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  Bigmouse was pinned. He had the PAP, but he was trapped in the little box of cover provided by the metal frame desks. The unseen gunman fired again, and console screens fragmented.

  Under the desks, Bigmouse looked desperately at Falk. Falk was two desk rows away. The second intruder wouldn't have even seen him.

  Still on his back, pathetic, stricken, Falk reached out his right hand, grasping at Bigmouse, gesturing to him. It took Bigmouse a second to notice and understand. He was balled up in fear as the shots ripped in around him.

  He got hold of his Colt and gave it a hard shove, sending it gliding across the hub floor on its slide like a curling stone. It travelled under the desks and finally came to rest just short of Falk, stopped by a coil of power cable.

  Falk rolled over. It took two tries to raise enough momentum to turn Bloom's body, and he knocked his chin on the floor tiles on the way over. He got his fingers around the muzzle of the gun, picked it up, pulled it back. He rolled back onto his side, and put the weapon down on the floor so he could pick it up again by the grip.

  It felt right in his hand. Bloom's hand knew the grip. His thumb toggled the safety off.

  With shuddering, superhuman effort, Falk got himself up on one knee under the line of the desk. He had to pull out a drawer to brace himself with his slack left hand. The LEAF locked. The snake in his belly convulsed. He used the barrel of the PDW to prop his other hand as he lifted.

  Then he swung up over the desk and fired.

  Every single shot missed. The kick of the PDW was so hefty, he almost dropped it. The barrel rose and skied most of the rounds. His left leg started to give out.

  At the end of the room, a man holding a PAP 20 to his cheek turned in surprise, wincing from the crack and whizz of the sudden, wild shooting. He brought the PAP around.

  Bigmouse's PAP 20 nailed him to the wall. The burst exploded him, painting the wall red, stippling it with chunks of meat and fragments of bone. As the human wreckage collapsed, it left a huge cloud of blood vapour drifting in the air behind it.

  "Move! Move! Move! Move!" Bigmouse yelled, running around the desks to Falk. "Come on!"

  There was a pervasive stink of innards that made them gag, a compost smell of meat and fat-shrouded organs exposed to the air, of burst stomach, of atomised flesh. Bigmouse had to put the PAP down to help Falk up.

  "Gimme that," Bigmouse said, eyes on the PDW.

  "No," said Falk, and holstered it.

  Bigmouse was wired to the balls. The fear had lit him up, but there was glee too, the glee of a giant adrenalin hit.

  "Score two," he said, his grin manic. "Fuck me, you see that pretard burst?"

  Falk struggled to find the right words.

  "In the Hard Place," he slurred. "Right in the zone, Mouse."

  They managed a messy fist bump. Bigmouse began to move him towards the door, the front exit. Falk was doing quite a good job making Bloom's body shuffle that way on its own. Black hats were going to be converging on the hub space in seconds, drawn by the exchange of fire.

  "I say front," said Bigmouse. "The yard. Maybe out and down the hill."

  "Yeah," Falk replied. Pain was reaming his hip, and his legs were burning with lactic acid. He could cheerfully settle for simply being behind something large and solid. There were precast bunkers and silos around the station yard area, plus the windfarm just down the slope. They could duck down, get their breath back and their heads together.

  They exited via the corridor he and Bigmouse had originally entered by. The hatch was ajar, letting daylight in. The breeze stirred the kids' drawings amongst the seaweed on the wall liner. Hanging coats loomed against the rectangle of daylight like loitering figures. Their footsteps on the metal grille made too much noise.

  Bigmouse slipped ahead, PAP ready, checked the hatch, took a squint outside. Falk waited, leaning against the coats, panting hard.

  "Come on," Bigmouse hissed.

  They went outside, into the painful light. There was still rain in the air, and it was cold, but the sky was mustardyellow and full of fat clouds that were crinkled like cauliflower or brain tissue. Falk gulped in the cold salt air in an effort to rid his nose and throat of the reek of particulated flesh.

  
Pika-don
was still parked in the main yard, engines off, side slide open. They edged down the spongy line of the walkboards to the old metal gate.

  Bigmouse beckoned him on. PAP ready, he led the way across the mud-lake of the yard towards the hopter. As they approached, Falk could tell there was no one aboard. That was wrong, in so many ways. Aircrew did not desert their mobile in the field unless there was no other option. They certainly wouldn't have abandoned it with the ports wide open.

