“So what is the plan, exactly?” Jesop eventually asked. He’d been getting visibly bored with the silence for a while.

It took Marek a few seconds to mentally disconnect from the instruments and the sandy vastness before him, but he did find his voice.

“Ideally, a non-stop ride,” he said. “I have the charge and the water to make it. We’ll do shifts. You’ll handle the flatter, safer stretches and I’ll use them to nap. We have about eighty hours to cross circa seven thousand kilometres, and complications don’t announce themselves ahead of time, so let’s leave room for them.”

“No stopping at all?” the man said, and seemed to reassess the available space in the cabin.

“We have food, water, and a toilet.” Marek pointed behind Jesop’s seat. “No stopping, except for repairs or obstructions, until we reach South White Valley. I’m hoping to join a caravan there, to float along with north.”

“And if we do meet with obstructions, on narrow roads? Do you have clearing charges?”

“I have two at the moment, but I avoid using those. I prefer the chainsaw.”

He pointed again.

“We will-”

Even while talking, his eyes darted towards the instrument panel every two seconds or so. The radar picked up something ahead; big and metal and slightly cooler than its environment. The surrounding dunes had a soft shape, and he knew from familiarity that there were no chasms in the area, so he immediately sent the car into a wide turn.

“What is it?” Jesop asked sharply, immediately on alert.

“Check for me,” Marek replied and indicated the binoculars, dangling from their usual spot between the two of them. The man instead fitted a scope to his rifle and screwed down his window. The landscape blocked his view for a few breaths, but soon enough Marek could glimpse a small, gleaming dot in the distance.

“It’s a car,” the man said, with his weapon out the window. “It’s been attacked, and I mean recently. There’s debris in the sand and the engine is still smoking.”

“What kind of car?”

“Big, bulky one. I would guess a transport for a few dozen people.”

“Do you see a banner?”

“No.”

“Drifters, then,” Marek said. “Or possibly migrants in a drifter truck, coming out of the south.”

“You’re not going to check it out?” Jesop asked.

“If it hasn’t been stripped bare, then it’s only because whoever hit them is lying in wait. We don’t need that. Keep watching for movement until we’ve made some distance.”

“Alright,” Jesop said, although he sounded a bit dissatisfied. “Do you think we-”

They came just as Marek crested a dune, roaring into view from behind two smaller dunes. There were two bikes, one buggy, and one hover-skiff, each one beat-up and held together with disparate parts, and being ridden by people in full armour and face-concealing helmets.

“Fire!” Marek shouted as he gunned the accelerator. His hand flew to the turbo switch, and the car, this metallic cover and extension of his body, ROARED as the engine disregarded its normal limits. Those sweet G-forces pushed him back into the seat like a gigantic palm and the car went across the sands like a bullet.

Down the dune they went, trailed by a massive cloud of dust and sand. He headed straight for the two bikes, forcing them to make rapid turns and fouling any potential efforts to line up a shot. He then shifted as sharply as he dared at such velocity, moving in between the lines of attack. Jesop fired his weapon. There was a quick flash whose report was utterly drowned out.

The skiff had some kind of mounted weapon, and the buggy’s passenger was standing in a shooter’s nest. Marek hit the slopes of a lesser dune, then turned again, bringing the car up on its left-side wheels. Something shot past the car and hit the sand. Marek left the dune, and the right-side wheels made contact again.

The buggy was already being left behind, literally in the dust, but the bikes and the skiff emerged from the cloud. Jesop stuck his entire upper torso out of the window, aimed the rifle over the roof, and fired. One of the bikes was hit and immediately upended at lethal velocity, but the other biker fired a weapon. Marek heard the sharp ping of the shot bouncing off the armoured roof, barely missing his passenger. Jesop darted back inside.

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They were outpacing their pursuers, but the skiff fired a cable that was just fast and long enough to close the distance. There was a click, and a lurch went through the car.

“What!?” Jesop shouted.

“Magnetic cable,” Marek told him, and undid his seat harness with a single button-press.

The skiff wasn’t heavy enough to bring the car to a stop, but certainly enough so to slow them down. The remaining bike actually started catching up, and the buggy reappeared on Marek’s short-range radar. Then the winch activated, and the skiff started pulling through the cloud the car was kicking up.

