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  "Should you be telling me any of this?" asked Falk. "I'm a media whore. Who knows what I'll do? You leak me stories like this, it sort of subverts the whole deniability thing."

  "Hear him out," said Cleesh.

  "I'm quite happy to sell you some line if needs be, Falk," said Apfel, "but I've always believed in the policy of not lying unless I have to. Fewer pieces of crap to remember. Makes life less complicated. And lies, when they occur, more valuable. I'm telling you about my interests because I'm pretty sure they're about to become mutual, so you'll be guarding them too. Cleesh agrees, don't you Cleesh?"

  "I suggested you when we realised we'd need another person, Falk," said Cleesh.

  Apfel tipped his head to suggest a direction he wanted them to walk. They went down the concrete steps off the platform.

  "GEO's interests on Eighty-Six are suffering badly because of the situation."

  "Well known," said Falk. "And GEO's not the only corp in trouble."

  "True, but we don't care about the others. The problems on Eighty-Six are actually beginning to impact GEO's position on the home market and across the General Settlement. It's ugly and it's going to get worse. The main problem is perception. It's generally held that GEO is responsible for its difficulties on Eighty-Six."

  "You're going to tell me this is like Sixty after all, Bari? A poor little post-global giant taking it in the nutsack for somebody else?"

  "Is that so hard to imagine?" Apfel asked. "The sheer scale of the post-globals make it so easy to believe they are insensitive and faceless and responsible for all society's evils. But on Sixty, it wasn't big pharm. Big pharm got serious shit thrown at it, and it wasn't them. You know that. Of all people."

  "Interesting choice of phrase."

  "You were there. You speak about it quite plainly, in open defence of big pharm and the way it was treated."

  "You know a lot about me," said Falk.

  "I told him stuff," said Cleesh from behind them, a tone of apology in her voice.

  "If you can't be bothered to do proper presearch on a man you intend to do business with," said Apfel, "you might as well get the fuck out of Dodge."

  "So who's not playing nice here?"

  "The United Status has got itself into a pickle on EightySix," Apfel replied. "They're messing with the Bloc. Things have gone hot for the first time ever."

  "This is over Fred?"

  "It's over Fred and all sorts of other shit. We don't even know the half of it, but it all seems to be resource-based. Strategic Significance Orders. Mineral lodes. Comes, quite literally, with the territory. Because the US and the Bloc are going at it, the SO is sucked in."

  "But not GEO?"

  "When GEO first came to Eighty-Six and started to invest, it played it very safe and smart. Standard operating practice. GEO's got strong US ties, I won't pretend otherwise, but it's not an exclusive relationship. It built itself up so that no matter who came out on top here, no matter who ended up holding the reins, GEO was in place, with the right infrastructure, ready to benefit."

  Apfel looked at Falk. They had reached a large, grubby loading dock at the side of the shed, where concrete steps led down to a closed shutter. A silt of dead leaves had gathered in the step well.

  "Are you getting the picture?" Apfel asked.

  "The Settlement Office is enforcing a media blackout on the dispute between the Bloc and the US, and as a consequence GEO is soaking up hits because it appears to be the aggressor?"

  "Pretty much."

  "So how would you change that? If you'd been employed on a woolly contract to rescue GEO's corporate reputation, I mean."

  "You tell the truth and shame the devil," said Apfel.

  "Meaning?"

  "You get more of the real story out there, into circulation, so that people start to get a more realistic picture of GEO's involvement. Re-information, Falk."

  "And how does that work?" Falk asked.

  Apfel bent down and got hold of the handle at the bottom of the battered shutter. He stood up again, clattering the shutter up and away into its over-door drum. Daylight streamed in on them.

  "You find yourself some high-quality correspondents," he said, "and you embed them in the warzone."

EIGHT

"The SO won't wear that," said Falk. "I mean, they flat-out won't."

  "I know," said Apfel.

  "Then you can't do it. You can't do it without their full cooperation."

  "Turns out he can," said Cleesh.

