EIGHTEEN

He was in his mid-twenties, with short brown hair and a lean face that looked like it was used to working outdoors. He was wearing dirty, dark-hued litex weatherproofs and heavy-soled boots. Raindrops beaded him like sequins. The PAP was SOMD-issue. At the start of the day, it had been somebody else's property.

Falk knew that, a gut instinct. He absorbed all the details instantly: the look of the man, his manner, his bearing, the fact his gun was stolen, the wet-cold air smell the man brought in with him, the moment of confusion sparked by finding two men in a room he had expected to be empty.

The PAP came up fast. The only thing that slowed the man down was the fact he had two targets, one on either side of the hub. There was a nanosecond of hesitation as he made a choice of which one to hit first.

The Colt PDW was still in Bigmouse's hand, and Bigmouse was wired as tight as a hair-spring mantrap. He leapt up, sending his open eFight kit flying into the air, tools scattering, and unloaded. The burst bracketed the intruder. Two or three rounds smacked into the wall on either side of him. Three or four more went through him: sternum, shoulder, forehead, chin. The chin impact made the most mess going in. The lower part of the man's face buckled. He was already hammering backwards, slammed by the kinetic force, arms flying up, whiplash cracking his neck. His hair rippled. His eyes defocused and almost crossed, his face contorted. He hit the wall behind him, slid down it, rolled onto his side. The PAP bounced off his thighs and clonked onto the floor.

Stunned, Falk moved awkwardly and the wheelie stool skidded out from under him. He crashed sideways off the console he was wedged against, and ended up on his back. The stool overturned, castors spinning. Landing smacked the wind out of him.

"Stay down!" Bigmouse ordered. Grunting and trying to rise, Falk heard Bigmouse cross the room to the man he'd just killed. Through the kneehole under the desk, he watched Bigmouse check the man, search his pockets and pick up the PAP. Bigmouse didn't want to touch him. Falk could see his reluctance, like the man was radioactive.

The gunshots had not gone unnoticed. Someone else came running in through the doors at the other end of the room. Falk heard a shout. Under the desk, he saw Bigmouse pulling himself down into cover. From the far end of the room, another PAP lit off. It made a noise like a food processor churning something wet. The room shook with the concussion of the impacts. There was a sudden blizzard of dust and micro-debris – splinters of wood, shreds of fibre, powdered brick – from the wall and furniture around Bigmouse. Loose papers billowed into the air like blurds. A coffee mug shattered. A pen pot cracked and spun, shedding pens.

Bigmouse was pinned. He had the PAP, but he was trapped in the little box of cover provided by the metal frame desks. The unseen gunman fired again, and console screens fragmented.

Still on his back, pathetic, stricken, Falk reached out his right hand, grasping at Bigmouse, gesturing to him. It took Bigmouse a second to notice and understand. He was balled up in fear as the shots ripped in around him.

He got hold of his Colt and gave it a hard shove, sending it gliding across the hub floor on its slide like a curling stone. It travelled under the desks and finally came to rest just short of Falk, stopped by a coil of power cable.

Falk rolled over. It took two tries to raise enough momentum to turn Bloom's body, and he knocked his chin on the floor tiles on the way over. He got his fingers around the muzzle of the gun, picked it up, pulled it back. He rolled back onto his side, and put the weapon down on the floor so he could pick it up again by the grip.

With shuddering, superhuman effort, Falk got himself up on one knee under the line of the desk. He had to pull out a drawer to brace himself with his slack left hand. The LEAF locked. The snake in his belly convulsed. He used the barrel of the PDW to prop his other hand as he lifted.

Every single shot missed. The kick of the PDW was so hefty, he almost dropped it. The barrel rose and skied most of the rounds. His left leg started to give out.

At the end of the room, a man holding a PAP 20 to his cheek turned in surprise, wincing from the crack and whizz of the sudden, wild shooting. He brought the PAP around.

Bigmouse's PAP 20 nailed him to the wall. The burst exploded him, painting the wall red, stippling it with chunks of meat and fragments of bone. As the human wreckage collapsed, it left a huge cloud of blood vapour drifting in the air behind it.

There was a pervasive stink of innards that made them gag, a compost smell of meat and fat-shrouded organs exposed to the air, of burst stomach, of atomised flesh. Bigmouse had to put the PAP down to help Falk up.

They managed a messy fist bump. Bigmouse began to move him towards the door, the front exit. Falk was doing quite a good job making Bloom's body shuffle that way on its own. Black hats were going to be converging on the hub space in seconds, drawn by the exchange of fire.

"Yeah," Falk replied. Pain was reaming his hip, and his legs were burning with lactic acid. He could cheerfully settle for simply being behind something large and solid. There were precast bunkers and silos around the station yard area, plus the windfarm just down the slope. They could duck down, get their breath back and their heads together.

They exited via the corridor he and Bigmouse had originally entered by. The hatch was ajar, letting daylight in. The breeze stirred the kids' drawings amongst the seaweed on the wall liner. Hanging coats loomed against the rectangle of daylight like loitering figures. Their footsteps on the metal grille made too much noise.

They went outside, into the painful light. There was still rain in the air, and it was cold, but the sky was mustardyellow and full of fat clouds that were crinkled like cauliflower or brain tissue. Falk gulped in the cold salt air in an effort to rid his nose and throat of the reek of particulated flesh.

Bigmouse beckoned him on. PAP ready, he led the way across the mud-lake of the yard towards the hopter. As they approached, Falk could tell there was no one aboard. That was wrong, in so many ways. Aircrew did not desert their mobile in the field unless there was no other option. They certainly wouldn't have abandoned it with the ports wide open.