  He came up to the boomer alongside Bigmouse. The nearest engine pod was cool but not cold. Internal standby systems were still live. There was a scalene triangle of wet on the deck inside the open side door where the rain had blown in at an angle. It had evidently stood open for a while. Bigmouse pointed. There were a number of tiny but deep dents in the cabin's metal liner. Small-arms impacts, from something fired in through the door. Little squashed lumps littered the deck: caseless rounds that had virtually flattened out hitting the liner skin. There was blood too, several arterial sprays on the wall, and a pooling patch that had run between the deck slats.

  Bigmouse glanced at Falk.

  "Check the onboard comms," said Falk. Bigmouse nodded, and hoisted himself up through the hatch. Rain tapped against the boomer's port and laminates. Falk saw that the seat restraints in the pilot's position were tangled.

  "Get a medpack too," he called out.

  There was a pair of glares lying on the deck just inside the rim of the hatch. Falk had no doubt that they'd fallen off someone's face, not out of someone's pocket. He picked them up, and hooked them by one arm from the neck of his vest. Then he sat down gingerly on the step plate of the hatch to rest his hip.

  "Radio's out," Bigmouse called. "Jammed."

  "Totally?"

  "I'm looking."

  "Mouse?"

  "Uh-huh?"

  "Bigmouse?"

  "Yeah?"

  Bigmouse clambered out of the cab front and came to the hatch. Two men had come out of the weather station via the main hatch. A third followed them.

  "Shit, shit, shit!" said Bigmouse as soon as he saw them.

  None of the men were wearing SOMD kit. They were all armed. One of the men, Falk realised, was a woman. The girl. The girl who'd fallen into the inspection pit.

  The girl who had shot him.

  She opened fire from the walkboards with the PAP she was carrying. There was a little crackle of muzzle flicker, most of the sound stolen by the open hilltop. Rounds spanked off the hull beside them and flumed up angry splashes from the mud around the landing feet. Several shots chipped the forward screen, leaving little cracked stars in the ultra-dense polyglass.

  Falk got down behind the side of the hull. Shots sliced the surface of the mud around him. There was a pair of unexpectedly loud bangs as rounds bounced off the engine cowling beside his head.

  "Bag of suck," remarked Bigmouse. He had jumped down and snuggled in beside the boomer's fat, armoured nosetip. He lined up and began blasting back.

  The three figures scattered. Falk saw Bigmouse's shots peppering the gate, the walkboards, the mud and the fence around the vegetable plot. Dirty water squirted up, and filaments of walkboarding fluttered like chaff. Parts of the fence broke. The blade-head of a toy windmill went spinning into the air.

  Falk checked Bigmouse's Colt. The LED at the top of the grip told him he had eighteen rounds left in the clip. Bigmouse carried the spares. Neither of them had reloads for the PAP Bigmouse was hosing away with. It took the same 2mil round as the PDW, so they could strip out ammo from the PDW spares and refill the PAP's two-hundred-capacity box mag by hand, but that would take time to do right.

  "Slow down!" Falk warned. Bigmouse was shooting at nothing. The black hats had found cover around the yellow demountables or the vegetable plot side of the station front.

  Bigmouse stopped firing. The fast-approaching limit of the PAP 20's supply had just occurred to him too.

  The insurgents rallied. They began to return fire. The two guys had M3A pipers. Falk suddenly heard that unearthly un-noise whine again, the shrill, edge-ofhearing bark of the hardbeam. He was on the receiving end. Little, local blinks of light occurred near the demountables.

  
Pika-don
shook hard like she'd been rammed repeatedly by a truck. One of the hardbeam shots went by the nosecone, too fast and bright to be seen, but it left a searing idiot afterimage across his retinas. Then another one punched through the boomer's hull beside him. It had come clean through the hull, across the cabin space, and out the other side. It left a fused, super-heated hole the size of a large-denomination coin. The edges glowed. There was no light, no flash, no visible raygun beam like in the sitops, just a smeared blur of heat haze, like petroleum jelly on glass.

