by Dan Abnett
They turned. An SOMD trooper was jogging towards them. He was in body-plate, and carrying a weapon.
"You two," he called. "I want to see some credentials. Now."
"Lose the brooch," Falk hissed.
"What?"
"Lose the fucking brooch, you silly bitch. Fast!"
The SOMD guy came right up to them. He was in full rig, harness and plate. The gun strapped across his front was a PAP 20, common, standard issue, a bullpup-format carbine. Personal [weapon] All Purpose. As he came close, the PAP seemed to become alarmingly, extravagantly big.
"You know you're not supposed to be in this area," the trooper said. He sounded weary, with a little edge of stress. It was immediately clear to Falk that there was going to be no mileage in trying to front it. The trooper wasn't in the mood to play a game. He hadn't even bothered to question the vest or the armband.
"Sorry," said Falk.
"You're just making our work more difficult," the trooper said. "Where's your freeking® self-respect? There's freeking® people scorched over there. You're getting in the freeking® way."
"Sorry," Falk repeated.
"Press?" asked the trooper.
"Yeah," said Falk.
"Well, better than you being freeking® rubbernecks, I suppose. Creds."
Falk fished his out of his pocket quickly, with an exaggerated show to demonstrate he wasn't reaching for anything else.
"I've got an SO validation," he said quickly, before green hiker girl could say anything or produce any papers of her own. "She's my researcher."
He willed green hiker girl not to say anything, not to contradict him.
The trooper looked at Falk's ID.
"Your researcher?"
"Yes."
"Uh-huh."
"I brought her in with me. This is on me. She seriously didn't want to cross the picket line."
The trooper looked at her.
"I didn't," she said, a little slowly, trying to follow what Falk was attempting. "I told him I didn't."
"I should've listened to her," said Falk.
The trooper's Mil-issue glares had scanned Falk's ID at the same time the trooper had. Falk saw a little ice-blue backlight behind the lenses as a secure processed response came back from SOMD Operations.
"Okay, that checks," said the trooper. "You're going to have to leave the area. I'll escort you. There may not be a follow-up, but I have to advise you that you may get a fine, or even some suspension of your validation privileges."
"Okay," said Falk.
"That's just how it works."
"I know," said Falk. "I was chancing my arm. I'm sorry."
"Let's get you to the line," said the trooper. They started walking. "Do me a favour and go home. I don't want to hear about you trying to get back in here."
"Sure, no problem," said Falk. "You stay wealthy. Thanks for being okay about it. It was a dumb stunt. But I had to try, right? How many meteor hit stories do you get?"
The trooper waved them across the barrier line.
"Almost none," he conceded.
They left the high-vis vest, the armband and the medical kit on the open tailgate of a paramedic roller. Several entrepreneurial types from the North End had turned up with food carts and mobile kiosks, supplying refreshment to the early morning crowd of sightseers and the crews on restbreaks. Falk bought two teas from an electric barrow with a chrome urn.
"Why'd you do that?" asked green hiker girl.
"It was the best way out," Falk replied.
She took the cup he offered her.
"You didn't want him looking at my ID," she said.
"I've got SO validation," said Falk. "And I'm Lex Falk. My accreditation can soak it up. If I get a fine, I can wash it through expenses. They'll probably waive a penalty if I keep my nose clean. You're only affiliated, so you're not half as flameproof."
"So you took the fall for the two of us because you're such a great fucking person?"
"I took the fall for the two of us because I was taking the fall anyway, and taking it for two wasn't going to hurt any worse."
He took a long sip of tea.
"And I took the fall for the two of us because of that fuck-ass brooch. Where is it?"
She took it out of her pocket. He took it, and looked at it.
"It's not a fake," he said.
"No," she replied. "It was in the door pocket of the transport I lifted the first aid kit from."
Falk stared at her.
"Do you not get it?" he asked. "You get caught bluffing in a secured zone, you get kicked out, fined, full marks for trying. Slap on the wrist, naughty correspondent person. You get caught in a secured zone with a fake or stolen SOMD ident, that's impersonating the Office, and that comes under martial regs. That's a whole avalanche of crap right there. They'd yank your accreditation for starters, forever. In fact, they'd probably boot you upstairs to catch the next driver home."
"I guess," she said.
"No, no, it's not guesswork," he snapped. "It's fucking what happens. You have to know these things. You have to know them, so you don't do something so fucking stupid it ends your career."
He bent his arm and threw the brooch over a fence into a marshalling yard.
"Wow," she said. "It's almost like you care what happens to me. Or you want to jump me."
"Neither," said Falk. "I was standing right beside you. If he'd found the brooch, the fan sprays that shit a long way."
