by Dan Abnett
"Of course you have," she smiled. It was the friendly, reassuring smile he'd seen via hi-res boxes a million times.
"They've arranged some visits for me. I saw some SOMD desker." He brushed his palms together, lit up the tiny screen of his celf and opened the document Fanciman had posted him.
"Two days' time, a look at Mitre Sands, then a visit to Marblehead." He showed her the celf's little display in the cup of his hand.
Cleesh pursed her lips and wobbled her head from side to side.
"What?" he asked.
"That'll just be handled PR stuff. Mitre Sands is a pretend camp they use to show everyone."
"It's not pretend."
Cleesh was drinking a tall glass of NoCal-Cola. She turned the glass by the rim with her thumb and fingers like she was cracking a safe.
"Okay, but it's a stores dump, dressed up to make people feel like they're visiting something authentic. Marblehead, that was hot, just not any more. It's tourism, Falk. They'll show you a wall with hard-round holes in it. They show it to everyone. Four days' time, you'll be sitting here telling me how they showed you the wall with the hard-round holes in it."
"That's always how it works," he replied. "You follow their tours around at the beginning while you find your feet, then you give the guide the slip. You know that."
"Tougher here," she said. "Freeking® tough."
"You've come here to report?"
"Yeah. Makes a change. I thought, if Falk can do it, how hard can it be? They're not letting anyone close to the good stuff. There's a lot of people doing a lot of graft on the down low to get access."
"A lot of people including you?"
"But of course."
"Have you got something, Cleesh?"
She gave him her stern look.
"I've been here three months, Falk. I've worked something out and it could be good. It's almost in the bag. I might share it with you, except you'll probably be here three minutes and get something better."
"Come on, Cleesh."
"Be patient. Work your magic. What I've got isn't guaranteed or anything. And if it boils over, it could get me rescinded forever."
"It's that dodgy?"
She shrugged. "I will spend the rest of my years teaching elementary ling to grade school settlementeers. Or in jail."
"Give me something," he said. "What do you know? Is the Bloc really involved in this, or is it just a corporate shooting match?"
She dropped her voice and leaned forward.
"It might actually be the Bloc this time, Falk," she said.
TWO
He was a good boy. He stayed in Shaverton for the next two days, and didn't step off. He walked boulevards that were so prosaically planned their designer's lack of imagination was as plain as the rows of palm-effect trees. He drank iced tea and NoCal-Cola under the glare shades of terrace diners, and watched the flitters and bugs droning through the sunlight. The biggest bugs were known as blurds. They were about the size of sparrows, and extremely common. They fluttered about like delicate pieces of folded paper engineering.
On the second day, he had lunch with Cleesh at a ProFood outlet on the north end of the Cape road. They sat near a big plastic statue of Booster Rooster. She brought a couple of people with her: a woman called Sylvane who was a stringer from NetWorth, and a nondescript man that Cleesh claimed worked for SO Logistics. Falk wondered if the man was her contact, and tried to open him up a little, but he was singularly dull and unforthcoming, and spent most of the time talking to Sylvane about import tariffs.
"You know they named Seventy-Seven?" Cleesh asked Falk.
"Officially? I hadn't heard that."
"Yup. They called it Fronteria."
"That makes it what? A settlement? A full state?"
"A full state."
"Wow."
"One hundred and thirteenth state of the Union," she said.
"It'll always be Seventy-Seven to me," he said. "Who the fuck thought of Fronteria?"
"I know," she agreed, "it's a freeking® awful name, right?"
"What's with this 'freeking' thing?" he asked, putting down his wrap.
"Sponsored expletive," said Sylvane.
"It's what?"
Sylvane was good-looking enough, but it was cameraready attractive. There was no depth to her appeal. It was all shopped and cosmetic.
"The SO wants to control bad language on all broadcasts," Sylvane said, "especially if stuff is going to the US networks free-feed. They were going to patch in a bleepmask to cover any cussing."
"Then NoCal-Cola stepped up and offered to sponsor an expletive for use in the zone," said Cleesh. "Freek®. Like in NoCal Freek®, the lime-flavoured hi-caff one. Didn't they offer to patch you when you got here?"
"No," said Falk.
"I told you he was special," Cleesh said to the others.
"They actually plugged it into you?" Falk asked, uneasy.
"Ling patch," said Cleesh. "It's a permit requirement for anyone from Associated or the indies. Keeping it clean across the networks."
"That's how you're making that little sound at the end of the word?" Falk asked.
"It's freeking® amazing, isn't it?" said Cleesh, doing it deliberately, with relish. "I spent the first few days swearing my freeking® ass off, and I can't say freek® all except the sponsored word."
"None of you can actually curse any more?" Falk asked, laughing.
"Nope," Cleesh replied. Sylvane shook her head.
"Say fuck!" he demanded.
"Freek®!" said Cleesh.
"I don't want to," said Sylvane.
"No one patched me," said the man from Logistics. "I think harsh language is the mark of a limited imagination."
