Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

Palm Strike’s Last Case

Palm Strike’s costume has never been comfortable, but lately it’s pinching his shoulders and chafing in the groin area. Sweat pools in the boots. The Tensilon-reinforced helmet gives him a blinding headache after two hours, and the chestplate is slightly too loose, which causes it to move around and rub the skin off his stomach and collarbone.

The thing that keeps Palm Strike running past water tower after water tower along the cracked rooftops of Argus City, the thing that keeps him breaking heads after taking three bullets that night, is the knowledge that there are still innocents out there whose lives haven’t yet been ruined.

Kids who still have hope and joy, the way Palm Strike’s own son did before Dark Shard got him. When the bruised ribs and punctured lung start to slow him down and the forty-pound costume has him dancing in chains, he pictures his son. Rene. It never fails—he feels a weight in his stomach, like a chunk of concrete studded with rocks, and it fills him with rage, which he turns into purpose.

Argus City is full of disintegrating Frank Lloyd Wright knock-offs and people who have nothing to lose but someone else’s innocence. This was a great city, once, just like America was a great country and Earth was a great planet.

Palm Strike catches a trio of Shardlings selling dreamflies in Grand Park, under the bronze statue of a war hero piloting a drone. The drone casts deep shadows, and that’s where they hunker in a three-point parabolic formation. They’re well trained, maybe even ex-Special Forces, and decently armed, including one customized 1911 with a tight-bore barrel. Dark Shard must be getting desperate.

Once they’re down, Palm Strike feeds them their own drugs, baggie by baggie.

“You know my rule,” he growls. The process is not unlike making foie gras. One of these men is so terrified, he blurts out the location of Dark Shard’s secret lair, the Pleasuresplinter.

Ambulance called. These men will be fine. Eventually. Palm Strike’s already far away before the sirens come. Losing himself in the filthy obstacle course of broken walls and shattered vestibules in the old financial district. Leaping over prone bodies. He doglegs into the old French Quarter. All of the bistros are shuttered, but a few subterranean bars give off a tallowy glare, along with the sound of blues musicians who refuse to quit for the night. Cleansing acrid smoke pours around his feet.

Turns out Dark Shard’s Pleasuresplinter is hidden right under City Hall. But service tunnels from the river go all the way, almost. Catacombs, filthy and crawling with vermin. Palm Strike’s boots get soaked, both inside and out. Men and women stand guard at intervals, but none of them sees Palm Strike coming. Palm Strike’s main superpower is the stupidity of his enemies. He sets charges as he goes, something to be a beacon for first responders, firefighters and EMTs. And police. But don’t trust the police, never trust the police.

Palm Strike crashes through the dense mahogany door just as all the charges he set in the tunnels go off. Smoke billows up out of the fractured street behind him. The door explodes inwards, into a beautiful marble space—a mausoleum—with a recessed floor like a sauna, and a dozen little dark alcoves and nooks. Red drapes. Gray-suited men sporting expensive guns and obvious body armor with the trademark broken-glass masks.

In one of those nooks, just on the far side of the room, he spots the children: all in their teens, some of them barely pubescent. Their faces wide open, like they are in the middle of something that will never leave them, no matter what else they see or do.

Everyone over eighteen is shooting at Palm Strike. Lung definitely collapsed. Healing mojo has crapped out.

First priority: get the children out. Second priority: bring this den of foulness down on these men’s heads. Third priority: find Dark Shard.

Children first, though.

One of the bullets goes right through Palm Strike’s thigh, in spite of the ablative fibers. Femoral artery? No time to check. This place probably smells like candy floss and cheap perfume most of the time, but now it’s laced with vomit, blood and sewage. Clear a path to the exit for the children. Drive the armed men into cover, in the far alcoves. Be a constantly moving whirl of anger, all weapon and no target. Unleash the throwing-claws and smart-javelins. Find one brave child, who can be a leader, who will guide the rest to safety. That one, with the upturned nose and dark eyes, who looks like Rene only with lighter, straighter hair. “Get them out,” Palm Strike says, and the kid understands. Throwing claws have taken out most of the ordnance. Children run past Palm Strike, stumbling but not stopping, into the tunnel.

Palm Strike blacks out. Just for an instant. He snaps awake to see the boy he’d appointed leader in the hands of one of the top Shardlings—you can tell from the mask’s shatter pattern. Stupid. Busting in here, with no plan. Dumb crazy old fool. The kid squirms in the man’s grasp, but his little face is calm. Palm Strike has one throwing-claw left. He hears the first responders in the tunnels behind him, and they’ve found the children who got away.

Palm Strike’s throwing-claw hits the pinstripe-suited thug in the neck, and slashes at him on its way to find a weapon to disable. An angry insect, made of Tensilon, stainless steel, and certain proprietary polymers, scuttles down the man’s neck. The man pulls the trigger—just as the throwing claw’s razor talons slice the gun in two. The recoil takes half the man’s hand, and then the boy is running for the exit. Palm Strike wants to stay and force-feed this man every drug he can find here. But he’s lost a lot of blood and can’t breathe, and the shouts are getting close.

Palm Strike barely makes it out of there before the place swarms with uniforms.

The Strike-copter is where he left it, concealed between the decaying awnings of the Grand Opera House. He manages to set the autopilot before passing out again. Healing mojo works for crap nowadays. After only three years of this, he’s played out. He regains and loses consciousness as his limp body weaves over the barbed silhouette of downtown, and then the squat brick tops of abandoned factories. At last, the Strike-copter carries him up the river, to a secluded mansion near Mercy Bay.

Josiah, his personal assistant, releases him from the copter’s harness, with practiced care. Josiah’s young, too young, with curly red hair and a wide face that looks constantly startled. As usual, he wears an apron over a suit and skinny tie. “You really did it this time,” Josiah says, prepping the gurney to roll Palm Strike through the hidden doorway in one of the granite blocks of the mansion’s outer walls. Josiah removes the headpiece, but before he can attach the oxygen mask, Palm Strike says: “The children.”

“They got out okay,” Josiah responds. “Ten of them. You did good. Now rest.”

Some time later, a day maybe, Palm Strike wakes with tubes in his arms and screens beeping ostentatiously around him. The healing mojo has finally kicked in. He still feels like hell but he’s not dying any more. He sits up, slowly. Josiah tries to keep him bedridden, but they both know it’s a lost cause.

“You’ve received a letter,” Josiah says as Palm Strike scans newsfeeds on his tablet. “An actual piece of paper. On stationery.”

Palm Strike—now he’s Luc Deveaux, because he’s out of costume—shrugs, which makes his ribs flare with agony. But then Josiah hands him the letter, already opened, and the Space Administration logo sends a shiver through Luc before he even sees the words.

