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  It scared the shit out of all three of them. Bigmouse started swearing and dragging Falk towards the cover of the refab row. Preben turned back and began firing again, his piper barking and wailing.

  "We're never going to get off this hill," said Bigmouse.

  "Not at this rate," Falk agreed. "What about that?"

  On the other side of the refabs was another little concrete pan slipway. There were two weather-battered vehicles sitting on it, side by side. They were both variations of the same basic model, one of the Smartkart family of civilian utility vehicles. Falk couldn't remember the exact name.
Porta
?
Mule
? Basic workhorse trucks with cabs and flatbed trays. One was undercoat-grey and the other was lime green with a white wing, offside front.

  Bigmouse tried the doors on both. Both were locked. He took out the driver's side pane of the lime-green one with the butt of his PAP and reached in to pop the door.

  "Get in!" he called to Falk. He was already at work behind the wheel, breaking the bottom off the dash. He'd left his eFight kit scattered across the floor of the hub, but he still had some pocket tools and a couple of power sticks. The Smartkarts were duel fuel, an electric standby supporting an omnivorous fusion plant. Bigmouse was attempting to light up the basic electrics and get it rolling.

  Falk walked around and got in the passenger side once Bigmouse flipped the lock. He was feeling extremely woozy from the exertion, and the state of palsy is his left side was back, worse than ever. He felt as though the left half of his face was slackening, like melting wax. His foot was dragging on the ground, his arm bent inside the LEAF like the wing of an injured bird. It took effort just to get up on the bench seat.

  "Come on, come on," Bigmouse said, talking to the starter.

  Two shots came by, very, very close. Clumps of earth spattered into the air and pattered off the bodywork. Vegetation caught fire, like dry grass under a magnifying glass.

  "Shit!" said Bigmouse.

  They could hear Preben shouting. He came running down onto the slipway behind them, yelling his head off.

  Bigmouse got the dash lights to come on. There was a low whine. Suddenly, loud music detonated in the door speakers, filling the cab. Fast, upbeat bubblegum, Shiona Kona's latest masterpiece.

  Ignoring the blaring music, Bigmouse slammed the driver's side door and undid the brake.

  The undercoat-grey Smartkart beside them took a direct hit. The impact made a deafening bang. The hardbeam cored it, explosively shredding and crumpling its chassis and bodywork. All the windows blew out. Flames gouted out from under the hood as the engine block lit.

  Bigmouse swore. Preben leapt into the tray of the limegreen truck and pounded on the rear screen for them to move.

  Another shot went by. They started rolling, gathering speed as they drove off the slipway and reached the slope of the track, accompanied the whole way by a pounding poplite soundtrack. They left the other Smartkart behind them, burning and slumped. Filthy black smoke was streaming off it into the sky.

  Bigmouse didn't seem to know where they were going. They were gaining more speed, and bouncing and lurching down the track slope. The rough motion had thrown Preben off his feet and he was clinging on to the tie-loops in the tray. Bigmouse was wrestling with the wheel. The cheerful, irrepressible music rendered the whole experience surreal.

  Falk looked at Bigmouse. He realised that Bigmouse had bypassed the key mechanism to trick-start the electrics, but that the steering lock was still on. Bigmouse couldn't turn the wheel. They were accelerating down the hill on a steep winding track, and they couldn't steer. And fucking Shiona Kona was shrilling about how fine her boyf was.

  Bigmouse started to stomp the brake, but that simply made the kart slip out on the wet mud, wheels biting and spinning.

  "Watch it–" Falk began.

  They hit a gatepost, the endstop of a four-bar metal fence. The collision took out the nearside front and ripped away part of the wheel arch. The force of the shunt caused the back end of the truck to swing wide, and threw Falk and Bigmouse forward.

  The fusion drive fired. The gathering speed had finally tripped it into life. It rattled and roared like an industrial pump or some kind of poorly maintained production line machine. The kart shook and bucked. Grey, greasy smoke farted from the exhaust.

  Once the fusion plant kicked in, the wheel lock selfcancelled. Bigmouse yelled in glee.

  They sped away down the track, trailing music behind them.

