Valdes and Goran went crazy, pouring weapons fire back at the station. Falk had no idea if they hit anything. The boomer shifted again, properly bumped a little.
"Don't you dare, Masry!" Falk yelled. He had fought the snake back enough to half-rise. He screamed over the seat backs at Masry in the pilot's seat.
"Stay on the ground!"
"We've got to go!"
"Stay on the fucking ground, Masry! We're not all here!"
"We've got to freeking® go, you freekhead®!" Masry yelled back. "We're dead if we stay here! They're on us! They're freeking® on us!"
"Stay on the fucking ground until Huck gets Hotel Four aboard!"
"Freek® you!" Masry answered. "I'm not going to sit here!"
The Boreal rose slightly, engines shrilling, then dipped back into the mud. The lurch threw everybody about. Valdes had been half in the door and he fell out, onto his back. He got up, slithering around in the mud, and tried to climb back in.
"Chief! Chief! Come on!" Preben yelled from the side door. Huck turned, saw them, saw there was no time left, and began to run back. Goran knelt down to give him covering fire.
Rash appeared. Rash, then the other members of Hotel Four. They came out of the undergrowth on the far side of the yard, out from behind a refab, firing as they moved. The urgency had forced them to abandon cover and risk the dash across the yard. It was that, or be left behind.
Barnard only made it a couple of steps. He folded sideways in a puff of blood mist, then tumbled over, rolling and rolling. A hardbeam cut Lintoff's left leg mid-shin and he fell over before he realised why he could no longer run or even stand. Estmunsen skidded to a halt, then rushed back to help Lintoff. Rash turned too, yelling Lintoff's name. Estmunsen got his wrists under Lintoff's armpits, started to drag him, Lintoff shrieking an inhuman kind of squeal. There was a bang. A second hardbeam shot went through both of them, both torsos, clean through, leaving a cauterised tunnel the size of a porthole. They fell as one, Lintoff suddenly mercifully silenced, hitting the yard in a splash of rainwater.
The boomer's tail came up. The fans thundered. Huck grabbed the screaming Rash, dragged him back towards the floundering aircraft. Hard rounds and the occasional hardbeam ripped around them, splattering mud, steamblasting craters. Rash was fighting Huck, and fighting Goran too when Goran tried to help Huck. He tried to push them away, resist their efforts to get him aboard so that he could stay in the yard with the mutilated bodies of his team members.
"Fuck it! Fuck it, man!" Valdes yelled from the door.
Like a cop restraining a violent offender, Huckelbery got Rash in an armlock from behind, turned him around and bundled him into the hatch. Preben grabbed him, Valdes too, Goran and Huck frantically posting Rash up from behind. Rash's head was back, eyes clenched shut, mouth wide open and bawling at the sky. Preben and Valdes got Rash inside, almost threw him down on the floor. They heaved Goran up and in, Huck right behind him on the kick-step.
Masry took the hopter up. No warning again. Just a sudden, violent ascent, overpowered, unskilled, woefully inept. Pika-don rose hard, twenty or thirty feet into the air, turbines protesting. At the same time, she yawed to the side, desperately unstable, tipping, swinging.
The ugly combination of violent rise and spastic dip took them all by surprise. Rash rolled and smashed into the cabin partition. Falk lurched forward, smacking his mouth into the door pillar. Goran lost his grip entirely. He fell backwards off a deck that was tilted at forty-five degrees. He fell back into Huckelbery, who was still clinging to the outside of the open hatchway.
They vanished together, out and away, falling face-up out of the side of the boomer.
Masry got the bird level, turned the nose.
"You've got to go back down!" Falk heard Preben screaming at Masry over the hammering roar of the jets and the wind. "Go back down! Down, you fuck! We've got to pick them up!"
The Boreal's tail rose, the chin tucked in. Climbing steeply, Masry accelerated them away from the hilltop yard.
TWENTY-FOUR
They climbed away, fast and urgent, but stability and control were all over the place. The bird, perhaps more significantly damaged than Masry had reckoned, shook wildly, as though it was juddering across an uneven surface, or simply untameable. The vibration became so intense it was all any of them could do just to hold on. The wind noise and the engine roar assaulted them, urging them to let go.
Falk wondered if the atrocious ride quality was entirely due to damage, or if Masry had vastly over-rated his ability to fly the thing. Even with equality compensator systems, multi-fan machines took skill and delicacy to control in terms of pitch and balance. They required experience, extensive simulator time and hundreds of logged flying hours. Masry came with nothing except second-hand exposure and a basic understanding of the principal controls.
Masry had left Huck and Goran at the station. The image of them falling was all Falk could see. Why hadn't Masry gone back? What the fuck would have stopped him going back? Terror, cold-blooded pragmatism, or just the fact that he was panicked and didn't have anything like enough skill to set the boomer down again once he'd got it up?
