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their profile again, and ran low. The All-ways tucked in close. One zipped ahead, taking point.
      "Stay buttoned up," Selton said into her mic. Their speed had decreased. "Authority given for weapons live. Commence standard sweep and target sampling."
      There was a disconcerting noise of motor gearing in the roof above them. The autohunt turret mount on the Fargo's cabin top activated and began to traverse.
      They entered a long incline, a winding ribbon road that followed the side of a valley down to the town limits. The place looked nondescript, dirty and dead, not so much a township as row after row of ugly precast buildings dumped on waste ground waiting to be shipped out on flatbeds to permanent homes. Places were shuttered and boarded, screened by chainlink and mesh sheeting, painted with pollution, stained by sunlight and finished off with the fine detail of graffiti scrawled by the bored, the indolent, the dispossessed, the township youth, the out-of-a-job migrants, the contract-less miners. East of the town were the vast land scars of the open-cast mines and the quarries, lunar landscapes of step-sided pits like negative spaces created by pressing ziggurats tip-down into soft clay. Each pit was big enough to hold the town itself. Spoil heaps and outfill had formed new mountains. Rusty orange bulk excavators, dump trucks and mass conveyer assemblies made it look like a sand box abandoned by children for fear of rain. The quarries were barer, their sides scraped back to pale, grained rock, like exposed bone.
      North of the town lay the precast plants, the curing works and the functionally ugly blast furnaces used to process byproduct. Near to these monstrosities sprawled the loading docks and the immense shipping parks where bulk roadliners that hadn't made the coast highway run regularly for almost two years slumbered under grimy weather wraps.
      "Seems delightful," said Falk.
      "I've been looking to summer here," said Lukes.
      They reached the edge of town and followed the road through three or more sets of wire gates that were wide open and seemed to have no purpose beyond the sculptural. Fuel drums weighted with set concrete dotted the roadlane, along with other trash like fence posts and some buckled signage, a makeshift slalom course to slow the advance of anything short of an MBT. The convoy steered around the obstructions, keeping line, bleeding little speed.
      "Where is everyone?" asked Jeanot, peering out and recording footage with a tablet.
      "There's a curfew," replied Selton, her attention primarily focused on her displays.
      "It's late morning," said green hiker girl.
      "It's a strict curfew," said Falk.
      Something on Selton's display pinged. For a second, Falk felt himself tense up instinctively.
      "Contact signal," said Selton, and typed something into a text pane.
       Fucking dope , Falk admonished himself. You actually bought into it.
      The FPG was coming out to meet them.
     
    The members of the Forward Patrol Group were driving in Fargos of their own, and they had a fat, armoured Longpig gunbus as the centrepiece of their motorcade. The vehicles, and the SOMD troopers riding in them, were caked in air-blown dirt. Their kit was a little bit more personalised and non-reg than the fresh-on-this-morning look being worked by Selton and her unit. Their rollers came to a halt, engines running, in a little fan behind the rumbling self-propelled, laid out like playing cards wiped across a table. Troopers with pipers and RPG thumpers dismounted and locked off the thoroughfare, shoulders tight to stocks, cheeks to top rails, eyes to optics, fingers resting ready on trigger guards. The gunbus, twice the size of a Fargo, reminded Falk of some creature from a bestiary, a traveller's excited fabulation of a rhinoceros or a warthog. It was broad and fat, lethargic and ill-tempered. It sat heavily on its broad treads with anti-rocket armour skirts hanging down around its