Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer

The wind’s picking up, keening between the stacks. If it gets any stronger, we’ll have to retreat.
“Alpha Seven, your favourite scout’s offline.”
“How long?”
“Nearly ten minutes.”
Switching myself to wide-hail, I call out.
“Team Seven, Scully’s dropped out. Who had last contact?”
There’s rapid chatter back and forth. We’ve become good at this: folk who stay lost for too long die. Ellis comes back to me.
“She was going to the ziggurat. Swore she had a double-detect on her movement scan.”
I told her not to go near that place! Then again, I’m only her captain. No real authority…
Switching back to Command, I update them.
“Reports are she headed for the closest ziggurat to confirm an intruder detection.”
There’s silence while someone gets past their swearing phase.
“We’ve told everybody about not doing that. I presume you emphasised it. Which leaves us with some interesting questions for her, if you bring her back alive, Alpha Seven.”
Nards.
“Interpreting that as a one-unit retrieval instruction, Command. Please confirm.”
“Confirmed, Alpha Seven. She’s your stray. Either you bring her back in or we’ll write off the two of you and call it quits.”
Nice of you to be honest about it. Then again, it’s not like this is the first time.
“Copy that, Command. Alpha Seven off into the wilds. Deputy Alpha is Colleen, Gamma Six-Four.”
There’s a short pause before a local message flashes across the info strip that runs across the bottom of my faceplate: ‘For real? They’re sending you after her?’
I reply: “Message: ‘Affirmative. Look after Team Seven’.”
She comes back: ‘Wilco. Happy hunting’.
Yeah, that.
The environment scan shows an incoming dust storm, and the wind has doubled in force since we landed this morning. It’s going to be vicious out here in a few hours. Best be quick.
“Launch warning. Alpha Seven going up in three, two, one.”
I punch my thrusters and hurtle into the sky with a deflection calculated to let the wind curve my flight to come down on the gigantic step pyramid that looms in the distance. We’re still not sure why the first dumpers turned the accumulated trash from Earth into these edifices, but we’ve lost too many people to traps within them to investigate further.
Dropping right on target, I punch the thrusters and come down perfectly, like stepping off an escalator.
“Where are you, Scully?”
A world covered in technological junk makes communication over distance impossible without using orbital devices. However, local hailing can be relied on for fifty metres or so if you don’t have line of sight. Chances are, if Command lost her, she’s in a hole. ‘How deep?’ and ‘Dead or alive?’ are the next questions.
No reply. I scramble about fifty metres along, then try again. Ziggurat’s a kilometre across… Going to be a long afternoon.

“Here.”
“Eleventh call. I was starting to get worried. Where’s ‘here’, exactly?”
“Second tier, underneath a chunk of Falcon 19 fuselage. It was coming loose, moving in the wind, which explains the movement readings. When I arrived, it fell on me.”
“That was rude of it.”
“I thought so.”
“Be with you-”
I’m on tier three, and it’s… Right there. I jump down.
“Now.”
A heat scan shows me where she is. I have to use cutters and claws to get to her.
“You should be flatter.”
“It got my legs, what more do you want?”
“Given the way Command sounded, you might regret surviving.”
She locks her suit to mine.
“Never gonna happen. Get me out of here.”
“Wilco. Launching in three, two, one…”