Embedded Read Free Page B

"Sit out the debrief if you like. I'm sure we won't be telling the likes of you anything new."
      "The likes of me would like to hear it anyway," he said. "It's part of the embedding experience. Besides, I don't want them resenting me for getting special treatment."
      He nodded his head in the direction of the other two correspondents.
      "Okay then," Tedders said.
      Four other agency reps had already assembled in the office space behind the waiting area. Like the two who'd come in with Falk, they looked packet-fresh and eager. He wanted tea, maybe some variety of baked goods, and twenty minutes by himself in a clean latrine. He felt like an old, notorious uncle who'd turned up at a wedding.
      "Major Selton," Tedders announced. Selton stepped up, fronting the room. She was a she too, a long-wheelbase Amazon compared to the portable, compact Tedders. Her fatigues had creases that could draw blood. Her hair was a black lawn, mown short. The overhead lights, unflatteringly hard, glinted off the digital brooch at her throat.
      "Welcome to Lasky," she said, "I hope you're all good and wealthy this morning. The SOMD wants to make your visit comfortable and safe, but I want to make sure you've all signed your permission waivers. My colleague, Warrant Officer Tedders, will have been through the prechecks, but I want to stress again that if you're carrying anything that transmits, you need to turn it in now. All our connections need to be secure. If you don't know, if you're uncertain, be safe and ask."
      She moved closer to the large wall box, and the proximity of her brooch woke it up. A test pattern colour card came up first, then the SOMD crest logo against a blue background. She was still talking.
      "Settlement Eighty-Six was first developed one hundred ten years ago during the Second Expansion. It has always been a high-productivity location, with specialisms that include agriculture, mineral sourcing, bulk manufacture and orbital assembly. Notable in-system resources include Eighty-Six's second moon, 86/b, locally known as 'Fred'. Page three of your packs. Fred has the third highest concentration of extro-transition elements in settled territory."
      The wall box opened a complex, rotating plan of EightySix and the mechanism of the stellar system that supported it. Fred was highlighted.
      "Forty-four years ago," Selton continued, "the Settlement Office formally declared all Northern Territories of Eighty-Six as the jurisdiction of the United Status, acknowledging the US's claims of sustained investment in, and support of, the Northern Territory settlements. This was ratified two years later. Nineteen small territorial parcels in the southern and subpolar zones remain outside United Status dominion. Seven are independent commercial outsearch stations. The others are agricultural fiefs of the Central Bloc."
      Topographs and geopolitical sat-maps of Eighty-Six rolled across the wall box, with little hot, bright datamarkers appearing and disappearing very fast, each one shooting a tag spear down to some surface detail before it vanished. Selton slowed the map rotation with a hand stroke.
      "The Northern Territories appealed for full statehood a decade ago. We're in work with the usual long, slow programme of discovery and interest-conflict assessment. The SO has supported the claim, and expects that EightySix will be approved for full state status within five years."
      "Presumably unless this war gets in the way?" asked a correspondent in the front row.
       Oooh! Don't interrupt her! Falk winced. And don't say war!
      Selton didn't miss a beat. She looked at the correspondent, a girl in a puffy, green litex hiking jacket, and fired off a ground-to-air laser-led public relations smile. Falk felt the girl incinerate.
      "The situation here on Eighty-Six may force a revision of that estimate," Selton said smoothly. "It does not, however, have direct relevance to the pending statehood