“Try not to touch any of the dying trees,” Kylee told her. “And avoid as much of the spilled sap as you can. Chabacho, aquajade, and stonewood won’t hurt you, but there’s probably a lot of vine sap and other stuff that might eat your skin off and kill you.”

Falise side-skipped where she’d been about to put her foot. “Does this shit ever end?”

“So, you’d rather be back at Inga’s in third place?” Kylee asked as she started across the obstacle course of cracked, smashed, and splintered timber. The shining silver hulk of the shuttle lay another fifty meters upslope. “You’re about to rescue the Inspector General. Ought to set you up just right with the sorry-assed legally constipated prig.”

“How do you know what a prig even is?” Falise’s legs had started to ache from the exertion; her lungs were starved for breath as she picked her way across the uneven wreckage. This wasn’t the first time she’d sweated this much. But last time had been in a sauna, with a cold drink at hand.

“It might not have been by exalted Taglionis on Transluna, but being raised by my mothers at Mundo was sort of a comprehensive education. At least up until I was nine.”

That’s when Kylee stopped, gaping at the wrecked shuttle. “Wow! Would you look at the size of thing?”

“You act like you’ve never seen a shuttle.”

“Never been this close to one. Hard to believe these things can actually fly.”

Falise made her way up a deep scrape in the soil, stepped wide to avoid something wiggling in the dirt, and arrived at the back of the left wing. On the other side, the right was pretty smashed up. Hydraulic fluid was leaking out of a crack in the smooth sialon. And there was a stench. Smelled like fried electronics. A couple of invertebrates—blue-violet shelled things—skittered across the wing’s sialon surface.

To Falise’s surprise, Kylee set her rifle to the side, bent, and cupped her hands to offer Falise a foot up. To her greater surprise, the young woman practically catapulted her onto the wing, streaked with dried vegetative matter as it was. How strong was that kid, anyway?

Then Kylee grabbed her rifle and vaulted up, led the way to the wing’s bent and buckled leading edge where a matting of crushed aquajade and assorted vegetation was desiccating and adding yet another aroma to the hot dense air that reminded Falise of burned ginger. The mass of splintered foliage swarmed with invertebrates that appeared to be devouring the stems and fluids. Beyond, on the fuselage, just ahead of the wing root, they could see the main hatch. Blocked by broken and piled vegetation, there was no way that was going to be opened anytime soon.

“Boost?” Falise asked, pointing to the fuselage’s high curve.