TWENTY-NINE

 
 

With what appeared to Falk to be a great deal more luck than judgement, Tal fitted them between the trees.

  Snowgums and bleakwoods, some trunks a yard across, appeared like surprises in the short, bright frame of the SObild's headlights, and Tal avoided every one of them. They took glancing blows off several, impacts hard enough to crumple bodywork and jolt everybody viciously. Some of the turns she made to avoid trees were so radical, Falk felt as though he would be thrown out of the cab. He braced for the moment when they'd come upon two trees that were too close together to drive between.

  "Slower! Slower!" he yelled. He was feeling very odd. His hip hurt like a bastard. The thrashing of the engine, the thump of every bounce and the impact cracks and scrapes of branches and stout scrub made it impossible to hear if they were still being shot at. Whatever the case, they would have to stop before long. The woods were only going to get thicker. They'd have to ditch the truck, maybe find a place to lie low. It was hard to think what to do. It was hard to clear his head. He felt like he was clenched, everything clenched.

  "Can't see a damn thing!" Tal complained, jerking the wheel brutally.

  He realised what she meant. The headlamps were bright, but their field only illuminated the immediate ground. Tree trunks, blindingly white, loomed with little warning. The swirling blurds were worse than a midwinter snow flurry.

  He adjusted the low-light setting of his glares, took them off, and slipped them onto her face as she drove. She didn't pull away, though he could tell that, despite her intense concentration, she was confused.

  Then he leaned in and killed the headlamps.

  She made a soft, chuckling sound, delighted by the way the world ahead of her had resolved. In the green wash of the glares' view, she had depth and distance, a better perception of the tree spacing, of what had previously been coming up blind behind the immediate dazzle of trees. Her driving quickly became less feral.

  He sat back for a second, and tried to force himself to shed the tension. The feeling of being clamped as tight as a fist was almost more than he could bear.

  But the ride was too uneven. He had to hold on just to stay upright. His head swam. He was pretty sure he was about to be very sick. Images were pinned to the backs of his eyes, shocking and grisly, the two faces he'd disintegrated with gunfire, staring at him.

  He considered what a hopeless cliché he was. Fucking pathetic, soft-centred moral outrage, the squeamish sensibilities of his safe, Old Settlement lifestyle recoiling from contact with ferocious actuality. But it wasn't disgust. It wasn't shock at what he had just seen and done. Nor was it, as the journalist in him would have been eager to confess with calculated sincerity, revulsion at the glee with which he had assumed his role.

  He was experiencing an extreme adrenaline dump from the hyperstress of the firefight. It was that simple. He had gone face-to-face with men who had been prepared to kill him, and he had killed them first, and in order to navigate a path through that uncompromising state, he had taken a giant hit of adrenaline. He didn't give a fuck about the bastards he'd dismantled. It was just biochemical overload from the effort to push past normal, everyday brakes like fear and hesitation.

  Cleesh said to him, "God, Falk, are you all right?"

  "I'm wealthy," he said, so quietly, Tal couldn't hear him.

  "You're right off the scale here, Falk," Cleesh replied. "Ayoob and Underwood are panicking. It's like you had a convulsion in the tank or something."

  "I'm fine."

  "What?" asked Tal, gaze fixed on the way ahead.

  "Underwood says your brain chemistry and neural patterning are way beyond acceptable bounds," said Cleesh. "She wants to tranq you, bring you down."

  "Fuck, no," he said.

  "She says she absolutely has to, or you could stroke out and die. Just a basic stabiliser."

  "No. Leave it. I'll settle. Leave it."

  Tal took her eyes off the path for a second, glanced at him.

  "What are you saying?" she asked.

  "It's okay," he replied. He tried to show her a smile. "Just thinking aloud."

  She risked another look at him, her hands see-sawing the steering wheel. "You look sick."

  "I'm okay. Watch what you're doing."

  He could feel Cleesh there, hear her breathing.

  "Cleesh, I need to come down on my own. I swear to God, if she tranqs me right now, I will die."

