by Dan Abnett
Simple. It went wherever they were going.
Tal had called it a mining road. It ran close to Seberg's property, his luxury Casman-style home. It ran right up through the area where all of his four hundred parcel bids had been made. All of the four hundred that the SO had yanked from him with a Strategic Significance Order. This half-made road, both literally and symbolically, marked how far Grayson Seberg's mining empire had got before politics had stopped it dead.
Falk adjusted his glares, and played back the clip. He saw the pair as Smitts had seen them, framed against the bleak white daylight of the open boomer hatch. He watched the mouth of the girl who had shot him, the mouth of the man Tal had known and despised. He heard their exchange with a mind now patched for Bloc national Russian.
"They don't know anything," the girl said, tired, dissatisfied. "They don't even know what they're here for."
"Then we need to secure it fast before they find their asses with both hands," the big man replied. He grinned. "Or maybe find fucking Grayson and ask him, eh?"
She said, "He can choke in hell. Heligo. Heligo is all we need."
"Yes, but which number is it? You find that out?"
"Not yet," she snapped. "Fuck him for using numeric codes. Shit!"
They were both looking at Smitts suddenly, rising out of their crouched stances.
"Fucker's still alive–"
End of playback.
Falk played it again. He played it again.
Heligo is all we need. Fuck him for using numeric codes.
Falk took a few deep breaths. He accessed the snap file, and went back through the folder of images he'd taken with the glares. He'd shot a lot of maps at the Eyeburn Slope registry, a lot of them. The one they'd been using had been the most local, a large scale area map, slap bang on the woodland where Pika-don had finished up. Others were older, more general, larger range, smaller scale, records of mineralogical scans, humidity, floodplain. They were records of different surveys at different times, all recording different aspects. SO databases would compile them and form a composite of all the detailing.
He zoomed out, started studying the edges of the maps for tag marks or identifiers. Some were missing. Some were handwritten on dotted blue lines. Some were serial stampprinted by a process recorder. Falk had managed to crop some of them out of his shots altogether.
He found a general view of the highland area above Eyeburn Junction. Small scale, very little detail, just contour shaping. On the dotted blue line there was a stamp, a number followed by Ocean Exp. The centre of the mapped area, a vast region, was subdivided into vaguely rectangular sectors, all packed in close together, like wedges, like teeth, their precise outlines and structures altering depending on the underlying formation of the land. Each sector was individually numbered. The numbering started just below twenty-five thousand two hundred and went up to just past twenty-five thousand six hundred, sequential.
Fuck him for using numeric codes.
Land parcels. Something of the order of four hundred of them, consecutively numbered. Seberg's bids. The foundation of Ocean Exploratory's mining enterprise. SO claim rules required all land packets to be filed by a registry number. But a man, an ambitious man, who was already on the ground and trying to open things up, he'd give places names. He'd talk about them to his men and his friends, and to prospective partners, in terms of names. He wouldn't fuck around with numbers except on official forms.
What names had he given to those places? Which parcel of land had Grayson Seberg called Heligo?
• • •
They drove on for another hour, climbing further into the immense hills. Falk kept leaning out of the cab window and looking back to see if there were any signs of pursuit. Three times he made Tal stop and turn off the engine so they could listen for the noise of rotors or ground vehicle engines. All they heard was the sound of the rain, and the distant booming of the clash in the valley.
On the second stop, Falk persuaded Tal to switch out and let Valdes drive for a while. She was reluctant to relinquish the wheel, but he explained how he wanted her to rest so she could be fresh for another stint, seeing as how she was the best driver.
She agreed, but insisted on riding in the cab with them, perched on the cab seat between Valdes and Falk. Falk kept an eye on the dashboard display, but the SObild ran on a fusion engine, and had decent legs left in it.
They had just followed the track over a hump of an escarpment when Valdes threw the anchors out and reversed hard. As Valdes brought the truck back, with Preben and Rash calling out from the back to find out what the fuck was going on, Falk saw what Valdes had seen. A spur off the trackway to their left, a turning.
"Hold on," Falk said.
He hoisted the M3 and jumped out. Preben got down from the back and ran to join him.
With the truck waiting at the mouth of the spur, engine rattling, they walked down the short track side by side, boots munching on the wet gritstone.
In the thick undergrowth on either side of the track, they could see fencing, and piles of old, waterlogged fibreplak posts. They reached a gate, a heavy chainlink frame big enough to open for a bulk transport.
The gate was held shut by swathes of padlocked chain. Weeds were growing up between the gate posts, and covering the yard inside the fence like fine grey down. Creepers had braided with the chain shackles. No one had opened up the site for at least six months.
