"We'll be coming up on the back of them," Falk began. "On the back of our own, I mean. They're falling back, on the run. How will they…"
"What?"
"How will they know we're with them? Bumping into them out of nowhere, out there… that's just asking to be shot at."
"We don't have a fucking choice," said Preben. "No secure, remember? With any luck, they'll tag our AC profiles before they scorch us." He turned and kept going.
Bigmouse lingered for a second, favoured Falk with a last glance, then thumped down the steps after Preben.
Falk took off his glares and studied them, turning them over in his trembling, unsubtle hands.
"Hey, hey," he called.
"Fucking come on, you pretard!" Preben growled back. "Come on, or stay the fuck here and shut up."
"The glares, our glares," Falk said, looking at them both. "To pick up profiles, they must have their own carrier fields. A separate field?"
"Fuck are you on about?" asked Preben.
"They're passive receivers, unless they're linked through a celf or Mil-secure," said Bigmouse. There was a look on his face that told Falk he was supposed to know that. Bloom was qualified on all equipment uses. He was being dumb.
"Cut me some slack, here," said Falk. "They shot me in the fucking head, okay? It's hard to concentrate."
"This is wasting time!" snapped Preben.
"Just help me with this," said Falk. "The black hats have jammed Mil-secure, but our glares are still reading aura code profiles, yeah? How? Remind me how."
"From our IDs," said Bigmouse. The brooches, the ID brooches they all wore. They generated the profile fields. Short range, ultra short range, independent. Passive recognition effect, separate from Mil-secure comms. Falk slipped the glares back on, blink-found the target sampler option. He got an immediate informatic view, and saw Preben and Bigmouse lit up with green flags. He retselected Bigmouse, which opened a data pane. It read Mauskin, Private First Class Waylon Wakes, S.O.M.D. A further sub pane folded out to display vital stats, blood type, medical notations.
Passive, short-range carrier field, generated by each brooch, read by the target sampler system.
"You stupid fuck," said Preben. "Stay here and keep your head down."
He swung around and walked away, picking up speed, Bigmouse shook his head, and followed.
On Seventy-Seven, Falk had covered a massive financial scandal involving Artine Pacific, four capital investment banks and two rising-star senators. During the bloody legal debacle of the inquiry and trial, Artine Pacific's lawyers had tried to control the news flow, delaying certain aspects of the story to allow their clients time to disengage and minimise the financial hit they would take when the markets found out. They tried gag orders first, then injunctions invoking corporate confidentiality issues. Finally, in desperation, they went hardball, and scorched all the celf and newsfeeds coming out of the state house using a system jammer, just to buy about ninety minutes of lead time to shed their liabilities.
Cleesh had seen that dirty pool coming. She said she'd anticipated it because it was exactly the kind of fucktard play she'd have tried. This was back when she still cursed, before the ling patch. No one, Falk included, could transmit out of the state house, but she'd made sure Falk had gone in with a jot pad and a stylus, the sort of passive field tool a waitress at a ProFood would use to write down a customer order so the till and the kitchen could read it. Then Cleesh had hired a bike courier to sit outside the state house gate with an ordinary, off-the-shelf base unit. Falk didn't broadcast anything. He wrote all the details down on the jot pad, and the courier at the gate read everything, copied it and, because he was outside the jamming cone, squirted it to Cleesh in her can. She broke the story fortyseven minutes before any other news source. Artine Pacific took a headshot on the market.
Falk blink-accessed his brooch, opened the priority medical awareness pane and used his celf to type in an update.
Then he descended the steps as rapidly as he could, Bigmouse and Preben about to disappear from sight along the walkboarded path. Hand shaking, he fired a single shot from his PDW into the decking.
Preben and Bigmouse jumped at the report. They both whirled around, weapons coming up, targeting him, locking up.
Then they both lowered their aim and relaxed.
"What the fuck?" said Preben. "What the fuck? How did you do that?"
