CHAPTER 3
When Savannah Runner filled half the view before him, Tarkos flipped and burned the rocket pack at a whole e-gee, slowing till he drifted forward at only a dozen meters a second.
Tarkos never much liked space walks. The inescapable emptiness of space could cause a kind of existential vertigo if he reflected on the vastness that surrounded him. Sometimes he enjoyed that: it gave him a sense of wild freedom and it reminded him that all his problems and worries were very, very small. But sometimes a space walk instilled a primordial fear all the way down his spine, like the feeling you get in the deep ocean when you are treading water and you realize there are miles and miles of black water, and creatures that live in that black water, below your n***d feet. So he tried, when