Falk and Preben peered through the link into the compound beyond. There were two refabs, and a row of demountables, along with an old Smartkart that had been stripped down on blocks, its transmission and engine extracted and left to rust on the ground beside it, like an automotive autopsy. Rust also adorned the bindings of the refabs, and the windward faces of the demountables were verdigrised. The forest growth, driven back and stunted by weed killer when the ground was cleared, was staging a comeback. It was encroaching from all sides, reconquering a site that had been temporarily opened for preliminary geological testing.
Falk wandered the length of the gate to the fence.
"You limping?" Preben asked.
Falk had forgotten the hit. He wasn't really thinking about the pain in his hip, just living with it. He glanced down and saw how the clothing below the chewed-off blate was stiff and black with dried blood. He lifted it, saw a crusted black furrow in the flesh of his hip that looked like a thick smear of caviar. The skin around it was hot and bruised. As he touched it, blood oozed out of the wound, and pain stuck fingers in his pelvis.
"We should–" Preben began to say.
Falk shook his head and dropped the hem.
"It'll keep," he said. He'd just seen the sign. It was secured to the gatepost, high up, a large placard printed on luminous ply. The thriving branches of a snowgum had partly obscured it.
It read OE 25208.
"What's that?" asked Preben.
Falk didn't answer him. He started walking back towards the waiting truck.
"Should we stay here?" Preben asked, running to catch up.
"Not here," said Falk.
"But it's got buildings. We could dig in."
"No. We go further."
"Why?"
"Because pretty much nowhere is safe right now," said Falk. "We're better off moving. Better still, we'll be safer if we have something valuable."
"Like?" asked Preben.
"Like knowing what this is all about," Falk replied. "People might not be so inclined to kill us if we know that."
He kept walking, heading for the right-hand end of the mouth of the spur.
"It's easy to tell you've been shot in the head, you know that?" Preben shouted after him.
Coming up this hill, Falk thought. Coming up this hill, up this track, driving a truck. A transport. Bringing in supplies. Valdes had overshot. Of course he had. You couldn't see the sign on the gate from the track. All Valdes had seen was the turning, after he'd passed it.
Falk waded into the undergrowth, parting the hillthorn and tangle. You'd
put a sign on the outside corner, where a driver could see it from the bend, before he reached the spur. Falk rummaged in the tanglevine. Small blurds flew up in his face out of the wet, peaty cavity. He caught a flash of something, of more luminous ply designed to catch and reflect headlamp beams.
The board had gone over and been enveloped by undergrowth. It was several years old, much older than the gate and the fencing. Damp had rotted out its stump and felled it into the loam, but it was still easy to read what it said.
EUCHRE EXPLORATORY SITE.
Euchre was 25208. When men named things, they did it to make them easy to remember. The moon was called Fred, for fuck's sake.
Sequences became easy when you named them in alphabetical order.
THIRTY
Thirty more miles and three side spurs on, they had cleared the forest cover and slogged up into the proper foothills, surrounded by crags and dark red earth, the bulk of the hills mist-shrouded above them.
They had found their way towards dawn too. The sun was rising, vaguely surfacing out of a grey soup sky, rain falling loose and intermittent from puffy, unobliging clouds. Below and to the west, what seemed like a spinrad passage away, the burning depot glowed like a hazard beacon, and put an inverted cone of black smoke into the air that filled the sky from side to side at high altitude.
They had stopped to take turns at the wheel several times during the night, sometimes halting to stretch their legs and walk about too. On clear stretches above the treeline, they had got out of the SObild and watched the depot fire burning in the pre-dawn gloom, and the twinkling stars of aircraft chasing and hunting across the wide valley and coast plain.
After Euchre, the next two site spurs had been minimal. They had almost missed one of them entirely. It had been neglected, or never developed in the first place, and the undergrowth was so heavy that there was barely a trace of a track. There had been no staked sign, just a roadside marker that Falk had been obliged to dismount to locate.
The second had been a turning to the right of the main track, leading to a clearing that had grown back with abundant tangletree. A small plot, there had once been three demountables there, but two had gone, leaving only their foot blocks, and the sole survivor was a gutted shell. There was no fence, no gate, no sign, no notice, but stencilled on the flaking side of the remaining demountable was the name Griseld.
Industry had been more extensive at 25211.
The approach was along a gorge in the steep hillside, a throat blast-widened and then shored up using wire gabions of blasting rubble and shot rock. The earth and stone up here were gritty and red, and permitted only the most hardy weeds any purchase. The track between the basket embankments had been marked by tractor tyres and caterpillar treads. The lip of the mighty caldera loomed over the surrounding cliffs like the buttress of Olympus.
