by Dan Abnett
DAN ABNETT
Praise for DAN ABNETT
"Dan Abnett is the master of war."
SFX
"Embedded is a nail-biting, seat-of-the-pants ride – which also has serious things to say about war and the news media – by a master of the adventure novel."
Eric Brown
"Rips across the page like a blast wave from a barrage of low orbit launched kinetic impactors. Abnett makes hard bitten, high concept mil-fic fun again."
John Birmingham
"If there's one thing Abnett does well, it's write a kick butt action sequence."
SF Signal
"With a firm grasp of character and a superior ability to convey action… Abnett delivers a great, readable science fiction novel and earns his comparisons to an SF Bernard Cornwell."
Wertzone
"The cinematic scope and dizzying vision we're shown puts most of the recent SF movie epics into deep shade. Dan Abnett entertains from the ground up."
SF Site
"The king of noir-infused military SF."
Mark Charan Newton
ALSO BY DAN ABNETT
Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero
Doctor Who: The Story of Martha
Torchwood: Border Princes
Primeval: Extinction Event
Warhammer 40,000 Novels
The Gaunt's Ghosts series
The Eisenhorn Trilogy
The Ravenor Trilogy
Horus Rising
Legion
Prospero Burns
Original Audio Adventures
Doctor Who: The Forever Trap
Torchwood: Everyone Says Hello
Comic Collections
Nova
Guardians of the Galaxy
Legion of Superheroes
Kingdom
Sinister Dexter
For Adelie and Cal, and thirty years
ONE
The digital brooch at the throat of his regulation unitard read Fanciman, Major Gene Gillard, S.O.M.D., but from the handshake and greeting it was clear that the major affected a more mannered pronunciation of his surname, something along the lines of Funsmun.
He suggested the chair Falk should occupy with a su casa wave, then resumed his seat at the desk. As he sat down, he pinched the thighs of his unitard to hoist up the slack in the legs.
"When did you get here?" he asked.
"Last night," Falk replied. "I came in by spinrad a month ago, but I've been in acclimation out on the Cape for twenty days."
"You won't have seen much of Eighty-Six yet, then. You'll discover it's fine country, Mr Falk. Beautiful country."
"Country worth fighting over?" Falk asked. He meant it lightly.
Major Fanciman favoured him with an expression of distaste, as though Falk had just skilfully farted the first few bars of the Settlement Anthem.
"Did I say something wrong?" asked Falk.
Fanciman prepared and lit a smile, slowly and expertly, like it was a Corona Grande.
"We are very conscious of vocabulary, Mr Falk. The word you used has negative connotations. It's, uhm, sensitivity-adverse. I'm not blaming you, God knows. You only just got here, and you haven't had time to digest all of our guideline document packet."
"Sorry," Falk lied. There hadn't been much else to do during the adjustment quarantine. The guidelines had run to several hundred thousand words, and had been remarkably informative. They had made it abundantly clear to Falk just how much stonewalling was going on.
Major Fanciman was keeping his smile alight, tending it to make sure it didn't go out.
"There is a message, Mr Falk," he said, "and we like to stay on it. We like all our sponsored correspondents to stay on it too. We are a mature species, and we no longer find it necessary to resort to crude practices such as fighting."
Falk leaned forward slightly.
"I understand, Major," he said, "but isn't this entire situation military in nature?"
"Undeniably. We have five brigades of the Settlement Office Military Directorate boots dusty here in Shaverton itself. Their role is entirely one of safeguard. Public safeguard."
"But let's just say," said Falk, "if the public was placed in immediate threat, their role of safeguard might require the SOMD to use its weapons?"
"True."
"And wouldn't that be fighting?"
"I can see why you came so highly recommended," Fanciman said, opening a file on his desk. "Probing questions. Incisive. Agile mind. I like it."
"Oh good," said Falk.
• • •
"Where are you staying, sir?" asked the driver who Major Fanciman had summoned for Falk.
"Doesn't matter. Where can you get a drink?"
"A bar?" the driver replied with a little halt in his voice that suggested he thought there might be a trick in the question.
"Where do you get a drink?" Falk asked.
"The mess, or the Cape Club sometimes."
"Either will be fine," Falk smiled. He closed the vehicle door and grinned at the driver encouragingly.
"They're both serving," the driver replied. He seemed uncomfortable.
"Good. I don't want to go to a bar that isn't serving," Falk said.
"No, I mean they're both reserved for serving personnel. You people use the Embassy or the Holiday Inn or the GEO."
"Me people?" asked Falk.
"Press," said the driver. "There's a list of clubs and bars that correspondents can use, provided you've got accreditation."