  They walked out into the open air across a weed-choked patch of ground in the lea of the museum shed. Blurds buzzed by. Falk felt microbugs alighting on his skin, and wished he'd bothered to top up his spray. It was an occupational regime that hadn't quite become second nature yet.

  A cinder path had been laid across the tract of scrub and, beyond it, an object had been put on display under a stand of tall, straight, ivory trees that were either dead or leafless. The object was about the size of a detached house, and it was reclining, three-quarter length, on a patch of pink gravel. Weeds had invaded the path, the gravel plot and the cavities of the dented, battered metal. Lichen had begun to coat the underside where the sunlight was never direct.

  "The original surveyor probe," said Apfel, "launched from a Settlement Advance driver. First man-made object to touch Eighty-Six. They dug it out of an endorheic basin a thousand miles east of Marblehead. Buried there, sending back informatics that changed this world."

  "Oh, it's so symbolic, I may have to kill myself," said Falk.

  "You think I'm that cheesy?" asked Apfel, amused.

  "You are that cheesy," said Cleesh.

  "I am, but still," said Apfel. "We were only coming this way to reach the truck."

  They followed the path around the mangled lump of the probe and past the trees, and the truck came into view. It was a medium cargo roller, pale blue, no insignia, parked on the rough slip of the park's slope. Coming out of the museum via the loading dock, the probe had kept it hidden from sight.

  Apfel knocked casually on the truck's cargo door, and then led the way up when it opened from inside. Falk followed him. Cleesh had to brace herself on the door frame, get a foot on the drop-step, and haul herself in. She was puffing from the walk.

  The truck interior was well-lit. The cargo module had been spray-lined with matt-white, shock-absorbent rubber, and then fitted out with frame-mounted data systems, all lit and busy. The rear of the space, nearest to the cab, looking like a miniature dental surgery, with medical tools and scanners racked around a floor-mounted recliner under adjustable lamps.

  There were three people inside waiting for them: a good-looking black kid in coveralls, a middle-aged woman who was dressed like she ran a veterinary practice on an agrarian settlement, and the nondescript man Falk had met in Cleesh's company several times, most recently at the Hyatt.

  "He's SO Logistics," said Falk.

  "Yes, he is," said Apfel.

  "Alarm bells?"

  "He's paid for," said Apfel. "We need people inside, in several key roles. We've very carefully presearched and recruited the right people."

  "You happy for him to talk about you like that?" Falk asked the nondescript man.

  "I know what I'm doing," the man answered, without much emotion. "I don't agree with the US or SO position on this, and this is my way of lodging an objection."

  "This is Ayoob, this is Underwood," Apfel said, introducing the kid and the woman. The kid grinned broadly and stuck out his hand. Falk shook it.

  "We'd like to get you in the chair," said the woman, Underwood. She had a handsome but weatherbeaten face, outdoorsy, and her hair was fine and blonde. Her clothes were litex and functional man-mades.

  "We've only just been introduced," replied Falk.

  "Underwood is one of my medical consultants," said Apfel. "She needs to check you over. A basic bill of health. We can't go anywhere with you until we're happy there are no underlying conditions that will jeopardise the procedure."

  "You haven't told me where we're going or what the procedure is yet," said Falk.

  "And I won't, until we're sure you're viable," replied Apfel. "It'd be a waste of your time and ours. If it turns out to be a no-go, the less you know, the less you'll be burdened with."

  "You've told me plenty already," said Falk.

  "He's barely started," said Cleesh. She was clearing her nose into a tissue. Falk saw that her cheeks were flushed. Quietly, she'd started crying again. She hadn't passed the test. He saw it now. She'd been on Apfel's list, but she'd failed the medical minimum. That was why she was upset. That was why she'd brought him in.

  But there was a tension too. A time factor, he was sure of it. Something had cranked the clock forward, eaten up all the lead time and built-in overrun margins.

  Falk let Underwood lead him over to the recliner. At her instruction, he stripped off his celf, his coat and his shirt, and sat down in the seat under the lamps. The plastic upholstery was cold against his back. He became abruptly aware of how white and hollow his chest looked, how skinny his arms.

  "You've been riding drivers a while?" asked Underwood, preparing some swabs.

