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  "Bloom thinks outside the box," Preben declared.

  "It's smart thinking," said Huck. "We were hosing at everything."

  "I just used the medical awareness updater," said Falk.

  "It's a fucking piece of genius," said Bigmouse. He was on his feet, looking ill, looking like he was holding it in and working extra hard. There was a sallow cast of pain in his face.

  "Nestor! My main guy!" Valdes cried, raising his hand to palm-slap Falk. "This is the Hard Place, right? The fucking Hard Place, huh?"

  "The hardest."

  "What happened to your face, Nestor?" Valdes asked.

  "I got shot in it."

  "Fuck, man."

  "We've got to move," said Falk to Huckelbery. "They are all over this. All fucking over it."

  Huck nodded.

  "What's that way? The hamlet, right?"

  "Eyeburn Slope," said Falk. "It's not great, but there was no one there except us half an hour ago. You leave anyone behind?"

  "Not alive," said Huckelbery.

  "This is all you got?"

  "They hit us about half an hour after we'd dropped. I had Kilo Two and Three with me."

  "We never saw what happened to Jay," said Goran.

  "Never saw him go," agreed Valdes.

  "Then Caudel and Caudel's whole team got scorched in like thirty seconds trying to get cover."

  "All of them?" asked Preben. "Fuck, Caudel?"

  "Dog food," said Huckelbery. "Then we saw the Hotel boombird get taken down coming in for extraction. We got Masry out of the boomer just before they shot the shit out of it, met these boys from Hotel a while later by the lake."

  "This was where?" asked Falk.

  "The depot," said Goran. "We were dropping at the depot to support Hotel."

  "They've got the depot then?" asked Falk.

  "The depot, the junction, the whole freeking
^®
highway," said Masry, the payload officer.

  "What about Juliet? Where's everyone else?" asked Bigmouse.

  "Fuck knows," said Goran.

  "All I know for sure is where we are," said Huckelbery.

  "Where's that?" asked Falk.

  "Deepest shit," he replied.

TWENTY-TWO

As the night deepened, the backmasked voices grew louder.

  With Huck and the newcomers, they struggled back through the hortiplex, scaled the embankment and took possession of Eyeburn Slope, specifically the meeting house. They left the lights on over the field system to make it harder for anyone to approach that way unseen. By the time they were up the embankment, the illuminated air above the fields was hazed with smoke from the firefight, and shimmering with billions of blurds that had been drawn to the light. Every now and then, fat, blundering blurds bounced off their faces or sleeves.

  The Slope hamlet was as they had left it, empty and lit by photoreceptive lamps in the yard and porch areas. Masry, the payload officer, was all for avoiding the settlement, and striking out into the black, non-arable country behind it, to lie low out of sight. The notion had a certain appeal. It was clear there were terrorists (Huck was using the term freely now, often hitched to the qualifier "fucking", as in "fucking terrorists") in the depot zone, and up at the hilltop station: in effect, either side of the lonely little farming hamlet. Following the firefight in the fields, those terrorists also knew that there were SOMD foot strengths still active in the area. They would come looking, before dawn most probably, and the little hamlet of Eyeburn Slope, with its genny and stores and shelter and lights, was the most obvious place to begin. Running and hiding in the dark seemed like a wise idea.

  But it was also clear that Masry was pretty traumatised. Falk could see the tremor in him, the darting glances, the over-reaction to sound. Masry was trying to hide it. He didn't want them to think he was scared. But no amount of self-control was going to cover those ticks.

  He had been payload officer on Hotel's boomer,
Gone
With The Wendigo
. Crew specialists were all solid troops, trained to the same basic levels of combat proficiency as their footslog counterparts in addition to their specialisations. Fireteam members did not look down on them. Indeed, they often had an infallible reputation, a balls of steel rep for not blinking or thinking twice when it came to supervising a drop or extraction under fire. POs were unflappable. They were the guys that the guys on the ground could always count on.

  However, as it seemed to Falk, Masry couldn't conceal the fact that he had not expected to be facing the sharp end of things. He had not expected to experience the Hard Place this way. The Hard Place was what the fire teams did, which is why God gave them h-beams and thumpers and feeble imaginations. POs were sky boys.

