd to Thorn that it had then released it in one piece — especially after seeing what Dragon did to the laser arrays.