Jesop leaned out again, lining up a shot on the skiff.

“No!” Marek shouted. “You’ll turn them into an anchor!”

He activated autodriver and went between the seats.

“Take out the bike and the buggy!”

He snatched up the chainsaw and opened the rear window. The wind screamed, his heart was pumping, and he could just barely make out the approaching skiff through all the dust. Another one of Jesop’s plasma shots flew through the air and Marek drew the boltgun with his free hand.

He fired one bolt, and another, as he walked across the cargo hold under the force of a wind that threatened to blow him off it. The skiff vanished into the dust, and the sturdy cable swayed a little as the driver sought to become a harder target. The pursuers fired back. There was the clink of a metallic hit behind Marek, followed by a thud against his chest. He glanced down and saw a bolt protruding.

Either his suit had stopped it from penetrating or it hadn’t. He was too fired up to tell, and in the moment it didn’t matter. He reached the rear of the car, made sure the biker wasn’t in immediate sight, and started up the chainsaw.

The skiff emerged from the dust, and on the hood stood one of the armoured raiders. Marek fired his third bolt and hit, but the figure still launched itself his way from a springset.

The raider slammed into Marek as they landed on the cargo area, and swung an axe. Marek fell back a step and the weapon went by his face. He fired his fourth bolt and nailed the raider’s foot to the car. If they screamed, then it was lost to the wind and the roar of engines.

Marek dropped the gun and double-gripped the chainsaw as he swung it upwards. It cut through the raider’s main arm without any slowdown. Then he swung it sideways. The tool was designed to cut up the hulls of wrecked starships. The raider’s armoured torso offered only barely more resistance than had their arm, and they flopped down in two pieces and a flood of crimson.

Marek immediately stepped over the gory mess and brought the saw down on the cable attached to the back of his car. The cable was stronger than flesh, but that only bought it three seconds before the chain cut through it. It was only readiness that saved Marek from lurching over the edge as his car shed the extra weight and picked up speed.

He deactivated the saw, plucked his bolt from the chest of the dead raider, and walked back in a crouch. Jesop was leaning out on the driver’s side, sighting down the fast-vanishing bike.

“I’m pretty sure he’s out of-” Marek said, before his partner pulled the trigger. In the distance there was the flash of a hit, immediately followed by the dust cloud of a crash. “Oh. Well done.”

“Thanks. I-” Jesop turned around and looked at Marek. “Oh, Seljun’s dick!”

“None of it’s mine,” Marek assured him, glancing down at the blood he was caked in. “I think.”

He plucked the bolt out of his chest. The tip was clean.

“No. None of it. Scoot over.”

Jesop was eager enough to get out of the way as Marek approached. They plopped down in their respective seats and Marek opened the gun’s cylinder. He put the bloodied bolt back in and was happy to see that the raider one fit as well. He then took two more bolts from a belt pouch and finished loading, before closing the weapon. Then he rapid-fire punched the roof with both fists and howled.

“WOOOO!”

He grasped the wheel and violently shook himself back and forth, then howled again. He finished his little bit of catharsis by punching the wheel a couple of times. Finally he sat back and started redoing his harness with one hand.

“That’s the desert for you,” he said to his neutral-faced passenger.

“Yes, it certainly is,” Jesop replied in a tone much like his expression. “Who were those people?”

“Oh, just typical grabbers,” Marek said as he finished with the harness. “Too well-equipped and stout to be from a failed community. They form small bands down in deep valleys or abandoned settlements, and make a living with light raids.”

The man looked back.

“Can we expect more?”

“Always expect trouble in the sand, Jesop,” Marek told him. “Always. Good shooting, by the way. You kept your cool.”

“I told you I’m not fresh in general.”

“So you did.”

Jesop let out a slightly awkward laugh.

“Am I crazy or did you enjoy all that?”

Marek turned his full attention to the desert. The endless sea of sand and danger, shimmering like a fevered imagination in the burning heat. One moment of poor judgement at the wrong time and it would all swallow him up. But not just now. Not yet.

“I enjoy being alive,” he said, without really focusing on it. “And you’re never more alive than when the alternative has brushed by you.”

He squeezed the wheel. The adrenaline high was still in him, better than anything sold in dinghy waystation backrooms.

Not yet.