Free Embedded by Dan Abnett Page A

sectioned hull of the third lander. Bari Apfel was waiting for them on the platform. He was wearing a dark suit, an exec's suit, under a brown litex coat.
      "Hello, Falk," he said. He shook Falk's hand.
      "So, what is this?" asked Falk. "Legit GEO biz, or something on the side?"
      "Can't it be both?" asked Apfel.
      "I don't know," said Falk. "Can it?"
      Apfel kept smiling and made a little "let's see" shrug.
      "Geoplanitia Enabling Operator has me on a short-term contract," he said. "My brief is corporate image."
      "You told me that," said Falk.
      "My remit is broad, and part of it is deliberately woolly. There are aspects of my function that haven't been put on record so as to facilitate deniability in the event of blowback."
      Falk chuckled.
      "I love the way you people talk," he said.
      "I'm sure you do," said Apfel. "We frame our terms with the same care as media whores like you people."
      Apfel turned to gaze at the third lander.
      "The downside of this job," he said, "is that I'm a vague contract number buried in the non-specific end of the GEO books. My working brief is spectacularly nebulous, and GEO can cut me loose and deny me at any moment in the interests of corporate integrity."
      He glanced a smile Falk's way.
      "The plus side is resources."
      "Black budget?"
      "Grey, actually. But extensive. The personal remuneration scale's great, of course, and far in excess of anything a contractor of my apparent significance ought to warrant. But the working capital. The access. The possibilities. I've got a free hand to use pretty much anything I want, including the development and deployment of some of GEO's most conjectural properties. Provided I return some decent results, the GEO top floor is happy to invest and turn a blind eye. They'd prefer not to know what I'm actually doing."
      "Should you be telling me any of this?" asked Falk. "I'm a media whore. Who knows what I'll do? You leak me stories like this, it sort of subverts the whole deniability thing."
      "Hear him out," said Cleesh.
      "I'm quite happy to sell you some line if needs be, Falk," said Apfel, "but I've always believed in the policy of not lying unless I have to. Fewer pieces of crap to remember. Makes life less complicated. And lies, when they occur, more valuable. I'm telling you about my interests because I'm pretty sure they're about to become mutual, so you'll be guarding them too. Cleesh agrees, don't you Cleesh?"
      "I suggested you when we realised we'd need another person, Falk," said Cleesh.
      Apfel tipped his head to suggest a direction he wanted them to walk. They went down the concrete steps off the platform.
      "GEO's interests on Eighty-Six are suffering badly because of the situation."
      "Well known," said Falk. "And GEO's not the only corp in trouble."
      "True, but we don't care about the others. The problems on Eighty-Six are actually beginning to impact GEO's position on the home market and across the General Settlement. It's ugly and it's going to get worse. The main problem is perception. It's generally held that GEO is responsible for its difficulties on Eighty-Six."
      "You're going to tell me this is like Sixty after all, Bari? A poor little post-global giant taking it in the nutsack for somebody else?"
      "Is that so hard to imagine?" Apfel asked. "The sheer scale of the post-globals make it so easy to believe they are insensitive and faceless and responsible for all society's evils. But on Sixty, it wasn't big pharm. Big pharm got serious shit thrown at it, and it wasn't them. You know that. Of all people."
      "Interesting choice of phrase."
      "You were there. You speak about it quite plainly, in open defence of big pharm and the way it was treated."
      "You know a lot about me," said Falk.
      "I told him stuff," said Cleesh from behind them, a tone of apology in her voice.
      "If you can't be bothered to do proper presearch on a man you