He tumbled in the air and Frederica with him, and somehow they were still connected to each other, suspended in space.


    Overhead a curtain of plasma bolts poured from the battlements of Liberation''s Reach, as the Chimerae rallied and began their concerted defense.


    He blinked. There was time enough to admire the sky and to trace the raised seams of the enemy''s armor now shed of its darkness and glossy by the daylight. They were so close to the Target , perhaps one or two hundred meters away.


    They sketched a steep trajectory and peaked higher than the adjacent horst and the buzzing ellipsoids of plasmafire shimmied past them, Betelgeuse and Frederica, and as their momentum caused him to invert, the magnificent explosion which had obliterated the center section of the forward-transport was finally revealed to him. A brilliant combustion of blue and orange and beige consumed a broad radius and spouted a jagged flametongue ten meters high; bits of metal and disembodied limbs tracing blood were spit from that maelstrom, traveling farther and faster than Betelgeuse could track.


    ''Mines,'' he thought, bracing himself for the reassertion of gravity.


    They slammed hard into the red gravel, Betelgeuse first and then Frederica on top of him. He pushed her off to the side and regained a crouching position, before almost keeling over in pain. He endured it, bit his lip until he tasted iron, and glanced over Frederica''s exosuit in a cursory inspection for any breaches.


    ''None. Just blunt force,'' he thought, coming to her face and seeing it scrunched up in pain.


    Next, he did a quick visual inspection of his railgun, running his eyes down from tip to butt. Everything seemed to be in place, although he couldn''t be sure that the internal components were still functioning.


    His ears pricked. Static and the cries of the doomed. Plasma fire was descending upon the erstwhile besiegers, and when he turned he saw before him the men of Jegorich dying on that plain—burning, cooking, melting where they flailed and shivered their last.


    "B.T.," Frederica coughed, struggling to get to her feet.


    "Keep low. We need to get to the wall, under their line of sight."


    They sprinted down the last stretch, traversing a low parapet and sliding down a slight depression to the wall of Liberation''s Reach. The depression appeared to run around the perimeter of the settlement, like a trench that had once been utilized as a moat long ago dried up under the red sun''s harsh glare. Now up close, Betelgeuse could see that its surface was dull, turbid and charred black in strips. There was nothing of the refulgence it had promised to him as he descended the Amate.


    Betelgeuse looked straight up. The plasma bolts continued to cut a broad angle overhead, bearing down toward the First Brigade stranded upon the plain. It didn''t appear that they had been noticed. No one was looking over or trying to dump anything dangerous onto them.


    Glancing to the right, Betelgeuse estimated that they were about three or four hundred meters to the Schwerer-made boreholes.


    "The… others…" Frederica managed, leaning against the surface to try to catch her breath. Betelgeuse could see blood thread from her lips and wondered–worried, perhaps–how bad she had been hurt.


    Betelgeuse crouch-crawled to the edge of the depression and, squinting over the low-parapet, widened his eyes in amazement as the tattered remnants of Third Company rallied and returned fire. Their movements were sluggish, heedless of the severe casualties they were suffering.


    "What are you doing! Run!" he roared, raising his arm and swinging it above his head madly, trying to signal to them to advance. He received only static in reply.


    A feeling rose in his gut, strange but not unfamiliar. Betelgeuse saw a masculine figure near the head of that troop, hunched and limping slowly across the ferric earth, making, as he had, for the wall. The man''s head was bowed and atop his helmet was emblazoned a circle and within the circle a tree denuded of leaves—the symbol of the Sylvan Protectorate, identifying the man''s rank as Major.


    Around the Major was clustered a dwindling group which included Thete, recognizable because she was noticeably shorter than even the other Desertians. No doubt the troop included Voke and Douglas, if they had survived the blast. All of them were huddled in the open and firing at the Chimerae atop the wall without regard for their own safety, and as they trod in time to the Major''s labored gait they left dark and steaming half-human lumps clotting upon the gravel and leaking gouts of vapor into the Desert air.


    ''It''s the compulsion-matrix!'' Betelgeuse gritted his teeth, fighting against the foul tendrils that were attempting to coil itself around his mind. The strength of it was many times that which the late Strionis Jove could muster, and it bore down upon him with the weight and ferocity of a great white shark and attacked him and left his intentionality nowhere to retreat even within his own mind.


    Enforce serenity.


    He concentrated his will and hurled his ego-stuff against that eldritch manifestation of control, purging it as far as he could from his mind and forcing down the urge to join his fellows in their doomed project.


    Regardless, it is a control I am made to endure.