"That's a fucking piece of genius," said Bigmouse.
He could only imagine what they could see, but his imagination was well informed.
Their target samplers had shown them Nestor Bloom, green-flagged as a friendly by his aura code. Across his body, like a virtual sandwich board, was an informatic pane, the priority medical awareness updater.
It read Can you read this, you fuckhats?
Preben and Bigmouse both raised their weapons again to relight the sampling flag, just so they could enjoy it a second time. They jogged back to him.
"How the fuck did you do that?" asked Preben.
Falk explained how.
"No, I mean how the fuck did you think of doing that?" asked Preben.
"It just came to me," Falk said.
Bigmouse had already tried it. When they pointed their weapons in his direction, they saw a pane that read Fucking genius idea.
"What do we write?" asked Bigmouse.
Falk shrugged.
"Kilo One friendly, in support to your rear?" he suggested. "It'll do for a start."
Preben's face dropped.
"Ah, I knew it was too clever," he sighed. "It's not secure."
"Doesn't matter," Falk replied. "It's only short range. Plus, they think we're jammed. They won't be looking for it."
"Yeah, but they can read it. If they see it, they can read it."
"If they see it," Falk agreed. "They like our weapons. They like our ammo too. But so far, I haven't seen any sign they've been lifting glares."
"They're old school," said Bigmouse. "Or untrained. The target sampler can be really confusing if you're not used to it. They're probably not bothering."
They adjusted their medic alerts and exchanged fist bumps. Then they moved off together.
The gunfire was getting closer. A wild pipe shot hissed through the crop rows and blew open the side of a galvanised reservoir full of rainwater. There was a shocked gasp of explosive steam, and a glugging rush as the tank emptied. The foliage the beam had cut through started to burn. Off to their right, hard rounds were hitting something solid.
Probably a wall, Falk decided.
TWENTY-ONE
It was getting scary. He was just playing at being a soldier. Then there was the matter of his hopeless coordination.
The cooking popcorn sounds of gunshots rippled through crop rows. There was a drifting sheen of smoke in the wet air, the distinctive burn smell of propellant. The target sampler kept throwing up yellow and orange flags.
Ten feet ahead of Falk, Preben suddenly turned to the right, cheeked his M3A and fired. A squeal and a blink of light.
Preben lowered his weapon slightly.
"Red flag," he said softly. "I believe I just scorched a sunbitch."
"More!" Bigmouse announced, and ran forward into the planting beds, ducking under training wires and rigged loops of irrigation pipe. He was squaring up to red-flag movement. Falk raised his PDW, a two-handed grip. Playing at being a fucking soldier, just playing.
Bigmouse adjusted for airburst, and sailed a pair of grenade rounds up over the crops. There were two big flashes followed by meaty, gritty bangs. Plants shook as if a wind had whipped through them.
Bigmouse jerked his head for them to follow. They left the walkboard, and pushed through the bed rows, ankle-deep in black loam, stooping to avoid the sprayer hoses. There was a strong smell of earth, of liquid fertiliser, of wet metal pipes. Overhead, Falk could see the low, grey evening sky through cages of irrigation gridwork and lighting frames.
They came out, crossed another walkboard aisle, then dropped back into the crop
thicket again. Somewhere to the left of them, an assault weapon was clattering like a sewing machine.
Out onto another walkboard path. On the far side, the crop row was tented under a large polytunnel. There was no obvious entry point, so Preben drew his utility knife, and sliced through the side of the sheeting. They slid through the cut, into a warm, moist cave filled with the peaty smell of germination. Pre-packed sacks of fertilised soil mix were stacked up, ready for use. They were marked with the GEO logo. Preben cut a slit out through the far side of the polytunnel, and they emerged onto another run of duckboards.
There was a corpse on the path. It was lying on its back a few feet down from their slit exit. The man had his legs bent and spread, as though he was running. He was wearing dark clothes, no uniform. His head was tilted right back, as if he was offering his throat for ritual cutting.
