“Ladies and Gentlemen of the Free Company, we have exactly no time at all. You are near as dammit on schedule and I mean for you to stay that way, so let’s get this thing started before it’s too late to do it at all. Unlikely though it may seem I have a few things to tell you which may actually help. When I was a young man,” Humbert Pestle said, “we used to call it ‘the Dope.’”
Maybe it was that one word which turned the trick: “the dope” is sniper slang for anything which helps you acquire and hit a given target. There was something about him too, a sniff of gunmetal beneath the fluff. Humbert Pestle gestured, and we trotted towards a pale green door in the far wall. He waited until the last of us was through before he came in himself.
BURNING FOX WAS A MOST fearsome thing. If it came into contact with live Stuff, it would ignite it instead of neutralising it, and that Stuff would ignite more Stuff, and pretty soon the unreal world would be on fire. And the unreal world was wrapped around the Livable Zone like the doughnut around the jam.
At the same time, FOX fire was very rare. You had to get it very hot, for a long time. So this could be an accident, but if so it was a particularly odd one, and if it wasn’t then that was something else to watch out for.
Humbert Pestle leaned on the table at the front of the room. I noticed he’d taken off only one glove. It wasn’t cold in the briefing room, but he was a respectable age. Or maybe he had a prosthetic, because he was careful with that hand, held it close to his chest as though it were fragile. He flicked on an overhead projector and there was a map, with lines of elevation and the clear, sharp boundaries of a cluster of buildings.
“This is the place. We call it Station 9,” Pestle said. “It contains our major reserve of FOX and a small back-up FOX generating system. And this is the fire.” He pulled a second layer of plastic down over the first, and a great, uneven patch of red swallowed the building, going orange over some storage huts and verging on yellow in the centre. “And this is the storm which is arriving in about twenty hours.” And over the top he laid a pattern of pressure and wind which would fan the flames and lift anything escaping straight to the Border and beyond.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, please!” And when we looked at him, he said it again: “Please . . . Go down there and put that fucker out.” Humbert Pestle had lived a life. He knew how to swear and make it stick. And one by one we looked at him and nodded, and Jim Hepsobah looked at Sally, and she nodded too. Yes, sir.
Jim Hepsobah stepped up and talked about approaches, and Annie the Ox joined him like a maiden aunt talking tea and cake, but she was talking explosive yield and necessary detonation overlap and minimum functional vacuum. Conventional explosives wouldn’t get the job done for burning FOX, hence the ten scary objects in our trucks outside. We’d set them in exactly the right place, detonate them in exactly the right sequence, and the blast would suck the air away from the fire and blow out the ordinary part of it, and the sudden combination of FOX and Stuff would do the same to the unconventional part. So all we had to be was brave, fast and perfect.
Okeydokey.
There were two serviceable roads, here and here, and we could have either of them or both of them to ourselves. And we had no time, none at all. Even without the storm winds coming, pressure in the Pipe was so low it was effectively offline in a great arc from Sallera to Brindleby, and there was word of a vanishing. It was unconfirmed but probable: a little place called Templeton, maybe three hundred people gone. Bad at any time, but very bad now because maybe the two were connected.
I’d been to Templeton twice—once on a job, and once with Leah for shopping, because Templeton was one of those rare places which traded with the people from the Border. It was right out on a finger of the Livable Zone, a valley spur which came off the Pipe and nestled in the crook of a lake. The borderliners came in their nimble cars and hefty 4 ×4s and traded unlikely fabrics and new spices. Risky living, to stay ahead of the Stuff and remain unchanged, and even more so, to come within reach of a town. If the folk there decided you were new, anything could happen. But now Templeton was gone, and you had to ask yourself whether maybe they’d had a little too much to do with the Border, and it had taken them. I shut my mouth very tight and tried not to feel sick at the idea of Templeton shucked from its shell and swallowed like Drowned Cross. Pestle drew his face down and a little bit of the old, cold bastard was briefly visible within; if Templeton was gone, then there was going to be a reckoning this time. You didn’t come into his bit of the world and pillage and plunder and steal his people out from under him. He leaned forward again and rested both hands in fists on the table (the plump, naked one squashed around the fingers but held at the knuckle: a little boxing at the alma mater, old fellow, and the muscles under his jacket heaved a little; the prosthetic didn’t give at all). He asked if there were any questions, and there weren’t, that was all there was. He looked around the room, nodded to Gonzo, and walked out, his shoes making that weird little noise again, one going tink, the other one tonk. We looked after him, and Jim Hepsobah walked up to the front and growled.