SEVEN
Cleesh had been calling him. When he finally got hold of her, she sounded upset for some reason.
"I need you to come and meet some people," she said.
"Who?"
"Just come and meet them."
"Where?" Falk asked.
She told him.
"Can you make it this afternoon? Four-ish?"
"Okay," he said. He didn't want to, and he was growing increasingly less interested in whatever it was Cleesh was into.
But it was Cleesh, and she sounded upset, and he had some fucked-up notion he owed her.
He had stuff to do. His hip still hurt. It hurt a lot. He tried to make himself comfortable in his apartment by adding cushions to the chair at the desk, but it was easier to stand up. He decided he could head to the SO Library in Furth, and work there. They had leather-effect banquettes. He could sprawl.
His celf lit.
"It's me," she said.
"Who?"
"Noma."
He let it hang for a moment, just so she'd know how little room she took up in his headspace.
"Oh. Right. What's up?"
"I've got something."
"Now that's being generous," he replied. "If you work hard for another five years, and exploit your sources ruthlessly, then maybe–"
"Hah hah hah, so funny. I've got something. I think you'll want to see it."
"Why?"
"Because it's cool, Falk."
"No," he said. "Why are you calling me? If you've got something and it's actually, properly good, then why are you calling me? Why aren't you just running with it?"
"Do you want the convincing answer?" she asked.
"Okay."
"Because you got me out of harm's way this morning in Letts, and I'm trying to say thank you. One-time gesture, no repeats, take it or leave it."
"Okay, that is quite convincing. What's the real reason?"
"Because this thing I've got," she said, "I don't know what the fuck I should do with it."
She lived in a cubicle hotel in South Site, the oldest part of Shaverton. Another twenty years, the area would catch a dose of Early Settlement chic, and incomers would pour money into the narrow streets, the depots and store sheds, the weatherboard and cinderblock businesses. People would buy into that pioneer/prospector vibe, and heritage plaques would appear on the facades of the counting house and the weights-and-measures office.
Until then, South Site would remain a hole reserved for low-rest accommodation, migrant temporaries, murky enterprises and ballast mar
kets. There was a smell of rancid soap in the air from the big drain outfalls, and a river-stink of decaying tar and stagnant water. There were cooking smells too, smoking hot and over-spiced, from the immigrant food stalls in the market walks and row streets. Vendors shouted their bills of fare, but the cooking smells shouted louder. Disguise recipes. Heavy peppers and flavour enhancers, copious spices, rubs, marinades. Cooking designed to mask the substitutions made for chicken, pork and beef. Not even chicken, pork or beef, in truth. These stands were working without chicken, pork or beef effect.
The buildings in South Site were caked in rust, or wet with lime seep. Some displayed the vague apparitions of their old, first-generation, hand-done sign boards. Paint withered and flaked, losing its colours before it lost itself into the inshore wind entirely. Blurds tapped around Chinese lanterns and bare bulbs. The streets were so tight and busy, Falk buttoned up his coat and dug his hands into his pockets.
He'd taken a cab from his place. The city had looked drab and lightless. Smoke cover from the Letts incident had formed a huge anvilhead of darkness in the north-west, and stolen all the colour. There was a gritty haze in the air. Even the majestic glass masts looked like they'd been sandblasted to a matt finish in the afternoon gloom.
Falk didn't like South Site much. The opportunities for something criminal and unfortunate to happen seemed high. But at least the place had some colour. Coloured lights and lanterns, colourful awnings, stainless-steel trays of vibrantly coloured food, brightly coloured flames from stall burners, colour-dyed cloth, colourful smells in the air.
He walked past wire baskets of brightly coloured rubber shoes at the edge of the ballast market, then more bins of cheap toys, knock-off sports caps, mops and brooms, kitchenware, each bin staked with a wire loop holding up the handwritten price card. Fashion glares hung like fruit from drying rails, their paper price tickets twitching in the wind. Men with trays like the olden-time concession girls presented celfs that came without packaging or paperwork.
Green hiker girl was waiting for him on the front steps of her cubicle dorm. She had no room to invite him into, no space where they could sit and talk. She said she knew a place.
She was actually wearing her green litex hiker, but he was beginning to think of her as Noma.
"How are you?" she asked cheerfully as they walked through the market.
"I'm wealthy," he said. She had her clutch tablet tucked into the breast of her hiker, and she kept touching it to make sure it hadn't gone anywhere.
She took him to a ProFood outlet on the west corner of the market space. She ordered two bottles of NoCal-Cola, because they could verify the tamper seal on the caps to tell if they were refills. Falk got a fistful of napkins from a dispenser, and some straws in individual paper sleeves. She ordered some food for herself. It was a franchise place. They still had the old Bill Berry Astronut logo on the napkins, rather than the slick, modern Booster Rooster rebrand.
