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  "No. This is just a correspondent buying an SOMD officer dinner so they can have a nice, informal chat."

  Tedders looked at their surroundings dubiously. Falk had chosen a small, family-run restaurant just off Equestrian.

  "Why here?" Tedders asked.

  "I heard the chicken-effect parmigiana was better than the Hyatt's."

  "It's chicken-effect parmigiana," said Tedders. "Define 'better'."

  "It arrives during your lifetime," he said.

  A waitress brought wine and a warm dish of re-baked bread rolls.

  "I don't know what you expect me to be able to do for you," Tedders said.

  "Just talk."

  "Seriously, Falk, if your complaint is that the SO isn't giving you the access you need, the best I'm going to be able to do is listen and nod sympathetically."

  "That was a pointless excursion we went on," he said.

  "Yeah, it was. Isn't it always?" She stared across the table at him. "It always surprises me when the media is shocked that the Office can manage its own message. It's like you think that because we wear uniforms and drive tanks we must be too dense to know about subtext and nuance. The SOMD looks like a modern army should, but it's just a very, very slick PR company with added guns."

  He didn't answer. He was waiting to hear what she said next.

  "Someone once told me that back in the day, the Queen of England used to think that the world smelled of fresh paint, because everywhere she went a team of workers had been there the day before pimping the place up for her. That's all we do, Falk. We paint over the rough patches and make everything user-friendly."

  He split a roll with his bread knife.

  "Sometimes, that's not in the public interest," he said.

  "Not your call to make," she replied. "Really, not in this day and age, not in situations on this magnitude."

  "Let me ask you this," he said. "Just for my own interest. Do you personally know something and are just not telling me, or do they keep you in the dark too."

  She smiled a quick version of her compact, portable smile.

  "Need to know, and I don't need to," she said.

  "Listen, I never thought you'd be able to do anything for me or tell me anything," said Falk, "but I wanted to cover all the bases. You're going to urge me, advise me, to go through official channels and see what extra cooperation I can coax, and I am going to do that. Really, I am. I am absolutely going to do this the way a correspondent should. But, and I'm not being defeatist here, I have a feeling it's not going to work, and after a month or two, I'll be right back here, scratching around to find an unofficial channel. I just thought I'd try and save myself a little time and set both things in motion at once. Start both balls rolling."

  "And?"

  "If you suddenly change your mind, or your conscience suddenly gets the better of you–"

  She laughed.

  "Or you run across something, or someone, you think it wouldn't hurt to pass my way, please do. It can just be general background, colour stuff, anything. Your name won't be in it. There won't be any comeback."

  "You say that. There always is."

  "You've done this before then?"

  "No. But once or twice I've seen SO people like me lose their jobs because they've been dumb enough to develop relationships with the wrong people. People they thought they could trust. People they thought they could relax and be off the record with."

  "That's not me. I promise. Won't happen."

  "It can't," she said.

  "Why?"

  "This weekend pass. I got given it because next Friday I rotate into the field for six months. Routing orders. Active detachment."

  "Where to?"

  "Yeah, I'll tell you that and point to it on a map."

  "Okay. Damn. Okay."

  "Sorry," she said. "You look all sad now. Like I've scored a dinner on false pretences."

  "Are you kidding? Anyway, look."

  The chicken-effect had arrived.

SIX

On Seventy-Seven, he'd lived on the coast for a few months, in a fabric house on the point near Beakes. At night, the ocean would crash against the foreshore, a hard boom followed by a long, clattering hiss of withdrawing surf dragging shingle back with it. The crash and draw punctuated his work and his sleep. He'd wake up to a chime on his celf, another link or edit from Cleesh, and lie there, listening.

  The ocean had woken him, sudden, sharply. The dream he'd been having snapped like a wishbone, and he was awake, eyes open, knowing he'd been disturbed.

  He was miles from the beach. He was in the small apartment he had rented on Parmingale Street in Shaverton. There was a city and a deep stretch of wild coastal foreland between him and the sea. There was the city and the night.

