Description: CHAPTER ONE They were on the return leg of a routine supply trip to bustling, dusty Primero when Hob Ravani saw the great eagles circling above the rolling sea of red dunes. The enormous birds were laboratory creations that had been brought along by the first settlers, a mix of eagle and vulture that could smell water from kilometers away - useful on a planet where there was no surface water for most of the year. They were also very, very good at smelling blood. The two older mercenaries from the Ghost Wolves chattered back and forth on the short wave circuit, shooting the shit about their most recent job. It had been a simple escort across the salt flats between Shimera and Walsen that begged for a bit of spice if it was going to be of use to catch the attention of any town girls. Their tinny voices were loud over the sound of wind, the soft hum of the electric motors and the metallic whine of chainmesh and steel tires propelling the motorcycles over the sand barely audible through Hob''s helmet. "So, shall it be eight bandits, or only six?" Coyote''s snobby accent and slightly nasal tones, there. He was the shortstack of the team, a good fifteen centimeters shorter than Hob at her lanky two meters, nearer thirty centimeters shorter than the dark mountain that was Dambala. He tended to make up for what he lacked in size with sheer, grinning craziness. "Weren''t any bandits ''tall." Dambala''s deep, rumbling bass. "You''re rather missing the point, Bala." Coyote huffed out a long-suffering sigh. "You lack vision." "You lack honesty." Hob laughed - it was impossible not to, listening to the Coyote and Dambala comedy hour - but it was pure habit. Her eye was fixed on the eagles as a third soaring shape joined them. "You seein'' what I''m seein''?" she asked, her voice activating the microphone in her helmet. "See what?" Dambala asked. "Eagles circlin'', ''bout two o''clock." "So it would seem," Coyote said a moment later. He sighed. "I suppose we ought to check on it." Him saying that as senior on the squad was more form than anything else; they''d already turned course, aiming for the dunes below those eagles. The command structure of Ravani''s Ghost Wolves tended to be more of a suggestion backed up with the occasional fist fight. Older Wolves called the shots over the younger ones out of respect, and by grace of being more cunning and less likely to get het up and run off with their cocks hanging out. Only when it came to the commander, Nick Ravani, did yessir and nosir magically pop up in anyone''s vocabulary, and Hob thought that was half a matter of a tradition that stretched back to the first colonization of Tanegawa''s World, and half a matter of Nick being crazier than a shithouse rat and seven times meaner. There was always a Ravani in charge, to the point that Ravani had come to mean commander and boss . It was a name you earned, a name you took when the old leader died and a new one clawed his way to the top through sheer cunning - most of the time. Somewhere out in space there was a government, and laws, but they might as well have been ghosts for all this dusty, desert world was concerned. Here, there was only TransRift, Inc and their private security company Mariposa, and neither much cared if someone was dying in the desert. Most of the time, if someone ended up in the dunes it was because the company had put him there. But Hob, Coyote, and Dambala weren''t TransRift employees, and even those under the thumb of the company had rules. Number One: never leave someone stranded to die, because you didn''t want the same to happen to you some day. It was bad luck, bad karma, bad everything. And the unspoken rule the Ghost Wolves added to it was this: if you were going to leave someone out in the dunes, well, you shot them in the head first. Because sometimes a quick death was the only kindness available. They crested a dune, and Hob caught sight of a dark huddle in the sand, full in the punishing afternoon sun. "Think it''s already too late for that one," she commented. "Might have a note for his wife or somethin''," Dambala said. "Better check." They pulled up at the base of the dune, parking their motorcycles with wide stands designed to not sink into the sand. Hob pulled her helmet off, the two tight plaits she kept her dark brown hair in plopping down onto her shoulders. Staying still for any length of time made the helmet into a personal, head-sized oven. Relative cool or not, she regretted her decision immediately as the strange, burnt death stink coming off the body hit her, thick enough to chew. Corpse it would be: only the unconscious or dead would stretch out facedown in the sun like that, and there was enough rust-brown spatter around to show that some carrion eaters had already worried at the person''s flesh. She could also tell it had likely been a man, from the cut of his