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  "It's okay," said Masry. "It's okay. It's not structural. The bodywork will hold together, good enough. The gear's shot out, which isn't great, but I can compensate on lift-off and we'll just be setting down with a bump."

  "You sure?"

  "Yeah, yeah."

  "Masry?"

  "It's fine. She's wealthy."

  "Okay."

  "I've got to get inside. Prep. Get her set and started."

  "How long?" asked Falk.

  "Five minutes."

  "Masry, can it be less?"

  "Maybe."

  "Masry, listen to me. Listen to me." He forced the PO to look at him.

  "Start the prep, fast as you can," said Falk. "You listening to me? Start it and prep it. Do not fire anything up without you warn us first, okay? Okay?"

  "Okay, Bloom. Jesus."

  "Masry, if you're going to make this baby make a noise, if you're going to power up or start an engine, warn us. It's going to bring them running, and we need to be ready."

  "Okay."

  Masry opened the side door and climbed into the pilot's seat. He started to check over the instrument display.

  "Get on board," Falk said to Bigmouse.

  "What?"

  "Get aboard," Falk repeated. "Don't wait around."

  Bigmouse nodded and started to haul himself up into the payload space. Preben saw he was having trouble, and helped him.

  Falk waited. Day was straining to break. Before it could get there, the snake bit him.

  The cramp came back, in his throat and the back of his neck as well as in his belly. Falk made as little noise as he could, a muffled snarl, but still it felled him, dropped him to his knees in the mud beside the boomer's slide door. He heard Bigmouse call his name, heard Preben moving to him, heard Huck.

  Heard rain. Heard the chop of the windfarm.

  Heard himself gasping, his blood pounding.

  "Get him up, get him up!" Huckelbery said.

  Hands on him trying to lift him, stretching out the tendons that attached the pain to his bones.

  "What happened to him?" That was Preben.

  "Just get him up!"

  Madness. Coiling pain, hissing like a kettle, like a snake, rushing up from his belly, up the pipeline of his spine, into his brain, too much pain to live through.

  "What's wrong with Nes, man?" That was Valdes, behind him.

  "Keep scanning!" Huck replied.

  "Is he dying, man?"

  Yes, I'm dying, Falk thought. This much pain could only be dying. This was the snake-pain, the hate-cramp, that came to get you when your time had come.

  "Keep watching the station!" Huckelbery snapped. "Preben, help me get Bloom in the cabin."

  Hands hoisted him. He saw the boomer's door sill close up, raindrops on it like diamonds, the worn, bare metal of the deck grille, then Bigmouse, stiff with his own pain, looking down at him with frightened eyes.

  Someone started screaming. A low, guttural complaint that grew and rose into a whine, a scream, a howl.

  Not someone. The engines. Masry had fired the boomer's engines. The fan jets thundered into life. Blown mud-spray lifted in a halo around the hopter.

  Falk was on his side, tight in a foetal curl, on the cabin deck, with Preben trying to pull him further inside. Masry had started the engines. No warning. No countdown. No cue. The airframe was shaking. Over the jet roar, Falk could hear shooting. He tried to see. He got one hand on the hatch pillar and tried to look out.

  Gunmen were spilling out of the station. Gunmen, insurgents, black hats, terrorists. Falk didn't know what they were, what name they wanted to be known by. The pain made certain he didn't care. He barely cared for the SOMD men outside, the men whose fate he was sharing. About the only emotion that was bright and sharp enough to pierce his shield of pain was his hatred of Masry, of Masry's selfish panic and thoughtlessness.

  The gunmen were in their drab, dark all-weather gear, like mountain hikers or hortiplex labourers, like the people who had tried to kill them earlier. They had Kobas and a few appropriated SO weapons. They came from both the front and side of the station, moving low, weapons up, firing tight bursts. They were professionals. Falk, just playing at being a soldier, could recognise real ones. It was the way they moved, carried themselves, used cover, blocked for each other, fired their weapons.

  Goran, Valdes and Clodell were returning fire, backing rapidly towards the howling transport. Huck was firing from the door. Preben had given up trying to drag Falk any further inside and was lining up with his M3A. There was no sign of Hotel Four.

  Falk wanted to shake the pain off, get up, add his Koba to the fire they were laying down. The cramp wouldn't let him. It wasn't done with him. The snake constricted around him, kept him pinned and scrunched up. The only thing he could do was hold on to the door pillar and make noises through his teeth.

  "Fuck you, Masry!" he slurred. "You fuck! You
fuck
!"

  Masry said something from the front. Falk couldn't hear it over the fan wash.
Pika-don
lurched a little, as if actually about to lift, like a big animal shifting in its sleep.

  "Hey! Hey!" Preben yelled.

  Hard rounds spanked off the hull. Huckelbery started to move away from the bird, firing, yelling.

  "Fuck's he going, man?" Valdes shouted.

  "Chief!" Goran bellowed. "Stay here! Stay with the bird!"

  Huckelbery was trying to make an opening. He was yelling for Rash and the rest of Hotel Four. He was yelling at them to close in, to head towards the bird, to get to the dust-off. Maybe they were pinned down around the side of the station. Maybe Huck was trying to punch a hole and let them through.

  
Pika-don
lurched again.

  "Masry, you fuck!" Falk gasped. "You've got to wait! You've got to wait!"

  It was too late for Clodell. Hard rounds felled him, bouncing off his blate. He went sprawling in the mud, alive but winded, dented, bruised. Falk heard another round crack one of Clodell's blate panels, actually fracture it. Clodell started to rise. An h-beam took his head off. It just scorched it off, vapourised it. There was a bang, a puff of smoke and a little shower of black debris, a brief, intense smell of burned bone, and Clodell's body tipped back into a puddle with just a smoking, fused stump sticking out of the neck of his blate. It was a gnarled lump, charred, steaming, that looked like a bad barbecue cut, a chunk of flesh and a piece of jaw with a couple of teeth still sticking out of it.

  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.