Embedded (32 page)

  Falk took out his glares, zipped through the playback, froze on a decent frame and handed them to her to put on.

  "Do you recognise her?" he asked.

  She looked strange with her head up and the glares on, as if staring at something invisible in front of her face.

  "I don't know her," she said.

  "Okay."

  "But I recognise the man with her."

  "You do?" he asked.

  Tal nodded and handed the glares back.

  "He came here sometimes. He was a customer."

  Falk put the glares on and looked at the frozen image he'd shown her. A moment from Smitts's clip. The girl who had shot him and a big dark-haired man, crouching together in the open hatch of
Pika-don
, backlit by fierce white light. A second later, they would get up and come towards the camera.

  "Definitely him?"

  "Yes."

  "Know his name?"

  "No."

  "Was he Bloc or US?"

  "He was Bloc," said Tal, "but he pretend to be US. His accent was good, but I did not think it was that good. It was like yours. I could tell it was fake."

  "He was ling patched."

  "What is that?" she asked.

  He shook his head as though it didn't matter. "So he was made to sound US."

  "I heard Popa call him a business associate. I heard someone else say he worked on local farm. His hands smelled of plant food. Not nice."

  "What was it Popa did? Do you know? Apart from running girls, I mean?"

  "Popa said he worked at fuel depot. He work for RP."

  She looked at him.

  "You asked me about the girl first," she said. "Why?"

  "She shot me."

  "She shot you?" Her voice was tinged with disbelief.

  "This is a bullet hole," he said, pointing at his face.

  She leaned towards him, squinting, staring at the wound.

  "A bullet went in there?"

  "Yeah."

  "How are you living still?"

  "Beats the hell out of me."

  She peered even closer, fascinated. "It hurts you?"

  "Yes," he said. "Don't touch it."

  She pulled back sharply.

  "I wasn't going to," she said. "I don't touch a man again."

  She got up and walked towards the counter.

  "Do you want another drink?" she asked. "I want another drink."

  "I'm fine," said Falk.

  "What is happening here?" she asked. "We heard bombs earlier. And then this hopter came in very close."

  "There's a war," said Falk. "And it's started for real."

Falk went out into the spacious living room. Valdes was napping on one of the plastic-wrapped couches. Bigmouse was sitting back on another. He looked asleep too, but he was stiff and awkward, and his skin was waxy. Falk knelt beside him, trying not to disturb him. His breathing was shallow and laboured, and when Falk listened close, he could hear an unpleasant crackling sound deep in his chest.

  It was beginning to get dark outside, and the rain cover was steeping the advancing gloom. Outside, in the twilight, he could see Rash and Preben walking the edge of the house perimeter, looking down the valley at the highway area.

  In the kitchenette of the annexe, Milla had lit a candle in a cup.

  "Keep it away from the windows," he told her. Tal was asleep on the bench, with Lenka curled up on the seat beside her, her head in Tal's lap. Falk walked through into the small, scruffy bedroom they shared, and pulled the door closed behind him.

  "Cleesh?" he said, quietly.

  There was no reply.

  "Cleesh?"

  This time, there were a few sideways sounds, beetle clicks, amphibious burblings.

  "Cleesh?"

  He sat down on the unmade bed. The girls had presumably shared the bed for warmth. Things had accumulated around and under it: candle stubs, food wrappers, a few dirty clothes. There were books too, colourful picture books taken, he presumed, from the child's bedroom upstairs. He picked one of them up. He hadn't seen any other books in the house, but he presumed the girls had chosen it because it didn't have the impenetrable slabs of English-language text a novel might contain. Simple bold captions in block type ran across attractive and arresting photographs.

  
Our Great Adventure
it said on the cover. The words were superimposed on an image of a man in a First Era space suit, performing an EVA, free-floating beside a capsule in near-Earth orbit. The Earth was partly reflected in the oversized, gold-tinted dome of his helmet. He looked helpless, adrift, like a bloated dead man floating in a rip tide. The red acronym of his launch agency was embossed across the chest plate of his obese, snow-white suit. The shadows were hard, the light was hard, there was a lack of diffusion, a kind of purity.

