Ramos hurried back into the room. "The coast is clear, at least for the moment. Should I carry you again, or can you walk?"

Concentrating hard, I tried to move my feet; they responded, though I could scarcely feel them. Ramos shifted in to help me, taking my right arm over her shoulders and wrapping her left arm around my waist. When I started forward it was more a babyfied toddle than a walk, but we found a rhythm after a few paces — faster than a tortoise, slower than a hare. Somewhere about the speed of a dog with worms as it drags its ass across your best broadloom.

Have I mentioned our family has pets?

Ramos and I shambled down a short passageway into a kitchen, the place sparkling-clean except for two dirty plates on the counter. By the looks of it, Mouth and Muscle had made spaghetti while they waited for me to wake up… and, of course, they were just the type to leave dishes for someone else to clean.

Cavalier buggers.

The kitchen led to a back-porch area, too spotless to call a mudroom. Through the windows I saw black night, as dark as a miner’s boot: clouds hid the stars, and thick forest crowded up within ten meters of the porch steps.

"We’re still on Great St. Caspian," Ramos said in a low voice, "but a long way from Bonaventure. The air’s a little thin outside… not that you can tell inside this pressurized house. We’ll be all right out there if we don’t try anything energetic — and we don’t have to go far, I’ve got a skimmer parked five minutes away. How are you holding up?"

"I’m fine." This time the words actually sounded like words — slurred words spoken by some pisshead drunk, but at least they had consonants.

"Amazing powers of recovery." Ramos gave me a faint smile. "Hang on, while I make sure we’re alone."

She bent down to a small machine that sat on the floor beside the door. It matched the size of a paint can, but its top was a flat glass screen. Ramos picked up the machine and swept it through a slow scan of the yard outside, keeping her eyes on the screen. "The Bumbler shows nothing on IR," she said, clipping the machine to her belt. "Let’s go."

The way out was a double-door arrangement: an airlock between the house and the skimpier atmosphere outside. My ears popped as the outer door opened, but it wasn’t a fierce hurt; either my neurons were too dizzy to register pain, or the pressure differential wasn’t so scary as Ramos thought. I leaned toward the second alternative. Offworlders always get overexcited about the threadiness of our atmosphere.

We hobbled across the dark yard and entered the darker woods. This wasn’t a sparse, well-spaced tundra forest — these trees were wild boreal. Instead of demure carpet moss, you got angry snarls of underbrush; instead of don’t-bother-the-neighbors bluebarrels, there were cactus-pines thorned up for war, reaching out to strangle each other with as many branches as possible. It all added up to show we were in the south half of the island… just a fraction warmer year-round, but enough to shift the ecology from tightly contained order to every-bush-for-itself chaos.

The only route forward was a game trail, narrow enough that Ramos and I had a devil of a time walking two abreast. Lucky for us, we didn’t need to go a long way — just over a ridge and down to a creek gully where Ramos had her skimmer waiting.

In the dark, the skimmer was blessed near invisible — not just camouflaged but chameleoned, its hull perfectly mimicking the nearby terrain. No identification markings either… which was mildly illegal, in a Class II misdemeanorly way. Ramos carried me to the back hatch, which opened as we reached it.

"Get in, get in!" cackled a voice from inside. Exactly the voice I’d heard in a junior-school play, when Lynn’s ten-year-old Barry got cast to play an old man: cartoonish, nasal, enthusiastically cracking every other syllable. The old-man voice people use in dirty jokes.

"Faye Smallwood," Ramos said, "this is Ogodda Unorr. Our getaway driver."

"Call me Oh-God," he grinned. "As soon as I start driving, you’ll know why."

The man was a Freep. A native of the Divian Free Republic: the closest habitable planet to Demoth, a mere six light-years away. The Free Republic started much like Demoth — a Divian billionaire bought a planet and commissioned a custom-engineered race so he could create his own Utopia. This particular utopia was intended to be staunchly libertarian but had too much wired-in greed to maintain any higher principles; it nose-dived into dog-eat-dog anarchy for three centuries after its founding, then calcified into a corporate oligarchy run by rich trade barons. Cartel capitalism. The Freep plutocracy chanted the mantra of "free markets" while making sure their markets were only free for those who played the right game.

By the looks of it, the Freep driving the skimmer had got himself out of the game by joining the navy — he wore black fatigues, faded and gone shiny in places, but still recognizable as a uniform of the Explorer Corps. The uniform had several circular spots darker than the surrounding cloth: places where insignia must have been sewn on. Oh-God’s badges were gone now, leaving no sign of his rank or ship assignment. He must be that rarity, an Explorer who’d lived long enough to retire.

I looked at Oh-God more closely. Yes, he was old. Cracking ancient. Like all Freeps, he was short, stocky, and cylindrical… a chest-high tree stump with arms. His skin was pale orange at this moment, the way all Freeps go orange on Demoth. Back on their home planet, Freep skins can chameleon all the way to black, a tactic for shutting out the barrage of ultraviolet that comes from the smaller of their two suns; but on Demoth, especially on a winter-spring night in Great St. Caspian, the UV was too weak to demand pigment protection.

"Come on, come on, come on," Oh-God said. "Stop gawking and get yourself belted in, missy. We don’t want to hang around here."

His voice still had that all-over-the-octave cackle, as if he was intentionally parodying his own age. Except that Divian voices get lower in their senior years, not higher. Then the truth struck me: Ogodda Unorr was an Explorer. And like all Explorers, he’d have some physical quirk that made his fellows edge away in disdain. Oh-God must have become an Explorer by virtue of that odd voice — a grating, googly, whistly voice that had marked him as different his whole life.

Ramos buckled me into place beside Oh-God and took the next seat herself. The skimmer was rising even before she had her safety belts fastened — a whisper-silent vertical ascent followed by the breakneck whip of acceleration as we bolted forward just above the treetops.

I’d never ridden in a skimmer that made so precious little sound. It must have been running state-of-the-art stealth engines — maybe even military grade. Looking at Oh-God’s control panel, I saw a slew of other quaint additions to the usual equipment… including a readout labeled radar fuzz. Radar fuzz = nano on the skimmer’s hull, dutifully (and illegally) making the craft invisible to groundcontrol traffic stations: a Class IV misdemeanor that often got argued up to a felony, "willful disregard for the safety of others."

"Hot," I said, pointing a wobbly finger toward the read-out. "Bad."

"Aww, missy," Oh-God wheedled back, "I only turn it on in emergencies. Like now. If there’s Admiralty scum on the prowl, you don’t want them seeing us, do you?"

He’d got me there. But this skimmer still had Smuggler written all over it. Silent and undetectable, big enough to haul a bumper load of questionable goods from Great St. Caspian halfway around the world without paying transport tax or trade-region import fees.

Oh-God might have left the Free Republic, but he hadn’t abandoned their "free enterprise" mentality.