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  He sat for a moment, as Underwood began to strip the plastic and paper sleeves off various sterile tools and clips, and lay them out on a tray. He suddenly became aware that Cleesh was standing over him.

  "It'll be all right," she said. "It'll be freeking
^®
amazing."

  "What happens once I'm in?"

  "Not sure really."

  "You've beta-tested this, right? Cleesh, you have betatested this?"

  "Not as much as we'd like," she replied. She patted his arm. "It'll be great."

  "But I want to know what happens once I'm in," he said. He felt a slight seam of panic in his core, a sense of sliding past a point of control. A sense of being unable to stop himself making a bad decision.

  "I want to know too," Cleesh said. "We'll find out together. We'll improvise. We'll figure it out as we go along."

  "I don't know, Cleesh."

  "I'll be with you every step of the way," she promised.

The Jung tank was heated. The metal shell of it was warm, almost like skin. He thought it was metal, but when he came to touch it, he realised it was some kind of ceramic. He could hear Ayoob and Apfel talking nearby, and he knew he ought to feel odd just standing there, buck-naked apart from the external plumbing of the intravenous tubes and sensor wires Underwood had fixed all over his body.

  But he didn't. His head was swimming. She'd shot him with several doses of stuff, including some premed-type anaesthetic and muscle relaxants.

  Ayoob and Underwood helped him up onto the step plate beside the tank's open top hatch. The smell of disinfectant and salt was stronger. There was steam heat coming out of the hatch. He peered inside. It was full of dark water, or dark fluid at least, barely rippling, carrying enough warmth to waft steam from its surface in the dank chamber.

  He murmured something.

  "Sensory deprivation," said Ayoob, as though Falk had asked him a question. Perhaps he had. "Pretty old-school tech, basically, but that's just the medium to suspend you in. We find it gives the best results for the embeddee in terms of feedback and response. It helps to sustain the reposition too."

  Underwood was clipping lines and tubes from the tank array to some of the drains and introducers she had connected to Falk's skin. He winced slightly as she pushed a trocar into a cannula.

  "Let's go," said Apfel, steadying his arm. There was a sort of cage frame to hold on to. An electric motor started. Falk felt himself beginning to sink into the tank, felt the pleasant warmth of the fluid swallow his legs. The motor stopped when he was waist-deep, and Ayoob fitted him with ear plugs, a face mask and, last of all, blackout goggles.

  The final thing he saw was Ayoob grinning and giving him a thumbs-up.

  The final thing he heard, after the muffled noise of the motor restarting, and the lap of the warm tank water climbing up his chest, was the clunk of the hatch closing overhead.

ELEVEN

There was a clunk as the hatch opened, and light flooded in.

  Heel on the step-rung, he jumped down out of the Fargo. Grit-dust underfoot. The dawn sky over Camp Lasky was the proud blue of a corporate logo. The camp was catching the sunrise, side walls washed luminous white. The floods were off. The compound was buzzing with personnel dismounting rollers. He was already inside the gate.

  He walked in through the assembly area. He didn't know where he was going, but that didn't seem to matter. His feet did. He walked with confidence, a swagger. His head was muzzy, like the greyscale hours that follow a migraine, but he hadn't felt so lithe, so physically able, in years. It was like idling in a high-performance vehicle. He knew, he just knew, how rapidly things would accelerate if he gunned the throttle.

  But something was off. He tried to work out what was disconcerting him. Something sat badly, ill at ease. Other troopers grinned and fist-bumped him as he walked in. He knew their names. He knew who he could banter with and who to steer around. He knew exactly how to needle some of them: the right words, names, references. Playful, mostly, sometimes the snap of rivalry, sometimes a verbal cuff to keep someone in their place. He thought he saw Selton, but she was heading somewhere.

  Even so, he felt he should avoid her.

  He stopped and dropped down to adjust the laces of his left boot. Into view: combat boots; a leg, kneeling, brought up to his chin, wearing tundra-pattern kit; strong, subtle hands, tanned from outdoor work, from dusty sunlight. He re-laid the tongue of the boot, re-laced, tied off. He realised he didn't know he could work that knot and lacing pattern.

