Eve started to laugh. She was standing in her home of the past decade, an airship that might as well be dead. The only way she could get it functional again was to make it back to the colony, across sand-pits that could swallow her whole, and then get the neural processor back from Tadeusz before it starved to death, and before the algae in the airship's oxygen recyclers and fuel-cells starved.

From somewhere inside her there came a deep swell of emotion, and she screamed. Some of it was from the loss of her husband. Some of it was fear of these terrible people. Some of it was just anger. But most of it was a nameless emotion, something primal, the feeling that an animal might have when after being chased into a corner, it turns to attack its predator. That emotion when not only does it need to fight, but a switch in its mind has been thrown and now it wants to fight.