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Amen
. Heads came up.

  "Let's go!" Huck said, clapping his hands.

  He rose. Across the mat, beside the next boomer in the line, he saw payload specialist Renn Lukes. Lukes was talking to an air crew tech,

  This was it. He felt his heart knot. Lukes knew him. It was all over. The whole thing was done.

  Lukes looked over.

  "Nestor!" he called, throwing a grin and a two-finger eyebrow stroke of a salute. He turned back to his conversation.

  "Sup, Bloom?" asked Stabler. She'd come up beside him.

  "What?"

  "The look on your face," she said. Karin Stabler. He knew he knew what she looked like naked.

  "I'm okay," he said. "I'm wealthy."

  "Fuck, I hope so. You pulled something, Nes?"

  "What?"

  "When you walked up just now," she said, "you had a little pimp roll going on. Like you were favouring your left foot."

  "No, I just need to get the lacing right on these boots. They're pinching."

  "You'd tell me if there was something wrong, right?" she asked. "I mean, it's me."

  "I'd tell you," he said. They fist-bumped. Then she squeezed his right buttock and walked away.

  The boomers were named. Each ground crew team had stencilled on a little tag or sample of nose art. It was strictly taboo during normal ops, because the SO didn't like the press seeing that kind of sensitivity-adverse shit. The hopter to the right of them was called
Crap Salad
. To the left,
Fuck You Very Much
, complete with an image of a pretty, coy girl caught
déshabillé
. Team Kilo's boomer was called
Pika-don
. A diligent calligrapher had written a motto under the name.
"Ask not what the fuck your country can do for you –
ask what you can fuck for your country."

  Sound filled the hangar, and everyone turned to look. In the vast slab of washed-denim dawn sky visible through the huge, cranked-wide doors, a flight of boomers was suddenly in sight, hammering away from them in loose formation, gaining altitude. It was the airborne force from Hangar Two, right next door. They were off and running. Everybody whooped and clapped and whistled as they watched the flock retreating towards the dust-blue skyline.

  They reminded him of a swarm of blurds, buzzing up from a patch of long grass, disturbed by a footstep. Not fleeing, the way the harmless, lacey lamp-bumpers did.

  Angry, like the vicious black-bodied predators.

  The ones that could sting.

TWELVE

Cicero, the sergeant, was giving them the scoop. They were cutting down through rain-fat ribbons of morning cloud, broad and flat, and the airframe was bucking. His LEAF locked tight as he looped his left hand through a wall strap. He couldn't hear its purr because of the rotor noise, and because he was ear-plugged into the sergeant's talkthrough. They'd just done their Mil-secure link check. There was no central display for the brief. Cicero was routing the visuals to their glares, and marking things out via his celf using a stylus.

  He volunteered a brief and unnecessary spiel about the "paramilitary threat", which was too vague to be of use to anyone, but sharp-edged enough to paint the opposition firmly as the black hats. Two, maybe three times he used the word
terrorist
, a piece of vocabulary that the SO, for the most part, had strenuously avoided in all to-media statements and interviews. It wasn't that the word was sensitivity-adverse per se, just that it was incendiary. It was the next gear up. If they held it back, it gave them a rhetoric of mass destruction they could resort to later.

  It was in play now, simply to get the blood up. The SO had okayed the word for use in field briefings. It was too loaded for media use, but it juiced the fire teams with a sense of righteousness.

  "Gunbelt Highway," said Cicero, punching the next image to their glares. Orbital relief, real time, real colour. The highway was the continental coast road. Winding along the landmass shelf for two thousand miles, around the buttresses of headland and throats of inlet, it linked Shaverton to Antrim by way of half-a-dozen junction bergs. It was a long, hard route, even in the air-con module of a bulk roadliner. Its looped line was intersected by thousands of dead creeks, run-off slots spoking down from the rim of the upland caldera, dry for years on end. From the air, from orbital vis, it resembled ammo linked into the belt-feed of a crew-served weapon.

  "Eyeburn Hill Junction is a weather station," said Cicero, loading the next image. "There's a fuelling depot, oceanic observatory and a horticultural fac. Select multiview to walk yourself around. Do it. Even you, Valdes."

  Valdes made a
pft
noise.

