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  "I haven't got confirmed anything. But if you wanted me to make an educated guess, I'd say yes. Central Bloc special forces."

  "Apfel wants to know–"

  The words suddenly inverted, became a blur.

  "Cleesh? Cleesh?"

  "–hear me? Can you still hear me, Falk?"

  "Yes."

  "Apfel says he wants to know what kind of hits the SOMD taskforce is taking there. We haven't been told anything official, but the SO is clearly gearing up to send serious support in. We think they're getting quite spooked about the total loss of contact."

  "They should be," said Falk. "I don't know much. Of the three teams I went in with directly, there's about four of us left. Four people. The insurgents were waiting for us on the ground. Plus, they had expunged most of the local pop too. Whole settlements cleared out, executed."

  "Are you serious?"

  "They knew we were coming, or they knew we would
be
coming. Cleesh, there's something in play here that no one can see. This whole extro-transition element thing is beginning to make more sense. Scary sense. There's something so valuable, the Bloc is prepared to turn the Cold War hot for the first time ever. But listen, listen to me, Cleesh. Everybody says it's because of Fred, but I don't think it's about Fred at all. Fred might just be the icing on the cake. I think it's actually about something down here. This whole thing here at Eyeburn, this whole situation, it's really geographically specific."

  "Like what?"

  "I don't know. But I've got a clip. A playback. I need to translate some Russian. If I play it back and sound it out?"

  "Yeah, I can work with that. Translation should be no problem."

  "Okay. Give me a few minutes. Give me a second to sort myself out. Cleesh?"

  Water moved softly, in hiding. A reversed whisper hid just beneath its lapping surface.

  "Cleesh?"

  Nothing.

  Nothing lasted for a while.

  He opened his eyes again and sat up.

  "Shit!" Valdes cried. "Shit, man! Nestor's awake! He's with us!"

  Falk looked around. The forest clearing was bathed in grey light, a haze. The trees were close-packed around them, heavy with cables of tendril creepers. The underbrush was a thick carpet of grey-green leaves and thorns, a foot or two deep. There was a smell of damp earth, of plant resin, of loam. It was cold, the wrong side of damp and unlit.

  Preben and Rash stood over him, Valdes crouched to his left.

  "We didn't die, then?" Falk asked.

  "Not all of us," said Preben.

  "Thought you had, though, man," said Valdes. He grinned. His face was bruised under the dirt.

  "Where did we come down?"

  "A way back that way," Rash said, gesturing over his shoulder.

  "You carried me?"

  "Had to," said Preben.

  "We thought the fucking thing might explode," Valdes said. He shook his head. "Thought the whole fucking thing might go up in a fucking fireball."

  He looked at Falk, grinned.

  "It didn't, though," he added.

  "Where's Mouse?" Falk asked.

  "Here," said Bigmouse, from behind him. Falk turned. Bigmouse was sitting propped up against a tree trunk. He tried to smile, but he looked like death. The half-light of the forest was making his skin look particularly ashen and sickly.

  "Masry?" Falk asked.

  "Fucker," said Preben.

  "He wasn't so lucky," said Valdes. "Not so lucky at all."

  Falk got to his feet. It wasn't a stable, steady process. Valdes rose and helped him.

  "Where are we?" Falk asked.

  "In a fucking forest, man," said Valdes.

  Falk looked at Preben.

  "What he said. The middle of a fucking forest," said Preben.

  "We're going to need to move. Find decent shelter," said Rash. "It was hard to carry you anywhere. But now you're awake."

  "What would you have done if I hadn't woken up?" asked Falk.

  "We would probably have had to leave you," said Rash.

  "Shut up," said Valdes. "You shut up. He doesn't mean that, Nes. He really doesn't."

  "It's what we talked about," said Rash. He shrugged.

  "I hope it was," said Falk. "Seriously. This is the Hard Place and a lot more besides. If it's a choice between ditching me and making yourselves secure, you know what you have to do."

  "Exactly," said Rash. "We can't be weak."

  "I ain't weak," said Valdes.

  "Where are my glares?" Falk asked.

  "Didn't see them," said Rash.

  "They weren't on you when we carried you clear," said Preben.

  "I need them," said Falk.

  "Borrow mine," said Rash.

