“Is it as dangerous as it looks?” she asked.

“Worse, if you ask me. That thing can damn near see you coming before you think of going. MagScan to beat the band. Infrared to tell your temperature. Real bad stuff.”

“Not if it serves you,” Chato said simply.

“But it served us up like fish on a platter,” Wilson said. “A bunch of optimists who never fought anything worse than a cranky engine or a bad headwind.”

Folks around Grace looked at one another and nodded.

“Gracie,” Wilson said, “I never want to go through that again. Leastwise not as dumb as I was today. I know how to raise cows. I’m damn good at farming this red dirt around here. I don’t know crap about fighting ’Mechs.”

“Me neither,” echoed around the circle.

Grace took a deep breath and tried to pull from deep inside her what had been taking shape. “I’m not much in favor of running every time the Net says boo. Running for the hills and hoping there’s something to come back to is no way for real people to live,” she said, eyeing the group. Only frowns met that. “Now, if I don’t know how to do something, I usually put out a call for someone who does. Pay them either to do it for me or teach me how. Seems to me that we need someone who can teach us a thing or two about fighting.”

That brought a long pause, which Grace took to mean that the men were seriously considering her suggestion. She was glad of the help; the future of Falkirk hung on the handful around her.

“When I need something we don’t make here,” Ho said slowly, “I buy the best I can afford from where it is available.”

“I don’t like strangers showing up and pushing me around,” Wilson said. “My family was here during the old wars. People from off-planet tried to take us on, and we bloodied their noses. If I have a vote, I say we do the same. And if we don’t know how, I say hire folks to show us the way.”

“That’s the way I see it, too,” Grace said. “The raiders came. We did what we could, and that was damn poor. I say we go to the Legate and demand that he train us to do what the people of Alkalurops have always done—defend ourselves. And if the Legate is as dead as I think he is, we find someone who can,” Grace said.

“That could cost money,” Ho pointed out.

“Would you rather pay for a defense or try to bribe the raiders, ’cause next time I wouldn’t bet on Auntie Maydell talking them down. The next raiders’ll demand our money or our ’Mechs,” Grace finished. Her listeners frowned but nodded.

“Better to fight than give up, and if we fight, I mean to fight a damn sight better next time,” Wilson said. “I’ll put up ten percent of my profits from last year to pay someone to teach me how to knock the next raiders on their asses.”

“Me, too,” came from the rest in the circle. Grace sighed. Now all she had to do was get the rest of Falkirk to go along.

Outside Kilkenny, Alkalurops

13 April 3134

A nudge brought Grace awake. “You’ll want to see this,” Chato said. Reluctantly, Grace opened her eyes. Chato had volunteered to drive the jeep Jim Wilson had donated to take the local reps to the capital, at Allabad. Something to deal with the situation had to be in the works at the capital, and Falkirk was damned if those fancy pants in the big city would ignore the working stiffs who paid the taxes. Or that the large mining corporations would ignore the small mining groups that made up the other half of the planet’s gross production. So Grace went straight from a gut-wrenching town hall meeting that had adopted her plan for defense to a night ride down gravel roads that might end in a raider roadblock.

Blinking sleep away, her eyes met rosy dawn. The morning sky was all that looked good. In the field beside the road, three burned-out jeeps still sent up smoke and made the morning stink. A half-burned body manned a machine gun on one of them. At the side of the road, bodies were lined up in a careful row, a single blanket covering the faces. “I guess you were luckier than you realized,” Jobe said from the backseat.

“Looks that way,” Grace agreed.

“Should I stop?” Chato asked. Ahead, a young man was waving his arm slowly, struggling with the effort. A red bandage was wrapped around the light armor on his other arm.

“Stop,” Grace ordered. She leaned out of the rig and asked, “What happened here? Who’s in charge?”

“The raiders sidestepped the North Constabulary when they came through Kilkenny headed north, so we figured to catch ’em on their way back south, ma’am,” the young man said, leaning heavily on the hood of their jeep. “I guess you’d say I’m in charge. Lieutenant Hicks, ma’am. I hate to do this, but I got wounded to transport. I have to commandeer your rig.”

“Hicks, I’m the mayor of Falkirk, and these two men represent the Donga and White River Valleys. We’re on our way to Allabad, but we’ll be glad to carry as many of your wounded as we can.”

The young man nodded his agreement. “We’ll do it your way, ma’am. Sergeant,” he said to a man standing nearby, “get the two stretchers laid across the back. You mind if my walking wounded ride your fender?”

“How many survivors do you have?” Grace asked.

“Too few,” the weary officer answered. “I’ll walk the rest back in. You take the six that are shot up into Kilkenny. There’s a clinic this side of town.” Grace counted four soldiers aside from the lieutenant and his sergeant.

“I know it,” Grace said. “We’ll take good care of your people. Chato, let’s go.”

“I’ll get us there as fast as I can, War Chief,” Chato said.

Grace eyed the wreckage as they pulled away. No one had stripped the dead or wounded of their body armor. What type of raid was this?

Dropping the wounded off at Kilkenny still allowed Grace and the others to reach Amarillo before noon. The largest town in the Gleann Mor Valley gave them the best of news. The raiders’ JumpShip had blasted off from south of there that morning loaded with the last of them. Grace and her group saw how selective the raiders had been: Only ’Mechs ten years old or younger had been hijacked and walked aboard the JumpShip. Old ’Mechs still went about their business.

As the three hurried south, the land changed. Once they came off the caprock, fields were greener and broken with more streams. Only occasionally did they see a farmhouse shot up; rarely did a town show bullet holes. Dublin Town was a similar case. Like so many of the large towns on Alkalurops, it was sheltered in a deep canyon from the seasonal high winds. Grace was driving as they took the road down. No surprise, the IndustrialMech dealerships on the outskirts had old ’Mechs in for repairs but no new rigs. But the communication towers were still standing, as were the power lines.

The next morning, as they drove out of Dublin Town, Grace found the local Net had come back to life. The news was full of wild stories: Government House had been burned to the ground, and the Governor and Legate were dead. Grace made a quick call to her mother to tell her the trip was going fine, then turned the phone over to Jobe and Chato so they could call their wives.

As the men talked, Grace mused on what her pirate namesake would have taken in a raid. Her list included a lot of gear that was still up and working on Alkalurops. When Grace voiced her thoughts, Jobe offered, “Maybe their DropShip couldn’t carry it all.”

“Why go raiding with only a small boat for the loot?” she asked. Neither man had an answer.

Late that afternoon they drove off the plains and into the long canyon that protected Allabad from the high winds of the flat country above. The large transmission tower by the road was undisturbed. The largest city on Alkalurops didn’t look that bad, either: Allabad now filled most of the canyon with wide rows of thick adobe homes and businesses. The long, shallow lake that had first drawn people to the city had been narrowed and deepened so that new buildings could be built on the old flood plain.