“Surely a ship-to-surface freight shuttle would be more economical,” Ratthi said, studying the scan images. He was with me and Amena in the meeting room off the galley. “Isn’t the Corporation Rim obsessed with how much things cost? Couldn’t they have used this material to make more habitable structures on the planet?”

I had never been on a contract with a colony like this, but I knew the answer to that one. “It’s to keep the humans and augmented humans from leaving the planet.”

Amena looked up at me, confused. “Huh?”

I explained, “If they used shuttles, a group might organize, take over the shuttle, and use it to get up to the supply ship. Then they could escape.” Granted, the Targets had done that via the space dock, but they had had to find a way to force the Barish-Estranza contact party to help them. If a bunch of desperate colonists came up in the drop box, the ship could just do a quick detach from the dock’s airlock and it would be unreachable. It wasn’t a foolproof method but it was 90 percent effective. (Foolproof is another weird word. Shouldn’t it be smartproof? It’s not like you’re going to breach and seize control of a ship attached to a space dock by tripping or forgetting to bring your weapon or something.)

Amena looked horrified. Ratthi’s expression did a whole progression. He said, “Are you telling us the colonists here were prisoners?”

“It’s a possibility. Humans don’t want to be dumped on unimproved planets with no control over their air, water, and food resources.” I mean, who would? Mining installations are horrible, but at least the humans were getting paid for their work (sort of, mostly, sometimes) and the supplies were usually reliable. And mining installations were too expensive to just abandon.

I didn’t know much about the kind of colonies meant to settle partially terraformed planets because the company had never bonded them. Which should tell you how dangerous they are right there, if the company thought the budget was so tight that the whole operation was unrealistic. Terraforming projects designed to get everything livable and ready way before the humans and augmented humans moved in were expensive longterm investments, but they didn’t fail like this.

Ratthi shook his head and waved his arms. “I’m not even surprised anymore. I think I’ve been in the Corporation Rim too long.”

Hey, me too.

“So not only do they just dump the people on planets and leave them to die, but they force them to go there in the first place.” Amena’s expression was half boggled and half furious.

“Theoretically not.” Theoretically the colony is continually supplied until it becomes self-sufficient and starts producing its own resources and the original colonists are released from indenture. But you know how that goes.

“But the colonists are not volunteers,” Thiago clarified over the general feed.

“Sometimes they are,” I said, because I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. There’s volunteering, going into something where you knew what it might be like but wanted to do it anyway, for whatever reason, like when I had gone to Milu. And then there was “volunteering,” where you did something you shouldn’t have to do because the alternative was getting your insides fried by your governor module, or whatever the human equivalent was.