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Hakim Hensel, co-opted onto the investigation of a transav crash near Jamestown, Vallis, has just learned there might be some debris in one of the hill shanties. Resources are ridiculously low, so he's decided to check it out himself. He doesn't want to be tied to the Jamestown government because he knows the no-asset people of Vallis are on the verge of open revolt.

There's been a lot of rain recently. This terraformed planet is still mostly bone dry, but parts of the place get reassuringly wet…

He got the driver to leave before any of the federals offered to look after him. The driver was just a routinely prejudiced Jamestown citizen and tolerable company. The federals, however, wouldn't be.

The car headed into the tangled patchwork of food and infrastructure crops. He used its link to search for any recovery team in the vicinity which had someone from Scenic shanty. Up popped the name Veracity Jo-Dan. She was the young woman he'd managed to promote to team leader the day before. She'd do nicely.

A track skirted hectares of biomass and went right past the wild patch where the big walker was parked on telescoped legs. He had to push his way along the path trampled into the tangle by the recovery team. He found them on soaking ground among wet bushes beneath dripping trees. One or two had been nearer, but no one was going near now.

Bedded in broken greenery was half a body still clothed in half a flight attendant's uniform. The name tag was still pinned on the lapel. Match the woman's name to her manoeuvre seat location on the transav, and you'd have another debris map location fixed. Alternatively, if body and debris distribution didn't reconcile, then you'd know she was out of her seat at the time and that something bad was happening aboard the transav.

Hakim didn't go near, either. He didn't do bodies.

"Helicopter's coming," she said. She kept pushing branches out of the way. They whipped back fans of sodden leaves, and sprayed him. "In an hour, they said. Don't know if they'll do that. They don't have so many helicopters."

"No." He blinked water out of his eyes. Then got a new load.

"No. This isn't like where you come from." She marched out onto the open track, then turned. "Terry, aren't you?"

"Yes," he said. Counter attack. Act curious and open minded. "Where do you get a surname like that? Jo-Dan?"

"I'm from Ridges. Up the Rift, past Vallis, other side of Pyramids. In Ridges, every kid gets its own name plus the mother's and father's names, in that order."

"Right. And why did you leave Ridges?"

"Better chances here. I was doing uplift training in infosystems at Martian Life, and I do gasti at Phobos Gate. Know what gasti means?"

"Yes. It means you don't get any credit, but the place would fall apart without you."

She studied him for a moment. Presumably she thought he was satirising any self-respect she tried to retain.

Move things along. "You're from Scenic shanty, aren't you? I want you to come with me to Scenic shanty and show me around."

"Oh." She looked at the ministry car, then back at the walker. Some of the team were sitting out the wait on the flatbed. They were watching with interest.

"Choose someone to take over while you're away. Later today, or tomorrow, you get the team back again."

She thought. She shook her head.

"Come on, there must be someone on the team who's literate enough to handle the job for a few hours."

She shook her head some more. "Not the problem. It just isn't a good idea if I get in a car and disappear with a terry." She squelched her foot into the mud of one of the walker's footprints. "Not for the now."

That one he hadn't expected. Promotion, association with one of the bosses, the smell of money. Was this some more of the politics? Move things all the way along. It might work to treat a no-asset person the way she expects. "You're earning as a team leader because of me. You're paid to do what I say. Come with me to Scenic shanty and show me around."

*

He got silence for a full hour while the driver was finding her way back through the maze of tracks to the highway, then north, then off to the west and past a sprawl of poverty she said was Water Margin, then directly at the rearing end of Lee Table. Climbing up the terminal ridge towards the cloud base were ragged stacks of shacks.

"Do we go up?" the driver asked. The dirt road ran right to the foot of the ridge, then zigzagged up it.

"Yes," he said. And by now he'd had enough of the solid silence from the mariner at his side. "So, what's your belief system? Are you pro-terry or anti-terry? Is your religion Lewisan, New Eden or martian gods?"

She was looking out of the window. She kept on looking. "Community of Righteous Angels."

