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  The chop got louder and became real. Tal glanced at him in alarm and they both turned and looked up.

  The rotorcraft swept in over the cliffs surrounding the site, coming from the north. It was moving fast and low, its hull leaning to port as it banked in on a broad, passing curve. The moment it cleared the clifftop, the chop of its proprotors became painfully raw. There was no barrier between them and the noise source. The rock cavity of the Heligo site made a sound box that echoed and amplified the clatter, turning it into the noise of a hundred rotorbirds.

  It passed over, and disappeared from view, taking its sound with it. Falk and Tal were already running back towards the site offices. Behind them, it returned. It had turned and powered back, much slower now, body upright, paired tilts rising to a support angle as it appeared over the cliffs. It drifted in above the flooded pits of the quarry complex, hanging, inquisitive.

  From the very first moment, Falk had known it was a Kamov. A Bloc gunship, an 18, like the one that had buzzed them at the house.

  "You," said Tal, as they ran. "You and trouble are great lovers."

THIRTY-ONE

In the refab, everybody was on their feet. Valdes was at one of the windows, pipe in hand, pulling the blind slats aside to peer up at the hovering rotorcraft.

  "Time to go," said Falk as he and Tal burst in.

  "No shit," replied Rash.

  "Did they see you?" asked Valdes.

  "Pretty sure, yes," said Falk. "We were out in the open, and they were just overhead suddenly."

  "Fuck," said Preben.

  "Just pick up Bigmouse and get him out to the truck," said Falk. "We'll blow and go, right now."

  "That fucking thing'll scorch us," said Valdes. "Come on, man, that gunbird will chew the truck up."

  "But a static target like a refab is much harder to hit," snapped Falk. "Come the fuck on!"

  Outside, the Ka-18 rotated slowly, fifty feet up, its bellicose chin out-thrust. Without explanation it accelerated away north and vanished behind the cliffs.

  "Fucking move!" Falk said.

  Rash moved into the bunk room with the girls to collect Mouse.

  "Get the SObild running," Falk said to Preben. Preben ran out of the refab's side door.

  "Valdes, we're getting the gate," Falk said.

  They exited through the front into the yard and the angry wind. Rash and the girls were already shuffling Mouse to the back exit in his sling. Lenka was crying again. This time, Falk could hear her.

  He ran across the yard with Valdes, both of them lugging their pipers. The rain hit them hard, coming down in big heavy drops. They reached the gate, grabbed a frame halfeach, prepared to drag.

  "Fuck it, man!" Valdes exclaimed.

  Through the gate link, they could see down the gabioned throat of the gorge all the way to the track. A pair of SObild trucks just like the one they were using had just pulled up at the mouth. In daylight, they could see the little red star decals on the cab doors. Falk wondered if the truck they had been driving around in all night had red star decals on the cab doors too.

  "No exit!" groaned Valdes. He let go of the gate.

  "Why aren't they coming down?" Falk asked, more to the air than to Valdes.

  "Falk? What's happening?" Cleesh asked.

  Falk saw why the trucks had stopped. They were giving way. Something bigger came into view. Its drive plant was making big, throbbing, revving sounds. Even without the trucks getting in its way, it didn't seem feasible that the Bloc MBT would fit its immense grey bulk down the entrance gorge.

  "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" Valdes wailed.

  The tank throbbed out a huge grunt of power and accelerated into the approach towards them. It was a T22, a massive tandem-turret fighting machine. Falk neither knew nor cared about its variant specifics. Its vast adaptive track systems and hydropneumatic suspension gave it a running sound that was almost a soft purr, like a beautifully oiled, antique wooden escalator in a classy department boutique. The Uralvagonzavod fusion plant growled like an emphysemic demon. Its aft turret, small and high, mounted twin hardbeam pipe weapons. Its forward turret, the big main cap, was low and flat and seemed to look at them down its giant coldbore gun.

  "Great. Great!" murmured Falk. "And what the fuck do we do now?"

  "We show them our A game, man!" cried Valdes. "We show them our fucking A game!"

  "Get real, Valdes!" Falk spat.

  They started to run back across the yard. They had almost reached the refab when the SObild drove into view, Preben at the wheel. He had everybody else on board.

  "Back! Back!" Falk yelled at him.

