Lai and Jecca didn’t finish their projects at the same time. It was pretty close, but they weren’t quite that synced after about a day of acquaintance. Lai was feeling vaguely silly in her new outfit, sitting at the sewing machine and trying to work out the quickest route to a less silly outfit.

  The quickest route was to make herself a new coat that wasn’t a parka with arm-slits on either side. As it was, she was wearing a parka with arm-slits, a leather bacva, mittens long enough to finish above her elbows, and leg warmers from ankle to mid-thigh. She’d had the notion to make herself some furry boots, but she had no idea how to actually make shoes, and her own boots weren’t that bad.

  Unsurprisingly, it had taken Jecca a long time to awl sixteen holes in Rukan’s steel table and bolt on the castors. As Lai went outside to distract herself from how silly her outfit was, Jecca was using some kind of induction heater to ftten out the steel sb.

  The induction heater, which looked a bit like a particurly long set of tongs, only looked safer than the sewing machine because it couldn’t stab anyone. The coils started to glow every time Jecca turned it on and Lai tensed when it started humming. It didn’t explode or electrocute Jecca, so it couldn’t have been too bad.

  Jecca took something like an extra half an hour to straighten out the tabletop with the induction heater and a massive pair of pliers. She must have been quite strong to be able to bend the metal as easily as she seemed to be.

  As she worked, the tear in the table widened.

  Lai sat nearby, under the eaves of the brick house, on a piece of wood, huddled up in her parka. She had worked in some adverse conditions before, but nothing like what Jecca had to deal with here. It was interesting.

  Very much more interesting than staring vacantly at the sewing machine.

  Once the table was basically ft, and the castors basically level, Jecca unplugged the induction coil, capped the bare ends of the wire, and started rolling it up.

  ‘Are you…’ Lai didn’t manage to stop herself, but she managed to cut herself off. ‘Never mind.’

  Jecca paused. ‘Did I do something wrong?’ she asked.

  Lai pressed her lips together. ‘No?’

  Jecca stood there, wire partially coiled around one elbow, induction heater in the other hand. ‘I would rather know than not know.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Lai said. ‘It doesn’t matter for a trolley.’

  Jecca’s eyebrows met. ‘What is it? What would it matter for?’

  Lai shouldn’t have said anything but, if asked directly… ‘If you were going to use it for anything that might put much strain on it, or for any kind of precision work, you’d probably want to equalise it first, no?’

  Jecca’s frown changed in a way that was hard to describe. ‘I don’t know what that means. Equalise…’ She looked at the table. ‘The heat? Isn’t it all the same temperature already?’

  ‘It’s a little more complicated than that,’ Lai said. ‘All the bending adds some stress to the metal, you can heat the whole thing in a particur way to make sure it won’t go wrong if you needed it for anything precise.’

  Jecca nodded. She coiled the wire back inside and came back a minute ter with that tablet in hand again. She talked slowly as she scrolled. ‘I haven’t done all the tasks reted to metalworking. So far everything works fine.’

  Lai nodded. ‘You don’t have a the or a milling machine,’ she said. ‘I’m sure it all works fine.’

  Jecca frowned down at the tablet and scrolled harder for a moment. ‘Lathes,’ she muttered. ‘It’s in here.’

  ‘Is that some kind of encyclopedia?’ Lai asked.

  Jecca turned it off and looked up. ‘What’s an encyclopedia?’

  ‘A… a bit collection of information about all sorts of topics,’ Lai said. ‘Sometimes they’re dedicated to particur topics, sometimes not.’

  Jecca nodded. ‘Not exactly,’ she said. ‘It’s a list of tasks. Instructions on how to achieve various things that might be useful out here. Not all of them are useful.’

  Lai nodded. It sounded like the sort of thing they would give the subject of an experiment, or a soldier on an exercise. She didn’t think she’d heard of anything exactly like that before.

  ‘Do you want to come with me?’ Jecca asked. ‘To the wreck? You… I expect you would know more about how the ship worked than I do.’

  Lai hadn’t thought about it. ‘Yes,’ she said, immediately. Sure her gut still hurt, but she was just as vulnerable to boredom as anyone who’s had constant access to stimution for the st fifteen years.

  Jecca nodded and proceeded to stare quite intently at Lai’s left shoulder for what felt like a very long time. ‘Do you know how to use a gun?’

  Lai shrugged. ‘I haven’t used one for a while, but yes.’

