Her phone trilled.

  Hitomi woke with a start. Sweat covered her face. At first, she thought she had been having a nightmare, but quickly realized the place she had been sleeping was stifling. The chill that had crept up outside hadn't penetrated yet into the... house? Was that where she was? The room before her had the look of one she remembered. That old Sullivan family house back in Toronto. Turning her head to the rear she got the feeling it was more of a hovel, the walls collapsed inward, the ceiling crumbled and the floor above dashed to pieces in the hallway. Rivulets of rain water poured around the plaster and wood, diving for hiding places in the toxic earth.

  Her flight jacket was hung almost tenderly on one of the trio of chewed up chairs. Her helmet teetered on an old table with a missing leg. Beside it, Dublin poked his head out of her pack.

  Every muscle ached as she roused from the disintegrating sofa she had been placed on. Dust, and what had to be three years' worth of animal hairs and billowed into the surrounding air. The resulting coughing fit brought an awful headache to her attention.

  "Goddamn. Is it New Year's Day?"

  An aluminum bottle dripping with condensation sat next to her flight jacket and she eagerly, but painfully slunk across the room for it. The cool liquid inside tasted of aluminum, but at least not of arsenic. She drank greedily. Gasping like a diver coming up from an extended descent.

  A picture window lay before her, a veil of steam looking out onto the yard of the former farmhouse. In the shadow of a brown-leaved tree stood a figure, stripped to the waist, thrusting a shovel into the spongy soil. Moisture, a mixture of rain and sweat stood out on his muscles. Pain, a mixture of exertion and grief stood out on his dark face. Next to him sat a bundle of parachute nylon, ready to go down into the Earth.

  Tomi's stomach grappled with the memory of what lay wrapped inside.

  Never seen a corpse before, have you? In the war – sorry, tactical economic action -- two years and never have.

  Her phone trilled again, waiting for her. She slung it out of her soaked pants pocket, noticing that her gun was still strapped to her thigh. She had taken an admittedly impotent swing at him and he hadn't disarmed her. He was either supremely confident or supremely stupid.

  Message: Yeoman Dominic Evans, the phone announced. Secure Tram Military Services channel.

  "Where the hell are you?! " Tomi read. "Ship detonated thirty K from the Pact line."

  The time stamp indicated the message had been sent nearly two hours prior to her getting it. With a satellite no-fly zone overhead, comms were going to be unreliable. Dom's frantic questions continued.

  "I know you're alive. Even the devil wouldn’t put up with your shit. Answer damn it."

  She mused for a moment. Even if she weren't under comms blackout, she would have let him dangle on the line for another hour or so.

  Outside, Gunnar Diaz was dumping his grim parcel into its toxin-soaked grave. In another minute or two he would be on his way inside. Worry overcame her.

  "How much do we know about him, Dubs? Why was he worth twice the usual escort? Or... sending drones to slaughter an entire squadron for?" she asked, tapping her finger on the phone. "You don't survive by walking into dark rooms."

  Oh, now you want to be careful? Amazing what a couple hours sleep and a suck from a bottle will do.

  Whatever message she sent wasn’t going to be getting anywhere for a while, but it was best to stay on top of these things. A satellite could slip just enough from its designated path to pick up the signal.

  Mindful of keeping the message short she typed. "New orders. Need info Cargo 3 pilot-"

  She paused. The pilot seat of the cargo cockpit had been destroyed. There was a single corpse from the crash. Whoever was digging the grave out in the farmyard could not be the pilot.

  Backspace. "Need info C3 co-pilot."

  The message was impotent at that moment. It would only send when in range of a transponder. But it was better than nothing.

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  The man outside, whoever he was, scraped the last of the acrid dirt over the corpse and with a vengeful thrust jammed the shovel into the ground as a primitive headstone. With a jerk, he snapped the handle off, carrying it like a club. He grabbed his sloppy, drenched shirt and wriggled his way into it as he walked toward the house.

  Tomi froze. What was going to happen? Was he going to play nice and come along or was he going to resist? Why drag her inside and provide water if he was just going to be an asshole?

  "Better safe than sorry," she whispered to Dublin, unclipping the Airman pistol from her leg. At the very least, she could establish who was in charge.

  The remnants of the house's front door, complete with rodent teeth marks, swung open and the black-haired head ventured inside. Tomi's heart raced as she levelled the gun at it.

