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  The six foot tall aluminium cut-outs mounted along the concrete forecourt spelled PIONEER USEUM, because the first M in museum had been mysteriously removed by hands unknown. The site was just off Equestrian, in an area earmarked for parks and memorials by city planners. At some point, three decades or more in the past, someone had got militant about the investment of serious capital in a museum to celebrate the settlement of Eighty-Six, when there were still so many aspects of Eighty-Six's infrastructure in need of funds. The project had been frozen. It wasn't the first world Falk had visited where a grand scheme of commemoration had been mothballed.

  Weeds had inveigled their way between the pavers in the concourse, the coloured gravel in the beds, the layout of paths. Nothing ornamental had ever been planted, so the weeds had filled in there too, and supplanted the lawns where the grass hadn't gone wild and hippy. The museum structure was a vast shed, like a boat dock or a bulk hangar. Construction had halted a week or two before it had reached the tipping point of being weatherproof. Guttering had slumped. Stained skylights in the immense roof had fallen in. Last winter's dead leaves and seed cases had blown in through the half-open main doors in huge, gritty drifts. Blurds had nested in the rafters. In places they were swirling madly, almost angrily, around their homes, as if a selective vortex had relaunched some of the dead leaves.

  Falk followed Cleesh inside. The museum would have been magnificent, airy, light. Even from the half-finished and neglected evidence, the architect had known his business.

  It was a museum of vacancies and empty spaces, a commemoration of voids. Plinths and displays had never been filled, description plaques never printed or placed. White stone blocks and elegant metal trestles supported nothing whatsoever for public inspection.

  The only palpable exhibits were the three crude manrated bulk landers that filled the main space of the shed, each one resting in a cast-stone cradle. Their pitted hulls of maraging steel were flecked and discoloured, carbonscorched and seared by entry burns, but it was still possible to see the black and white paint scheme, the foiled silver of the thrusters and couplers, the bold red of the United Status and SOE identifiers. These titanic metal drums had brought the first settlers down. Fred Shaver had been aboard one. His wife Ginger too, presumably.

  "Why here?" Falk asked.

  She kept going. Sometimes he forgot the bulk of her and what an effort it was for her to walk.

  "No one comes here," she said.

  "Should I have worn a raincoat with the collar up?" he asked.

  She didn't laugh.

  "Just come on. There's a degree of privacy. This whole park area is unlinked."

  He'd taken an electric tram up Equestrian and walked the rest of the way. He presumed she had done the same thing, because there had been no sign of a vehicle out front. She led him down the length of the cavernous shed, their footsteps trailing small echoes. He craned his neck to admire the giant landers as they went.

  "So the thing in Letts," he said, by way of conversation.

  "Yeah. Something else."

  "What are you hearing about that?"

  "Same as everyone. Meteor slamdunk."

  "I can't help noticing you're not your usual cheery self," he said.

  She spared him a quick backward glance. He noticed that she'd been scratching at the surgical plug excisions in her throat.

  "Stuff's going on," she said. "That's mainly why you're here."

  "Have I done something to piss you off, Cleesh?"

  "Yes. You're Lex Falk and I'm me."

  "What?" he asked.

  She stopped walking and turned to face him. Some brief emotion that was hard to define passed across her face, like an interaction between clouds and sunlight.

  She surprised him by walking back to where he was standing and embracing him. Her mass swallowed him up.

  "Sorry," she said. "That was bitchy. I don't mean it. I've had a few setbacks. A few gut punches to my confidence."

  "You?"

  "Teasing isn't going to help, Falk. Everything was fine and wealthy when I was an omnipotent voice in a circling can. Life sucks in grav time."

  "It's a matter of adjustment," he said, secretly hoping she'd let him go soon but not wanting to pull away. "Everything will be wealthy again soon, you'll see."

  "No," she said. "It freeks® you up, circling. Freeks® you completely up. I've blown a lot of my choices forever, and that holes your confidence behind the heatshield."

  She released him from the bearhug and smiled down at him.

  "I don't blame you for being you, and look – you get to take full advantage of my setback."

  "How?"

  "You'll see."

  They started walking again.

  "About Letts. It wasn't a strike."

  "We know," she said.

  "Who's 'we'?"

  "The strike is just a cover story."

  "Who's 'we'?" he repeated.

  Beneath large picture windows at the rear of the museum hulk there was a raised viewing platform that had been built to allow visitors the chance to peer down into the anatomically sectioned hull of the third lander. Bari Apfel was waiting for them on the platform. He was wearing a dark suit, an exec's suit, under a brown litex coat.

  "Hello, Falk," he said. He shook Falk's hand.

  "So, what is this?" asked Falk. "Legit GEO biz, or something on the side?"

  "Can't it be both?" asked Apfel.

  "I don't know," said Falk. "Can it?"

  Apfel kept smiling and made a little "let's see" shrug.

  "Geoplanitia Enabling Operator has me on a short-term contract," he said. "My brief is corporate image."

  "You told me that," said Falk.

  "My remit is broad, and part of it is deliberately woolly. There are aspects of my function that haven't been put on record so as to facilitate deniability in the event of blowback."

  Falk chuckled.

  "I love the way you people talk," he said.

  "I'm sure you do," said Apfel. "We frame our terms with the same care as media whores like you people."

  Apfel turned to gaze at the third lander.

  "The downside of this job," he said, "is that I'm a vague contract number buried in the non-specific end of the GEO books. My working brief is spectacularly nebulous, and GEO can cut me loose and deny me at any moment in the interests of corporate integrity."

  He glanced a smile Falk's way.

  "The plus side is resources."

  "Black budget?"

  "Grey, actually. But extensive. The personal remuneration scale's great, of course, and far in excess of anything a contractor of my apparent significance ought to warrant. But the working capital. The access. The possibilities. I've got a free hand to use pretty much anything I want, including the development and deployment of some of GEO's most conjectural properties. Provided I return some decent results, the GEO top floor is happy to invest and turn a blind eye. They'd prefer not to know what I'm actually doing."

  "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 pro
blems 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 c
hest 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?"