clothes - it was rare for women to wear men''s clothing like Hob did, except for the few who fought for a place deep in the mines, where the money was best. His suit had probably been a good one before he was picked apart by animals, and strangest of all, he still wore his jacket. As a rule, people who got blacklisted and thrown out into the desert weren''t wearing their Sunday best - and they sure didn''t keep on anything more than they had to once the punishing heat hit. He had no hat, likely either gone on the wind or forgotten entirely. The patches of hair visible against the burnt skin stretched taut across his skull were gray, neatly trimmed. Hob glanced at Dambala and Coyote. Both still straddled their bikes, waiting for her to make the check. Of course they were; they''d both been full Wolves for over a decade, and had no reason to get their hands dirty when someone barely out of puppyhood was around. Even less reason when their resident pup was an itinerant fuckup who''d unaccountably been given a second chance. Grimacing, Hob crouched down next to the still man and pushed him over. His face was bloated horror, eyes gone, but she''d seen worse. Something niggled at her brain, the set of his jaw maybe, still visible in silhouette. She felt at the man''s pockets and found a small wallet with some money in it. Gold flashed on his finger - a ring - and she lifted the hand up for a closer look, glad that she was wearing gloves. She let go abruptly. "Shit..." she whispered. Coyote''s voice came tinny and thin from the speakers of her helmet, overturned on the sand nearby; apparently he preferred heat to stink. "What''s wrong, Hob?" Hob took up the man''s hand again, this time much more reverently, inspecting the ring. "We know him." She''d seen the light play off etched geometric shapes time and again, helped lose it once and find it again in a much more innocent time. "I had a bad feeling you might say that. Who is it?" Coyote asked. "Uncle Phil." Philip Kushtrim wasn''t her uncle by blood; she had no blood relatives on the entire planet, had jumped ship here over a decade ago from an interstellar cargo hauler. But he was Nick Ravani''s older brother, and Nick was the closest thing to a father Hob had ever had - sad comment on her life that it was. " Fuck ." It was Coyote''s turn to curse. Not that any word existed to encompass the sight, Hob knew. They''d all been friends with Phil, one way or another. "Old Nick''s not going to be pleased." "He''s gonna spit blood over this." Dambala sucked at his teeth. "Someone else''s blood." Hob held Phil''s hand between hers for a moment, fingers gently touching his knuckles as if that could urge him to un-die somehow, to erase the horrors of a body left for days in the sun. It was hard to imagine this blackened, bloated sack of rotting meat was all that remained of the man who had tried so hard to treat her like a second daughter despite all the stubborn resistance she''d shown as a gangly adolescent. He''d been so kind to her, and she''d repaid it all with anger, selfishness, and betrayal. She rolled his body half over, running her hand lightly across his back, something twisting inside her chest. "There''s at least four bullet holes, middle of his back. Maybe more. Hard to tell with all the pickin'' the eagles have done already. But whoever done this must''a gunned him down, as he was running. I seen it before." "We''ve all seen it before. The only question is if it was greenbellies or bandits," Coyote said grimly. "Ain''t much of a difference, is there." Nearly five years ago, Hob had found a gold tie tack shaped like a maple leaf on the corpse of a bandit - same kind the Mariposa greenbellies wore. Old Nick had just looked like he''d been sucking lemons when she handed it over to him, not a hair turned with surprise. It was a well-known, black-humored joke that Mariposa must actually be bad at guarding things, at the rate so-called bandits stole state-of-the-art guns from them. "TransRift don''t care who cleans off their blacklist. Dead''s dead," Dambala said. Though the thought of Uncle Phil on the blacklist was inconceivable - he was, had been , a crew leader at the mine in Rouse. He was no company shill, but he was respected and liked by everyone, and had as much power as someone who wasn''t a blue suit could. Hob shook her head, put Phil on his back again, then tugged at his wedding ring - his wife, Irina, would want that back - but it wouldn''t come from the bloated flesh. Nothing for it, then; she slid a knife from her sleeve. "Sorry. Not like you can feel this anyway." She took his entire finger and slipped the ring from the severed stump, tucking it into her pocket. The remaining carrion she made to toss back onto the sand, but then thought better of it and pulled a handkerchief from another pocket.

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