Lai, whenever possible, liked to bme Rukan for her problems. Usually, if Rukan was around, or had been involved in something that became a problem, it was his fault to some degree.

  Thus it was Rukan’s fault that disassembling his bunker took hours. The main problem was the airbags. Neither Lai or Jecca could find any mechanism to release or even defte the airbags, and so getting to the welds and fasteners that held the wall together was much more annoying than it needed to be.

  And the electron generator was in the floor, which only made things more difficult.

  It took maybe half an hour to extract the computer and its peripherals from the wall. The rest of the time was taken tracking the generator down and working out how to remove it. It was probably worth the effort, though, there were few things Lai could think of that would be more useful out here than an electron generator.

  Jecca admittedly already had one, which made sense given that Lai hadn’t seen any signs of any normal kind of generator around her little brick house. But there was nothing wrong with having two.

  ‘They’re called electron generators?’ Jecca had asked at some point during the process. ‘The tablet called them stable generators.’

  ‘I haven’t heard that one,’ Lai had said, sounding strained with most of her arm inside the floor.

  Jecca had waited patiently for further expnation.

  ‘Perpetual generators, is the other term I’ve heard. Nothing generators, sometimes, when people are being stupid,’ Lai had said. ‘They generate power from the energy in electrons, which is then replenished by contact with anything that’s not complete vacuum.’

  Jecca had nodded. ‘They work in space?’

  If Lai could have shrugged, she would have. ‘You wouldn’t want them as the main power source on a ship,’ she said. ‘Having a small one on board is usually fine, as long as you’re not in space for too long, or as long as you have another type of generator on board.’

  ‘So another type of generator puts the energy back into the electrons?’

  Lai had really wished she could have shrugged. ‘Pretty much, yes.’

  Jecca had nodded a few more times. ‘What’s an electron?’

  So the time had passed easily as Lai expined the basics of atomic structure, and then the very basics of why electrons have energy to begin with, and why it was a completely renewable source on a pnet, since pretty much all atomic interaction effected the amount of energy in an electron.

  Jecca bundled up the computer and the electron generator in several yers of airbag, which she cut down from the wall with her metal shears, and thankfully carried it all down to the trolley herself.

  As much as the pile of metal pieces had been sufficient for Lai to get up to the bunker, she wasn’t very confident that it would serve her getting down, and was pretty certain she couldn’t climb down while carrying anything.

  Given that she wasn’t cold, Lai was already pretty happy with her furry outfit, aside from the looks. Climbing down a pile of sharp metal pieces, she was even happier with it all being made from leather.

  Outside the bunker it was sunny. Though the sun was further off to one side than Lai was used to, it looked like it was about midday. Lai sat down on the trolley again and opened the second bag of pemmican. She was starving.

  ‘Do you eat a lot?’ Jecca said. ‘The tablet seemed to think that I should eat more than I do. Do other people eat more?’

  Lai shrugged. ‘I do eat a lot, sometimes.’

  Jecca frowned for a moment. ‘Because of drift? Or something else?’

  Lai shrugged some more. ‘I like eating. But that might be because of the drift as well.’ She shrugged a couple more times for good measure. ‘It’s… not exactly common, but it’s a known interaction. My parents had patches that are pretty common for farmers, which affect digestion and sleep. They clearly had different patches to each other, and I got the interaction. So I eat instead of sleeping, and I can’t really sleep normally. I can do something simir, so I don’t have to constantly eat everything. But the longer I go without doing it, the more I need to eat.’

  Jecca nodded a few times. ‘Sleeping is like being unconscious on purpose, right?’

  Lai nodded. ‘Which is what I can’t do.’

  Jecca nodded back. ‘I don’t sleep. But I don’t think I need to eat very much.’

  Lai shrugged some more. ‘I’m not an expert on this sort of thing.’

  Near the south pole of Hialt was a pteau about sixty kilometres across. It was approximately circur and about three kilometres above the ground around it. No one had lived on the pteau until 2472 days ago, when a pod fell from the sky without any sign of the ship that dropped it.

  No one had lived on the pteau because it was colder, the wind was harsher, and the ground was harder than anywhere in the immediate surrounds.

  Among the people who had not lived on the pteau was a young man who had once expressed a desire to go fishing. Fish, as he was called now, had never been up to the pteau, even before the woman who lived there now had arrived.

  Fish had been near the pteau a few times, when ships crashed or debris fell in the vicinity. Like the rest of the pirates he lived with, Fish had not been near the pteau for at least 247 days. Fish personally had not been near the pteau for longer than that, but he hadn’t kept track exactly.

  While it was true that, 247 days ago, a group of pirate salvagers had soundly lost a fight with the strange-looking woman who lived on the pteau, that had little to do with why none of them had gone near the pce for a while. There had been nothing worth the effort.

  The pteau was about twenty-five kilometres away from the pirate base, on the far side of a woodnd. While some of the pirates were confident in their ability to ride their bikes through the woodnd, none of them did so with any kind of regurity. People had to walk.

