That was how I started.

L’Eesh was the most formidable hunter of his generation. And he was here for my prey.

Once this system, in the crowded Sagittarius Arm, was at the heart of the range of the Silver Ghosts. But the Third Expansion rolled right through here, a great wave of human colonization heading for the center of the Galaxy. Until a few decades back, some nests survived within the Expansion itself; that fast-moving front left great unexplored voids behind it. My mother, a hunter herself, took part in such actions. She never came back from her last operation, the cleansing of a world called Snowball.

But those nests have long been cleaned out. The last wild Ghosts have retreated to their pits—like the one L’Eesh and I had gotten ourselves stuck in.

I had thought I would be first here. I had been dismayed to find L’Eesh had grabbed a place on the same Spline transport as me. Though I had warily gone along with his proposal that we should pool our resources and split the proceeds, I wasn’t about to submit to him.

Not even in the mess we found ourselves in now.

We dug ourselves out of the dirt.

Our med systems weren’t functioning, so we put each other through brisk checks—limbs, vision, coordination. Then we tested out the equipment. Our pressure suits were lightweight skinsuits, running off backpacks of gen-enged algae. The comms system worked on pale blue bioluminescent glyphs that crawled over each suit’s surface.

I poked around in the dirt. Remnants of struts and hull plates crumbled. The little ship had broken up, sacrificing the last of its integrity to save us as it was designed to, and then it had broken up some more. There was nothing to salvage. We had the suits we wore, and nothing else.

L’Eesh was watching me. His augmented eyes were like steel balls in his head; when he blinked you could hear the whir of servomotors. “It doesn’t surprise you that your suit works, does it? Even here—it doesn’t occur to you to ask the question.”