On the second day of our flight from Camrose Station, we dropped back into the universe. Operating well beyond her safety limits, the Trouble Dog had already burned through an unacceptably high percentage of her fuel. Ordinarily, the ship could have made the entire trip using her on-board reserves. Under normal conditions, a little antimatter could power the ship for weeks, but a velocity increase of fifty per cent required double the amount of fuel; an increase of seventy-five per cent demanded quadruple. The faster we travelled, the more reserves we consumed, and we didn’t want to get to the crash site without enough in hand to haul urgent casualties straight back to civilisation. The Dog needed to eject the antimatter cores it had used and replenish what it had spent. In order to do that, we’d been ordered to make landfall at Cichol, an out-of-the-way planet close to the ragged edge of human-controlled space. Better to stop there and top up now than be forced to do so on the way back, when our infirmary might be burdened by several hundred wounded.

Cichol was too insignificant and too far from the main shipping lanes to warrant the construction of an orbital dockyard. Instead, the Trouble Dog would have to descend through the atmosphere to the main ground-based facility, situated on a rocky plateau above a wide river valley on the planet’s northernmost continent.

“Savages,” it muttered. I didn’t reply. I was still stiff from having slept in the inflatable raft. Instead, I watched from the bridge as we drifted across the landing field and sank towards a section of tarmac adjacent to a row of condensation-laden hydrogen tanks. Two parallel rows of improvised buildings stretched away at a right angle to the main runway, forming the settlement’s main street. A few were prefabricated or printed from recognisable templates, but the rest had been constructed from whatever materials had come to hand, be that metal, stone, wood or plastic. Some were accommodation blocks; others sported frontages that marked them out as workshops, stores or saloons.

The town was called Northfield. It was situated on the edge of the planet’s arctic circle, far from the humid jungles that ringed the equator. Gritty snow lay in the shadows the sun couldn’t penetrate; the streets were a mush of mud and slush. Wrapped in thick coats and wide-brimmed hats, the townsfolk watched from their doorways and balconies as we slowed to a halt in the air. The edges of the landing field’s concrete apron had grown cracked and mossy. I guessed ship visits were few and far between, and the sudden appearance of a Carnivore-class fighting machine—even a defanged one—would be something of a novelty.