He came up to the boomer alongside Bigmouse. The nearest engine pod was cool but not cold. Internal standby systems were still live. There was a scalene triangle of wet on the deck inside the open side door where the rain had blown in at an angle. It had evidently stood open for a while. Bigmouse pointed. There were a number of tiny but deep dents in the cabin's metal liner. Small-arms impacts, from something fired in through the door. Little squashed lumps littered the deck: caseless rounds that had virtually flattened out hitting the liner skin. There was blood too, several arterial sprays on the wall, and a pooling patch that had run between the deck slats.

"Check the onboard comms," said Falk. Bigmouse nodded, and hoisted himself up through the hatch. Rain tapped against the boomer's port and laminates. Falk saw that the seat restraints in the pilot's position were tangled.

There was a pair of glares lying on the deck just inside the rim of the hatch. Falk had no doubt that they'd fallen off someone's face, not out of someone's pocket. He picked them up, and hooked them by one arm from the neck of his vest. Then he sat down gingerly on the step plate of the hatch to rest his hip.

None of the men were wearing SOMD kit. They were all armed. One of the men, Falk realised, was a woman. The girl. The girl who'd fallen into the inspection pit.

She opened fire from the walkboards with the PAP she was carrying. There was a little crackle of muzzle flicker, most of the sound stolen by the open hilltop. Rounds spanked off the hull beside them and flumed up angry splashes from the mud around the landing feet. Several shots chipped the forward screen, leaving little cracked stars in the ultra-dense polyglass.

Falk got down behind the side of the hull. Shots sliced the surface of the mud around him. There was a pair of unexpectedly loud bangs as rounds bounced off the engine cowling beside his head.

The three figures scattered. Falk saw Bigmouse's shots peppering the gate, the walkboards, the mud and the fence around the vegetable plot. Dirty water squirted up, and filaments of walkboarding fluttered like chaff. Parts of the fence broke. The blade-head of a toy windmill went spinning into the air.

Falk checked Bigmouse's Colt. The LED at the top of the grip told him he had eighteen rounds left in the clip. Bigmouse carried the spares. Neither of them had reloads for the PAP Bigmouse was hosing away with. It took the same 2mil round as the PDW, so they could strip out ammo from the PDW spares and refill the PAP's two-hundred-capacity box mag by hand, but that would take time to do right.

"Slow down!" Falk warned. Bigmouse was shooting at nothing. The black hats had found cover around the yellow demountables or the vegetable plot side of the station front.

The insurgents rallied. They began to return fire. The two guys had M3A pipers. Falk suddenly heard that unearthly un-noise whine again, the shrill, edge-ofhearing bark of the hardbeam. He was on the receiving end. Little, local blinks of light occurred near the demountables.

Pika-don shook hard like she'd been rammed repeatedly by a truck. One of the hardbeam shots went by the nosecone, too fast and bright to be seen, but it left a searing idiot afterimage across his retinas. Then another one punched through the boomer's hull beside him. It had come clean through the hull, across the cabin space, and out the other side. It left a fused, super-heated hole the size of a large-denomination coin. The edges glowed. There was no light, no flash, no visible raygun beam like in the sitops, just a smeared blur of heat haze, like petroleum jelly on glass.

A second later, it happened again. Another bodyblow to the hopter, another through-and-through superhot hole. Falk remembered the fucktard from thInc, Jeanot, blahblahing on about the boombird's hull armour during the ride to Mitre Sands. Dermetic-weave six-ply fuselage sheathing, a laminate construct designed to survive hardbeam damage through a combination of ablation, dissipation and cushioning. There were layers of reflective bead silicates between the armour skins, alternating with energy-soaking graphene membranes. It was pretty good at stopping the output of a man-portable pipe weapon. It certainly had a good chance of stopping a guy with an M3A from knocking a moving Boreal out of the sky.

A shot went through the front canopy, gouging a huge molten tear out of the curved and tinted polyglass. The tint contained a polarising anti-laser treatment, but it was useless at close range. The glass bubbled and glistened like honey. Bigmouse swore and ducked down tighter.

There was a loud bang from underneath the hopter, and another smear of heat haze light. A pipe beam had struck and destroyed the forward pilot's side gear. There was a sharp smell of burning metal and oil. Debris blew out and the hopter gently sagged to one side, nose dipping, as the landing gear assembly collapsed.

Bigmouse dropped the PAP into the mud and unslung the thumper from his backplate clamps. It was fat, black, unlovely, a 1090 MSGL Rand Dynamik grenade launcher with an eight-shooter drum. He cancelled the airburst ranging, selected strike detonation and pumped two shells at the demountables. The thumper thumped, a solid, dead noise like a carpet beater. The chunk shells smacked into the side of the nearest demountable and blew the side off in a sheet of flame and a spray of whizzing tiles and weatherboard fragments.

"Move your ass," he said. He paused to recover the PAP and they began to move away from the station as fast as Falk could go, heading across the yard, towards the slope of the hill, keeping the stricken hopter between them and the station buildings.

"Head for those refabs," Falk gasped. He was panting hard. Bigmouse had him by the arm, frogmarching him down the incline towards an overgrown fence and a group of battered crate-and-creates behind the whup-whupwhupping windfarm.

Preben stood up behind the overgrown fence ahead of them. He rose like a pop-up target on the range. He had his M3A against his cheek, aimed up the slope.