Mars 2194

The night of the fight, Tamiko met Mere in the locker room before the  fight. Mere thought she’d come to walk her to the cage, like most  managers did, but then saw Tamiko's face.

It had finally happened! After almost a decade of waiting it was here,  well, the other side of the planet, but close enough! War! Shahzad  Ebrahimi had been dreaming of the next war since the last one ended, and  he knew exactly who he was going to kill first. That fat Mexican that  worked at Materfer VacTube that was always leering at him. He had only  gotten the delivery job so he would have access to the important  Sudamericans, and now the time had come.

The insulation of the thermal-suit was good as well, she couldn't feel  the icy air touching any part of her skin, but after an hour or so, a  cold ache set into her arms, and then her feet, and then legs. By the  time she reached the airship the ache had spread up her back, and the  Cyber Heads-Up Display implanted in her eyes was reporting mild  hypothermia. She suddenly realized she had been running through the  darkness, and wondered if Cheng could have even made the journey without  waving around a light that would have let everyone on the airship know  he was coming. Did the Confederacy implant its troops this CHUDs?

General Rome waited until the mercenaries were in the airlock before jumping to his feet and grabbing his duster and respirator mask. "I'll be back," he said to the waitress as he ran to the door into the motel. He swung the duster over his shoulders as he stepped into the lobby airlock, then pushed the respirator mask to his face as he hit the button for the outer airlock door. As he stepped out into the swirling sand, he pulled the strap of the respirator mask over the back of his head, and the mask pressurized. Across the lot, a vehicle had just landed. All Rome could see through the sand were the lights, but based on their spacing it had to be a truck or a bus.

He saw the shapes of the mercenaries moving around near the pub's airlock and ran out into the sandstorm at a right angle to the vehicle so the mercenaries wouldn't see him. When he couldn't see them anymore, he curved back towards the vehicle. It was a bus, a long-range transport, the type usually used to connect smaller settlements to major hubs. Someone was climbing out, several people. General Rome ducked under one of the short wings that supported the turbofans, and crept up behind the new arrivals, he couldn't see the mercenaries anywhere. Rome pulled out his pistol and dagger but left the dagger's plasma-blade turned off as the light would immediately alert everyone to his presence.

Eve started to laugh. She was standing in her home of the past decade, an airship that might as well be dead. The only way she could get it functional again was to make it back to the colony, across sand-pits that could swallow her whole, and then get the neural processor back from Tadeusz before it starved to death, and before the algae in the airship's oxygen recyclers and fuel-cells starved.

From somewhere inside her there came a deep swell of emotion, and she screamed. Some of it was from the loss of her husband. Some of it was fear of these terrible people. Some of it was just anger. But most of it was a nameless emotion, something primal, the feeling that an animal might have when after being chased into a corner, it turns to attack its predator. That emotion when not only does it need to fight, but a switch in its mind has been thrown and now it wants to fight.