Embedded (21 page)

  Probably a wall, Falk decided.

TWENTY-ONE

It was getting scary. He was just playing at being a soldier. Then there was the matter of his hopeless coordination.

  The cooking popcorn sounds of gunshots rippled through crop rows. There was a drifting sheen of smoke in the wet air, the distinctive burn smell of propellant. The target sampler kept throwing up yellow and orange flags.

  Ten feet ahead of Falk, Preben suddenly turned to the right, cheeked his M3A and fired. A squeal and a blink of light.

  Preben lowered his weapon slightly.

  "Red flag," he said softly. "I believe I just scorched a sunbitch."

  "More!" Bigmouse announced, and ran forward into the planting beds, ducking under training wires and rigged loops of irrigation pipe. He was squaring up to red-flag movement. Falk raised his PDW, a two-handed grip. Playing at being a fucking soldier, just playing.

  Bigmouse adjusted for airburst, and sailed a pair of grenade rounds up over the crops. There were two big flashes followed by meaty, gritty bangs. Plants shook as if a wind had whipped through them.

  Bigmouse jerked his head for them to follow. They left the walkboard, and pushed through the bed rows, ankle-deep in black loam, stooping to avoid the sprayer hoses. There was a strong smell of earth, of liquid fertiliser, of wet metal pipes. Overhead, Falk could see the low, grey evening sky through cages of irrigation gridwork and lighting frames.

  They came out, crossed another walkboard aisle, then dropped back into the crop thicket again. Somewhere to the left of them, an assault weapon was clattering like a sewing machine.

  Out onto another walkboard path. On the far side, the crop row was tented under a large polytunnel. There was no obvious entry point, so Preben drew his utility knife, and sliced through the side of the sheeting. They slid through the cut, into a warm, moist cave filled with the peaty smell of germination. Pre-packed sacks of fertilised soil mix were stacked up, ready for use. They were marked with the GEO logo. Preben cut a slit out through the far side of the polytunnel, and they emerged onto another run of duckboards.

  There was a corpse on the path. It was lying on its back a few feet down from their slit exit. The man had his legs bent and spread, as though he was running. He was wearing dark clothes, no uniform. His head was tilted right back, as if he was offering his throat for ritual cutting.

  The greater part of his torso was a mangled hole. The loss of tissue and bone, of general matter, was astonishing. It looked like something white-hot, the size of a beeball, had punched clean through him. The edges of the wound were shredded and mangled, fused into a smoking crust of burned blood and blackened flesh. Thick fluid, viscous as tar or expensive balsamic vinegar, drooled out of the astonishing yawn of the cavity, and there was a speckled haze of it across the decking behind him. That's what a hardbeam piper did to human anatomy.

  "Fuck," murmured Preben, staring down, genuinely thunderstruck by the sight of his handiwork.

  "Nice grouping," said Falk.

  "Fuck me," Preben murmured. He'd fired live before, he'd done it up at the hilltop station, but Falk knew Bloom knew it was the first time Preben had been presented with proof of a killshot.

  The smell was appalling. Faeces and toffee, cremated bone, melted meat, the inside-out body stench that no one who smelled it ever forgot.

  "Sucks to be him," said Bigmouse.

  Falk got red and green across his glares suddenly. He looked up, past Preben and Bigmouse, both still too startled by the actuality of the dead man to be aware of anything else. Three figures had appeared at the far end of the aisle. Three bright red flags.

  Falk started firing, firing his Colt between Preben and Bigmouse, who both jerked back in dismay. The shots were wild. It was more to make a noise than anything. The red flags scattered. Preben turned himself around, and cut off with the M3A. The piper screamed in the direction of the end of the row.

  The Colt PDW suddenly seized up in Falk's hand. He gazed at it for a second. The slide was clamped back and smoke was curling from the action. The
ammo out
LED was lit. Falk realised he didn't know what to do with it. He had asked for spare stripmags, but he'd never reloaded a weapon in his life.

  Bigmouse shoulder-barged him. It was a full-on bodycheck, Bigmouse slamming into Falk, knocking him backwards. It hurt. It winded him. The force of the collision made him lose his footing, and he fell over against the wall of the polytunnel. The rain-beaded plastic was springy like a trampoline skin. He didn't tear through it, he bellied off it, and wound up on his side in the mud between the duckboards and the base of the tunnel.

