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  Falk didn't like South Site much. The opportunities for something criminal and unfortunate to happen seemed high. But at least the place had some colour. Coloured lights and lanterns, colourful awnings, stainless-steel trays of vibrantly coloured food, brightly coloured flames from stall burners, colour-dyed cloth, colourful smells in the air.

  He walked past wire baskets of brightly coloured rubber shoes at the edge of the ballast market, then more bins of cheap toys, knock-off sports caps, mops and brooms, kitchenware, each bin staked with a wire loop holding up the handwritten price card. Fashion glares hung like fruit from drying rails, their paper price tickets twitching in the wind. Men with trays like the olden-time concession girls presented celfs that came without packaging or paperwork.

  Green hiker girl was waiting for him on the front steps of her cubicle dorm. She had no room to invite him into, no space where they could sit and talk. She said she knew a place.

  She was actually wearing her green litex hiker, but he was beginning to think of her as Noma.

  "How are you?" she asked cheerfully as they walked through the market.

  "I'm wealthy," he said. She had her clutch tablet tucked into the breast of her hiker, and she kept touching it to make sure it hadn't gone anywhere.

  She took him to a ProFood outlet on the west corner of the market space. She ordered two bottles of NoCal-Cola, because they could verify the tamper seal on the caps to tell if they were refills. Falk got a fistful of napkins from a dispenser, and some straws in individual paper sleeves. She ordered some food for herself. It was a franchise place. They still had the old Bill Berry Astronut logo on the napkins, rather than the slick, modern Booster Rooster rebrand.

  They sat out of the way at a table in the back. There were sticky rings on the plastic tabletop. She offered him a bite of her food, a greaseproof cone full of what seemed to be grilled meat on skewers. He shook his head.

  "The food around here isn't actually bad," she said.

  "Neither's basejumping, but I'm not attempting that either."

  She gnawed a lump off one of the skewers.

  "I think there's a fair bit of reprocessed blurd in it, mind," she added.

  "Really selling me on basejumping," he replied.

  She grinned, chewing.

  "So what's this about?" he asked.

  "In such a hurry. Can't we just continue our conflirtation?"

  "What's this about?" he repeated.

  She took one of the napkins, wiped the tabletop, and then put her tablet down and slid it over to him. Upside down, she woke it, rotated an image, expanded it.

  "What's this?" he asked.

  "Play it. Watch."

  He let the clip run. There was about forty seconds worth. He paused when it had ended, then touched replay and watched it again.

  "Where did this come from?" he asked.

  "Friends. High places. You know."

  He glared at her. She shrugged.

  "Eighty-Six is prone to meteoritic strikes. Fact of life. Risk small, but real. That's the official line. Letts got unlucky on the bolide lottery. Oh, the humanity! Zero warning. Impact values so high, so fast, nothing tracked it, not ground-based, not orbital. Nothing. Official line, on the feeds just an hour ago. Nothing. Forget we've got, let's think,
the Terminal
out there on the Cape. Nothing detected it until it impacted."

  She touched replay on the clutch tablet clip again. Looking up, she met his eyes, and seemed amused to find him looking at her rather than the playback.

  "And did you know," she asked, "there are currently eight drivers geo-stationary upstairs? Eight drivers parked directly over Shaverton."

  "With their detector arrays on downsweep," said Falk.

  "Yes, to monitor cargo traffic. And that, Mr Lex Falk, is a direct lift from the array archive of the spinrad driver
Manchurian
."

  The clip, heavy with informatic overlays and subsidiary data, was an orbital view of northwest Shaverton. Night. Thermal capture. A city plan with a gentle drift to it. Twenty-eight seconds in, a white-hot flare blooms in Letts.

  "No track," said Falk.

  "No track. Not even eye-invisible. Nothing on instrumentation. It wasn't a strike."

  "How did you get this?"

  "The
Manchurian
was the driver I came in on. A reasonably senior crewperson decided it was better to source the clip for me than have me write about the non-regulation relationship he conducted with a passenger on the trip insystem."

  "Dirty pool," he said, almost in admiration.

  "It wasn't even something I was keeping in my back pocket," she replied. "It was just expedient. You said to me they'd boot me upstairs to catch the next driver home, and it got me thinking about drivers. Just in time."

  "What do you mean?"

  "There was a guy on one of the general networks this lunchtime interviewing an SO rep. He asked straight out if anything parked or circling had got a view of the strike, and the rep told him categorically that all sources had been checked and there was nothing."

  "It's been redacted already."

  "Uh-huh."

  Falk tapped his fingers on the tabletop beside the tablet. He felt hot, and the plastic seat was hurting his hip. He unwrapped his straw, uncapped the Cola bottle and took a drink.

  "I can see why you were conflicted," he said.

  "I thought you might have some ideas."

  He reached over and helped himself to a skewer from her greaseproof cone. He was experiencing something like a caffeine rush, and he needed to be steady. He needed some carbs and protein. It actually tasted okay. Crunchy. Like pork-flavoured peanut brittle.

  "The explosive sniffers have slightly more significance now," he said.

  "They do."

  "If we're going to 'do' anything with this, we need to be sure what we're 'doing'."

  "Go on."

  "If we're going to expose something, we need to know what we're exposing. What's going on that they needed to say it was a bolide strike? Did whatever it was happen in Letts randomly, or because of what was in Letts?"

  "Okay. How do we find that out?"

  "Let me work on it. Let's meet up again tonight."

  She nodded.

  "Can I take this?"

  "No."

  "A copy?"

  "No."

  "But I can trust you to look after it?"

  "Yes."

  "And not do anything stupid with it?"

  "Yes," she said.

Cleesh had been crying.

  "You're late," she said.

  "It's a little out of my way," he replied. He looked at her and narrowed his eyes.

  "Have you been crying?"

  "My eyes have been playing up," she said. "I told you about it the other day. Tear duct, humidity thing. I was up in a can for too long. I told you."

  He remembered her saying something. It wasn't the first time he'd seen her with pink puffiness around the eyes. He was beginning to realise that he didn't know her that well, in person. He didn't know if she suffered from allergies, if she was prone to tearfulness, if pink puffiness was a normal look.

  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."