The room trembled as another cargo plane lumbered skywards, carrying food and ammunition for the rebels in the mountains. We listened to the sound of its engines fade into the jungle’s evening chorus.

Wreathed in mist, the mountains were treacherous to navigate at the best of times. If Harris had been flying tired and strung out, it was quite possible he’d simply flown into the ground, or hit one of those huge manta ray creatures. It had happened before, to other pilots under similar circumstances. These guys were civilian contractors operating in a combat zone. They weren’t used to taking fire while flying at low altitude through difficult terrain. When the stress finally got to them—and it inevitably did—they either bought themselves out of their contracts or they ended up like Harris.

I poured a beer from the pitcher.

The rebels could print their own guns, but they didn’t have the facilities or time to manufacture the quantities of ammunition and medicine needed to support their campaign. Instead, a Conglomeration freighter passed through the fringes of the system once a fortnight and released a cargo pod on a slow, unpowered trajectory that eventually brought it parachuting down into the ocean a few kilometres from the mouth of the delta. From there, local fishermen recovered the anonymous crates within and brought them here, to this airbase, where they were loaded onto planes and dropped once again, this time into the mountains.

In the early days of the operation, I’d ridden along on most of the sorties, establishing relationships with some of the local guerrilla chiefs, negotiating the terms of our aid. Then, about two months after first setting foot on this rock, I’d made the mistake of landing on the outskirts of a village recently “liberated” by the rebels. Palls of ash-white smoke lingered in the turgid mid-afternoon air. Nothing else moved. Most of the villagers had perished as their dwellings were burned. Their remains were blackened sticks among the smouldering piles of their former homes. The dozen or so that had survived had been tied to stakes in the village square. Some had been shot, others eviscerated, and their entrails spilled into the dust at their feet. Their corpses sagged against their damp restraints, heads bowed. From the way the stakes had been set in a rough semi-circle, I guessed that, before they’d been killed, they’d been made to watch as their livestock had been impaled, one on top of the other, on a long bamboo spike.

And when the livestock had run out, the rebels had made a second spike and started impaling children, starting with a boy of around thirteen, and then working down by age, from oldest to youngest…

My left eye twitched. I hadn’t been into the mountains since. I cleared my throat, pushing the memory aside.

“Have you heard from your bosses recently?”