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  "We'll get out to the woods!" Preben yelled. "Come on!"

  "Okay, okay!"

  Rash and the girls were already bringing Bigmouse out through the back door. Blue smoke wreathed the whole area behind the house, gunsmoke and propellant fumes, explosive wash. The tangled corpse that had taken a grenade in the chest was still burning, like a neglected bonfire. Another few burning cinders drifted down.

  "This way!" Preben yelled at Rash. Lenka was still pumping the bag valve. They were stumbling. The ground was uneven, and Bigmouse was getting heavy.

  Falk checked himself. There was blood soaking his hip, and he could see a large chunk of abdominal blating had been chewed off.

  He looked down towards the corner of the house, the direction the SObild had driven in from. The others were coming. The squads dismounting from the trucks at the front were hurrying around the side, drawn by the fierce exchange of fire. The first couple came into view, at the corner, beside the row of grit bins. Falk fired at them, but his Koba jammed almost immediately. Ammo out. He'd exhausted the second double mag.

  Hardbeam fire screamed in from his right, from the treeline beyond the truck. In cover, Valdes had an excellent angle on the corner approach. The first beam from his M3A hit one of the tubs, exploding grit in all directions like a nail bomb. One of the Bloc nationals went down, blinded, dazed. Valdes knocked his companion over with his second shot.

  Half-running, half-limping, Falk moved to the front of the truck, where blurds were swarming furiously in the noon of the headlamps. He tossed the empty Koba away into the grass, and retrieved the M3A that the third man had been armed with. He needed a replacement weapon fast, and he could tell, he could
feel
, Bloom wanted a piper, not a hard-round gun. He checked the weapon quickly and expertly for impact damage. The M3A was a robust piece of kit. This wasn't a captured SOMD model, this was the slightly older M3 used by the Bloc, the same basic design, fewer frills and extras. Falk pulled the pouch of spare cells off the battered, twisted corpse.

  They were taking heavy fire from the corner of the house, despite Valdes's blasts and the grenades pumped by Preben. Falk was pretty sure that the other two trucks, the ones that had been lagging behind the first three, had now arrived. His little clutch of survivors could be facing upwards of thirty battlefield troops. The air trembled and buzzed with crossfire. A hardbeam shot lanced over, an invisible heat ghost, and ignited a snowgum in the treeline.

  Rash and the girls had almost drawn level with the SObild, but they had been forced to put Bigmouse down and drop because of the shooting. Lenka was crying. Milla had her arms and hair over her, trying to shelter her. Hard rounds were pinging and flinting off the truck's bodywork.

  Falk raised the M3, lined it up. He felt the LEAF lock tight to platform its bulk. He lit off a shot. The piper made its trademark bark, and vibrated firmly with the discharge.

  "I can drive that!" Tal screamed at him. She was gesturing violently at the SObild. "Why are we running for the woods? I can drive that thing!"

  Falk glanced at Rash.

  "Go! Go!" Falk yelled. "Come on! The truck!"

  He started to fire repeated shots at the corner area, trying to keep heads ducked down. Preben reloaded and pumped off some smoke charges. Valdes fired, again, moving in from the trees.

  Rash and the girls lifted Bigmouse and hoisted him into the back of the truck. The SObild had a high wheelbase, and lifting him all the way up onto the flatbed took such immense effort, Milla yelled out in anguish. For a second, Falk feared she'd been shot.

  They slid Bigmouse in. As soon as the flatbed had its share of his weight, Tal let go and dashed around to the front of the vehicle, climbing in through the cab door on the side away from the house. Rash, Milla and Lenka scrambled up alongside the casualty.

  Falk heard the engine clear its throat and start. He fired the M3 again, two more shots, one of which bit a chunk out of the corner of the house wall. He shouted to Preben and Valdes, the smoke in the air sanding his throat and making his eyes water.

  Valdes arrived.

  "Get in!" Falk yelled, and the trooper scrambled up into the back, Rash grabbing his hands. Preben was close behind. As soon as Preben was clambering up, Falk ran to the cab, half-falling over the corpse of the squad leader in his effort to get inside. Tal was behind the wheel. She didn't even wait for his instruction. The SObild took off with a wild lurch, wheels churning and spinning in the damp grass. Everyone in the back cried out, thrown around. Falk grabbed the dashboard to brace himself.

