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, though 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.

  He could see nothing unusual. The mine was productive, certainly. There were clearly big deposits in parcel 25211. High-gain stuff, rare metals, even traces of extrotransitionals. A decent, hard working outfit could make a decent hard working fortune out of a site like this. If Seberg's four hundred investments in the Gunbelt range had yielded just a half-dozen locations as productive as 25211, then Ocean Exploratory would have turned a very handsome profit within a decade, and a serious return for its investing partners in two or three. More than enough to get you mad as hell if the SO fucked you around. Enough to make you fight it in the courts, throw money at appeals.

  But nothing like enough to drag the US and the Bloc into a shooting war. The good stuff had to be hidden, or classified. Like Fred and its rumoured riches, there had to be more than met the eye. Maybe he was reading it wrong. Maybe, via Cleesh, Apfel's people could explain to him what he was missing in these bald, percentile lists.

  Maybe it was just politics? Deep-seated Bloc/US agendas that the SO was ringfencing? Maybe Seberg's little speculation was just a good excuse to settle something less material?

  "Come on, then," said Rash. He had walked into the office behind Falk. He had another self-heat can of food on the go. It smelled like curry.

  "I don't know," said Falk. "I thought I'd find something here, but I haven't."

  "You thought you'd find the reason we're fucking killing each other?" asked Rash.

  "Yes."

  "You're more of a fucktard than Preben," he said, and took a spoonful of curry. "Why here?" he asked, chewing. "Why this place? You've got stuff you're not saying."

  "I thought the fight was about mineral exploitation," said Falk. "I thought it was the Bloc getting pissy because the SO had shut them out of some big mining action."

  Rash shrugged.

  "It doesn't add up," said Falk.

  "And you, an SO shavehead, can tell this, being an expert on such things?" Rash asked.

  "I don't have to be an expert," said Falk. "Casus belli. It's always about stuff. What I've got and you haven't. What you've got and–"

  "I get it."

  "So, it's also got to be big, then, right? Not just any stuff. Big stuff. After all this time, to finally start a fucking fight? Come on, just frustration, you think? Just doing what we've secretly always wanted to do?"

  "My reading of history," said Rash, taking another spoonful, "and understand I do not pretend to be an expert of any kind, Bloom. My reading is wars are always started for ultimately stupid reasons. Reasons just like you said, big reasons even, but ultimately stupid ones. They always look like they could have been avoided, if someone had shown the presence of mind to communicate the right notion. We put up with a lot of shit from each other. Why stop?"

  "So you're saying it's stupid trying to look for a reason that makes sense?" asked Falk.

  "I am. They'll blame this on minerals. Well, great. It isn't the fucking ground's fault, right? It's probably some giant domino effect. Some asshole somewhere said the wrong thing to another asshole at some fucking summit, and then some other asshole didn't get his preferential deal, and so he cut the profits on yet another asshole's contract and then… and then… and then… and it's a giant rolling ball of shit coming downhill and sweeping everything up. And that giant rolling ball of shit's called history, Bloom, and we were standing in its fucking way."

 

Falk wandered back through the rooms. In the other office, Preben was sitting at one of the planner desks and doing a takedown and clean on his M3A. Valdes was idly playing with an informatic console that was giving nothing back. The girls were asleep, except Milla, who was keeping Mouse's bag valve going.

  He went outside. The rain was fresh and cold, and the wind was almost too uncomfortable to bear. He walked as far as the closest excavation pit. Most of it had filled with water, like a dirty swimming pool. Along the edge of the quarry there was a metal walkway with a rail, and evidence of a small pump house and pipe system, installed so that rainwater wouldn't become an issue. It hadn't run in a long time, and the rain was winning.

  The surface of the flooded excavation shivered with each gust of wind and dimpled with the raindrops.

  "What are you going to do, Falk?" Cleesh asked, her voice in the beat of the rain.

  "I think it's way past time we devised an exit strategy," he replied. He folded his arms to keep his hands warm.

  "You mean unplug you?"

  "No, I don't. I mean find a way out. It was worth chasing for a bit, but this is getting insane. You didn't see. You didn't see what happened, Cleesh. Fighting our way out of that house. It's not a fucking game, Cleesh. It's not a fucking assignment, either."

  "Are you okay?"

  "I'm wealthy," he said. "I'm golden, Cleesh. But Bigmouse isn't, and we can't keep him alive much longer. And the others don't deserve to be stuck in this shit if there's a viable way out. Can you talk to Bari? Can you find out if GEO can get a transport in to us?"

  "Of course."

  "We're at parcel 25211. We're right up in the caldera range, Cleesh, a decent way from the main hot zone."

  He waited for her to answer.

  "There's a no-fly advisory on that whole region," she said after about a minute. "Absolute. SOMD has stamped control jurisdiction across the whole western half of the Northern Territories."

  "I thought they might have," he said, trying not to sound disappointed. He tilted his face up, let the rain hit it, eyes closed.