Falk had accreditation. It was one of the few things he was certain of. Most of everything else was a fuzz. It was hard to peg time of day. His body wasn't telling him. He reflected that he hadn't had a steady diurnal rhythm in about five years, and the stay on Fiwol with its frantic, twenty-minute days had utterly fucked his bioclock.
It looked like it was late afternoon. The sky over Shaverton's glass masts, blocks and pylons looked like a late afternoon sky. It was the colour of lemon Turkish Delight with an icing sugar dust of clouds.
He didn't know how long the day/night cycle was on Eighty-Six. It wasn't that he'd rushed his presearch, he just wasn't much interested in the physical ecosystem. He'd learn that by living in it. During acclimation, and the trip in-system on the gradually decelerating spinrad driver, he'd studied the political, military and social content of the briefing packet, and any other documents he could access. The SO was doing a more than usually extravagant job of redacting material and neutering news outlets, even the big networks and authorised broadcasters.
His meeting with Major Fanciman had been designed to deliver a specific message. The message was: Lex Falk, you are an acclaimed correspondent with several agency awards to your name and a reputation for hard facts and penetrating coverage, therefore the SO is very pleased to welcome you to Settlement Eighty-Six, and to validate your accreditation. Having you here proves to the public back home that, despite reports of open conflict, the Settlement Office has nothing to conceal on Eighty-Six, and your reportage will be received as unvarnished and credible.
You will, of course, report only what we permit you to report.
That had been pretty much it. Fanciman had told him all of that without expressly using any of those actual words. Falk needed to understand it, and needed to make it clear he understood it. If necessary, the message could be reinforced through further meetings with SO execs more senior than Fanciman. If really necessary, an accommodation might be reached where the SO surrendered some juicy nugget to Falk, something that would lend any correspondence he filed the bat-squeak of raw truth. One hand washes the other.
Falk sat back in the bodymould seat as the driver turned west onto Equestrian and accelerated towards the hazy megastructure of the Terminal. It amused him to th
ink that the Settlement Office had precisely fuck all idea how uninterested he was in any of it. He was bone-light and lagged from too many years riding drivers, he was having trouble finding anything he actually engaged with any more, and he'd only agreed to the Eighty-Six commission because the fee-with-expenses was generous by any network standards, and the whole thing smelled just like another Pulitzer. He had issues. He had a few things he should have taken care of long since, things he couldn't really work up the enthusiasm to tackle head-on. He had a vague plan (which he'd share with anybody who asked because it made him sound layered) of going home, rebuilding his health and leasing some place on the ocean for a year while he switched gears and wrote That Novel. The addendum he didn't share was that he was no longer sure what That Novel was about, or that the prospect really didn't get him all that fucking thrilled, though living beside the ocean sounded nice.
Falk hadn't warmed to Eighty-Six much. The climate of the Shaverton region, at whatever time of whatever year it was, nudged at the comfort limits of hot and humid. It was one of those places – and Falk had been to a few – that wasn't a natural fit for occupation. It was a tiny margin of variation, almost a nuance thing, but just because the atmosphere wasn't technically inimical to human life, it didn't naturally follow that people ought to live there. Outdoors, it was too hot in an odd way, and too bright. There was an odd saturation to colours.
Indoors, everything was too cold. Everything smelled of air-con and a ubiquitous, lemon-scented twang of Insect-Aside.
The driver took him to the GEO. It was the name of both the corp and the serious glass mast the corp occupied in the land skirts of the massive Terminal. From the executive offices, employees of Geoplanitia Enabling Operator could see the heavy-hipped ferries banging up and down out of the arrestor silos on the Cape, serving the vast drivers lurking invisibly, upstairs at the edge of space.
There was a bar in the basement, flushed with sickly lighting, piped music and a funk of bug spray, and fitted out with Early Settlement Era furniture, undoubtedly repro, woven from wicker-effect polymer lattice. The place made up in business what it lacked in soul. There were distinct currents separating the crowd: non-local correspondents and affiliates, sorted by old acquaintance or network loyalty; GEO employees; locals work-ing the room, shilling everything from sources to sex in order to leverage a little network expense account action.
Falk got talking to a GEO exec at the rail of the marbleeffect bar. The exec was ordering a tray of drinks. It was a colleague's birthday. As the barman filled the order, a casual question or two got the exec to admit that the mood was downtrend among GEO staffers. The dispute (even after two beer-effect drinks, the exec was on-message enough not to refer to the situation as a "war" or even a "conflict") was having non-advantageous outcomes for the corporation. Development contracts were overrunning or remaining unfulfilled, SO grants were being withheld and GEO's share price had dipped badly on the home market because of public perception. GEO had substantial holdings on Eighty-Six.
"Our share value is in the shitter," the exec said, "and our corporate rep is floating there right beside it. The public thinks we're driving this dispute through corporate greed. It's like Sixty all over again."