“What the fuck are you all staring at? Is it your first dance? Bring back my company! Get in your suits, get in your trucks and let’s do this thing!” And somehow that plugged us all back into ourselves, and we dived for our hazmat moonsuits and hit the trucks at speed and were gone in a rattle and a roar. I glanced in the mirror as we pulled out. Pestle was nowhere. The standard-issue guys were gone. Harrisburg was a ghost again, but just maybe, in the high window of a building by the gate, there was the shadow of a silverback.
I drove and Gonzo slept. Jim had chosen the southern route, and Bone Briskett’s convoy moved us swiftly but cautiously along well-kept roads. No one wanted to risk a smash with ten makeshift FOX bombs in close proximity.
I wondered about Templeton, and whether it was possible what people said: that the vanishings were the new people, the Found Thousand showing their real face. I wondered about Zaher Bey—a most unlikely bogeyman—but I’d never been in his bad books. Only on his good side. If it was true; if the Bey was leading an army of vengeful horrors, then there was another war coming, and I would fight. Or maybe it was already here. Maybe the Found Thousand were just striking back. Who knew what we’d been doing, on the quiet and in the dark? Men of Gonzo’s old profession slinking out beyond our fences to strike the enemy before they had the chance to become a threat.
I just couldn’t see the Bey as a monster.
I wondered if that was because he was my friend, or had been.
I wondered that for three hours, and then Gonzo woke up to take his turn at the wheel. I stared at the unfamiliar ceiling of our new truck and wished for our old one, and worried some more until the sound of the road under us made me drowsy, and the little corner of the moon I could see through the window disappeared behind some clouds. I dozed, and in the patches of wakefulness when Gonzo braked a little harder or the wind played a higher note around the sheer edges of the cab, I thought about fire.
THE MIRACLE OF FIRE is that it dies. It is a chemical and sometimes an atomic reaction, the collapse and recombination of things at their most fundamental level. Without it, we could not exist, and yet if it persisted past the point where it wanes, nothing would survive. Thus, the saving grace of fire is that it has limits and can be extinguished.
At least, very small fires can be. Others, one must simply outlive. We are so proud of our mastery of the element; we unleashed the broken atom in 1945 and thought ourselves quite significant, but a bad forest fire will release in ten minutes all the energy which consumed Hiroshima, and produce heat four hundred times greater than our most sophisticated firefighting units can control. Fire was our first magic and our first science, and we have harnessed it hardly at all.
Like an empire, fire must expand. It consumes the land it stands on, so it cannot rest. Thus it can be contained in two dimensions, though not reliably in three. A firebreak of pre-emptively burned ground will cage a blaze, and eventually, if t
he job is done well, it will fade and expire like a lonely bear. Also, flames need oxygen and enough ambient heat to sustain ignition. This is the fireman’s triad: drive away the air for long enough, cool the fuel and abate the heat and your job is done. And thus our plan: the blast from our explosives would kill the flames themselves, blow away the oxygen and then draw in cold air from all sides. The reaction would consume much of the fuel, so that—we believed—the whole process could not begin again. This was less like conventional firefighting than it was surgery.
