The building was larger than I'd thought, colonnaded wings stretching back behind the main body. Most of the windows were blocked by fresh-looking, unpainted concrete, leaving only narrow vision slits. With the College's already thick walls, it gave the impression of being in a castle.

  We walked deeper into the College, past resting troops, sleeping men and women sprawled out in side rooms, on benches, on desks, on the floor. A few played games with cards made from the same type of white flimsy I'd seen on Martens' desk, others ate.

  "How's the supply situation?" I asked.

  Dil hesitated, a minuscule pause before replying, long enough for our boots to strike the floor almost in unison. Evaluating what he was going to say, still not trusting me. A positive sign. The Roughnecks and their commander kept proving they weren't complete mungers.

  "Good," Dil said. "The city vats are intact, and the company's main shipping terminal was the Cant City Spaceport. We seized lots of luxury goods there."

  He handed me a candy bar, with a garish red-and-blue berry dancing on the wrapper. Not quite a blueberry, nor a raspberry. More an artist's impression of a berry done by someone who'd lived in an enclosed habitat with no growth zone all their life. The sugar in it was real, though, and the chocolate tasted bio-organic. Not high quality, but real.

  "This what passes as luxuries at the company?" I said.

  "Luxury enough," Dil replied, not looking at me. His chin was covered in stubble that scratched against the collar of his unbuttoned camo jacket, a patch of the grey nano-polyweave showing where he'd worn away the top material.

  "Been on Millet long?" I said.

  "Long enough," Dil said. "The locals call it Newm. Call themselves Newms, except the company men."

  "Tell me about the company," I said, expecting him to take offense and refuse the way everyone else had. He didn't.

  "The almighty New Millet Lumber and Cellulose Processing Company," Dil said. "Great name, isn't it?"

  "Very catchy," I said. "They cut trees?"

  "They cut trees, past tense," Dil said. "Newm's a single-biome world. Was supposed to grow all the biomass needed for the sector. That was in ancient times, before zero-loss vat tech."

  "No vat's truly zero-loss," I said, but Dil waved it away, my Hurmer slipping down his shoulder as he did. He shrugged the sling higher.

  "Yes, sir," he said. "Anyway, biomass became a low-cost product. The trees had already been planted and they kept spreading. Took some centuries, but the forests grew over everything. Now Newm lives from its lumber, but the boles aren't wide enough for truly massive slabs."

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  "So they compete with vat-growth," I said. The hall we walked through was mostly storerooms, brown crates in irregular piles, stuff packed in some sort of rough biopolymer. Untreated, flattened cellulose, likely. People always use what's cheapest.

  Our steps echoed, not quite in sync, one-one-two, one-one-two. Behind us came the echo of multiple steps, fully in sync.

  Someone following, several someones.

  "Yes," said Dil, hiking my slimline's sling higher. My rifle clacked against the Hurmer.

  "Careful with that," I said.

  "Sir," he confirmed, without any rancor or sarcasm that I could hear. Like patting a youngster on the head. I pegged him as a career sergeant who'd perfected his handling of touchy junior officers. At least he kept the Hurmer from hitting my slimline again.

  I tried to get a look at whomever was following without being obvious, but they were far enough away that the few intervening troops blocked my sight. Dil didn't seem worried, or he hid it well.

  "The company?" I prompted.

  "Well, twenty years ago, someone came up with the idea that the value of Newm didn't lie in exporting the wood, but in owning it. The company was failing, one of many at the time. This was during the hauler wars, everything coming to a standstill. You couldn't sell the wood. Cant City paid a bounty on trees, for removing biomass from its borders to create firebreaks."

  "Lots of forest fires?" I said. We were approaching a corner, the corridor doing a 90-degree turn to the left. Great place for an ambush, if the corridor stopped. No one seeing, nowhere to go. My shoulder blades crawled together on their own. I hate being followed.

  "There are dry years," Dil said. "Sometimes the fires get hot enough to create fire tornadoes. One of those gets close to habitation and even two feet of solid concrete won't protect you."

  We came to the corner and I glanced over my shoulder at Dil. A casual glance. The corridor lay empty for twenty meters behind us. And then a trio of soldiers.

  Two men and a woman, all three slim, non-threatening, only side arms. They looked very bland, friendly, with casual smiles plastered on their faces. If they hadn't been exhausted enough to fall into a cadence in their steps, I'd even have bought it.

  Assassin squad. Crud. Did Martens want me dead? Why not have me shot outright then? He could have ordered it.

  Or did he fear killing an envoy? More questions. I hate questions, unless I'm the one asking them.

  "What's all that got to do with the company?" I said, to keep Dil talking while I thought. I needed a way out, and fast, before the assassin squad caught up with us.

  With me.

  "It's the potential," Dil said. "Our purser explained it. Goes like this. If you cut down the forest, you have a piece of wood that you can sell. It's a fixed value commodity that degrades over time, and you've got all sorts of costs associated with it, like storage and transport.

  "But if you have a tree, you have an amount of wood that could become valuable in the future. Then you can do all sorts of economic things with it, like borrowing against it and investing in something really profitable, or selling shares in the wood.

  "Newm's forests are huge, so they're very valuable as long as they're not used. You don't even need to be on the planet to mortgage it, as long as you own it. Which is what the company will do, if they can get rid of the rest of us. They'd be the local government, owning the planet."

  "Sounds overly complex," I said.

  Dil shrugged.

  "Economics. Can't say I understood it. Here we are, sir."

  There was a massive, wooden door ahead of us, brown, ornate, twice as tall as me. A polished brass handle stuck out from it. I pressed down, pulled, but the door wouldn't budge.

  Behind me, the steps fell silent as the assassin squad rounded the corner and stopped.