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I peered back at the valley floor, at the single pair of steepled humps kicked up by Egara’s boots.
Any drone could make out those.
It would be nigh-on impossible for us to cover them up behind ourselves.
“Do you think we’re close?” I said.
He didn’t look at me and focused on the next rise.
“Could be,” he said, noncommittally.
In truth, there was no way he could know for sure either way.
He knew no more than I did.
“Come on,” I said. “If we’re going to find this shuttlecraft of yours, we’re going to have to get a move on.”
We marched onward and rounded the next corner.
I checked the sky, looking for a flicker of light that might bounce off a drone’s hard outer shell.
Egara had much better hearing than me.
He would likely hear a drone’s loud buzzing, like giant hornets, before he would see them.
We had to take each corner at a time, hoping it would be the last, each counting down to the one that would finally reveal the merchants who’d stolen his shuttlecraft.
“Who would live in such a place as this?” I wondered out loud.
“This moon was colonized long ago,” Egara said, trudging through the sand that never failed to catch the front of his boots. “That species had to sell it to pay off debts. The debtors came and evicted most of the locals. They were allowed to stay so long as they didn’t hinder the building of the prisons.”
“What happened to those that did?”
“Well, there’s plenty of room at the local ‘hotels.’”
I gasped.
It somehow seemed perverse to imprison the very species that, through no fault of their own, had lost possession of this moon to an opportunistic alien race.
Especially since they had done nothing wrong to deserve it.
“The prisons get more funds the more prisoners they have here,” Egara said, mildly surprised at my shock. “The more prisoners they have, the more money they make.”
It was an entire field of the prison’s operating procedure I had never considered before.
Why would I? It wasn’t like it affected me.
Except, it did.
I was a part of that system now.
If the prison was run like a business, then I would be considered nothing more than an expenditure.
A single line on a ledger somewhere, where a thin nosed accountant would squint at the numbers and question the tax liabilities of each item.
I wondered how I would be referenced.
Entertainment?
