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  They were halfway across the meadow, heading for the brake of trees, when noise boomed up the valley. There was a jetrush whoosh, a spear of sound that sliced the air north to south, in line with the highway. Right on its heels came a series of deep, bass booms.

  They all started, looked west. Nothing to see at first, nothing to see except a clear warm day. And then something. Bristling domes of smoke and ash, burned brown, thick, rippling, rising from the ground five or six miles north-west of them.

  They were still staring at the smoke blossoms when the jetrush sounded again. This time, they were looking, so they saw the black dot streak by, low, horizontal, ultrafast, coming from the north, zipping towards the south, the powerburn of an attack run. At the far southern end of the pass, they saw the dot turn, bank, come up and over before climbing away, a flash of sunlight on a wing face or a canopy. By then, more smoke blossoms had boomed into being, overlapping the first, bigger and fiercer. This time, they witnessed the core spark of the detonation, the flash that the blast followed.

  "Fuck," said Valdes.

  "Airstrike," said Preben.

  "Hitting the valley," said Rash. "Hitting the valley hard. The highway."

  "But, ours?" asked Bigmouse, asking the question so obvious none of them had thought of it.

  "Didn't get a good enough look," said Preben, "some kind of GAP."

  "Standard US GAP is the A6, the Thunderdog. Dogs have eight ducted LA TF6 engines. They're fast."

  "That was fast," said Valdes.

  "No,
fast
," said Falk. "If they were providing a little close air support, we wouldn't even see them."

  "Since when d'you know so much about it?" asked Preben.

  Since the father of the man lurking behind Nestor Bloom's eyes worked for USCAM Propulsion in Fallowmal, Falk wanted to say.

  "Standard Bloc ground attack platform is the Sukhoi 41," said Bigmouse.

  "The Frogeye," said Falk.

  "That's the one," said Bigmouse. "Do you think that's what we were looking at?"

  "It seems more likely," said Falk.

  "We need to get over to the trees," said Rash.

  They all glanced at him. Rash was staring out into the distance, across the sea of mist and grass heads and swirling blurds. Down the line of the valley, where the clouds of smoke were growing and spreading in the sunny air, black dots had appeared. Three… no, four of them. Tiny to begin with. Peppercorns.

  On the wind, intermittent at first, they heard the chop of rotors.

  "Rash is right," said Falk.

  They started to move, picking up their course, hurrying with a new urgency. They crossed the field towards the dense stand of snowgums and bleakwoods. The dots were getting closer. Their chop was a loud, air-cutting ripple, rolling out across the meadows like the clatter of distant lawnmowers.

  Bigmouse was lagging. Preben and Rash got hold of him and almost picked him up, running with him through the standing grass. The stalks swished around their legs. Blurds flew up in their faces, as insubstantial as dusty feathers.

  They reached the emerald shadows of the trees, clambered in amongst them, getting down amongst the thick, exposed roots in the undergrowth.

  The black shapes moved down the valley towards them, low over the golden, sunlit meadows. The lines of the flying machines, and their glossy black bodywork, made Falk think of fat scorpions, except the form was reversed. The raised pincers were to the rear, spread, the hooked metasoma to the front. Falk knew what they were. Kamov Progressiv 18s, the Bloc's best rotorcraft gunship. The "pincers" to the rear were the distinctive paired mounts of the tiltrotor system. In their bulk abdomens there was crew space for a fireteam squad, but they also packed a significant amount of groundattack armament. Not as large, or as fast, or as versatile as an SOMD Boreal, but considerably more vicious.

  The gunships were moving down the valley, following the line of the highway, quite clearly hunting the terrain for movement or heat tracks. They were staying together as a loose pack, but every little while one of them would halt and divert, circling a ground target before rejoining the general formation.

  As they began to draw level, one of them peeled away and began to skim up the meadow slopes towards the stand of trees.

  "Oh shit," whispered Valdes. Preben prepped his M3A, perhaps actually believing he could swat a Bloc gunship out of the air if it came to it.

  "Kill your aura codes," said Bigmouse. "Switch the fuckers off, fast!"

