With that, she turns smartly and walks towards the gates, her head held high. No thanks, no emotion. I watch as the soldiers level their guns at her, as she makes a dismissive gesture, flicking her head to show the tattoos. They snap to attention. I watch as the huge, riveted gate slides open and she walks through, her small figure swallowed by the dark.

There is a pain in my chest and noise in my head. I don’t want it there, and so I go to find myself a drink.

* * *

Landfall might have changed, but Falco’s is the same.

The bar had once been a container used to ship arms for the Accord. Falco has decorated every inch of the walls with bright, brash, obscene graffiti, at odds with the drabness of the Accord base. They might have built this moon, she once said with a laugh, but that doesn’t make it theirs.

Unlike Sorry Damovitch, or most people, the prison hulks didn’t hold Falco back for long. The story went that she had been born to a wealthy merchant family, but her parents had lost everything in a trade deal gone bad. Other people said she had been born on one of the original supply haulers, during their first long trip to Brovos and the border moons.

Whatever the truth, it’s a generally accepted fact that, when the war came, she enlisted with the Accord for the sole purpose of robbing them blind. After years of racketeering, profiteering, fencing and blackmail, she was finally caught and sentenced as a Nine. But facility after facility found themselves compromised by her activities; prison walls seemed to turn into sieves around her. Finally, after eighteen months a warden gave up, commuted her sentence to time-served and issued her the name Malady as an insult. It didn’t land. In fact, they say, she was delighted.

Now, Falco’s is the number one place in Landfall Five to do business. I step through the first door of the airlock and wait for the second to open. As soon as it does, my chest loosens. Despite the crowded bar, the air within is cool, clean. I breathe deep, feeling the rush of oxygen to my head. Few people on Factus are powerful or well-connected enough to have their own augmented air supply.

Music plays, a bouncy, jittery pop song I’ve never heard. I pause beside the bar to listen as the song ends and the announcer takes over.

… another icy hit from the steel-eyed sirens. I’m Lester Sixofus and we’re coming at you from – where are we? – somewhere near Ithmid XBI and rollin’ on. News from the cruise: cow-quarantines on Brovos, tech warehouse strikes on Jericho and nickel tycoon Lutho Xoon has been appointed First Premier of oh-so-glamorous Delos. Well done, sir. Now…

‘Taplicker!’