Two things happened after two years in space.

  The first was the loss in muscle mass and bone density that made life back on Earth increasingly difficult. Facilities existed where pilots could run on their little hamster wheels to keep what little muscle they had, but subscriptions were expensive and most, including Hitomi, opted for the less expensive once-a-week option.

  The second was a sudden obsession with human waste. After several days on the moon's surface, a person got to wondering where exactly it all went. Of course, one of those same people would have consumed any number of books and movies about the glories of space travel and then filed away the conclusions to maintain their own sanity.

  When she had first gone up, Hitomi's most common expletives had been of the fornication variety. Now? Shit had taken the place of fuck. For situations not bad enough for shit, piss would do.

  Both of those things made her staggering journey through the lake waters that much worse.

  She had swum a good hundred meters before realizing she could just stand up in the remarkably shallow waters. It had solved the problem of being sure she was swimming through warm piss, it had created the problem of being a sopping wet bag of bones that was in danger of collapsing under the weight of her clothes. Her one good arm dragged the emergency kit from the escape pod through the algae soup. The other, sliced up by a twisted hatch cover, crushed Dublin against her chest.

  Watery red blood highlighted his black singed fur. Her good-luck sheep was a sorry goddamn sight.

  They both were.

  Her face was pale both from shock and nausea at slogging through the frappé of bacteria and swamp gas that had once been a lake. A trail of vomit danced in the 'water' behind her.

  A splash. Her left leg buckled, and she fell into the muck, buffering the withering trees from the massive cesspool. Dragging and retching and gasping, Hitomi crawled from the shallows, collapsing on top of the hard shell of the emergency kit. Her matted black hair dripped foulness onto the sandy fish graveyard.

  The sun baked her space-bleached skin. Everything felt heavy, the earth trying to drag her down into itself. It was trying to eat her. Her trembling arms held up the bloodied, burnt and turgid Dublin to block out the blinding sun.

  "We should be dead, buddy." Her voice was a croak. The plushie's head bobbled back and forth, pelting her with sludge. She spat and dropped Dublin into the sand.

  As strength slowly returned to her muscles, Tomi rolled off the emergency kit, shoving it ahead of her as she crawled on all fours toward the promise of the sheltering trees. Sand and possibly fish guts coated her hands and knees, sticking to the flowing blood from the tear in her flight suit.

  The clasps on the kit yielded to her clumsy, sweat-soaked fingers, revealing the treasure trove she had bought just days before her first real flight with money she didn’t really have at the time. In those heady days, she had been convinced that crashing onto a desolate wasteland was a much more remote possibility than it had turned out to be. She had always hoped she would have the courage to go down with her ship. The quality of the contents inside were a reflection of that hubris.

  Two bottles of Nestlé liquid rations (all the fluids, carbohydrates, and protein a person needs for two days). A ThermoFisher water sterilization attachment. A Black Ice brand wound sealer and accompanying blood replacement package. A Mountain Trail backpack. Two doses of Amp (for those all-night wilderness slumber parties). And most importantly: The thing she had not dared skimp on, even in her youthful, one year prior naivety: a Pritchard Armoury 3mm single magazine Airman coil pistol. Thirty shots.

  With her uninjured arm, she scooped the gun and rations into the backpack. Shouldering out of her dripping flight jacket, Tomi placed the disgusting sleeve in her mouth and bit down. She lifted the Black Ice machine to the gash running down her arm. It hissed, injecting a dose of lidocaine before loading its first staple.

  Pop.

  She screamed into the soaked sleeve even before the pain spiked into her arm. Tears ran from her eyes, washing the slime from the lake down the length of her cheeks. The lidocaine capsule slid out of the device and into her shaking palm.

  Expired.

  "Shit." Her voice garbled against the oozing jacket sleeve.

  She bit down harder, causing the foul, sopping fabric to run sludge into her mouth. The next staple hooked into her flesh with a thump. The pain this time was dulled by the echo of the previous staple. A slow rivulet replaced the steady stream of red slithering down her forearm.

  The blood package was halfway into its slot when she paused. Expired.

  So were the rations. She tossed all three into the backpack, running her good hand through her hair.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  "You'd be surprised how good some things taste when you're starving."

  Her heart sank clear into the muck as she realized the Amp was likely expired as well.

  Tomi collapsed on the sand next to the carcass of a huge white bird, its glassy eyes staring at her. With a grim finality, she yanked off her helmet and tossed Dublin inside. It was nice in the shade. Maybe she would just lay here for a while, listening to the frothing filth lap against the sand.

  Didn’t really matter if she ever moved again, really. There was no life to go back to. But she would. She was a survivor.

  Her mind wandered in the heat, and she briefly fell into the kind of half-sleep that her adrenaline soaked brain would allow, brought out of it only by the buzzing of flies and mosquitoes.