"I see." That placed her into a map of the universe which was exactly the same as the one used by the Lewisans, but which had been given an opposite interpretation. "New Eden, the Great Angel of Mars. So, how do I fit? Am I just here to help by doing my job, or am I an agent of the evil power which has taken over the Earth?"

She kind of grunted. "You're wearing a martian god." She glanced over her shoulder. "That's what's on that string, isn't it? I didn't know terries did martian gods."

"I'm a helicist. This - well, a friend asked me to look after it for him."

Another grunt. "Keep it out of the eye. A mensch doesn't get friends here if he has a martian god. Or if he's a terry with Jamestown."

"Why? Because of the transav?"

"Because of things like Eden Beach last night. Because they took a friend of mine the night before. You're on the same side." She went on staring out at the shacks that were going past the looping, ridge-wrapped road. "What do you want here?"

"Wreckage," he said. "It's around somewhere. Show me."

*

Halfway up the Prow, they pulled aside at a hairpin and parked the car on an off-sloping path that was part road, part rain run-off and part sewer. It seemed best to leave the driver with the vehicle to protect it. She had rickety shack walls on one side, and on the other a cloud-roofed view all the way to the varicose South Side River and the shore of the Copper Sea. Way out there, it was raining.

He set off with his guide through the stacked-up shanty.

It was alleys and steps and steep slippery slopes squeezed between walls of plasboard, paperlack or cannibalised who-knew-what. It was the next side alley above, or the brief openness of the looping, rutted road. It was food smells and sewage smells and fumes from a decrepit greedy burner and wet fabrics coming from damp dwellings tacked to the side of a soaking world. It was unserviced entertainment centres, chattering voices, shouting, snoring, and dogs and cats. It was a staggered, overlapping, hillside-clinging exploration of poverty. A lot of shacks were daytime empty. There were few people around, and they didn't like the disturbance. Little kids who could have been learning something were picking away at bottom-of-the-pile tasks. There were suspicious stares for the terry-dressed stranger. Veracity Jo-Dan started out uneasy and got rapidly more unhappy. She didn't seem to like being seen with him.

There was a shack squeezed in among the others which had its plasboard roof smashed into its heart. There was a group of homes cascading down the slope which had been reduced to a staircase of rain-washed cinders after something inflammable had poured through them from top to bottom. Everything inside the ground outlines had been burned to insubstantial nothing except for the molten lump of someone's entertainment. There must have been devices in the shacks to cook and store food whose shells at least should have withstood the fire. Maybe they'd been salvaged, or looted.

There was damage everywhere Hakim looked in this part of the shanty. Here was where the wreckage had come down.

"Were you affected?" he asked. "Where do you live?"

"At the church." She waved a hand vaguely between descending roofs. "It goes."

"Goes?"

She looked at him scornfully. "It's okay. Yes?"

"Okay." He looked around, out past the limits of the trampled shack they were occupying and over the creative rooflines of the neighbours. Somewhere over on that side was the front of the Prow and the road looping up it, and on that side the edge where the shanty eventually had to give up and leave the rearing mesa slope alone. Down there? Roofs and rickety roofs. "Okay," he said again. "You're showing me where the wreckage hit, but not the wreckage. Where is it? Who's got it?"

She shrugged.

Maybe he needed to bring someone with pockets full of old fashioned cash. He poked his shoe under a broken piece of plasboard and lifted it. The plasboard came up easily. Something underneath it creaked and then made a snapping sound. Hidden things moved. He stepped aside onto sagging floor panels. Down the centre of the ruined shack, a shuffled fan of shards and sheeting slipped and re-stacked itself and took Veracity Jo-Dan with it for a couple of metres. She managed to get off at the other side of the little avalanche before it piled up at the bottom. Another scornful look.

Hakim surveyed the scar it had revealed. Bare soil, broken bits and pieces, slide marks cutting into the mud. Snapped but still in one piece, a cheap picture was stuck on a board, one edge curled by fire damage, the other blistered by water, and everything smeared in mud. It used to be a sunny field full of sparkling flowers.

"Everything that's left," he said. "It's stuff that was already here. Either nobody found it yet, or it isn't worth recovering. Where's the wreckage? It could be really important. It might help tell us what happened."