  SOMD personnel were queuing up out through the dust screens of the stores block. He'd take his turn, but he had little desire to loiter in line. He crossed a patch of sunlight into the wash house. Restroom stalls down one wall, brickbond tiled floor, the shower block opposite. There was a humid smell of bodies, of cheap soap, the locker-room funk of a forgotten sock or vest baking behind a heating pipe. He said hello to the two troopers heading out as he came in, swinging fieldpacks onto their shoulders.

  Then he was alone. He took off his glares and went over to the sinks. Above the stainless-steel bowls, a long, slightly foggy mirror had been riveted to the cinderblock wall.

  He looked back at himself. The clean, pressed tundrapattern reg shirt, the digital brooch and the stitch-label tag over the left breast pocket, both stating the same name, the cuff-cut short sleeves revealing corded arms, muscles bunched as he leaned forward on the edge of the sink in examination. Dirty-blond hair, high and tight, like straw stubble. A face that was familiarly unfamiliar, handsome and strong the way a good piece of furniture or a landscape is handsome and strong. Blue eyes, blue as an Eighty-Six sky, a corporate logo. Blue eyes that looked into foggy glass and saw through to somewhere else entirely. A wry half-smile.

  "Hello," he said, blue eyes looking right into blue eyes. "You should be able to hear me. They said you should. I won't hear you, so."

  He shrugged.

  "I don't know if you're in there, I don't feel you, but I feel something. Like a, like a something, an ache. Like when you have the flu coming. Is that you? I hope so. I don't want the flu. I have had shots, also."

  He leaned closer, still staring.

  "I just wanted to say hello, because the chances are we will not have a moment like this again. You talk to yourself in front of your guys, they tend to take your gun away and reassign you to food services. We're not going to be alone much from this point on."

  He grinned more broadly, and held out a mocking hand to his reflection, as if to shake.

  "My name is Bloom. Nestor Bloom. Pleased to meet you. Freek
^®
alone knows what your name is. I don't get told that. But it's good to have you along. Just keep it down in there, okay?"

  The door opened behind him. Two troopers came in.

  "Hey, Nestor! My main guy!" said one.

  "We are going for it," said the other, shorter, Hispanic. "Into the Hard Place! We gonna show those mothers our A game, man!"

  Laughter. Palm-slaps.

  He had too many questions. He had a sick feeling deep down, the nasty burn of adrenaline. He didn't want to turn away from the sinks, but he was turning away from the sinks. He didn't want to take a piss, but he was taking a piss. What the fuck?
What the fuck?
It was as if he was paralysed,
moving
, but paralysed. He was willing himself to do things and his body was doing something else. It was making him crazy, insane with claustrophobia.

  With a final, titanic effort, he made a sound.

  "You okay there, Nestor?" asked the Hispanic trooper, hosing a long stream into the metal trough, hands on hips.

  "Yeah."

  "You gonna puke, man?"

  "No, I'm okay," he replied. "Just a little heartburn."

  "Sounded like you were retching, Nestor. Like you were going to puke."

  "Just freeking
^®
heartburn, man," he replied, patting his chest, smiling. Not smiling inside. "I'm wealthy."

  The little Hispanic came over. He knew his name before he read his brooch. Valdes. Valdes's expression was that of a long-suffering brother-in-law.

  "You ever going to get that ling patch lifted out of you, man?" Valdes asked. "You know you don't have to worry about no harsh language where we're going."

  "The Hard Place, Nestor," said the other trooper. "No dummy rounds, it's live language out there, you know?"

  "I'm going to get it lifted," he said.

  "Good, that's good," said Valdes.

  "You're SOMD, you better cuss like a motherfucker," said the other man. "Not like some fucking adfomercial."

  "You coming?" asked Valdes, heading for the exit.

  "I'll be right along."

  They left him alone. He turned and looked back into himself in the mirror.

  "You do not pull that freek
^®
again, you hear?" he said. "Whatever that was you did. You do not do that. You just ride along. Ride along. Do not freek
^®
with me again."

Glares on, he walked into stores, out of the hard light. It wasn't even 6.30am. The air was beginning to carry dust, like shot silk. The blue of the sky had faded, weathered. Out on the west side of Lasky, boomers were running ignition checks, making an unholy row like a fleet of brushcutters.

  He'd worked out what was so disconcerting. His POV, his eye level, was about eight inches higher than he was used to. It was a small but significant defamiliarisation. It made him feel seasick.

