Mitzner and McAfree needed to find some means of communicating with the Armstrong. McAfree insisted that she could hack anything capable of communicating with the ship, so it was a simple matter of getting access. Of course, interstellar communications systems weren't things people just left lying around. If they were going to find something like this they'd need the lay of the land.

McAfree's best attempt at a Babylonian accent bordered on being offensive, so Mitzner was going to do the talking. At least the people there spoke Martian.

 The slums of the city had grown out from the edges, and into the cracks and crannies of the planned colony. Every space where makeshift shanties, stalls or even primitive houses could be erected from salvaged material they were. Beggars, peddlers, and the sickly seemed to line the street, which were themselves covered in a thin layer of industrial grime. The scarcity inherent to a relatively new colony only made the poverty here more pronounced.

McAfree doubted anyone here had an Ansible they could use. She was skeptical they'd even be able to get access to electricity.

Mitzner led them to the edge of the slum, but it was separated from the rest of the city by a fortified wall. Mitzner knew that there would be, at the very least, a steep toll to use any gates into the city proper to keep the people in the slum from leaving. There was just no way around it; they would need some Babylonian money.

"You could sell one of your guns," offered McAfree.

"No. Unequivocally," said Mitzner.

"So what are we going to do then?" asked McAfree "Rob someone?"

"It's bad enough that people have to live like this," said Mitzner "We're not going to contribute to their misery."

"I can only assume then," said McAfree "That you have some great plan which is why you're shooting down all of my reasonable plans."

"We're just going to have to find a way to make ourselves useful," said Mitzner "We both have marketable skills."

"Mitzner, I don't want to settle down here," said McAfree "How long do you think the Armstrong is going to wait for us? We can't find jobs and start saving up."

"There is one alternative," said Mitzner "But it's dangerous. It's what I would do if you weren't here, but it's liable to get you killed."

"What's that?" asked McAfree.

"We scale the wall, and become fugitives twice over," said Mitzner.

"That's a much better plan," said McAfree "I vote we do that."

"You're just a baseline human, McAfree," said Mitzner "You probably won't make it over the wall."

"First," said McAfree "We prefer to be called 'humans'. Second, I'd rather die trying to get the hell out of here than have to live long enough to find out what it is these people eat."

"If that's your decision, let's go. I think I saw a potential blind spot in the smartgun's visual sensor field a ways back. We can sneak up from that angle and try to take out all four of the smartguns that will be within range to fire at us before we get completely obliterated, Then we'll have about four standard minutes to get over the wall before the troopers will be able to get to our position."

"Smartguns?" asked McAfree, her eyes lighting up "Those are only about the most vulnerable autonomous weapons system ever developed. Do you know they get their orders broadcast from a central hub? It's like they were designed to be hacked."

"You're saying you could hack the smartguns?" asked Mitzner.

"From halfway across the city, using nothing but my glasses if necessary," said McAfree, touching the computer glasses she always wore "New plan: All the smartguns fire on one another, destroying the entire autonomous defense perimeter, and then while the troopers are running around like chickens with their heads cut off we climb the wall at the place of our choosing."

"Yeah," said Mitzner "Let's do that."