“Congratulations. You have been selected to join the next colonization wave…”

The Space Agency interview process is the last vivid memory Luc has of Rene. And he remembers it two different ways.

First version: They were happy, a family, in this together. His son leaned his head against Luc’s shoulder in the waiting room, with its framed Naïve-art posters of happy colonists unsnapping helmets under a wild new sun. Rene joked about his main qualification being his ability to invent a brand new style of dance for a higher-gravity world, and even demonstrated high-gravity dancing for the other families in the waiting room, to general applause. Rene aced the interviews, they both did, and Luc was so proud of his son, as he gave clever answers, dressed up in a little suit like a baby banker.

In that version of the memory, Rene turned to Luc in the waiting room and said, “I know our main selling point is you, your geo-engineering experience. But they’ll need young people who are up for literally whatever, any challenge, to make this planet livable. And that’ll be me. You’ll see, Dad.”

So. Damn. Proud.

The other version of the memory only comes to Luc when he’s half asleep, or when he’s had a few single malts and is sick of lying to himself. In that other version, Rene was being a smartmouth the whole time—in the waiting room, in the interviews, the whole time—and Luc had to chew his tongue bloody to keep from telling his son to put a sock in it. They both knew that Luc was the one with the land-reclamation skills the colony would need, and all Rene had to do was shut his trap and let them think he’d make himself useful and not be too much of a smart-ass. That’s all.

Luc can just about remember the stiffening in his neck and chest every time Rene acted out or failed to follow the script in those interviews. Rene had to get cute, doing his high-gravity dance and annoying all the other families. It’s a close cousin to the anger that keeps him laying into Dark Shard’s thugs every night, if he wants to be honest with himself, which he mostly doesn’t. Except after a few single malts, or when he’s half asleep.

Both versions of the memory are true, Luc guesses. If he really wanted a second opinion, he could ask Josiah if he was too hard on Rene when his son was alive, but he never does.

He has too many other regrets crowding that one out, anyway. Like, why didn’t he pick Rene up from school himself that day? And keep better tabs, in general? Or, why didn’t he get Rene off this doomed planet before it was too late to save him?

Now Luc grips the letter in both hands, wondering whose idea of a joke this is.

“You have to go,” Josiah says. Luc is already crumpling the letter into a ball, aiming for the recycling. “You have to go. Sir. If you stay, you’ll die.”

“My work here is not done.” Luc realizes he’s slept through most of the day. Almost time to suit up. “Dark Shard still needs to pay. For Rene. And all the rest.”

Luc can’t find his headpiece. A jet-black scowling half-mask, with a shock-absorbing duroplex helmet built in, it usually isn’t hard to spot in the midst of civilized bedroom furnishings and nice linens. But it’s gone. Now he remembers—Josiah took it from him when he was strapped to the gurney.

“How do you think you’ll best honor Rene’s memory?” Josiah is touching Luc’s arm. “By throwing your life away here? Or by following Rene’s dream and going to another planet, where you could really make a difference? You’ve destroyed Dark Shard’s lair. Which will weaken him a little, but also drive him further underground.”

“Where is my headpiece?” Luc asks. Josiah won’t answer. “Where did you put my helmet? Tell me.”

Josiah backs away, even though Luc still walks teeteringly.

“You could help build something new,” Josiah says. “Instead of breaking things, over and over, until you’re broken in turn. You could build something.”

“That part of me is dead.” Luc is already thinking about alternatives to the headpiece. There are prototypes, which he hid someplace even Josiah doesn’t know about. Flawed designs, but good enough for a night or two, until Josiah comes around. “This is all I have left.”

The nanofiber-reinforced lower half of his costume still has that bullet-hole, and his leg is so heavily bandaged that the pants barely fit. This could be a problem, especially if the rip widens around the bandages. He could end up with a big white patch on his leg, like a target for every thug to aim at in the darkness. Stain the bandages black? Wrap black tape around them?

“Luc. Please.” Josiah grabs his arm and shoves the letter, which he’s retrieved and uncrumpled, in Luc’s face. “I helped bury your son. I don’t want to bury you.” He has tears in his eyes, which are also puffy from sleepless nights caring for Luc’s slow-healing wounds. “There’s more than one way to be a hero. You taught me that, before all this.”

Luc stares at the letter again. Departure date is in just a few weeks, and there are a lot of training sessions and tests before then. Someone must have backed out, or maybe washed out. “If I go,” he growls at Josiah, “I won’t leave you any money. I’ve spent every last penny on my fight.”

“I know that, sir,” Josiah says, smiling wearily. “Who do you think has been keeping them from taking the house? We’ve restructured your debt five times in the last two years.”

In the end, Luc says yes, even though every instinct rebels against it. Not because Josiah hid his mask, but because something inside him, his core, is suddenly too exhausted to do anything else. Sleeping for a hundred years sounds perfect. Maybe he’ll wake up having understood something. Maybe he won’t wake up at all—even better.

After that, Luc’s trapped in the clutches of officialdom. Imprisoned. Every spare minute goes to medical tests—even with the healing mojo, he still has to explain the scars and old broken bones—and briefings on absolutely everything they know about Kepler, which people are calling Newfoundland. The same facts are repeated over and over, like the fact that Newfoundland has 1.27 times Earth gravity and a year that lasts fifteen Earth months. Only one of the seven continents is habitable, the south pole. Blah blah blah. There is a whole three-hour talk on what to do if you wake up early, and five days devoted to how to convert the ship into a survival module on landing—the crew should know, but if the crew are dead, then the colonists may need to know, too. The other colonists in the briefings are cute, fresh-faced. Mostly around Luc’s age, but he feels much, much older.

And meanwhile, all of Luc’s sources in the underworld suggest that Dark Shard has blown town, and his organization is in disarray.

At last, the day comes. Two days of fasting, then Luc strips naked and climbs inside the decontamination vat—which sears off a few layers of skin—and then the cryo-module. The technicians close the lid over his face, and he feels the ice threading through his veins and into his muscles and joints.

Just as the paralysis starts to take hold, he’s dead certain he hears someone say, “Palm Strike.” With a chuckle.

Palm Strike hears his name and comes to life. But it’s too late. Palm Strike tries to fight the cold tendrils immobilizing his body, to stay awake. He almost sits up in his tiny chamber. He only needs to pull out these tubes. He battles with everything he has, kicking against the top of his coffin. But the clammy grip pulls him under, into an ocean with no surface.

Falling for years, drowning in slow motion, Luc sees Rene’s corpse over and over. The bullet hole in his side, the tell-tale dilated pupils, the broken capillaries in his face. Mouth frozen open in a last abortive yell. They made him identify the body.