  The Ka-18 approached. The distinctive interchop noise of its fat-bladed proprotors didn't get louder, but they could feel it in their chests more deeply. The chop made the trees tremble, made their leaves vibrate. As it came low over the meadow, the engine nacelles began to angle more vertically, and the black craft created gusting eddy patterns in the grasses below it, swirling them into a circle track, spinning the mist up like columns of smoke.

  It came closer. They could see the sunlight flash off the brown-tinted glass of the bubble canopy, see the red lines edging the intakes of the turboshaft engines. The front end, that inverse scorpion's tail, bristled with hardpoint mounts, enough firepower to fell all the trees and turn them into wood pulp, and still puncture tank armour at four miles.

  "Keep the fuck down," said Rash.

  The Ka-18 swept past them, swirling up streamers of mist. They felt the proprotor wash like a winter wind, smelled the exhaust, the clinical metallic output. The trees bent and flexed, branches creaking.

  The Bloc bird approached the country house, getting lower and lower as if it was trying to bend down to peer into the windows of a doll's house. It had come to investigate the structure. Close to, the rage of its engines was not just a roar. It was more complex. The deep, volcanic pounding was decorated with light, delicate jingling of swashplates and pushrods.

  The main part of the house was an elegant rectangle faced in white fishscale shingles. There were long black ribbon windows in the front aspect, and the side that Falk could see. It was a good-looking house. It reminded him of a proposed retirement place an older colleague had once shown him pictures of. Neosettlement Revival. Good lines, and square angles. Minimal yet extravagant.

  Falk watched the rapacious aircraft circle the place, saw the black shape reflecting in the ribbon windows, like a shark gliding in a darkened aquarium. Its downwash whisked and frothed the grass around the plot, whipping up the mist like candyfloss. Falk noticed that the long grasses extended right up to the edges of the plot, and grew in between the house and some of its outbuildings. There'd been at least a few weeks of growth since anyone had tended the outside of the place or taken a mower to the grounds. The house was sitting in the wild meadow as if it had just been elevated in position out of the ground.

  Nothing stirred in the house. No one came out to wave at the hovering predator, no one fled from the back doors and tried to make a run for the wood. No dogs barked.

  The Ka-18 made one last circle, rotating oh-so-neatly on its twin engines, which were upright like parasols, and then sped off again, nose down, proprotors tilting, throttle open in an abrupt blast of power and noise. It hammered away down the meadow slope and turned south in pursuit of its own kind.

  They waited a while, until even the lingering chuckle of its sound had gone away.

  "You, me and Preben," Falk said to Rash. He turned to Valdes and said, "You look after Bigmouse for me here, man. Okay?"

  "Okay, man. Okay, Nes, you got it."

  "Switch your codes back on. We will signal as soon as we've scoped the place," said Falk.

  Valdes nodded.

  "You got it, Nes. Mouse'll be okay with me."

  The three of them got up and moved away from the trees towards the house. The building was so plain, so minimal, there was something almost unfinished about it.

  The first building they reached was a refab shed, empty except for some metal drums that might once have contained paint or a weatherproofing solution. The next shed, adjacent, was a more substantial storage structure, well made of lapped timber. Preben forced the door.

  The shed was full of unused building materials. Pallets of hand-glazed tiles, rolls of underfelt and a tube of expensive carpet, spare packets of fishscale shingles, paint, a box of light fixtures. The fixtures were expensive brass examples, high end, Early Settlement style, possibly even the real thing. Refurbed antiques, not local. Rash tried the store's lights, but they were dead.

  "The building next door's the generator," said Preben. "Self-sustaining plant with a solar soak. Probably wind too, but I don't see a mill. I could get it working."

  "Let's check the house first," said Falk.

  They came in around the side of the main building. The sliding doors, insulated against deep winter and armoured against intruders, were nevertheless unlocked. The frame was wired with complex security installations, packetfresh, which had never been engaged. Even the door handle still had shreds of its protective shipping wrap clinging to it.

  Preben opened the door. Rash went in first, PAP steady. There was an entrance lobby, a tiled boot room, then a giant kitchen, open-plan and worthy of a lifestyle pictorial. The surfaces were glass and enamel, and the stove the latest ceramic block multifunction. It had never been used. There were still packing materials inside its grill compartment. There was a space ready to accommodate a bulk cooler. No water, hot or cold, issued from the hand-turned wooden taps. There was a musty smell of vacancy and cold, but also a scent of chemicals, new paint, sealants, specialised preparatory treatments. Falk stroked one hand along a sleek glass countertop, and it came away with a tiny residue of dust, like the finest sawdust.