  A second later, it happened again. Another bodyblow to the hopter, another through-and-through superhot hole. Falk remembered the fucktard from thInc, Jeanot, blahblahing on about the boombird's hull armour during the ride to Mitre Sands. Dermetic-weave six-ply fuselage sheathing, a laminate construct designed to survive hardbeam damage through a combination of ablation, dissipation and cushioning. There were layers of reflective bead silicates between the armour skins, alternating with energy-soaking graphene membranes. It was pretty good at stopping the output of a man-portable pipe weapon. It certainly had a good chance of stopping a guy with an M3A from knocking a moving Boreal out of the sky.

  But they were on the ground, a static target, and the M3As were firing at them from less than twenty yards away.

  A shot went through the front canopy, gouging a huge molten tear out of the curved and tinted polyglass. The tint contained a polarising anti-laser treatment, but it was useless at close range. The glass bubbled and glistened like honey. Bigmouse swore and ducked down tighter.

  There was a loud bang from underneath the hopter, and another smear of heat haze light. A pipe beam had struck and destroyed the forward pilot's side gear. There was a sharp smell of burning metal and oil. Debris blew out and the hopter gently sagged to one side, nose dipping, as the landing gear assembly collapsed.

  "Bigmouse! Bigmouse!" Falk yelled.

  Bigmouse dropped the PAP into the mud and unslung the thumper from his backplate clamps. It was fat, black, unlovely, a 1090 MSGL Rand Dynamik grenade launcher with an eight-shooter drum. He cancelled the airburst ranging, selected strike detonation and pumped two shells at the demountables. The thumper thumped, a solid, dead noise like a carpet beater. The chunk shells smacked into the side of the nearest demountable and blew the side off in a sheet of flame and a spray of whizzing tiles and weatherboard fragments.

  Bigmouse tilted and put a third grenade into the vegetable plot. He glanced at Falk.

  "Move your ass," he said. He paused to recover the PAP and they began to move away from the station as fast as Falk could go, heading across the yard, towards the slope of the hill, keeping the stricken hopter between them and the station buildings.

  After a few seconds they heard the un-noise barking of hardbeams again, but there was no sign of impacts. Mud sloshed up over their boots.

  "Head for those refabs," Falk gasped. He was panting hard. Bigmouse had him by the arm, frogmarching him down the incline towards an overgrown fence and a group of battered crate-and-creates behind the
whup-whupwhupping
windfarm.

  They could hear shouting from behind them. The voices weren't speaking English.

  "Bag of suck," Bigmouse repeated. He was struggling with Falk and the weight of the weapons.

  Preben stood up behind the overgrown fence ahead of them. He rose like a pop-up target on the range. He had his M3A against his cheek, aimed up the slope.

  "Get the fuck down," he said.

NINETEEN

Preben began firing. Close up, the piper made a noise like a seal expressing outrage at being clubbed to death. Each shot offended Falk's nervous system, jangled his bones and aggravated the snake in his belly.

  They got past him, around the fence and bushes, and onto a paved pan beside the refabs. Large slabs of precast walling concrete had been dropped flat and butted together to make a solid apron for vehicles. There were plastic sacks of fertiliser and carbon chips stacked along the refab wall, tops tied up against the thieving wind. Springy saltgrass weeds and tangled ash-heads nodded and swayed in the steady ocean breeze. Now they had dropped down the slope a little way, the acoustics of the windfarm had changed. The chopping rhythm had deepened and developed an echo. It simply added to Falk's confused discomfort.

  Preben backed slowly away from his initial position beside the fence. He squeezed off another couple of shots, spitting heat-haze streaks up the hill towards the yard.

  "We're so screwed," he said. "The fucktards are all over this place."

  "Insurgents?" asked Bigmouse. "Insurgents, right?"

  "What does that even mean?" asked Preben. He shot them a meaningful look.

  "Some fuck spent five minutes drilling at me down the farm just now," he said. "Swear to Christ he was using a Koba."

  Koba Avtomat 90. Standard Central Bloc hard-round troop weapon.

  "Fuck happened to you?" Preben added, looking at Falk.

  "Bloom got hit," said Bigmouse. "We need an exit strategy here, and a medic."

  "No shit," said Preben. "This whole op is a cluster. There's nothing friendly and organised in this zone. Just poor motherfuckers like us, loose and lost."

  The top corner of the refab beside them exploded. There was a flash, and the painful bang of mass energy transfer. The exploded stub was left smoking and black, and secondary beam-heat ignition lit flames along the roofing felt and the weed-choked guttering.