He only met Dark Shard once—and it was as Luc, not as Palm Strike. Palm Strike didn’t even exist yet. A few nights after he buried Rene, there was a shape in his window. A shadowy form, wearing a cloak over a chestplate, with a mask that appeared to be constantly exploding outward with black crystal pieces.

Luc heard something and sat up in bed. The light wouldn’t turn on.

“I came to convey my regrets,” Dark Shard said in a voice like the grinding of broken glass. His hands were obsidian fragments, flexing. “Your son was not meant to die. It was an unfortunate mistake. The responsible individual has been disciplined.”

“What…” Luc stammered. Naked except for filthy boxer shorts. Half drunk since the funeral. He couldn’t remember, later, what he said to Dark Shard, but none of it had any dignity. He may have begged for death. He was sure he cried and tore his own sheets. He tried, over and over, to imagine that meeting if he’d been Palm Strike.

“Your son was not meant to die,” Dark Shard said again. “We do not waste lives in such a fashion. We would have taken him for ransom, held him in our Pleasuresplinter a day or two, but he would not have been molested in any way. He might have been allowed to sample our dreamflies, which are highly addictive, depending on whether we desired a single ransom payment or an ongoing relationship.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Luc still didn’t know the answer to that question, all this time later. If Dark Shard hadn’t shown up to apologize for Rene’s death, he might not have felt such intense hatred. Luc might have remained a regular broken wreck instead of spending the fortune he’d made from his land-reclamation projects becoming Palm Strike.

The way Dark Shard explained it, they had seized Rene, as a hostage, but then they’d gotten caught in a shootout with a rival group, the Street Commanders. Rene had taken a bullet to the gut, and he was bleeding out. So one of the Shardlings, a man named Jobbo, had cradled Rene in his arms and given him something for the pain.

Rene might have survived if Jobbo hadn’t given him the drugs. The dreamflies thinned his blood and prevented coagulation, so he bled out faster. Plus Rene’s final moments were spent under the effects of a dissociative drug that made him feel lost to the world and slowed everything to a hideous crawl. He died not knowing who he was, or who loved him.

Luc has imagined Rene’s death a million times since Dark Shard described it to him. But in this frozen sensory deprivation tank, he’s living it. Rene’s eyes, like empty wells—the image keeps tormenting Luc. The harder he tries to swim, the deeper he sinks.

When the frozen waves recede and light invades, Luc cries out from deep in his strangulated throat. He’s sure he can’t face reality again, after the endless nightmare. But the light is remorseless, and the cold abandons him. He can move his arms again. At last, the lid of the cryo-module opens, and he’s looking up at a young round face. A girl. Twelve or thirteen. Red hair, in braids.

“I did it,” she says. “Hot wow, I can’t believe I did it.”

“Did what?” Luc tries to sit up, but he’s still too weak. She raises a sippy-cup of something hot and bitter, and pours it down his throat.

“I finally got this thing working. It’s been my project, for years.”

“Years?” Luc blinks. Something is wrong. He can see the chamber behind the girl’s head, and it looks old, broken. The gray serrated walls are bare except for some torn fibers and rough edges, as though every last bit of technology was stripped away long ago.

“Oh, sorry. Yeah.” She leans over further, so she can make eye contact. Her eyes are hazel. “Better start at the beginning. The Endeavour landed, like twenty years ago. Your module was busted, the wake-up sequence failed. There was no way to revive you without killing you. But I’ve been tinkering, every spare moment.”

“Everybody needs a hobby,” Luc grunts.

“Take it slow, okay?” The girl puts a threadbare blanket over him. “There was a lot of stuff here, originally. Procedures and things. You were supposed to watch some video that explained that a hundred and three years have passed on Earth and everyone you knew is dead. Plus any last messages from your loved ones back home. And there was an acclimation chamber to help you adjust to the air and gravity. But that stuff is all gone. Sorry, guy.”

“What’s your name?” This time Luc does manage to sit up.

“I’m Sasha Jacobs. Anyway, you should be glad. We almost ate you. More than once. The whole colony’s starving. Nothing grows here any more—the soil just kills all our crops. You were supposed to be some kind of big-time agriculture expert, right? I figured maybe you could help.”

“Geo-engineer.” Luc shrugs. He’s naked under the blanket. He glares at Sasha until she hands him some pants. “But that was another life, a long time ago. These days, my main skill-set involves finding bad people and making them pay. Someone sabotaged my casket. And whoever it was, they’re going to learn my rule.”

He tugs the itchy red pants on under the blanket and lifts himself up out of the cryo-module, only to collapse in a heap at Sasha’s rawhide-covered feet when his legs won’t support his weight. He twitches and grips his own knees, dry-heaving.

“You might not want to rush into anything,” Sasha says.

Luc and Sasha emerge, not from a spaceship or a survival module, but from a crude hut covered with some kind of rubbery wood, attached in overlapping wedge-shaped slats. There’s no sign of any source of that wood, though—the surrounding area is barren and the ground has a crumbly furrowed consistency, like the surface of a brain made of pale clay. Luc sees no other buildings or signs of civilization, which makes him wonder if they really did hide his cryo-module to save him from being eaten, after all.

The sun is too bright and pale—reminding Luc of the time he experimented with night-vision lenses and someone shone a floodlight in his eyes. In the blanched daylight, Sasha looks a little older. She’s a rangy girl, with arms too long for her torso and a shiny blue dress that might be made out of the upholstery fabric from one of the ship’s escape pods. Her face has freckles and a thin nose that appears to twitch constantly, perhaps in amusement or maybe because he smells bad.

“The air is higher in nitrogen than you’re used to, and the gravity—”

Luc cuts her off. “I remember the briefings. Where’s the colony?”

“Down the hill, a kilometer and a half away.” Sasha gestures. “Everyone is going to want to meet you, if you’re up for it.”

“I’m up for it.” The sooner Luc meets the pool of suspects, which is everyone who was an adult when the ship left Earth, the sooner he can start narrowing it down.

Sasha leads Luc along an unsteady slope covered with loose rocks that jab at his bare feet, and he stumbles repeatedly as the gravity catches him off guard. She keeps talking about the planet, how the other six continents have temperatures too extreme for humans to survive most of the time, but contain massive jungles full of megafauna, including nine-limbed mammoths that swing through a canopy of carnivorous fronds. She wants to visit someday.

They walk maybe three quarters of a kilometer before they reach the first buildings, which are laid out in a pinwheel pattern around the center of the colony, set in a kind of valley. Most of the buildings are made of that same spongy wood, which looks like pumice, only softer. Pipes come out of the houses and disappear into the ground. Wires snake along their rooftops, connecting to junctions on poles.