  "Yeah. A lot of travel in my line of work."

  She started to do some skin and saliva wipes, then took a little blood and ran various scanning wands over him. She asked a few questions about his health, his diet, made notes on a tablet.

  "It's Letts, isn't it?" Falk asked Apfel over her shoulder.

  "What do you mean?"

  "What happened last night in Letts. It's forcing you to step things up."

  "Our window has closed considerably," said the nondescript man.

  "What happened in Letts?" Falk asked.

  Cleesh and the kid both looked at Apfel. Apfel nodded at the kid.

  "The site in Letts was an unlisted operations centre for the SOMD," said Ayoob. "Strategic, Special Focus. Very high-value asset. We believe the Bloc scorched it with some form of autoguided surface-to-surface munition device."

  "They walked a drone bomb onto an SOMD Special Focus base?"

  "You saw the size of the hole," said Apfel. "They just walked a drone bomb into the general vicinity."

  "Why?" asked Falk.

  "Best guess," Apfel replied, "is that the SOMD had got their hands on something. Data of some sort. They'd sent it to their Special Focus centre for processing or unpacking. And the Bloc did not want that information shared."

  He looked at Underwood.

  "Well?"

  "I need to wait for a few results," she said, "and I have some concerns about a few things. Bone density, for one. Renal function. A few additional items. I wish I had a week or two to process him and–"

  "You don't," said Apfel.

  "On the basis of this, then, he's reasonably sound."

  "Thanks for the glowing reference," said Falk.

  "You can put your shirt back on," Underwood said.

  "So I'm in?" asked Falk.

  "We'll work on that assumption," said Apfel.

  "So tell me about the procedure."

  "You ever seen a Jung tank?" Ayoob asked.

  "A what?"

  "A Jung tank," said Apfel. "It's a theoretical concept."

  "Funny, I don't see many of those."

  "It's a theoretical concept everywhere outside of the GEO actualisation division," said Ayoob. "Very much conjectural technology. It's based on some of the breakthrough telepresence tech GEO evolved back in the Early, mixed up with some realtime sensory reposition hardware we've been tooling around for about a decade. We've repurposed stuff designed to help pilot drone probes in ultra-hostile environments."

  "What does it do?" asked Falk. "Allows for remote viewing?"

  "Sort of," said Ayoob.

  Falk stood up, slipped on his shirt and then relinked his celf. He buttoned up his shirt, and tucked it in, all the while looking at Apfel.

  "So what, Bari?" he said. "Are you proposing to jack a pirate feed off a Mil-secure signal to let me look through the glares-cam of some poor SOMD shavehead? I've seen that sort of shit before, and it blows. It's all novelty. The feed quality is generally fuck-awful, and the POV is lousy. You're always looking at completely the wrong thing. I'm really not interested. In fact, I can't think of a single credible network that would take anything like that, unless you managed to scoop some stand-out clip by accident. They wouldn't carry it for the news content. I mean they wouldn't take it for the solid, message-related reasons you'd want them to take it. They'd buy six seconds of exclusive explosion on camera. They wouldn't buy a story."

  "I know," said Apfel. "This isn't a pirate feed to let you see through some joker's glares."

  "Really?"

  "This lets you see through his eyes, Falk," said Cleesh. "This lets you
be
someone. This lets you go in
inside
someone's freeking
^®
head."

NINE

It was getting dark by the time he got off the tram downtown. Lights were shining in the windows of the commercial properties, and the streetpost bug zappers had started to glow. Over the roofline, a purple silhouette, the glass masts were lit up like neon ladders.

  Neon ladders with many rungs missing.

  Falk felt pretty good. His response qualified as excitement, despite various misgivings. A really inviting possibility had opened up, and even if it turned out to be hollow, it was going to make for a very saleable story.

  He walked down the street as trams hummed past. Street boxes trailed the latest headlines about the Letts incident. There was talk of a publicly funded meteor defence programme.

  Classic misdirection.

  He stepped into a ProFood, and ordered a coffee. While he waited for it, he stared out of the front windows into the darkening street and considered his misgivings. Poplite trilled in the background.