I cry a warning, but it’s too late. She pulls the trigger, and the Rook’s fuel tank explodes in a paroxysm of flames, sending it crashing to earth.

* * *

We don’t stop until we’re certain we are not being followed.

‘Is it safe, here?’ I croak, in the abrupt silence.

‘Don’t know.’ Falco pulls the scarf from her face. She looks haggard. ‘But the engine is fit to bust. If we don’t let it cool we won’t make it another mile, let alone to the Pit.’

‘You think they’ll follow us?’

‘Moloney might look like a bit of meat with eyes, but he’s a vicious bastard. Rooks don’t dare mess with us in Landfall. Out here though…’

A mare rumbles up beside us. It carries Pegeen and a second, slumped figure.

‘Boots is hurt!’ Peg yells.

The other G’hal is bleeding heavily from a head wound, her glasses missing, her skin grazed and torn from scalp to hip. She’s conscious, but barely. When we slide her from the back of the mare, she lets out a cry of pain.

Falco’s eye is bright with tears as she holds Boots’s face. ‘Doc?’

‘Bring her up here.’ I unclip the medkit. ‘I can treat her as we ride.’

The General gives up her seat. All the savage energy of the fight has left her, and now her eyes are raw and red, her face strained beneath a paste of dust and fuel.

‘What can I do?’ she asks.

I glance at her. Had she fought in the war like that, with so little thought for her own life? Or is it the recklessness of the dying? ‘You have done enough,’ I say.

‘We owe you our lives,’ Pegeen agrees, tearfully.

Falco shakes her head. ‘Never thought I’d be thanking a starred General of the Accord for anything, but Peg’s right. You saved our hides back there. Though god knows how you did it.’

The General smiles at last, her dry lips cracking. ‘That ship was a repurposed scout. A Peregrine 420. They have a tank in the belly for easy refuelling. Stupid design.’

‘Still, must have been a thousand to one chance of hitting a target like that, let alone moving, let alone in the dark.’

The General shrugs. ‘For you, maybe.’

I know what she means. For us ordinary humans. I stay quiet as Falco starts the engine and we move on, concentrating on treating Boots, and ignoring the clash of awe and pity and horror that fills me every time I look at the General.

Finally, when Boots’s wounds are dressed and she lies on the seats, breathing more easily, I look down. The General hunches on the floor of the wagon in her yellow jacket, like a sick bird, her eyes closed.

‘How are you feeling?’ I ask awkwardly, reaching to touch her forehead.