Roman shifted in his seat, and nudged the piss bottle with his boot as he tried futilely to get comfortable. It clattered, and he winced thinking he just spilled urine across the Razor’s bridge, then sighed with relief at seeing the cap was still on.

  Old man Hitori thought of everything when he renovated the Razor—everything but repair procedures for in-flight plumbing. No one had owned up to clogging the head. On space-goo rations, nobody’s gut was making bricks. More likely the line had cracked during their chaotic launch. It was comical how often geniuses tended to forget about mankind’s most basic needs.

  The Razor’s bridge had a low ceiling, a slit view port, and several rows of chairs split by an aisle. Mina and Suraj were strapped into the captain chairs at the front, Snake, Val, and Cenn were strewn across the middle rows, and Roman occupied one of the two in the back.

  They spent the past two days sleeping and bickering, then sleeping again. It was fitting, they’d hardly rested at all in the time spent preparing to leave the freighter. Despite the disastrous launch, they survived the first part of the plan: get off the rock. Now they had to accomplish the next, more lofted step: land on another rock.

  Geniuses.

  Out the viewport, Quay swam into their path—five times the size of the belt pebble they’d fled, the moonlet was a twelve kilometer lozenge that barely qualified as a satellite among Jupiter’s orbital hoard. It hosted a small Dearth outpost called Quay, which shared the name with the satellite itself.

  Roman could remember a bit of history about Quay, not much, but enough to know it had once been a hot stop on the way to Jupiter. Then the war grew, lanes fattened and became more direct for titanic freighters, and this waystation slipped off the map. By the time they left Dearth, he knew it to be a smuggler’s layover. Hitori’s scans indicated people still lived here but Roman couldn’t think of a reason its reputation would have improved.

  Roman leaned toward the viewport. He could just make out Occam’s chin hanging low over the hull. Arthur had been a peach on the coms, which only meant he was showboating, proving how much punishment he could take. There was no safe way to bring him back inside—Hitori had made that clear—so they carried on with Arthur lashed to the roof.

  Guilt stirred. If Arthur died, would that be on him too? Who else was there to blame? And if the rest of the crew burned up in some freak accident, would their blood sit on his hands too?

  Quay rose from their left as the last booster sputtered out. Guided by Hitori, Mina keyed the landing sequence.

  “Reading protocol—confirm.”

  She refused to call her father’s program by the name he’d been given, though Hitori had yet to notice.

  “Confirmed. We’re on approach. Engaging.”

  Roman hid a smile. Mina’s tone always soured when she had to speak to Hitori. At first the friction was sad, then dramatic. Now it was the closest thing they had to entertainment.

  The Razor was able to navigate to the surface on her own power. Though most of the landing was automated, Roman was still impressed at how quickly Mina had learned to operate the ship. If anyone missed the memo to catch up on sleep the past few days it was her. Well, her and Arthur who was likely pouring over all the bells and whistles in Occam.

  The prospect of attaining the meck for the Circle weighed heavily on him. He’d been instructed to deliver Daiko, and was near to doing just that, when everything—something—went wrong… Was he supposed to deliver the meck without the man? For that matter, who’s to say any Martians alive today even knew about his mission?

  Quay’s surface swelled until it filled the viewport. Roman felt Occam shuffling on the roof—Arthur repositioning before touchdown. To spare the Razor’s hull, Hitori directed him to roll clear just before contact. The image of a kid tumbling out of a moving car came to mind.

  The black canvas of space turned slate gray. The Razor dipped, then leveled almost instantly. Roman realized he’d never been awake for a landing before. When he’d first come to Dearth from Mars via the Loyalist Program, they’d kept him in cryo for thirty days just to see if his arrival stirred any sleeper cells.

  The Razor slowed, syncing with Quay. He looked at Val whose chin sagged, drool bridging the gap between mouth and shoulder. Then a sudden jolt snapped his limbs forward. The Razor settled. No alarms. No red lights. Nothing horrific as he imagined.

  Occam’s inhuman—yet also too human—face bent over the view port. Any trepidation at seeing its face dissipated as soon as Occam started waving his hand back and forth like a windshield wiper. Roman couldn’t help himself, he burst out laughing.

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  “What?” Arthur said over coms, as Occam ran a hand over its face as though cleaning up a blot of ketchup.

  Suraj flipped the com, “we’re all good in here.”

  “How’s the weather out there?” Roman called up.

  Occam stood, leaving the crew to stare at the meck’s knees.