And then the ground levels out, the buildings grow denser, and the stench clouds Luc’s eyes just as the sights become unbearable. The crumbling shacks, made of a mixture of prefab construction materials from the ship, plus spongy wood, weak drywall and local rocks. The river clogged with effluent, running through the middle of Hopetown. The lashed-together pieces of failing technology. And above it all, the rank odor of wounds and sores that won’t heal properly due to the malnutrition. Luc saw a lot of nightmares, when he was helping to turn Benin into the world’s last breadbasket and visiting the Arkansas refugee camps. But here, no relief workers are coming. He passes a group of teenagers playing listlessly in the street, with arms like twigs and swollen torsos. Older people slump against the unstable walls.

But there’s something else, too—some of the people standing around that ugly modern-art sculpture made of cannibalized spaceship parts at the center of it all have a vacant look in their bloodshot eyes that he knows at a glance. And festering trackmarks on their arms. Luc files that away, for now.

The Survival Module—all that’s left of the Endeavour—is at the other end of Hopetown from where Luc and Sandy came in, along the filthy river and to the right. The dinged-up white structure, the size of the Opera House back home, has been dressed up as a town hall, with a podium and sound system out front, plus someone has painted a decorative gold leaf motif around the entrance using some local plant sludge. Sasha waves hi at the people sitting at desks inside the building, then runs off to tell her mother her amazing news.

“Oh, my lord,” says a middle-aged lady, maybe around fifty, sitting in a repurposed cockpit chair at the rear of the Survival Module, behind a big desk covered with data tablets. “Sasha actually did it. Mr. Deveaux, you don’t know any of us, but you’re famous around these parts: the agriculture expert who didn’t wake up.”

“Tell me what went wrong,” Luc says.

Here’s the secret that almost nobody ever guessed about Palm Strike: he was a brawler. The name “Palm Strike” was an intentional misdirect, to make people believe he was some kind of martial-arts wizard and then catch them off guard with his total lack of skill. People tended to overestimate him, and then underestimate him. He’d had months, not years, of training, but he mostly relied on the healing mojo and the enhanced strength. His detective skills, too, mostly involved punching people and asking questions.

So Luc sits there, for hours, and listens to the colony’s leaders talk about their incredibly meticulous terraforming process and all the things they did before and after planetfall to prepare the soil for farming. The tests that revealed nothing wrong, and the excellent early harvests. Inside, he’s still raging and traumatized by his endless cryo-nightmares, but he maintains a totally blank expression. Luc has to believe that whoever sabotaged his cryo-unit also made the voyage here—maybe even Dark Shard himself—and at some point Luc will have someone to hit. And that person will already know that Luc is Palm Strike, and will therefore fear him. He studies each of these people, looking for the signs of that fear. He’s a lousy detective, but he knows all about fear.

“We brought bioengineered microbes from Earth that were supposed to neutralize any toxins in the soil and correct the pH balance,” one burly man named Ron McGregor is saying, “but most of them died in flight, due to cosmic radiation exposure in that section of the ship.” McGregor’s the right age and almost the right build, but he’s a fussy bureaucrat whose biggest worry is that Luc will make him look incompetent. He’s neither afraid of Luc nor happy to see him.

They’re in a conference room behind the town hall, which turns out to be the ship’s flight deck with all of the equipment and panels removed and a big table made out of some kind of polished slate, surrounded by a dozen chairs. Luc begins to feel weary after just a couple hours of this briefing. The gravity takes its toll, as do the aftereffects of years of deathly cold and cryo-nightmares. But he wants to look all these people over while they’re still surprised by his return from the dead.

Luc keeps drinking the hot brew, made from some kind of noxious weed that they also use for clothing, and it keeps him awake.

“We tested the soil and it was perfect.” The governor, or president, of Newfoundland, is that woman from the town hall, Rebecca Hoffman. Attractive for her age, which is roughly the age Luc would be if he’d woken on time. Hair in a messy gray bob, blouse made of some local algae. “Five or six years of decent harvests. And then the crops just… stopped growing.”

Ron McGregor keeps interrupting himself and nodding at his own points. He talks about the heavy terraforming engine that cleared the local vegetation, removed the biggest obstructions, and wiped out the local pests—these horrible bugs got everywhere and into everything, at first.

Happiest to see Luc is probably Bertram Cargill, an old man who has hair coming out of his ears that matches his fuzzy vest. And open sores on his knuckles and wrists. Cargill took over as the water and soil expert when Luc didn’t wake up, and he found the river that provided irrigation and drinking water, one tributary of which is now a sewer running through Hopetown. Plus the geyser and hot springs that supply heat and geothermal power to their dwellings.

“Geyser,” Luc says at last. “That explains the brain-like furrow pattern I noticed on the ground when I arrived. Soil near a geyser is often highly acidic. Plus those hot springs probably have bacteria living in them, kilometers under the surface, and they could be producing toxins we’ve never even encountered before.”

Everybody pauses—even McGregor—waiting for Luc to finish his thought. “The mystery here isn’t why the soil stopped being fertile,” he says. “It’s why it ever was.”

Luc catches up with Sasha, who’s hanging around the edge of town, basking in her heroism. Everybody in the world has been patting her on the back, and she’s got a crowd of other kids standing around listening to her triumphant narrative of how she cobbled together a new wake-up circuit out of spit and dead branches. The kids are all Sasha’s age, give or take—chances are, nobody’s wanted to have children in this colony, since the food started running out.

“Hey,” she says. “How did it go? Want to meet my mom? She’s dying to meet you.”

They walk toward the edge of Hopetown, the opposite direction from the hut where Luc woke up. He’s going to need some shoes, or better yet boots. Along the way, he sees plenty more emaciated people shuffling like the living dead, with tiny punctures in their arms. Even amongst the starving people with hair like dead grass and skin like bedsores, the addicts stand out.

“Tell me about the drugs,” Luc says when they’re far enough away from the center of town, where the ramshackle huts are spaced further apart.

“I don’t use them,” Sasha says, shrugging even as she swings her arms mid-stride. “I’m not that dumb.”

“Good for you,” Luc says. The exhaustion and strain are catching up with him, and he’s about to keel over. He’s famished, too, which means he’s becoming a real citizen of Newfoundland.

“Every now and then, Hoffman’s peacekeepers turn the town upside down, looking for the source. She gives speeches. And they’ve actually executed a few drug-dealers, just beheaded them. But you gotta understand, we’ve been starving a long time. People need something to distract them from the inevitable.”

“Even here.” Luc is clenching his fists, staring at the worry-lined earth. Not dirt. Dead microorganisms. “Even here. Goddamnit.”

“From what I hear, they have a recipe,” says Sasha. “The ship’s engine still had a lot of coolant left over after landing, and they siphoned everything out of the cryo-units, except yours, of course. Plus some fungi that grow on the coast have hallucinogenic properties, in very tiny doses. They trade it for food rations, or bits of Earth clothing and personal items.”

