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  "You all right in there?" Bigmouse called through the door.

  "Yeah, yeah," Falk replied. He flushed and came back out.

  "You look steadier," said Bigmouse. "Walking steadier."

  "Yeah, I feel a bit more together."

  "You should let me patch that."

  "I know, but I don't want to play around with it. I just want to get out. Get out of here and get to SO medical. It feels like it's stable, and I don't want to aggravate it."

  "Okay," said Bigmouse.

  "We all need to get out of here," said Falk. "We need to get a signal out."

  "Agreed," said Preben, appearing in the doorway. "So we'll eat, then we'll–"

  "Talk like you're in charge there, Preben," said Falk.

  "I am."

  "Allow us to follow the logic of that," said Falk.

  "You're hit, hurt. We don't know how much you're impaired. I'm next in line."

  "I'm fine," said Falk, "so that's settled."

  "It's not–"

  "I call the shots in Kilo One," said Falk.

  "There is no Kilo One," said Preben. "Just three fucking idiots left out on their own."

  "There's a Kilo One all the while we're here in the Hard Place, you dumb fuck," said Falk. "Get used to the idea."

  Preben glared at him and then left the room. Falk glanced at Bigmouse.

  "Fuck happened to your ling patch?" Bigmouse asked.

He was feeling better, but he was still hobbling like a stroke victim. There was a sense, that Falk was perfectly prepared to accept, that it was his imagination, that he and Bloom weren't fighting for control so much. Maybe Nestor Bloom had relaxed his grip. He hadn't died, because his emotions and memories kept surfacing, but his grip had slackened. Bloom was like a full-body LEAF, a metal brace locking out and limiting motion. Whatever, something had disabled his ling patch along the way.

  His hip was still as sore as hell, and Falk was pretty sure it was his hip, and not Bloom's.

  There was a trace of a voice in his head. A voice, or maybe voices. When he'd first woken up, he'd heard them, and attributed them to the default repeat of the earbuds.

  But it wasn't that. Some memory, or function of the imagination, or damaged inner ear, was making him hear voices. Nothing tangible, just a muffled echo, like a recording of speech played backwards so that each alien mutter came to an abrupt, unnatural stop. He had to concentrate to clear his head of the noises, and then they'd drift in out of the silence again when his attention switched elsewhere.

  Falk wasn't keen to speculate precisely whose memory, imagination or inner ear was responsible. He limped around the buildings, distracted by everyday objects that reminded somebody other than him of something else. A water jug, a hairbrush, a dresser drawer that opened to release the trapped scent of an empty perfume bottle.

  He heard someone calling Bloom's name.

  It was Bigmouse. Falk hobbled outside into what was fast becoming a damp, stone-grey evening. Level sensors around the hamlet complex had already brought some lights on automatically, and the generator hum was audible over the fresh wind and the spatter of rain falling on the plastic slope of the walkway roofing. Preben joined them from the other direction.

  "I found a radio rig," said Preben, "but I can't raise anyone."

  "Forget that," said Bigmouse. "Listen."

  They listened.

  "I don't hear anything," said Preben.

  Falk did. He heard the voices, like a backmasked audio track. He didn't say anything.

  "There," said Bigmouse, raising a hand.

  Very faint, in the distance. Over aways, in the broad belt of field systems between the hamlet and the fuelling depot. The low-lying area was little more than a dark blue shadow in the failing light.

  "You hear that?" asked Bigmouse quietly.

  Gunfire, a faraway rattle.

  Bigmouse and Preben both trained their glares. Falk thought he saw tiny yellow and white sparks dancing out in the murk of the fields. He remembered the glares he had retrieved from the boomer. He pulled them off the shirt neck and put them on, his hands cumbersome and fat-fingered. It took a moment for the glares to react to body heat and wake, and another few seconds for him to blink away the clutter left behind by the previous user. It was difficult. Difficult because of the state he was in, difficult because he was used to the simple functions of civilian-model glares, not the complex options of Milgrade sets. Bloom had known how to manage it. There was so much eye junk: stored files, snaps, target playbacks.

  He cleared it at last and keyed in the low-light enhancer and zoom.