  For a very short time, he was stunned, unable to assess what had happened. The first coherent thing that occurred to him was that Bigmouse had tackled him and brought him over in some grandstanding stunt to save his life. But Bigmouse had fallen over too. Bigmouse was on his arse on the decking. He was groaning, whimpering like a beaten dog.

  Falk registered a rapid
thup-thup-thup!
sound coming from above him. Automatic hard rounds were punching a diagonal line of holes through the polytunnel skin, creating puckered dimples in the plastic, each whorl stretching under the plastic's tension to form an indentation like a navel in the firm curve of stomach. Bigmouse had been hit by hard rounds. They'd struck him in the torso armour, clubbed him down, smashing him into Falk in the process. Falk couldn't see any blood, but he could see dents in Bigmouse's chest blate that looked like they had been punched with a hammer and an awl.

  Preben was trying to drag Bigmouse into cover. He was fighting to manage the unwieldy bulk of the M3A with his right hand while attempting to grab the straps of Bigmouse's blate rig with his left. Preben was yelling. Bigmouse was yelling. Hard rounds slapped into the polytunnel sheeting, into the mud, into the walkboards, lifting little geysers of droplets and shredded fibreplak. One shot chipped off Preben's thigh plate, just a glancing impact, but enough to rotate him, to twist his lower half, to make him holler.

  Falk had dropped his PDW. Frantic for cover, he scrabbled at the side of the crop tunnel. It was like trying to tear through a drumhead. Futile. Then the third finger of his right hand snagged in one of the bullet-hole belly buttons, and that afforded him purchase enough to tear. He wrenched. The plastic stretched and parted. He fell facefirst into the tunnel, his hands still tangled in the sheeting.

  Inside, on all fours, bullets were spitting through the transparent walls above him. Each puncture-hit sounded like a golfer driving off. As they passed through the polytunnel, the rounds ricocheted off the tunnel frame, off the sprinkler pipework, off the main props. They
thupped
into soil mix bags, destroyed racks of seedlings, shattered plastic pot trays, shredded mature plants. The already moist, suffocatingly peaty air filled with the released sap stench of vapourised plant fibres. One shot shattered the casing of one of the sunlamps clamped to the tunnel roof.

  Falk looked around wildly. Through the condensationfogged wall of the tunnel, he saw Preben dragging Bigmouse off the walkboard into the plant row opposite. Falk started to crawl forward a foot or two and drew level with the slits where they had crossed through the tunnel earlier.

  The corpse of the man killed by the hardbeam shot was right outside. His weapon, a compact grey assault rifle, had fallen into the gulley beside the duckboard path. Falk peeled back the flap of the hanging sheet, reached out, grabbed it, dragged it back in. Bullets zipped and tore through the tunnel above him.

  He turned the weapon over in his hands. Koba Avtomat 90, the "A" version, modern, the latest upgrade. Clean, well kept, new. Twelve inch casehardened barrel. The stock was a milled finished plastic. Behind the angled foregrip, it had integrated connection polymer magazines, each holding sixty rounds of standard Central Bloc pattern 4mil cased. The bolt had already been pulled and the ambidextrous safety disengaged.

  Falk took a breath, a deep one. He could hear the backmasked voices in the corner of his brain. He adjusted his glares and got them to maximum tint, then rose to his feet, using the nearest centre post as a support. A bullet
plocked
through the polytunnel and hissed right past his nose. Falk reached up, opened the relay box mounted to the post at head height, and gripped the paddle inside.

  "Preben!" he yelled at the top of his voice. "Preben, close your fucking eyes!"

  He didn't wait for a reply. He yanked the paddle down hard.

  The sun lamps switched on.

  They were mounted along each polytunnel row, and in the grow frames of several open-air beds too. Daylight lamp rigs were also set up around the walkboard junctions, and the access to the sheds.

  The whole area suddenly blazed with painful white light. Black sky above, glare below. The firing faltered almost immediately.

  Falk didn't wait. He dragged back the slit, swung out onto the walkway and opened fire. The Koba was sweet. Very little felt recoil, very little muzzle rise. It wasn't cued to his target sampler, because the Koba had no active sensor system that could be mated to it, but his glares were red-flagging shapes anyway. Human shapes in the crop rows at the end of the walkway, behind stacks of soil-mix bags, beside a rainwater tub.