  "This is getting bigger by the hour, Falk," Cleesh said, some of her words turned inside out or see-through by static. "Even with the com blackout, it's clear how hot things are. There are reports of major fighting at Antrim and Hall Valley. They can see the smoke from that depot fire at Furlow. Our SO source says that there is an expectation that the Central Bloc fiefs will issue a formal declaration in the next thirty-six hours. Which will be, you know, a red letter day in the history of our proud species."

  "Yeah, okay. Well, what if we keep going? Take the track across the range, head east as far as we can get. It may take another day or so, but is there somewhere a transport can meet us? Somewhere closer? Just a hopter with a scrambled medical team."

  "Whoa, whoa, lose the misery," she said. "I said it was no-fly. I didn't say it was wouldn't-fly. Bari's looking into it. GEO leases some private airfields in the west. He thinks they might be able to sneak a bird up to you in the next three or four hours. Strictly off the books, a look-the-otherway job. They wouldn't be able to file any kind of flight plan, and they'd have to move low and slow to avoid attention, but it's possible. Bari thinks he can get the fuelling and prep done under the cover of general contingency. GEO has told the SO that as things degrade, they will be implementing policy to extract GEO personnel from the zone. He also reckons he knows a few crews who are crazy enough to want the adventure."

  "How certain is he that he can pull this off?" Falk asked.

  "I kinda like the look on his face right now."

  "Okay. Thanks. Thanks, Cleesh. Let me know how it develops."

  "We'll know in an hour or so what's practical. You–"

  "What?" he asked.

  "You're drawing a blank with Heligo then?" she asked. He could hear her smile.

  "Yeah. It looked promising, but it's a mess, a bunch of nothings. If I get out of here, you and I can probably put everything we've got together and come out with a good, solid series about SO bias and mismanagement. Something pretty damn ballsy. Just not the great bit I was hoping for."

  "You will get out of there," she insisted.

  "Actually, let's assume I'm not going to, Cleesh."

  "Oh, yes, let's! Let's be really freeking^® pessimistic!"

  He blinked raindrops out of his eyes.

  "I'm serious," he said. "Listen to me. There's a girl, an affiliate for Data-Scatter. Her name's Noma Berlin."

  "Okay."

  "She's got a place in South Site. She was the one who brought the Letts story to me. I was going to give her stuff from this in return. Get it all to her, Cleesh."

  "Serious? All of it?" Cleesh asked.

  "Yeah. Feed her everything. Help her like you'd help me. Help her get the story out. Tell her, tell her to use the contact she made. Jill Versailles at Reuters. We couldn't do much better than that."

  "Okay, if you like. Is this girl that good?"

  "I don't know," he replied. "She's a pain in the ass, actually. But she might be. Yeah, I think she really might be. But all that matters is she's in the exactly the right place."

  "Is she the one you had so much sex with it broke your hip?"

  "Ha ha. No comment," he said. He suddenly became aware that he wasn't on his own. Tal had appeared, hands in pockets, head down against the rain. She wandered along to the quarry edge to join him and stared down at their wobbling reflections in the pit water.

  "Who do you talk to when you talk to yourself?" she asked.

  He shot her a look.

  "You talk to yourself a lot," she said, with as much of a shrug as having her hands in her pockets would allow.

  "I just think through things," he said. "Talk my way through things."

  She nodded.

  "I do that," she said.

  "Like how best to survive a situation," he said.

  She nodded again.

  "We'll probably have to keep moving," he told her. "Keep running. It'll be quite a distance before we're clear of trouble."

  She looked at him. The wind pulled at her fringe.

  "Running is not so bad," she said. "At least if you are running you are doing something. We should have learnt to run a long time ago."

  "You had nowhere to run to," he said.

  "Do we now?" she asked.

  "I hope so. We'll vouch for you. If we reach SO protection, or get an extraction, we will make sure the authorities understand the situation you were in. We'll make sure they take care of you."

  "For myself, I don't care so much," she said. "For Lenka, she never deserved any of this."

  She looked at him. He liked the bones of her face, the lean strength. Her cheekbones were high and her jaw was tight and heart-shaped. She reminded him of the wind vanes at the hill farm. Relentless, driven by the wind, but never knocked down. She managed a half-smile, like it was something she was allergic to, or a movement that caused her pain. He could almost hear the whup-whup of wind turbines.

  The chop got louder and became real. Tal glanced at him in alarm and they both turned and looked up.

  The rotorcraft swept in over the cliffs surrounding the site, coming from the north. It was moving fast and low, its hull leaning to port as it banked in on a broad, passing curve. The moment it cleared the clifftop, the chop of its proprotors became painfully raw. There was no barrier between them and the noise source. The rock cavity of the Heligo site made a sound box that echoed and amplified the clatter, turning it into the noise of a hundred rotorbirds.

  It passed over, and disappeared from view, taking its sound with it. Falk and Tal were already running back towards the site offices. Behind them, it returned. It had turned and powered back, much slower now, body upright, paired tilts rising to a support angle as it appeared over the cliffs. It drifted in above the flooded pits of the quarry complex, hanging, inquisitive.

  From the very first moment, Falk had known it was a Kamov. A Bloc gunship, an 18, like the one that had buzzed them at the house.

  "You," said Tal, as they ran. "You and trouble are great lovers."