‘Out to New Despair. Word is the ranches are in dire need of organic matter. They’re paying double.’
‘You’re a goddam vulture, Falco.’
‘If you’re done with my goods?’
There’s another silence, before finally, the tarp is dropped. ‘We’ll be watching. Those G’hals of yours better not get any ideas while you’re gone.’
‘Ideas? Never. Though they might have a notion or two.’ She stomps the wagon’s pedal, sending us shooting forwards in a cloud of choking dust.
Half an hour later, in the wilds beyond the Air Line tracks, we’re finally able to slide free from our fetid hiding place. As soon as she gets the respirator off her face, the General starts to heave and retch.
‘You bitch,’ she croaks at Falco.
Falco just laughs at her, though she’d have anyone else who called her that beaten to a pulp. She hands me a canteen of water. ‘You alright, Doc?’
I suck in a breath, pulling the thin desert air into my lungs. ‘No worse than swimming in a waste tank.’ I look around. ‘What’s the plan?’
‘We’re losing the muck, you’ll be pleased to know.’ Pegeen unhooks the trailer from Falco’s wagon, and reattaches it to two of the mares. They’re beautiful vehicles, up close; sleeker and faster than mules, painted in blue and gold dazzle, to blend with the desert shadows, I realise.
‘Take it to the nearest ranch,’ Falco is telling the G’hals who wait, ‘we might as well make some cash from it. Peg, you’re with us. And Boots.’ She nods to another of the G’hals with half-shaved short blue hair and thick-lensed glasses.
I climb onto the wagon, thankfully behind the driver’s seat this time, and settle the new hat onto my head. Falco’s clothes, I have to admit, are far better quality than my old ones, including as they do an armoured vest. At the last minute, without a word, Falco handed me a patterned scarf to hide my neck. Sometimes I wonder how much she suspects.
The General is already hunkered down in a seat, looking smaller than ever in a huge yellow canvas jacket, a bandana tied over her head to hide the tattoos. Although she has stopped heaving, the fabric over her forehead is wet with perspiration, and her lips pale and compressed.
In a few months, perhaps less, your body will fail you completely.
Is she truly dying? Or was that a lie, to trick her into submitting to her own termination?
Either way, there are no answers in Landfall. Falco kicks the engine into life, the G’hals whoop, and the wagon takes off, towards the hard white line of the horizon.
* * *
It will take almost two days’ riding to reach the Pit. We push the wagon hard, stopping only to relieve ourselves, or when the engines threaten to overheat beneath the beating sun. Falco – ever restless – passes the time by telling stories of her many adventures across the settled planets, from running an illegal poker den on a mining ship, to hawking stolen tinned peaches, to swindling a pair of bounty hunters in the Golden Web.
‘Doc, I ever tell you about the first scam I ran, in the AC?’
The General’s head jerks up.
‘You were in the Accord?’ she asks.
‘How can you ask me that?’ Falco replies in mock-outrage. ‘I joined up first chance I got to do my duty as a star-born daughter. To fight for law and order across our brave, new system and defeat the anarchists who threatened to tear us apart.’
I catch her grin in the wing mirror and fight back a smile of my own. There aren’t many who can make me laugh about the FL, these days.
‘If you were in the Accord,’ the General says suspiciously, ‘what happened to your tattoo?’
‘Had it removed. Properly, not by some drunk with a soldering iron.’
‘That’s illegal.’
‘Oh, I’ll tell the beautician who did it. I’m sure he’ll hand himself in.’
The General huffs and turns away, but I can tell she’s curious. ‘What division were you?’ she asks at last.
‘Thirty-fourth Security, the Pangolins.’
‘Security,’ the General scoffs. ‘Should’ve known.’
‘We had a very important job, ma’am, escorting all those necessities to the front, stopping the FL from hijacking such fine, top-class, Prosper-made goods…’
I listen, eyes half-closed against the sunset. All of us fought different wars. Falco’s seemed full of opportunity and near misses and daring deals. But – I know – these stories of hers are a kind of armour, a coating of words around pain to make it safe, to stop it bleeding into the everyday.
Finally, after hours, I must have slept, for I wake to find the wagon slowing in the emptiness beneath a brilliant, star-strewn sky.
Falco cuts the engine, the G’hals stop their mares. My ears ring in the sudden silence. There’s no wind, no voices; the sands are dead still, the stars throbbing strangely through the terraform. For a moment, in that haze of waking, I imagine I am back on Ty-Hala, that my best friend Adán and I have snuck out of the dormitory onto the flat roof of the Children’s Domicile to lie and look at the stars.
In those days, the central planets were nothing to us but lights in the sky. We would pick them out and recite what we knew, gleaned from bulletins and the occasional advertisement. The faint shimmering blue light was Prosper, Adán would say, where no one touched the ground or knew anyone else’s name. I would reply by pointing to the darkness and telling him of far-distant Brovos at the very edge of the known system, where strange fungi covered the ground and there were twenty animals to every person and the cows were bred as big as elephants. We would thrill each other with talk of seedy, bustling Jericho, where whole cities existed between warehouse walls, even the distant whispers of the border moons, promising land and freedom.
Lying there, we felt we were special, star-born, one of the first generations conceived and raised away from Earth, and all those worlds were waiting
