An Empty Holster on Cessation

Marshal Quill rode into the Halberd Combine's claim with an empty holster and a single folded paper, because that was all she had, and she had learned a long time ago to walk in like the thing you lack is the thing you chose to leave behind.

Cessation was a dust moon, third out from a cold sun, and its one wealth lay deep: a single aquifer threading the rock like a vein under skin, the only liquid water for nine hundred thousand kilometres. Every soul on the moon — the homesteaders, the moss-farmers, the children in the prefab school at Tin Hollow — drank from one well, and the law that shared it out was old and plain and Quill's to keep.

The Halberd Combine had brought four extraction rigs across the regolith in the night, set them down over the deep seam, and begun to pump the aquifer dry to slurry their ore. They had done it without a permit because they had calculated, correctly, that the nearest marshal was one tired woman with a sidearm she'd pawned in a worse season than this one.

Their foreman, a wide soft man named Sereda Box, came out to meet her flanked by six hired guns whose rifles cost more than Tin Hollow's whole school. He looked at her hip, and he smiled, because he was a man who read a holster the way some men read a hand of cards.

"Marshal," he said. "I don't see a gun."

"No," Quill agreed. The dust ticked against her coat. "I didn't bring one."

"Then Idon't see why we're talking."

"Because," she said, and unfolded the paper slow enough that every one of the six watched her hands instead of her eyes, "you brought rifles to a place where rifles aren't the thing that owns the water. And I came to read you who does."