She took a handful of them all. Her pack was heavy now and she was pushing her luck. Time to go.
Light jabbed down into her face, making her cry out, and a hand grabbed her shoulder.
Tona Criid had been taught to fight by her brothers, all of them gangers. Instinctively, she pivoted back into the grip and shoulder-threw the owner of the hand. The flashlight bounced away across the rockcrete barn floor and the heavy male form bounced after it, barking out an oath and most of its breath.
But it had her still, and even as it went over her, it twisted her round in combat-trained hands and threw her sideways into the crate stack.
The impact stunned her. She tried to rise, hearing the other moving too. A few more oaths, a harsh question she didn’t understand.
She rose and delivered a spin-kick into the darkness. It would be the VPHC, she was sure. She braced for the las-shot, the bolt-round, the mindset that would treat her no better than a carrion-dog.
Her spinning foot connected and the figure went down with a bone-crack. More rampant cursing.
Tona ran for the crack in the barn wall.
A much larger form tackled her from behind in the dark and brought her down on her belly on the rockcrete floor. She was frantic now, kicking and thrashing.
Her assailant had her pinned by way of superior strength and technique. His weight slumped on top of her and the flashlight winked on again, probing down at her wincing eyes.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” said a hoarse voice in tunefully accented Low Gothic. “Don’t fight me.”
She looked up, fighting still. She saw the face of the off-world soldier, the young one, the man who had chased Dalin out of the barn weeks before.
The blade purred in her hand and she sliced it upwards.
Caffran saw the vibro-blade coming and threw himself aside, releasing his captive. It was the gang girl, the beautiful one he had glimpsed across the rubble when he had gone chasing the boy.
She was on her feet now, menacing with the buzzing blade, head down. Knife-combat stance, thought Caffran, good enough to be a Ghost.
“Put it down,” he said carefully. “I can help you.”
She turned and ran, heading for the slit in the fibre-board back wall of the barn.
Caffran pulled out his laspistol, braced his aiming hand and fired three times, blowing a ring of holes in the back wall of the shed around her. Daylight streamed in through the punctures. She skidded to a halt, frozen, as if expecting the next one to let the light shine through her too.
Caffran got to his feet, gun raised. “I can help you,” he repeated. “I don’t want to see you live like that. You’ve got children, right, a boy at least? What do you need?”
She turned slowly to face him and his light, blade in one hand, the other raised against the stabbing beam. Caffran lowered it so it wouldn’t blind her.
“Trick,” she said.
“What?”
“This is a trick. lust shoot me, you gak.”
“No trick.” He stepped forward and holstered his pistol. “No trick.”
She flew at him, blade slicing the air. He flinched and grabbed her arms, rolling backwards to deposit her flat on her own back. The impact knocked her out for a moment.
Caffran kicked the purring blade away.
He pulled her up. She was coughing and gasping. She felt so thin and fragile in his hands, though he knew she was mean and tough enough to hurt him.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
Her jabbing fingers punched into his eyes and he bellowed, rolling back and clutching his face.
By the time he struggled up again, she was pushing through the back wall to freedom. Caffran noticed she had been mindful enough to recover her blade.
He ran after her.
“Feth you, stop! I want to help! Stop!”
She looked back at him, her eyes as wild and mad as an animal. Her bulging pack was caught on a fork of fibre-boards, preventing her from squeezing through the hole.
“Get away! Get away!” she shrilled.
He approached her, hands held wide and empty, trying to look unthreatening.
“I won’t hurt you… please… my name is Caffran. My friends call me Caff. I’m a lost soul like you. Just a Ghost without a home. I didn’t ask for this and I know you fething didn’t. Please.
He was a hand’s reach away from her now, hating the fear in her face. She spat and howled, then jabbed her blade round and cut the strap of her pack. It dropped to the ground, but she was free. Abandoning it, she flew out of the bam and sprinted away across the rubble.
Caffran pushed out after her, straining to get his greater bulk through the slit.
He got a glimpse of her looking back and terrified, darting over the splintered mounds of wreckage before dropping out of sight.
Tona lay in cover for a few minutes, buried in the soot of a crater, stinking corpses around her. When it seemed the soldier was not following, she crawled out and ran a few metres to a slumped wall and hid behind it.
Then she heard a crunch of boots on rubble and froze.
Twenty metres away, looking in the wrong direction, the black-uniformed soldier was walking up through the ruins, her pack dangling from his hand.
“Hello?” he was calling. “Hello? You need this. You really do. Hello?”
He stood for a long while, maybe ten minutes, looking around. Tona remained in hiding. Finally, the soldier put the pack down.
“It’s here if you want it,” he said. A long pause.
Then he walked back down the ruin slope and clambered back into the bam.
Tona waited a full fifteen minutes more before she moved. She ran from cover, scooped up the pack and leapt away into the confused maze of the ruins.
The soldier didn’t reappear or follow.
In a foxhole, she hunched and opened the pack, studying the contents. Everything she had taken was there, everything—as well as three flasks of sterilised water, a field-dressing kit, a pack of one-shot antibiotic jabs, some net-wrapped dry sausage… and a laspistol, the very laspistol she was sure he had fired after her in the barn. The charge pack was almost full.