  "Valdes, how are you going to show them your famous A game if you don't pay attention?" Cicero asked.

  There was laughter.

  "Eyeburn went dead-air two nights ago, though this could be nothing," Cicero continued, "Several of the coast towns have been having uplink problems in the last month."

  "Cause?" asked Caudel.

  "Seasonal. Solar flares. That's what they're telling me."

  "Just us?" asked Jay.

  "Three booms. Us, Juliet, Hotel."

  The three Boreals had broken from the pack together about five minutes earlier. He could just see Juliet and Hotel through the sliced cloud, in line astern, portside.

  He sat uneasily, crouched down, his h-beam in a weathercase on the deck beside him. Everything was vibrating from the shock-rock of the ride. His skin was tingling from the quiver, organs sloshing with each air-pocket lurch.

  Inside, a strange stillness. Taut, like something was stretched tight and rigid to the limits of its give. He felt the other him pulling against him, like an anti-him, equal and opposite, blocking his every urge, his every desire, negating his every move. He couldn't speak, and when he did speak, it didn't feel like it was his voice. It felt post-ictal, dismaying. It felt like he was wearing clothes the wrong size. It felt like the sudden onset of body dysmorphia.

  He used his celf to tap out a text flash, let it trickle across the inside of his glares, one character at a time.

  
I need you to calm down or something, buddy. You're making me sick.

  He waited, then erased rather than sending it. Then he wrote again.

  
If this is you, deal with it. Stop it. Relax or something. If this is the process, then we are going to have to pull the plug, because I can't handle this feeling.

  Erase. Then: Wa
iting.

  "Bloom?"

  "What?"

  He looked up.

  "The sergeant is addressing you personally, Nestor," clipped Huck over the mic. "Wake the fuck up."

  "Sorry."

  Cicero was staring right at him over the frame of his glares.

  "I want Kilo One to secure the weather station. Can you do that, or are you too busy looking out of the damn window?"

  Cicero wasn't ling patched because Cicero didn't swear. Damn was as strong as it got, which made him using it shocking.

  "I can do that, sergeant. Kilo One can do that."
  "You certain?"
  "Certain as, sergeant."
  Cicero let it hang. He kept his eyes on him.
  "You okay there, Bloom?"
  "I'm good, sergeant. We're good."
  "Yeah?"
  "We're wealthy. We're golden."

Cicero nodded. He switched his gaze to Goran. "Kilo Two gets the depot," he continued.

Looking down on the continental rim, it looked like a rutted mud track seen from the underside of a roller. The caldera bit deep like a pothole, its belly full of water. Fragments of water lay in other ruts and furrows, like slivers of glass, catching the light. The terrain was a moist brown colour flecked with white, like the ganache of a coffee cake. Only the fragile wisps of clouds whipping past lent any sense of depth of scale.

  
Pika-don
rocked. A squall hit it crosswise, rain pelting off the canopy and ports like small-arms fire. It squirmed across the glass like worms of liquid diamond.

  "Four minutes!" the payload officer called.

  He started to glove up. His right hand was shaking. He clamped it in his left to halt the tremor. No one had noticed. He pulled on his gloves, then unpopped the weathercase of his M3A. He stared at it. Licorice black, hefty, like an implement for heavy construction or road breaking. Adjustable stock, billet lower and trigger grip, top rail and optics cluster, power cell, vertical grip and the long pipe of the muzzle sleeve, all black oil, a dull sheen.

  He felt afraid of it. Too afraid to pick it up. If he did pick it up, he was afraid he wouldn't be strong enough to carry it. To aim it.

  "Freek
^®
," he said, under his breath.

  "Nes?"

  His guys were looking at him. Kilo One. Stabler, Preben, Bigmouse. They were ready. Their expressions were stone, unreadable, but he could taste wariness. He could see someone else's face reflected in the espressoblack of their glares.

  Stabler slid hers up off her face. Her eyes were grey.

  "You okay, Nes?"

  "Wealthy," he said, forcing out a smile that took as much effort as the last rep of a bench press. "Set?"

  "Set," she nodded.

  "Set," said Preben.

  "Set," said Bigmouse. "I got a point of entry ready, referenced to the landing plot."

