The Gone-Away World

Chapter Nine

THE NEW truck still smelled of plastic, but now it smelled of trucker as well: of too little sleep and a lot of coffee, of paying attention and hurrying. There was a feathery smear on the windscreen where the pigeon had bounced off the cab, and Gonzo had already spilled Flynn the Barman’s espresso into the cupholder. Try as we might, though, we couldn’t quite get rid of the smell of pig. It stuck to the seats and hung in the air, and from time to time you tasted it in passing if you were eating a piece of chocolate and were rash enough to open your mouth. Give us a few days of bad terrain and no showers, and this truck would be so entirely baptised in us that you couldn’t imagine anyone else wanting to go near it, but that whisper of the wallow seemed as if it might be there for ever. I moved my feet along the dash, trying to jam my heels into the handle of the glove box, and they slipped. I lifted them back up and tried again. No good. Our old truck was just that little bit smaller, I could get purchase on the dash and wedge my spine into the seat, but this monster was more luxurious and I wasn’t quite tall enough.

Drowned Cross was a day behind us, and for all my misgivings we’d come through the Border without as much as a single monster charging from the gloom or dropping out of a tree. The road had been empty from one end to the other. Once I saw a shadowy figure off to one side, and another time a bird or a bat flittered past the truck, but that was all. The route might as well have been cleared in advance. Even Bone Briskett seemed to feel we’d made good time, and he’d slackened his breakneck pace so that the drivers could breathe a little easier, and told us we were nearly there. Dick Washburn put his head out of the tank and pointed ahead down the road as if he were in command, and Bone’s tank suddenly developed a mysterious gearbox problem which bounced him around and shook him up until he went back inside.

We came back into the solid world a little while later, and almost straight into Harrisburg, which was a no-fun town in a completely different way from Drowned Cross. It wasn’t much of a burg and there had probably never been a Harris. It was a collection of little concrete boxes for people to be kept in while they were waiting to go on duty. You could see it in the bargain-basement architecture: those neat roads and regulation fences and heartless little prefabs, laid out as if they were a real town with shops and boutiques and cafes and a future, and not just a place of preparation and storage whose tomorrows were inevitably violent and sad. This town was a body bank; the adults were the current account and the kids were on deposit, just waiting to be spent at need.

Harrisburg’s only reason to exist was on a muddy rise just beyond the tarmac square which served as the city centre: a big fat storage facility where they kept things no one who lived in Haviland City or New Paris would want to be anywhere near. Bone Briskett’s tank rolled up to the gates, and a couple of guys in suits and standard-issue sunglasses came out and looked at him. Bone glowered back and gave them his ID. The standard-issue guys huddled. Bone growled, and the pencilneck popped up next to him and yipped, and they waved us through. The convoy peeled off to one side and we were escorted through to a vast, empty hangar with a lot of soldiers and standard-issue guys around it, and in the middle of this enormous space there were ten objects arranged in a ring. Each of them was a lash-up, a thing about seven feet tall and bolted together in a hurry.

Gonzo sucked air between his teeth.

Between the crossed arms of the standard-issue guys, we could see that each charge was made up of two big containment tanks yoked together. One tank was yellow, in a loud, friendly way which nonetheless was not reassuring. The other one was red, the kind of red which means it’s best not to get near it rather than the kind which says come in and have a smoke and a fairy cake. The yellow tanks were marked with the word fox. The red ones had hazard stamps on them, and STUFF in black. These things, put together the right way, make what you might term an idiot bomb. It makes a very large bang, but you have to be stupid to want one.

Gonzo jumped down out of the truck, and sauntered over to have a look. The standard-issue guys didn’t like that, so there was a great deal of cock waving, which went like this:

Gonzo: So these are our babies?

Mr. Standard Issue: Step away from there, please, sir.

Gonzo: Gotta tell you, no one said anything about FOX . . .

Mr. Standard Issue: Step away, sir!

Gonzo: Exqueeze me?

Mr. Standard Issue: We are required to keep the tanks secured. Sir.

Gonzo: Yeah, well, not from me. I’m the guy who—

Mr. Standard Issue: Yes, sir, also from you.

