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  Behind them, the engine scream changed tone.
Pika-don
hoisted herself out of the mud, rump up, blizzarding water and mud spray with renewed force. The PO sign-off came as a rasp click in his ear. One extra-harsh buffet of cold hurricane wind, and the boomer was over them, clear, passing away over the roofs, behind the uplink mast. Its shadow, trailing behind, blinked over them.

  Its rotor-beat became a hard clacking in the distance, rolling around the hills. The quiet it left behind was uncomfortable. He felt vulnerable. He wanted the roar back so he could hide in it.

  A much softer range of sounds circled them. The flap of the wind, the patter of rain against mud and weatherboard sidings. The splashes of their footsteps. The labour of their breathing. The churning murmur of the big windmills down the hill. The fast, shrill flutter of the toy windmills stapled along the vegetable garden fence. Tiny, doublerosette windmills for children, whizzing and spinning in the breeze, their brightly coloured plastics faded by weather.

  There was a shriek. He switched around, expecting a red flag.

  Bigmouse had opened the yard gate, a repurposed rusting wire frame from an old feed pen. It squealed on its hinges. Stabler came up past him, the stock of her PAP tight to her cheek, first one onto the boarded pathway that led through to the main site buildings. Her boots made a sound like someone knocking on a door. The boards, sprung by the mud beneath them, jumped under her and Bigmouse, trampolining drops of water.

  He reached the gate, waited a second, took a moment. The frantic whirl of the stick windmills was getting on his nerves. He was scared again.

  He turned a full circle. The hilltop was big, rounded. It was called Eyeburn because, the presearch brief had claimed, on clear summer days the sun could come up over the brow so hard and big it could scorch out a man's retinas.

  Hard to imagine on a day like today, grey and rinsed. The smoke-vague line of the caldera rose up behind the rain-bleached station buildings. In the opposite direction, beyond the forest of turning turbine heads in the windfarm, the coastline dropped away. Most of the settlement clung to the skirts of the hill, but the weather station had been planted up where the wind and rain could find it. The sea was a dark plain, frosted with morning mist. The sky came down to meet it like a sheet of sandblasted metal, a beaten panel, primed but unpainted. If he listened carefully, past the hypnotic masking throb of the turbines, he could hear the boom-hiss of the sea down in the bay. Crash-boom,
suck-hiss.

  "Get with it," said Preben.

  "I'm with it. Just getting my bearings."

  Preben scowled. Farel Preben had the face of a prepubescent boy, and the physique of a bodybuilder.

  "You're fucking dreaming."

  They went through the gate and up the path. The autovibe had shaken the droplets off his glares. The sun yawned out suddenly, hard and bright. Respond traffic was still nil. Bigmouse and Stabler were approaching the front door of the main station house. It was a hatch lock. The wind banged an unsecured window shutter.
Rap rap-rap rap rap,
a signal telegraphed in some unknown code. Preben lugged a piper, same as him. Stabler had her PAP, and Bigmouse had the extra weight of the thumper. He was beside the door, trying the code in the pushbutton panel. Bigmouse had been called that for a long time, christened because of his size and his informatic skills, even though no one outside a museum had used a mouse in twelve decades. Stabler said Bigmouse's nickname was
retro
, as though that was a recommendation. He was their techie. Strapped to his left thigh was the team's eFight pack.

  Bigmouse was long-boned and without grace. His frame was functionally large instead of heroic. He had eyes like the windows of an unoccupied apartment, and a deep philtrum that made him look like a bad caricature of a real face.

  The codes weren't working.

  Falk hung back with Preben, sweeping the zone with their pipers. His heart was beating fast, like he was really sick or on a chemical rush. Cardiac blow-out. Cardio-pop. The fear was deep in him, lodged like a knife, nicking his ribs, his heart, his lungs, making them deflate so he couldn't draw a proper breath.

  "Hurry it up!" he shouted.

  "Hatch is dead!" Bigmouse called back.

  "Power?"

  "Power's out!"

  "Just the hatch," said Preben. He nodded up at the roof. A little link dish beside the chimney flue was in the middle of an automatic re-alignment.

  "Get it open!" he ordered.

