by Dan Abnett
Falk didn't want to stay.
They moved back through the forest, Rash going at Falk's speed, mindful of his injury. They didn't speak. Away from the gash the boomer had cut through the forest cover, it was dark and closeted. The trees, mostly snowgums, were pale columns like the legs of giant grazers. Shadows were deep black or emerald-green, pockets of darkness. The air was tinted grey-green, forest light, leaf-filtered.
Overhead, the canopy sighed and creaked in the wind, leaves hissing like surf on a shingle beach. There was a strong smell of leaf litter, and the sounds of their footsteps were magnified. Every now and then, a large blurd droned past, clattering like a wind-up wooden toy or buzzing like a saw.
Rash stopped.
"What's up?" asked Falk.
Rash looked at him, and didn't reply. His eyes were fierce. He looked pointedly off into the distance behind them, in roughly the direction of the crash site.
"What?" asked Falk.
"Something," Rash murmured. He raised his PAP 20, moved back a few feet, using a tree for cover. Falk followed, sliding the Koba off his shoulder.
"Just the trees moving," said Falk, conscious of how quietly he was speaking.
Rash shook his head.
"I heard voices," he said. "Behind us. I'm guessing a search sweep, looking for the bird. Looking to find out where it came in. Looking to see if anyone walked away."
He fell silent, waited. Falk listened.
From far away, very far away, he caught the sound of voices. Men talking as they moved along, checking back and forth, an exchange of commands.
"They're coming this way," whispered Rash. "Probably not far off finding the boomer."
Falk nodded. They started to move again, more urgently, heading towards the camp. Falk tried to go as fast as possible so as not to slow Rash down.
He paused, and took one last listen to the sounds of pursuit.
Very far away.
But nothing like far enough.
TWENTY-SIX
Falk accessed the images stored in the glares. The maps were intact, but the glares had suffered some wear and tear. The power cell seemed to be faulty, or there was a bad connection. Images flickered occasionally, for no reason.
Rash got the group moving at once. He aimed to put some distance between them and the searchers before getting too concerned about precise location. As they wound through the trees in the trackless forest, with Bigmouse determining the rate of movement, Falk tried to pinpoint their position using the stored maps.
It occurred to him that Eyeburn Junction, like so many small towns and communities in that part of the continent, was still coming to terms with what it was, and what it would become. It was a classic early-stage settlement, with a population that was original generation, or not many past it. It bore the affirming boldness of land stakes, of first principles, of community foundation. The spirit of that process had been part of the human experience since before man expanded out from his cradle. As a trope, it recurred on every settlement world. People finding some new ground, some new land, and deciding, almost arbitrarily, that they would connect with that particular place, that this was what they had been looking for. They had brought a curious, portable sense of belonging with them, a readyto-use ownership, and they had planted it in the first suitable place, declaring that this was what anchored their lives now. This determined them, and would determine their children. This particular patch of land defined them.
Falk had never felt that way. He'd never felt connected to anywhere, not even as a child, certainly not as an adult. His profession, tailored by his character no doubt, required him to be a guest, visiting places and people, looking in, informed by the contrasts and details revealed simply by his lack of familiarity. He was an observer, and he never stayed anywhere long enough to get bored with the view.
He liked to drift. To look in through other people's windows. Or, in this case, out of other people's eyes.
His father's life had been shaped by a long career in propulsion. He designed engines, very successfully. This talent had literally propelled him around the worlds of the Human Settlement, and he acquired as he went the habit of travel that inspired his work. Indirectly, brought along for the ride, hisfamily had learned the behaviour too.
When his father finally, and without much notice, dismantled his starter family, and decided, obdurately and in the face of an entire lifetime of far-flung work postings, to settle somewhere and make one place his permanent location, Lex Falk had simply not been prepared to stop as well. Part of it, of course, was resentment at his father's actions and towards his new half-family, but he had also acquired an addiction. Moving, never stopping, always driving on to see whatever was next. Never settling for settlement. He had learned it from his father, contracted it through contact with his father's demanding career.
And he had always been grateful to his father for it. He had always believed it made him somehow more sophisticated. He was not satisfied with one, static experience. He was not one of life's fence builders or roof raisers. He was not filled with a desire to make neighbours out of anybody. His father's late-onset shift into this fixed state had made him anxious. Or rather, disappointed at his father's sudden change of heart, and anxious that one day, without warning, his genes might pull the same dirty trick on him.
If they were going to do that, he had always presumed, it would be a sudden change, sudden like his father's change to changelessness had seemed to be. But Falk had a sneaking suspicion, one that had quietly developed over the previous few years, that the change was in reality rather more subtle. It was creeping up on him, very slowly decelerating his forward velocity, an imperceptible shift, just like a spinrad driver could use the gravity well of a sun to gradually arrest his craft and turn it without expending any of its own power. Something in his life was transmitting just such an effect to him, bringing him progressively to rest.