I wondered how it would look, this FOX fire, and how it would smell. I asked myself how hot it would be, how long we would be able to operate, even in our suits. I wondered whether that heat would stop the bombs from working, or set them off too soon. I thought of a towering plume, a great, white jet roaring like a geyser from the ground, fed by barrels and buildings, sucking in more air and spreading, flashing over into stands of trees. I thought about blackened grass and smoking soil, and the layered nature of fire: first, the clear gases which are not yet burning, which roost below the flame; then the thin bright line above it where those gases catch; and finally the incandescent cone which reaches up and out, orange or white or green, depending on all the badness in the mix.
And then I realised I was not dreaming. I was simply looking, staring, through the glass at the thing itself.
Station 9 was a circle of buildings like a hill fort, and once upon a time they’d been all sleek and we’re-in-control, towers and domes and cylinders. Now, though, they were the stamen of a thick, manypetalled flower, grey and magnesium-white and blazing. Even this far out, I could feel the heat through the windscreen. The temperature around the main storage area was reaching levels it really didn’t oughta, and the whole thing would shortly melt, tear and sluice down into itself. Little leaves of dirty fire were twisting away into the sky. If those leaves carried to the Border—and the wind was coming up, blowing that way even now—then we’d have failed, and more than failed.
Half a mile from Station 9 there was a broad circle of road, a turning place, with a patch of smoking grass in the middle. Bone Briskett stopped off to one side with his tank pointed at the fire as if he wanted to shoot it. We lined up the trucks in a row, facing the enemy. Five target zones on the edge of the blaze; ten primary trucks, each with a bomb and paired so that one could go wrong and the pattern wouldn’t be upset; and ten more trucks in support, filled with lifting gear, decon chambers and medical bays and additional moonsuits. The suits are good for five hundred degrees—for a while, anyway—but the radios don’t work in heat like that for very long, and the days of GPS came to an end on the first day of the Go Away War. There were triangulation towers around Station 9 which would tell us where we were, but they needed line of sight to be reliable and we wouldn’t have it, so we’d memorised where we had to be. Every single one of us can work from a map with nothing more than a memory and the ground beneath his feet, or hers. This is what we do. We stared at the fire and waited for the word.
All around us, Bone Briskett’s soldiers waited too, in suits of their own, most likely wishing for a stand-up fight over this, any day. Humbert Pestle had decreed that we should have our escort all the way to the edge of hell. No harm in being safe, he’d said, and it only takes a few people to save the world, but it never hurts to have some guys on hand to carry them out afterwards. You couldn’t argue with him; he just smiled and did what he did, and you felt better for knowing he was there. I looked at the soldiers closest to me and wondered if they’d lied about their ages to enlist.
The growl of the engines was too quiet to hear over the noise of the fire.
“Hoods,” said Jim Hepsobah over the radio, and we checked our masks and suit seals.
“Locations,” Jim said, and we sounded off where we were going.
“Deploy in two minutes. Time to detonation, twelve hundred seconds from the go,” Sally Culpepper said. And we waited.
Twelve hundred seconds. Three hundred to enter and reach the target area. Six hundred to set and secure the bomb. Three hundred to get out again and reach safe distance. No radio detonators because they might be triggered by interference on the site. I checked my suit again. It was big and ungainly and made of impermeable fabric and some kind of metallic sheath. It had a coolant layer, and when you switched it on it filled with air. You could stand in a gas cloud and puncture the suit, and the air would flow out rather than in for long enough to keep you alive. No one had ever tried it with Stuff, because no one wanted to be the first.
“One minute,” Sally Culpepper said.
Gonzo looked at me and grinned through his faceplate. We were going through the middle with Jim and Sally, setting the bomb closest to the blaze. The most dangerous, the most important.
Gonzo’s favourite thing. And then at some point Sally Culpepper said “Go” because everyone surged forward at once.