  There was a firefight ripping through the field system. He could peg hard-round bursts and pipe fire. It was hard to resolve clear contacts, but the SOMD viewer protocols were flagging the aura codes of friendlies.

  "They're taking some," said Preben. "Being pushed this way."

  "We have to get down there," said Bigmouse.

  "Why?" asked Falk. They turned to look at him.

  "Are you fucking serious?" asked Preben.

  "What good would we do?"

  "We could come in across the top there," said Preben, pointing. "Give them some cover fire. Let them know that the compound is clean and, let's face it, more defendable than a fucking field."

  Falk swallowed.

  "Fuck's the matter with you, Bloom?" asked Preben.

  "This is the Hard Place," said Bigmouse.

  "Yeah, the Hard Place," Preben agreed. "This is why we're here, this shit. And pardon me, but aren't you supposed to be Mr In Charge? Aren't you supposed to know what the fuck we're supposed to be about?"

  "I didn't mean it like that," said Falk.

  "Really?" Preben replied. "I didn't mean fuck you like that, but fuck you, Bloom." He looked at Bigmouse. "Let's go."

  Bigmouse hesitated, his eyes on Falk.

  "Yeah," said Falk, nodding. "Yeah, let's go."

  They came out of the covered walkway into the yard and the rain. The gunfire was louder now. Hip burning, legs stiff, Falk waddled behind the others, trying to keep up. Preben was prepping his M3A. Bigmouse had unslung the thumper. Falk remembered the PDW in his holster.

  "I need spares," he said. "I need spares. I'm almost out."

  Preben ignored him. Bigmouse reached into a thigh pouch and produced two stripmags.

  They approached the edge of the hamlet compound and followed an embankment that formed the north-western end of the vast hortiplex zone. There were walkboard lanes and accessways laid across the mud, and Falk saw some pipework sections of the giant irrigation grid that overlaid the field system and watered its channels and beds in the hot season. Some field lots were dense and in need of clearing. Others were bare and fallow, or caged with growing frames. Towards the central part of the acreage there were long rows of polytunnels and crop shelters, along with a cluster of refab storage huts. Bursts of gunfire were backlighting the crop rows and growing frames half a mile away.

  "That's a Koba," said Preben, listening. "That's a damn Koba on auto."

  "What do we do?" asked Bigmouse. He kept pursing his lips to blot the nervous sweat collecting on his philtrum, a stress habit.

  "Come in around the top here, lay down some interference," said Preben. He started down the short flight of refab steps from the embankment onto the walkboards.

  "Wait," said Falk, "wait."

  "What?" Preben looked back up at him.

  "We'll be coming up on the back of them," Falk began. "On the back of our own, I mean. They're falling back, on the run. How will they…"

  "What?"

  "How will they know we're with them? Bumping into them out of nowhere, out there… that's just asking to be shot at."

  "We don't have a fucking choice," said Preben. "No secure, remember? With any luck, they'll tag our AC profiles before they scorch us." He turned and kept going.

  Bigmouse lingered for a second, favoured Falk with a last glance, then thumped down the steps after Preben.

  Falk took off his glares and studied them, turning them over in his trembling, unsubtle hands.

  "Hey, hey," he called.

  "Fucking come on, you pretard!" Preben growled back. "Come on, or stay the fuck here and shut up."

  "The glares, our glares," Falk said, looking at them both. "To pick up profiles, they must have their own carrier fields. A separate field?"

  "Fuck are you on about?" asked Preben.

  "They're passive receivers, unless they're linked through a celf or Mil-secure," said Bigmouse. There was a look on his face that told Falk he was supposed to know that. Bloom was qualified on all equipment uses. He was being dumb.

  "Cut me some slack, here," said Falk. "They shot me in the fucking head, okay? It's hard to concentrate."

  "This is wasting time!" snapped Preben.

  "Just help me with this," said Falk. "The black hats have jammed Mil-secure, but our glares are still reading aura code profiles, yeah? How? Remind me how."

