A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers #2)(62)

‘You didn’t even open it up.’

‘Owl, it’s a light panel. It’s not a f*cking pinhole drive.’

‘I really wish you wouldn’t talk like that.’

‘I said I’ll find something. Light panels are not that hard.’ She walked through the airlock to the outer hatch and picked up the handle for her cargo wagon. Owl’s face was real sad. Somehow, that made her all the more annoying. Jane sighed again. ‘I will. Seriously, I’ve done this before.’

She had. The scrapyard was as familiar to Jane as her own face. Probably more than that. She spent way more time looking at scrap than at herself. She’d thought once, years ago, about marking the piles she’d already combed through, but there was no need. She knew where she was. She knew where she’d been.

The piles in an easily walkable radius had stopped being useful a long time ago. Oh, there was a f*ckton of scrap left, sure, but it was either too broken even for her, or things she couldn’t use, or buried so deep there was no point in bothering. Scavenging was a surface-level kind of job. You’d spend forever digging otherwise, and most of it was junk anyway. Still, though, she could never get over how much decent, fixable tech the Enhanced just chucked out. Did they not have fix-it shops, like they did in the sims? Was grease and gunk that gross to them that they had to dump it all half a planet away? She’d never seen an Enhanced – she hadn’t seen anyone since the factory – but she was pretty sure she’d hurt them bad if she did. Plasma Fist to the ribcage, just like Combusto.

She talked to herself as she walked, for company. Walking didn’t take much brain, and hers got away from her if she wasn’t working on something. Today’s selection was the first scene from Night Clan Rebellion, which was pretty good. It wasn’t as good as Scorch Squad, but she talked that one out all the time.

‘Chapter one: we open on a snowy forest, stained red with blood! There’s a big f*cking monster wrecking a castle, and Knight Queen Arabelle is on a cool horse.’ She did a voice kind of like Knight Queen Arabelle. ‘Come, warrior! I need your assistance!’ She went back to her own voice again. ‘And so I go running in, and the monster takes out the tower with its tail – crash! – and so the Knight Queen gives me a cool horse, and she says, “We must hurry! Before the Evergard is lost!”’

Jane kept going. She got all the way through chapter two – the bit where you find out that the monsters actually have a good reason for wrecking shit – when the back wheel on her wagon started to wobble. ‘Ah, shit,’ she said, kneeling down to take a look. The axle had come loose. She dug through her satchel, got a tool, and sat down in the dirt to make repairs. ‘Come on, get back in there. You know where you’re supposed to be.’

She heard the dogs before she saw them – a scruffy pack of five, all watching her close. Jane wasn’t worried. She stood up real chill, and got her weapon ready. She sized them up, one by one. Taking a dog this early in the day wasn’t the best. Dragging around the extra weight sucked, and midday heat and a freshly dead dog wasn’t a great combo. But it wouldn’t spoil or anything, and she needed jerky. ‘Good morning, shitheads,’ she said, giving the weapon switch a quick flick. A little tongue of electricity slithered out. ‘So, which one of you guys am I gonna eat?’

One of the dogs hunched down and stepped toward her. A crusty old female, blind in one eye. She snarled.

Jane snarled back. ‘Yeah, come on,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

The dog kept growling, but didn’t make a move. Jane had seen this one around before, slinking off in the distance. She’d never gotten close. Maybe this pack had come Jane’s way by accident, or maybe they were real hungry (lizard-birds and dust mice weren’t much for big carnivores to go on). If that was why they approached her now, well, too bad. They were leaving hungry. Jane wasn’t.

She picked up a rock, never taking her eyes off the female’s teeth. She switched the weapon into her left hand and, with a quick flick of her wrist, whipped the rock into the dog’s nose.

Killing it wasn’t even hard. The dog lunged, the zapper zapped, and the rest of the pack freaked out.

‘Yeah!’ Jane yelled, jumping over the heap of smoking fur. ‘Yeah, come on! Who’s next?’ She thumped her chest like Combusto. ‘You wanna go?’

The other dogs were pissed, but they backed off. They knew. They got it.

‘That’s right, I’m real scary!’ Jane said, turning her back on them. ‘Be sure to tell all your stupid friends, if I don’t eat you first.’ She grabbed the dead one by the legs and heaved it onto the wagon. It landed with a thud. Jane glanced over her shoulder, but of course the dogs were gone. Of course they were. She’d done this like a thousand times. She knew what was up.

‘We are the blessed warriors of the Night Clan!’ she said in her best justified-in-wrecking-shit monster voice. She gave the wagon axle a wiggle. All good. She dragged the now-heavy wagon behind her. ‘For a thousand years, we have waited for our hour of vengeance—’

Nothing else bugged her as she made her way. She saw a couple cargo ships fly by high up over ahead, full of new scrap to drop off. That was nothing new. They only made drops at the edge of the yard, which was days and days of walking from home, she guessed. She never saw them on the ground. And the wider the yard got, the farther the drop site was. Besides, she was pretty sure there weren’t any people on the ships, and they obviously weren’t scanning the ground or anything. The same was true of the collector drones, which scooped up mouthfuls of scrap to take back to the factories. They didn’t care about her at all. They probably thought she was a dog, if they could even think. She’d once wondered if the collectors would get to where the shuttle was before she left the planet, but Owl had calculated it, and given how often the drones made an appearance and how far away they were and how much scrap they appeared to take, it’d be another six years or so before they even got close. Six years. Jane couldn’t deal with that thought.