Hao’s loader growled its way upward along the tunnel. It was a big, yellow, tracked beast with a winch-and-scoop combo at the front and a bed massive enough that the two engine housings and some hundred armor plates didn’t even begin to fill it. Mightily uncomfortable, too. Still, I wanted to talk to Hao without Tomlin hearing, and he was stuck taking the trike behind us.

  “Why’d you ride the kid so hard?” I said.

  “Tomlin?” Hao said, pulling on the steering levers. The loader steered by braking the right or left track and hoping the thing didn’t shake to pieces. “He’s been giving me moon eyes for two years. I’m letting him down gently.”

  “Doesn’t seem to be working,” I said.

  “I could give him the answer I gave Young Baylen,” she said.

  “Which was?”

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  She slammed her boot into the safety plate around the driving platform, making it ring and echo in the tunnel.

  “Really?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Walked funny for a month,” she said. “Not that I minded. I hate people who break their word. At least he didn’t bother me after that.”

  “He didn’t strike me as the kind of man who takes no for an answer,” I said.

  “Told his old man that if he didn’t rope his kin back, he’d have to look to someone else to repair his water purifiers.”

  “Nice.” I was starting to like her despite myself. Maybe Jackson Depot wouldn’t be as bad as I thought. At least old man Baylen seemed in control. I’d met spoiled brats before. Hopefully daddy would hold brat boy Baylen in check.

  The loader growled on, the air getting ever more frigid until we crested a fold in the floor and made our way past the blast doors at the mine entrance. Outside, the sepia sand was still bathed in dull, blue moonlight. The freezing air still stunk of ammonia. I still had a ship in dire need of repairs.

  “How long will it take you to fix the Bucket?” I said.

  “Not long,” Hao said. “Two, three days.”

  She drove the loader around the Bucket’s nose.

  “Or maybe a lot longer than that,” Hao said, nodding toward my ship.

  I cursed.

  Someone had blown the Bucket’s airlock wide open.