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approaching heat death by now."
      "Poetic. Can I quote you?"
      "Sure. We've put plenty of space between us, Falk. Literally. The US, the Bloc, the Chinese, everyone's got room to breathe, to develop. No one's treading on anyone else's toes any more. No one gets to seem like a bad neighbour. There's no reason for war, cold or otherwise."
      "But you'd agree," said Falk, "if we suddenly found one, that would be a huge hairy deal?"
      "None hairier," she replied, flashing her eyebrows at him. "But that is not the situation on Eighty-Six. It's a local settlement dispute with disaffected paramilitaries."
      "Where do the paramilitaries get their arms from?" asked green hiker girl from the bucket seat behind Falk. Falk hadn't realised she'd been listening.
      Selton said something in reply, then turned to check something on her display's terrain scanner.
      "What did she say?" green hiker girl asked over the thunder of the engines.
      "I think she said 'that's not material'," Falk replied.
     
 

FOUR
     
 
    A short distance out of Mitre Sands, on the open track, the Fargos rose up on their suspension and went what Lukes called "long-legged". Lifting the hull and broadening the chassis frame made for superior clearance and weight distribution, and the extended footprint boosted stability. The ride got appreciably smoother.
      Through the dust-worn side window, Falk watched the All-ways riding out wide alongside them across the stone scrub, lifting plumes of dust like foam wakes. The chase cars were light and fast. Sunlight flashed off the glares of the shavehead manning the heavy-gauge pintle mount.
      Mountains sulked to the west of them like a grey barn wall. For an hour, the cloudcover came and went like timelapse footage: cloud boil, sharp sun breaks, cloud boil again. Over the shared com system, Selton drew their attention to a pair of the big, rare tundra grazers, turning on the thermals, but Falk didn't get to the window in time and all he saw were sun dogs.
      He was uncomfortable in his seat. It was tight, and the hard form-mould transmitted every bump and vibration to his ass. His back and his right hip began to ache.
      Green hiker girl was writing something on a clutch tablet.
      "This your first zone posting?" he asked her, trying to reboot things.
      "I'm thirty-one," she replied.
      He gave her "quizzical".
      "Are we playing Respond To One Question With The Answer To Another?" he asked.
      "I'm not playing anything with you, period," she replied. She returned to her work.
      "The longer I spend with you," he said, "the more I sense I'm getting to know the real you."
      She looked up at him again. He considered himself thick-skinned, but the contempt in her eyes came as a surprise.
      "I have a horrible feeling," she said, "that someone once told you that you were charming, and you believed them."
     
    Marblehead was an ore town that had been seeded about fifty years before. The first-gen pop, according to Selton, had been mostly Chinese and Portuguese, though that had diluted as the town's prosperity had grown. The place had secured major contracts to supply ore for the construction industry, mainly blue metal aggregate for precast concrete mixes, though it also quarried quality materials for facing and dressing. The extractors of Marblehead had made a significant contribution to the rise of Shaverton.
      Marblehead had been one of the flashpoints in the early phase of the dispute. Production had cut back as the SOMD restricted transport and conveyance. A lot of the pop had drained out in the previous nine months.
      Selton told them that the op profile was to meet with a Forward Patrol Group, conduct a security appraisal and then extract before nightfall. Falk was pretty sure that was just a bunch of rugged-sounding terms that actually meant a pretend wargame exercise with added show-and-tell.
      Approaching the town, now driving on a hardpan roadway, they dropped