Most of the Eyeburn Hill township was scattered around the skirts of the hill. Past the windfarm, the track became more significant, and ran down past irrigated field systems towards a hamlet of barns and houses. Once they were well beyond the windfarm, Bigmouse slowed down a little, and got an opportunity to find the button to silence Shiona Kona's warbling.

  They drove into the hamlet. A United Status flag was flying from a mast attached to the front of the main barn like a bowsprit. There was no sign of anyone around. Blinds were closed in the windows of the houses. They pulled up between a long, low, pungent clapboard building that served as a hatchery and coop, and a narrow shed that housed a processor machine for converting vegetable matter and, Falk was sure, blurds into animal feed blocks.

  Bigmouse and Preben dismounted to check the locale. Falk got out and waited by the kart. He expected to die very soon. There was something wrong with the sight in his right eye, and his motor control was worse than ever. He felt cold. He was going to die, or he was going to wake up being dragged out of that fucking Jung tank.

  He walked around the utility vehicle several times to get his legs working. It was old, and had been refitted several times. Along the chassis line, below the bodywork, there were traces of the old tariff stamps. The vehicle, or at least its mechanical basics, had been imported to Eighty-Six. That suggested it'd been in use before there were any local manufacturing plants. Either that, or it had seen service on other settlement worlds. Some settlementeers were superstitious like that. If they or their dependants or successors moved on to a new site world, they often brought along vehicles or machinery that had served them well: a kart that had never broken down, an uplink that had weathered storms, an autoplough that had helped feed a generation or two of the same family. It was partly the frugal mindset, partly the need for tools a man could trust.

  A large blue-green blurd, as big as his hand, droned down and circled him and the kart twice, a slow, lazy circuit. Then it lifted away into the sky, its body flashing like glass.

  Falk started to cry. It wasn't lost-little-boy crying, the kind you might do standing beside a ProFood counter under the warm smile of Bill Berry. It was broken heart crying, the deep, seismic sobbing of the bereft. It was grief, and he couldn't control it. He couldn't choke it off and shut it down.

  He couldn't, because it wasn't his. Falk was hurt, scared, upset and extremely vulnerable, and he probably could have cried well enough if he had the mind to. Falk's mindset was simply providing the right conditions for Bloom's misery. It all belonged to Nestor Bloom. It was all about mistakes and stupid choices, and a shocking realisation that he'd fucked up. He'd failed on most of the basic professional levels expected of him. He'd fundamentally compromised his performance as an SOMD soldier.

  More than anything else, it was about a girl called Karin Stabler. Falk was weeping uncontrollably over a woman he'd never known. He was expressing Bloom's grief for him.

  When it was done, when the grief jag passed away like a rainstorm moved on by the wind, he felt oddly better. He felt more together than at any point since waking up in the walkthrough under the smile.

  Preben and Bigmouse emerged from the buildings. He looked at them, and for a second the vice of grief threatened to tighten again. The deep currents of Nestor Bloom's subconscious stirred memories that didn't belong to Lex Falk. Here were two men he'd only half-known for less than a day, but Bloom had known for years. There was a brief firecracker flurry of sparking memories, synapses lighting and firing, glimpses of other moments, other jokes, other operations, other nights on the town. Inexplicable kinship, like deja vu over something that had never happened in the first place, or nostalgia for a life unlived.

  Falk shook it off.

  "You okay?" Bigmouse asked.

  "I'm wealthy," he said. "What did you find?"

TWENTY

Like the hilltop weather station, the hamlet was abandoned. Preben and Bigmouse hadn't done a thorough house-to-house, but the sample buildings they'd checked had all shown signs of being vacated abruptly. Lights left on, doors and shutters unbolted, systems running, beverages cold and half-drunk, a sandwich on a kitchen block, made but not eaten.

  The hamlet was called Eyeburn Slope. Falk learned this from a noticeboard in the hallway of the meeting house.
Eyeburn Slope Residents Associations
it read, in the official blocky typeface of the Settlement Office, and underneath were lists of sub-committees, of yard-cleaning rotas, of church meetings, of classes for pickle and preserve making, of the harvest festival. Eyeburn Slope was a ward of the greater Eyeburn Hill parish. Eyeburn Junction, a slightly larger township, lay on the highway, about six miles east. That was where the fuelling depot was situated. They could see the dark shape of it rising above the field systems of the hortiplex. It was one of the vital way stations on Gunbelt Highway.