  Inside, the words and pictures told a simple version of the first milestones of post-terrestrial expansion. The Space Race. Falk had forgotten it had ever been called that. Such a glib thing to call it, so cheerful and optimistic. As he understood it, there had been no gentlemanly fair play. Just three global superpowers locked in a ruthless, often reckless, competition to establish domains beyond the terrestrial limits. Two of them, the US and the Bloc, had essentially used the First Era to pursue and expand their Cold War rivalry through technological superiority and brash endeavour.

  There were the great moments he remembered from his own childhood picture books, the building blocks that had led to the real acceleration into the First Expansion. Vostok and Gemini. Glenn and Leonov. Shepherd and Gagarin. The Soyuz, Apollo and Long March programmes. The launches. The orbits. The spacewalks and the launch pad fires. The most memorable shot of all, the indelible image of the first man on the moon. Virgil Grissom, June 1967.

  "Falk?"

  He started, dropped the book.

  "Cleesh? Where did you go?"

  "Same problem as before, sorry," she said.

  He closed his eyes, slipped into the darkness to make listening easier.

  "I've got a little info for you," she said. "I've been listening. Sorry. Hard not to. I've located you on the SO land registry. Pretty sure I have, anyway. There was a Grayson Seberg working for Resource Provision here on Eighty-Six. He was an operations director. When the coast sections and Gunbelt Highway range opened up for development, he lodged about four hundred private purchase bids for land parcels in the area."

  "That's a lot."

  "It is, though it's not unusual for a senior exec who's close to retirement and wants to invest heavily in a developing settlement. Seberg was part of a little cartel, in fact. Private speculators, several of them with backgrounds in mineralogy and earth science. I think those thirty years spent working for RP in a developing market like this showed him the smart investments were mineral rights and mining infrastructure. He took his retirement fund from RP, and chose the Gunbelt Range. Set up a little company called Ocean Exploratory."

  "This house?"

  "A retirement place. A family estate close to the bulk of his investments."

  Falk sighed. Water lapped.

  "And then?"

  "Until about two years ago, things were clearly going well for Ocean Exploratory. They were developing relationships with several large corporate entities, both US and Bloc, probably looking for the right tender to set up a coventure and start to exploit the land Seberg and his partners had secured."

  "So playing both sides?"

  "Nothing unusual there, either. Seberg was feeling out Bloc and US mining companies alike, surveyors, extraction engineering firms. His company was also talking to two Chinese processing consortia. They were auditioning for the best partners to get into business with."

  Falk lay back on the dirty bed, listening to her voice.

  "Two years ago," Cleesh said, "the trouble started. Small stuff at first. Several pieces in the Shaverton newsfeeds claiming Seberg had used propriatorial data acquired during his years at RP to inform his choice of territories. RP and two of the big US mining companies up at Marblehead were going to sue him for abuse of privileged information. Seberg went on record and said it was hard to stick a pin in a map of Eighty-Six and
not
strike something worth mining, and he was simply embodying the settlementeer ideal of entrepreneurial yadda yadda. But then it all gets weird."

  "By which you mean…?"

  "It all goes quiet. Ocean Exploratory shuts shop. Seberg disappears from the picture, and all the development in that area comes to a halt. If you lift the lid and inspect the records, like I just did, you can see why. The SO stepped in. First they accused Seberg and Ocean of developing parcels before formal approval and permissions had been granted or ownership formally transferred. Then they slapped a Strategic Development Order on the whole lot."

  "Harsh. What do we read from that?"

  "What would you read, Falk?" she asked.

  He shrugged.

  "The US bias on Eighty-Six is particularly obvious. Maybe Seberg was getting too friendly with a Bloc partner and various US rivals didn't like it."

  "That sounds credible, right?"

  "Well, there would be a lot at stake," he replied. "Trillions, perhaps, long term, from extraction? Depends what he had here. A couple of big US corps think they're going to lose out, apply a little pressure to the SO, which then comes down on Seberg. I suppose if Seberg and his partners hadn't filed their claims impeccably, the SO might have found some technicality to exploit, and turned that into grounds to formally disallow all of Seberg's pending bids."