Another shrug, less dismissive. "What are you looking for most?"

"Most? Anything at all. But I think this was the nose section. If it was… Flight deck instruments. Bodies."

She nodded. She looked up at a rising pile of roof edges and improvise rain spouts and window openings and leaking wisps of cooking smoke. She pointed.

*

Up another soil-stepped alley steep as a staircase. Voices went quiet behind an open doorway as the terry and his guide climbed past. Sideways, between posts holding up a deck stacked under with bales and bundles of some kind of stores and, on the off-slope side, a lean-to roof over the next dwelling down. A jammed gate with a broken frame at the end, with a supporting timber, broken, sticking up behind. Veracity Jo-Dan shoved the gate as far as it would go and slid through. Hakim squeezed after.

He'd entered a tangle of fire-cracked panels and the broken struts of shacks which had collapsed into one another. The ruination reached up the slope for around twenty metres - seven or eight homes had gone here, belonging to who knew how many people. And in the middle, planted like punctuations into the inclined mess, were two carbonised lumps which could have been human beings on pilot seats.

He stared up at the sky for a while. The clouds seemed awful close. The crash reports said the cloud had been low like this on the day these two came tearing out of the overcast in a halo of accompanying debris, some of it burning, which seconds before had been joined up into the deck and skin and structure and contents of the safe, reliable, technological wonder which flew them up to Phobos and back. When did they die? In the violent instant when the pitched-up transav snapped into supersonic sections? During the tumbling fragmentation of the nose as it arced its way towards Lee Table in a fireball all of its own? Or not until they hit the ground?

He envied people strong enough to do bodies.

"Didn't find these until the day after. Been a fire here."

"Yes," he said. The body taste didn't break into his mouth. Something had cauterised them so well it was still absent five days after the crash.

"And I think they doused them with greedy and burned them again two days ago. The rats were getting busy."

"Right." Rats were good colonisers as well as good recycling agents. Wherever you found people, you found rats. He brought his gaze down from the sky. The mind fools itself. It was expecting a level horizon, it got a steep skyline made from crazy bits of roof. The dizziness rolled up behind him like a tempting vortex.

He forced his eyes forward so that he could see only ground. Cinder shards came back into focus. They grew in lumps and clumps on the slope.

"Some mensch put flowers." There was a catch of surprise in her voice.

Hakim lifted his eyes to the hillside again. In front of the charcoal corpses was a little splash of red and green. A Mars-coloured constellation for the dead from the sky. "Why didn't anyone say there are bodies here?"

"No one asked. And we don't like pro-terries in Scenic. And the federals would come. Anyway, wouldn't help them."

He wanted to reply that finding out what happened might depend on clues recovered here, and that discovering the cause might prevent the same thing happening to someone else, and that no-asset or not, didn't she have enough grasp of what a society was for her to be aware of every individual's responsibility to all the other lives around…? Cinders in lumps and clumps on the slope?

He poked his toe at a cinder-sludge heap. It had something hard inside. He crouched and brushed at it with his hand, wiping aside the sticky layer. Metal, ventilation slots, pin connector strip, snapped fixing brackets. With both hands, he held the grit-coated thing and eased it free, then turned it over. The crazed and blotched surface might be opaque now, but it used to be a display screen. Around the rim were the big touch keys preferred in the aviation world, where the manipulating finger might be disturbed in its fine accuracy by vibration or gee forces.

This module used to tell things to the pilots on the flight deck.

He moved to the next lump. Another display element whose screen had peeled free from the computation behind it. He turned to the one beside it. A pedal detached from the rudder bar. He crossed the slope to the next. Flight deck fire extinguisher, half-buried in the ground due to the force of impact. The next one. A broken piece of override panel arrayed with switches - the name plates were all burned illegible, but from their mounting angle and their locations between the switches, they were designed to be read as the pilot looked up, so they were overheads, so they were probably part of the servo activation backups. He moved to the next…

This, under the skim of ashes, was investigator's gold. The slope was littered with instrument modules, smashed and burned and burst open and obviously too close to the haunting bodies to be looted yet. He went from one piece to the next, stepping and stumbling over bits of ruin that slipped or tipped or shattered under his feet. He recognised some of the finds, knew to some extent what the display elements and the sealed boxes linked behind them were for. He had to get teams out here. He had to recover the precious pieces that might just reveal what the pilots had been doing when the disaster exploded around them. Next to the flight recorders, this would be where the answers lay…

She'd been following him around, just footsteps he heard now and then sinking into the ashes as she took up another place to wait. "…know your name?" she seemed to be asking. "Hensel? Is that right?"

