From somewhere in the ship comes talk and the occasional thump; the General, Peg and Falco sparring in the hold.
‘Again,’ I hear Falco say, over the blare of raucous music.
‘Show me the other one,’ the General asks. ‘The eye-gouging.’
‘Not until you have this one learned.’
‘I know it already!’
There’s a scuffle of footsteps then a heavy thud.
‘That was cheating,’ the General complains. ‘I wasn’t ready. Try it again, I’ll show you a move I learned from a brawler from Delos—’
‘Enough for now. You should rest.’
‘No!’
‘Yes. You’re tired.’
‘I am not.’
Smiling to myself, I look across, studying Silas’s profile. The golden light brings out the warmth of his skin, and the saturated blue-black of his hair. He looks over, catches my eye, and smiles.
A second later the ship lurches sideways, almost throwing me from the seat. Instantly, the drowsiness is gone, replaced by alarm.
‘What’s going on?’
Silas’s teeth clench around the pipe stem as he hammers at the controls. The ship lurches again, with a sickening drop. ‘Boosters aren’t firing.’ He swears and spins around, wrenching open a panel to reveal a mess of wires. ‘Goddam it.’
Pegeen staggers onto the flight deck, followed by Falco as the ship bucks and sinks.
‘What the hell?’ Falco shouts.
‘Yeah, what the hell,’ Silas shoots back. ‘This is what happens when a crazy woman with a shotgun uses all the water that we needed to stop the system overheating.’
‘If this was a real ship, it wouldn’t overheat.’ She leans on his chair. ‘What can you do about it?’
Silas flips some switches, shaking his head. ‘Nothing. We gotta land, let her cool down.’
I scramble to peer out of the windshield. The view is not comforting; we’re flying above a long, desolate canyon between plateaus. Bad terrain, unless you were planning an ambush.
‘Where the hell are we?’ I look at the nav screen, scrolling it rapidly, hoping that I’m wrong. ‘Shit.’
‘What?’ Falco asks.
‘I think we’re in the U Zone.’
She swears, with greater energy than me. I know why. The Unincorporated Zone is part of the Barrens even she avoids, unless absolutely necessary. Sometimes, in my lowest moments, I have thought about the U Zone, about driving the mule past the signs that tell me I’m leaving Factus’s official territory and that I will have no recourse to the regulations of the Accord, or of any land. But every time, I remembered the stories – cults, loners, communities who hated outsiders, hostile to the point of madness, too much space between them and no one coming, no water or medical or food drops, no Air Line Road for hundreds of miles – and turned back.
‘You got a map?’ Falco demands.
The tattered and stained thing that Silas produces is less than promising.
‘This is out of date,’ she accuses, peering. ‘Look, it has White Cat listed. That place burned down two years ago.’
‘What’s happening?’ The General stumbles onto the flight deck.
‘We have to land,’ I tell her.
‘Why?’
‘System’s overheating.’ Silas lets out a noise of frustration as the ship drops, a horrible whining noise filling the flight deck. ‘This sounds bad. Might mean repairs.’
‘Have you tried opening the secondary air-cooling ducts?’ the General asks.
‘Of course I have!’
Falco jabs at the map. ‘Here, I think we’re at the end of this canyon.’
I look over the host of Xs hatched across the desolation, marking dead towns and no-go settlements and ghost ranches.
‘Think we could reach Tidhar’s Dozen?’
‘How far?’
‘Eighty klicks.’
‘Too far!’ Silas hangs on as the ship sways.
‘There.’ Pegeen is at Falco’s elbow. ‘What about Bliss?’
‘I heard the headman went crazy, killed everyone but himself.’
‘There’s a ranch here— ah forget it, it was the Mbelas’s place. They upped sticks six months ago.’
‘What about Gally Town?’
‘Gallowtown? We’d be dead and this ship stripped in minutes.’
‘There.’ On the map, just beyond the canyon’s lip, a dotted line has been hashed in. ‘What’s that? It doesn’t say what it is, just…’ I peer, ‘Esterházy.’
Falco and Pegeen look at each other.
‘That’s Angel Share,’ Pegeen says. ‘It’s a port, kind of.’
‘A port? So we could land there?’
‘Not a good idea.’
‘Why the hell not?’ Silas yells as the whining increases. ‘I’ve heard of that place, a clearing house, isn’t it?’
Falco’s jaw is tight. ‘It’s a clearing house that will be crawling with bounty hunters, and what’s more, has a Marshal who is an asshole and a psychopath.’
Silas swears. ‘We’re going down fast, it’s there or fry in the desert!’
Pegeen takes Falco’s arm. ‘Pec would give us shelter, surely?’
Falco’s noise of disagreement is lost to the terrible lurch of the ship as it sinks. ‘Looks like we’ve got no choice.’
* * *
How Silas manages to limp the Charis the last few klicks to the edge of Angel Share I have no idea. By the time the settlement comes into view we are already flying too low, wallowing towards the ground like a drunk vulture. Through the tilting windshield I make out an ungainly metal structure: a port, with as many as thirty rusted docking platforms spreading across the dust. Behind it is a forest of containers, some new and shiny with paint, others dented and battered as if they have crossed the system a dozen times. A handful of buildings stretch beyond them, on either side of a dirt street, as if the port opened its great steel maw and belched them out onto the sand.
There are one or two other ships on the wharves, pilot birds and a pair of freighters, by the look of them. Not the reputable kind. I raise an eyebrow as Pegeen arms a pair of pistols. We’ll have