  Masry had extremely fair red hair and a complexion to match. His hair was so blond, his eyelashes were virtually invisible, and in the hard, yellow light of Eyeburn Slope's yard lamps, he looked like he was a sand sculpture. His ling patch robbed the force out of all his comments, and made him sound like a pathetic, whining bitch.

  That was unfortunate, because Masry deserved some sympathy. He'd come close to dying. Huck said they'd pulled Masry out of his boomer at the depot. He'd lost his crew. There was blood on his kit and combats, and it wasn't his. More significantly, Falk believed, Masry had lost his boombird. That was the real trauma. Crew bonded with their machines, and Masry had seen his die. He was bereft, and he was also stranded.

  Ergo, he wanted to hide in the dark.

  Huckelbery overruled him. Though the location was obvious, Eyeburn Slope offered them a lot of things. Resources, warmth, dry conditions, the chance for all of them to eat and some of them to sleep. More particularly, the walls and structures gave them a defendable position. Out in the scrub, it would be dark and cold and wet, and by dawn, they would be tired and shivering, strung out, cramped and aching, jumpy. If they were found in the meantime, they would be found in the open. A night in the hamlet might recharge their batteries a little. A night in the open would certainly drain them.

  Huck suggested they use the end house as a strong point. It had the best vantage and the best position. From the front, they could watch the hortiplex, and from the side there was a clear view of the yard, the pens and the hill track.

  Preben had a suggestion of his own. The meeting house. It stood among a cluster of buildings, and thus the lines of sight weren't as good. But it was surfaced block where the farmhouse was a weatherboard skin over a frame. Preben had checked under the lapboarding. The walls and floors of the meeting house would stop most hard-round fire, anything short of a piper in fact, and it would also soak up the blast wash of rockets or grenades. The jumble of buildings around it, though they made access more diffuse, also multiplied possible exit strategies in an emergency. They could slip out, covering their asses, a number of different ways. Preben had made a few sketches. He showed Huck. He'd thought about it.

  Huck was impressed, and okayed it. Falk was impressed too. Preben was a solid professional. Falk wondered how well Bloom would have done it. Would he have seen those things, made those recommendations? How much were they missing Nestor Bloom right now? How much deader, or more alive, would any of them be if Bloom had been running things, and not someone wearing Bloom's face?

  Masry went along with it, and followed the group towards the meeting house. He twitched, eyes staring, hunting, every time a blurd tapped against a lamp cowl.

  Ty Goran's team, Kilo Two, was Valdes and a quiet black guy called Clodell. Jay, the lost member of the team, was spoken about. The usual, positive mythmaking was already at work. Jay wasn't dead, he was alive out there somewhere and they'd find him eventually. Fucking Jay. What an idiot, always getting into shit. Falk had a clear mental image of Will Jay. A memory. Someone else's memory.

  Hotel Four were Lintoff, Barnard, Estmunsen and Rash. Bloom hadn't known any of them well, so they weren't even afterimages on Falk's mind. Rash was the leader, stocky and angry, shimmering with musclepower and discontent. His skin was actually black, far blacker than Clodell's. He was well spoken and extremely precise. It was a long time since Falk had met anyone so tightly wound as Rash: nothing to prove but absolutely hell-bent on proving it. Hotel Four had been one of the tactical squads charged with securing the fuelling depot. For clearance purposes, they were all equipped with PAP 20s that had been fitted with underbarrel shotgun mounts. The shotgun section could take a variety of shells, including a smallcalibre grenade. All four men had belts of cartridges around their bodies, like bandits.

  "Did you get any kind of look at the terrorists?" Falk asked Rash. He was still getting used to using the word.

  "Insurgents," Rash replied, with a little shake of his head. He stuck out his chin and pursed his lips in an expression that indicated distaste. "I believe some of them may have been local settlementeers, converted to a cause, supplied by external agitators."

  "Like the Bloc?" Falk asked.

  "Not for me to say," said Rash.

  "If you won't say, nobody will. You saw them as well as anyone. Did they fight like farmers or frontline troops?"

  "I can't say," said Rash.

  "Well, they fucked Hotel and Kilo up pretty good, so I'm guessing better than farmers," said Falk. "Wouldn't you?"

