Her hands hurt. She loosened her grip on the fence. That would not happen. This was not one of those legendary lost outposts turning to dust, with tales of which new recruits frightened each other on lonely, predawn guard duty. She shook her hands at her sides until the white marks faded. If the vaccine did not work, then Company would close down the operation. She and her personnel would be transferred to some orbital hospital facility. There might be a few tests, yes, but after suitable decontamination and quarantine, and no doubt tedious debriefing, they would be sent home on well‑deserved furlough, then reassigned.

Would they? That was not what Sara Hiam thought, nor what Marghe seemed to believe.

Danner did not know what to think. Until an hour ago, she had believed that Company trusted her, that it looked after its own. But that was what Marghe had thought about SEC. And she had been wrong.

Clouds scudded overhead. She tipped her head up to watch. They looked like the giant sea skates she had seen easing past above her the time she had gone diving off the Great Barrier Reef.

A cold, fat raindrop splashed on her forehead at the hairline. Another hit her hand. On impulse, she lifted her wet knuckle to her mouth and sucked. The rain was sweet, unspoiled. She remembered a day when she was eleven, standing scrape‑kneed with her friends on a heap of used car tires, tasting polluted rain and trying to guess what the different chemicals were. Afterward, they took some home and tested it to see who had identified the most. There were far more than any of them had thought.

The rain was coming down steadily. If Sara Hiam was right, if Marghe was right, she might never see Earth again, might never get to taste rain eaten up and spat out, partially clean, by tailored bacteria. She walked slowly along the fence. The grass was getting high here, hard to walk through. She should order it cut. It could provide cover for hostiles.

Hostiles. Sometimes she felt like a bit player in one of those old, bad movies about the American West. Only, in this movie, some of her cavalry soldiers were spies, and the good ones left the fort, went into a reservation, and were never heard from again. Perhaps, as in the old movies, they died.

“Stop this,” she said out loud. Her voice sounded small and lonely against the hissing of the rain. She leaned her forehead against the chain‑link. Maybe she was lonely, maybe there were spies, but she was not small and she was not helpless. She would find these spies, and she would not let Company use her up and leave her for dead like a broken‑winded horse.

Except for the piles of printouts awaiting her attention, the neat chip racks, and the framed hardcopy of her promotion fixed to the wall above the computer, Danner’s mod was as bare as the day she had first come to Jeep. She stripped off her uniform and showered. Halfway through drying herself, she threw the towel on the floor next to the discarded and crumpled uniform.

She did not want anything next to her skin that reminded her of Company.

She sat naked in front of her screen. What was Company, really? A profit‑making organization. Whatever the situation, they would make their decisions based on the accounts. Very well.

She pulled up lists of plant and equipment, compared their costs to transportation costs; tried to figure in months of full pay for personnel who did nothing but sit around in decontamination, and added to that the cost of such a facility; weighed all that against Company’s control of public opinion through the media. The answer was clear.

If the vaccine did not work, Company would find it more expedient, more cost‑effective, to simply abandon her, her staff, and Port Central. No one would find out: Company controlled the media.

She wondered why she had never understood this before, then realized she had, deep down; just like Marghe, just like Sara Hiam, just like all those Jeep personnel, Mirror and civilian, who were busy decorating their mods, making their own clothes, and weaving beautiful tapestries. Adapting to the realities and necessities of their new home, as she had been: worrying over supplies of suture reels and hypodermic needles, pushing, always pushing to get more communication relays up. Yes, she had known all along.

A new thought struck her. She tapped at the keys for several minutes, then sighed in relief. No. It would cost too much to sterilize the planet as a precaution against the virus. All Company needed to do was destroy Estrade, and that was that, planet sealed. The only question was whether or not they would take off Sara Hiam and the rest of the orbital crew first. They were uncontaminated, but they knew too much. She set that problem aside for later.

Supposing the vaccine did not work, and Company really did abandon them all. How would they survive? How would they replenish their food, their clothes, their medicines? The microwave relay satellite would not remain in orbit forever; they would need to find new ways to heat and light their homes. They might even need to build new homes, closer to suitable agricultural sites. And what would they use to make plows, and barrels, and sacks and bottles and plates and shoes and beds and combs?

She stared at the screen, then blanked it. This was not something she could fix in a few hours. This was more, far more, than an exercise in resupply. Marghe was right. To survive here, they needed to be part of the cultural food chain.

First, she needed information on Company and its plans. Information. The only person likely to know more than she did was the spy–or spies. Find them first, proceed from there. After all, the vaccine might still work.

To catch a spy, or a rabbit, or a thief, one needed a trap. To set a trap, she would need assistance. Who could she trust?

The transmissions had been sent eight days ago, from here, Port Central. Eight days ago Letitia Dogias and Lu Wai had been at Holme Valley. They could not have sent them. They might still have had something to do with it, but she dismissed that; she had to trust somebody, sometime. The more she thought about it, the more it made sense. Dogias was a communications technician, so she would be able to think of ways to track the signal. Both she and Lu Wai often left Port Central for weeks at a time, so any necessary absence would not attract suspicion. Perfect.

She dressed rapidly, returned to the screen.

“Vincio?”

“Ma’am?”

“Please inform Sergeant Lu Wai and Technician Letitia Dogias to meet me here, my mod, in two hours.”

“Yes, ma’am. Are you available to take calls now?”

“Not for two hours. In an emergency, I’ll be at the fencing hall with Private Kahn.”

Ana Kahn was a championship fencer, good enough to give her a workout that should drain the last of the anger from her body. She could not afford anger. For what lay ahead, she needed a clear, focused mind.

Outside, the rain had stopped. Danner strode briskly, leaving bootprints in the wet grass.

Chapter Six

THE WINTER CAMP of the Echraidhe huddled under a fast‑moving winter sky: fifty or more tents surrounding three animal pens and a thin, ice‑rimed spring that ran fifteen yards before disappearing back into the ground beneath the snow. Blue‑gray smoke, sharp with the smell of animal dung, trickled from several of the low black tents. One of the tents was much larger than the others. As they rode closer, Marghe could see the roofs sagging with snow. Winding from tent to tent, to stream and corral, paths had been worn through the snow to the mossy grass beneath. In places there was no moss, and Pella’s hooves rang on the iron‑hard ground. A windswirl blew snow up off the ground into Marghe’s face.

Two of the pens were empty. A third held a handful of horses standing nose to tail at the far end near a trough that was beginning to scum over with ice. Their breath steamed. The wooden uprights and cross‑planks looked dark and old but were fixed together with rope–a temporary structure, like everything else.