  ‘I always take one with me, or some kind of weapon, when I go out. I haven’t had any problems for a hundred and thirty-eight days, but I wouldn’t want to get caught unarmed.’ Jecca nodded several times, stared intently at Lai’s shoulder for a couple more seconds, turned, and went back inside.

  Lai decided not to follow Jecca immediately. When people tried to help her with things in limited space, or who didn’t know enough about the situation, it always annoyed her. She figured it would annoy Jecca.

  It felt like an age before Jecca came back out the door with a rge bag slung over one shoulder and a short rifle with a sling in the other hand. She dropped the bag onto the trolley before she offered the rifle to Lai.

  ‘It’s not my favourite,’ Jecca said. ‘But I have twelve bullets for it, which is more than everything except this.’ She turned to show the pistol still on her hip.

  Lai took the rifle. ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘You said you taught the pirates their lesson?’

  Jecca nodded and frowned at the same time. ‘I expect so. I haven’t seen them since then.’

  It wasn’t a type of rifle that Lai had seen before, but it looked much like any other rifle she’d used, including the compact prism mounted on top. It took her several seconds to take the rifle from Jecca. First she had to get her arms out of the parka, then she had to get her hands out of the mittens.

  Lai shifted to sit cross-legged, ejected the magazine, made sure that the chamber was empty, and locked the slide open. The action felt fine to operate, the safety was exactly where Lai expected it to be, she had no way of verifying the zero on the prism, which looked like maybe a one and half.

  Last, she double-checked the sling wasn’t going to break if she put some tension on it. She closed the slide, spped the magazine back in, and triple-checked the safety before she slung it over her head.

  Jecca’s eyebrows were raised.

  Lai raised her own eyebrows in return.

  ‘You don’t have a bullet in the gun,’ Jecca said.

  Lai managed to resist her urges. ‘I don’t like to carry guns like that,’ she said. ‘It’s not very safe.’

  ‘Really?’

  Lai shrugged. ‘It’s not very unsafe,’ she said, and shrugged again. ‘That’s just how I was trained with them. I mostly used guns for hunting, so I suppose I didn’t need to be quick on the draw.’

  Jecca nodded. ‘I usually hunt with a knife.’

  Lai nodded back and didn’t say that that sounded like a great show.

  Most of the three-hour walk to the start of the crash site was taken by Lai expining quite a lot of the various things she knew about to Jecca. It started with more questions about equalising metal, and continued into Lai’s general knowledge about machines and mechanics.

  Lai said, at some point, that she’d worked as a mechanic for about fifteen years, and before that she was raised on an independent farm. Jecca’s questions stemmed from there. She knew how to make some machines from her tablet, but didn’t know much about the principals, as it turned out. And she knew almost nothing about farming except that it was something that a town thirty-one hours walk west did and sold her the results if she bothered making the trip.

  In her time as a mechanic, and before that a bourer who hung out with the mechanics a lot, Lai had not had the opportunity to mentor or train anyone. Some of the people who’d taught her had compined about students or apprentices being annoying, but most had seemed to enjoy it.

  Lai could see why.

  Sure, she knew a lot of stuff. But having to distil the ideas into an expnation that made sense to someone who had no idea was exactly the right combination of difficult and enjoyable.

  But it was also annoying when she couldn’t quite manage it, and they had to talk around the subject until she found a better way to expin it.

  Unlike some of Lai’s worse teachers, she did her best to not get annoyed with Jecca about it. If Jecca wasn’t understanding what she was saying, that was a problem with her expnation.

  By the time they reached a snow-coated pile of parts that had once been the single gun on the Friendship, Lai’s voice was getting hoarse, she was sweaty, her legs hurt, and she was hungry.

  It was no surprise that she wasn’t as fit as Jecca, but what was interesting was that Jecca wasn’t hungry. She didn’t eat anything when Lai suggested they take a break so that they could have some lunch.

  Cold, pin pemmican was not a pleasant lunch. Eating the soft, squishy, cold goo was unpleasant in almost all of the ways food can be unpleasant. At least it wasn’t rotting.

  Lai sat on the cart while Jecca stood and finally started asking about the ship itself. Jecca could not remember ever being on a space ship, and only had a few wreckages over the years that she’d been here to go off of.

  With a mouth feeling increasingly full of solid fat, Lai told Jecca about the Friendship. How annoying it was to work with Rukan at all. How the whole ship had already been on the verge of falling apart even before they were attacked by pirates. And how exceptionally short Shae had been.

