Allen was right. As much as the engines and fuel cells had gone the way of a peaceful life when the admin arrived, it seemed like most of the ship controls and supplies had landed in or at the edge of the forest, below the slope up to that woman’s plateau.

  The small woman was also right, most of it was in pretty terrible condition and even Fish knew enough about this sort of thing to tell that it had been in pretty terrible condition even before the ship had exploded.

  Therefore, Allen was as wrong. Even as evening was starting to settle in and the pirates bad finished checking the wreckage, they hadn’t found nearly enough good salvage to be worth what that computer and electron generator were.

  ‘If only we hadn’t grabbed those three idiots,’ Vila complained. ‘We could have gotten here first.’

  ‘If Stamp is right about that Rukan guy, it won’t matter,’ Oscar said. ‘If we can get more money out of him, it’ll barely be worth scavenging all this stuff in the first place.’

  Fish hated to say it. ‘If he’s wrong about that Rukan guy, Vila’s right.’

  Allen glared at Fish. ‘Stamp’s the smart one, keep in mind, he’s barely ever wrong. And remember the last time he was wrong?’

  The last time Stamp had been wrong was 247 days ago, when he’d said thirteen people would be enough to deal with the woman on the plateau.

  Nasser, who wasn’t the most talkative, nodded up the plateau in question. The woman was dragging her trolley up the slope. And there was someone else with her, by now.

  Over the last few hours, since their shouting match, the pirates had caught glimpses of a second figure up on the slope. Not enough to be completely certain, but enough that it wasn’t a surprise to see someone dressed in a massive leather coat and hood following the trolley up the mountain.

  This second person was carrying the short rifle that had once belonged to Fish’s friend Igor. Fish tried not to have strong feelings about that, and failed.

  ‘Couldn’t we follow them?’ Fish said. ‘Like at a good distance? Get them once they get to wherever she lives? She must have a lot of good stuff up there by now.’

  Nasser, Vila, Crate, and Pointy nodded along.

  ‘Like she’s not the driftiest person you’ve ever seen,’ Allen said. ‘We don’t know if she even sleeps.’

  ‘We know she’s got a house up there,’ Toby said. ‘We’ve known that since we first saw her.’

  ‘And if we can fight her away from all the wreckage, she won’t have good cover,’ Pointy pointed out.

  ‘Neither will we,’ Oscar pointed out.

  Crate nodded to the train. ‘Easy to bring.’

  ‘And we can set it up without her seeing,’ Fish said.

  ‘And think how good if we get the generator,’ Vila said. ‘Won’t matter if Stamp’s wrong then.’

  ‘Won’t matter if he’s right either,’ William said. ‘For a computer and a generator?’

  Allen sighed. ‘Maybe. But we need a better plan than “drag a big piece of wall up the plateau and hope”, right? And it’s not urgent anyway. We can go back and get more people.’

  Oscar turned on Allen and all was lost. ‘Even if you steal Fish’s idea, none of us’ll get credit if we go back for more people. It’ll all be on Boss and Stamp.’

  Allen was in his early forties. He was calm, he was sensible. He loved taking credit for other people’s ideas, and he hated when other people did it to him.

  Allen scrunched up his face, looked up the slope after the two figures and the trolley. ‘Fine, fine. Fish has a good idea. We need to work on the cover. We need something better.’

  Laila and Jecca got back to the brick house on the plateau in the late evening. Laila had finished the third bag of pemmican and was absolutely starving. She went and cooked up some dinner while Jecca started unloading the trolley.

  They hadn’t brought all that much from the wreckage beyond the computer and the electron generator. Jecca had explained the sorts of things the pirates considered valuable, and they’d mostly just gone through stripping them for when the pirates inevitably started climbing the slope while they were gone.

  Even if the pirates hadn’t turned up, all the electronics, servos, gyros, and wiring would have been Laila’s first pick for what to strip out of the wreckage. Other than the computer and generator, none of it was in very good condition, and a lot of it would almost certainly be broken, but it was the sort of thing that Laila could fix, if Jecca couldn’t.

  As she cooked, Laila fantasised about building her own lathe and milling machine and welder. Whether or not she was planning to stay wasn’t part of the equation, it was simply the idea of making one of these machines with her own knowledge and scavenged materials that appealed to her.

  If she was going to stay, she’d need more food. Jecca’s little pile of pemmican had already diminished by more than half since Laila had arrived. Sure she’d been saving the roots of the onions and cabbages, but that was hardly a short-term solution. Not to mention she’d need dirt and probably better lights to grow vegetables anyway.

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  That could all wait. First, she needed to eat, and then she needed to rest.

  Jecca still didn’t eat, so Laila ate the whole thing and was still feeling slightly peckish. At least she was full enough to get some rest. She padded the surgery table with leftover fur, lay down, closed her eyes, and took deep breaths.

  Someone had told Liala once that her version of sleep was similar to REM sleep. More people had said it was similar to meditation. Laila was inclined to agree with the latter, if only because her parents had taught her the technique as a form of meditation when she was very young.

  Apparently, Laila hadn’t slept at all for the first three years of her life.

  Laila didn’t exactly dream, in her trance, but she didn’t exactly think either. When she was awake, Laila thought primarily in words, images only really turning up when she needed them. In her trance, Laila thought primarily in images, words only turning up when she needed them.