"Screw that," said Falk. "Whatever happened to free speech?"
"This is free speech," said Cleesh. "I didn't have to pay for the patch."
"I meant your constitutional right as a citizen of the United Status," said Falk.
"That's what I'm freeking® talking about, baby," she said.
On the morning of his first arranged tour, he was required to report to the depot at Camp Lasky on Shaverton's south shore two hours before dawn. He got transport down and arrived in good time, but he felt like crap. He couldn't sync to the day/night cycle. Lag had got him. He was wide awake in the middle of the night, and hungry for something he couldn't specifically identify. He had spent too much of the previous evening sinking Scotch-effect at the GEO bar in an attempt to feel drowsy while trying to talk Sylvane into bed. The latter was a purely academic exercise. He didn't especially want to sleep with her. He wanted to sleep with somebody. He wasn't that fussy. It was part of his hunger. He let her say the no he was expecting, and told himself it was useful sparring to get himself back in the ring.
Wake-up felt disgustingly early. Falk felt as though someone had folded the night in half. He'd managed to catch about half an hour's sleep in the end, and his head was raw from too much Scotch-effect. It never got much better, despite some pills and a bottle of water.
The transport dropped him and two other correspondents at the gate, under the blue-white floods. Blurds were battering themselves insensible against the mesh covers on the lamps.
The other two correspondents looked refreshed and well equipped. He felt shoddy and rough. He wondered if they could smell his breath. Fuck them if they could.
Two SOMD shaveheads in tundra-pattern kit checked their credentials and let them in through the barrier to a waiting area beside the loading docks. A female warrant officer called Tedders came to find them. She checked their credentials again, and made them bag their celf plugs and any other transmitting devices. The poly bags, labelled and signed for, went into lockers.
"You're going to be embedded for the sweep tour from Mitre Sands," she said. "We can't have an unsecured live signal coming off any of you." One of the other two produced a pen tablet and asked her if that was okay. She spent a moment checking it over. She was small and robust, with sleeves folded up to her elbow
s and her hair in a tight bun as small and hard as a grenade.
"How are you today, sir?" she asked when it was Falk's turn to be swept.
"I'm wealthy, thank you," he replied. He got his game face on, notched up the charm.
"Good to hear," she said. There was a look in her eyes, the way she regarded him, that suggested he was specialhandling cargo she'd had notice of.
"You've been told to expect me, haven't you?" he asked.
"I do my job, sir. I read my presearch. I see I'm going to be hosting a guy who's got press awards over his fireplace, I take it seriously."
"I don't bite," he said.
"I don't get bitten," she replied. Her smile was firm, non-negotiable. Then her expression changed slightly, became more agreeable. "Sit out the debrief if you like. I'm sure we won't be telling the likes of you anything new."
"The likes of me would like to hear it anyway," he said. "It's part of the embedding experience. Besides, I don't want them resenting me for getting special treatment."
He nodded his head in the direction of the other two correspondents.
"Okay then," Tedders said.
Four other agency reps had already assembled in the office space behind the waiting area. Like the two who'd come in with Falk, they looked packet-fresh and eager. He wanted tea, maybe some variety of baked goods, and twenty minutes by himself in a clean latrine. He felt like an old, notorious uncle who'd turned up at a wedding.
"Major Selton," Tedders announced. Selton stepped up, fronting the room. She was a she too, a long-wheelbase Amazon compared to the portable, compact Tedders. Her fatigues had creases that could draw blood. Her hair was a black lawn, mown short. The overhead lights, unflatteringly hard, glinted off the digital brooch at her throat.
"Welcome to Lasky," she said, "I hope you're all good and wealthy this morning. The SOMD wants to make your visit comfortable and safe, but I want to make sure you've all signed your permission waivers. My colleague, Warrant Officer Tedders, will have been through the prechecks, but I want to stress again that if you're carrying anything that transmits, you need to turn it in now. All our connections need to be secure. If you don't know, if you're uncertain, be safe and ask."
She moved closer to the large wall box, and the proximity of her brooch woke it up. A test pattern colour card came up first, then the SOMD crest logo against a blue background. She was still talking.
"Settlement Eighty-Six was first developed one hundred ten years ago during the Second Expansion. It has always been a high-productivity location, with specialisms that include agriculture, mineral sourcing, bulk manufacture and orbital assembly. Notable in-system resources include Eighty-Six's second moon, 86/b, locally known as 'Fred'. Page three of your packs. Fred has the third highest concentration of extro-transition elements in settled territory."
The wall box opened a complex, rotating plan of EightySix and the mechanism of the stellar system that supported it. Fred was highlighted.
"Forty-four years ago," Selton continued, "the Settlement Office formally declared all Northern Territories of Eighty-Six as the jurisdiction of the United Status, acknowledging the US's claims of sustained investment in, and support of, the Northern Territory settlements. This was ratified two years later. Nineteen small territorial parcels in the southern and subpolar zones remain outside United Status dominion. Seven are independent commercial outsearch stations. The others are agricultural fiefs of the Central Bloc."
