“Vincio, ma’am. Another message from SEC rep Taishan. Do you wish to follow code‑five procedure?”

Banner was already changing direction, angling toward her office. “Yes. I’ll pick it up personally.”

Day and T’orre Na were sitting on the bench along the far wall of the outer office when Danner got there. She nodded to them both. The viajera was running a knotted cord through her fingers; bright threads flickered through her tanned hands. “It came on a herd bird,” she said.

“My office.”

They sat. Danner felt a vast irritation. She did not have time for this. “What does it say this time?”

“ From Marghe Amun to Commander Danner, greetings. Hannah, you must,”–Thenike looked at Danner–“there’s great emphasis on that word, you must accede to Cassil’s trata demands. Even if you only send half‑a‑dozen officers. You must be seen to do something. Please review my report. I’m on my way to talk to you personally.”

“But she’s pregnant!”

T’orre Na looked at Danner blankly, and Day grinned.

“I mean… Oh, curse the woman! This is the last thing I need! A pregnant SEC rep who’s gone native, swanning in here stomach‑first and telling me what I must and must not do! Well, I can’t stop her, she can come and she can say what she likes. But I’m just too damn busy.” Danner felt foolish at her outburst, then angry at feeling foolish. Damn it, the day was just too hot for this. “I have an appointment.” Then she remembered she needed to talk to the viajera. “If you two could meet with me for dinner? Good.”

She got out of the office and took four strides across the grass toward her appointment with Gautier and her lunch before her wristcom beeped again.

What the hell was it now? “Danner!”

“Dogias here. We’ve got trouble. The northern relay has just gone from the grid.”

“Gone? What do you mean, gone?”

“Gone. Phht. Kaput.”

Danner felt like strangling the woman. “Explain,” she said through gritted teeth.

“The northern relay is no longer accessible. Diagnostics show it does not exist.”

“Theories?”

“None. What I need is a satellite scan, or to go up there personally and take a look.”

It took Nyo two hours to send signals through the Port Central uplink to Estradeordering a satellite to scan the right area and send down a data squirt. Sigrid took another half an hour to collate the information. The delay did nothing to soothe Danner’s irritation.

The room was crowded: Dogias, Danner, T’orre Na, Sara Hiam, Lu Wai, Day, Nyo; Sigrid at the screen.

“It’s a bit fuzzy, but the best I could do with the cloud cover. This is the Holme Valley. Here and here”–she circled areas to the north–“are native dwellings. Here”–further to the north–“is the area where the relay is.” She magnified. And again. “Or was.”

“Sweet god.” Danner stared at the tangled structure that had once been the northern relay.

“Someone trashed it,” Dogias said. “They must have fired it first. Only way to bend those plastics. Can you enlarge it once more?” Nyo did. Dogias studied it intently. “Looks like they’ve even smashed the dish. See? Those shards there. I can’t put that back together. Build another, maybe, but that one’s history.”

“How the hell did this happen?” Danner turned to T’orre Na. “Is this how Cassil responds when I refuse to help?”

There was a sudden thick silence; Danner had ample time to wish she had not said anything.

“No,” T’orre Na said, mildly enough, but Danner knew the viajera was angry.

She did not have the patience to apologize now. “The weather, maybe?”

Dogias shook her head. “A big enough storm with lightning hitting it square on might damage it, but, no, this kind of destruction is deliberate.”

They all looked silently at the screen.

“There’s something else you might want to see,” Sigrid said. The picture changed.

“What the hell is this?”

“Watch.” The dark patch that filled a quarter of the screen shifted. “This one was taken one minute later. Let me enlarge.”

Horses. It was a hundred or more riders. “It’s those damn tribes,” Danner said wonderingly.

“It looks that way,” Day agreed.

“Assuming they’ve kept a straight line, extrapolate their origin.

It took less than a minute. The screen showed a purple line running directly from the wrecked relay to the riders.

No one, no one could be allowed to get away with that. “Lu Wai, assemble four sleds. Sixty officers, with full field armor and rations for…” she calculated in her head, “thirty days. Field hospital and shelters. And make sure we include the crossbow squad.” It would be interesting to see how they performed in a real situation. “I’ll command. Other personnel: Dogias and Neuyen and whoever else we need to build another relay. When can you have your gear together, Dogias?”

“Three hours.”

“Then we’ll leave in four. That gives us two hours’ daylight.” She turned to Nyo. “I want that satellite moved north. I need communications.”

“I can do that. And keep you updated on the weather. There’s an unusual weather system building up there. Severe storms.”

“Very well. Dr. Hiam, we might need a physician.”

“I’d be happy to come along.”

“And T’orre Na, and Day. I’ll need you to liaise at Holme Valley.” She remembered they were guests. “If you’re willing.”

Danner strode out of her offices, the adrenaline of rage singing light and hot through her veins. Rage that soon became a kind of exhilaration.

She was going to get to do her job. At last.

The breeze blowing cool through the Yelland hills eased off as Marghe and Thenike made their way down the foothills and onto the plain toward Holme Valley. The heat made Marghe feel tired and tense. The air was humid, so thick with moisture that she felt it like spiderwebs across her face, and kept wanting to brush it away, wipe it from her skin.

They stopped at midafternoon. Marghe felt a kind of tension in the air, a tension she might not have been aware of before the virus became part of her.

“I don’t like this,” Thenike said, standing still and sniffing at the heavy air like a pointer. “There’s more than one storm on its way. We need to find shelter.”

Marghe remembered the mad ride on the sled, bucking over rocks as Lu Wai raced for shelter. Remembered the wind building, then the awful, fabulous lightning; Letitia Dogias laughing like a madwoman; the sheer excitement of so much raw power.

But the image that kept recurring was not Letitia throwing back her head and laughing with the storm, but Uaithne. Uaithne with her knife and her horse and her pale eyes, holding up hands stained with blood, laughing and laughing and riding into the storm looking for blood.

“We have to go on as long as we can,” Marghe said. “Uaithne’s going to do something terrible in this storm. We’ve got to keep going.”

They plodded on, on and on, until they felt as though they were wading through heat, alert for the first rising of wind.

Marghe told herself there was nothing Uaithne could do against Danner; no way the tribeswoman could hurt Lu Wai and Letitia. It was not possible for Uaithne with her wooden spears and her sharp stones to get past the sleds and slick armor and firepower of the Mirrors. Not possible. But the image of Uaithne with her knife would not go away.

Marghe walked faster. Last time, Aoife had been there to take the knife from Uaithne’s hand. Where was she now? Where was Aoife in all this?

Holme Valley looked like a refugee camp, Danner thought as she stepped out of the field hospital. Women everywhere, talking angrily or sitting apathetically, rocking children, and everywhere dust: dust kicked up by the Singing Pasture horse herds which were skittish and nervous, by the sleds pulling hawsers tight to further secure the field hospital, by Mirrors erecting temporary quarters and technicians hanging solar panels and stringing cable. The dust hung in the still air like particles suspended in a liquid.