A few weeks of the year, the nearest continent cools down enough for humans to travel there and do some big game hunting. But the last expedition never made it back, and the colony won’t survive long enough to make another hunting trip, Sasha says.

Sasha’s mother is a cheerful, leather-faced woman named Clarissa, with curly hair that was probably dirty blonde but has gone platinum thanks to the unrelenting sun. She insists that Luc sit down at her dining-room table, which is made of that same rock as the table back in the conference room. She gives him some of her dead husband’s clothes, including a decent pair of boots that made the trip from Earth. (Luc’s own personal effects from Earth were stolen years ago.) Like every other adult here, her tongue is swollen, making her diction hard to understand at first. She fusses over Luc, feeding him a watery stew with some tough roots in it. Then she insists that Luc should rest—there’s a kind of hammock in the front room of the four-room house, that he can sleep in.

Luc lays on the hammock, but he can’t close his eyes without seeing Rene bleeding out, now filtered through his cryogenic visions. The broken-off piece of rock inside his stomach that kept him going out every night and pummeling criminals is back, sharper than ever, since he spent a hundred and twenty years having the same nightmare.

In the morning, Sasha’s mother is gone, but Sasha gives Luc a single strip of pungent jerky left over from some great beast they killed on their last successful sortie to the jungle continent to the north. “Save your food,” Luc says, but she insists and he chews a bit of it. The best he can say is that digesting it will keep his stomach busy for hours. The house is dusty—that loose soil gets everywhere—and it makes him itch. Soil erosion. Wooden structures everywhere, but no trees.

“They gave me a few days off my chores and studies,” Sasha says, “to help you acclimate, since I was the one who brought you back. This ought to be planting season, but that’s been delayed indefinitely.”

Luc walks around the colony, trying to get used to the gravity, letting everyone get an eyeful of him. Something about that cryo-freeze has recharged his healing mojo. Old aches hurt less, even in 1.27-G. Looking everybody in the eyes, he sees signs of long-term starvation, worse even than what he saw in Arkansas—but also lots of dilated pupils (painful in this more intense sunlight, he guesses), no teeth, and puncture scars. Junkies: They assault anyone who comes too close, with a terrifying fury but no strength. Too far gone. Even if he could feed those people, he can’t save most of them.

Becky Hoffman shows Luc the last of the seed vault, with Sasha on tiptoes behind them. Corn, wheat, some sorghum. But not much of any. Even with a bumper crop, you couldn’t plant enough to feed 3,000 people for another 15 months.

“Don’t tell anybody what you’ve seen here,” Hoffman whispers. “I’m frankly terrified of what will happen if people discover how hopeless it is. We already have a huge drug problem, and a lot of unrest.” A lot of people took to eating the clay near the river last year, just to feel full, until dysentery and some excruciating thistle-shaped parasite killed a few dozen within a month, she says.

Luc glances over at Sasha, and can’t read anything from her face.

Many colonies, back on Earth, died within one generation. Of the ten extrasolar planets that humans have colonized thus far, only three still have people living on them. Including Newfoundland.

The seed vault, behind the town hall, is one of two places in Newfoundland that has a guard, wearing body armor and toting a Brazelton fast-repeater, the kind they used for crowd control back on Earth. The other place is the food dispensary right off the town square, where Sasha goes once per day to collect her family’s food rations in a red box while two people with clubs and guns watch carefully.

Luc heads into the fields, stretching out to the horizon, where Cargill irrigated using river water, and can’t find egregious fault with Cargill’s work. The soil, though, is toxic, arid, acrid, a dead waste. He kneels in the dirt, his skin getting burnt and then unburning as the healing mojo works. He leans against a wooden post.

The sun goes down and the first of three moons is already up. Sasha comes to find Luc, who is kicking the dirt and cursing, punching the wooden post until his hand is bleeding and crammed with splinters.

“Hey, calm down,” Sasha says. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

Luc’s only answer is a roar and another swing of his fist, hard enough to smash the wood to splinters. He looks at his own bloody hand and backs off, shaking off Sasha’s attempt to see to him.

“It’s hopeless,” he says. “I could have done something. I could have stopped this. You didn’t all have to die. But somebody sabotaged my capsule. Whoever did that has murdered this colony, and I’m here just in time to watch it rot. And they’re probably the same person who’s profiting off all this misery. Selling drugs to people who are living in hell.”

The wounds on Luc’s hand are already closing. He sits in the dirt, convulsed with pure anger, lurching into his own knees again and again. He can’t think, he can’t see a way forward. Nothing but dead soil all around him.

“For the first time ever,” he says when his rage has spun down, “I believe my son was lucky.”

Sasha sits near him, but keeps her distance, probably because he looks as if he’ll take her head off if she gets too close.

“I’m sorry,” Luc says. “I didn’t mean to go nuts on you.”

“It’s okay,” Sasha says. “I guess this is a big adjustment. You get used to seeing people lose their minds, around here.” She hesitates, then: “Hey, I wanted to ask you something.”

“Sure.”

She’s studying him. “When I first got you out of your coffin, you said something about your main skill being justice. I can’t remember the exact words. What were you talking about?”

“I lost someone, back on Earth. The people who did it needed to pay. So I turned myself into something else. A crime-fighter. I spent millions of dollars to become this whole other creature. When I got out of my casket and it was twenty years too late, I had a moment of bravado. It was like a defense mechanism. Forget it happened.”

“So you’re not going to get justice? For your cryo-unit, and everything else?”

“I don’t know,” Luc says, realizing that’s the truth. “I’ve been biding my time these last couple days, but now I’m not sure what the point would be. The guilty and the innocent will both die the same way, soon enough.”

“When I was working on your cryo-pod, I had this idea that I would wake you up, and you would burst out of there and save us all. Maybe with a fanfare, like in that videox they let me watch before the ship’s entertainment system finally gave out. And when I did wake you up and you said all that stuff, part of me was thrilled because you really sounded like… I don’t know, like someone who saves people.”

The light of the first moon draws shadows under her eyes, while a second moon sneaks up on her, illuminating her hair and her rough jacket. She looks as if she’s in the middle of one of those rite-of-passage moments where you surrender some of your illusions on the way to adulthood. Something is breaking forever inside her. He has no idea what he’s supposed to do about this.

What would Palm Strike do? He wouldn’t be sitting here in the dirt kissing his knees. Palm Strike would find a way to save the colony and take down the pushers.

“Can you help me get some gear?” he asks Sasha. “I need a helmet, body armor, gloves. It needs to be black, or I need some dye. Do you know where I can score some?”