  Falk got up. It was long after midnight. The windows of the apartment faced north and, beyond the soft amber freckles of the city lights, he thought he could see another glow, something softer and more diffuse, far away towards the north-west. The harder he looked at it, the more he couldn't see it.

  He turned on the apartment's box, but there was nothing on the news. He lit his celf. There were messages, mostly junk, two from Cleesh that he'd return later. He got a glass of water. It was too early to get up and too late to sleep. The moment he turned the night stand light on, blurds began to patter against the windows.

  He took another sip of water. Even the water was threaded with the lemony tang of Insect-Aside.

  Sleep seemed the only sensible recourse, but he couldn't shake that half-dreamt oceanic boom, the crash and draw. He ran a few last searches on his celf.

  A minor news hub, unaffiliated and unsupported by any network or SO mandate, had a story. An accident in northwest Shaverton. An explosion in the Letts district. No details.

  He waited thirty seconds. Suddenly, his celf began to chime repeatedly as all the query searches he'd launched on waking up began to return positive matches for his parameters. Small news hubs first, then quick responses from the associateds, then a flurry of independent correspondents who were monitoring the main links. An accident in Letts. An explosion. No details. Unconfirmed.

  Then the first main newsfeed carried it as a breaking story. At almost the same moment that his celf pinged it, the news channel playing on his box switched to developments in Letts. An explosion had occurred at 2.09. That was ten minutes earlier.

  Falk had been awake for ten minutes.

  The world caught up. In another minute it went from no stories to almost forty items. He tried calling Cleesh to see what she had, but there was no answer from her celf or her rental.

  He felt slight agitation. He put on some coffee and pulled on trousers and a shirt while the filter sputtered. Sixty-six items now. The first unsubstantiated details. A major explosion in a derelict industrial site on Letts, north of Landmark Hill, in a non-residential zone sandwiched between District Through and the Cape Highway. Two reports said unstable chemicals, oil condensates, improperly stored in an abandoned warehouse. Another said a meteor strike. No mention of casualties.

  The filter sputtered. He went back to the window and looked out at a flat, glazed night that wished to make no official comment at this time. Was that a fuzz of light in the north-west? A radiance? A fire? If the blast had been enough to wake him, it must have been big.

  He tried Cleesh again. Nothing. He tried two other correspondents he'd got to know. On the box, an SO spokesperson appeared on a live feed, talking calmly and solemnly. Behind her, the unfocused yellow glare of a significant fire, the silhouettes of emergency teams moving against it.

  Falk put the sound up. The spokesperson was live in Letts. She was explaining that meteor impacts were a rare but very present fact of life on Eighty-Six. Everyone had seen the shooting stars. The majority by far were atmosphere grazers or too minuscule to matter. Most bolides weren't significant enough to cause damage or hypervelocity impacts. The Letts district had been unlucky. Still no word on any casualties. City rescue was containing the incident.

  It was too early for the city's overground rail system, and cabs had become extinct. A driver in the ProFood luncheonette down the street from Falk's apartment told Falk he was off duty, hence the breakfast, and besides the SO had closed north-west routes in the city. There was an advisory.

  Falk went back into the empty street. It was dark grey and barren. The main window of the ProFood glowed like a giant box, an aquarium, an Edward Hopper. Falk contemplated stepping back out of the twilight into the warm, vivid world of the ProFood's interior and offering the cab driver a chunk of change, but the man was clearly committed to his sausage and egg. He watched him eat for a while through the chicken-in-a-spacesuit logo of ProFood's Booster Rooster
^®
etched on the glass.

  He went back up the street to his apartment, woke the night manager, who was chin-on-his-chest comatose at his back-office desk in front of looping situation operas on a portable box, and negotiated the temporary hire of the manager's transport.

The manager's ride was a scuffed little Shifty two-seater, pearlescent blue with an interior that smelled of fish-sticks. A Madonna bobbled from the mirror.