  That was why some of the people she’d talked to likened her trance to REM sleep. The images were largely undirected, and just washed over Laila as she rested, but they were also largely sensible.

  In her trance, she imagined shooting the pirates from where she’d been hidden with her rifle. She imagined farming onions. She imagined making things. She imagined living alone on this plateau and, more or less, enjoying herself.

  According to Jecca’s watch, Laila was in her trance for slightly more than four hours, which was longer than usual, but Laila also didn’t usually go so long without sleeping these days.

  When she woke, she was feeling much better. Even though there was no chance her liver had grown back already, she didn’t feel so much like there was a hole in her guts. And she didn’t feel ready to eat another two kilogram bag of pemmican.

  To Laila’s mild surprise, once she woke Jecca asked her to help wire the new electron generator into the brick house’s system. Laila was more than happy to help, of course. She wasn’t technically an electrician, but a spaceship mechanic is similar enough that she knew what she was doing.

  And, as Laila took apart some of the wiring connecting the first generator into the wall, she was pretty sure she knew what Jecca had learned, too. It wasn’t that Jecca had done a bad job, it was more that Laila was immediately certain that fixing the house’s wiring to be a bit safer and a bit more efficient wouldn’t be difficult.

  Laila was just in the process of suggesting that she could do that when Jecca frowned, snapped her head to the left, and stared into the darkness for several seconds.

  ‘Do you hear that?’ Jecca asked.

  Laila took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and tried to listen. She mostly heard the wind, the distant rustling of trees, and… ‘Yes, I hear it.’

  The totally reasonable plan that Oscar, Nasser, and Crate had come up with for cover was to take the wheels off of one of the train carts and attach them a large, solid piece of spaceship wall. Allen’s contribution, the reason they were more than four hours behind those two people, was that actually, they should make two.

  Allen’s reasoning was sound, of course. There were two people up there, both of them were armed, and if they had a single, straight piece of wall, it would be easy to get to the side and make the cover useless.

  It took about three hours to find and construct the two pieces of cover, and far longer than anyone liked to admit to manoeuvre then up onto the slope past the thickest part of the crash site.

  From there it wasn’t exactly easy going, pushing two big and heavy pieces of metal up the slope, but at least the pirates no longer felt like they were wasting time. Whether or not they were, indeed, wasting time was immaterial to how they felt.

  The time was going to pass either way.

  And so it was very close to midnight by the time nine pirates finished pushing two large pieces of metal up onto the plateau. From where Fish was craning his neck around the side of the wall, he could see light leaking from around the front door of a cozy-looking brick house, illuminated fairly well by the gibbous moon and bright stars.

  There were no windows on the house, and no sign of anyone outside.

  Fish leaned back into cover. ‘Can’t see anyone. No windows either. They’re probably asleep,’ he whispered.

  Allen shook his head. ‘Stay in cover, we don’t know yet.’

  Fish poked his head back out of cover, probably a bit less careful this time, to try to have another look around.

  Fish saw the muzzle flash, but didn’t hear the shot. Bullets move faster than sound.

  Laila was impressed that the zero on the rifle was so good. She hadn’t expected to hit the head poking out the side of the steel plate. She hadn’t expected to hit much of anything.

  She was having mixed feelings about her success.

  On the one hand, she was impressed that she still knew how to operate a gun and, apparently, operate it fairly well. On the other hand, she hadn’t meant to shoot that man. Still on that other hand, the pirates might not have had hostile intentions. Also on that other hand, she’d never even shot at a person before.

  Back on that first hand, the rest of the pirates were shooting at her, blasting chunks out of the brick wall at the front of the house.

  Somewhere off to Laila’s left, out on the plateau, Jecca opened fire. She was clearly much better at operating a gun. The pirates stopped shooting and their two walls moved closer together, a last shot from Jecca banging off the metal.

  Laila had an idea.

  She leaned around her corner very carefully. No one opened fire on her.

  The night was bright, Laila’s eyes were good. The wheels on the bottom of the wall had raised it slightly off the ground. She couldn’t exactly see anyone’s feet, but she could get a pretty good idea from the shadows.

  The recoil on the rifle was very gentle, despite the short barrel, and Laila got to see the outcome of this second shot just as well as she’d seen the outcome of the first. She had pretty straightforward feelings about this one.

  Snow blasted out from under the wall, someone shouted, and there was a thump as the shadows rushed around.

  Laila wasn’t so concerned about hitting anything this time. Another plume of snow, a group shout, no sound of someone falling over.

  One of the pirates leaned out of cover and started shooting again. Laila ducked back behind the wall. This time, the pirates didn’t waste more bullets shooting the bricks. Laila crouched and braced herself. She let the rifle hang around her chest, put a hand on the wall, took a deep breath, and leaned out of cover and then back in as quick as she could.

  A couple more shots broke another brick.

  Laila couldn’t see what happened. There was a shout, a rapid series of gunshots, and then silence.

  Laila took a deep breath and stood up. She stayed where she was behind the wall. She didn’t know what had happened and she didn’t want to be wrong about it.

  ‘Laila,’ Jecca called. ‘We’re clear.’

  Laila took another deep breath and peeked around the corner. Jecca was standing in the open between the two walls. She had blood on her side.

  Laila hurried over. Jecca’s shirt was torn, she had a scab on her side, except that it wasn’t a scab exactly. Dark blood oozed slowly from her side. The blood she was spattered in was not her own.