  "Which, on top of everything else, would leave a bunch of very disgruntled Central Bloc partners north of the border, grieving over their ruined deal and failed investment."

  "Indeed it would," he said.

  "It's a serious story," said Cleesh.

  "It's a major, major story," Falk replied. "Are you kidding? The SO displaying blatant bias and using its powers and influence to favour US interests, and in so doing light off the first ever post-global war? Our names will look very good on the awards."

  "They will. Bari says–"

  "Listen, Cleesh. I think we have to tread very carefully here. Bari is GEO, and GEO is not without a vested interest. Can he hear me saying this?"

  "No."

  "It's true. GEO is very much a US corporation."

  "Agreed, except that GEO is a principal investor in the Eighty-Six settlement, and has been since the early days, and has no particular interest in a mining remit. Even if the SO's bias was pro-US, a war on Eighty-Six is going to hurt GEO in fundamental ways. Bari wants this out there as much as we do. If it can do anything to break the deadlock and bring this conflict back from the brink, we have his full support."

  There was a distant thump, a hollow sound. Someone had knocked against the outside of the Jung tank, and the kettle drum echo had rolled through the water to him.

  "It would be very useful to get some hard evidence this end," he said.

  "What are you thinking?" she asked. "I'm filling some pretty fat files here. Seberg. Ocean Exploratory. The parcel bids. The business courtships. The Strategic Significance Order."

  "Yeah, but that'll be official record. The SO and the favoured corps will have covered anything untoward very carefully. We'd need contract lawyers to comb the evidence, and even if we did find an irregularity, it would probably be some very subtle thing that lacked any newsweight."

  "I can get a team on it," she replied. "Bari can bring in some specialists."

  "Hold off for now. It will sell better if we retain an independent firm to do the searches. GEO's thumbprint would not be helpful."

  "Well, gee, Falk, I don't know what a hotshot like you has got in the bank," she said, "but I can't afford that kind of retainer. We need Bari for this."

  "No, we need an outlet. We need to decide how we're going to break this story and handle it. That means a really respectable agency or network. Give it some thought. Between us, we've got plenty of links."

  Someone gently banged against the metal tube of his tank again.

  "So the evidence your end?" she asked.

  "I don't know. It would be useful to know if a specific or unusual deposit was at the root of the dispute. It would be good to find Seberg or any of his partners."

  "Oh, about that," she said. "It may not be much, but the employment records for the Eyeburn depot listed an asset manager called Reed Popper. That's double-pee-ee-are. He'd been there two years and was still listed at the time the place went silent."

  "He was RP?"

  "No, he was a contractor, but he was paid through RP. I was wondering if he was your 'Popa'. Right place, right time, probably knew Seberg."

  "Probably."

  "I tracked him back, and let's just say his identity record is not great. It's not entirely clear who Reed Popper is, where he came from, or when he arrived on Eighty-Six."

  "See what you can do to track down Seberg or any of his key associates," said Falk. "The real prize, I suppose, would be proof that a US corp is exploiting any of the resources that Seberg claimed in this area."

  "Because they shouldn't be?"

  "Exactly because they shouldn't be. The SO snatched all the land rights away from Ocean. Do we know the grounds of the Strategic Significance Order?"

  "They're not obliged to disclose the terms," Cleesh replied. "I'll go through it closely to see if there are any hints. It's usually either to protect the security of a sovereign state, or it's about protecting an area of singular scientific interest or an exceptional natural environment."

  "Right, so technically, all the parcels should have reverted to SO protection. Like they did with the western veldt on Seventy-Seven? The habitat of those herding grazers?"

  "Yeah. And like that bulk refinery the Chinese tried to build on that island off the Bloc settlement on Twenty-Six. That whole fuss, Falk, remember?"

  "I do. So, if there's a commercial US operator or operators at work anywhere on what used to be Ocean holdings, even in a preliminary fashion, it's smoking-gun evidence that the SO strong-armed commercial competitors out of the way, cleared the region and let US national interests in through a back door. It would be primary evidence of prejudicial misconduct."