"Hakim Hensel." He was levering up an element that looked, from the size of it, that it might be the main navigation display. Under his shirt, the martian thing swung out on its cord, kind of heavy.

"Thought so."

As he levered at the element, his balance went. He tipped forward, on one knee and one hand. He hit quite hard, jolted the piece of wreckage. Something rolled loose beneath it and slipped out of sight under a broken edge of plasboard. His fingers pursued it.

"Well, Hakim Hensel, it's been nice knowing you."

His fingers closed on a tube. It was about the length of a pen, and as fat as his thumb. It was singed under the paste of ash. He knocked a plug of dirt off its end, and held it up close. The end looked like a connector, but he had no idea what the component might be. He turned his head and looked up at Veracity Jo-Dan. It was a long way up because she was standing on the slope above him. "What did you say?"

She was looking down, but not at him. She was looking down the slope.

He turned. He was above the bodies now. The backs of the pilot seats were a carbonised sponge of cushion spanned between tubular metal. Past the seats, down at the bottom corner, someone was coming through the gate they'd used. It was a tight squeeze. The woman came through, then so did the axe in her trailing hand.

There were eight other people already in a line down there. They had staves, knives, something that swung loose like a piece of chain. The woman made nine. A tenth came in, a kid with a bottle grasped by the neck. He smashed the bottle, carefully.

"They've come for you."

He nodded. He stood up, slowly. He put the little component in his pocket and dismissed it. Other things obviously mattered right now. He swallowed. Better tell them why he wasn't a threat, and hope his guide was going to back him up. "I'm not from Jamestown. I'm not a Promoter. I'm nothing to do with the federals. I'm here to investigate the crash and find out why this happened."

"They don't care. You're just a mensch who sent this scheiss from the sky."

They started climbing the slope. They did it without lowering their weapons while negotiating the ground. And without taking their eyes off him.

"Please - I'm not from Jamestown. I'm nothing to do with the government here. I'm investigating the crash. I'm not - "

*

He wasn't hard to move. Caught him off balance. Hand in his collar, heave sideways, schlepp him the same way he staggered. He was running across the slope like a great big puppet, head down as she pushed him towards the wall. Faster! Keep him off balance!

He got his hands up. The plasboard burst apart as he rammed into it. Through he went. Through she followed. Lost hold of his collar. He writhed aside. Wild and furious eyes. "What are you trying to do?"

"They're going to kill you." She pushed him across the room they were in. The next wall was paperlack. He went straight through that, too.

The two mensches on the other side were swapping shopping doggie style. They froze. They stared. Passion to panic in a blitz.

The terry didn't understand, either.

"They're going to kill you! Run!" She hammered at him.

He nearly fell over the chair. He slid open the rickety door. He went into the light.

She grabbed the chair, turned at the door, backed out. She lifted the chair while the lovers stared. She tipped the chair in the open doorframe, jammed it - and dropped with her elbows against it, delivering all her weight. It snapped. It wedged.

He was running down the alley. Fast learner. She ran after him. Her feet skidded out ahead of the slope on dreck and abfall. Don't fall. Don't fall!

The committee got to the blocked doorway above her. Fury and fists.

"Left! Go left!"

The terry skidded in a long turn, moving down. And then wasted time to look back at her.

"Left!" Bits of wood exploded high behind her. "Go left!"

He went. He vanished into the side alley. She had to follow the terry or he'd never get out by himself. But they'd see him go. They could see her now. They were screaming. All of Scenic was going to hear.