    The Major was some sixty or seventy meters away now and his meatshield was being lacerated by superheated rounds. Those men and women of Jegorich were missing arms or hopping on single legs, intent, for as long as they could maintain consciousness, to keep the Major safe and firing their weapons with as many hands as they still possessed. The earth was crusted with the detritus of limbs and twitching rhombuses of perforated torso and strips of jerky twisted into louring statuettes of plastic and meat.


    "We must go… Major Storr is in danger!" Frederica hissed, coming up beside him and making ready to dash out of cover. When he turned to regard her he saw within her brown eyes a mad conviction to sacrifice herself.


    For what? For the Major? For the Protectorate? For the Democracy?


    Betelgeuse exploded into action, barreling into Frederica and bowling her over, then sitting on her chest and pinning her body to the ground.


    "Fool! It''s the mind-control!" Betelgeuse seethed, raising his weapon and initializing the acceleration-supporting-solenoids. The railgun chassis sputtered but shortly began to whine and Betelgeuse knew it was good enough to kill.


    But then what? They will know I killed him, and they may very well kill me too. Think about it carefully. Remember how it was with Frederica and Douglas—the compulsion appears to hijack intentionality itself; it will take some convincing to bring home the point that they were compelled to sacrifice themselves.


    And it is by no means guaranteed that they will be convinced. Not everyone will be so easy to bring around as PLPs and ex-''mutineers''.


    Observe. It appears that the compulsion-matrix works on lower-grade Incunabulum, except for incompatibles like myself. I assume that the higher one''s grade, the stronger the compulsion. The Major must be above Hollow grade, to be able to control Thete. If I assume further that there''s a White in there somewhere, the Major is perhaps Primary or Bronze.


    Once the Major goes down, nothing will stop any of them from attempting the compulsion-matrix upon me. I can assume that it will be more difficult to resist control from multiple fronts. The overall risks of killing the Major outweigh the benefits.


    Frederica blinked, nonplussed. She looked up at Betelgeuse, felt his weight upon her, and saw him brace his weapon then sit silently for many seconds.


    As if suddenly intuiting he had murder on his mind, Frederica began to struggle wildly, whipping her arm across and catching Betelgeuse in his oblique. He grunted and fell off to the side, and Frederica jumped up to a crouching position.


    Betelgeuse, barely winded, bounded upward at the same time and swung his weapon on its sling to clip Frederica''s helmet with the railgun''s butt. She tumbled, ears ringing, and he pounced atop her, slamming the back of her helmet into the gravel and bringing himself face to face with her.


    "Snap out of it!" he roared, slamming his visor into hers, the force of the impact rattling his brain within his skull.


    The temperature dropped. The blood in his veins turned to ice. His Incunabulum, pressed against his chest, pulsed like a living heart. His muscles twitched uncontrollably to a harrowing resonance and his bones vibrated with such energy he felt he might come apart—all the signs of having manifested another Etching.


    Frederica''s eyes cleared and she hyperventilated, then began speaking in tongues.


    "What? What are you saying?" Betelgeuse snapped.


    "Ewa? Ah! The Major! He will die!" Frederica sputtered, but Betelgeuse saw that she had ceased struggling.


    "Still mind-controlled!" Betelgeuse exclaimed, his brows furrowing. He stared deeply into her eyes but could find no further trace of the compulsion.


    "... No…" Frederica managed after a moment''s hesitation, looking unsure.


    Observing that the strange conviction had dissipated from her eyes, Betelgeuse nodded and was surer than Frederica that the spell was broken.


    An explosion cratered the ground nearby and shocked him half out of his skin. Gravel pelted him from above and he felt Frederica clutch wildly at him from below.


    ''A stray grenade,'' he confirmed, lifting himself up off Frederica and confirming that there were no punctures. ''Can''t let my guard down for even a moment.''


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    He brought himself back up to crouching position and saw over the edge of the depression that the Major had made it much closer—but the circle of soldiers was much reduced. They were near enough that Betelgeuse could see Thete''s face through her visor. He scanned the faces beside her and recognized Voke and Douglas, observing that Douglas had lost his left arm all the way up to the cauterized, steaming bicep.


    He squinted. Douglas'' countenance was cast in beatific tones, as if by means of his monohanded discharge of armature-rounds he had achieved a rare ecstasy, or perhaps some kind of heroic sublimation. As far as he could tell, Douglas was the only one who harbored so lurid an expression.


    A streak blazed faster than the speed of thought across that whole expanse of land and smashed into the wall behind with a terrific sound, burrowing into the metal and sending out from that great ingress thick billets of smoke.


    Betelgeuse gritted his teeth and slammed himself back into the gravel, bringing his arm up around Frederica.


    A drizzle of metal dust tinkled against their exosuits. Betelgeuse glanced upward, then grabbed Frederica and strafed to the side. Bodies of Chimerae creatures, their segmented arms flailing, sprinkled the ground en masse, thrown upward by the sudden and savage warping of the structure they had been defending.


