Beside me, the General sleeps, the dead ant crushed at her feet.
* * *
I’ve not been to Landfall Five in many months, and sure enough it’s already changed. Here is the new-found prosperity brought by restitution payments; here are real blacktop roads and buildings made from girders and concrete. There are mules and crafts that aren’t a decade old and clogged with dust. Here there’s trade, official and bootleg, pumping life onto this dry moon. Here are people from across the now-Accorded Nations, more than I have seen in a long time, all scrambling to make a home, to remember themselves and their ways however they can.
At the edges, the original stinking, hardscrabble town of Landfall remains; evidence of those who first arrived here as convict work parties, huddling against the army for food and warmth. Had I been on my own, I would have run for those shadows. As it is, I have no choice but to keep my head down and walk the new, sticky roads towards the centre of the town: the army base where the ships had first touched down, thirty years ago.
It’s almost night. Out in the Barrens the sands sigh, the air is cold blue and voices from between the stars ride down on the winds. None of that here. The smell of cook-smoke and pepper and unnamed meats from the Chuan stands mixes with the hot oil and frying protein-maize from the arepa sellers to remind my stomach it once knew real food. The air fizzes with sparks from engine repair shops, competing with the lights of the snake-soup canteens, the wire-and-picture sellers, liquor stores hawking scorpion whiskey and snake wine and distilled venom “for medicinal purposes only”. At a metered water fountain, people queue with their drums and buckets, gossiping, coughing, glancing at the sky. Folk aren’t so afraid of the Ifs, here. With enough activity, the implausible is just that: happenstance, coincidence, bad luck.
I’m glad of it. I don’t want them here, not now, when this business is almost done. Perhaps they will transfer their interest to the General. Perhaps they will follow her to whatever planet she is posted to next and leave me be. Did they venture beyond Factus? I have never heard reports of them anywhere else.
I sigh. ‘We are almost there.’
The General nods. Though she looks around with narrow, searching eyes, I can tell she is struggling. Her jaw is tight, beads of perspiration on her forehead. Not my problem. Her people can heal her, with the seemingly unlimited resources they so rarely share with the rest of us.
Soon, the base comes into view, high metal and wire fences surrounding clean-edged, utilitarian buildings. A flag flutters in the faint wind that finds its way here from the desert.
‘About goddam time.’ She strides forwards. When I don’t follow she turns, impatient. ‘Well?’
‘I am not going in there.’
She rolls her eyes. ‘Tiresome. What of your payment?’
‘I will wait.’
‘It’ll take time to make an inventory of supplies, to see what can be spared.’ When I don’t move, she sighs. ‘Alright. I’ll order it to be delivered to you. Where will you be?’
She has become a military official before my eyes; that flag, with its golden triangles, has swallowed up any part of her that seemed lost or in pain.
I jerk my chin. ‘There’s a benzenery, in Tiger Town. Malady Falco’s. They will know of it at the camp.’
‘Just the sort of place for you. Fine. Expect delivery there by 2230.’
‘And if it does not arrive?’
‘I made you a promise by the First and Last Accords. Or have you forgotten what honour looks like?’
I half smile and shake my head.
She frowns at me for a moment longer. ‘I won’t say it has been a pleasure, knowing you. But even if you are a traitor, you kept your word. Perhaps the times are changing, after all.’
With that, she turns smartly and walks towards the gates, her head held high. No thanks, no emotion. I watch as the soldiers level their guns at her, as she makes a dismissive gesture, flicking her head to show the tattoos. They snap to attention. I watch as the huge, riveted gate slides open and she walks through, her small figure swallowed by the dark.
There is a pain in my chest and noise in my head. I don’t want it there, and so I go to find myself a drink.
* * *
Landfall might have changed, but Falco’s is the same.
The bar had once been a container used to ship arms for the Accord. Falco has decorated every inch of the walls with bright, brash, obscene graffiti, at odds with the drabness of the Accord base. They might have built this moon, she once said with a laugh, but that doesn’t make it theirs.
Unlike Sorry Damovitch, or most people, the prison hulks didn’t hold Falco back for long. The story went that she had been born to a wealthy merchant family, but her parents had lost everything in a trade deal gone bad. Other people said she had been born on one of the original supply haulers, during their first long trip to Brovos and the border moons.
Whatever the truth, it’s a generally accepted fact that, when the war came, she enlisted with the Accord for the sole purpose of robbing them blind. After years of racketeering, profiteering, fencing and blackmail, she was finally caught and sentenced as a Nine. But facility after facility found themselves compromised by her activities; prison walls seemed to turn into sieves around her. Finally, after eighteen months a warden gave up, commuted her sentence to time-served and issued her the name Malady as an insult. It didn’t land. In fact, they say, she was delighted.
Now, Falco’s is the number one place in Landfall Five to do business. I step through the first door of the airlock and wait for the second to open. As soon as it does, my chest loosens. Despite the crowded bar, the air within is cool, clean. I