She skidded. She bounced. She nearly went over. She grabbed at the shack on the corner. It had a stick-out panel. The panel bulged and popped nails, but didn't come free. She hauled herself around it into the side alley.

It wasn't wide. It was full of abfall and she bounced along the sides while her feet squelched and slithered and picked up shreds of stuff. He wouldn't know where he was going. He couldn't be far.

He wasn't anywhere.

The narrow alley went straight, except for up and down. It went between the backs of down-slope shacks and the bottom bits of overhanging shacks. He couldn't be right ahead to the next bend…

Then she saw the broken fence sticking out from the in-slope side. And the feet of a struggling man.

He was still trying to get up. He'd fallen sideways and smashed right through the panels under an overhanging shack. The panels hadn't tried hard to stop him. Why he fell she couldn't see. Just scheiss luck and a lot of abfall.

He was stuck among the panels and pieces. He was clutching the martian god in his hand, and looking surprised. Then he was going to speak, because the feet and screams were coming down the hill.

She slapped a hand against his mouth, then got hold of his shoulder to pull. Then stopped.

They were inside this little secret behind the fence. The roof was the sagged floor of the shack above. At the gloomy back was bare redstone, with a slit in it. Bitsi sewer gutters ran into the slit from both sides.

Quiet, she said: "Pagan tunnels." Then she hauled him up and pushed him backwards into the slit. She stooped, wrenched a fence panel out from under her feet, twisted with it and planted it across the gap. She pushed at it, straightening her arms, and her backside went into him and shoved him deeper into the rock.

Outside, a piece of plasboard away, pairs of feet went crashing past.

She turned in the deep evening and found her eyes looking up at his chin. Above were his own eyes, and they were scared. Finger on her lips, and then a firm push…

He retreated into the stinking darkness, turning as he did. She followed, keeping one hand on his collar and dodging the sewer drips inside the entrance. The slit led down in a slimy stair…

And they splashed into water, which was flowing like a dark chill around their ankles. "Okay," she said. "These are caves. Old as the rock. Mostly, a mensch doesn't come here. They won't think you know this way out."

"What?" He was shadow painted in dim. Little bits of light leaked in through shafts in the roof and clefts in the sides. Slow, you could start to see the walls of wavy rock, and the ripples on the running water. It sang. "Caves? Where's the water…?"

"Rain, from up on the Table." She moved past him, stepping out away from the wall to do so, and not liking it. She got back to the wall and put a hand on the wet, cold rock. "Okay. Follow me. Keep on this side. Don't get into the middle. There are holes in the floor. You'll disappear, drowned. Come out on the flat half a year from now, in falling season, when the water level drops again." She started walking, splashing. "We're going down, okay? There's some waterfalls ahead. We can walk them. Are you coming with me?"

"Yes!" He was right behind her.

"Then don't shout. Someone up there doing a scheiss will hear you."

*

It wasn't so bad. There was a place where water was going noisily down through a sink in the middle of the bed, and he could feel the swirl against his feet as they went past. Then came the cascade, and they really could walk down it on soap smooth sunken steps. A long crack in the roof let in daylight and drips. It smelled as though it might just be rain. He hoped it was. Come to Mars, explore the drains, get a poor disease, and die.

She stopped where there was a gap in the wall. Filthy water trickled out of it.

"Up there," she said. "At the mouth, climb up on the bank above it, then go left. You should be on the way where you left the car. Okay?"

"Yes," he said. "What about you?"

"I'm going out somewhere else. Don't want too many seeing me help you."

"No. I guess… Are you going to be all right?"

She shrugged in the gloom. "It goes." Then she turned and splashed away through the water. "Go good," was the last thing she said.

Hakim climbed into the cleft and picked his way upwards through the steep trickle of stinking water. He had to steady himself on the rock side. At least it didn't seem to be slimed at hand height. He got to the entrance slit and stepped out…

Into daylight under an abrupt bank, with shanty roofs right in front on him which disappeared downwards in a jumble of pitches and ridges and spouts. The sewer flow simply ran down the bank and turned into the cleft. He climbed up beside it. Or tried to. One handed wasn't enough. His right hand was clamped on a fistful of shirt, and inside the shirt was the Vali amulet… He wasn't superstitious. He let go. He made the climb, a wrongly dressed figure with filthy feet, out on an exposed piece of the hillside where every hate-filled local could see him. This wasn't why he thought he'd come to Scenic.

