out the door and saw people jumping to the ground, shooting toward the other set of colonists. His platoon was shouting, but the colonists were leaving them alone. Damn, now they really were in the middle of a firefight. “Move it, Elena,” he said.
She finished fastening three horizontal panels on the bottom of the sheeting. “Watch your fingers,” she warned Greg, lowering the makeshift stretcher to the ground next to Goldjani. “The edges are a little rough.”
Goldjani, subdued, didn’t resist when Greg and Elena slid him gently onto the stretcher. If they hurt him further, he didn’t let on. Stubborn kid. Greg remembered himself at nineteen, powered by nothing but hormones and self-righteous anger. He would have been equally stupid in Goldjani’s situation. “I have to warn you,” he said, hoping to cheer the kid up, “my doctor’s kind of a dick.”
“Then why do you keep him?” At least Goldjani was making an effort.
“Because he mixes really good drinks and lets me win at cards,” Greg told him. Goldjani smiled, and Greg thought it was partly genuine.
“Anything here you need to bring?” he asked Elena.
“No. Wait!” She dashed to the front of the shuttle and retrieved something off the floor: a box, about fifteen centimeters across. From the way she lifted it, it was either empty or contained something quite light. She tucked it into her pocket. “Bear’s going to have my damn head,” she said, giving a resigned glance around the shuttle. Then she looked back at him, businesslike, determined, familiar. “Let’s get out of here before somebody drops a nuke on those guys.”
She took Goldjani’s head, and Greg lifted the corrugated sheet at his feet. He commed Bristol and Darrow. “We’re coming out with wounded,” he said. “Cover us.”
They lifted, and he backed out of the shuttle, steadying himself in the dirt before Elena came out after him. The colonists were all in front of Sparrow now, ignoring Herrod’s repeated exhortations for a cease-fire, shooting determinedly at each other. Along with the shooting, there were a couple of fistfights. In the training vids, enemies were always expert and organized, with a strategy discernible after a few minutes of observation. In reality, colony squabbles were almost always made up of a bunch of homeowners engaged in a deadly slap-fight with their neighbors.
Before they could make it to the door, a plasma flare sped past Greg’s head, and he swore. “One more shot like that,” he shouted, “and we’ll blow it up, do you hear me? We’ve got wounded here! Stand the fuck down!”
Another shot went wide, and they started scrambling for the door. “When we get inside,” Greg told Darrow, “fire one shot directly back at Budapest’s shuttle, and withdraw.”
Goldjani protested. “You really want them to blow up the cargo?”
“Plasma cannon won’t breach the cargo containers,” Elena told him. “But it’ll destroy the shuttle and make a hell of a statement. They’ll leave us alone long enough for us to get out of here.”
Another shot caught the side of Sparrow, and Greg cursed. “Now, Darrow!” he shouted, hauling his end of the stretcher into the ship.
Darrow aimed the cannon and fired, and Greg realized they should have been farther away.
The shuttle blew instantly, the chemical flame lighting up the landscape. The shipping containers, as advertised, were jostled by the blast but undamaged. But the seed they had dumped into the dirt was vaporized, a cloud of dust sinking slowly in the low gravity. Greg knew the colonists could see it, too.
The platoon hustled inside, the door closing behind them. Greg and Elena set Goldjani’s stretcher down, and he left her to seal the door while he went to the pilot’s seat to get them out of there. Herrod was already standing, giving up his place.
The grain distraction had worked, at least in part. Some of the colonists had rushed over to the cargo containers, tugging at them, desperately trying to pull them aside. Desperately. There was a lot of seed, but their actions suggested they needed every bit of it, including what had been destroyed. “Is there more?” Greg asked Elena.
“On Nova Ganymede,” she said. “Six weeks away.”
Of course. “Get him secure,” Greg told his soldiers grimly. “We’re getting out of here.”
More colonists had surrounded the containers, ignoring Sparrow’s weapons. They were squabbling again, shoving at each other. Someone behind the row of colonists began to fire, and the people began to drop, one by one in a row, from both sides. “But—” Arin broke off. “Can’t you stop them?”
“We’ve got nothing to stop them with,” Greg said, as gently as he could. And he lifted them off, abandoning the chaos, pointing Sparrow’s nose at the pristine stars.
Greg lifted them off slowly, most likely in deference to the people on the ground, but Elena didn’t think his consideration would be necessary much longer. She had seen far too many squabbles go this way. In a few minutes, Yakutsk would be down five-hundred-odd colonists, and the dome governments would be back to accusations and raids. Or worse.
And she wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing to help.
She sat on the floor next to Arin, gripping the bench as the shuttle rose through Yakutsk’s light gravity and began generating its own field, stabilizing them. Shit. She was going to have to comm Bear.
“Greg,” she said, “can I have comms control?”
Across from her, Admiral Herrod sat in silence. She wanted to tell him to say something; his silence was unnerving. But he had helped, she realized. He had kept the shooters off them long enough for them to get Arin to safety. He had done something good.
Even a stopped clock is right once a day.
“Go ahead,” Greg said from the pilot’s cabin.
Bear picked up almost immediately. “Shaw? What the fuck? Have you got Arin?”
“He’s here,” she said. “He’s safe. We’re headed back to Galileo.”
“Fuck Galileo,” Bear snapped. “You need to get your ass back here. Did you drop those supplies?”
“He’s injured, Bear.”
Bear went silent for a moment. “How bad?”
Even with her isolated existence, Elena knew the tone: the stomach-knotting fear of a parent too far from a sick child. “He’s talking,” Greg interceded. “He was steady as a rock out there.”
“I’m fine,” Arin said, trying to sound reassuring.
But Bear didn’t want their reassurances. “Elena?”
“He’s got a concussion,” she said, “and I think a ruptured spleen. But the internal bleeding is under control. We’ll be back on Galileo in—” She turned to meet Greg’s eyes.
“Fifteen