Gonzo: Uh . . . Sparky? This thing and I need to get to know one another, and you’re in the way.

Mr. Standard Issue: My name is Lipton, sir.

Gonzo: Good. Well, Sparky, in a short while now I will be leaving with this appalling crap, and my friends and I will take it off somewhere and use it to do this thing which you may or may not be cleared to know about—

Mr. Standard Issue: (tetchy) I’m fully cleared for the mission, sir.

Gonzo:—but which you absolutely do not have the stones for. And the thing is that while you were still learning your ABC of exploding cigars, these people you see here were building the Jorgmund Pipe, and generally saving the arse of the planet . . .

Mr. Standard Issue: I’m aware of who these people are, sir.

Gonzo:And so the question is not whether you have yet had permission for me to approach that catastrophe of demolition over there, because that is the whole point of it existing. The question is whether you or any of these governmental protozoa is qualified to be anywhere near it. And the answer, unless you can show me a diploma or some relevant experience, is absolutely no fucking way. So step back, stand down and let the dog see the rabbit, okay?

Mr. Standard Issue: (leaning close and lowering his voice) Now you listen to me, you cowboy fuckstick. Mr. Pestle will be here in five minutes to release the goods to you. If you approach these tanks without clearance, I will drop the hammer on the remote detonator right now, as per my standing orders, and we will all end up as dust in the wind, which is seriously poetic but isn’t how I expect you want to spend the rest of your day. So why don’t you park your attitude in your oversized compensator back there and we’ll all wait for the authorisation code, all right?

Gonzo: (also leaning close and reaching into his coat) What, this detonator?

Mr. Standard Issue: (clutching at his left pocket) How? Ungh! (The word “ungh” should be taken to mean that Gonzo, by means of this deception and now armed with the location of the remote, has punched Mr. Standard Issue in the throat, gently enough that the guy’s just really unhappy rather than dead, and abstracted the object in that pocket, which is a scary-looking slab of plastic with a red button on it.)

Gonzo: (whistling tunelessly as he wanders over to the nearest tank) Hello, little lady! Ain’t you a fine figure of a woman? (Because for Gonzo, anything which may explode at any moment is clearly a girl.)

Gonzo’s massive testicular superiority thus established, he caressed the nearest bomb in a moderately obscene way, and the rest of us climbed out of our trucks and started figuring out how best to lift and stow them. The soldierboys had a forklift, but forklifts don’t have a whole lot of suspension and there was no way you wanted these things jolting around. In the end we rigged a set of A-frame pulleys with turntable waists, and we lifted them with actual muscle and sweat so we would be able to feel anything going wrong before it happened.

Mr. Pestle made his appearance as we were loading up the last truck, and he did it with aplomb. He was a genial old gaffer with weightlifter’s shoulders and a neat patch of silver wire on his head, and he was craggy with a man’s experience. His shoes were two-tone leather like a gangster’s in a movie, and they made little noises as he walked: tink for one and tonk for the other. He threw an arm around Gonzo, and slapped him thunderously on the shoulder with one gloved hand. He was letting us know he wasn’t Dickwash, that he was the real thing; that he had the right to tell us what to do, and just maybe he did. There was a faint scar along one side of his face, by the hairline, which might have been shrapnel, certainly wasn’t a facelift. Mr. Pestle had a voice like a town crier.

“I’m Pestle, call me Humbert! Pestle like mortar, mortar like in a wall! Ain’t that ever a regrettable name? If my mother was alive, God rest her, I’d have her walk behind me and explain herself to every Jack and Jill—especially every Jill! Dead these many years, the old monster, and tongue-lashing the Almighty in heaven or the Devil in hell, depending on her ultimate destination. So you’re the guy? Gonzo Lubitsch, man of action? And these here are your deputies! Ha! Ha? Cowboy joke, you’re too young . . . And this lady must be Sally Culpepper, who handed Washburn his papery backside and won you people a contract I’d like a piece of myself? Richard”—and by this he meant the pencilneck, probably the name Dick belonged to some crusty upper-echelon SOB and so Dick Washburn was Richard to his superiors, because there can only ever be One True Dick—“neglected to mention you had legs like the Queen of Sheba. Poor dumb animal never stood a chance, did he? Ha!” And he wrapped an arm around Sally too, with a respectful nod to Jim Hepsobah, because Humbert Pestle was not a genial old gaffer at all, he was a silverback, a pencilneck in excelsis, and he could read a personnel file and play you like a tuppenny whistle. Pestle nodded to the standard-issue guys, then turned back to us, as a group.