  Bigmouse put his thumper over his shoulder on its sling, opened his thigh pack and pulled out an electric driver, a little thing the size of a stylus. It zipped the screws out of the lock plate almost silently. Bigmouse let the die-cut plate fall off the key pad into his palm, then switched the drill for a juice stick, inserted it and powered up the lock assembly. It banged two or three times, whinnied, and then the hatch shunted open a couple of inches. Stabler got the snout of her PAP in the crack, and then forced the door wide open with her left hand and foot.

  Inside, an entry corridor. Metal grille decking, boot bench, a wall rack for tools and lamps, a row of hooks. Weatherproof coats, all high-vis, rustled in the wind.

  He took a step forward. Fear made him puke. He kept the swill in his mouth, sucked it back, swallowed it.

  "The side," he said, throat rough from stomach acid. "Find the secondary."

  Stabler looked at him.

  "You and Preben. Go."

  They took off around the end wall, down the lea side of the building.

  He led the way in. It was tight. Everything was flagging his target sampler. He banged the end of his piper against the tool rack.

  "Jesus, Bloom," said Bigmouse from behind.

  Stupid. He knew better. Nerves were making him stupid. The taste of puke in his mouth was making him brainless. The beam piper was too much gun for close interior work. A PAP was the preferred clearance weapon. That's why Stabler had looked at him funny when he'd sent her around instead of letting her take point.

  He made his pipe safe and locked it to the carry slot on the backplate behind his left shoulder. He drew his PDW, matt grey and heavy, armed it, got it comfortable in a two-fist grip. Bigmouse already had his out. The
Personal
Defence Weapon
was an automatic (caseless) handgun manufactured under SO contract by Colt. Forty 2mil rounds in a disposable slot-in stripmag. An interrogator flashed up on the inside of his left lens. Did he want to mate the PDW's muzzle sensor with his target sampling system?

  He selected
no
, killed all the eye junk jumping about on his lenses. He didn't need any more distractions.

  He glanced back at Bigmouse. From the faint glow behind his glares, it was clear Bigmouse had selected
yes.
Of course he had. That would be the smart thing to do. That would be the approved thing. That would be SOP.

  "Power to the door was cut from the inside," said Bigmouse, checking the interior side of the hatch lock. "Someone pulled a fuse."

  The corridor headed away from the hatch to a cross junction. The hanging coats smelled wet. He put his hand on the shelf below them, felt the run-off of rainwater that had collected there. Somebody had been out, early, in the rain. How long had it been raining? Since daybreak? Since the small hours?

  The overheads were motion-sensitive, a powerconserving function, but they didn't light up. Someone had stuck little strips of torn tape over the wall sensors.

  Why was that? Was it for a good reason, such as the onoff lights had begun to annoy one of the long-term residential scientists? Was it for a bad one, such as the corridor had been prepped for an ambush?

  The utility wall liner was covered in instruments, everything from modern hydrometers to antique barometers, even a skein or two of non-local seaweed, brittle and pungent. Among them were drawings done by children, skies at the top, grounds at the bottom, suns somewhere between the two, with square cabin houses and people in yellow and orange coats, and lots of windmills.

  They edged on, sweeping left and right, training their PDWs. Here, old coffee tins had been left under a patch of leaking roof. They were full of water, overflowing. There, a signed SO flag with the logo of the Climatographic Division, framed behind glass like a picture. Old paper books on a shelf, damp from the air. Wooden boxes of unwashed root vegetables, still thick with soil, slid under a wall bench. The smell of turnips, of earth. A sun-faded kite hanging from a wall bracket.

  He heard a noise, swung his gun up. A coastal-form blurd, the size of a man's middle finger, was bouncing off the tinted skylight overhead, trying to escape into a golden summer's day that didn't exist.

  He lowered the weapon, tried to lower his breathing rate along with it. It was so damn airless. His chest was tight.

  "Bloom."

  Bigmouse had found the station hub. Through a hatch doorway to their left was a large monitor room, stacked with junk and equipment. Most of the consoles and boxes were off, but some still glowed on standby power.

  "The heating pipes are warm," said Bigmouse, touching them. "Where did everyone go?"

  "See if the answer's in one of those," he replied, looking at the consoles.