We ploughed in. Bone Briskett charged his tank through the main gates, and they spanged and popped and his tracks crushed them, bent them flat. Tobemory Trent and Annie the Ox went off to one side, and Samuel P. and Brightwater Fisk spun off to the other. Gonzo and I and Jim and Sally (first in, last out, no matter where and what) rolled over the busted gates, and our tyres chewed them apart, because they were heated up and soft, and we headed for our target. We were going inside the secondary depot of Station 9, just this side of the main holding area, which was currently holding the flames like a crucible—but not for long. We roared the trucks right in across the executive parking lot and the yellow and black tarmac which said access only, and then through the red trapezium reading restricted, and the paint on the bonnet started to blister. Then we crashed through the corrugated doors and into the depot, and it was like coming in out of the sun. The depot was filled with vapours and heat shimmer, but it wasn’t as hot as outside. Two loads of Bone Briskett’s men hurtled in after us and spread out to the sides.
Jim Hepsobah half swung, half jack-knifed his truck in a slewing turn which brought his bomb as close as could be to the X (there was no actual X) and stopped, leaving a trail of rubber on the floor and saving us twenty seconds. We stepped out into a hot, bad place. Bone’s boys, looking like wasps in their armoured military suits, went out around us in a circle, like anyone would be crazy enough to attack us now, while we were doing this. They had big, special-manufacture guns which would work in these conditions, flanged and water-cooled and stacked with ammunition which would kill a man but leave a FOX tank unharmed. Probably.
Off to one side there was a row of black boxes, man-high and bound up in a tangle of hoses. FOX generator, back-up, one. Nothing to say how it worked. No magic wands or fairies flitting around it, no choirs of angels. If anything, it was sinister, like a row of six coffins linked together for a mass embalming. No lights on: good. If the thing isn’t running, there’s no danger of it feeding the blaze. We can just blow it away. One problem the less, and high time we caught a break.
The ground was thrumming. The whole structure was vibrating with the sheer power of what was going on on the other side of the wall. Twenty feet to the crucible. Seven feet through the crucible to the flames and the more-than-flames. Thirty feet from the most destructive force in the world, held in by a crumbling cup of not-very-strong stone and dust. No time to screw around then. Hoist, pulleys: Jim Hepsobah took the strain, and Sally steered with nimble arms, and all of us heard one another’s grunting over the radios, but that was all—no chatter, no questions. We knew the job; we knew one another. Conversation meant misunderstanding.
“Position set,” Sally said, because it was. Time: four minutes fifty seconds and counting. Fastest ever, anywhere, by anyone. Jim Hepsobah stepped forward to adjust dials and set the timer, and then something went plink. I turned to see what it was, and I saw, and I felt the world turn to ice.
There was a man in here with us. A slender, ordinary man in black, almost priestly—or monkish perhaps. He was sweating, because it was way too hot in here for a human being. At around
forty degrees, the human brain starts to flake out. Core body temperature can go up only a couple of degrees before you forget what’s going on and start to die. This guy was not starting to die. He had not lost his concentration. He looked, if anything, slightly bored. In one hand he carried a length of chain with a hook on the end. He was about five eleven, had some Asian ancestry somewhere and his arms and legs were loose like a marionette’s. He had a really posey little moustache, two half-inch barbs like the bad guy in a black-and-white film. He bowed.
“Good evening,” said the moustache guy. “My presence here is a regrettable necessity. This will be over soon.” And with that cursory introduction, he started killing Bone’s boys.
Now understand, Bone’s boys were not a bunch of slacker kids with guns. They were not just standing around waiting for Mr. Moustache to sink his hook-and-chain arrangement into their soft parts. They were armoured soldiers with modern weapons, some of the best troops the world had to offer. They fought. They took positions, created a kill zone, found firing solutions. A triangle-base volume of air (a pentahedron; you don’t see many of those) maybe six feet in height became instantly uninhabitable. When he slipped past that, they dumped the guns and went hand to hand with carbon-fibre batons and ceramic knives. They were young and fast and strong, and they knew how to fight without getting in each other’s way. There was a lot of karate and some Silat and the occasional bit of Iaijutsu going on, and none of it was amateur. Bone’s boys were good. They were so good, they very nearly slowed him down.