    Another Schwerer round came screaming by, drilling into the wall and biting a partial-circle out of its top portion. Bits of flailing Chimerae-parts were thrown up and tainted the air pink with gore.


    The Schwerers'' thundering strikes were coming hard and fast. Fueled by pure adrenaline, Betelgeuse and Frederica tore down the side of the shuddering wall when a Chimera fell directly in front of them; with a deft motion Betelgeuse grabbed the barrel of his railgun and jammed its muzzle into the Chimera''s neck, then found the trigger and fired. The force of the armature-round pushed him back a half-step and the neck was vaporized, tearing off that geometrical head and sending it rolling away still-helmeted like some oddly-shaped football.


    They were coming to the low-lying holes which had been made by the Schwerers'' first firing, when the ground began to rumble and shift under their feet. Behind them the Major had finally made it to cover and the Jegorichians began to swarm wildly across that flensed strip of land, descending upon the dying Chimerae with their own singed half-forms and killing the Chimera with fevered intensity.


    In moments, the slaughter had become general. Betelgeuse couldn''t help but turn, curious as Lot''s wife to witness that frenzied melee where blood ran freely and bodies torqued into queer shapes in death.


    ''He''s sending them all in a suicide-rush,'' Betelgeuse thought, the sweat starting to bead on his forehead.


    And the frenzy of Jegorichians brandishing wicked bowie knives shot past Betelgeuse and Frederica, moving far faster than humanly possible, all of them delirious, hysterical and caught in the throes of some murderous lunacy. Betelgeuse slammed backward into the wall, stunned, feeling the compulsion in them as he had felt it in Frederica, and though he tried to fight against that tenebrous manifestation of oppression his efforts came to naught. Frederica followed suit, remaining flush with his body, and Betelgeuse thought he saw Cacliocos himself stumble forth from the fog of war and brush past them into Liberation''s Reach.


    From out of the comms'' static came half-formed jabbers and perfervid yodels, and somewhere in that chaotic diarrhea of words he caught Thete''s voice screaming some stuttery Desertian dialect.


    "Sergeant Jutson!" Betelgeuse roared in as commanding a voice as he could manage. No sooner had he said this when a figure came bolting toward him faster than a leopard, backtracking, it appeared from further up ahead.


    Thete.


    "Get off your ass, Sakar! We''re going in!" She yelled. Her charcoal pupil bore an insane self-sacrificial conviction, crazed in its absolute certainty.


    Betelgeuse'' arms shot out, grabbing onto her shoulders and slamming her sidewise into the wall, yelling to Frederica: "grab her!"


    Frederica did so and trapped her in a bear hug, and all through that deafening pound of death-beam after death-beam Betelgeuse searched for the nub of the compulsion and, finding it somewhere through her biological eye, purged it with some formless manifestation of his intentionality that he could neither feel nor properly steer.


    The last remnants of the Company had passed out of the range permitted by the Chimerae''s jammer and Betelgeuse'' comms settled into the consistent drone of white noise. He saw, through the haze of exhaustion, Thete''s eye clear, even as she grasped Frederica''s arms and bucked, flinging with superhuman strength that woman''s muscular bulk into the gravel slant opposite. Frederica crashed into the red earth with a loud whump, and a maroon mist ballooned where she landed.


    Betelgeuse transmitted frantically through comms-link: "You''ve been mind-controlled, Sergeant Jutson! Thete! Listen to me, you were under the Major''s control—"


    "... Control?" Thete blinked haltingly, her arms held outward, her hands clawlike and locked in a combat stance reminiscent of a praying mantis.


    "Yes. There, see Douglas and Voke. There''s no time for bullshit. We need to deal with the Major or everyone''s going to die," Betelgeuse asserted.


    Frederica regained her feet, wincing with pain. "We got to seal up Doug''s suit!" she said.


    "Compulsion," Thete breathed, the understanding dawning as violent as the impact of the Schwerer rounds overhead.


    About thirty meters away and gaining quickly, Douglas and Voke were running full tilt down the corpse-strewn length of the wall-trench. Further down was the Major, alone, sitting upright against the wall and engaged in foaming up the breaches in his suit. To Betelgeuse'' left, and across the last stretch of jagged plain, the next company was no further than a hundred meters away and getting closer every second. The low parapet was just high enough that the Major appeared out of the line of sight of the advancing troop.


    "Get them, Freddy!" Thete transmitted, swinging around and making toward Douglas and Voke.


    ''It''s now or never,'' Betelgeuse thought, and a cheerless smile graced his features.


