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his way to the front of the line ahead of the departing passengers, making the other businessmen and travelers wait. Next, the tight-knit religious group exited at their own pace. For all his eager jostling, Fernando didn’t manage to disembark any faster than if they had simply waited their turn. Vincent glanced behind him and saw that the girl Antonia was hesitating in the back, looking lost. He knew exactly how she felt.
    Emerging under the greenish-brown sky, Vincent drew a deep breath of the strange-smelling air. Fernando spread his hands wide and looked around as if he had just entered paradise. “Hellhole – the place to go, when you’ve got nowhere else to go! Not exactly a vacation paradise, eh, Vincent? Still, we’re here and ready to make the best of it.”
    Back on the Crown Jewel worlds, the noble holdings were so subdivided that there was little opportunity for growth or exploration. Once the stringline transportation network was extended to the untamed Deep Zone, Diadem Michella encouraged all manner of dreamers, pioneers, and risk-takers to rush to those virgin planets and claim a place for themselves. Unlike the crowded core worlds, the DZ frontier was wide open, the landscapes new, the possibilities endless.
    Of all the DZ planets opened to colonization, Hallholme was at the bottom of the list, a dumping ground for undesirables: charlatans, misfits, outcasts, and criminals. Vincent had never imagined that he would be counted among that lot. He’d led a quiet life, never bothering anyone, but even so . . .
    Outside in the paved spaceport area, guards escorted the convicts in a convoy out to their camp assignment. Transport vehicles and cargo flatbeds streamed away from the landing zone towards the main town a few kilometers away. While he and Fernando waited for instructions (Vincent more patiently than his friend), the blue-garbed religious group hired a transport and hurried off to their own destination, without inviting the stragglers to join them.
    As the crowd dwindled around the passenger pod, Vincent tried to figure out where he was supposed to go. His stomach was in a knot. Noticing a colony reception office on the far side of the landing field, he said, “I wonder if we need to sign in and receive supplies or a welcome kit.” He looked around, hoping to find someone in authority.
    “No thanks – then we’d be with all the other new arrivals, and we’ll miss our chance. I know, let’s go straight to town and see what we can find there.” Fernando took his arm and with full (and perhaps feigned) confidence, walked to a group of supply workers unloading one of the downboxes. He talked quickly, smiled, and asked for “a quick favor.” They let him and Vincent hitch a ride with a handful of businessmen from the Crown Jewel worlds.
    After he reached the colony town, Vincent looked at the buildings, all of which seemed drab and squat, hunkered down against unexpected threats. He noted a lack of color, none of the verdant greens and blues of his homeworld of Orsini. Everything – even the people walking along the streets – seemed gray and brown or drab shades in between. This was going to be his new home . . .
    Fernando smiled. “Ah, we’re going to fit right in, my friend.”
    At twenty-nine, soft-spoken Vincent didn’t like to call attention to himself, didn’t clown around in conversations. Back on Orsini, he had lived with his retired and sickly father, Drew, tending the man’s worsening medical condition. Vincent had worked in a repair shop for large machinery, eventually becoming manager; he understood cranes and lifters, construction loaders, upboxes and downboxes. He was used to crawling right inside the engines and power pods in order to fix them. A good employee, very reliable, never causing any trouble.
    But when his father’s condition changed from disability to terminal illness, Vincent found himself sliding into a bottomless pit of treatments, medical experts and