Peter Hamilton - Fallen Fragon

"Sir, I don't think that's—"

"He's alive, Sergeant. I'm not allowing one of my men to die here. This was a traffic accident, not a setup for a sniper. Understand?"

"Yes, sir." Lawrence took a moment to compose himself, knowing full well what his own medical telemetry would be showing Bryant. Not that the captain would be looking. "Hal, Dennis, you're with me. Amersy, finish our sweep."

It was a narrow alley in an old commercial district. Vertical stone-and-concrete walls with white paint badly faded and peeling, scraggly weeds sprouting all along the base. The only windows were high up and covered with bars, glass too dirty to see through; doors were sturdy metal, welded up or sealed with thick riveted plates. Dust was still rolling out of the entrance when Lawrence arrived, thick gray clouds of dry carcinogenic particles that latched on tenaciously to his Skin carapace. Crowds of civilians were gathered around on the main street, several with handkerchiefs over their faces. They all peered into the gloomy alley. Two TVL88 helicopters were circling just above the rooftops, magnetic Gatling cannon extended from the noses like squat insect mandibles. Their rotors were exacerbating the dust problem.

Lawrence checked around quickly. There was no obvious high building providing a firepoint nest down the alley. His suit AS increased the infrared sensor percentage as he made his way into the dust; his visual picture lost all color apart from gray, black and pink—though the general outlines maintained their integrity. He saw rubbish piled up against the walls on either side of the alley: boxes, bags and drums all printed with the town's civic emblem, denoting it ready for collection. There couldn't have been a pickup truck down here for a month. In some places the piles were so big they actually sprawled right across the cracked tarmac. Lawrence had to clamber over them.

There was a kink in the alley, and he was abruptly facing the collapsed wall. He grunted in dismay. "Shit, this is a mess." A huge section had collapsed, leaving tattered shreds of tigercotton reinforcement mesh flapping along the jagged upright edges. The building behind had been some kind of warehouse, or disused factory, a big empty cube with aging metal beams and ducts running up the walls, now bent and twisted, whole strands torn free and dangling precariously. Its flat concrete panel ceiling had collapsed along with the wall, crashing down and shattering over the floor and a big crumpled truck. On the opposite wall at the front of the building, a roll-up door had been torn apart, showing a wide street outside that was clogged with stationary traffic.

Lawrence took only a second to work out that the truck had gone runaway, bursting through the door to ram into the wall. Exactly when Foran was standing in the alley on the other side.

That was quite extraordinary bad timing.

He didn't believe any of it. Instinct hardened and sharpened by the last twenty years was flashing up warning icons of a kind more potent than any AS symbology.

Skins swarmed over the massive pile of debris. They flung body-sized lumps of concrete and stone through the air as if they were made of feathers, digging out a wide crater above their fallen comrade. They possessed the desperate stop-go motions of hive insects synchronized for maximum productivity.

"Let's get to it," Lawrence told Hal and Dennis curtly. They joined the other Skins, prizing big chunks of masonry free. Grit and powdery fragments spewed off each piece like a dry liquid. The filthy deluge of dust made visibility difficult even with Skin sensors. Infrared helmet beams were turned up to full intensity, creating swirling crimson auras as if vanquished stars were expiring in the cloud.

It took nearly fifty minutes to excavate the rubble. At the end there was only enough room for two Skins to work in the bottom, carefully picking up lumps of stone and handing them to a chain of Skins to be carried clear. The crater walls were so unsteady it would take very little to trigger a further collapse. Foran's Skin was slowly exposed. Dust around him was clotted into mud with glistening scarlet blood. Bloodpak reserves and stored oxygen had kept him alive, though nearly half of his medical telemetry was in the amber, with several organ functions flatlined red. He was unconscious, too, when he was finally lifted clear.

All the paramedics did was hook his Skin umbilicals up to fresh bloodpaks. The Skin was providing the most stable physiological environment possible until they could get him into trauma surgery. They rushed him away to the medevac helicopter that had landed in the middle of the street at the end of the alley.

"I didn't think anything could get through our Skin," Hal said lamely as they milled around at the foot of the rubble.

The dust was settling now that the digging had stopped, cloaking the immediate vicinity in pallid gray.

"Believe it," Dennis said. "A hundred tons of sharp rock falling on top of you is going to puncture your Skin."

"Poor bastard. Is he going to be okay?"

"His brain's still alive, and oxygenated. So they'll be able to bring him up to full consciousness without any trouble. The rest of him... I don't know. He'll need a lot of replacement work."

"But we bring prosthetics with us, right?"

"Yeah, kid, we've got a whole bunch of biomech spares. I guess at least he'll be independently mobile at any rate. Whether he'll ever rejoin the platoon is another matter. You know how top-rate we have to be."

Even with Skin muscles augmenting every move, Lawrence felt distinctly non-top-rate right now. His own muscles ached from the effort of digging. For a moment, the mantle of cloying dust brought up an image of Amethi during the Wakening, when the slush stuck to everything, imprisoning the world in a decrepit winter. He looked around the narrow alley. The piles of rubbish were as wide here as they were at the end. Foran would have had to walk right next to the wall.

Lawrence slowly moved across the lower part of the rubble until he could see back into the ruined building. The traffic on the main road in front was moving again. Skins stood guard beside the wrecked door. A couple of techs were examining the truck, shifting the concrete slabs so they could get into the engine compartment. Captain Bryant was standing behind them.

"What happened to it, sir?" Lawrence asked over the secure command link.

"They don't know yet," Bryant replied. He sounded annoyed. "Damn, I really don't need accidents like this messing up my command."

"This wasn't an accident, sir."

"Of course it was, Sergeant The track went out of control and crashed."

"It crashed into one of us."

"Your concern for our personnel is commendable, but in this case it's misplaced. This is a traffic accident. A tragic one, I accept, but an accident."

"What did the traffic regulator AS log as the fault?"

"It didn't log anything, Sergeant. That's the problem. The track's electronics crashed."

"The software or hardware?"

"Sergeant, you'll be able to read the report for yourself as soon as it's been made. We haven't even accessed the track's memory block yet."

"But what about the fail-safes?"

"Newton, what the hell are you doing? What's the matter with you? He will recover, you know, he'll get the best possible treatment."

"Sir, I just don't see how this could be an accident."

"That's enough, Sergeant. It's unfortunate, but it happened."

"Not one fail-safe cuts in when the electronics crash. Sir, not even Thallspring technology is that shoddy. Then it veers off the road to hit a door square in the center."

"Sergeant!"

"And after that it demolishes a wall while one of our men is standing directly behind it. One of the few things that can damage a Skin suit. I don't buy it, sir. That's not one coincidence, that's about a thousand falling into line."