There was a small track at the top, bordered on its in-slope side by rickety fences with more roof jumble rising above. Somewhere to the left, a car horn was sounding. He ran along the track. It turned a corner in the hillside and widened and -

Someone came out from the fence! Ran right at him -

Grabbed him by the arm as he tried to duck and found it was a precipice he was twisting towards. Steadied him, pulled him upright, slowed him down, steered him on along the track at walking pace.

It was the head-hunter.

The head-hunter winked.

The man had a handgun strapped at his side, ammunition and what looked like a charge pack slung from his belt, a knife in a sheath on his thigh, and his other hand was hefting that short, fat shoulder weapon. It was a laser rifle. You didn't see many of those in civilian life. Josef Reális of Martian Life hired only the best.

"Hear the horn?" the head-hunter asked happily.

"Yes."

"Hoped you would. Place is turning nasty. Told your driver to sound it. She was going to leave. But…" The laser rifle swung slightly. "She changed her mind."

They went around another corner. There was the ministry car, door open, the driver standing beside it and sounding the horn inside while she twisted and turned to stare wildly at the overlooking roofs and the loop of the main track further along. I would have left, Hakim was thinking. I'm glad he stopped her…

"Name's Harry Cableman. It's not a good idea to come into a shanty without an escort. So I followed to see what happened."

"You followed? Were you watching me?"

The driver was back in her car and had the door shut and the engine on. She was swinging and reversing to turn the vehicle on the narrow track. She almost put the rear wheels over the drop. Hanging the car on the edge would have trapped them.

"Needs better training," Cableman said.

"Were you watching me? Did Reális tell you to - ?"

"I do things my own way." He finally let go of Hakim as they came up to the car. "The Righteous Angels girl lead you into a trap?"

"No. She helped me out of it."

"Divided loyalties? Bad way to work." He pulled open the car door while the driver was still lining up to flee along the track. "My vehicle is on the main road. Stay with me. That's the only way you're going to get out of here."

"Get in!" the driver yelled. "Close the door!"

Hakim got in. The car was jolting forward before the door had closed. Then the car was sitting still again, then rolling sedately along the dirt surface. Because Cableman was right in front, walking.

He walked back to the road that wove itself across the ridge of the Prow. He stayed in the middle of that road, and headed down. They had to roll steadily behind him. The driver was so wound up behind her wheel, Hakim thought she was going to tear her arm muscles in frustration. They came to the sharp bend across the Prow.

There were people waiting. They weren't sightseers. They were armed woodcutter style, farmer style and kitchen style. They moved aside for the head-hunter, and stared at the terry in the car. The terry looked at the things they'd brought to kill him with…

Just below the corner was a brutal four-by standing across the road. It blocked the way. Further down was a trucki with piles of scrap on its open back and a patient driver in its open cab, waiting. There seemed to be something about a head-hunter. The kids who'd gathered to examine the four-by looked at it, but didn't go near it. Then Hakim noticed one girl nursing her hand and acting unhappy. The four-by was able to defend itself.

The head-hunter got in, wheeled the four-by tight around and set off down the road. The trucki backed all the way to the next hairpin to let it pass. Their car passed, too. They followed the four-by down the endless loops. The note under the bad road noise and the excellent engine hum was the driver's voice, incessantly muttering something that gradually emerged into intelligibility. "Go faster. Go faster."

Cableman didn't go faster. They left Scenic, going downhill, as slowly as they'd arrived climbing uphill. They were out on the farmed flat before he turned aside on a field track. He even gave them a wave.

The driver didn't wave back. She hit the accelerator and flung roosters of mud from the wheels as she raced towards Water Margin and the highway on the other side. It was about then that Hakim noticed he was clutching the Vali amulet again as if the thing was in charge of his life. Maybe it was the suicidal speed.