When people came to rest, voluntarily or deliberately, they often didn't immediately know where they would end up. First principles of survival – a roof, a supply of power and food and water – gave way to a much more interesting period of determination. Much of Eighty-Six was doing that, not the cities perhaps, but certainly the great colonial plots, the settlement territories, land parcels like Eyeburn Junction. It was possibly why settlement worlds took so long to arrive at a formal name. It took a while for them to find out what they were going to be.
Falk didn't know why Eyeburn Junction had originally been planted. Perhaps the weather station because of the vantage, or the fuelling depot because of the range of freight liners. Either one would have brought staff, and staff would have brought families, and families would have made a community like Eyeburn Slope, and that would have required the farming infrastructure. But agriculture was simply there to provide. It would never become a major off-world export. The hortiplex belts would feed communities, ship produce to towns, supply cities like Shaverton, maybe even become a mighty industry in domestic terms. But it wasn't the thing. Mining was the thing. The rich and precious resources of Eighty-Six's mantle and crust, that was what it was all about. Mining would be the cornerstone of Eighty-Six's trade and export. Mining would make Eighty-Six a prosperous world in the Settlement. Not for a few generations yet, but soon. Maybe one day, it would earn Eighty-Six a formal name like Prospect or Orpheus, or even Greenstone, the name that Fifty had been given. Maybe mining would decide what Eighty-Six was going to be.
In miniature, this was what was happening to Eyeburn Junction and the territory surrounding it. The land registry at Eyeburn Slope attested to this. The distribution of land parcels for homesteads and agriculture required careful record, but it was a service often performed by a central SO registry. The land office at Eyeburn Slope was not for farming purposes. Its detailed charts, deep resonance mapping, satlinks and surveyor records were evidence of people who were interested in the substance of the land. The settlementeers – and bigger corporations, no doubt – were prospecting the region to
see where their fortunes might lie. A man could come and acquire a parcel of land in the Eyeburn belt for his family to live on, then spend the rest of his life studying parcels of land in the nearby hills to find the one that would turn his family into a rich dynasty. The area looked promising. In fifty or seventy-five years there would probably be glass masts in the city of Eyeburn, maybe a ferry port and a Hyatt, and Gunbelt Highway and Eyeburn Slope and Depot Street would be the names of roads and boulevards.
He wondered what the grey, silent woods would be called. A residential area known as Snowgum Heights, perhaps? The Tangletree Halls Campus at the University of Eyeburn?
They stopped so that Bigmouse could rest. They were still deep in the trees, submerged in the murky, sea-green light. They could hear the rain coming and going above the canopy, and smell the fresh, renewing damp after every shower.
Falk moved away from the resting group. He tried playback a few more times, then closed his eyes and waited.
The leaves rustled above him, stirred by the wind, sounding like backmasked voices.
"Cleesh?"
At first, she didn't seem to be there. Then Falk got the distinct impression that she was, that she was struggling urgently to get through. Little sideways half-words seemed to reach him, the sounds of words and phrases rotated in such a way as to render them nothing more useful than noises.
"Come on, Cleesh."
Still nothing, just a whisper, like a voice muffled by a door or a baffling conversation heard through a party wall.
"Cleesh, if you can hear me, this is what I need a translation for."
He spoke out the words the couple on the playback said as best he could, sounding out each part as accurately as possible. Then he did it again, breaking each part down, doing the lines one at a time, watching the playback and speaking along to it.
"Where have you gone, Cleesh?" he asked. "I need to hear from you."
"Talking to yourself?" asked Rash.
Falk turned.
"Yeah, it's a bad habit, I know."
Rash nodded.
"You find anything on those charts?" he asked.
"That's what I was just checking," said Falk. "I think I've got us pretty much locked. Of course, this territory is so young, nowhere has much of a name."
He blinked up a map, and then handed the glares to Rash so he could look.
"Copy it across," Falk suggested, and Rash touched Falk's glares against his own.
They put the devices back on, studied the results.
"Yeah, that's convincing," said Rash.
Falk had focused on an area that was called Twenty Thousand Acre Forest on the registry map, which encompassed the mouth of an unnamed glen and straddled a stream network that simply owned a serial number.
"I used the glares to run comparative mapping," said Falk. "Of course, there's a broader margin of error, because the source is a copy of a hard-print map and not a loaded chart. But it looks likely."
Rash nodded again.
"What's this here?"
"I think it's a barn complex, for lumber storage. It's about five miles west of us, towards the highway."
"And this? A farm, right?"
"Yes, and so's this. Both a good distance south-west. Those two triangles I think are markers for undeveloped or unclaimed parcels. That is some kind of livestock structure, maybe a gross battery pen or an automated bier."
