My tie was loose. With shaky hands, I pulled it off altogether and stuffed it into a drawer. On the wall beside me, a two-dimensional map showed the surrounding terrain, with pins and coloured stickers to mark troop positions and major strategic targets—nearly all of them guesses based on observations by our pilots. Everything here was so low-tech. I would have given my left nut for a decent satellite overview of the front lines, but every time we put one up, the government knocked it down. And it wasn’t as if I had resources to burn. Even replacing one of the rattling, aluminium-sided supply planes could take four to six weeks, during which time our allies in the mountains would have to ration their ammunition and tighten their belts over empty bellies.

The hard truth was that as far as Conglomeration Intelligence was concerned, this civil war simply wasn’t a priority. Viewed from a hundred light years away, it was scarcely more than a nasty provincial scuffle. We were covertly supplying arms, food and medicine to the guerrillas opposing the government, but that was the extent of our involvement. The top brass could have sent a couple of Scimitar warships and a few thousand ground troops to end the conflict in a matter of hours. Unfortunately, this planet lay on a political fault line between the Conglomeration and the Outward Faction, and so we were reduced to acting through civilian front organisations. As far as the universe beyond this mud ball was concerned, I was the proprietor of a charitable aircraft haulage company employing seven pilots and two-dozen mechanics, shipping humanitarian supplies to refugees displaced by the fighting. In reality, our materiel drops only prolonged the insurgency, destabilising the entire region.

I wiped my forehead on my sleeve. I hadn’t felt clean since I’d been here. Even cold showers were effective only as long as I remained beneath them. Seconds after emerging, I’d start to sweat again.

I tapped the pistol with an unsteady fingertip, setting it spinning. It made a grinding noise on the pocked and dented metal surface of the desk.

The drawer that now held my screwed-up tie also held a clear plastic bag containing three sticks of barracuda weed, a mildly addictive local root. I stuck one in the corner of my mouth and squeezed it between my teeth, allowing its bitter sap to mix with my saliva.

Chewing barracuda weed took the edge off. It stopped my hands from shaking, but couldn’t completely numb me to the endless days of administrative tedium punctuated by the occasional interruptions of searing terror—such as last week, when a government drone strafed the airfield and I’d had to take cover beneath this very desk. As an assignment, this had to be the worst I could have been given. The only mystery was what I had done to deserve such treatment.