FOUR

 
 

A short distance out of Mitre Sands, on the open track, the Fargos rose up on their suspension and went what Lukes called "long-legged". Lifting the hull and broadening the chassis frame made for superior clearance and weight distribution, and the extended footprint boosted stability. The ride got appreciably smoother.

  Through the dust-worn side window, Falk watched the All-ways riding out wide alongside them across the stone scrub, lifting plumes of dust like foam wakes. The chase cars were light and fast. Sunlight flashed off the glares of the shavehead manning the heavy-gauge pintle mount.

  Mountains sulked to the west of them like a grey barn wall. For an hour, the cloudcover came and went like timelapse footage: cloud boil, sharp sun breaks, cloud boil again. Over the shared com system, Selton drew their attention to a pair of the big, rare tundra grazers, turning on the thermals, but Falk didn't get to the window in time and all he saw were sun dogs.

  He was uncomfortable in his seat. It was tight, and the hard form-mould transmitted every bump and vibration to his ass. His back and his right hip began to ache.

  Green hiker girl was writing something on a clutch tablet.

  "This your first zone posting?" he asked her, trying to reboot things.

  "I'm thirty-one," she replied.

  He gave her "quizzical".

  "Are we playing Respond To One Question With The Answer To Another?" he asked.

  "I'm not playing anything with you, period," she replied. She returned to her work.

  "The longer I spend with you," he said, "the more I sense I'm getting to know the real you."

  She looked up at him again. He considered himself thick-skinned, but the contempt in her eyes came as a surprise.

  "I have a horrible feeling," she said, "that someone once told you that you were charming, and you believed them."

 

Marblehead was an ore town that had been seeded about fifty years before. The first-gen pop, according to Selton, had been mostly Chinese and Portuguese, though that had diluted as the town's prosperity had grown. The place had secured major contracts to supply ore for the construction industry, mainly blue metal aggregate for precast concrete mixes, though it also quarried quality materials for facing and dressing. The extractors of Marblehead had made a significant contribution to the rise of Shaverton.

  Marblehead had been one of the flashpoints in the early phase of the dispute. Production had cut back as the SOMD restricted transport and conveyance. A lot of the pop had drained out in the previous nine months.

  Selton told them that the op profile was to meet with a Forward Patrol Group, conduct a security appraisal and then extract before nightfall. Falk was pretty sure that was just a bunch of rugged-sounding terms that actually meant a pretend wargame exercise with added show-and-tell.

  Approaching the town, now driving on a hardpan roadway, they dropped their profile again, and ran low. The All-ways tucked in close. One zipped ahead, taking point.

  "Stay buttoned up," Selton said into her mic. Their speed had decreased. "Authority given for weapons live. Commence standard sweep and target sampling."

  There was a disconcerting noise of motor gearing in the roof above them. The autohunt turret mount on the Fargo's cabin top activated and began to traverse.

  They entered a long incline, a winding ribbon road that followed the side of a valley down to the town limits. The place looked nondescript, dirty and dead, not so much a township as row after row of ugly precast buildings dumped on waste ground waiting to be shipped out on flatbeds to permanent homes. Places were shuttered and boarded, screened by chainlink and mesh sheeting, painted with pollution, stained by sunlight and finished off with the fine detail of graffiti scrawled by the bored, the indolent, the dispossessed, the township youth, the out-of-a-job migrants, the contract-less miners. East of the town were the vast land scars of the open-cast mines and the quarries, lunar landscapes of step-sided pits like negative spaces created by pressing ziggurats tip-down into soft clay. Each pit was big enough to hold the town itself. Spoil heaps and outfill had formed new mountains. Rusty orange bulk excavators, dump trucks and mass conveyer assemblies made it look like a sand box abandoned by children for fear of rain. The quarries were barer, their sides scraped back to pale, grained rock, like exposed bone.

  North of the town lay the precast plants, the curing works and the functionally ugly blast furnaces used to process byproduct. Near to these monstrosities sprawled the loading docks and the immense shipping parks where bulk roadliners that hadn't made the coast highway run regularly for almost two years slumbered under grimy weather wraps.

  "Seems delightful," said Falk.

  "I've been looking to summer here," said Lukes.

  They reached the edge of town and followed the road through three or more sets of wire gates that were wide open and seemed to have no purpose beyond the sculptural. Fuel drums weighted with set concrete dotted the roadlane, along with other trash like fence posts and some buckled signage, a makeshift slalom course to slow the advance of anything short of an MBT. The convoy steered around the obstructions, keeping line, bleeding little speed.