"And this thing? Here, close by. No more than two miles north-east. It looks like a property."
"It does, but I think it's another plot. It's the registered proposal for an intended structure, a planning proposal. I'm not entirely familiar with all the registry notations yet, but the outline is pale blue. It looks like a residence or a structured plot, but there's no orange property outline so the parcel isn't registered to an owner, individual or corporate. I think someone's filed a proposal for land use, and if they get approval, they'll purchase the plot. At the moment, it's just the record of an idea."
"But you're not sure?"
"No, not absolutely."
"Shame," said Rash. "Looks like it could have been a big place. Decent shelter, resources."
Falk looked at him.
"We certainly need something," he agreed.
Rash took off his glares. His expression was solid, frank.
"We do. Your man, Bigmouse. He's in trouble, Bloom. And that means he could be trouble for all of us."
"We're not ditching him, Rash."
"Interesting. When you came around after the crash, you were all for pragmatic decisions. Very eloquent."
"That was about sacrificing myself," said Falk. "Not Bigmouse. He's one of mine. He's my responsibility, and he's depending on me. I'm not ditching him."
"We could move faster without him. Nothing is safe out here. Nothing is guaranteed. We're probably dead already, but we're more likely to be dead if we're weighed down by someone who is too hurt to fight or move. Our only chance is to stay mobile and keep out of the way of these bastards."
"So as far as Bigmouse is concerned, shelter is helpful?"
"Of course. We could maybe get him more comfortable. We could defend a location. Hell, if it came to it, I'd rather ditch him where he could stay warm and fed rather than leave him out in the rain. Give the man some possibility of survival."
Falk thought for a moment.
"We try this farm, then. This residence."
"You don't think it's real."
"If it's not real, we review. If it is real, it buys Bigmouse some time."
"Okay." Rash seemed unconvinced.
"Rash," said Falk, "if you'd had any choice in the matter at all, would you have left any of Hotel Four behind?"
"Point," said Rash.
By the time they had reached the skirts of the forest's densest section, the rain had eased and the sun had come out. The temperature climbed rapidly, a shift that felt unnatural from a human standpoint. It reminded Falk yet again of his first, uneasy impressions of Eighty-Six as a forced fit for settlement. It only took a few minutes of hard sunlight lancing down through the canopy before they were uncomfortably hot. The yellow light was dappled, filtered by the shifting mesh of the leaves, turning the forest interior into a dazzling, leopard-print palace. When Falk looked up, the light flashed and glittered beyond the trees like reflecting water.
They reached the edge of the trees, less than half a mile from the plot on the map. It was a building after all, a structure of some considerable size. They could see it clearly from where they had stopped. It was on the far side of a large, banking meadow and beyond a brake of trees. To their right, the meadowland curved up to meet the hem of the woods, which extended up and away in luxurious folds into the hills. These uplands were massive. Falk had seen them from the boomer and from the east side of the weather station site, but now he was at their feet and properly understood their scale.
To their left, alternating expanses of meadow and clumps of woodland patchworked the long slope of the land down to the distant and invisible course of the highway. In that direction was haze, the smoky heat and light of an afternoon stretching away towards the ocean under the sun.
The sky was clear, the powder blue of ground ore. The sun had burned all the clouds away.
Falk took a look at the building, using the zoom function. It was an impressive building, a massive two- or three-storey house of modern, rectilinear design, surrounded by small annexes and outbuildings. Preben made a passing reference to it as a ranch, but it didn't strike Falk that way. The outbuildings looked like simple service or storage buildings, not the infrastructure of a working farm station. It was a high-status house, a mansion, a country seat.
"Real," said Rash.
"Apparently," Falk replied.
"I can't see no one around the place," said Valdes. He was adjusting the pan and zoom of the powerful optics on his M3A, like he was going to take a shot at the place.
"Let's move in," said Rash. He glanced at Falk for an okay. There was a slight awkwardness betw
een them. They were the two senior men in the group, both squad leaders. Falk – Bloom – technically outranked Rash because there were more of his original section in the remainder, but Rash had the edge because he was intact and Falk was carrying an injury.
"Let's move," Falk agreed.
The meadow was thick with tall nodding grass, stiff and pale gold like straw. Each stalk had high leaves and little white flowerheads that were husking into seed cases. The grass was waist-high, a lake of dried yellow. They waded into it, fording it. The sunshine was raising evaporation from the ground, shrouding the meadow in a fuzz of white fog, like the air in a steam room. It clung on tight, in a layer no more than a foot deep above the grass. Billions of tiny moth-like blurds, green and white, billowed in the blanket of mist, wildly active in the heads of the grass. Hectic and busy, none of them rose more than an inch or two above the layer of drifting steam. The light, the warmth, the ghost smear of mist, the confetti blurds, it made everything dreamlike. There was an equanimity.