  And then a new buzz rose above their tiny droning. Her pocket vibrated against her thigh. With trembling fingers, she dug out her phone. The indicator bar at the top scrolled with a message. Wherever the hell she had washed up was still within the LAR communications network.

  She flicked open the screen and found a map.

  "You are here." Almost smack-dab in the middle of North America, midway between where the LAR forces were dug in to the East and Pact landing ships were still trying to secure the West. "In fucking No Man's Land."

  Her heart sank. If that's where she was, there was no one coming to pick her up. The Articles of War were very clear that no military presence was allowed to enter this long strip of land running from the North Pole all the way down to Panama. So much for hitching a ride home.

  But someone was trying to contact her. Maybe someone would come.

  Messages winked at her.

  "The best fighter pilots all know this one secret. - Marvellous tips"

  "Get time off to visit family with this trick. - UAR News Network"

  She scrolled down, feeling the sting of mosquitoes through her black tank top.

  "Why did I just get a message you ejected from my ship?! - Dom Gregory"

  Farther.

  "Contract #499384402 - Tram Military Services"

  With the sun creeping up on her from the other side of the withering trees, Tomi squinted. Why the hell were they sending new contracts minutes after she had ditched her ship? No one in Summerland awake to watch for status updates?

  "Dear Lt. Sullivan. Tram military services is happy to extend to you an offer to complete contract #499384402, rescue of independent transportation contractor. Location: 50.1866456,-98.3421465"

  Her brow furrowed and Tomi wiggled farther into the coolness, away from the angry sun.

  "Legal preamble: Due to Articles of War between the Liberal Atlantic Republics and Eastern Pact States, military personnel are forbidden from entering contested territory. According to paragraph twenty-two, subsection four, personnel who have declared emergency status before entering said territory are considered non-combatants and free to act according to the International Law Treaty of 2044."

  She stared at the text for a moment. A loophole. The mighty legal super-intelligences in Summerland needed a goddamn soldier where none could be sent and luckily for them, the next best thing had been shot out of the sky just overhead. And what independent transportation contractors could need rescuing in the general area?

  Fucking assholes who had jumped lines and nearly gotten her killed, that’s who.

  "Kick bricks," she cackled, looking over at Dublin peeking out of her helmet. "They want me to go pull that dipshit out of the mud?! How do you pick shit out of mud? Nyuk. Nyuk. I’ll just lay here and die, thank you very much."

  She was about to toss the phone aside and wait for starvation to make her expired rations taste like a four-star banquet when the bottom line of text caught her eye.

  "Upon delivery of the contractor (alive) to the consignee, the sum of twelve million reformed-dollars ($12,000,000RD) will be deposited in your contractor's account."

  Hitomi sat up like a shot. The motion caused her head to swim. Vertigo overtook her, and she slowly sank down with her head resting on the emergency crate, choking back the vomit slowly rising in her throat.

  A goddamn fortune. A fighter jock's income for a good three years. It was enough to put a down payment on a whole new Starseeker. Maybe even enough to upgrade to the series three. And take a week off while they were painting it!

  A way back to life.

  Breath came reluctantly. She was absolutely exhausted, barely in any shape to stand up, but at the same time, there was no telling what kind of shape this asshole was in. He could be dead by the time she got there. She was in the process of pulling the map back up to find where Dipshit had landed when a second message sprang up.

  "Contract #499384503 - Pritchard Consortium Armed Response

  Dear Lt. Sullivan, the PCAR is happy to extend to you an offer to complete contract #499384503..."

  Verbatim it was the same as the previous contract from Tram with one or two differences in the legalese boilerplate. Two identical contracts? Impossible. It never happened. Tram and PCAR, all the big corpo families, took great pains to prevent duplication of effort in their military operations.

  There was one other difference.

  Fourteen million dollars.

  "What the great, glorious shit?" she whispered. "Dub-"

  Ding.

  "Dear Lt. Sullivan, Cronstar Logistics is happy..."

  Ding.

  Haptic Tri-National.

  Over the next several seconds another three offers hit her phone and Tomi was nearly back up in the stratosphere. By the time they were done, the asking price had gone up to sixteen million, a counter offer from Tram.

  "Hot damn!" she breathed. "Dipshit, someone wants you bad!"

  Tram was the logical choice. Loyalty was rewarded. She could get a discount on that Starseeker. Her finger circled around the large green "ACCEPT" icon at the bottom of the application. Around the dimness of her peripheral vision she could see Dublin staring doubtfully at her.

  Something's really wrong here. You need to stop, rest. Get your shit together.

  Tomi nodded her head in agreement, but by the time she had taken a deep cleansing breath, her thumb had already pressed down on the button.