She stares at him, her eyes ginormous. Then, slowly, she nods.

Palm Strike never had a sidekick. For a while, he let Josiah create a fake identity as his partner No-Shadow, not to do any actual fighting but to talk to the cops once they stopped trying to kill Palm Strike. No-Shadow’s outfit was all cape and full-face mask, plus some gloves with spikes coming out of them. Ridiculous.

One night, Palm Strike got back from busting heads but No-Shadow was nowhere to be found. Turned out No-Shadow had gone on a ride-along with a pair of detectives, Lancaster and Marsh, so they could talk his ear off.

“They think you’re doing more harm than good,” Josiah explained when he got home. “You shut down the Street Commanders and took out some of the Shardlings, but in the process you’ve only strengthened Dark Shard. Both by eliminating his competition and culling his weakest people.”

“You shouldn’t judge an exterminator halfway through a job,” Luc grunted.

“But that’s the thing. It’s like, during the Great Leap Forward, Mao sent every peasant in China out to kill sparrows, on the theory that sparrows were eating seeds and reducing the harvests. But once the sparrows were all gone, turned out they had been eating locusts, which had been eating the grain. It was an ecosystem. When all the sparrows were gone, everybody starved.”

Josiah said these things while he was making a sandwich for Luc, still wearing his big black cape and unfeasibly spiky gloves as he stood at the marble kitchen counter.

“Maybe Palm Strike isn’t the best solution,” Luc said after he stopped laughing at No-Shadow. “But he’s all I’m capable of, right now.”

The next few days, Luc spends every waking hour traveling around and taking soil samples, and every night watching the rotating cast of hoodlums selling drugs in the town square. He hasn’t seen much in the way of “peacekeepers” in this town of three thousand souls, but the dealers are there from sundown to sunup. They mostly trade drugs for food, which means there’s a stockpile somewhere.

You wouldn’t want to be the only one eating when everyone else is starving to death. You’d find out the hard way that nobody is an island.

One day, when Luc’s sitting in front of the house, Clarissa comes out and sits with him. He is trying to nibble his breakfast so he can give most of it to Sasha. She’s growing, and he has his healing mojo. “Starvation isn’t as cool as when I was a teenager trying to be a ballerina back on Earth,” Clarissa says, with sympathy. “It’s more like a chronic pain, and exhaustion. I can’t think straight and I feel like I’m constantly getting sick. It just sucks.”

“Starvation was pretty widespread back on Earth, too,” Luc says. “It’s just that here, there’s no class of people who aren’t starving. It’s more egalitarian.”

“God, this colony is such a clusterfuck.” Clarissa kicks the white dirt. “We all had jobs, most of which turned out to be irrelevant. I was supposed to be the marine biologist. We’ve barely studied the ocean here. We cannibalized the diving equipment early on and we haven’t been able to catch any marine life at all. It’s a joke. So now I’m Becky Hoffman’s assistant instead.”

“I bet Hoffman’s an okay boss,” Luc says. Clarissa just snorts.

There’s a long pause, both of them watching the sky turn pale. “Be careful with Sasha,” Clarissa says out of nowhere. “That whole time she was working on your pod, she was trying to develop her mechanic skills. But I also caught her looking at your face sometimes, as if she thought you were going to replace her dad or something.”

“I’m very comfortable having people project onto me,” said Luc.

“Just don’t break her heart, okay?” she says. Luc nods, slowly.

At night, down near the dirtiest part of the river, people gather in a three-walled structure and sing, holding hands and swaying on their feet. Luc hears their muffled chanting as he stakes out the drug dealers, hiding behind the Town Hall’s partially disassembled ancillary cockpit.

Two dawns in a row, Luc tries to follow the dealers when they leave the town square with their ill-gotten food supply. But both nights, the food disappears. He can’t see where they’re stashing it. They leave their cozy perch, walk around that ugly sculpture, go through the tight space between the two municipal buildings, then out toward the polluted estuary that runs through Hopetown. By that point, they’ve ditched their crate of food and they’re swinging their unladen arms, eager to crash out. Their route takes them right near the guard watching the food dispensary, but she doesn’t worry about people carrying food around, just about them taking food from the communal store. Luc searches every spot the dealers passed on their route. No sign.

Sasha has found him a banged-up helmet, a chest-plate, and a single ancient glove. “When do we make our move?” she asks every few minutes.

Luc keeps thinking about Mao and the sparrows. The pests that turned out to be essential. And then he thinks about the terraforming process.

On the fourth morning since he woke from his long sleep, he gets up and tells Sasha he needs to do something on his own. Then he takes off walking, toward the polar geyser. He walks for hours, until his feet are throbbing and the sunburn overtaxes his healing mojo. He hasn’t taken a long walk in the wilderness since Rene was born, and he’s forgotten how giant the sky can loom, or how it feels to be miles away from other people. His mind empties as the landscape unfolds, ridge after ridge, and he’s weirdly calm. But he’s also stewing. He’s jaw-grinding mad at Sasha for waking him up in the first place, at Clarissa for telling him not to break Sasha’s heart, and at this whole colony for being so perfectly self-destructive. He keeps yelling at people in his head. As he passes the geyser, it seems totally inert, a dry depression, but it could blow without warning. He keeps walking, the sun in his eyes, until he sees the first silhouettes on the horizon. The sun is behind him by the time he gets to the trees.

Up close, the white spikes rise up so far they seem to converge in the sky. Thousands of them, singing with the wind. Zigzag spikes extend from them, and they remind him of a power-staff Palm Strike experimented with wielding for a few months. Luc hasn’t felt anything like joy since he lost Rene, but he feels an unaccustomed thrill of wonder in the middle of all this.

Then he crouches down and opens his bag of equipment. Time to get to work. He grabs a soil sample and adds nanosensors to it.

The sun’s almost gone and two moons are taunting him, and he still can’t make sense of how these things live, or what they’re doing. They have no roots, no leaves. They fix the soil and make it fertile, that much is clear from his first samples—but they’re too far from the colony’s current site to farm here without relocating everyone. Which could actually be impossible, given that the colony only has a few small ATVs, and the exertion of moving would kill most of the colonists even quicker.

But if Luc could figure out what these things are, and how they live… He takes samples of their “bark,” he digs around them, he makes scans. He has a grinding headache, but he keeps working.

It’s almost a relief when Luc hears a loud crack and feels a gouging pain in his chest, and looks down to realize he’s been shot. He keels over, painting the white dust crimson. His chest is spurting blood like that geyser. He feels everything going black for a moment.

A moment later, he hears three sets of footsteps, feels their heavy tread as they stand around him. “We’ll bury him out here,” one woman says. “They’ll never know.”

“They better not find out,” a man says. “They still think this clown can feed the starving masses.”

