Dropping her rifle, Talina clawed for her pistol, prepared to take as many of the little bastards with her as she could before they cut her to ribbons. As she lifted it, the lowest mobbers jinked sideways in flight, their squeal like an icepick through her ears.

With incomprehensible agility—the deafening squeal spreading up the column—the horde broke, jinked a couple meters to the left, and within seconds, fled into the trees.

As the chime began to rise again, Talina and Dek—spattered and dripping with blood and bits—were left alone beneath an open sky; offal, fluids, and pieces of dead and dying mobbers colored the patterned gneiss.

When Talina finally caught her breath, got her heart rate back to normal, and stopped the shaking in her arms and fingers, she dropped to a knee in the gore.

Placing a hand on Dek’s shoulder, she rolled him over, asking, “Hey, Dek. You all right?”

When she stared into his eyes, it was to meet a terror-locked stare. The man might have been catatonic.

“Dek? Dek! You okay?”

He blinked. Seemed to focus. As his eyes widened in terror, a bloodcurdling scream tore from his throat.

38

Kalico stared out the side window as her A-7 dropped from the sky toward Corporate Mine. As it lost altitude, she had a perfect view of her empire. Corporate Mine perched on a metal-rich ridge jutting out on the southeast side of the Corporate Range. Part of the crater’s rim, Corporate Range composed the southern arc of the Wind Mountains where they curved eastward toward the Gulf. On a resistant outcrop below the high peaks, Kalico had blasted a flat pad, built a fenced compound around a large dome and equipment yard, and erected two headstocks over the Number One and Number Two mines.

A tramline carried ore down the mountain and across the forested lowlands to the smelter where it had been built on the floodplain beside a bend in the river. Contiguous to it lay the small plot of farmland and the lower shuttle landing field. Landing field might have been a stretch; the thing consisted of nothing more than a thruster-baked red-dirt field. The faint scar of the slowly proceeding haul road could be seen where the trees had been held at bay by the struggling line of immature pines.

When she’d stepped out of the seatruck back on the beach pad and climbed into the A-7, Makarov had told her that her missing miners were Alia Fey and Stana Viola. The two had just driven the mucking machine into place and began removing ore when the roof goafed less than a hundred meters behind them. Meanwhile, Jin and Masters were servicing the drill back at the portal. The framing crew had been in the adit, preparing to haul timbers up to the working face. The miracle was that the cave-in hadn’t killed the entire crew.