  Shots hammered into them from behind. The hardround impacts sounded like someone with a mallet beating the back and side panels. A hardbeam shot kissed the weatherproofed litex back shroud, and melted a gash in it. The fabric, superheated, started to burn. No one in the back was steady enough to reach up and beat it out.

  The ground was rough. They were bouncing, jumping. The world through the front screen was a white glare of hyper-illuminated grass and brush, and a blizzard of blurds sweeping in to be massacred on impact. Tal's manner of driving was ruthless and all-out. She was standing on the throttle, fighting with the wheel, crashing them over the turf, heaving to correct oversteer and skidding caused by hitting ruts too hard. They were plunging towards the woods, tree trunks filling the headlamp beams. She was driving intently for the thickets, and the trees were going to stop them just like they had stopped
Pika-don.
It was going to hurt.

TWENTY-NINE

With what appeared to Falk to be a great deal more luck than judgement, Tal fitted them between the trees.

  Snowgums and bleakwoods, some trunks a yard across, appeared like surprises in the short, bright frame of the SObild's headlights, and Tal avoided every one of them. They took glancing blows off several, impacts hard enough to crumple bodywork and jolt everybody viciously. Some of the turns she made to avoid trees were so radical, Falk felt as though he would be thrown out of the cab. He braced for the moment when they'd come upon two trees that were too close together to drive between.

  "Slower! Slower!" he yelled. He was feeling very odd. His hip hurt like a bastard. The thrashing of the engine, the thump of every bounce and the impact cracks and scrapes of branches and stout scrub made it impossible to hear if they were still being shot at. Whatever the case, they would have to stop before long. The woods were only going to get thicker. They'd have to ditch the truck, maybe find a place to lie low. It was hard to think what to do. It was hard to clear his head. He felt like he was clenched, everything clenched.

  "Can't see a damn thing!" Tal complained, jerking the wheel brutally.

  He realised what she meant. The headlamps were bright, but their field only illuminated the immediate ground. Tree trunks, blindingly white, loomed with little warning. The swirling blurds were worse than a midwinter snow flurry.

  He adjusted the low-light setting of his glares, took them off, and slipped them onto her face as she drove. She didn't pull away, though he could tell that, despite her intense concentration, she was confused.

  Then he leaned in and killed the headlamps.

  She made a soft, chuckling sound, delighted by the way the world ahead of her had resolved. In the green wash of the glares' view, she had depth and distance, a better perception of the tree spacing, of what had previously been coming up blind behind the immediate dazzle of trees. Her driving quickly became less feral.

  He sat back for a second, and tried to force himself to shed the tension. The feeling of being clamped as tight as a fist was almost more than he could bear.

  But the ride was too uneven. He had to hold on just to stay upright. His head swam. He was pretty sure he was about to be very sick. Images were pinned to the backs of his eyes, shocking and grisly, the two faces he'd disintegrated with gunfire, staring at him.

  He considered what a hopeless cliché he was. Fucking pathetic, soft-centred moral outrage, the squeamish sensibilities of his safe, Old Settlement lifestyle recoiling from contact with ferocious actuality. But it wasn't disgust. It wasn't shock at what he had just seen and done. Nor was it, as the journalist in him would have been eager to confess with calculated sincerity, revulsion at the glee with which he had assumed his role.

  He was experiencing an extreme adrenaline dump from the hyperstress of the firefight. It was that simple. He had gone face-to-face with men who had been prepared to kill him, and he had killed them first, and in order to navigate a path through that uncompromising state, he had taken a giant hit of adrenaline. He didn't give a fuck about the bastards he'd dismantled. It was just biochemical overload from the effort to push past normal, everyday brakes like fear and hesitation.

  Cleesh said to him, "God, Falk, are you all right?"

  "I'm wealthy," he said, so quietly, Tal couldn't hear him.

  "You're right off the scale here, Falk," Cleesh replied. "Ayoob and Underwood are panicking. It's like you had a convulsion in the tank or something."

  "I'm fine."

  "What?" asked Tal, gaze fixed on the way ahead.

