We’re still waiting for the fight when shadows part, and a few pairs of troopers step into the light with buckets in their hands. They slosh water up and down the line, running it out in deep ladles. They spill it over our chins and our shirts and across our blistered skins, but each of us gets a fair measure of the company’s generosity.

It’s shipboard-stale and almost unbearably cold, but for a few moments, it’s the only thing that matters in the entire universe.

At the end, we find ourselves under the eyes of a short man in a pair of red overalls.

“Folau,” he says, in a voice to match his size. “Anyone here by the name of Folau?”

“Folau!” adds a nearby marine, more loudly. “Is there a Folau here?”

“Thank you, sergeant.”

The line doesn’t move. We’re still recovering, still gawking at the man who came to find us. His eyes are small and sharp and crow-footed at the corners. Engine grease inhabits every wrinkle, but misses the bristle-brush moustache perching on his lip.

“Is there an Arko Folau here?”

“Arko Folau!” yells the sergeant. “Show yourself!”

“Who’s asking?”

The chain gang chuckles.

I don’t know too many people on the line. When you’re locked up, you cluster around familiar things. Mannerisms, for the most part, language and accent close behind, and anything else that gives you something to relate. Salt is colonial, while Lear and I are corporate, but all three of us were jockeys once upon a time, and it’s easy enough to see. We picked each other out in the first few seconds after we met, and after that, we kept to ourselves. We spent our time on the barges together, and before that on Kiruna station. Before that, on the shimmer-ship that brought us from the edge of familiar space, launched from a silo on Syndamere. Before that, in Reveley Prison, sharing tables in the mess, and watching out for each other on the yard.

If you know where to look, the line is full of little cliques like ours. Former soldiers, pilots and mercs, bloodhounds and hunters and helix-tricks. There are a few plain ol’ convicts in the mix, a handful of thieves and murderers added in for good measure, but they’re even more obvious than everyone else.

Most of us don’t know more than a bare handful of the others, but everyone knows Folau.

I don’t know what he did before he ended up on the chain, but wherever it was, it burned out any sense of fear he might have had before. Wouldn’t be much of a problem if it was anyone but Folau, but his brain has a direct line to the muscles that move his face around.

The moustache looks him up and down, takes a breath to speak, but Folau cuts him off.