They sat out of the way at a table in the back. There were sticky rings on the plastic tabletop. She offered him a bite of her food, a greaseproof cone full of what seemed to be grilled meat on skewers. He shook his head.
"The food around here isn't actually bad," she said.
"Neither's basejumping, but I'm not attempting that either."
She gnawed a lump off one of the skewers.
"I think there's a fair bit of reprocessed blurd in it, mind," she added.
"Really selling me on basejumping," he replied.
She grinned, chewing.
"So what's this about?" he asked.
"In such a hurry. Can't we just continue our conflirtation?"
"What's this about?" he repeated.
She took one of the napkins, wiped the tabletop, and then put her tablet down and slid it over to him. Upside down, she woke it, rotated an image, expanded it.
"What's this?" he asked.
"Play it. Watch."
He let the clip run. There was about forty seconds worth. He paused when it had ended, then touched replay and watched it again.
"Where did this come from?" he asked.
"Friends. High places. You know."
He glared at her. She shrugged.
"Eighty-Six is prone to meteoritic strikes. Fact of life. Risk small, but real. That's the official line. Letts got unlucky on the bolide lottery. Oh, the humanity! Zero warning. Impact values so high, so fast, nothing tracked it, not ground-based, not orbital. Nothing. Official line, on the feeds just an hour ago. Nothing. Forget we've got, let's think, the Terminal out there on the Cape. Nothing detected it until it impacted."
She touched replay on the clutch tablet clip again. Looking up, she met his eyes, and seemed amused to find him looking at her rather than the playback.
"And did you know," she asked, "there are currently eight drivers geo-stationary upstairs? Eight drivers parked directly over Shaverton."
"With their detector arrays on downsweep," said Falk.
"Yes, to monitor cargo traffic. And that, Mr Lex Falk, is a direct lift from the array archive of the spinrad driver Manchurian."
The clip, heavy with informatic overlays and subsidiary data, was an orbital view of northwest Shaverton. Night. Thermal capture. A city plan with a gentle drift to it. Twenty-eight seconds in, a white-hot flare blooms in Letts.
"No track," said Falk.
"No track. Not even eye-invisible. Nothing on instrumentation. It wasn't a strike."
"How did you get this?"
"The Manchurian was the driver I came in on. A reasonably senior crewperson decided it was better to source the clip for me than have me write about the non-regulation relationship he conducted with a passenger on the trip insystem."
"Dirty pool," he said, almost in admiration.
"It wasn't even something I was keeping in my back pocket," she replied. "It was just expedient. You said to me they'd boot me upstairs to catch the next driver home, and it got me thinking about drivers. Just in time."
"What do you mean?"
"There was a guy on one of the general networks this lunchtime interviewing an SO rep. He asked straight out if anything parked or circling had got a view of the strike, and the rep told him categorically that all sources had been checked and there was nothing."
"It's been redacted already."
"Uh-huh."
Falk tapped his fingers on the tabletop beside the tablet. He felt hot, and the plastic seat was hurting his hip. He unwrapped his straw, uncapped the Cola bottle and took a drink.
"I can see why you were conflicted," he said.
"I thought you might have some ideas."
He reached over and helped himself to a skewer from her greaseproof cone. He was experiencing something like a caffeine rush, and he needed to be steady. He needed some carbs and protein. It actually tasted okay. Crunchy. Like pork-flavoured peanut brittle.
"The explosive sniffers have slightly more significance now," he said.
"They do."
"If we're going to 'do' anything with this, we need to be sure what we're 'doing'."
"Go on."
"If we're going to expose something, we need to know what we're exposing. What's going on that they needed to say it was a bolide strike? Did whatever it was happen in Letts randomly, or because of what was in Letts?"
"Okay. How do we find that out?"
"Let me work on it. Let's meet up again tonight."
She nodded.
"Can I take this?"
"No."
"A copy?"
"No."
"But I can trust you to look after it?"
"Yes."
"And not do anything stupid with it?"
"Yes," she said.
Cleesh had been crying.
"You're late," she said.
"It's a little out of my way," he replied. He looked at her and narrowed his eyes.
"Have you been crying?"
"My eyes have been playing up," she said. "I told you about it the other day. Tear duct, humidity thing. I w
as up in a can for too long. I told you."
He remembered her saying something. It wasn't the first time he'd seen her with pink puffiness around the eyes. He was beginning to realise that he didn't know her that well, in person. He didn't know if she suffered from allergies, if she was prone to tearfulness, if pink puffiness was a normal look.