  "I had good copies of area maps," said Falk. "Not just Eyeburn, this whole zone. I copied them from the land registry. Probably need them. Probably be really handy."

  "They must have fallen off you," said Preben. "Maybe at the crash site."

  "I need to look," said Falk. "I need to find them. Try, at least. Where's the crash?"

  "I'll show you," said Rash. "Rest of you stay here. We won't be long."

  Someone had brought the Koba along. Falk picked it up.

  "Let's go, then," he said.

They walked back towards the crash site. Rash led the way, stopping now and then to wait while the slower-moving Falk caught up. The forest was quiet, wisps of mist drifting like smoke, like steam.

  "Who's Cleesh?" Rash asked.

  "Who?"

  "Cleesh?"

  "Why do you ask?"

  "You were talking. After the crash. You were talking like you were having a nightmare. In your sleep. It was the main reason we decided not to dump you. It was as though you were talking about someone called Cleesh, or
to
someone called Cleesh."

  "Just someone I used to know. Years ago. I haven't thought about them in a while. My mind must've gone there."

  "That must be it."

  They moved on in silence. Falk began to smell a waft of petrochemicals. The backmasked voices drifted around in the shadows behind him.

  "Here," said Rash. "Just here."

  The crash site was a little way ahead. They were approaching a glow, a luminosity cupped within the forest gloom. Daylight was streaming down through the ruptured canopy, through the grey mist that was gathering under the spectral snowgums.
Pika-don
was dead, a tangled black carcass driven up against a stand of robust trees, front end crumpled in like a boxer's nose, flanks dented from motion impacts and scarred down to base metal. Its tail boom was up, partly propped by a slumped tree trunk. Vines and ropes of succulent creeper were draped off its edges and stub wings, dragging like streamers, like lilac ribbons off a wedding car's bumper, like the running cables of multiple harpoons stretching out behind a whale that had finally been slain. There was a great carved wake behind it, a giant furrow of splintered tree trunks, ploughed soil and shredded vegetation that stretched away through the forest ranks, a deep incision bleeding green sap and pulped wood. The ground was littered with debris: pieces of twisted hull plate, fragments of glass, chips of plastic, unidentifiable component parts trailing wires or cables. An entire engine mount had torn off and lay half-submerged in the undergrowth. There was a lingering smell of burnt sugar.

  Falk limped towards the main hull and approached the port cargo door. The door was missing, wrenched off its sliders, leaving only the buckled runners and the slot it had fitted into. A large piece of tree branch was wedged into the upper corner of the door space, like a lump of gristle stuck between teeth.

  Rash came up behind Falk, weapon clutched low across his belly.

  "See them?" he asked.

  Falk shook his head. He looked around, parting ground cover stalks. Then he got up on the exposed kick-step of the hull and leaned into the cabin. Leaves, twigs, glass and stones had gathered at the foot of the sloping deck. There were blurds all around: small ones buzzing around his face, larger ones circling the glade, catching the shafting light. Some, large and glossy, crawled and basked on the trunks of nearby trees.

  He finally located the glares behind the pilot's seat where they had slid. He leaned in to retrieve them. One arm was slightly bent.

  "Okay?" asked Rash.

  "Yeah," Falk replied.

  Masry was still in his seat, and his seat was still in the nose section of the boomer, but the nose section now shared, with a massive tree trunk, a space that had previously been occupied by the trunk alone. The compression damage was immense. The hull's metal skin had puckered and wrinkled like elephant hide as it crunched and folded. Hydraulic fluid was leaking out of fissures and cracks, beading the leaves of the undergrowth, stinking of lube oil and man. The enormous impact forces had crushed Masry into his seat, pushing him down into the footwell under the instrument panel and then squeezing that shut too, like an over-stuffed purse. Falk didn't really want to think about the physics required to pack a body up into a space so small and enclosed, the snapping of long bones that would have been required, the terrifying momentum. Masry had been jammed into a cavity designed to accommodate his legs. Very little of him was visible, just his right arm and hand, raised to ward off both the forest and the death rushing up to greet him. The arm was draped forward, limp and unmarked, over the top of the instrument panel, through the shattered front screen. It was pinned between the seat back and the dashboard mount that had shunted backwards to meet it during impact.

  Falk was pretty grateful he couldn't see Masry to admire the compact form into which he was now packaged.