“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 the 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.

Moustache stepped through them, fluid and measured. He was not particularly quick. He was simply exactly where he wanted to be. By the time they had compensated for one movement, he had made another. Contrary to popular wisdom, it was almost exactly not like a dance. A dancer works with rhythm and display. The body moves as a series of separate parts, finding beauty in harmony. A dancer wants to express something rather than conceal it. Moustache did none of these things. He did not move his body extraneously, or any part of it in isolation, and he was not showy. He killed without suddenness or excess force. He stabbed you just enough to make you die, not enough to get his hook caught up on your ribs or your spine. He killed ergonomically, so that later, when he was reporting to his evil moustache boss, he would not have an uncomfortable twinge in his shoulders, would not have to go to the evil moustache doctor and ask for some time off to get rid of his RSI. And occasionally, when he wasn’t quite perfect, his chain-and-hook weapon went plink. It was the only energy he wasted.

In my ear Jim Hepsobah was broadcasting while he worked, Hostile, say again, hostile! We are under attack! But the interference from the fire was bad, and only broken phrases came back. The others were either setting their explosives or fighting for their lives, maybe both. It mattered, but it wasn’t relevant. We had our own job to do.

Moustache removed the hook from some kid whose name I never had time to ask, and stepped towards us.

Gonzo went to meet him.

Things happened.

I had never seen Gonzo fight at full stretch. I had never realised how scary my best friend was. Gonzo stepped towards Moustache, moving in a straight line (hard forms; closest distance between two points, close with the target and strike, and keep doing it) and scooping up a short steel bar along the way. Encumbered by the suit, Gonzo was not as graceful as Moustache. He moved like an ice shelf. Moustache stopped. He didn’t like what he was seeing. And then he slid forward into a new stance, and the hook started to move around his body on its chain. Whirr, whirr, whupp. And again.

Gonzo was at full speed when he hit Moustache’s blurring shield. His steel bar caught the hook perfectly and he wrenched back on it, hard and unsubtle, which was not what Moustache was expecting. Moustache had a choice: follow the wrench and risk grappling, or release the weapon and take the opportunity to strike. He must not have fancied grappling with a big man in a flabby suit, because he chose the second option. The hook spun away, and Moustache launched a hand high, twisted, slammed Gonzo with a foot like a rivet gun, kerchunk!, then stepped back along a different line so that Gonzo’s blinding riposte with the bar blurred through empty air. So. One up to Gonzo, but not for nothing.

Moustache came back in, which proved to be a mistake because Gonzo was waiting for it. The bar slammed into his chest, and something broke. Moustache rolled out, taking Gonzo’s leg on the way, a single shot to the muscle of the calf which must have deadened it, because Gonzo staggered and had to hop to regain his balance. Moustache scuttled over to his right and scooped up his hook again, and instead of going after Gonzo, he came after us. Specifically, he came after the FOX bomb. His hand whipped out and flicked once, twice, like a man fly-fishing, and the hook sailed over my head and into the machinery of the bomb. It sliced through a hose, and hit the gubbins and gaskets. It stuck. Moustache pulled, and it came free. Something went plink. It wasn’t the hook. It was the bomb. As Moustache reeled in his weapon, something sprang after it: a length of tubing and some bits of metal. Plink.

