He was a bit shocked at how hard that knowledge hit him. It wasn't as if Dermott had had a dazzling personality or been any kind of a beauty queen. Not too bright, really, with a broad Vat face on a big workhorse body. But a nice girl all the same. A very nice girl. A girl with a dream… One more indebted conscript the Company wouldn't be collecting from.

Still, he had to make sure. Maybe He got up and began digging into the rubble.

"You're not going to get out that way, Connolly," said Siobhan.

"I'm looking for someone," he replied stubbornly.

"Nobody would still be alive."

"I know. But I can't just leave her. There's a chance."

"Dermott's dead," said the bat quietly. "A scorp got her, in the middle of cave-in. I saw."

Chip swallowed. He supposed that it had been an open secret. A private life in the trenches was a wild dream. "Are you sure?"

"Sure as breath. It was quick and painless, Connolly."

That was a lie. Scorp poison wasn't. But Siobhan had seen her die. That was plain enough. Poor kid. He thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and swore quietly to himself.

He sighed, and started to haul clods away behind the digging rats. Every single time you said, "Don't get involved, or, if you're gonna get involved, just keep it physical." But you always ended up exchanging dreams. Dermott had wanted a farm. Huh. A Vat-born indentured girl who wanted a farm! Fat chance. Farm laborer was the closest vatbrats could get. Well. The kid had bought one. And the Company wouldn't be screwing her any more, either. Yep, the only way out of the Shareholders' clutches… die. And then, rumor had it, they'd bill your clone for the burial charges.

"Responsible socialism," the New Fabian Society Shareholders called the system they'd set up on the colony planet of Harmony And Reason. HAR-or, as vatbrats called it, Har-de-har-har. When they weren't just calling it the Company Town.