  It had been a long time since Falk had driven anything anywhere, even a toy car like the Shifty with its autotouch controls, safety sensors and road-reader nav. Under his hands, the wheel felt like it was fighting him. The car slowed down when he wanted to speed up along a clearway, took junctions he hadn't intended to take. When he reached the edge of the advisory cone, just outside Letts on District Through, the ride parked and stopped dead. A dashboard window explained that the Shifty would not operate in an advisory area, and function could only be enabled if the vehicle was steered out of the cone.

  Falk give it a frank opinion of its performance. He couldn't set it to manual because he didn't know the duty manager's code.

  He walked up into Letts, through the industrial underpasses and vacant streets. His hip still hurt from the ride in the damn Fargo. His celf was collecting news hits, sorting and filing. Details were still scant, but meteor strike was the official story. As he walked, he left a message for Cleesh to call him.

  He became aware of others. A few vehicles went past, some of them city transports with hazard lights. There was a murmur of voices and activity, and a dry smell in the air. The darkness had enfolded and hidden the light of the fire, but the paling sky of the morning could not disguise the shabby trail of smoke.

  He long-stepped over a deep gutter choked with trash and turned a corner. The street ahead of him was suddenly full of people and vehicles, so many of them it was almost shocking. Letts was not a densely populated part of town, but crowds had gathered: locals, derelicts, watchmen site wardens, and shift workers. SOMD troopers and civil defence officers were keeping them back from the emergency vehicles, SO transports and rescue wagons packed in along the kerb. The press had gathered too. As he limped up to the edge of the mob, Falk saw several well-paid cabs loitering for return runs.

  Beyond the line and the clustered vehicles, beyond the red and blue lamps firing strobe blinks in the thin dawn light, a large acreage of warehousing was on fire. Significant sections had been levelled. It was burning fiercely in some places. In others, smouldering metal frames made a charcoal diagram of where buildings had previously stood. Falk could smell soot and cinders, chemical retardant, damp concrete, smoke. He could hear distant, shouted instructions cutting over the crowd's murmur.

  He nosed his way through the crowd towards the boundary of the incident zone. Three, maybe four blocks had gone. He could see the debris, some of it fused and flaked or blackened, scattered on the road, the pavement and flat roofs. A curl of burned roofing felt hung from a street sign. Pools of shattered glass lay under every road lamp. Ash residue had frosted every surface, and flecks of it tumbled in the air like grey snow. Oil-sheened run-off thick with curds of retardant foam drooled along the gutters and stood on the road surface.

  "Back behind the barrier, please," said a middle-aged man wearing the high-vis vest of civil defence.

  Falk didn't blink.

  "No, I'm going to my ambulance," he said.

  The man hesitated, but regarded Falk's lack of medcrew uniform dubiously.

  "Is that rain-top regulation?" Falk asked, gesturing to the garment the man was wearing under his vest.

  "I was in a hurry," said the man.

  "My point exactly," said Falk, and pushed past him with a confidence born of fifteen years of being an arrogant dick.

  He walked up the pavement, past a foam bowser and a trio of emergency transporters. The hatch ports to the carry-bay and equipment lockers were wide open on all three. He leaned in as he walked by one of them, and helped himself to a high-vis vest from a locker hook, clipping it on around his body as he moved on. The heat from the fires wafted to him with each swell of wind. He could hear emergency cutters. Civil defence workers passed him, going the other way, talking emphatically into their celfs. A hopter droned overhead, thrumming the air, lost and found in the rising smoke.

  Falk wiped the lenses of his glares and slipped them on, selecting
snapshot
. He started to blink off shots for general ref. He rounded a corner, got a wall of heat in the face, and saw a crowd of rescue workers engaged in urgent activity. He stepped back. They were SO staff, firefighters, paramedics. Some were shouting, others were running up with carry-kits from the transports. There were bodies on the ground. Falk couldn't get a good view, or blink off more than general shots, but there were definitely bodies. Three or four, wound in plastic blankets, surrounded by kneeling medics.

  He wanted a better look, and considered fronting his way into the huddle, but there was a difference between bluffing your way past a police line and obstructing lifesaving procedures that even a fifteen-year arrogant dick could recognise.