  Bigmouse holstered his PDW, and sat down at the primary position. He looked the console over, then opened a fascia panel and wired in another juice stick. The box mounted above the console lit. Bigmouse drifted through weather patterns, temp charts, precipitation measurement tables.

  He could still hear the blurd knocking against the tinted skylight.

  "Look for a log," he said.

  "I'm looking for a log," Bigmouse replied.

  He went out, through a pantry where tinned and dried goods sat on metal shelves. Through a side door lay a washroom, with stalls, sinks and a mirror. It smelled of bleach that was intended to mask the aroma of damp and a brimming septic tank. The windows were reinforced with wire mesh, and formed rectangles of pale, luminous daylight. The mesh and window sills were crusted with dead blurds.

  He ducked back out. A broad, unlit well of a passageway continued on into a machine shop, beyond which lay the generator plant. There was a background hum. He swallowed back fear and bile. He used the LEAF to keep the weapon rock-steady.

  Tools hung on pegboards. Labels were handwritten. Hoist chains dangled over workbenches, and an inspection pit yawned like a freshly dug grave, heady with the smell of oil. There was an up-and-over hatch, currently locked tight, which allowed small or mid-sized vehicles to be brought indoors up a concrete ramp.

  Despite the LEAF, his hands were shaking.

  "Stop it," he whispered. "Stop doing this to me."

  He flicked on his target sampler, lit the lens. There was something in the shop with him. The genny hummed, just running on reserve. Doorway: yellow flag. Lockers: yellow flag. Shadows of the inspection pit: orange flag. Side door: yellow flag.

  Movement: red flag.

  He was going to shout a warning, but he'd retched into his mouth again. He felt as though his heart was about to blow up.

  He fired the handgun.

FOURTEEN

The PDW made two thunderclap sounds. The recoil punched his wrist. Blowback gases choked him, acrid, prickling his face. The muzzle flashes were so bright, his glares auto-tinted.

  He hit something. The opposite wall detonated. A peg board shattered, one corner releasing so it swung down sideways onto the workbench. A noisy avalanche of wrenches and pliers, hammers, handsaws. Nails and washers pinged off the floor, rolled like coins, scattered.

  He stood blinking for a second, gun gripped and aimed, ears ringing. Smoke fumed around him in the light from the skylight. A final rolling washer trickled to a halt.

  "Bloom? Bloom!"

  Bigmouse, over the audio. He could hear his voice too as he came crashing through from the hub.

  He swallowed hard.

  "Clear!" he shouted. He still hadn't lowered the gun.

  Bigmouse ploughed into the shop, PDW out.

  "Fuck happened?" he asked.

  "Clear," he replied. It seemed like all he could say.

  "Was it contact? Did you get a target?"

  "Yes."

  "What the fuck did you shoot at?"

  The up-and-over shutter hatch clattered open, letting in daylight and the laundered smell of rain. Preben and Stabler stood there, framed in the square of light, aiming their main weapons.

  "Clear!" he told them. They lowered their guns cautiously. He could smell burned metal where they'd sliced the padlock off the shutter.

  "Hell's happening in here?" Stabler asked, coming in. "Nes?"

  "He started shooting," said Bigmouse.

  "I had a contact," he said. "I saw a contact. In the doorway."

  "There's nothing here," said Stabler. She looked at Bigmouse. He saw Bigmouse shake his head at her.

  "There was movement. Right in front of me. I saw someone. I saw a weapon."

  He looked at the three of them. The fear was looping inside him like a snake biting its tail. He hated the looks on their faces.

  He holstered his weapon and adjusted his glares. Review playback. Movement. Red flag.
Flash flash
, bright as an eyeburning sun. What the hell had he shot at?

  Slow it down. Red flag alert.
Flash
. Back a little. That shadow blur, just before the flag. A nanosecond of movement. What was that? An apron, hanging on a pegboard, caught by a breeze? Enhance. Nothing, something.

  A figure. A human figure.

  "Someone came out of that doorway," he said, pointing, reading his glare display.

  "Who?" asked Stabler.

  He shook his head. "It's just a shape."

  "Not real then," said Preben.

  "It's a person. You can look at the playback. I'm running frame by frame. A shape. It red-flags."