Gurminder crossed his arms over his chest and glared down at the stocky and obnoxious brat.

“What is it then?” he asked. “And did you bring your ID? What’s your landing code?”

“Tory,” she told him, crossed her arms in response, trying not to appear intimidated and for a moment not succeeding. He considered pulling the flare gun back out of its holster. “Who are you?”

“Gurminder,” he told her. “Gurminder Kalsi. Don’t you have a last name? I know you have a code, every one of you get one. Give me your spreader, it’ll be on there in case you’re too stupid to memorize your alphanumerics.”

“Spreaders have a built in geotracking,” she told him. “If I wanted to get out of the CU I’d be stupid to take a spreader, or anything that has a RFID chip that can’t be removed. Would I have gotten this far if I was that stupid?”

That stopped him for a moment as Gurminder tried to think up a decent retort. If she was like this to her parents or teachers he had no doubt she was used to being locked up.

“Well you weren’t smart enough to pick the right rig for one thing,” he told her. “You are not welcome here, newer, none of your kind are.”

That she was smart enough to not bring along any trackable tech, though, forced him to reassess her. And her p-suit had to be stolen, so she was skilled enough to shut down any of its tranceiving capability. All that meant she had real commitment to her attempt to escape the CU. Gurminder dropped his hands to his side and she followed suit, glancing down at her hands for a moment, seeming shamed by his comment, before she raised her eyes again.

”I don’t want to be on this planet any more than you want me here,” she continued. “You want me to go back where I came from then, I’ll be happy to go. Just get me where I need to go to make that happen. How hard can that be? Maybe I’m not the stupid one.”

Gurminder laughed. No matter how smart she was with tech, she clearly had no idea how the real Mars worked.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gurminder told her. “Don’t you remember the whole security setup up you had to pass through on your way here, on landing, on entering CU? Besides, even if I could get through the outer ring of the field, and that’s as far as a rig like this would be allowed, you could find a way onto the port complex, you wouldn’t make it further than that. Security at The Big Drop is High Triple A. They’d tase you, bundle you up in a crate and send you back to whoever brought you here.”

He wondered how old this girl was. It was hard to tell with newers. She could be as old as he was, twenty or so. Then again she could be as young as ten. His gut suggested it was closer to the latter. Her brattish attitude certainly suggested it was.

Then the girl told him how screwed he might be.

“Fine,” she said, “You can take me back, if that’s really what you think you have to. But I’ll have to tell them about the stuff I found back there in the other compartments back there.”

Gurminder took a step back, unsure how to handle her blackmail threat, his spine hitting an articulation stanchion. The girl had searched through the other compartments? Had she actually figured out their electronic keys? It wasn’t impossible if she did what she said she had done to board the rig but it was fricken trouble.

What he was looking at was ten years up on Phobos at least, what he had back there. And there would only be one way to shut here up, out here.

He sank down onto his behind and looked up the girl and pressed a palm into his right temple. There was no way this was going to end well for either of them.

She narrowed her eyes at him, obviously not expecting his response to her threat.

“I don’t care about them if I don’t need to. I just want to go home,” she insisted again. “Would you please just give me a ride to somewhere I can at least find another rig that will take me to the field?”

Gurminder let out a breath. How did he keep finding himself in situations he had to twist himself half crazy to get out of? This girl, Tory, wasn’t even his first stowaway, even if she was his first newlander. This was more than just bad luck. Something like this had been pushing him away from a trouble free life ever since the Force Out of Indiclan. But even if MarSec and MarsCorp had screwed his clan out of their land, he wasn’t going to kill or abandon a kid in the middle of the red. He didn’t doubt she hated the planet and wanted to go home. Who from the green and blue marble should? And he’d done some stupid things as well when he was younger including what she was doing and hadn’t gotten the punishment he’d deserved.

But still, Gurminder wondered, gazing over into Tory’s now uncertain gaze. Who was going to have to deal with this custerfluck when it came due?