  "Drop the shovel," she ordered flatly.

  Surprise waxed and waned in an instant and a broad show of white teeth broke the man's face.

  "Thanks, I needed a good laugh," he chuckled, calmly entering and closing the door behind him. The shovel handle wedged against the door, and the mould infused floor, a buttress against anyone entering. "You're not shooting anyone with that thing."

  "The hell I'm not." Tomi's anxiety was not lessened by the loss of his weapon.

  "That model's at least three years old. Pritchard obsolescence chips kick in after two."

  Tomi's heart sank. She hadn't even seen the gun in a little over a year. Normally, it should be humming slightly in her hand, but that hum was conspicuously absent. Intent on a show of force, she pulled the weapon to the side, aiming for the wall and pulled the trigger.

  Clack.

  "If I had some tools I could maybe bypass it for you, but right now that thing is just a plastic club."

  "Shit." Tomi cursed.

  "If you want, you can take another swing at me. You look like you got a bit of your strength back."

  She didn't feel it. Her arms were lead, legs tired and sore. The bottle of water had loosened the headache, but hunger was already starting to tighten the band again.

  "You got my friends killed." She imagined her glower withering him where he stood.

  Friends is a bit of a strong word.

  "If I could take it back, I would," he brushed past her apologetically. "Seemed like a good idea at the time."

  "Tell me why you did it." Tomi followed him into the steaming house. "Why did you jump the line?"

  Gunnar grasped a duffel next to the sofa and began rooting around inside. His hand emerged with a pair of plastic wrapped bars and the shotgun with its smooth metal pipe and wooden stock. One of the bars he handed to her. Standard chewy ration. Designed to prevent dust in zero gravity.

  "You have your orders," he said simply. "I have mine. Guaranteed delivery."

  "And that means you get to get people killed?"

  "I wouldn't expect you to understand the pressure --" he began the thought and then immediately thought better of it.

  Anger flared. "Right. I wouldn't understand that keeping your family fed depends on you getting your lug home. When getting the closer slip on the north port of Big Red might mean the difference between your kids back home going hungry for another week."

  A morose expression crept over his face. For a moment, Tomi was certain he was going to take his own advice and take a swing at her. Instead he exhaled and began feeding a handful of smaller cylinders into the shotgun. She fidgeted nervously, taking a look at the collapsed ceiling, the only egress out of the hovel now that the door was stopped.

  "My parents were Luggers," Tomi said. "I made a Mars run every summer, tenth grade to twelfth." She lifted the ration bar for emphasis. "This is probably my number two brand. Tyco cherry protein is better."

  Why the hell do you care what he thinks?

  "Cherry's trash," Gunnar flipped the pipe over with a grunt and presented the wooden end of it to her. "Your parents have one of these on their ship?"

  Tomi's brow furrowed.

  "Uses explosive force to propel a cluster of pellets at the target. Goes boom. Pump action. You push this forward and pull it back to load a shot. You know how a trigger works, right?"

  Tomi snatched the weapon from his hand.

  "Whoa. You gotta treat it gently. It's an antique."

  Snorting, Tomi shouldered the weapon. "It survived a fall from space, didn't it?"

  A pair of baleful eyes glanced through the fogged window toward the makeshift grave.

  "You feel good about that comment?" Gunnar stepped aside and stomped angrily on one of the chair legs, breaking it off and swinging it experimentally.

  "Why are you giving me this?" Tomi asked.

  "Three reasons," he grunted, smashing his foot into a second chair leg. "One, your gun isn't worth shit at the moment. Two, you hit like a fucking baby bird after all that time in space." The barely darkened, fist-shaped mark on his face stood out under his finger. "Three--" The finger turned to the steamed up window. "That."

  Through the steam and the rain and the trees, a trio of lights flitted around outside. Near as she could tell, they were half a kilometre off, darting around what remained of the Atlas's cockpit. Malice and mischief carried along the light beams as they all at once focused towards her. Tomi became certain they were staring through the walls of the hovel, looking directly at her. Spiders who had discovered a fly flitting around their web.

  "Local kids. Came in on some kind of vehicle. I figure by now they've got everything of value they could out of Sazzy – the ship," Gunnar mused. "And if the rain hasn't washed the tracks away, they're coming here looking for the bare necessities."

  Tomi's fingers dug into the gun metal in her left hand.

  "Fuck me."

  "Probably that too."