The engines were making a brutal noise, an uneven, grinding clatter, especially the rear starboard unit. Falk tried to rise. He had fresh blood on his lips and chin where he'd head-butted the pillar. He was pretty sure that if he got the opportunity, he was going to shoot Masry.
Pulling himself up a little, bracing against the constant shake, he looked out. It was freezing cold. Clouds slashed past them. It felt like they were miles up in the air, but it was only a thousand feet or so. He could see the valley below them, the thin white vein of the highway. He got his bearings a little. There, the highway, the rising bulk of the mountains, the caldera rim. The ocean, that had to be behind them.
"Masry!" he yelled, gripping the headrests of the front seats for support. "Masry, where the fuck are you going? What are you doing? We want south! We want to go south! This is east, you fucktard! Where the fuck are you going?"
All of Masry's effort was focused on fighting with the stick. The instrument panel was lit up with red warning lights and flashing yellow alerts. Falk realised it was pretty much all Masry could do to simply keep the boomer aloft. Navigation, headings, all of that shit had gone right out of the window. Discarded. Non-essential. Remaining in the air was the only thing that counted.
"You've got to turn!" Falk yelled."Turn that way! South! South, you get it? Masry?"
Masry glanced up at him, just for a second, just a second, just long enough for Falk to see that there was no more reasoning with him. Masry was beyond argument or persuasion. He wasn't even really hearing Falk. His mind was locked. There was nothing in his face at all but some blind flavour of craziness. Falk saw a man who had swum way out beyond the safety markers and the life guards, a man who knew he'd embarked upon something he should never have attempted, something he couldn't hope to finish.
Masry turned away, returned to his struggle.
"We are so fucking dead," said Falk.
The rear starboard engine decided it wanted to die first. Just before Falk finished uttering the words, there was a painful metallic bang, like a ton of scrap iron being dropped into a skip. The boomer bucked savagely. Pieces of broken rotor head exploded out of the case and punched into the main hull like porcupine quills. Black smoke, as dark and gold-shot as expensive silk, spilled out of the engine housing and trailed into the slipstream in a long and slender ribbon.
A klaxon started to whoop. Hazard panels flashed battenburg patterns. The awful, juddering vibration suddenly became something a whole lot worse: a feral, pummelling fury.
They were descending rapidly, planing down in an easterly direction. Once again, Falk wasn't sure if this was something that Masry intended, or a result of the boomer's increasing inability to avoid the ground. The cold highlands loomed ahead of them, grey and wet, scribbled on with chalk-mark clouds. They were crossing the line of the highway, leaving Eyeburn
Junction and the depot behind over their right shoulder. The landscape below was unworked, wild. Scree slopes, grass meadows, thickets of gorse, thorn and salt bramble, pale and rusty like a stain of lichen on a boulder. Beyond that, stands of trees, then beards of denser forest, tangletree and snowgum and the fat, starchy genus that looked like rubberwood. The forest coated the escarpments of the rising hills, and lined the dark clefts and glens, the steep slices in the rock where mist hung like net curtaining, veiling private darknesses and secret streams. It felt as though they had some destination, as though the wounded Boreal was pressing on, down towards one of the forested gaps, drawn by an instinct or a navigation program.
Despite the icy, wet wind blasting in through the open slider doors, they could all smell burning, an overhot stink of frying plastic that was welling out of the drive compartment behind the cabin space. Debris from the exploding engine had punched into the main fuselage and done untold harm, splintering and tumbling and spreading like hollowpoint rounds inside a target body. What systems had been destroyed? What was burning? Hydraulics? Fuel lines? Electrics? Fucking fire suppression?
"Can you land this?"
Falk looked up. Preben was braced beside him, holding on to the overheads, shouting forwards at Masry in the nose.
"Masry? Can you land this?" he called.
Masry said something.
"I can't hear you, Masry," Preben yelled. "What did you say? Can you land this or not?"
Something. Something like a yes, maybe?
Preben flicked his eyes at Falk for a second, saw he was watching. Falk wiped blood off his mouth.
"Masry?" Falk shouted. "Masry, where are you going to set down?"
"Masry, answer Bloom's question," Preben called. "Where are you going to set down? Masry?"
Nothing. Preben looked at Falk.
"I should just fucking shoot him," he declared. "We wouldn't be in any worse shit."
"Masry!" Falk shouted.
The engine note changed suddenly. Briefly, Falk thought everything had cut out, but then he realised that the ground was beginning to rise quite significantly beneath them. It was rushing closer. The tree cover was soaking up the reflected roar and clatter of their engines, suddenly giving little of it back. The roar became a buzzing and whirring. The airframe kept jolting and rattling.
"Oh fuck, man," Falk heard Valdes moan.
"Masry!" Falk yelled. "Steer towards the flat ground! The open ground, Masry! Over that way! Don't take us down into the fucking trees! Masry!"
It wasn't going to happen. There was an ocean of tree tops skimming under them, a grey treescape. Falk willed them to stay above it. It was just leaves. Just leaves and twigs. It should be soft, it ought to give. They could almost bounce right off it, like a coin springing off a corner-tucked sheet, like a stone skipping across a lake.