  "From our IDs," said Bigmouse. The brooches, the ID brooches they all wore. They generated the profile fields. Short range, ultra short range, independent. Passive recognition effect, separate from Mil-secure comms. Falk slipped the glares back on, blink-found the target sampler option. He got an immediate informatic view, and saw Preben and Bigmouse lit up with green flags. He retselected Bigmouse, which opened a data pane. It read
Mauskin, Private First Class Waylon Wakes, S.O.M.D.
A further sub pane folded out to display vital stats, blood type, medical notations.

  Passive, short-range carrier field, generated by each brooch, read by the target sampler system.

  "You stupid fuck," said Preben. "Stay here and keep your head down."

  He swung around and walked away, picking up speed, Bigmouse shook his head, and followed.

  On Seventy-Seven, Falk had covered a massive financial scandal involving Artine Pacific, four capital investment banks and two rising-star senators. During the bloody legal debacle of the inquiry and trial, Artine Pacific's lawyers had tried to control the news flow, delaying certain aspects of the story to allow their clients time to disengage and minimise the financial hit they would take when the markets found out. They tried gag orders first, then injunctions invoking corporate confidentiality issues. Finally, in desperation, they went hardball, and scorched all the celf and newsfeeds coming out of the state house using a system jammer, just to buy about ninety minutes of lead time to shed their liabilities.

  Cleesh had seen that dirty pool coming. She said she'd anticipated it because it was exactly the kind of fucktard play she'd have tried. This was back when she still cursed, before the ling patch. No one, Falk included, could transmit out of the state house, but she'd made sure Falk had gone in with a jot pad and a stylus, the sort of passive field tool a waitress at a ProFood would use to write down a customer order so the till and the kitchen could read it. Then Cleesh had hired a bike courier to sit outside the state house gate with an ordinary, off-the-shelf base unit. Falk didn't broadcast anything. He wrote all the details down on the jot pad, and the courier at the gate read everything, copied it and, because he was outside the jamming cone, squirted it to Cleesh in her can. She broke the story fortyseven minutes before any other news source. Artine Pacific took a headshot on the market.

  Falk blink-accessed his brooch, opened the priority medical awareness pane and used his celf to type in an update.

  Then he descended the steps as rapidly as he could, Bigmouse and Preben about to disappear from sight along the walkboarded path. Hand shaking, he fired a single shot from his PDW into the decking.

  Preben and Bigmouse jumped at the report. They both whirled around, weapons coming up, targeting him, locking up.

  Then they both lowered their aim and relaxed.

  "What the fuck?" said Preben. "What the fuck? How did you do that?"

  "That's a fucking piece of genius," said Bigmouse.

  He could only imagine what they could see, but his imagination was well informed.

  Their target samplers had shown them Nestor Bloom, green-flagged as a friendly by his aura code. Across his body, like a virtual sandwich board, was an informatic pane, the priority medical awareness updater.

  It read
Can you read this, you fuckhats?

  Preben and Bigmouse both raised their weapons again to relight the sampling flag, just so they could enjoy it a second time. They jogged back to him.

  "How the fuck did you do that?" asked Preben.

  Falk explained how.

  "No, I mean how the fuck did you think of doing that?" asked Preben.

  "It just came to me," Falk said.

  Bigmouse had already tried it. When they pointed their weapons in his direction, they saw a pane that read
Fucking
genius idea.

  "What do we write?" asked Bigmouse.

  Falk shrugged.

  "Kilo One friendly, in support to your rear?" he suggested. "It'll do for a start."

  Preben's face dropped.

  "Ah, I knew it was too clever," he sighed. "It's not secure."

  "Doesn't matter," Falk replied. "It's only short range. Plus, they think we're jammed. They won't be looking for it."

  "Yeah, but they can read it. If they see it, they can read it."

  "If they see it," Falk agreed. "They like our weapons. They like our ammo too. But so far, I haven't seen any sign they've been lifting glares."

  "They're old school," said Bigmouse. "Or untrained. The target sampler can be really confusing if you're not used to it. They're probably not bothering."

  They adjusted their medic alerts and exchanged fist bumps. Then they moved off together.

  The gunfire was getting closer. A wild pipe shot hissed through the crop rows and blew open the side of a galvanised reservoir full of rainwater. There was a shocked gasp of explosive steam, and a glugging rush as the tank emptied. The foliage the beam had cut through started to burn. Off to their right, hard rounds were hitting something solid.