The device erupted in fire, sparks, and a plume of smoke. Scalzer fell backward, surprised but unhurt. Everyone else scattered away from him, widening the circle for a few moments until everyone logjammed at the exits.

Everyone except McLellan, who had prepared an exit strategy hours earlier. Triggering her encrypted emergency transponder, she rolled across the floor and through a wall panel she’d loosened that led to a snow-covered lane behind the building. Springing to her feet, she sprinted across a dark and narrow street and dashed into a meter-wide gap between two flimsy, jury-rigged structures.

She heard Scalzer bellowing orders. The moonless night echoed with the wet slapping footfalls of men running across muddy roads. Tinny voices squawked from two-way radios on either side of McLellan as she reached the end of the sliver-thin passageway.

Sneaking onto the surface of Amonash had been easy. Getting off it was promising to be a bit more challenging.

McLellan checked the corners ahead of her. Both directions looked clear. Brandishing her phaser, she darted into the street and straight toward the extraction point.

Bolts of charged plasma screamed past her head.

She ducked and returned fire on a wide-dispersal setting. The shots might miss their targets or not do much damage, but she hoped they would stun a few of her pursuers or blind them long enough for her to get back undercover.

A disruptor blast streaked past her, red and angry, as she somersaulted over a low stack of cargo crates. More shots flashed against the durable metal shipping containers as McLellan rolled to cover. Too close,she admonished herself, fleeing down another alleyway into the cold night.

One dead end after another forced McLellan to double back, risking capture—and who knew what else—with every step. Stumbling upon a downhill grade, she followed it, remembering that her ride off this miserable rock was waiting for her in a ravine near the bottom of the hill on which this abandoned town-turned-smugglers’ hideout had been built.

Behind a dilapidated warehouse she skirted the edge of an industrial yard that occupied the last patch of level ground above the ravine. Inside its low-walled perimeter, a labyrinth of pipes, stairs, ladders, and catwalks filled the gaps between dozens of rusted silos, which sat several meters aboveground on corroded metal stilts. Beyond the enclosure, the ground sloped sharply downward into the end of the narrow gorge below.

Ahead of her, at the far edge of the silo field and past the corner of the warehouse, was a road that led to a hidden trail into the dry ravine where her escape vessel lay.

Flashlight beams swept back and forth across that road. Searchers with palm beacons were closing in on her.

She turned back and walked a few steps before she heard more voices drawing near, then she saw more harsh-white beams slice through the darkness, cutting off her path of retreat.

Muttering low, vile curses in a smattering of alien tongues, she steeled herself for a fight.

A hand clasped McLellan’s shoulder.

She spun, lifted her phaser, and nearly shot her partner in the face.

He lifted his hands in mock surrender. “Ease up, Bridy Mac.” The lean, clear-eyed scoundrel was standing in a nook along the warehouse’s back wall. McLellan realized she must have walked past him moments earlier without seeing he was there. She had no idea how, when, or where he’d learned to hide himself so perfectly; for now, she added that mystery to the growing list of things she still didn’t know about Cervantes Quinn.

Lowering her weapon, she shook her head and rolled her eyes at the fiftyish man. “Dammit, Quinn, I nearly killed you.”

“Join the club,” he said, flashing a good-ol’-boy grin.

Recalling the mission profile she’d written for this op, she snapped, “I thought I told you to stay with the ship.”

“Yeah, an’ we both know how good I am at followin’ orders.” Nodding in the direction of her pursuers, he drawled with deadpan calm, “Looks like you got yerself a spot o’ company.”

“Looks like,” she replied.

“Lucky for you I poked my head out, then.” He pointed at the silo field. “Here’s my plan for savin’ your skin. We haul ass through here, shootin’ out them stilts as we go. These big-ass silos come down in a heap, coverin’ our backsides. We go up that last set o’ stairs, jump off that catwalk, and catch that rusty comm dish, which I reckon’ll break free when we hit it. Then we ride it down the slope and over the edge into the gorge. Play it right and we should have a fair-to-medium-soft snow landing.”

Despite knowing there wasn’t a drop of booze anywhere on Quinn’s clattertrap of a ship, she stared at him and wondered if he was drunk.

“You’re out of your mind.”

He smiled. “Guilty as charged.”

At the far end of the warehouse someone turned the corner, aimed a flashlight beam directly at Quinn and McLellan, and started yelling for reinforcements.

Quinn drew his stun pistol and dropped the distant shouter with one shot.

“So let me get this straight,” he said to McLellan. “My plan is so stupid, you’d rather take fifty-to-one odds on a stand-up fight?”

Armed men appeared at either end of the alley, on rooftops, and just about every other place in McLellan’s field of vision. She gestured at the silos with her phaser and said to Quinn, “I’ll take the ones on the left?”

“Deal.”

They hurdled over the low concrete retaining wall and sprinted into the iron maze of the industrial yard.

A chaotic firestorm converged upon them. Ricocheted plasma bolts kicked up sparks, and disruptor blasts cut like blades through the twisted old steel around McLellan and Quinn.

There was no point returning fire. She and Quinn would need all their luck and marksmanship to pull off his crazy plan. With their weapons set to full power, they vaporized struts under each silo as they ran past.

They didn’t have to hit all the struts—decay and gravity would do most of the work. Quinn and McLellan were just giving the silos a few nudges in the right direction.

Deep metallic groans preceded the whining of distressed iron, which within seconds became the screech of buckling steel. One by one the silos pitched sideways and slammed to the ground, splitting open and gushing forth their toxic contents.

McLellan and Quinn kept shooting and sprinting across the sprawl of cracked cement while looking over their shoulders at the surge of caustic acid lapping at their heels.

They reached the last staircase half a step ahead of an acid bath. A barrage of enemy fire pierced the metal avalanche they’d left in their wake and pinged off the catwalk railing and the wall behind their heads.

Running side by side, the duo leaped off the end of the catwalk toward a huge comm antenna. As Quinn had predicted, it broke free of the narrow stand on which it was mounted. Clutching the feed horn in the center of the parabolic dish, they rode it in free fall to the snowy slope below.

The convex side of the dish slammed against the ground, and they raced downhill at a perilous speed.

Plasma bolts and disruptor beams peppered the hillside around them, kicking up steam and dirt. McLellan volleyed a few shots back at the smugglers, despite there being no way for her to aim with any accuracy during the bumpy slide down to the ravine. She was rewarded by the sight of a few sizable explosions lighting up the night sky behind her.

“Here comes the fun part,” Quinn said.

McLellan turned back in time to see the ground come to an end beneath their improvised sled. They were back in free fall, plummeting more than a dozen meters to a curving slope of windblown snow that filled the end of the ravine.

Their bone-jarring landing made her feel as if she were about to cough up her stomach. They spun and slid down the snowdrift, turning McLellan’s world into a sickening blur.