“Of course, Supervisor. I’ll have some food prepared and ready for you to—”

“After last night, I’m not sure I want to trust my health to anything Bill Martin might fix.”

Michaela’s eyes widened, her lips parting. “Certainly you don’t think he’d—”

“Director, I don’t know what the hell to think. Now, I’m packing my bag, and I’m going to want that seatruck waiting on the deck by the time I get there. So move!”

Kalico slammed the door in the woman’s face. Not that she had a lot to pack. She washed, threw her few things into the bag, and all the while was picturing the Number Three. That miserable hole through crumbling and dripping rock.

It’s cost me people? Who? How many?

More familiar faces, human beings with whom she had joked, eaten, and shared. Companions who had given their all in the effort to make Corporate Mine into a miracle.

When she stepped out onto the dock where the seatrucks were stored, a stiff wind blew in from the east. Given the looks of the white-capped swells, it was pushing a two-meter sea. Where she waited beside the seatruck, a stiff gust tried to push Michaela Hailwood off balance and ruffled the woman’s coveralls. Up in the seatruck’s cab, Bryan Atumbo sat at the wheel, his dark face a mixture of excitement and apprehension.

Kalico Aguila let her gaze shift from one to the other of them.

“I’m so sorry for all of this,” Hailwood told her. “I don’t know where all that anger came from. Shin dying the way he did, it sort of acted like a catalyst. Then, to have Lara go like that? It’s like they have lost all of their direction. When Anna said we should go it alone, they just all jumped on it, as if they’d found something to cling to even if it was wrong.”

Kalico grabbed her hair as the breeze tried to whip it around her face. “You have something to ponder here, Michaela. If your people are so lost, if they’re looking for something, it’s your job to find it for them. If there’s a failure here, it’s yours.”

The woman’s dark brown eyes widened, then hardened. “Don’t lay this on me, Supervisor. I did everything I was supposed to. I got my people out of Deck Three, kept them unified. I got them to Donovan. No one prepared me for what we’d find here. It’s The Corporation’s fault. They should have given me the tools I’d need to keep my people safe.”

Kalico chuckled. “Shig Mosadek once told me that if I could overcome my cultural baggage, look past who I used to be back in the Solar System, I could accomplish great things on Donovan. Maybe you can, too.”