TWELVE

Cicero, the sergeant, was giving them the scoop. They were cutting down through rain-fat ribbons of morning cloud, broad and flat, and the airframe was bucking. His LEAF locked tight as he looped his left hand through a wall strap. He couldn't hear its purr because of the rotor noise, and because he was ear-plugged into the sergeant's talkthrough. They'd just done their Mil-secure link check. There was no central display for the brief. Cicero was routing the visuals to their glares, and marking things out via his celf using a stylus.

He volunteered a brief and unnecessary spiel about the "paramilitary threat", which was too vague to be of use to anyone, but sharp-edged enough to paint the opposition firmly as the black hats. Two, maybe three times he used the word terrorist, a piece of vocabulary that the SO, for the most part, had strenuously avoided in all to-media statements and interviews. It wasn't that the word was sensitivity-adverse per se, just that it was incendiary. It was the next gear up. If they held it back, it gave them a rhetoric of mass destruction they could resort to later.

It was in play now, simply to get the blood up. The SO had okayed the word for use in field briefings. It was too loaded for media use, but it juiced the fire teams with a sense of righteousness.

"Gunbelt Highway," said Cicero, punching the next image to their glares. Orbital relief, real time, real colour. The highway was the continental coast road. Winding along the landmass shelf for two thousand miles, around the buttresses of headland and throats of inlet, it linked Shaverton to Antrim by way of half-a-dozen junction bergs. It was a long, hard route, even in the air-con module of a bulk roadliner. Its looped line was intersected by thousands of dead creeks, run-off slots spoking down from the rim of the upland caldera, dry for years on end. From the air, from orbital vis, it resembled ammo linked into the belt-feed of a crew-served weapon.

"Eyeburn Hill Junction is a weather station," said Cicero, loading the next image. "There's a fuelling depot, oceanic observatory and a horticultural fac. Select multiview to walk yourself around. Do it. Even you, Valdes."

"Eyeburn went dead-air two nights ago, though this could be nothing," Cicero continued, "Several of the coast towns have been having uplink problems in the last month."

The three Boreals had broken from the pack together about five minutes earlier. He could just see Juliet and Hotel through the sliced cloud, in line astern, portside.

He sat uneasily, crouched down, his h-beam in a weathercase on the deck beside him. Everything was vibrating from the shock-rock of the ride. His skin was tingling from the quiver, organs sloshing with each air-pocket lurch.

Inside, a strange stillness. Taut, like something was stretched tight and rigid to the limits of its give. He felt the other him pulling against him, like an anti-him, equal and opposite, blocking his every urge, his every desire, negating his every move. He couldn't speak, and when he did speak, it didn't feel like it was his voice. It felt post-ictal, dismaying. It felt like he was wearing clothes the wrong size. It felt like the sudden onset of body dysmorphia.

If this is you, deal with it. Stop it. Relax or something. If this is the process, then we are going to have to pull the plug, because I can't handle this feeling.

  "I can do that, sergeant. Kilo One can do that."
  "You certain?"
  "Certain as, sergeant."
  Cicero let it hang. He kept his eyes on him.
  "You okay there, Bloom?"
  "I'm good, sergeant. We're good."
  "Yeah?"
  "We're wealthy. We're golden."

Looking down on the continental rim, it looked like a rutted mud track seen from the underside of a roller. The caldera bit deep like a pothole, its belly full of water. Fragments of water lay in other ruts and furrows, like slivers of glass, catching the light. The terrain was a moist brown colour flecked with white, like the ganache of a coffee cake. Only the fragile wisps of clouds whipping past lent any sense of depth of scale.

Pika-don rocked. A squall hit it crosswise, rain pelting off the canopy and ports like small-arms fire. It squirmed across the glass like worms of liquid diamond.

He started to glove up. His right hand was shaking. He clamped it in his left to halt the tremor. No one had noticed. He pulled on his gloves, then unpopped the weathercase of his M3A. He stared at it. Licorice black, hefty, like an implement for heavy construction or road breaking. Adjustable stock, billet lower and trigger grip, top rail and optics cluster, power cell, vertical grip and the long pipe of the muzzle sleeve, all black oil, a dull sheen.

He felt afraid of it. Too afraid to pick it up. If he did pick it up, he was afraid he wouldn't be strong enough to carry it. To aim it.

His guys were looking at him. Kilo One. Stabler, Preben, Bigmouse. They were ready. Their expressions were stone, unreadable, but he could taste wariness. He could see someone else's face reflected in the espressoblack of their glares.

"You lead off, we'll disperse wide," he said. Close enough they wouldn't lose sight contact, wide enough that a thump round or an IED wouldn't scorch them in one hit. Jesus, that clinical? The full expectation that not all of them would make it to the first marker?

They were low now, really low, wallowing drunkenly in the cold air, churning through a crosswind. The sound of their rotors was bouncing back up at them from the valley sides. Their guts were yanking up and down like yoyos with the pitch and yaw.

The PO dragged the side hatch open. Rain exploded in like spindrift, windblown. Air, noise, the howl of the blades and the downrate. Cold too, bone-cold air, hard like a wall.

They were in the doorframe, feet braced, hanging from the over-rail by their left hands. Any and all loose cloth on their bodies was flapping, whip-cracking. Rain in the face, needles.

The PO's voice was strangled by the mic and the noise wash. The ground was zooming up, a mountain rising to greet them, a breaching leviathan ascending from the depths. Vibration was wobbling them so hard, he could barely see steadily. Below, huts, refabs, demountables, something cinderblock, weatherboarded. High ground, a track, a storehouse. Two parked tray-trucks. A forest of turbine masts, a windfarm, like robot daffodils. More refabs. Some crate-and-creates. A livestock pen.

A yard, a compound yard. Mud, coffee ganache, rutted with real wheeltracks. Puddles that were actual pothole puddles, not mountain lakes.

Wet mud dimpling, smearing out in concentric rings, planed and smoothed by the boomer's underblow. Spray pluming into mist, in a circle all around them, driven up in a ring. A rainbow as the sunlight cut the water in the air.