Advancing with more awareness of his surroundings now, Molat reached the embankment and the barrier fence — now flattened by both the enemy tanks and Lurn's forces — and climbed it cautiously to take in the view.
Infantry — quite obviously belonging to the Underground — were attacking the now poorly defended compound. The fighting around the ponds and grape trees was fierce and without quarter, bodies were strewn everywhere like some new and grizzly harvest, and the fire of rail-guns and pulse-rifles was rapidly turning sheds, trees, fences, agricultural vehicles, and people into an evenly mixed morass of wood splinters, metal and plastic fragments, raw earth and shreds of flesh. Lowering himself back out of sight, Molat looked back the way he had come. In his aug he searched for the direct address of Lurn's aug, and sent:
"Lurn, ground forces are taking the compound."
By the tone of Lurn's reply, it became evident the man had other concerns:
"Well, that's real surprising fucking news."
Molat went on:
"Surely the compound is more important than a few tanks."
Lurn relented a little:
"Same problem at Cyprian compound, only they're closer to us now. I'm going to join up with Colas, who has also been out chasing tanks, and together we're going to hit the infantry that's attacking there."
"Agatha compound?" Molat asked.
"May be considered a write-off until new forces come down from Charity. My advice to you is for you to get as many of your people out of there as you can, and head over here."
Molat did not bother taking another look over the bank, but quickly turned back into the flute grass. A few hundred metres in, he came upon three corpses — one of whom he vaguely recognized — wearing army fatigues, and from these obtained a working rail-gun and a knapsack of magazines, a rations pack, and a jacket not too filthy with mud and blood. He was morbidly probing from his aug through to theirs and finding only ghostly networks that were breaking apart as the biotech augs died on their hosts, when someone came crashing through the grass towards him. He turned and fired in that direction.
"No! No! I'm unarmed! I give up!" someone shouted.
"Come forward, Toris," Molat sent.
There was a long silence, then Proctor Toris stumped out into the open, aware that because of the aug connection he could not deny his presence. Molat studied the man: he was short and fat and always seemed to be sweating, even now in a temperature that was not many degrees above zero. Molat gestured to the three corpses.
"Take whatever you need. We're walking to Cyprian compound," he said.
Toris had found himself a working hand laser, and was studying it speculatively, when a huge explosion bucked the ground beneath their feet. Gazing in the direction of Cyprian compound, Molat observed a column of smoke belching into the air and immediately felt a horrible wrenching through his aug — a sudden distancing and almost painful loneliness, as if he had been in a room full of friends and suddenly been instantly dragged many kilometres away.
"May God have mercy on them," he murmured.
Molat knew that you could hardly feel one death through the aug network, unless it was that of a close friend, but he had just felt thousands die. He turned to Toris.
"Best collect their oxygen bottles. I think we may have to walk a bit further."
"Amen," concluded Toris aloud, though Molat was not sure to what.
"The plan is for us to head for the city now — we're needed to hit the old defences," said Uris.
"Yeah," replied Carl, staring out at the mayhem the mines had wrought upon the Theocracy forces from both the Cyprian and Agatha compounds. It seemed not one square metre of the churned ground did not have human body parts randomly commingled. "We won't be able to go into the city itself, though, unless she wants us to abandon the tanks first."
Uris replied, "About half the infantry will be going in to take the city after we've knocked out its defences — the rest of them will stay out here to secure the compounds and organize the distribution of ajectant amongst the workers."
Carl engaged the drive of the tank and took it around a blackened APC, out of which he had earlier seen two soldiers stagger, their clothing on fire until the lack of oxygen outside their vehicle extinguished the flames. The two had by then suffocated.
"What about the initial attack there… on the city?" Beckle asked, not taking his face away from his targeting visor.
Carl glanced over at Uris. "Anything on that?"
Uris merely shook his head, so Carl opened his direct channel to Lellan's control room and asked the same question. It was Lellan herself who replied with, "Heavy resistance, Carl. Apparently Deacon Clotus pulled in all the roving forces as soon as Dragon trashed the arrays, and those forces are now screwed in to the old fortifications."
"They care so much about their people in the city?" Carl inquired sarcastically.
"They care about the spaceport, I think," Lellan replied.
"What losses there?"
"We lost five tanks to some big launchers Clotus had set up."
"Now?" asked Carl, as he drove the tank up beside a stand of new flute grass and noted, on the radar traces transferred from Uris's console, that other tanks from other attack points were now converging on his own.
"Most of the launchers are down, apparently, but there are still snipers with rail-guns stuck in the old bastions — like scole leaves, as Polas puts it," Lellan replied.
Carl succinctly relayed this information to his crew.
"Still seems too easy," remarked Beckle, pushing his targeting visor away from his face and glancing tiredly towards Carl.
"It is," said Carl, his face without expression. "All bets changed once the arrays went down." He now stared down at the screen to which Uris was relaying all command signals. "If it makes you feel any better, Polas is keeping me updated on the situation up above: the fleet is now on its way, with forces embarked from Charily, so it seems likely we'll have a whole rush of Theocracy troops up our arses any day now."
Into the short silence that followed this announcement Uris interjected, "Then we need to take the spaceport as soon as possible."
"Yes," agreed Carl. "If they can bring down their mu-class ships, then they'll be able to offload heavy armour. Without the port they'll have to use the landers and infantry, and they'll have to come down on the plains, as there aren't enough clear areas around here to land on."
"It'll get bloody," said Paul.
Thinking of the carnage they had so recently wrought, Carl said, "What do you mean, get?"
The sun sank close beside Calypse, bouncing light off the gas giant in a brief flood that turned the landscape golden. Within half an hour this odd light was fading, and now the clouds along the horizon, behind which both planet and sun were sinking, had the appearance of stretched marshmallows in pastel shades of green, blue, and red against a rusty orange sky.
"It's because of the dust and smoke," said Cormac. "Pollution makes for the best sunsets."
Apis only half heard what the agent was saying, as pain and anger sat inside him hand in glove, clenched in a fist around his insides — or perhaps the physical pain he felt was due to the constant drag of gravity, of being confined here in this dark well. After all, the words 'My mother is dead' seemed to have no real meaning at all, along with phrases like Miranda has been destroyed… I am the only survivor from the supposed rescue ship, which was in turn destroyed by Dragon… I killed twenty-three of my fellow survivors because they would have killed me… the AI dreadnought that then rescued me has been hijacked by a Separatist madman wielding the technology of a five-million-year-dead race — the same technology that is now keeping me alive in gravity that would otherwise kill me.