  “Looks pretty deserted.”

  “Look to your right,” Mina said, expanding a terrain map on her holo. Roman unclipped his harness and moved up a row to get a better look.

  “Uh, same, I think…” Arthur replied.

  “You think?” Suraj said.

  “Well, there’s a shimmering off a ways, like a—like a mirage.”

  “How big of a shimmer?” Mina asked, considering another reading on a separate monitor.

  “How am I sup—wait. Right, thanks—it’s two kilometers wide and…100 meters high.”

  Mina’s eyes flicked toward Suraj. They’d clearly discussed this while Roman slept, because the bravista answered without pause.

  “Quay.”

  “Quay,” Mina agreed.

  “What are we quaying about?” Val slipped free of her harness and was now perched on her chair like a crow.

  Mina turned her own chair to face the group.

  “In deep space, a heat haze like that means oxcellerators,” she explained, “a lot of them.”

  Snake leaned over her shoulder to see, patting Val’s head as she tried to climb him to get a better look as well.

  “So the settlement’s still active,” Roman said.

  “It would appear so,” Suraj replied, “but the size of it is concerning,”

  “In what way?” Roman heard his own tone, and admonished himself for sounding so petulant. Suraj continued as though no one had even asked a question.

  “According to the readings, Quay is the same size as the last time I was here, roughly three three years before our launch from Dearth. If the oxcellerators are active it may mean neither Geos or Dearth forces, have bothered it since.”

  Roman bit his tongue to keep from saying something snide about the implicit nationalism. Asparian prejudice assumed they were the only ones in the universe, as though the Martian people weren’t capable of navigating space without their liege lords teaching them how.

  Get it together, Roman.

  Maybe his people had broken free in the century he’d missed. The thought of Suraj seeing Quay run by Martians almost made him smile.

  “Well,” Roman said, “what are we waiting for? Let’s get in there.”

  “Hey,” Mina said, turning toward them, “hold on a second.”

  “We have to investigate don’t we? Or do you you have a better idea?” Cenn stood to join Roman.

  “Don’t be so dramatic,” Mina said. “Obviously we need to investigate.”

  “Agreed,” Suraj said. “We need supplies, and more importantly information. You said the Razor could move out here, right?” He looked back to Snake for a response.

  “I doubt he said anything,” Val replied, and Roman gave her an appreciative nod.

  “Yes,” Mina said quickly, “Snake, can you take the chair and start moving us toward Quay?”

  Roman’s gut tightened. He pictured walking into a shanty town, Razor gleaming in the dust, Occam beneath its bay doors.

  “Wait,” he said. “Walking in there with the Razor and Occam seems like a risk.”

  Suraj’s chair creaked as he turned. “What are you afraid of?”

  “I don’t know—maybe barely surviving two crashes fried my brain. Or maybe, since this trip started as an unlisted cargo mission, we try not to inform people we have a highly advanced meck aboard.”

  And, it’ll give me time to think about my mission, and maybe see if there’s a way out of this.

  Cenn cut the silence. “He’s right. We shouldn’t risk it.”

  “I agree,” Mina said.

  Suraj gave a slow nod. “Then we split. One group goes into town. The other guards the Razor.”

  “I’ll go!” Arthur blurted over coms.

  “No,” the group said together, surprisingly all on the same page.

  “Why not. I’m—” Arthur was obviously receiving instruction from Hitori. After a moment he agreed to stay behind.

  “Someone has to protect the goods,” Roman yelled through the coms, making his way down the ram to the bay.

  “That’s why we’ve got Cenn,” Val gave Cenn a spank as she passed the woman.

  “Agreed,” Mina and Suraj said at once.

  “I’m not staying here,” Cenn argued.

  “Well Arthur can’t go,” Mina’s tone was casual as she caught up to Roman. “He should stay with the meck just in case. And Snake can pilot the Razor if it needs to move.”

  “So can you,” Cenn continued to rebel, following them down the track that lead to the external doors. Mina turned to face her.

  “But I can’t teach him how to be a better pilot. The way I see it, you can use this time to give him some hints.”

  “Hints…”

  “Lots of hints!” Val called.

  Cenn glared, but stopped pursuing them further. Roman noted how clever a strategy Mina had just deployed—using Cenn’s own ego against her.

  “Cheer up,” Roman said to Cenn, “you get to come rescue us if things go south.”

  That pulled a smile on the veterans face.

  “Be seeing you soon, then.”

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