  "I don't like your tone," said Rash.

  "I don't either," Falk agreed. "Still, probably best we talk about these things if we want to, you know, live."

  Rash looked at him contemptuously.

  "They were well disciplined," said Lintoff. "They had the ground first, so that gave them an edge, but you could see by the way they coordinated. Extreme training. Proper fireteam skill sets."

  "No uniforms, but good-quality hard-weather gear, plus clean new weapons," said Goran. "Nothing fancy. But proper workhouse shit. All Bloc-made."

  "I heard some of them talking," said Huckelbery quietly. "Sounded Russian."

  "I heard another language too," said Preben. "Don't know what it was, but it wasn't English."

  "So, have we got Bloc infiltrators?" asked Bigmouse, "or locals militarised by Bloc-sponsored specialists and trainers?"

  He was sitting to one side, stripped to the waist, wrapping his bruise-blackened torso with an elasticated support bandage and analgesic patches. Every couple of words, he winced.

  "Plenty of room in these freeking
^®
hills for training camps," said Masry. "Plenty of room to hide and work out and practise. Indoctrination camps, you know. Promise the local freekers
^®
anything. Better subsidies, better support, play on their fears of big government, their expectations of religious freedom and liberty."

  "Were any of them fat?" asked Falk.

  They all looked at him.

  "What now?" asked Huckelbery.

  "Were any of them fat?" Falk repeated. "Or old? Any of them out of shape?"

  "They're fucking farmers," said Valdes. "You live this kind of life of toil, you don't get fat, man."

  "No, but you get old," said Falk. "And actually, I've seen plenty of tractor operators or battery farm workers who carry too much weight because they sit down all day. Plenty of weather station personnel who sit at a box all hours scarfing choc-effect bars and NoCal-Cola. So my question stands, were any of them fat or old?"

  Rash glanced at Lintoff.

  "Not that we saw," he said.

  "We saw young, we saw female," said Falk. "But no fat or old. I've seen militias on other settlements. All manner of fuckers get involved. Beardie weirdies, fat hippy bitches, old fucks. You militarise a community like this, you recruit all sorts. These people–"

  He paused and looked at Huck.

  "–these
terrorists
, they are fit and trained and in the right age catchment for military service. SOMD or otherwise. Besides, I saw a dump site up at the station. Civilian bodies. A few of them. Executed. Surplus to requirements."

  "You never told us that, Bloom," said Bigmouse.

  "We've been rather occupied," said Falk. He didn't want to expand on that. Truth was, that discovery had been partly wiped by the trauma and stress that had come on its heels. He was only just remembering, and he didn't want any of them knowing how frail his mind was. The backmasked voices were whispering things that he was sure were questions about his basic ability to function, and his hip was beginning to feel sore again. Lex Falk's hip, not Nestor Bloom's. Nestor Bloom was the one with the dull, toothache throb radiating from the middle of his face.

  "When the fuck did you ever see militia on other settlements, man?" Valdes asked.

  Falk avoided answering.

  "Major Selton has mentioned, several times and strictly off the record, that the Bloc might be involved in this one," said Huckelbery quietly. "Don't any of you pretend to look surprised. We all knew this was part of the profile on this one. Looks like it's true."

  "I think the Bloc had people on the inside in this community," Falk said. "Other communities too. They'd infiltrated. Long term, well planned, well resourced. When they got the go, probably when they realised we were mobilising, they activated their sleepers to prepare the ground for their main force. Cleaned house, got rid of everyone who objected or was in the way. Maybe they sent rapid-deploy squads in to assist with that. Fast and effective, ready to greet us."

  "That's a lot of planning and preparation," said Rash.

  "It really is," agreed Falk. "Which tells us something else."

  "What?" asked Rash.

  "Whatever's at stake has got to be really fucking important to make all this effort worthwhile."

• • •

Fred was up. Falk could see the little tallow disk over the battery pens. The rain had stopped, but the wind was up, and it sent little dark thumbprints of cloud scudding across the moon. It was so quiet, Falk could hear the Chinese whisper of the windfarm up the hill, and the ocean beyond it, trying to shush the whirring mills.