Topographs and geopolitical sat-maps of Eighty-Six rolled across the wall box, with little hot, bright datamarkers appearing and disappearing very fast, each one shooting a tag spear down to some surface detail before it vanished. Selton slowed the map rotation with a hand stroke.
"The Northern Territories appealed for full statehood a decade ago. We're in work with the usual long, slow programme of discovery and interest-conflict assessment. The SO has supported the claim, and expects that EightySix will be approved for full state status within five years."
"Presumably unless this war gets in the way?" asked a correspondent in the front row.
Oooh! Don't interrupt her! Falk winced. And don't say war!
Selton didn't miss a beat. She looked at the correspondent, a girl in a puffy, green litex hiking jacket, and fired off a ground-to-air laser-led public relations smile. Falk felt the girl incinerate.
"The situation here on Eighty-Six may force a revision of that estimate," Selton said smoothly. "It does not, however, have direct relevance to the pending statehood process."
"But surely–" the girl continued.
Fuck me, learn to drop it! Falk thought. In God's name, stop baiting her!
He stuck his hand up.
"That will make Eighty-Six the what?" he asked. "The one hundred and fourteenth state of the Union?"
"One-fourteen or one-fifteen," Selton replied, acknowledging him with an agreeable smile. "It depends whether Sixty-Six fast-tracks its statehood legislation or not."
"What will Eighty-Six be called?" Falk asked.
"We don't know. That hasn't yet been decided."
"But formal naming usually accompanies the declaration of statehood."
"Of course. I mean, we're not in the loop. I believe some names are being audience-tested for a shortlist. That's not my bailiwick. You'd have to ask the SO direct."
"Thanks," said Falk, and pretended to make a note. The girl in the green hiker definitely owed him big for easing the heat off her.
"We expect to be out for about fourteen hours today. The weather's looking clear along the seaboard, so we should make good time into the mountain zone. We transfer from hopter to ground roller for the last leg. I'm going to buddy each one of you up with a member of the sweep unit. You can ask them questions, but you will, and I stress will, follow their instructions at all times. This is a potential firezone, so there is a present danger of death. Follow instructions. Do not deviate. We do not expect trouble, but if trouble starts, we cannot have you making it worse."
"Don't mention it," Falk said.
The girl in the green hiker looked at him.
"Mention what?" she asked.
"Me taking that bullet for you."
"What are you talking about?" she asked. She clearly wasn't amused or impressed. Irritation creases bunched at the bridge of her nose.
They were outside, doing up their jackets and spraying on Insect-Aside, waiting for the unit. The sun was coming up.
"Selton was going to scorch you," said Falk.
"I asked a legitimate question," the girl replied.
"That was what it was, was it?" He laughed.
"Who the fuck are you?" she asked.
"Falk," he said.
"I know what the fuck I'm doing, Falk," she said.
"How many days of subtlety school did you miss, growing up?" he asked.
"Fuck!" she said, backing away. "I don't know what this is. Are you coming on to me? You're being weird."
She walked away.
"Smooth," said Tedders. She was standing right there beside him.
"Some people don't know when you're doing them a favour," he said.
"I hear you," said Tedders.
"Who is she?" he asked. She consulted her celf.
"Noma Berlin. Affiliated Dispersal. Says she's got a short-term contract with Data-Scatter."
"Rookie," he murmured.
"She's young, she'll learn," said Tedders.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Falk asked.
"The 'she'll learn' part?" asked Tedders. "Or the 'she's young' part?"
He shook his head like it was all a joke and he didn't care. The compact, portable smile didn't leave Tedders' lips.
"Are you coming with us, Tedders?" he asked.
"Today?" she replied. "No. Thank fuck."
Selton called everyone to order. The rising sun was already notching the heat up, and the air was swirling with tiny bugs. She ran through a few more pointers, took a question or two and then led them across to the hangars.
&nb
sp; In the interval since the brief, she'd strapped on body armour plates and a torso harness the colour of putty. There was some kind of short-action sidearm holsterpacked on her left hip.
The hangars were vast, airy spaces out of the heat. A row of big, matt-grey transport hopters sat facing the north doors. C440s, bleeding-edge machines, intended to impress. The blades of their turbofans were neatly folded like the buds of photonastic flowers waiting for the sun.
Beside each hopter, groups of SOMD servicemen were suiting up from kit sets laid out on the deck in identical patterns. They were all big guys, even the ones that were girls. They wore the same style tundra-pattern field dress and armour harness rigs as Selton. They were intimidatingly clean and precise. Each kit layout included a principal weapon, reverentially resting on a ground sheet. The most common issue was the heavy, black M3A Hardlaser (beam) Emitter, known as the pipe or piper, though some mission specialists carried more compact PAP 20s loading 2mil SOMD Standard Caseless in stock-lock clips. Falk could smell gun oil and anti-dust lube.