  Preben braked hard, curling up a fat wave of muddy brown water, and began to reverse, swinging the truck around to head back into the site. Falk and Valdes ran after it.

  They heard the hopter coming back. It had brought a friend. The two Ka-18s ran in over the northern cliffs in formation, and began to descend towards the centre of the biggest yard space. Their rotors were stacked almost vertically to bring them down. Valdes raised his weapon to shoot at them.

  "Don't be a fucking idiot!" Falk told him.

  They ran for the line of the sheds, willing themselves into a position where there was something between them and the Bloc units.

  Kissing the mud almost simultaneously, whisking up counter-patterns of spray, the gunships opened their carrier doors and men leapt out, dispersing wide. They were dressed in black blate, weapons high and ready. Bloc special forces. Scorpions, perhaps. Black Butterflies. As soon as the fireteams had deployed, the Ka-18s lifted off again, doors still gaping, noses down as they ascended.

  The T-22 came through the site gates.
Through
them. The chainlink frames scrunched and collapsed like sugar icing under its tracks and armour skirts.

  The first gunfire came from the special forces. Valdes and Falk heard the hard rounds and beam shots banging into the end wall of the refab as they came around the side heading for the quarries. One hardbeam cut clean through two fibreplak sidings and blew out the windows of the refab behind them.

  Preben had made a bad choice. Instead of swinging right and running the SOBild through the acreage of the machine park in the east of the site, he had kept going straight along the edge of the flooded quarries and therefore rapidly run out of places to go. The SObild was stopped at the end of a muddy causeway between a quarry pool and a row of storehuts, its route blocked by a semiextended bulk conveyor. The conveyor had the head of its scaffoldwork processor sloping down into the dark water of the field quarry, so that it resembled a rusty yellow sauropod taking a drink from a lake.

  "Fuck are they doing, man?" Valdes shouted. "Back up! Back up this way!"

  The truck was three hundred feet away, a long, lonely run along the quarry edge. Valdes started towards it, but Falk grabbed him. As soon as the Black Butterflies, or whatever the fuck they were, came around the side of the site refabs, Falk and Valdes would be clean targets.

  One of the Ka-18s appeared, banking tightly as it came around two rusty-green ore hoppers. It skimmed in across the quarry, summoning clouds of spray from the water surface.

  Valdes shouted out. Falk dragged him into cover behind the storehuts. They scrambled along down a rough, wet gully lined with drainage pipes.

  The Ka-18 had read the heat of the SObild. It pulled up halfway across the quarry lake and lit off its chin cannons. There was a harsh, grating noise, like a coffee grinder full of nails. The SObild began to shake, vibrating on its springs. Then it shredded. Torn metal fluttered in every direction, glass sprayed like water. Large, dismembered chunks of the truck's chassis, transmission and engine block lurched into the air, turning over and over, shedding debris, freed from the truck-shaped shell that had once confined them. Something in the heart of it all ignited and lit the destruction with a gas-jet puff of flame.

  Pieces of the disintegrated vehicle rained down on the hut roofs, on the mud, peppered the quarry pool.

  Valdes screamed. Falk wanted to scream too, but he knew it was far too late. He seized Valdes tight and stopped him from running out into the open.

  They reached the end of the storehut row, passing through the dispersing cloud of acrid smoke spilling off the truck's wreckage. Valdes clambered under the support stand of the conveyor and Falk followed. They heard the gunship chopping away, repositioning. If it had painted their heat, it was holding off.

  And if it was holding off, that meant the Bloc ground troops were close.

  Two or three shots burned down the gulley and spanked into the heavy metalwork of the conveyor. The metal struts boomed like a gong. The wind, relentless, was keening around the upper framework of the huge machine. Falk glimpsed two or three figures in black, coming down the back of the huts the way he and Valdes had run. Closer and closer.

  Falk and Valdes ran clear of the conveyor, across a small, muddy yard and between two refab workshops. Falk wondered where they were actually running to, in the end. Heligo was a finite area, surrounded by ancient cliffs. The best they could hope for was somewhere to hide.

  Beyond the weatherboarded workshops, the site floor shelved down into a more significant cut in the red soil, where a broad shelf ran alongside a much deeper quarry beneath the overhanging wall of cliff. Metal duckboards paved the shelf, and a set of temporary metal steps linked the two levels.