  There were about ten staffers managing the points of service. Each one was using a Mil-issue celf to swipe ID brooches and call up the spec-tailored requisites from the manifest. From initial swipe and confirm, it took about forty seconds for the plastic-wrapped kit sets, fieldpacks and webbing to come down the belt. Body armour harnesses and torso rigs came out on an electric rail a little slower, swinging and jiggling like funhouse skeletons.

  His stores manager was a small Korean girl with a sarcastic smile.

  "Nestor!" she announced, swiping him as he came up to her station. "Fuck's happening, man?"

  "Fit me up, Chin."

  "I so will, soldier boy. You're usually first man in."

  "I got held up."

  "Fuck that. You gonna kill someone for me, real nice?"

  "Sure. You got blate for me?"

  She did a little shimmy, elbows out, as the ablative/ballistic plate armour rattled down the rail towards them like clothes on a carousel at a dry cleaner's.

  "Only best blate for you, hot boy," she said.

  "You're a freeking
^®
star, Chin."

  "You gonna get that shit stripped out, Nestor?" she asked, pointing at his mouth. "It's not good. I wanna hear you talk dirty talk."

  "I dunno."

  "Docs do it right now," she said. "You go ask. Takes like five fucking minutes."

  "I figured I'd keep it, Chin," he said. "Let my piper do my talking for me."

  "You badass!" she declared.

He looked badass. Ten minutes later, plated and blated, he caught sight of his reflection in the screen windows of the obs station. The body panels bulked his already tall, hefty frame to heroic proportions. The backboard contained rechargeable power packs for running any and all equipment, including the integral Limb Assist Exo Frame, an external servo armature buckled around his left arm, designed to help support and steady the M3A piper during extended operations. The inertially reactive joints uttered a soft purr every time he moved his shoulder or elbow.

  He passed the misters, filling the doorway space with a fine fog of Insect-Aside.

  Team Kilo was assembling on the decking beside its hopter in the dust-mote dark of the hangar. Their pipers, PAPs and thumpers were laid out on the ground sheets under the tail boom. The hopter was just one of eighteen set up for final check as its team gathered for prep brief and grace. There was a smell of petrochemicals and paint. Amped voices delivered echoing instructions across the hangar yard, and the air throbbed with starter motor testfires, warning hooters from freight porters and the pulsed whoop of power drivers winding home hex-head screws.

  Eighteen matt-grey boomers, lined up just so, like missiles in a silo cage.

  "Good of you to join us," said Huckelbery, the staff sergeant, as he walked out onto the mat. Everyone else was there, apart from the sergeant. Caudel, Stabler, Goran, Jay, Preben, Valdes, Bigmouse, the rest. They were all on their knees, or squatting, making a half-circle around Huck. Some of them were still adjusting the fit of their fresh-issue harnesses, or re-lacing their boots.

  "Was going to let you go on ahead," he said, dropping in beside Caudel, "but I knew you wouldn't last five minutes without me."

  "Yuckity yuck," replied the staff sergeant. "Briefing's gonna be in the air, but so far we know it's Gunbelt Highway, Eyeburn Hill Junction, and we know it's Close Target Recon."

  "But we know it's the Hard Place, right?" asked Valdes.

  "The hardest," replied Huck. "Guaranteed hot pocket. This is no fuckabout. It's come down from the top, the gloves are off. We're going in live, so I do not expect you rat-ass motherfuckers to make me look like a pretard. Every day for months you've been telling me you want the real thing. Here we go, the real thing. You fumble this, so help me I will sodomise each and every one of you with a loaded PAP 20. Who are you?"

  "Team Kilo."

  Huck looked unimpressed, cupped a hand to his ear.

  "Who?"

  "Team Kilo!"

  "Better. Let's take a moment, okay?"

  They all bowed their heads. Some hands covered hearts, some clasped ID brooches. He heard several sets of LEAF servos purr.

  "God of my personal conviction," Huck said. They all echoed the words. "Watch over me on this morning, and throughout this endeavour, and watch over my comrades in this unit, even if they are heathen sunbitches who believe in some other god than thou. Help me to maintain honour and courage, and uphold the great institution of the Settlement Office, and the constitution of the United Status, amen."