  "You lead off, we'll disperse wide," he said. Close enough they wouldn't lose sight contact, wide enough that a thump round or an IED wouldn't scorch them in one hit. Jesus, that clinical? The full expectation that not all of them would make it to the first marker?

  He ignored his inner whisper.

  "You got codes for the entry?"

  "I got codes," said Bigmouse.

  "And if there's no power?"

  "I got other skills," Bigmouse replied. He and Stabler fist-bumped.

  "Two minutes!" the PO squawked.

  They would be delivered first. They got up and shuffled to the hatch, bent low under gear weight like invalids.

  "Don't fuck up," Huck told him.

  "I'll bear that in mind," he replied.

  Huck smacked him on the arm.

  "One minute!"

  They were low now, really low, wallowing drunkenly in the cold air, churning through a crosswind. The sound of their rotors was bouncing back up at them from the valley sides. Their guts were yanking up and down like yoyos with the pitch and yaw.

  The PO dragged the side hatch open. Rain exploded in like spindrift, windblown. Air, noise, the howl of the blades and the downrate. Cold too, bone-cold air, hard like a wall.

  They were in the doorframe, feet braced, hanging from the over-rail by their left hands. Any and all loose cloth on their bodies was flapping, whip-cracking. Rain in the face, needles.

  "In ten!"

  The PO's voice was strangled by the mic and the noise wash. The ground was zooming up, a mountain rising to greet them, a breaching leviathan ascending from the depths. Vibration was wobbling them so hard, he could barely see steadily. Below, huts, refabs, demountables, something cinderblock, weatherboarded. High ground, a track, a storehouse. Two parked tray-trucks. A forest of turbine masts, a windfarm, like robot daffodils. More refabs. Some crate-and-creates. A livestock pen.

  A yard, a compound yard. Mud, coffee ganache, rutted with real wheeltracks. Puddles that were actual pothole puddles, not mountain lakes.

  Wet mud dimpling, smearing out in concentric rings, planed and smoothed by the boomer's underblow. Spray pluming into mist, in a circle all around them, driven up in a ring. A rainbow as the sunlight cut the water in the air.

  Down.

  Down.

  Go.

THIRTEEN

The ground gave under his feet as he landed, jetting brown water up his legs. The mud in the rutted yard was slush, like wet snow. It was not thick, sucking mire. Morning rain had hammered the hilltop so hard, everything was waterlogged and saturated, loose.

  The boomer's fan wash was pushing against his back, and he was soaked with driven spray, so his spine and shoulders chilled unpleasantly. The woodchipper howl of the engines pummelled him. Droplets of water coated his glares, even though the lenses were auto-vibrating to repel moisture.

  He tucked his head down, and started to run. The M3A was as heavy as a length of box girder in his hands. As he began to move, his LEAF locked off to provide a stable platform. The armature distributed the weight across his body, allowed him to move more freely. The liberation came as a surprise, which in turn terrified him. He knew what a LEAF did. Of course he did. Active tours, weeks of conditioning and training: he knew what it felt like when a servo tension-enabled. What the hell was wrong with him that it came as a genuine surprise?

  The steady heart monitor chime of the target sampler system entered his left ear via the audio plug. Like a metal detector, the pulse rate accelerated or declined according to the aiming field of the pipe. If he turned the muzzle of the M3A towards an open space, the chime decreased. If he swung it towards a shape that the sensors read as a doorway or cover point, the pinging grew rapid. Graphics zipped across the inside of his left lens, quadranting the target potential. Door frame, truck side door, underside of truck, low roof, side windows, barn dock. Each one flagged yellow, sometimes orange, depending on perceived threat intensity. Then the sampler identified a humanoid shape, and the flag went red.

  Just a scarecrow, a weatherbeaten tramp Christ, crucified in the vegetable garden.

  He kept moving. He was aware of his own tongue, his own breathless wheezing. Whenever the others crossed his field of view, the sampler recognised their aura code and didn't flag them.

  Bigmouse was up ahead, Stabler wide to the right. Preben was behind him. They were coming up the track, leaving the mud lake in favour of a walkboarded pier, approaching the outbuildings of the weather station. The air was cold, rain-sweet. His cheeks stung. The hilltop sky was vast and white, splashed with rashers of grey cloud. Bigmouse was at the gate, two block-raised demountables to his right. They were bright yellow, used for off-site storage.