  He went out into the hall beyond, keeping the Koba ready. The hallway was triple height, a cored-out space with a tinted skylight that made the blue sky bluer. There was no carpet or flooring at ground level, just the underfloor boarding and fittings, fibreplak baseboard expertly cut to size and still marked with the smudged red stamp of the supplier. The rough hem of insulation layers and cushioning still protruded around the skirting plates, unfinished and waiting to be cut back. In contrast, the staircase was magnificent, a great curved sweep of Neosettlement Revival grandeur with hand-turned balusters, and the upper and middle newel posts decorated with a pendant drop. The handrail was a beautiful slope of steam-bent timber, polished and gleaming, the colour of good caramel.

  Through a broad doorway lay the heart of the house, a breathtakingly vast, open-plan living space, split-level. The dramatic ribbon windows, with photoreceptive glass, afforded a panoramic view over the meadow towards the distant coastal hills where the weather station lay. There was supposed to be a fireplace here, but it hadn't been fitted. The bulk of it lay in sections in plastic sheeting on the floor. It had lain there long enough to form deep, indelible impressions in the otherwise unworn carpet. The fireplace was another ostentatious piece of Neosettlement design, marble and slate, a genuine antique.

  Falk knelt beside the packaged fireplace and examined it. There was probably more than a ton of material wrapped up on the carpet. He thought about the sort of person whose life required a statement like that. That person would have to be equipped with disposable money and a powerful notion of his significance. It was one thing to build a home this imposing. It was a declaration of new roots, of a commitment to the future: a good spot with a good view on a promising world, the foundation of a legacy, an ancestral seat in the making. But a settlement like Eighty-Six brought a service industry influx with it, a tide of craftsmen and specialists, plumbers, engineers, joiners, stonemasons, woodworkers, glaziers, roofers. Given the virtually untapped natural resources of EightySix, a decent craftsman could have sourced, shaped and fitted a stone fireplace of equal magnificence for a fraction of the price. A grand staircase too, cut from local wood. And the factories of Shaverton should have been able to produce good-quality light fittings.

  But the maker of this house had brought them all to Eyeburn. He had chosen them, and purchased them, and paid to ship them whole from other worlds. Falk shuddered to think about the mass-burden the fireplace represented, the payload cost, the freight charges for conveyance aboard a spinrad driver. It was an enduring habit of man to drag the status trappings of his past with him. It was a defiant assertion of permanence, two fingers in the face of the galaxy's dehumanising vastness.

  The truly ironic part, of course, was that this sort of Revival furnishing was part of an ultra-fashionable trend for frontier chic. For a long time, it had been the thing to do to import furniture and fittings from Earth, to transplant classic homeworld style and substance to foreign soil, to have a fireplace or a rolltop desk or a slipper bath that had once lived in France or Argentina or Norway, to have hand-coloured tiles that had come from a Dutch farmhouse, or a woodblock floor salvaged from an Italian library. That was a pathology Falk could understand, a birthworld fixation, an obsession with the original and the authentic. A kitchen table of Earthborn oak made a spiritual connection that no other table could achieve, not even if it were hand-made from the many woods superior to oak that settlement had introduced to the human race.

  But that fashion was now considered crass. The thing to have these days was a piece of genuine Early Settlement design, a sofa from Three, a sundeck from Nine, reclaimed brick from Seventeen. Architectural salvage from redevelopments and demolitions on First Expansion settlement worlds, often from crude structures that had long outlived their original purpose or aesthetic, were being bought up and shipped out, to capture the flavour of human settlement. People were paying a premium for it. Fireplaces and windows and doors that had been fabricated by whatever local means were available from whatever local materials were available, just to make do, because imports from Earth were so prohibitive in the early days, were now being exported at great expense to new settlements to capture that frontier spirit. Falk felt that it missed the point by such a margin that it went past being funny and came back the other way. Truly capturing the frontier spirit surely meant fabricating what you needed from the resources around you, not importing the results of similar labour by previous pioneers.