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tacit consent. “I’ll stay out here and keep watch,” I tell Soltznin in a low voice. “You go first.”
    She enters carefully with the clothes she’d picked draped over her shoulder, then returns in less than two minutes. “It’s clear. Just a squat, but she has a lot of uniforms in there.”
    Nodding, I repeat the action and step back into the street feeling, for the first time in ten years, like anything but a soldier. Part of me wants to question the woman about where she’d gotten all those uniforms and what she knows about the apparently high volume of deserters coming through the outpost, but I can see she has had more than her fill of us. It’s time to move on.
    At this time of year on this moon, there should only be a few hours of semidarkness to stand in for nightfall, but in the hour since we’d left David at the craft, the planet has shifted enough to make the light from our three suns resemble dusk, which I fully welcome. It takes the edge off the heat and cuts the glare from the overbright sky. It’ll be easier to see if someone is coming at us with less-than-friendly intentions if we’re not fighting the glare.
    Checking in with David as we put distance between us and the vendor, I let him know we’re good so far. A couple hundred meters down, the street opens up into a wide circle. In the center is what appears to be a public water pump and well. Two boys, teenagers who look somewhere between thirteen and sixteen, stand at it, filling a tank cinched to the back of a four-wheeled sand quad.
    Soltznin and I approach, and the teenagers barely glance at us, engaged in watching a porn on holovid being projected from a device sitting on the quad’s front fender.
    “Hey,” I greet them, and they glance at us disinterestedly. “Can you point us toward the nearest trade station that deals with…transport craft?”
    This gets their attention, and the oldest asks, “Why? You want something? I can hook you up with sandbikes, hover runners, whatever lights your fire.”
    He’s in the strange no-man’s-land between adulthood and still filling out, with awkward, gangly arms, legs that seem too long, and a skinny, sunken torso, but with broad shoulders and good height that hint at the powerfully built man he’ll soon be. His voice is already rough and deep, as if he either smokes or doesn’t have a good enough air filter to keep his lungs free of whatever this moon’s atmosphere likes to rain on its inhabitants.
    Soltznin and I had donned nasal filters from the craft, just in case. Most of the Spectras and their moons had seen abundant Admin-controlled mining operations, and the Admin set up at least rudimentary terraforming and atmosphere conversion stations while the mines produced resources and turned profits. But planets with mines that aren’t operating at full capacity anymore don’t see many maintenance crews to keep the things running. A few of their stations have even been pulled apart by enterprising but shortsighted (and now likely dead or diseased) scavengers. As deserters, this is the kind of environment we’re likely to spend the rest of our lives in, short or long. Better get used to it.
    “Sandbikes may come in handy later, but right now we’re looking to trade something bigger. Know a place?”
    The tinny sound of the porn holo still projecting from the quad punctuates my question with amusing grunts and moans. The boys seem oblivious of the interference, but the oldest stares at me as if he might be imagining me as the star of his own private skin flick.
    “We might know a place,” he answers slowly. “Want a ride?”
    The unintended double entendre makes me chuckle, and the kid’s eyebrows crease in anger. So he’s a tough, maybe even a scout for slavers. This is a dead end.
    “Come on.” I nod at Soltznin.
    We begin walking toward a left-hand branch of the roundabout that looks more trafficked and busier, when the crunch of footsteps on the gravel behind me sends my