    The idea, laid to rest, flashed anew across the surface of his mind, modified to reduce the chance of it being traced back to him.


    Behold, the inhuman instrument.


    Betelgeuse dashed out several meters toward the low parapet, grabbed what he supposed was a plasma boltrifle clutched within the prehensile grip of a dead Chimera, and brought it up to a ready position. The weapon chassis was fashioned of curved chrome bands which traced outward from the butt a bulbous middle portion likely housing the weapon''s firing mechanism. The bands thinned toward the weapon''s end and a cylindrical barrel pointed outward from the beanpod-shaped chassis, the whole thing blunt as a carbine.


    "Goddammit, where''s the trigger?" Betelgeuse cursed aloud.


    "Your other hand! Their fingers are longer than—" Thete began, then was cut off by static.


    Thete was already halfway to Voke and Douglas. She leaped as she reached them and crashed straight into Douglas, the two collapsing onto the ground in a tangle of limbs. Frederica behind her was tracing a collision course with Voke.


    Betelgeuse found the long slab-like trigger and sucked in his breath. The Schwerers had gone silent, and an eerie stillness descended upon the battlefield. Not finding any aiming sights atop the weapon''s chassis, he aligned the muzzle with the Major as best as he could, felt his mouth run dry and his mind empty its thoughts, and gunned the trigger.


    Three incandescent bolts shot through the air, the sound of their firing swallowed by the incessant blasts of the Jegorich artillery. Betelgeuse saw the man raise his arm in surprise even as he became engulfed in flame; the arm was pointing at him, accusatory, or it could have been pointing at the waxing sun; that limb, straight and engorged, fell rigid from his melting form to rest upon the ancient dust.


    Betelgeuse threw the weapon on the ground, then, thinking better of it, picked it back up and returned it to the hand of its former owner. He wasted no time in rushing over to his wrestling section-mates, yelling: "Stop struggling, Voke! Douglas—it was the mind-control."


    "Aw, hell," he heard Douglas pant. Thete was straddling Douglas'' torso with her arms poised as hammerfists just inches from his visor, evidently having arrested her attack just in time.


    "Yer lucky you broke out of it when you did," Thete said. "Your arm—it looks burnt shut but we need to seal your exosuit ASAP. Oxygen percentage?"


    "Eighteen point five percent," Douglas returned, now hyperventilating."Must''ve taken in quite some C-O. Starting to feel wonk."


    Voke, pinned to the ground by Frederica, was still struggling.


    "What have you done—"


    "Shut it," Betelgeuse interrupted Voke brusquely, then continued with the commanding tone he had so easily appropriated, "once Doug''s sealed we must get into Target. The further away from here the better."


    Thete wasted no time in foaming up Douglas'' arm-stump, and as Betelgeuse edged closer to the supinated Douglas and observed his strabismic eyes wobble within their sockets, he noted how the man showed no visible signs of pain otherwise.


    "... You''re holding up well," Frederica commented, shifting her weight off Voke.


    "What can I say? I eat pain for breakfast," Douglas chortled thinly.


    "You knew," Thete mumbled half to herself as she bandaged Douglas'' stump for good order. "You knew about the compulsion. Your dossiers didn''t record that you were shown the infomentaries. How?"


    "T''was practical experience," Betelgeuse laughed, his voice unnaturally loud and grating. "And it looks to me like it''s quite often abused. But we gotta go, yeah? ASAP."


    "Someone will explain this to me the moment we have the chance," Voke demanded as he scrabbled upright, and Douglas could barely keep a lid on his raucous guffaw.


    Betelgeuse observed that the next company was reaching the low parapet, and recognized near the head of that group the familiar silhouette of the giant Entuban. They no doubt knew that Major Storr had utilized the compulsion matrix, and difficult questions would be raised if Section Five were seen so close to his corpse.


    The defending Chimera had already been thoroughly annihilated by the Schwerers, and no more plasma fire served to impede the advance of the Jegorich First Brigade.


    "Hurry up, they''re coming," Betelgeuse urged, placing a hand on Thete''s shoulder.


    "I''m done, man," Thete returned, shrugging off his hand with a rough wag of her shoulder.


    She regained her feet and, motioning toward the entrance-holes, bolted forward along the trench, flitting like a ghost across the bodies of humans and Chimerae alike. Frederica, Voke and Douglas followed hot on her heels, doing everything they could to keep up.


    For the barest sliver of an instant, Betelgeuse felt beneath his feet an ominous trembling. The smog had risen and there was no sound save for the windlike rush of static. Across the plain a forest of rock-bristles flexed skyward upon the hump-backed land, hiding from view those terrifying weapons that command was willing to fire into the midst of its own forces.


    He frowned briefly before chasing after his section.