  ‘Surely she had other features?’ Jecca said.

  ‘Oh, she was great,’ Lai phlegmed. ‘Lots of energy, knew exactly what she was about. Young, still, but very sensible aside from working on Rukan’s ship.’

  ‘You were working there too?’ Jecca said.

  Lai shrugged. ‘It didn’t seem polite to ask, but I figured Shae and Woll were there for much the same reason I was. Couldn’t get a proper job without proper registration. I don’t know about Woll, but I reckon it was drift, same as me, for Shae.’

  Jecca’s eyebrows got close to each other in what Lai was starting to recognise as confusion. ‘What does that have to do with this registration thing?’

  Lai took another bite and tried to puzzle out an expnation. ‘Since the colonial administration made the sort of experimentation that mostly leads to drift illegal, or at least highly reguted, they seem to have an aversion to recognising that it’s already happened.’

  Jecca’s eyebrows stayed where they were, but she nodded. ‘So people with drift can’t get registered?’

  Lai wobbled her head. ‘They’ve been here about a hundred years, people have been here probably more like four hundred years. Some people, like my parents, don’t like that the administration wants to come in and impose all these rules and regutions. So they don’t register their kids. Once you’re not registered, it’s nearly impossible to get registered without a genetic test that the admin will use to say that you’re illegally modified and probably imprison you over.’

  Jecca’s eyebrows finally met in the middle. ‘Why would they imprison you?’

  Lai rolled her head around on her neck. ‘If you’ve committed a crime, like illegal genetic modification by having been born, they can give you a sentence of indentured work. So you have to work for them for some amount of time. Last I heard it was five years for a bad test result. Then they can send you to some abandoned old pnet to set up new colonies, or here on Hialt they’d probably send you out to help build up one of their new ones.’

  ‘They can’t just ask people?’ Jecca suggested.

  ‘Some people volunteer for whatever reason,’ Lai said. ‘But it must not be enough for whatever the admin wants to get done.’

  Jecca’s eyebrows stayed cmped together. ‘But if you get registered when you’re born?’

  Lai nodded. ‘Or if you’re a refugee younger than five,’ she said. ‘They register you before doing the test, so you just get written up normally as having drift and it’s usually fine. But if your parents aren’t registered, they get arrested.’

  Jecca nodded. ‘So why would anyone who’s not registered want to register their child?’

  ‘Exactly the problem. They don’t.’

  Jecca nodded some more. ‘I don’t see why it would be like that. But I think I get it.’

  ‘Supposedly it wasn’t like that way earlier on, before the admin got here. Anyone could get registered without any problems, because they wanted citizens as much as workers. Now, I guess they want workers more.’

  ‘After the five years, though, are you registered? Or do they just arrest you again?’

  Lai snorted. ‘You’re registered,’ she said. ‘But most of the time you’re also stuck wherever they sent you. Plus, it’s not hard to get arrested again if you’ve got the wrong sort of drift, like me.’

  Jecca nodded some more, frowned, then unfrowned and presumably decided not to ask the obvious followup question. ‘Are you ready to keep going?’

  Lai nodded and got up from the trolley. Her legs felt stiff, but she wasn’t feeling so sweaty and sore. She was still hungry, so she kept on eating the pemmican as they walked.

  The bags had to be about two kilograms each. They’d brought three. When she still felt hungry after finishing off the whole bag, Lai started to worry that three wouldn’t be enough.

  The bunker was exactly where Jecca had said it would be, lodged about three metres up a cliff face, angled up so that the open doorway must have been five metres off the ground. In the weak morning sunlight, Lai could see the smear of blood on the locking wheel.

  Lai was pretty strong. She’d been raised on a farm and then worked as a bourer and ship mechanic. She wasn’t drift strong, she knew that from the people she’d met and worked with who were. But she also wasn’t particurly athletic, aside from stretching when she was getting sore, she didn’t exercise when she wasn’t working.

  Even if she’d been athletic, even if she’d been drift strong like any of the other people she’d met who were, Lai couldn’t have done what Jecca did.

  What Jecca did was bend her knees and unch herself three metres into the air to grab the bottom of the doorway.

  Lai half-expected there to a crater where she’d jumped.

  For a few seconds, Lai just stared up at Jecca and figured what a shame it was that she wasn’t going to get in there herself. Then it occurred to her to look around for something resembling a dder.