The greater part of his torso was a mangled hole. The loss of tissue and bone, of general matter, was astonishing. It looked like something white-hot, the size of a beeball, had punched clean through him. The edges of the wound were shredded and mangled, fused into a smoking crust of burned blood and blackened flesh. Thick fluid, viscous as tar or expensive balsamic vinegar, drooled out of the astonishing yawn of the cavity, and there was a speckled haze of it across the decking behind him. That's what a hardbeam piper did to human anatomy.
"Fuck," murmured Preben, staring down, genuinely thunderstruck by the sight of his handiwork.
"Nice grouping," said Falk.
"Fuck me," Preben murmured. He'd fired live before, he'd done it up at the hilltop station, but Falk knew Bloom knew it was the first time Preben had been presented with proof of a killshot.
The smell was appalling. Faeces and toffee, cremated bone, melted meat, the inside-out body stench that no one who smelled it ever forgot.
"Sucks to be him," said Bigmouse.
Falk got red and green across his glares suddenly. He looked up, past Preben and Bigmouse, both still too startled by the actuality of the dead man to be aware of anything else. Three figures had appeared at the far end of the aisle. Three bright red flags.
Falk started firing, firing his Colt between Preben and Bigmouse, who both jerked back in dismay. The shots were wild. It was more to make a noise than anything. The red flags scattered. Preben turned himself around, and cut off with the M3A. The piper screamed in the direction of the end of the row.
The Colt PDW suddenly seized up in Falk's hand. He gazed at it for a second. The slide was clamped back and smoke was curling from the action. The ammo out LED was lit. Falk realised he didn't know what to do with it. He had asked for spare stripmags, but he'd never reloaded a weapon in his life.
Bigmouse shoulder-barged him. It was a full-on bodycheck, Bigmouse slamming into Falk, knocking him backwards. It hurt. It winded him. The force of the collision made him lose his footing, and he fell over against the wall of the polytunnel. The rain-beaded plastic was springy like a trampoline skin. He didn't tear through it, he bellied off it, and wound up on his side in the mud between the duckboards and the base of the tunnel.
For a very short time, he was stunned, unable to assess what had happened. The first coherent thing that occurred to him was that Bigmouse had tackled him and brought him over in some grandstanding stunt to save his life. But Bigmouse had fallen over too. Bigmouse was on his arse on the decking. He was groaning, whimpering like a beaten dog.
Falk registered a rapid thup-thup-thup! sound coming from above him. Automatic hard rounds were punching a diagonal line of holes through the polytunnel skin, creating puckered dimples in the plastic, each whorl stretching under the plastic's tension to form an indentation like a navel in the firm curve of stomach. Bigmouse had been hit by hard rounds. They'd struck him in the torso armour, clubbed him down, smashing him into Falk in the process. Falk couldn't see any blood, but he could see dents in Bigmouse's chest blate that looked like they had been punched with a hammer and an awl.
Preben was trying to drag Bigmouse into cover. He was fighting to manage the unwieldy bulk of the M3A with his right hand while attempting to grab the straps of Bigmouse's blate rig with his left. Preben was yelling. Bigmouse was yelling. Hard rounds slapped into the polytunnel sheeting, into the mud, into the walkboards, lifting little geysers of droplets and shredded fibreplak. One shot chipped off Preben's thigh plate, just a glancing impact, but enough to rotate him, to twist his lower half, to make him holler.
Falk had dropped his PDW. Frantic for cover, he scrabbled at the side of the crop tunnel. It was like trying to tear through a drumhead. Futile. Then the third finger of his right hand snagged in one of the bullet-hole belly buttons, and that afforded him purchase enough to tear. He wrenched. The plastic stretched and parted. He fell facefirst into the tunnel, his hands still tangled in the sheeting.