  Fish didn’t mind walking. For one thing, the woodnd was very pretty with it’s dark green trees, unduting snow, and occasional flowers. For another thing, it meant he got to spend more time not having to deal with Rukan. And more time not trying to argue with Boss and Stamp that they should really just accept Rukan’s money and let him go because what else was the point of having him?

  Unusually for a trek out to the pteau, there had been a lot of volunteers. Boss and Stamp, even if they were stubborn, had enough sense not to make any single person deal with Rukan for too long at a time. More people had volunteered to go than were needed.

  The initial reconnoitre of the crash site had been interrupted twice. First by Rukan ambushing the scouts on the way, and second by finding the other two in the remains of the control room.

  Fish didn’t think of himself as too cruel or callous. He didn’t understand why they’d bothered capturing anyone.

  Though Oscar was pulling the train after them, the group of nine weren’t going to the crash site to scavenge just yet, they were going to actually investigate. Nine out of sixteen volunteers.

  Unlike Jecca and Lai, the pirates had brought a picnic bnket and a variety of food that didn’t turn into translucent goo when cold. They stopped under the trees for lunch not long after encountering the start of the crash site.

  Fish hadn’t been part of either of the initial scouting attempts, but what he’d heard was that the crash site was at least five kilometres long, probably longer. He hadn’t been surprised to hear it. He’d been on the big guns, ready to open fire on the smuggler ship from the ground if it hadn’t exploded first.

  He’d seen what happened.

  When asked, Rukan had cimed that he was alone on the ship, the small woman had crossed her arms and gred, and the other man had wheezed like maybe his lung was punctured.

  Fish didn’t see why it mattered if there were more people on the ship. The person who mattered was that woman up on the pteau. That was why they’d brought so many weapons after all.

  The pirates packed up their picnic and kept going.

  They spread out through the trees to try to get some sense of the overall shape of the crash site, but they knew from experience that anything of much value would likely be along the centre of the crash.

  From time to time, someone would add something to the train: some mostly intact gyros; a chunk of ship wall full of wires and switches; a piece of a console or computer. But they mostly weren’t there as scavengers, so there were things they left behind, like a partially wrecked hospital bed and what looked like most of a targeting computer.

  Whether it was the same nine of them or not, people would be back with the big trains, the crane, and a lot of rope to start taking apart the crash site properly. Once the scouts could confirm that nothing was going to explode, and give an estimate of how much transport they would need to take everything that looked useful.

  Unlike the woman up on the mountain, the pirates weren’t very interested in scrap metal. They could get metal that was much easier to work with by trading all of these electronics and the like.

  Unlike the woman up on the mountain, the pirates didn’t spot anyone.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you to keep away?’ a voice rang out from the mountains.

  Fish, luckily, had never met Jecca. He didn’t know what she sounded like.

  The pirates ducked into whatever looked like cover in their immediate vicinity and looked around. Fish couldn’t see the woman who had yelled. He thought he could see a trolley.

  ‘It’s not yours,’ Allen shouted back. ‘We can share.’

  Fish was offended on behalf of Boss and Stamp, but he had already been told that it was fine to negotiate with this woman. She’d soundly beaten a group of thirteen most of a year ago, she probably wasn’t worth fighting.

  The woman in question was quiet for a while.

  Fish wasn’t the only one to hurried switch his cover from a less-than-torso-width tree to a rge piece of fallen ship wall. From his new vantage he could see the trolley better, but still had no idea where there woman was.

  ‘You stay off the slope and we won’t have a problem,’ the woman shouted, after a while.

  Fish felt bad for doing it, but it seemed the most reasonable thing to do at the time. From his new position, Fish could see what was on the woman’s trolley, and he could see Allen well enough to get his attention.

  So Fish waved at Allen, pointed up the slope, made a typing sort of motion with his fingers, and then made a big swirling motion with his hands. Allen frowned at him, but Allen had been one of the people who worked out the hand signals in the first pce.

  ‘Fine,’ Allen shouted back. ‘We’ll stay off the slope.’

  The woman didn’t respond and, after a couple of tense seconds, Fish saw her emerge from behind some debris and pick up a big chain connected to the trolley. She started dragging it away, and no one fired on her.

  After a few more seconds, Allen scurried out of cover over to Fish, followed rapidly by the rest of the pirates.

  ‘You’re sure?’ Allen was still frowning.

  Though the short woman had been unwilling to give any information about what the smugglers had been doing or how many of them there were, she had been very willing to talk shit about Rukan. Specifically that he was the cheapest fuck she’d ever worked for and there would probably be nothing valuable in the wreckage since the fucking ship had barely worked to begin with.

  Fish nodded. ‘A proper computer and an electron generator,’ he said.

  ‘From what that girl said, there’s no way there’s more than one in the wreckage, right?’ Oscar said.

  Allen shook his head. ‘There’s heaps of consoles and computers, we don’t need to worry about it.’

  Everyone except Allen gave each other looks. A bit more than eight months ago, thirteen pirates had very much failed to get a broken electron generator back from the woman on the mountain. Out here one of those was, by a very wide margin, the most valuable thing on the ship.

  ‘We don’t need to worry about it,’ Allen said, slightly louder. ‘There’s a lot of good stuff down here, too.’

  Everyone nodded. No one was convinced.