A hundred years previously, people on Earth carefully recycled the last generation’s garbage, breaking down matter into its component atoms, refining their castoffs and sludge into useful compounds, ready to supply manufacturing and microfacturing industries. But now, with so much raw asteroid matériel streaming in at minimal cost, that energy-intensive processing of recycling old things was no longer financially viable.

Those fiscal conditions meant that obsolete items—for example, the Bureau’s fifteen-year-old Black Mariahs—were simply disposed of in the most economic fashion possible.

Just before the four-by-four carrying Alik went through the hub, the last Black Mariah drove into the giant cylindrical airlock and the door swung shut. The heavy-duty rim seal engaged. Carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide from the big extractor towers flooded in.

After all the nitrogen and oxygen had been expelled from the airlock, the door at the other end of the big metal cylinder opened, exposing the portal behind it, which twinned to Haumea station. The pressurized toxic gases acted like a shotgun cartridge, blasting the Black Mariahs out into trans-Neptune space.

Juloss

JULOSS

YEAR 591 AA

The fifteen boys and five girls that made up the Immerle clan’s current senior year were clumped together in a big old plaza, in the shade of a dilapidated seventy-story skyscraper. They had spent six days exploring the ancient abandoned city as part of their training, investigating and analyzing unfamiliar environments. The trip had been scheduled to end nineteen hours ago.

Their flyer hadn’t arrived. Their personal databuds had been glitchy for the whole expedition and had now dropped out of the planetary network. They were isolated, hundreds of kilometers away from the clan estate. Their supplies were low. They had no weapons. They were completely alone.

The meeting was generating a lot of nervous chatter and some outbreaks of near-panicked shouting as they tried to work out what to do. Suggestions were dismissed or endorsed abruptly. A plan began to emerge; they were to set up camp in a more sheltered spot. Weapons were to be improvised, signal fires to be lit—

Dellian smiled at that, remembering his own insistence about signal fires on the arid hillside where his yeargroup had been marooned. From his vantage point, perched unseen a hundred meters up the side of a nearby skyscraper, he could make out the worry and uncertainty on several faces, while a few of the boys had started to assume a more determined posture.

Time to stir things up.

His biologic pterodactyl’s talons let go, and he fell for thirty meters, building velocity. Then his wings opened wide, producing a leathery rushing sound. The avian beast had undergone a few artistic modifications from the original predator that had roamed Earth’s skies millions of years ago, specialist designers accentuating a more dangerous aesthetic. Dellian thought they might have been a little too enthusiastic; the big creature was practically a dragon.