by Dan Abnett
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 an
d 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."
"You all right in there?" Bigmouse called through the door.
"Yeah, yeah," Falk replied. He flushed and came back out.
"You look steadier," said Bigmouse. "Walking steadier."
"Yeah, I feel a bit more together."
"You should let me patch that."
"I know, but I don't want to play around with it. I just want to get out. Get out of here and get to SO medical. It feels like it's stable, and I don't want to aggravate it."
"Okay," said Bigmouse.
"We all need to get out of here," said Falk. "We need to get a signal out."
"Agreed," said Preben, appearing in the doorway. "So we'll eat, then we'll–"
"Talk like you're in charge there, Preben," said Falk.
"I am."
"Allow us to follow the logic of that," said Falk.
"You're hit, hurt. We don't know how much you're impaired. I'm next in line."
"I'm fine," said Falk, "so that's settled."
"It's not–"
"I call the shots in Kilo One," said Falk.
"There is no Kilo One," said Preben. "Just three fucking idiots left out on their own."
"There's a Kilo One all the while we're here in the Hard Place, you dumb fuck," said Falk. "Get used to the idea."
Preben glared at him and then left the room. Falk glanced at Bigmouse.
"Fuck happened to your ling patch?" Bigmouse asked.
He was feeling better, but he was still hobbling like a stroke victim. There was a sense, that Falk was perfectly prepared to accept, that it was his imagination, that he and Bloom weren't fighting for control so much. Maybe Nestor Bloom had relaxed his grip. He hadn't died, because his emotions and memories kept surfacing, but his grip had slackened. Bloom was like a full-body LEAF, a metal brace locking out and limiting motion. Whatever, something had disabled his ling patch along the way.
His hip was still as sore as hell, and Falk was pretty sure it was his hip, and not Bloom's.
There was a trace of a voice in his head. A voice, or maybe voices. When he'd first woken up, he'd heard them, and attributed them to the default repeat of the earbuds.
But it wasn't that. Some memory, or function of the imagination, or damaged inner ear, was making him hear voices. Nothing tangible, just a muffled echo, like a recording of speech played backwards so that each alien mutter came to an abrupt, unnatural stop. He had to concentrate to clear his head of the noises, and then they'd drift in out of the silence again when his attention switched elsewhere.
Falk wasn't keen to speculate precisely whose memory, imagination or inner ear was responsible. He limped around the buildings, distracted by everyday objects that reminded somebody other than him of something else. A water jug, a hairbrush, a dresser drawer that opened to release the trapped scent of an empty perfume bottle.
He heard someone calling Bloom's name.
It was Bigmouse. Falk hobbled outside into what was fast becoming a damp, stone-grey evening. Level sensors around the hamlet complex had already brought some lights on automatically, and the generator hum was audible over the fresh wind and the spatter of rain falling on the plastic slope of the walkway roofing. Preben joined them from the other direction.
"I found a radio rig," said Preben, "but I can't raise anyone."
"Forget that," said Bigmouse. "Listen."
They listened.
"I don't hear anything," said Preben.
Falk did. He heard the voices, like a backmasked audio track. He didn't say anything.
"There," said Bigmouse, raising a hand.
Very faint, in the distance. Over aways, in the broad belt of field systems between the hamlet and the fuelling depot. The low-lying area was little more than a dark blue shadow in the failing light.
"You hear that?" asked Bigmouse quietly.
Gunfire, a faraway rattle.
Bigmouse and Preben both trained their glares. Falk thought he saw tiny yellow and white sparks dancing out in the murk of the fields. He remembered the glares he had retrieved from the boomer. He pulled them off the shirt neck and put them on, his hands cumbersome and fat-fingered. It took a moment for the glares to react to body heat and wake, and another few seconds for him to blink away the clutter left behind by the previous user. It was difficult. Difficult because of the state he was in, difficult because he was used to the simple functions of civilian-model glares, not the complex options of Milgrade sets. Bloom had known how to manage it. There was so much eye junk: stored files, snaps, target playbacks.
He cleared it at last and keyed in the low-light enhancer and zoom.
There was a firefight ripping through the field system. He could peg hard-round bursts and pipe fire. It was hard to resolve clear contacts, but the SOMD viewer protocols were flagging the aura codes of friendlies.
"They're taking some," said Preben. "Being pushed this way."
"We have to get down there," said Bigmouse.
"Why?" asked Falk. They turned to look at him.
"Are you fucking serious?" asked Preben.
"What good would we do?"
"We could come in across the top there," said Preben, pointing. "Give them some cover fire. Let them know that the compound is clean and, let's face it, more defendable than a fucking field."
Falk swallowed.
"Fuck's the matter with you, Bloom?" asked Preben.
"This is the Hard Place," said Bigmouse.
"Yeah, the Hard Place," Preben agreed. "This is why we're here, this shit. And pardon me, but aren't you supposed to be Mr In Charge? Aren't you supposed to know what the fuck we're supposed to be about?"
"I didn't mean it like that," said Falk.
"Really?" Preben replied. "I didn't mean fuck you like that, but fuck you, Bloom." He looked at Bigmouse. "Let's go."
Bigmouse hesitated, his eyes on Falk.
"Yeah," said Falk, nodding. "Yeah, let's go."
They came out of the covered walkway into the yard and the rain. The gunfire was louder now. Hip burning, legs stiff, Falk waddled behind the others, trying to keep up. Preben was prepping his M3A. Bigmouse had unslung the thumper. Falk remembered the PDW in his holster.
"I need spares," he said. "I need spares. I'm almost out."
Preben ignored him. Bigmouse reached into a thigh pouch and produced two stripmags.
They approached the edge of the hamlet compound and followed an embankment that formed the north-western end of the vast hortiplex zone. There were walkboard lanes and accessways laid across the mud, and Falk saw some pipework sections of the giant irrigation grid that overlaid the field system and watered its channels and beds in the hot season. Some field lots were dense and in need of clearing. Others were bare and fallow, or caged with growing frames. Towards the central part of the acreage there were long rows of polytunnels and crop shelters, along with a cluster of refab storage huts. Bursts of gunfire were backlighting the crop rows and growing frames half a mile away.
"That's a Koba," said Preben, listening. "That's a
damn Koba on auto."
"What do we do?" asked Bigmouse. He kept pursing his lips to blot the nervous sweat collecting on his philtrum, a stress habit.
"Come in around the top here, lay down some interference," said Preben. He started down the short flight of refab steps from the embankment onto the walkboards.
"Wait," said Falk, "wait."
"What?" Preben looked back up at him.
"We'll be coming up on the back of them," Falk began. "On the back of our own, I mean. They're falling back, on the run. How will they…"