  Blurds buzzed and chirred around the arm and found ways into the compacted mystery below. They settled briefly on the top of the dashboard and twitched, then buzzed away again. They landed on Masry's sleeve, his cuff and on the red-gold hairs of his arm. Falk found himself staring. The tiny touch of blurds against the fine arm hair made him itch. He kept expecting Masry's arm to move, irritated, to flick them away.

  The blurds were the same kind of bottle-black ones he had seen on the corpses up at the weather station.

  "Fucker," said Rash.

  Falk nodded.

  Rash stared at what they could see of Masry.

  "If he had survived," Rash began. He cleared his throat. "If he had made it, I swear to God I would have shot him."

  "That's been a popular sentiment," Falk replied.

  "Uh-huh."

  Rash looked up at the canopy around them, the greylime wash of the light, the spiralling blurds.

  "We should go back," he said.

  "Okay," said Falk.

  "You got what you need?"

  "Yeah."

  They turned and started to pick their way back from the wreck, through the undergrowth and ground flowers. Rain, a passing squall, pattered on the leaves above them, and wind shushed the branches. A moment later, drips fell like glass beads out of the tree cover.

  Falk took a last look back at
Pika-don
, dead in its forest grave. Masry's arm, hanging from the compressed cockpit, looked like it was waving them goodbye, a sad farewell.

  Either that, or it was beckoning them back, urging them not to leave, encouraging them to stay.

  Falk didn't want to stay.

They moved back through the forest, Rash going at Falk's speed, mindful of his injury. They didn't speak. Away from the gash the boomer had cut through the forest cover, it was dark and closeted. The trees, mostly snowgums, were pale columns like the legs of giant grazers. Shadows were deep black or emerald-green, pockets of darkness. The air was tinted grey-green, forest light, leaf-filtered.

  Overhead, the canopy sighed and creaked in the wind, leaves hissing like surf on a shingle beach. There was a strong smell of leaf litter, and the sounds of their footsteps were magnified. Every now and then, a large blurd droned past, clattering like a wind-up wooden toy or buzzing like a saw.

  Rash stopped.

  "What's up?" asked Falk.

  Rash looked at him, and didn't reply. His eyes were fierce. He looked pointedly off into the distance behind them, in roughly the direction of the crash site.

  "What?" asked Falk.

  "Something," Rash murmured. He raised his PAP 20, moved back a few feet, using a tree for cover. Falk followed, sliding the Koba off his shoulder.

  "Just the trees moving," said Falk, conscious of how quietly he was speaking.

  Rash shook his head.

  "I heard voices," he said. "Behind us. I'm guessing a search sweep, looking for the bird. Looking to find out where it came in. Looking to see if anyone walked away."

  He fell silent, waited. Falk listened.

  From far away, very far away, he caught the sound of voices. Men talking as they moved along, checking back and forth, an exchange of commands.

  "They're coming this way," whispered Rash. "Probably not far off finding the boomer."

  Falk nodded. They started to move again, more urgently, heading towards the camp. Falk tried to go as fast as possible so as not to slow Rash down.

  He paused, and took one last listen to the sounds of pursuit.

  Very far away.

  But nothing like far enough.

TWENTY-SIX

Falk accessed the images stored in the glares. The maps were intact, but the glares had suffered some wear and tear. The power cell seemed to be faulty, or there was a bad connection. Images flickered occasionally, for no reason.

  Rash got the group moving at once. He aimed to put some distance between them and the searchers before getting too concerned about precise location. As they wound through the trees in the trackless forest, with Bigmouse determining the rate of movement, Falk tried to pinpoint their position using the stored maps.

  It occurred to him that Eyeburn Junction, like so many small towns and communities in that part of the continent, was still coming to terms with what it was, and what it would become. It was a classic early-stage settlement, with a population that was original generation, or not many past it. It bore the affirming boldness of land stakes, of first principles, of community foundation. The spirit of that process had been part of the human experience since before man expanded out from his cradle. As a trope, it recurred on every settlement world. People finding some new ground, some new land, and deciding, almost arbitrarily, that they would connect with that particular place, that this was what they had been looking for. They had brought a curious, portable sense of belonging with them, a readyto-use ownership, and they had planted it in the first suitable place, declaring that this was what anchored their lives now. This determined them, and would determine their children. This particular patch of land defined them.