Turned out it was like hitting a wall.
There was an impact, like striking rock. Noise again, roaring, clattering, engines shrieking. Klaxons. The whole machine shaking and rattling with homicidal rage. Squeaking, scraping, ripping, cracking, scratching sounds as they tore through the tree cover, broken branch ends knifing the hull, leaf debris in the air around them, driven in through the side doors.
Then something bigger, heavier, more ungiving, smacked into them and turned them hard, like a right hook breaking a jaw, turning a skull aside. Then another, a blow to the ribs that almost rolled them to the left. Headlong still, demolishing canopy and splintering solid boles. Needles of wood and chips of bark in a blizzard, motion too blurry to control.
The final sledgehammer hit. Falk was thrown forward, bouncing off the back of the cab seats and the cabin divider.
The shaking wouldn't stop. There were sounds all around him. The hull yelped like a whipped dog as it buckled and cracked, laminates crumpling like foil, metal screeching and shredding, dermetic alloys protesting. Falling metal versus trees and ground.
Then nothing.
Falk wasn't sure which way up he was. He wasn't sure if any parts of him were missing, if any parts of him had been torn off. He was reasonably certain he was alive, which was, in itself, a major miracle. It wasn't clear how survival had been at all possible.
Denying all of the pain that would inevitably follow, he allowed himself a tiny moment of triumph, of joy at the randomness of fortune.
Then the snake struck, and the cramp hit him, and he was gone anyway.
TWENTY-FIVE
"Falk."
His name was unfamiliar. He hadn't heard it spoken in a while. Backmasked voices and upside-down sounds hummed inside his head, coming in and out, first soft, then louder, then soft again.
His name emerged from the sounds, briefly, like some small, deep-sea creature coming up for air and breaking the surface. It was the right way around, his name appearing intact out of the reversed nonsense of the voices.
"Falk."
There was no pain. This was either merciful good news, or an early indication of fundamental spinal calamity.
"Falk."
He opened his eyes. Bloom's eyes. Above him, a canopy of leaves and branches, a dark grey, cavernous space under the spread of the forest, where the light was soft and slatecoloured, like snow light, like the hue of the sky before a blizzard came in.
He was on his back, looking up at a roof of gum branches, tangletrees, leaves the colour of ash and chalk, bark like untanned skin. Succulents wrapped every limb and trunk like external circulation. The looping ropes, which reminded him uncomfortably of snakes, were weighted with white berries like milky pearls, and little dot flowers of yellow. Some of the vines had intertwined so enthusiastically, they resembled sheafs of electrical trunking or cable-tied wires.
Daylight, tiny triangles of daylight, peeked through the gently moving roof.
Faces loomed. People were bending over him, looking down at him, into his face. Expressions of concern. Rash, Preben, then Valdes. They were all grubby, their faces smeared with dirt and sweat, and speckled with blood and oil.
"Falk?" said Rash. "Can you hear me? If you're alive, make some kind of sign."
"Falk," said Preben. "You're hurt. We have a serious problem. Unforeseen. We're trying to solve it. Falk? We're going to help you, okay?"
He wondered how they'd found out his name. How had they done that?
"Falk," said Valdes, eyes wide as he peered down. "Please. We've been trying to reach you for hours. Please respond to me."
They all had the same voice, he realised. All three of them had the same voice, and it was a woman's voice.
"Please, Falk, please respond," said Rash. No, he wasn't saying that. He wasn't saying anything like that. His lips didn't match the words. He was saying something else, saying something to Preben. The voice Falk could hear was merely speaking at the same time. Overlap. It was like bad dubbing on a movie.
Falk closed his eyes so he could hear the voice better. It was coming and going out of the backmasked track, but many of the words were now the right way around.
"Falk?"
"Cleesh?"
A pause.
"Falk? Oh my God! Oh freek® me! I've got him! I've got him! Falk, can you hear me?"
"Yes, Cleesh. It's nice to hear your voice."
"Oh, Jesus, Falk! You freek®! We really thought we'd lost you! I have been going crazy here!"
"Can you calm down a little, Cleesh? Can you? It's a bit weird here. I need you to talk slowly and more calmly, so I can understand you."
Her voice receded into the blackness for a moment then came back.
"…I can, sure. No problem. It's just good to hear you, that's all. Listen, listen to me, Falk, we're trying to dig you out of there. We're trying to disengage you from the soldier."
"His name's Bloom."
"Bloom. Right, okay. I knew that. Look, it's complicated. Ayoob says it's complicated. Things have happened that they weren't expecting."
"Like what?"
"Just things they couldn't predict, things they couldn't prepare for
. We're working on it right now. They're–"
"Like what?"
A pause. It gave him a moment to get used to the blackness around him. With his eyes closed, it was almost as if he was floating in a lightless tank full of warm water and not lying on a forest floor at all.