"Except," said Falk, "this isn't a big post-global company taking the blame for what turned out to be fundamentalists terror-bombing settlement pharms."
"Fuck you know about it?" the exec asked.
"I was there."
"On Sixty?"
"At the end, yeah."
The exec nodded, and folded his mouth down in a shape that indicated he was quite impressed.
"Big pharm got the blame on Sixty until it finally came out that there was some pretty nasty activism going on. That's not the case here, is it? This dispute has been triggered by the aggressive policies of corps like GEO. Please don't compare it to Sixty unless you know what the fuck you're talking about."
The exec offered to buy Falk a drink and took him to meet his colleagues. They were a sallow bunch who plainly spent too much time indoors in the tailored environment of their corporate glass mast. Falk had never understood that. He looked like shit because he spent too much time aboard drivers where there was no outside to step into. But if you've gone to live and work on another planet for a five- or ten-year rotation, or forever, why the fuck didn't you ever go outside? Why the fuck do you stay inside your mast? You might as well be on a driver. You might as well have stayed in Beijing.
They wanted to know about Sixty. He gave them a short but embellished version, romanticising his own hardline newsman cred. They all oohed and aahed in all the right places, like they knew from bullshit. They all nodded sagely at his tough yet sentimental verdicts.
Three of them were due to leave in a week, six years shy of their contracted finish. Two more were going the following month. There were, he learned, whole floors of the mast unoccupied. Some had emptied since the start of the dispute, as GEO reposted staff to other, less controversial settlements. Others had never been filled. The GEO glass mast had been standing for just twenty years. There was a real possibility that it would be closed and sold off before the corporation that had paid for its construction had properly inhabited it.
Falk listened to them rabbit. It was automatic, just warming up his journo muscles. They weren't saying much that was interesting beyond the state of the mast. They were worried about their futures, about their careers. They were fretting about where they might get posted, and what the bad press was doing to their stocks and bonuses.
His Scotch-effect drink was crappy but welcome after the abstinence of transit and acclimation. He got a little buzz cooking and felt good about himself. He arranged his face so it looked like he was interested.
He kept an eye on a nearby table where some network boys had clustered. One of the faces looked familiar, like a very old, careworn version of a man he had once known, an older brother, a father.
"Falk? Is that you?"
He recognised her voice, but not her face when he turned to look at it. She was carrying a lot of mass, even more than she had when he'd last seen her. Like her voice, her smile hadn't changed.
"Cleesh."
He got up and hugged her. His hands didn't meet. She smelled of nutrition bars and the sugar-plastic aftertaste of diet control packs. There were little flesh-match patches covering the constellations of surgical plug excisions dotting her scalp, the side of her throat and her slabby upper arms where they showed beyond the sleeves of her Cola tee.
Falk hadn't seen her since Seventy-Seven, and even then only on screen.
"How are you?" he asked.
"I'm wealthy. Really wealthy," she laughed.
"Look at you. You unhooked."
"Had to," she replied, looking him up and down. "Doctors said I had to. Can't circle forever. Freeks® you up. I needed grav time."
"But circling's what you do, Cleesh," he said.
"I know. I'm not an in-person person. But it was that or die, so I thought I'd spend a little time in the company of normal gravity, drop a gazillion sizes, make sure I don't go cardio-pop."
She eyed him head to toe again and grinned.
"Look at you, though, Falk. You're like a bird. We're like the pedia entry for sublime and ridiculous."
"Hey, I'm at my fucking physical peak," he objected.
"You look like shit. But shit that I'm pleased to see," she replied. "Buy me a drink."
He'd known her for years, but the core of their relationship was a sixteen month assignment to Seventy-Seven. Cleesh was a data wet nurse, feeding, supplying and managing the newslines from a can station circling at twenty-nine miles. She was the most able and clued-in editor-engineer he'd ever worked with. They'd become friends, but he'd never met her in the flesh. She never unhooked from the plug network and left her no-grav home. Prolonged no-grav fucked you up, sooner or later. It made you bone-light or flesh-heavy, sometimes both. No matter how well sunlight, clean air, fresh water and food were simulated, they were st
ill simulated, and it poisoned you eventually. Diabetes, SAD, muscle wastage, organ failure, obesity, eczema, there was always some kind of price.
They talked. He became aware of how twig-scrawny his wrists were compared to hers. Perhaps he had been riding the drivers too long.
"You're here to cover the thing that isn't a war?" she asked.
"Of course."
"You got an in? They're freeking® tight about the press free-associating with servicemen."
"I've got a hot ticket pass," he said. He took a sip of his Scotch-effect. "Settlement Office accreditation. Access."