like that. Just wander off into the dark and get killed horribly, one by one.
‘I’ll turn up the flier lights,’ Sal said, reaching for the interior. ‘If ness, we can lift off and--’
‘ILEN!’ Taince shouted at the top of her lungs. Fassin jumped. He hoped the others hadn’t noticed.
‘… Over here.’ Ilen’s voice came, very distantly, from further inside the wreck.
‘Wandering off!’ Sal shouted in the general direction Ilen’s voice had come from. ‘Not good idea! In fact, very bad idea! Suggest return immediately!’
‘Peeing in front of peers problem,’ the reply drifted back. ‘Bashful bladder syndrome. Relieved, returning. Speak normal now, or Len get Tain poke Sal eye out.’
Taince grinned. Fassin had to turn away. Sometimes, through all the almost wilfully unjustified reticence and uncertainty, and often at moments like this when you might least expect it, Ilen surprised him by doing or saying something like this. She made his insides hurt. Oh, don’t let me start to fall in love with her, he thought. That would just be too much to bear.
Sal laughed. A vaguely Hen-shaped blob appeared in IR sense fifty metres away, head first over a fold in the rippled floor like a shallow hill. ‘There. She’s fine,’ Sal announced, as though he’d rescued her personally.
Ilen rejoined them, smiling and blinking in the soft lights of the flier, her white-gold hair shining. She nodded. ‘Evening,’ she said, and grinned at them.
‘Welcome back,’ Sal told her, and hauled a pack out of one of the flier’s storage lockers. He swung the bag onto his back.
Taince glared at the pack, then at Sal’s face. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
Sal looked innocent. ‘Going to take a look round. You can join me if--’
‘Like fuck you are.’
‘Tain, child,’ he laughed. ‘I don’t need your permission.’
‘I’m not a fucking child and yes, you fucking do.’
‘And will you please stop swearing quite so much? There’s really no need to flaunt your newly acquired gruff military manner quite so conspicuously.’
‘We stay here,’ she told him, using the cold voice again. ‘Close to the flier. We don’t go wandering off into a prohibited alien shipwreck in the middle of the night with an enemy craft cruising overhead.’
‘Why not?’ Sal protested. ‘For one thing it’s probably on the other side of the planet by now or maybe even destroyed. And anyway, if this Beyonder ship, or battlesat, or drone, or whatever it is can see inside here, which I seriously doubt, it’s going to target the flier, not a few human warm-bods, so we’re safer away from the thing.’
‘You stay with the craft, always,’ Taince said, her jaw set.
‘For how long?’ Sal asked. ‘How long do these nuisance raids, these attacklets, usually last?’ Taince just glared at him. ‘Half a day, average,’ Sal told her. ‘Overnight, probably, in this case. Meantime we’re somewhere it’s not normally possible to be, through no fault of our own, with time to kill… why the hell not take a look round?’
‘Because it’s Prohibited,’ Taince said. ‘That’s why.’ Fassin and Ilen exchanged looks, concerned but still amused.
‘Taince!’ Sal said, waving his arms. ‘Life is risk. That’s business. Come on!’
‘You stay with the craft,’ Taince repeated grimly.
‘Will you step out of your programming just for a second?’ Sal asked her, sounding genuinely annoyed and looking at the other two for support. ‘Can any of us think of one good reason why this place is prohibited, apart from standard authoritarian, bureaucratic, overreacting, territory-marking militaristic bullshit?’
‘Maybe they know stuff we don’t,’ Taince said.
‘Oh, come on!’ Sal protested. ‘They always claim that!’
‘Listen,’ Taince said levelly. ‘Your point is taken regarding the likelihood of the flier’s systems being targeted by hostiles, and therefore I volunteer to walk out, every hour on the
Yvonne Harriott
Seth Libby
L.L. Muir
Lyn Brittan
Simon van Booy
Kate Noble
Linda Wood Rondeau
Jerry B. Jenkins, Chris Fabry
Christina OW
Carrie Kelly