Inside, on all fours, bullets were spitting through the transparent walls above him. Each puncture-hit sounded like a golfer driving off. As they passed through the polytunnel, the rounds ricocheted off the tunnel frame, off the sprinkler pipework, off the main props. They thupped into soil mix bags, destroyed racks of seedlings, shattered plastic pot trays, shredded mature plants. The already moist, suffocatingly peaty air filled with the released sap stench of vapourised plant fibres. One shot shattered the casing of one of the sunlamps clamped to the tunnel roof.
Falk looked around wildly. Through the condensationfogged wall of the tunnel, he saw Preben dragging Bigmouse off the walkboard into the plant row opposite. Falk started to crawl forward a foot or two and drew level with the slits where they had crossed through the tunnel earlier.
The corpse of the man killed by the hardbeam shot was right outside. His weapon, a compact grey assault rifle, had fallen into the gulley beside the duckboard path. Falk peeled back the flap of the hanging sheet, reached out, grabbed it, dragged it back in. Bullets zipped and tore through the tunnel above him.
He turned the weapon over in his hands. Koba Avtomat 90, the "A" version, modern, the latest upgrade. Clean, well kept, new. Twelve inch casehardened barrel. The stock was a milled finished plastic. Behind the angled foregrip, it had integrated connection polymer magazines, each holding sixty rounds of standard Central Bloc pattern 4mil cased. The bolt had already been pulled and the ambidextrous safety disengaged.
Falk took a breath, a deep one. He could hear the backmasked voices in the corner of his brain. He adjusted his glares and got them to maximum tint, then rose to his feet, using the nearest centre post as a support. A bullet plocked through the polytunnel and hissed right past his nose. Falk reached up, opened the relay box mounted to the post at head height, and gripped the paddle inside.
"Preben!" he yelled at the top of his voice. "Preben, close your fucking eyes!"
He didn't wait for a reply. He yanked the paddle down hard.
The sun lamps switched on.
They were mounted along each polytunnel row, and in the grow frames of several open-air beds too. Daylight lamp rigs were also set up around the walkboard junctions, and the access to the sheds.
The whole area suddenly blazed with painful white light. Black sky above, glare below. The firing faltered almost immediately.
Falk didn't wait. He dragged back the slit, swung out onto the walkway and opened fire. The Koba was sweet. Very little felt recoil, very little muzzle rise. It wasn't cued to his target sampler, because the Koba had no active sensor system that could be mated to it, but his glares were red-flagging shapes anyway. Human shapes in the crop rows at the end of the walkway, behind stacks of soil-mix bags, beside a rainwater tub.
He fired at the flags, a burst at each, loosing a stream of shots before switching to the next tagged target. Red and orange only. The cased rounds spat their spent, twisted plastic sleeves out of the ejector port like the sprayed offcuts of some light industrial process. The torn cases rained onto the duckboards around his feet.
He hit one red flag squarely and saw a graphic enhanced human shape wallop backwards into a row of bushes, tearing so
me of them down. Other hits weren't so positive. One fell, but may have slipped or ducked. Another vanished, but could have been pulling back. Once the blinding surprise of the light had passed, the opposition began shooting back again.
But Preben had wrestled the thumper off Bigmouse. Supporting Falk's general fire, he pumped four grenades into the thickets of crops and watering frames. They blew the living shit out of the rear part of the row. Earth, stalks and debris spewed up into the air in a hot, gritty rush and rattled down on top of them like hail. Twigs and clods of earth drummed off the polytunnel roof. There were suddenly blurds everywhere, blurds flicking and darting through the air, swirling like confetti, drawn to the light, creating hard white blobs against the black sky where the lamplight caught them.
Falk fired several more bursts into the wafting smoke and swirling airborne vapour until he emptied the mags. A flick of the thumb ejected the mag casing. He tilted the whole weapon sideways as he did this so the flying case would spit out sideways, away from him, then bent down to search the corpse for reloads.