“We had no choice,” a second man responds. “He was getting too close to the truth.”

The man who spoke last kicks Luc’s body. And Luc grabs his foot with both hands and twists, snapping the man’s ankle. As Luc rises, he flings the first man at the second, and they both fall in a tangle. The woman is the one with the gun, and she’s raising it to aim at his head. He knocks it out of her grasp.

Fighting in high gravity is everything Luc feared. He keeps misjudging his swings and overbalancing. And then just as he finally connects with the second guy’s neck, he remembers to pull his punch. His whole fighting style is adapted to a world of paramedics and ambulances. But even a fairly minor injury could wind up being fatal this far from any doctors, and he has no idea how bad sepsis can be here with the local bacteria. So he can’t afford to hurt these people too much, even as they’re trying to kill him. They take turns kicking him and lashing him with their fists, with each blow landing harder than it would on Earth. Luc’s head rings, and it dawns on him that he’s on a pretty good trajectory to lose this fight.

The one bright spot is they’ve lost their only gun somewhere down in the billowing dirt. He finds it first, with his foot, and he steps down on it until he hears metal splinter. After that, he staggers out of the way of the larger man’s roundhouse and grabs him, bringing his head and the woman’s together with as much gentleness as he can manage. They fall on either side of him. The last man, the one whose ankle he broke, cowers as Luc grabs his stubbly throat.

Time to put on the best Palm Strike voice. Sounds throatier in the high-nitrogen air. “Where is Dark Shard?” he bellows. “Who sabotaged my cryo-unit?”

“I don’t know.” The scrawny man weeps. “What are you talking about? I don’t even understand.” Broken Ankle is staining his pants, and Luc believes he has no idea what Luc is asking. At least Broken Ankle gives up the location of the lab where the drugs are manufactured: the basement of a red house upriver from the town where the water isn’t too polluted.

Luc lets Broken Ankle fall next to his friends, then notices that the “tree” he was examining now has a hole in it, thanks to the bullet that went through Luc’s chest. And he catches a glimpse of something dark in motion. A lot of somethings, in fact.

Luc puts a swab inside the hole, and pulls out a number of tiny mites, the biggest of them no more than a centimeter wide. They’re bright red with yellow stripes, and they have long proboscises and a dozen crooked legs each. If you happened to notice them, you’d think they were akin to termites. They’re not, though. They do eat the “trees” from the inside, but they also consume the surrounding soil and detoxify it, releasing nutrients in a form that the tree can use. Symbiosis. He puts one of the mites into a soil sample he collected earlier, from the barren fields near the colony, and dumps them into a continuous monitor tube. Pretty soon, the soil shows up as fertile.

Luc analyzes a few of these mites using every test he can think of, then on a hunch he bends over Broken Ankle’s face with his swab full of bugs. “Open up,” he growls. Broken Ankle tries to clamp his mouth shut, but Luc threatens to smack him again, so he opens up and takes his medicine. And seems to suffer no ill effects, at least not during the time it takes Luc to haul him back to the thugs’ vehicle, an all-terrain buggy parked on a nearby rise, and drive him back to the colony.

“That’s the nicest thing I’ve ever force-fed to someone like you,” Luc tells Broken Ankle, who has wiry gray hair, freckles and a habitual look of terror and alarm. Habitual the whole time Luc has known him, at least. Broken Ankle tells Luc again where they make the drugs, but not where they put the food they collect from the addicts.

Luc leaves Broken Ankle in a ditch within crawling distance of Hopetown, then he goes back to Sasha’s house. When he gets there, there’s no sign of her anywhere. Clarissa is sleeping in a chair near the door, but she wakes up when Luc comes in. “Where’s Sasha?” Clarissa asks, before Luc can ask her the same thing. “I thought she must have gone off with you.”

“No,” Luc says. “I’ve been gone all day, and half the night.”

Luc searches the house and its surroundings for any sign of Sasha, convinced that the same assholes who tried to kill him must have sent someone to take care of her. He feels the familiar jagged rock in his stomach. If they harm her, he will forget his earlier mercy; he will rain permanent injury down on them.

Just as Luc is about to run back to interrogate Broken Ankle one more time, Clarissa notices her oceanographer kit is gone, including the binoculars and the special shoes that keep you from getting yanked away by the dangerous waves. “She’s gone to the beach,” Clarissa says, as if this is something Sasha does a lot. Go to the beach, in the middle of the night. “It’s where her father is,” Clarissa adds. She shrugs and shakes her head when Luc asks if she wants to come along.

Sure enough, Sasha is sitting on a giant rock, dangling her giant shoes in the froth kicked up by the giant waves. Luc comes and sits beside her, but he doesn’t say anything.

“My dad went on one of those expeditions to the northern jungle,” Sasha says, staring at the rough surf. “He hated hot weather. We buried his body right over there.” She points at a rockpile that’s half underwater.

“I was worried about you,” Luc says.

“I thought you had decided to ditch us,” Sasha said. “Or something happened to you. You just took off, without any explanation. I figured we’d seen the last of you.”

“I’m not used to having to explain myself to anyone.” The moons lace the angry water with silver lines. The air is brine-scented. “I had to do something on my own. And I’m not sure you want to be around for what I’m going to do next, either.”

She turns and looks at him. “Why’s that?”

“I just… You know all of these people, right? You grew up with them. This is a small town, I keep forgetting how small. I just hurt some people and I’m about to hurt some more people. I figure that could be hard for you to watch.”

“I want to watch.” She looks fierce. “I want to help. My dad died for this place.”

“Okay. Did you find me a second glove?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I have a complete outfit, in a crate under my bed. It’s even sort of black, sort of.”

“Okay. One more question,” Luc says. “Do you know anything about setting explosives?”

She shakes her head.

“Would you like to learn?”

Sasha nods, slowly.

WHo was Dark Shard? Was Dark Shard even a person? Did different people take turns wearing that costume? Luc spent all this time thinking of Dark Shard as his nemesis, but he knew nothing about him. Luc is slowly letting go of the idea that Dark Shard might have made the trip to Newfoundland, because the more he sees of the local drug dealers, the less they resemble Dark Shard’s crew. He’s never going to get perfect closure, no matter what happens. This isn’t even about him.

Somehow, realizing this makes Luc feel lighter, even as his improvised Palm Strike uniform is weighing him down. He has a tough time conjuring the menace of Palm Strike with a tween girl on his heels chattering loudly about righting the colony’s wrongs.

“Listen,” Palm Strike tells Sasha. “When we get to the drug lab, I’m going to need you to hang back, okay? You to see what happens next, that’s fine—but don’t get in harm’s way. I can’t be hurt, not really, but you can.”

