The rooftops of a few tall buildings peeked over the dust clouds, the first visible sign of any change Harper could see from the small circular windows on the sides of the Hail Mary for at least two hours. “This is Riga!” Walters said, laughing in tune with the metallic rattling of the dust ship’s hull, “Means we’re just about twenty kilometers from Crantown! Ready to land, sugartits?”

  Harper thought of Walters sort of like a day-old dog turd: crusty on the outside and slimy on the inside, to be avoided at all costs. His long, receding hair was only washed out of necessity when he got dust in it. His well-oiled black mustache was perhaps the best kept part of the man, though it was still drooped over a patchy field of brown stubble. Its impressive size had the unintended effect of making his little brown eyes look even smaller in comparison, and Harper wondered if his mustache were any bigger, could it at least make it harder to tell when those small wet beads were staring down her cleavage?

  “Call me sugartits one more time and I’ll throw you out the back, dickhead,” Harper said as she leaned back into her seat, across from the third member of their crew, Viktor Payton.

  “Bet she can do it too,” Payton laughed. “What is she, a head taller than you, Walters?” It was only a slight exaggeration.

  “I know,” Walters said, looking over his shoulder at Harper with a big grin, his upper lip completely overshadowed by his mustache. “Just how I like ‘em!”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Harper said, and shook her head, turning her attention instead to Payton. The man could’ve been thirty-five or fifty-five for all she could tell. His short black hair carried slight flecks of gray. His dark skin was riddled with scars and black tattoos, though most of them weren’t visible under his duster. Among them, the names of four fallen brothers in arms and a skull emblem with the words “Kunnia ja Veljeys” in the old Finnish tongue: Honor and Brotherhood. He was just a bit taller than Harper, perhaps pushing six feet, but he was nearly twice as wide. And most of that was muscle.

  “So, what we bringing these townies?” Harper asked, grabbing a hair tie from the pocket of her cargo pants and gathering her rusty ginger hair into a ponytail. “My ass is practically stuck to the seat by now, I’m starting to believe all this talk of dust-free zones outside of New Helsinki was drein-shit.”

  “Ah, you know…” Payton said with a shrug, “Tapes, batteries, kids’ toys… whatever they can’t grow or scavenge out there. You ever think of leaving the big city for good, kid, just remember… those hicks are willing to pay enough for junk like that to make it worth us flying all the way out here.”

  Harper let out something between a scoff and a laugh. Truth is, she had thought of leaving the city more than she cared to admit. Not that she was gonna go AWOL, of course, but getting to see the world outside the cartel city was one of the reasons she signed up on the Hail Mary. She wasn’t ready to give up the illusion that there was something better on the other side of the dust, at least not until she could see it for herself.

  “So what’s on the tapes?” she asked.

  “Oh you know…” Walters said, as he turned back towards Harper again, making a fist and moving his tanned bony hand up and down.

  “You give our new crew member one more remark like that and I’ll throw you out myself,” Payton said.

  “Gee, sorry boss,” Walters said, raising his hands and turning his eyes back to the wheel, “I ain’t lying though…”

  Payton sighed and looked down, fighting against the laughter threatening to rise from his throat. “Well, that’s not all there is. Got some classics from before the Storm too… Die Hard, Jaws, Scarface…”

  “Right…” said Harper, pulling her turtleneck over her tank top and reaching for the duster coat hanging behind her.

  “You got the right idea kid, but you know, the town isn’t actually in the dust,” Payton said, “It’s hot as hell out there, you don’t gotta cover up.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Oh I know,” Harper smiled, “It’s not cause of the dust, it’s cause of Walters.”

  “Ah, don’t worry about him,” Payton said, “He likes to make the new guy uncomfortable. If you weren’t a chick, he’d be just as gross. Shit, maybe worse.”

  “I ain’t worried,” Harper said, “It’s like you said. Could throw him out the back easily enough…”

  Walters began to shout from the front. “Hey, maybe you should throw me on the ground instead and-”

  “Shut up,” Harper said, “Hey Payton, you sure he ain't been breathing in the dust? Maybe he’s a rare case that turned into a pervert instead of a slayer.”