  "Where is everyone?" asked Jeanot, peering out and recording footage with a tablet.

  "There's a curfew," replied Selton, her attention primarily focused on her displays.

  "It's late morning," said green hiker girl.

  "It's a strict curfew," said Falk.

  Something on Selton's display pinged. For a second, Falk felt himself tense up instinctively.

  "Contact signal," said Selton, and typed something into a text pane.

  Fucking dope, Falk admonished himself. You actually bought into it.

  The FPG was coming out to meet them.

 

The members of the Forward Patrol Group were driving in Fargos of their own, and they had a fat, armoured Longpig gunbus as the centrepiece of their motorcade. The vehicles, and the SOMD troopers riding in them, were caked in air-blown dirt. Their kit was a little bit more personalised and non-reg than the fresh-on-this-morning look being worked by Selton and her unit. Their rollers came to a halt, engines running, in a little fan behind the rumbling self-propelled, laid out like playing cards wiped across a table. Troopers with pipers and RPG thumpers dismounted and locked off the thoroughfare, shoulders tight to stocks, cheeks to top rails, eyes to optics, fingers resting ready on trigger guards. The gunbus, twice the size of a Fargo, reminded Falk of some creature from a bestiary, a traveller's excited fabulation of a rhinoceros or a warthog. It was broad and fat, lethargic and ill-tempered. It sat heavily on its broad treads with anti-rocket armour skirts hanging down around its wheel hubs. It was almost black with grime. The M190 howitzer slanted at the sky like a unicorn's horn, vulgarly big, rendered preposterous by the massive, fluted, vented muzzle brake at the end of the barrel. The brake lent the whole machine an unpleasant fetishistic air.

  The commander of the column was an SOMD major called LaRue. He and Selton chatted for a while, then he ambled over to greet the media crew. He seemed real to Falk, genuine. Falk wondered if he might actually have cynically overestimated the show-and-tell factor. He got the tingle of tension back, the feeling that he was actually in some fucker's crosshairs after all. LaRue looked like someone who'd been leading an FPG in the field for six weeks. He spoke like it. His body language was unmannered and tired. There was nothing scripted or autocued about what he said.

  He told them that the FPG was about to conduct a room-by-room of Number Two Blast Furnace, following a tip-off from one of the labour watch teams. A forced entry overnight had lit a red light on the site foreman's security display. Selton's unit and the correspondents were welcome to accompany the FPG for the duration of the operation, provided that they followed FPG instructions explicitly and didn't get in what LaRue gently described as "the fucking way".

  Unpatched, thought Falk. Unreconstructed.

  Dropping the pitch of his voice, LaRue issued a bald statement about the risks. Shots might be fired. There might be full-on contact. Their lives would be in danger, despite the body-plate and the SOMD presence. Even if they followed every syllable, every letter of the instructions, there was still a chance that any one of them could get scorched. LaRue wanted them to know that. He didn't want anyone operating under the illusion that this wasn't the real deal. The real fucking deal, as he put it.

  Anyone could duck out, no problem. They could stay under guard with the rollers, or be taken to a strongpoint to wait for the others. No one would be judged.

  "Think about it for a minute," he said. "To be honest, I'd be happier if none of you came. It makes our job easier. But I will accommodate you. Think about it, then have a word with my staff sergeant here if you want to be included."

  Falk felt an odd heat rising inside him. Tension and fear, a blend he hadn't tasted in a long time. Of course he was going to get himself included. Things had just got interesting. The most interesting thing of all was his unbidden response. He was excited. He was scared. He felt cynicism peeling off him like onion skin. He didn't want to get shot. Now there was a chance he could. He felt sore from the ride, nauseous from the night before and sick with trepidation. He was amazed at how upbeat these crappy physiological responses made him feel.

  "Oh, there's something I want to show you," LaRue added. "Crazy. You'll love it. It'll give you a little perspective while you're making up your minds."

  Escorted by a bunch of troopers carrying their primary weapons ready across their chests, LaRue walked the media correspondents a little way back down the roadway, and then off onto the dirt, into the yard behind a derelict construction works.

  "There," he said. He said it with pride, like he was a breeder parading a prize-winning steer, or the patriarch at a bris.

  He was showing them a wall. It was peppered with hard-round holes from small-arms fire.

  "Un-freeking-believable," murmured Falk.