  "Okay," she said.

  Falk could feel a burn in his heart, like acid was leaking out of something inside his chest. He could taste a sour metallic tang, the unhealthy, artificially coloured flavours of panic and terror. He swallowed hard. Despite the jarring ride, he felt a slight, slow curve returning to his spine.

  "We can't go much further," he said.

  "What?" Tal asked.

  He said it in Russian this time.

  "We can," she said.

  "We needed the truck to get out in a hurry, but it's not practical. The woods, the hills."

  "You wait," she said.

  "For what? Tal?"

  "You see."

  And he saw. It only took another three or four minutes, and she brought them to what she had been heading for all along. The SObild bounced out of the trees, ripped creepers flapping off its roof rails, and swung around onto a track.

  She stopped, the engine chugging.

  Falk leaned forward, took his glares back and looked out. The woods were thick on either side, so thick they joined to form a roof of foliage over the trail. The track was rough, just mud worn back by the steady traffic of heavy vehicles. It ran east-west, roughly, inclined so it swept up into the hill slopes. The rain was softening the ruts, and streams of run-off were trickling down its length in rivulets.

  Falk hadn't seen any trail on the map.

  "What is this?" he said.

  "Track," Tal said. "Mining road."

  "Where does it go?"

  She shrugged her shoulders. "Up and down."

  "How did you know it was here?" he asked.

  "We found it," she said. "One day, when we walk. We used to walk, when it wasn't raining, just to get outside. We walk around the meadow, or into the woods. Not far. One day, we find this."

  He could picture them, the three of them, pacing the boundaries of their wall-less prison, after days of only their own company, hoping to see someone, afraid that they actually might. Finding the road by accident one day, thrilled by its implied promise. Two directions, and they were too scared to choose either of them.

  "Which way, then?" he asked. He knew which way, but he wanted her to make the decision too.

  "Up the hills," she said, pointing to the right. "Up the hills is away from the fighting. Down the hills goes into the war."

  "Let's go up, then," he said. He leaned over into the back and told Rash, Preben and Valdes about the trail.

  "Give me Mouse's glares," he said. Rash passed them across.

  "Is he still breathing?" Falk asked.

  "He's more alive than he was," said Rash. Lenka was devotedly squeezing the bag valve.

  "That's a good job you're doing there," Falk told her in Russian. He turned back, and handed Mouse's glares to Tal. He'd set them to low light. She put them on, cocking her head and pouting like a covergirl in mirror shades.

  "Okay," she said.

  She found a gear, and the wheels spun for a moment in the muddy streams of the track. Then they were moving, following the track up the long, curving gradient.

 

The climb was steep, and the wet conditions tough. Rain had come on again, so hard it stirred the tunnel of trees overhead. But the SObild was up for anything. It was a simple, hardwearing machine decently constructed to handle poor terrain.

  Despite the canopy cover, there was still a red afterglow from the west, the glare of the burning depot. Falk wondered if Bloc forces were coming after them. Had they pushed the other trucks through the wood in pursuit, or had they waited for backup and new orders? He was pretty sure that if he'd been the force commander, he'd have given chase. Falk's band had hit them very hard. Quite apart from payback, he'd have wanted to know who the fuck they were, and what they had been doing there.

  The trail wasn't on the map he and Rash had been using. The registry chart of Twenty Thousand Acre Forest had given streams serial numbers, and had even shown the mansion, which shouldn't have been there.

  But no trail. And the trail was considerable. It wasn't just a track made by someone trekking through the landscape. It wasn't metalled or formally constructed, but it was wide and reliable. It had been created by heavy traffic, maybe even by caterpillar-tracked vehicles. Bulk vehicles, industrial machines. Traffic would have had to come and go along this road regularly to cut it in like this. Every few miles, the track broadened for short sections, suggesting deliberate passing bays where big vehicles could meet and slip by one another. A working route. To the west, behind them, what did it join? The highway? Probably. A work access that ran right back down to the main arterial, maybe to the depot. To the east, ahead of them, where did it go?

  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.