  He fired at the flags, a burst at each, loosing a stream of shots before switching to the next tagged target. Red and orange only. The cased rounds spat their spent, twisted plastic sleeves out of the ejector port like the sprayed offcuts of some light industrial process. The torn cases rained onto the duckboards around his feet.

  He hit one red flag squarely and saw a graphic enhanced human shape wallop backwards into a row of bushes, tearing some of them down. Other hits weren't so positive. One fell, but may have slipped or ducked. Another vanished, but could have been pulling back. Once the blinding surprise of the light had passed, the opposition began shooting back again.

  But Preben had wrestled the thumper off Bigmouse. Supporting Falk's general fire, he pumped four grenades into the thickets of crops and watering frames. They blew the living shit out of the rear part of the row. Earth, stalks and debris spewed up into the air in a hot, gritty rush and rattled down on top of them like hail. Twigs and clods of earth drummed off the polytunnel roof. There were suddenly blurds everywhere, blurds flicking and darting through the air, swirling like confetti, drawn to the light, creating hard white blobs against the black sky where the lamplight caught them.

  Falk fired several more bursts into the wafting smoke and swirling airborne vapour until he emptied the mags. A flick of the thumb ejected the mag casing. He tilted the whole weapon sideways as he did this so the flying case would spit out sideways, away from him, then bent down to search the corpse for reloads.

  He stopped dead. Crouched down, his hip didn't hurt. Where had that little learned habit of tilting the weapon at ejection come from? What about the confidence and ease with which he'd checked and then used the Koba? Where the fuck had any of that come from?

  Preben came out onto the walkboards, the thumper in his hands, the piper clamped to his back plate.

  "You got reloads?" he asked, the launcher up and covering the far end. Blurds swirled around them both.

  "Think so," said Falk. He found two more integrated pairs in the corpse's hip sack. Two hundred and forty rounds total. He tucked one into his thigh pocket, and slapped the other one home, then worked the bolt to cock the weapon. A satisfying, lubricated mechanical double clack. He got up.

  "Nice. With the lights," said Preben.

  "Uh-huh," Falk replied. His hands were tingling. He saw the PDW where he'd dropped it, slide locked open. He bent to pick it up, putting the Koba down for a moment.

  "Is Bigmouse alive?" he asked. He wiped and blew flecks of soil off the Colt, ejected the empty disposable strip and palmed home one of the spares Bigmouse had given him.

  "Yeah," said Preben, hunting for flags with his glares and the raised thumper. "Fucking lucky. Three hits, all on his body boards. They stopped them, but I think he broke some ribs. He's having a lie down and a cry."

  "You shoot him up?" Falk asked, referring to the oneuse painkiller spikes they carried.

  "He refused it," replied Preben. "Says he'll get over it in a second. Good call. We don't want to waste that shit."

  Falk finished checking the Colt. The reload had brought the ammo counter back to forty. He racked it to put the first one in the pipe, and then toggled on the safety and holstered it, buttoned down.

  So sure, so practised, so expert. How did his hands know to do any of that shit? That wasn't playing at being a soldier. That was knowing what the fuck you were doing. That was handling and setting weaponry with skill and minimal fuss.

  He stood up, the Koba back in his hands.

  "Get Mouse upright," he said. "We're pretards if we hang around here."

  "Yeah," said Preben. He brushed away a large green blurd that was fussing at his face. "Should kill the fucking lights too, I guess."

  Preben went to get Bigmouse but stopped. Someone was coming. Movement, flagged shapes, from back down the walkboard path behind them.

  Green flags.

  SOMD troopers. Two of them. Then five more behind them, moving fast, moving low.

  Falk got aura code tags on the first two before he could see their faces. Private Goran. Staff Sergeant Huckelbery.

  "Preben? Bloom?" Huck called out. "Aren't you a fucking sexy sight!"

  "Yes, chief," said Falk. "Who's with you?"

  "Most of Two, plus Masry, plus Hotel Four," Huckelbery replied, coming up to them. He was dirty and wet, his skin feverish white in the lights. Ty Goran, the leader of Kilo Two, had blood on his left cheek.

  "How the fuck did you do that thing with your aura code?" he asked.