  "Underwood says your brain chemistry and neural patterning are way beyond acceptable bounds," said Cleesh. "She wants to tranq you, bring you down."

  "Fuck, no," he said.

  "She says she absolutely has to, or you could stroke out and die. Just a basic stabiliser."

  "No. Leave it. I'll settle. Leave it."

  Tal took her eyes off the path for a second, glanced at him.

  "What are you saying?" she asked.

  "It's okay," he replied. He tried to show her a smile. "Just thinking aloud."

  She risked another look at him, her hands see-sawing the steering wheel. "You look sick."

  "I'm okay. Watch what you're doing."

  He could feel Cleesh there, hear her breathing.

  "Cleesh, I need to come down on my own. I swear to God, if she tranqs me right now, I will die."

  "Okay," she said.

  Falk could feel a burn in his heart, like acid was leaking out of something inside his chest. He could taste a sour metallic tang, the unhealthy, artificially coloured flavours of panic and terror. He swallowed hard. Despite the jarring ride, he felt a slight, slow curve returning to his spine.

  "We can't go much further," he said.

  "What?" Tal asked.

  He said it in Russian this time.

  "We can," she said.

  "We needed the truck to get out in a hurry, but it's not practical. The woods, the hills."

  "You wait," she said.

  "For what? Tal?"

  "You see."

  And he saw. It only took another three or four minutes, and she brought them to what she had been heading for all along. The SObild bounced out of the trees, ripped creepers flapping off its roof rails, and swung around onto a track.

  She stopped, the engine chugging.

  Falk leaned forward, took his glares back and looked out. The woods were thick on either side, so thick they joined to form a roof of foliage over the trail. The track was rough, just mud worn back by the steady traffic of heavy vehicles. It ran east-west, roughly, inclined so it swept up into the hill slopes. The rain was softening the ruts, and streams of run-off were trickling down its length in rivulets.

  Falk hadn't seen any trail on the map.

  "What is this?" he said.

  "Track," Tal said. "Mining road."

  "Where does it go?"

  She shrugged her shoulders. "Up and down."

  "How did you know it was here?" he asked.

  "We found it," she said. "One day, when we walk. We used to walk, when it wasn't raining, just to get outside. We walk around the meadow, or into the woods. Not far. One day, we find this."

  He could picture them, the three of them, pacing the boundaries of their wall-less prison, after days of only their own company, hoping to see someone, afraid that they actually might. Finding the road by accident one day, thrilled by its implied promise. Two directions, and they were too scared to choose either of them.

  "Which way, then?" he asked. He knew which way, but he wanted her to make the decision too.

  "Up the hills," she said, pointing to the right. "Up the hills is away from the fighting. Down the hills goes into the war."

  "Let's go up, then," he said. He leaned over into the back and told Rash, Preben and Valdes about the trail.

  "Give me Mouse's glares," he said. Rash passed them across.

  "Is he still breathing?" Falk asked.

  "He's more alive than he was," said Rash. Lenka was devotedly squeezing the bag valve.

  "That's a good job you're doing there," Falk told her in Russian. He turned back, and handed Mouse's glares to Tal. He'd set them to low light. She put them on, cocking her head and pouting like a covergirl in mirror shades.

  "Okay," she said.

  She found a gear, and the wheels spun for a moment in the muddy streams of the track. Then they were moving, following the track up the long, curving gradient.

The climb was steep, and the wet conditions tough. Rain had come on again, so hard it stirred the tunnel of trees overhead. But the SObild was up for anything. It was a simple, hardwearing machine decently constructed to handle poor terrain.

  Despite the canopy cover, there was still a red afterglow from the west, the glare of the burning depot. Falk wondered if Bloc forces were coming after them. Had they pushed the other trucks through the wood in pursuit, or had they waited for backup and new orders? He was pretty sure that if he'd been the force commander, he'd have given chase. Falk's band had hit them very hard. Quite apart from payback, he'd have wanted to know who the fuck they were, and what they had been doing there.

  The trail wasn't on the map he and Rash had been using. The registry chart of Twenty Thousand Acre Forest had given streams serial numbers, and had even shown the mansion, which shouldn't have been there.