‘He couldn’t have,’ the General wheezes. ‘Now stop gibbering and help me.’

She is searching through the wreckage for anything of use. I paw at the remains of the pilot’s seat with my good hand. Tools and old cans and disgusting rags tumble out of every pocket and compartment I search but, at last, I find what I’m looking for: an ancient, scratched tin box marked with a single red star. A guerrilla medkit.

I shove it inside my shirt. The emergency light flickers and dies.

In the darkness, something shifts, like a snake’s belly over sand.

When the light blinks back on, the General’s eyes are huge.

‘Water?’ I croak.

She nods, still staring about. ‘Half a canister. Stale.’

‘Rope?’

‘There are cables—’

‘Get one.’ My body threatens to give up, pain pulsing in waves, but there is one more thing I have to do. Clumsily, I reach down and drag the long, leather jacket from Moloney’s corpse. It is ripped and blood-soaked, but I persist, though my muscles are as good as useless.

The General returns and lets out a noise of disgust. ‘What are you doing?’

I thrust it at her. Her own jacket is ruined. ‘Night is cold.’ And we have a long way to walk.

Wincing, one hand clamped to her side, she puts it on. It swamps her, down to the ankles.

‘Now, tie us together.’

‘What?’

‘If one of us takes a wrong step…’

Her gaze flickers to the impenetrable darkness. She swears and loops the cable around her waist, teeth clenched.

‘Roped to a traitor,’ she mutters. ‘This is not how I’ll die.’ She squints ahead. ‘By my reckoning, that’s the direction we came from.’

I sway. The emergency light is little more than a faded glow, and beyond us, all around, is the unknown.

‘Low?’ the General says uncertainly.

In the last struggling flickers, I meet her eyes.

The light goes out.

* * *

The controls flash, the comms channel blares over and over as the hulk tries to reach me. The warden: she makes her voice soothing, makes it stern as she orders, entreats, bribes… Life, come back and we’ll be lenient, we’ll see that no more than another quarter is added to your sentence, we’ll overlook the assaults, come back now or we’ll have to give the Accord Forces permission to strike.

They’ll send out scouts faster than this pitiful escape craft. My hands are caked in blood as I paw at the controls. There’s enough power for one full acceleration and no more.

I scan the navigation screen, trying desperately to see where I am. They keep the hulks isolated, away from any major planets or moons, do not even tell us which sector we are in. There is nothing I recognise, just satellites and the dots of distant ships.