Then someone clubbed him in the head from behind.

He heard it coming, felt the motion in the air at his ear, was turning toward the attack, but way too late to get clear. Black exploded through him, speckled with tiny, tiny sparks. He pivoted and went down in the crystalline light around the datapoint. His vision inked out, inked back in. Another blunt figure came and stood over him. Through the waltzing colors that washed up and down behind his eyes, he saw a gun muzzle and stopped struggling.

“Miami Vice, asshole. You stay down or I’ll drill a hole right in your fucking head.”

They arrested him of course.

6:13 AM.

Low strands of cloud in a rinsed-out, predawn sky. Last night’s drizzle still sequined on the black metal carapaces of the rap-rep shuttles, evercrete landing apron damp with it, and spots of rain still in the air. Joey Driscoll came out of the canteen with a tall canister of self-heating coffee in each hand, arms spread wide as if to balance the weight, eyes heavy lidded with end-of-shift drowse. His mouth unzipped in a cavernous yawn.

The siren hit, upward-winding like the threat of a gigantic dentist’s drill.

“Oh for fuck’s sake…”

For a moment he stood in weary disbelief—then the coffee canisters hit the evercrete and he was running resignedly for the tackle room. Above his head, the sirens made it to their first hitched-in breath and started the cranking whine all over again. Big LCLS panels on the hangar lintels lit with flashing amber. Off to the left, under the sirens, he heard the deeper-throated grind of the rapid-response shuttles’ turbines kicking in. Maybe a minute and a half tops before they hit pitch. Two more minutes for crew loading and then they’d be lifting, dipping and bopping on the apron like dogs trying to tug loose from a tight leash. Anyone late aboard was going to get their balls cut off.

He made the tackle room door just as Zdena darted out of it, tactical vest still not fully laced on, helmet dangling off the lower edge, XM still long-stocked in her hand from standing in the rack. Widemouthed Slavic grin as she saw him.

“Where’s my fucking coffee, Joe?” She had to shout over the sirens.

“Back there on the concrete. You want it, go lick it up.” He gestured up in exasperation at the noise. “I mean, fuck. Forty minutes to shift change, and we get this shit.”

“Why they pay us, cowboy.”

She snapped the XM’s stock down to carbine length and secured it there, shoved the weapon into the long stick-grip sheath on her thigh, and focused on pulling the buckles tight on her tac vest. Joe shouldered past her.

“They pay us?”

Into the riot of the tackle room at alert. A dozen other bodies, yelling, cursing at their superannuated gear, laughing out the tension like dogs barking. Joe grabbed vest, helmet, T-mask off the untidy piles on the counter, didn’t bother putting any of it on. Experience had taught him to do that in the belly of the rap-rep as it tilted out over the Pacific. He gripped the upright barrel of an XM in its recess on the rack, struggled briefly with it as the release catch failed to give, finally snapped the assault rifle free and headed back for the door.

Forty fucking minutes, man.

Zdena was already sitting on the lowered tailgate of Blue One, helmet fitted loosely, unmasked, grinning at him as he panted up and hauled himself, ass slithering, aboard. She leaned in to yell above the screech of the turbines. “Hey, cowboy. You ready for rock and roll?”

He could never work out if she was hamming up the Natasha accent or not. They hadn’t been working together that long; she’d come in with the new hires at the end of May. He figured—and etiquette said you never never asked—she was probably licensed outland labor, at least as legal as he was these days. He doubted she’d hopped the fence the way he had, though. More likely she was across from the Siberian coastal strip or maybe one of those Russian factory rafts farther south, part of that fucking Pacific Rim labor fluidity they were always talking about. Of course, for all he knew, she might even be West Coast born and bred. Out here, mangled English didn’t necessarily signify anything. Wasn’t like back in the Republic, where they blanket-enforced Amanglic, punished the kids in school for speaking anything else. In the Rim States, English was strictly a trade tongue—you learned it to the extent you needed it, which, depending on the barrio you grew up in, didn’t have to be that much.

“You gotta”—still panting from the sprint, no breath to yell—“stop watching all those old movies, Zed. This is gonna be a fucking punt around the deep-water mark. Scaring the shit out of some idiot plankton farmer who’s forgotten to upgrade his clear tags for the month. Fucking waste of time.”

“I don’t think, Joe.” Zdena nodded out along the line of shuttles. “Is four boats they got powering up. Lot of firepower for plankton farmer.”

“Yeah, yeah. You’ll see.”

The dust-off went pretty smoothly, for their ship anyway, last month’s practice drills paying off, it seemed, despite the groans. Eight troops in, standard deployment strength, all webbed into their crash seats along the inner walls of the shuttle’s belly, grinning tension grins. Joe had his tactical vest all hooked up by then, vital signs wired in, though he wondered if anyone bothered to look at that shit anymore now they’d downgraded cockpit command crew from three to two. But at least the automeds would look after him in a firefight, and in the final analysis the vest was somewhere to hang all the spare XM magazines and boarding tools.

Briefing came in over the comset in his ear, drummed from the speakers set in the roof of the shuttle like an echo.

This is a class-two aerial breach incursion, repeat class-two incursion, we expect no combat—

He leaned out and nodded triumphantly down the line at Zdena—Told you fucking so.

—but maintain combat alertness nonetheless. Mask and gloves to be worn throughout mission, apply anticontaminant gel as for biohazard operations. Please note, there is no reason to assume a biohazard situation, these are precautions only. We have a downed COLIN spacecraft, repeat a downed COLIN spacecraft inside coastal limits—

Zdena shot him the look right back again.

“Fucking spaceship?” someone yelped from the row of seats on the other wall.

—medical teams will stand by until Blue Squad completes a sweep. Be prepared to encounter crash casualties. Squad division in deployment teams as follows, team alpha, Driscoll on point, Hernandez and Zhou to follow. Team beta…

He tuned it out, old news. Current rotations put him at the sharp end of deployment for the next three weeks. Now he couldn’t make up his mind if he was pissed at that or glad. This was going to be a fucking trip. Outside of TV, and a couple of virtual tours of the COLIN museum in Santa Cruz, he’d never seen a real spaceship, but one thing he did know—they didn’t land those fucking things on Earth. Not since the nanorack towers went up everywhere, disappearing into the clouds like black-and-steel beanstalks from that stupid fucking story his gran used to tell him when he was a kid. The only spaceships Joe knew about outside of historical footage were the ones that occasionally cropped up at the slow end of the news feeds, docking serenely at the mushroom top flanges of those fairy-tale stalks into the sky, their only impact economic. Just returned from Habitat 9, the haulage tug Weaver’s cargo is expected to make a substantial dent in the precious metals market for this quarter. Measures requested by the Association of African Metal-Producing States to protect Earth-side mining are still before the World Trade Organization, where representatives of the Hab 9 Consortium contend that such restraint of trade is—