“I’m going to get hurt, one way or the other, if we don’t fix this. I chose to come along and help. We’re in this together.”

“Yeah. Just, I don’t know, be careful. Your mom would kill me.”

Upriver from town, where the water is still relatively clean, a red building houses an industrial laundry facility. A dozen people with guns and machetes are guarding it in the middle of the night.

Palm Strike signals for Sasha to take cover, and uses the river to mask his footsteps, sloshing only slightly as he wades upstream. Then he climbs a jagged rock, leaps, and catches the edge of the building’s roof with one hand. Moments later, he drops off the other side and lands on top of the man with the biggest gun. After that, it’s one big knife fight in close quarters, with Palm Strike using the high gravity to his advantage for a change, staying low and letting his opponents overbalance. He brings his forearm down onto one man’s neck, while headbutting the woman who’s trying to choke him. Gently. No life-threatening injuries. He executes one move straight out of Rene’s high-gravity dance routine, but there’s no time to dwell on the past.

In the midst of the fracas, Palm Strike keeps moving, heading for the door they were guarding, which leads to a basement.

In the basement, there’s a giant vat of ochre sludge, surrounded by people wearing masks and smocks. They’re all shooting at him. He’s finally starting to like this planet.

Becky Hoffman is still asleep when Palm Strike comes through her bedroom window. The tableau is so reminiscent of Dark Shard visiting Luc’s bedroom that he has to shudder. He gets out of the way long enough to let Sasha slip in behind him. Hoffman sits up in bed and stifles a gasp when she sees his dark shape looming over her bed. “Deveaux?” she says. “What the hell are you—”

“I solved the food problem,” he growls. “There are billions of tiny mites that live in the soil around those trees, the ones you destroyed with your terraforming procedures. They eliminate the toxins and acidity from the soil. They’ll have to be reintroduced to your growing areas, which will be a slow painful process. In the mean time, though, the bugs themselves are high in protein, renewable, and easy to transport.”

“That’s great news.” She blinks. “Why didn’t you just come to my office in a few hours to tell me?”

“Because three people tried to kill me tonight. I couldn’t figure out what secret was so important they’d be willing to kill to protect it. Everybody knew they were trading drugs for food, so that couldn’t be it. And meanwhile, I still couldn’t work out where they were putting the food they collected from the addicts. Until I finally realized: there was only one place on the drug dealers’ route at the end of the night that they could be leaving the food. The colony’s food dispensary. Where it came from in the first place. And that led me to you.”

“It’s a perfect system.” Misery displaces Hoffman’s last traces of sleepiness. “We hand out the same food rations, over and over.”

“That’s insane,” Sasha says, from the foot of Hoffman’s bed, where she’s standing. Hoffman startles, noticing the girl for the first time.

“We would have run out of food by now,” Becky Hoffman says to Luc. “We would all have starved.”

“Don’t explain to me,” Palm Strike snarls. “Explain to her.” He jerks a gloved hand in Sasha’s direction. “She’s one of your people. She was born here. This colony is all she’s ever known. You have to explain to her.”

“You’re too young to understand,” Hoffman pleads with Sasha. “We—I—had to make impossible choices. There wasn’t enough food. And it was a mercy. The people who use our drug don’t feel any hunger pains, and they don’t even notice their bodies shutting down. It gives people like you and Clarissa, good people, a chance to survive.”

Sasha stares at the colony’s leader, her mom’s boss, with tears streaming down her face. Luc has to remind himself she wanted to see this. “I don’t…” she gropes for an unaccustomed formality. “I don’t recognize your authority any longer.”

“I didn’t set up the drug operation,” Becky Hoffman says. She’s sweating, and inching her hand toward something under her pillow. A silent alarm? Her guards are already taken care of. “I found out about it. I told them they could work for me, or be executed. I turned it into a way to save the colony. This was the only way to ration the food that wouldn’t lead to riots.”

Becky Hoffman makes her move, pulling out a power-welder of the sort that you’d use to repair hull damage on a starship in flight. It’s the size and shape of a big fork, like you’d use on a pot roast. At close range, it would tear a hole in Palm Strike that even his healing mojo couldn’t begin to fix. He’s already on her, trying to pin her wrist, but she slips under his guard. She brings the power welder up and activates it, bringing it within a few centimeters of Palm Strike’s chest.

“Now,” he tells Sasha.

Sasha squeezes the remote she rigged up, and an explosion in the distance rattles the survival module so violently the emergency impact alarms go off, like a dozen electronic goats bleating. Hoffman’s grip loosens on the power-welder long enough for Palm Strike to knock it out of her grasp.

Palm Strike looks into Hoffman’s tear-soaked face and unleashes The Voice. “That was your drug lab. Next time, it’ll be your office. Your days of choosing who gets to live are over. You are going to help me fix this mess.” And then Palm Strike gestures for Sasha to go back out the window they came in. He takes the power-welder with him.

Luc digs until his arms are throbbing, and he’s waist deep in the hard, unyielding earth. Probably deep enough—he doesn’t want to hit one of those underground hot springs. Then he clambers back out, and tosses the helmet, safety vest, gloves and leggings into the hole. It’s not like burying the actual Palm Strike costume, but close enough. And if he needs safety gear later, he’ll know where some’s buried.

“Do you want to say some words?” Sasha asks. She’s hit a growth spurt, and her wrists and ankles are miles long. Even in the higher gravity, you get human beanpoles. Amazing.

“Don’t be stupid,” Luc grunts.

“We are gathered here today to remember Palm Strike,” Sasha intones.

“Cut it out,” Luc says. “Seriously.”

“He was a good man, even though we never knew who he really was. Some said he was a sea slug that oozed inside some old safety gear and pretended to be a man. But he fought for justice.”

Luc tunes out her terrible funeral oration, starts filling in the hole. He pauses just long enough to turn and look out at the farmland, where they’ve managed to transplant a handful of the “trees” from the other side of the geyser, and a few acres of sorghum are being planted. Too close together. You’ll want at least a couple feet between plants, or the mites will shred the roots. He’ll need to talk to McGregor about that. He’s almost done filling the hole, and Sasha is still nattering.

“—and he dedicated himself to helping people, unless they had really gross teeth or bad breath, in which case they were on their own.”

Luc slings the shovel over his shoulder, and wrestles with the temptation to tell her to shut the hell up for once. Instead, he just shrugs and says, “I knew this was a bad idea.”

The sun is going down. The parade of moons begins. Luc turns and walks back the way they came. Sasha doesn’t quit blabbing the whole way back to the colony, which is still filled with the susurration of a thousand people moaning in the grasp of drug withdrawal, like souls crawling out of hell. Part of Luc feels compassion at the sound, but another part of him finds the din weirdly comforting. It sounds like home.