The buyer was late. Zoe was starting to get a real bad feeling about this job, and she was pretty sure Mal was, too. Twenty minutes was a long time to wait, when the cargo was a shipment of Alliance-made sniper rifles with laser sights, and twenty cases of ammunition. How they’d been lifted in the first place, Mal and Zoe didn’t know and hadn’t asked; security on this type of item was normally tighter than on shipments of pure platinum ore. Mal and Zoe only knew that they’d been hired to deliver the stuff to a buyer on Whittier, and that buyer was now twenty-five minutes late.

“I don’t like it,” Mal muttered.

“If we leave, are we in worse trouble?” she muttered back. Whoever had gone to the trouble of stealing these weapons was bound to be mighty put out if Mal and Zoe simply up and disappeared with them.

Naturally, there was no cover where they were. It was an old landing strip for atmospheric craft, long abandoned, its tower burned to the ground. Nothing around but pavement – the two runways, the taxiways, the parking lots all testimony to someone or some group who had believed that this backwater world would someday support a thriving economy. It hadn’t happened. Unless stolen and smuggled sniper rifles counted as a thriving economy. The only other thing thriving here were the weeds, poking stubbornly up through the tarmac, breaking it up in a slow war to recover their lost ground.

Mal raised his commlink. “Wash? You see anybody? We are all alone out here, for all we can tell.”

“I got nothing, Mal,” Wash said. “You want me to come get you?”

“No. Sit tight for now.”

“Sitting tight.”

“Sir.” Zoe pointed south, where a faint cloud of dust was rising. Mal squinted in that direction until the source of the cloud resolved itself as a largish ground vehicle – an armored personnel carrier, relic of the war, that looked as though it had lived through at least one explosion. Its right side was dented, and the vehicle was covered with black scorch marks.

“Uh, Mal, I got somet