The gorge opened out into a vast site of red cliffs and spoil heaps. Work had taken place to commence a series of open quarries. They reminded Falk of the industry he had seen outside Marblehead. The quarry pits were step-sided, cut by blade excavators and h-beam cutters. On the flat inside the gate were a series of yards, a complex of refabs and squat, precast and cinderblock buildings. There were also machines, big bulk excavators and dump trucks, all lined up and lagged down under vast coloured sheets of industrial litex. It had cost a lot of time and money to ship the equipment up there. Seberg hadn't realised how far he was jumping the gun. When the SO dropped their desist order on him, he had made his material secure, hoping to come back and restart work once a legal fight was done. Cheaper than moving bulk machines off a mountain.
Falk found this evidence of Seberg's stubbornness and entrepreneurial optimism almost touching. The man'd had no idea, no idea what sort of fight he was actually going to see.
Parcel 25211 had clearly been a much more promising proposition than other Eyeburn bids.
A heavy chainlink gateway and fence blocked the approach from the gorge, shutting off its gabioned throat before the space widened into the first yard.
Preben was driving. He pulled up, facing the resolutely shut gateway.
"Here?" he asked.
"Yes," said Falk. He'd been dozing for a while, but came sharply awake as they swung off the track. It was cold. He chafed his hands.
"Why here?" asked Preben.
"Look at it," said Falk.
"So? It's a bigger site. So what?"
Falk got out and walked to the gates. Tal came with him, and so did Rash. Falk wondered how much he should tell Rash.
"Facilities look better here than anywhere else," he said. "We all need to stop and rest."
Rash shrugged.
"Just a few hours," said Falk. "Eat, sleep, fuel up the truck. Then we can head on over the range, maybe make for Furlow Pits."
"That's a couple or three days, if the road's useable," said Rash.
"So we'll need decent rest."
Rash stared at him.
"There's other stuff, isn't there?" he asked. "I can smell it on you. You're looking for something."
"We're all looking for something, Rash," said Falk, smiling Bloom's smile.
Rash pointed back down the gorge towards the black smoke in the distant sky.
"You see back there, back there where the depot is on fire?" he asked.
"Yes," said Falk.
"Everything stopped being funny around about there. If you know something, you tell me. You fucking tell me."
"Okay," said Falk. "Lets get inside, and I'll tell you what I think."
Rash stuck out his chin, thought about it, then sniffed and turned to look at the gate. He held his hand out. Falk hesitated, then passed over his M3.
Rash aimed the piper at the main padlock and fired. A loud bang echoed along the gorge. Smoke streamed off the disintegrated lock into the wind. Rash handed the piper back, and then gingerly pulled the broken chain away. Fused ends were glowing red-hot. So were the ends of the sundered links in the mesh behind it.
Rash put his shoulder into the right-hand gate and dragged it across the mud. Falk and Tal swung the other half. Preben drove the SObild through the gap, and they pulled the gates together again behind it.
The cavity of the quarry site was attractive to the wind. It knifed across the yards, rattled the windows of the refabs, and agitated the tarps covering the big machines. All the puddles in the yard quivered as though they were being vibrated from below.
The wind had actually managed to pull the litex sheeting off one of the heavy dump trucks, and had repositioned it across a nearby refab like a shroud, like a discarded surgical mask.
They parked the SObild behind a storeblock, checked around and then broke into one of the main refabs. It was dark and cold, bone-cold, and smelled of damp. The wind whined through the roofing and around the window fittings. They found two offices, a kitchen, a locker room, a bedroom with bunks. Rash and Preben carried Bigmouse in and got him onto one of the bunks. Valdes went around lighting the small fusion heaters, and then looked to see if he could conjure a light source.
"Generator's in the next block over," he said. "I'll go look."
The water that issued from the taps was pale green and smelled of ponds. Falk wasn't confident that boiling it would be any help. Tal and Lenka found a cupboard and unearthed a stack of old biscuit boxes containing self-heat cans with ProFood labels, and a crate of NoCal-Cola bottles. They opened some, drank, said nothing. The refab lights came on, just a glimmer, then full power.
"Way to go, Valdes," said Rash, toasting with his bottle.
"Eat," said Falk. "We eat."
They all pulled cans off the shelf and strip-heated them. The can labels all showed Rooster Booster giving a cheery wave of the wing. Falk had macaroni cheese-effect. He was on his second can when Valdes returned.
"You started without me, man," he said.
"There's plenty," said Falk.
"Plenty," agreed Tal in English, and laughed. Falk smiled.
Heat began to creep into the block, t
hough surfaces still felt damp. Having food in his belly helped a lot. The cola made him belch, but he opened a second bottle anyway. This one tasted of lime, quite foul. He looked at the label. NoCal Freek®. He smiled.
He began to sort through the offices. It was just junk. What paperwork had been left behind was simple excavation proposals and sheets of supply costings, payroll, worksheets. He found a clamp folder stuffed with geo reports and began to go through it. The pages were cold. It was lists of the composition densities of ores extracted from samples. The lists were dated. The oldest was twelve years, the newest two. Some bore a headstrap logo. Ocean Exploratory company notepaper.