Through the terrible howl of fire only thirty feet away; through the suits; through testosterone and fear and my own breathing, I heard that damn thing break, and I moved. I moved, and Gonzo moved with me, perfect mirrors. I lunged for the loose, flapping conduit, the magnetised metallic gooseneck which was connected to the Stuff tank on the bomb. I lunged, and I got it. And Gonzo, more human, less sensible, shunted Jim Hepsobah out of the way, so that both of us were dead centre of the target when the thing happened, and all the best-laid plans went thoroughly agley and the situation was, as Ronnie Cheung would have said, bollocksed from here to Buddha’s colon.

Above us, the valve on the Stuff tank shattered. The Stuff inside raced down the magnetic tube and flooded out. We stood, together, under the waterfall, and who knew what was happening? The Stuff was interacting with us, bonding with us, doing whatever it did, and I’d have horns and a tail and Leah would never kiss me again. But there was no time. Five minutes exactly, and so we had five more to rig the back-up and not let everyone down, and that’s what I shouted into my radio as I spun out of the stream and raced for our truck. Moustache stared. Maybe evil moustache men didn’t have friends who’d do that for them, or maybe he hadn’t imagined that anyone who wasn’t an evil moustache man would accept falling through a stream of Stuff and carry on with their mission. Whatever—Moustache was distracted. Almost absent-mindedly, Gonzo bowled the steel bar through the air, and Moustache clocked it about a half a beat too late. It sank a few inches into his temple, and he fell straight over onto his back. He didn’t even shudder, he was just gone. Don’t care. Not important.

I reached the doors of our truck and hauled them open, then glanced over my shoulder. Gonzo was staring at me through his visor, and he seemed to be all right. Maybe the suits had kept us safe, maybe the presence of so much leaky FOX had made it all okay, neutralised it. Maybe all that time on Piper 90 had made us immune. And maybe there was a special retirement farm for old dogs where all the rabbits were too fat to run away and an eccentric millionaire hired professional masseurs to stroke them every evening in front of a log fire. Jim Hepsobah wasn’t moving and neither was Sally Culpepper. They were all petrified. Oh, bloody hell, maybe they were petrified. I screamed at them, a rageful yawp full of command and desperation.

“Four minutes and twenty seconds and then we’re fucked. I don’t care if I have got fucking horns and a tail, do this and you can cut them off me, but stop standing there like a fucking bikini parade and move the bloody bomb!” I had become Ronnie, but Gonzo at least was hit between the eyes by it, moved alongside me in a heartbeat, and he almost lifted the damn bomb without the hoist. Then Jim and Sally were there and we had three minutes and that’s impossible, but we were doing it. We were over target but under deadline—we knew that because we were alive. And staying that way, yes. We didn’t have time to stop and pick up the wounded, but thank God, Moustache wasn’t the kind of guy who left any. Gonzo’s suit had dissolved along one arm, and his skin must be burning, but he didn’t slow. We fled.

“New bomb,” Sally was saying. “New bomb in place! Evacuate now, repeat now. Confirm by solid tone only,” because each handset can send a single note for Morse or to test a channel, and seconds later it came back, a series of tones blending into a chord, and we knew they could hear us and they were alive. We set the timer for ninety seconds and jumped back in our trucks. At ninety seconds we were passing through the searing heat outside, and the tyres were actually skidding in the melted surface of the road. Eighty seconds, and we skidded over the gates and dragged a piece with us for a moment, and we could see the other trucks and the rest of Bone’s boys way out ahead of us. The radio channel lit up with questions and demands: What the fuck? What enemy? Jesus, put your foot down and Jim Hepsobah like a minister: Shut up and tell me it’s done! And it is. All charges set. One minute to detonation, and Gonzo nearly turned the truck over getting us around the curve of the hill.

We tucked in under the brow, twenty trucks and as many tanks and armoured vehicles, paint scorched and wheels melted, and we hid and hunkered down, and waited.

“Three seconds,” Sally Culpepper said, and I was sure she was wrong.

Then the sky went white above us and I squeezed my eyes shut, and even so I could see the shadow of the hill against the white of the fields beyond, and the image of a steering wheel. The trucks shook and shuddered, and one of the tanks on the very outside of our huddle flipped over.

When we looked around the hill, Station 9 was gone, and in its place was a black, smoking ruin, and no fire.

Good feeling.