Half a kilometre ahead, the canyon branched, and then branched again a little way further beyond. I chose the right-hand fork at the first junction, then the left at the second, convinced that if my choices were random, our movements would be harder for our pursuers to predict. As long as we kept moving and avoided dead ends, we would be able to stay ahead of anyone travelling on foot.

I didn’t mention the main anxiety gnawing at me: that if our attackers used their shuttle to sweep the canyons from above, we’d be as conspicuous down here as cockroaches in a laboratory maze. We had nowhere to take shelter and no way of fighting back. Our only hope was that they’d spend their time checking over the wreck rather than chasing down strays.

Twenty: Sal Konstanz

TWENTY

SAL KONSTANZ

I found it impossible to tell whether Armand Mulch’s moustache was intentional, or whether the bristles on his unshaven face simply grew more thickly in the region between his nose and upper lip. Whatever the truth, the overall effect was one of lubricious indolence, and I sensed that, despite the misdirection of his business suit, he was a man suited less to the bright lights and civilised discourse of the mainstream and more to the raw and shady politics of this out-of-the-way shithole, where the only real laws were those of unvarnished chance and necessity.

I had met his kind many times, on many worlds.

“Okay.” I swirled the drink in the bottom of my glass. “You must have known there’d be no way I’d take that many passengers.”

We were inside now, seated at one of the saloon’s tables. Mulch leant back and smiled, playing the gracious host. “I thought I might appeal to your better nature.”

I gave him a look. I didn’t have time for bullshit. “I leave in ten minutes,” I told him.

I watched him smooth down the edges of his moustache with a licked thumb tip.

“That is a real shame,” he said. He looked down at his fingernails.

Behind him, the front door opened. The pair who stepped into the bar looked, at first glance, to be a perfectly normal couple. Their clothes were unflattering and unfashionable, and had obviously been printed by the same tailor from the same set of templates. They could almost have been a couple of civilian off-worlders whose safari had taken an unexpected turn; and yet there was something in the straightness of their postures (and the way they positioned themselves to keep both of the room’s exits within their peripheral visual fields) that screamed military and, maybe worse, military intelligence.

“Are these two with you?” I asked Mulch. I thought they might be his enforcers, here to help persuade me.

Mulch shook his head. He stood as they approached us.

“Captain Konstanz?” the man asked.