  The quarry pit where the SObild had been killed must have been a shallow, exploratory cut to have been so full of water. The one they were approaching was a huge, stepsided cistern, cut into the ground with a giant spade. Metal staircases and scaffolding platforms lined the side below the causeway. A giant ramp of packed earth, like something raised to aid the construction of pyramids, filled the western side, providing access for the heavy machines. Far below them, the bottom level of the pit was full of dark water. It was a vast excavation. Seberg really had been a good way into his work when the SO stopped him. They ran down the steps, clanged across the decking and onto the walkway of the shelf.

  The cliff overhang gave them a little shelter. Three Bloc soldiers appeared at the top of the steps and paused to snag off shots with their Kobas. Falk felt the rounds smack into the chin of rock above the walkway. He saw the puffs of dust that the hits drilled out. Valdes, boiling with inexpressible rage, turned and lined up, fast and fluid. He got an instant red flag via his glares and fired. His piper barked. There was a wink of hot, distorted light and one of the Bloc troopers was knocked flying. Falk was sure he glimpsed sky through the hole Valdes made in the man's torso. The other two men ducked, fired some more shots. Falk had to tug at Valdes to get him running again.

  The Ka-18 came in over the earth cut and the banked wall, and rotated into the airspace of the vast quarry. The chopwash of its rotors filled the resonating hole of the huge pit. Far below, the surface of the dark sediment of collected rainwater whipped and swirled.

  The rotorcraft came in low, cautious, inquisitive. It was on a level with the main shelf, nose towards the cliff, hunting for targets. Falk kept running. The walkway had to fucking lead somewhere. He realised Valdes wasn't with him.

  Valdes had stopped. He was standing up straight on the shelf walkway, making no attempt to hide or find cover, lining up his M3A at the hovering Kamov.

  "Valdes!" Falk yelled, skidding and turning back. "Valdes, you're fucking crazy!"

  The h-beam piper was a hell of a weapon, but a Bloc rotorcraft gunship was in another class. It had composite reactive armour, ablative plating, heatsoak laminates. It was a bastard killing machine, and something that a man on the ground with a gun, no matter how much of a gun, didn't have a prayer of bringing down.

  No one, it seemed, had explained any of that to Valdes. He had three things going for him. Expert operator rating on all M3 weapons, ridiculously close range, and an almost incandescent fury. The Ka-18 was right in front of him, its rotors tilted upright and thundering, so close they could see the pilot and gunner through the smoky cockpit bubble.

  "Eat it, motherfucker!" Valdes screamed.

  He fired. The hardbeam punched a fist-sized hole in the bubble and decapitated the pilot. Control vanished instantly as the pilot's nerveless hand or foot spasmed. The gunship hurtled forward on full throttle.

  It didn't hit Valdes. It drove head-on into the quarry wall directly below him, folding and crumpling and shredding the way the SObild had shredded. There was a huge pressure clap as a raging fireball expanded out of it. Debris whizzed through the air like glitter. Falk felt pieces striking the walkboards, the wall, the cliff shelf. The head of an entire rotor assembly tore off, spinning wildly, chopping the air like a lethal, unleashed wind turbine. It bounced once, off the shelf between Valdes and Falk, its blades ripping up metal walkboards and strewing them into the air. Then it splintered off the cliff overhang and whirled away into the quarry.

  The rest of the machine, the bulk of it, on fire and deformed, fell back, slipping and scraping down the face of the quarry wall, ripping away walkway platforms and metal stair flights as it dropped. Most of the scaffolded superstructure lining the quarry side came down with it. And hit the dark, cold water in the base of the pit. Falk heard the suck-rush as burning metal met chilled liquid, like the crash-draw of an ocean hitting a shingle beach.

  Burning scraps were raining down around them. Valdes got up off his knees.

  "Fuck, man! Fuck it, Nes!" he shouted, immeasurably proud of himself. "Did you fucking ever see shit like that, man?"

  The first of the Black Butterflies onto the shelf behind Valdes put three rounds through his head. Falk flinched and yelled as red mist blew out the side of Valdes's skull.

  Valdes didn't buckle. It was probably the weight of his piper. Straight and stiff, he just tipped forward and plunged off the shelf, head first, limbs limp.