  “Nah, he was a perv since before his first mission,” Payton said, hoping neither he nor Harper would need to make good on the promise of throwing their only pilot out, “You watch tapes, kid? Got a fave? If it’s on the list, could let it ‘go missing’ from the pile.”

  “Sure, but more into the stuff Neo-Classica makes, you know?” Harper said. She could already guess Payton wasn’t gonna like that.

  “Pearls, before fucking swine…” he said. Just about what Harper predicted he would. “Gotta let you watch some of those old fighter movies, y’know… Top Gun, Dunkirk… learn a bit of our history.”

  “Shit, you wanna teach her our history boss,” Walters said, “She better off watching Ice Road Truckers! Hail Mary’s a lot closer to a truck than a plane! Big, fat, ugly, noisy…”

  “Hey, don’t talk shit about our girl,” Payton said, patting the ship's walls as if trying to reassure the Hail Mary that she’d always be beautiful in his eyes, “She’s a beautiful fighting gal, an explorer, an angel of the dust!”

  A wave of static washed over the hull of the Hail Mary, a jumble of incomprehensible voices and words. Slowly forming into a coherent, frightened “Hello?”.

  “Fuck…” Walters uttered, pointing to a series of fiery lights up ahead, barely visible in the distance through the dust. “That don’t look right, boss.”

  “Hello?” the voice repeated, seeming to belong to a frightened, half-whispering woman, “This is the CS Siegfried… does anyone copy?”

  “Roger that,” Walters said, picking up the receiver of the Hail Mary’s radio transmitter, “This is the Hail Mary, registered independent.”

  “The Siegfried…” Payton repeated, pulling over his goggles and reaching to fasten his dust mask, nodding to Harper to do the same, “Fucking hell, that’s a freighter…”

  Harper fastened her goggles and mask, pulling on her black leather gloves as she tried to make sense of the situation. The Hail Mary was an old modified 54 Sky Truck, about twenty meters in length and four meters in width (around eight if counting the four ducted fans on the sides of the ship allowing the craft to fly). In other words, pretty damn big for a dust ship. Freighters, however, were a class on their own. Probably ten times the size, capable of transporting hundreds of passengers or dozens of tons of cargo. Each cartel only owned a couple of those beasts.

  “Something’s wrong, I don’t know… a dust leak?” the woman’s voice whimpered across the radio, “The captain, some of the passengers, they’ve gone insane. They’re-”

  The radio cut, around the same time as an explosion lit the sky, the shockwave shaking the Hail Mary and causing Harper to drop back into her seat seconds after she stood. The Siegfried had become a giant inferno in the distance, hurling through the dust, crashing down into the abandoned streets of the ashen city below.

  The tops of the tallest buildings were barely visible through the dust, which had gone from gray to orange, then slowly turned black as it mixed with the smoke below. The ground shook as Walters tried to regain control of the Hail Mary, muttering a prayer and reaching to kiss the cross hanging from his neck.

  “Take us down,” Payton said, making sure his mask was fastened. He grabbed two shotguns from the ship’s weapon rack and threw one to Harper.

  “Shit, into THAT?” Walters cried out, “Boss, ain’t anyone surviving that crash! We’re risking our lives and our cargo…”

  “Take us down, that’s an order,” Payton said again.

  Harper’s mind was racing. Her hand was shaking as she fed two shells into her double-barreled shotgun. Was her mask on tight enough? Were her goggles the right size? They were actually going into the dust? She figured if she was in this business long enough, maybe she’d have to. But this soon? She figured all she’d do was look tough, help with maintenance, get some real animal meat from the townies, maybe meet a handsome farmer. She didn’t expect to be clipping a bandolier of shotgun shells around her duster and wading right into the dust itself.

  “Here, kid,” Payton said, tapping her shoulder and handing her a holstered revolver. She recognized the model, an old Zaykov 19. Solid blackened steel except for its oversized chrome cylinder, holding eight .357 rounds. Harper looked at it, then back to Payton, not seeing the smile under his dust mask. “Trust me, nothing more reliable out there… Hope you won’t need it.”

  “Alright, fuck…” Walters said, “Landing in 20 seconds. God help us…”