  The rear part of the meeting house was a community hall, which doubled as an assembly room and a gymnasium. There were beeball court lines painted on the polished fibreplak floor, and two fold-out hoops, high up, one above the entry doors, the other above a small table that probably also served as an altar during services. From the kids' pictures on the wall, the hall was probably a school room. On side tables and shelves, half-woven garlands and papier mache tractors showed the work in progress for the harvest festival decorations. On a brown fibre plaque beside the doors, the names and dates of office of the community leaders had been recorded in gold. There was a column and a half of names on a space marked out to hold eight full columns. Far more future than past. That was the optimistic way of looking at it, anyway.

  The front part of the meeting house was a collection of offices. A clerk's office, a production management office, and a pair of rooms for land registry and realty. According to another notice, this one laminated, a Settlement Office registrar visited every other month to process and review parcel claims and purchases. The room had boxes of mining contracts, metal cabinets full of large-format territorial maps, a satlink projector and lightboxes. A quick look at the core files showed how land claims and registrations were spreading out like a mosaic from the trunk of the highway. Large areas to the north had been reserved for the bulk mining developments around Antrim, Furlow Pits and, to the east, Marblehead.

  Until the previous week, Marblehead had marked the limit of paramilitary encroachment into the US-held Northern Territories. Whatever had happened in Eyeburn Junction, and it wasn't completely clear to Falk what that was, it entirely revised the tactical map. The paramilitaries – insurgents, Bloc-backed landgrabbers, home-rule independents, whatever they were – had brought the fight into the farming hinterlands of the Shaverton region, right into US land. And it wasn't simply a response to the new SO offensive, either. The insurgents had been on the ground, in Eyeburn, waiting for them.

  The cause and effect bothered Falk. The insurgent forces had clearly taken, or at least entered, Eyeburn in a lowkey fashion. There was no sign of full-on assault. It had been an inside job, that's how it felt to Falk. Neighbours had turned on neighbours. Townsfolk had suddenly revealed insurgent sympathies. Resisters had been executed and left in out-of-the-way dumpsites. It seemed likely to Falk that the same story had played out in junction towns and farm hamlets right down Gunbelt Highway.

  But this morning's SO offensive had been fast-tracked because of the Letts bombing. If you were stealthily taking farmsteads up and down the farm belt, why would you provoke a major military reaction by bombing the territorial capital?

  How many other incidents like the Letts bombing had gone unnoticed?

  "They were using Kobas?" he asked Preben. There was still an unhealthy slur in his unfamiliar voice that he didn't like.

  "What?" asked Preben.

  "This morning."

  Preben shrugged. He was boiling water in the kitchenette off the registry rooms while Bigmouse looked for food.

  "Yeah, Kobas."

  "So, Bloc, then? They were Bloc?"

  "It'd be fucking crazy if they were," said Preben. "The Bloc so doesn't want to get into one with the US, or the SO. What the fuck could be worth this kind of pain?"

  "Fred?" Falk suggested.

  "The moon? You've been listening to those mineral access conspiracy theories, Bloom?"

  "What's your theory then, Preben?"

  Preben shrugged. His boyish looks and smooth skin mismatched uncomfortably with his very adult muscular frame.

  "The Koba Avtomat 90 is a cheap, hardwearing weapon," he replied. "Sort of thing you could buy in decent numbers through third parties alongside agriculture machinery. If you were isolationists who rejected SO values."

  Bigmouse appeared with a medikit he'd found in the management office, but Falk refused to let him touch him. He went into the bathroom, locked the door and peered at himself in the little mirror beside the hand drier. Bloom's face was pale and dirty, and rinsing it by hand in the basin didn't help much. There was a little black hole under his eye, like a drill hole. His cheek and eye socket were bruising mauve and violet, with an odd patch of yellow around the cheekbone.

  "I want to go home now," he said to the mirror. "Cleesh, why aren't you bringing me home? Get me out of the tank. Tell someone what's happening here. The SO needs to know they are losing people left and right. Tell Apfel, tell him he needs to take this to the SO and get them fully appraised."