Others, then, might have to be.

“I appreciate your full cooperation, Agent Magdallen.” He rose and held out his hand, ancient gesture, deliberate and provocative gesture in a world of potential contaminants and infection. “Your cooperation and your reports, as you’ll choose to give them to me. I know you’re not legally bound to report to me, but I shall very much appreciate your opinions and your advice. And your alert observance on the street. I expect to have it, under present circumstances.”

“I appreciate the warning, sir,” Magdallen said, shook his hand, and immediately left—taking himself and that extravagant shirt back, the report of his own agents would suggest, to a certain apartment on Blunt—to leave the coat in yet another apartment he maintained in a very seedy neighborhood on 2nd Street.

It wasn’t to say he didn’t wipe down his hand thoroughly after Magdallen left, and he was confident Magdallen would hasten to do the same, probably going straight to a washroom. It remained a visceral comfort, the lemon-scented wipe washing off the memory of a foreign, off-station contact, not that he truly dreaded foreign contamination from Apex. The new scent, primeval cure, canceled the lingering presence that could convey viral intrusion or—in this hotbed of politics that Concord always was—things far more elaborate and damaging.

Being remote cousins of Earth, even knowing there were remediations, Outsiders had never quite cured themselves of fear. They didn’t go so far as to use robot interface. Outsiders trafficked with other worlds, observing sheer bravado in their personal contacts—but still, for psychological reasons, scrubbed such contacts off, frequently kept packets of wipes or Sterilites in their pockets, quite, quite silly as the action was. If Magdallen had brought any engineered contagion aboard, the whole station was already at risk. Always was. Always had been. Always would be. Far more threat than a sensible, well-paid agent from the central authority, the station had its biocriminals and its active nethermonde, that element that had threatened, and acted, usually for petty profit, sometimes for political reasons, on numerous occasions that the Office of Biological Security had had to scramble into action.

As for their ambassador from Earth—forget any trivial threat of germs from them. Earth wasn’t a threat: they feared biotech too much. Hence the containment unit.

One always, always, worried about one’s internal security, however, when the likes of Magdallen showed up, as Magdallen had, two years ago, about the time Procyon had risen to his rank, about twice the time ago this ship from Earth would have launched. Or a complete cycle, if something had reached Earth and bounced back to them, in the form of Mr. Gide.

Right now he was more than worried: he and Magdallen had bumped spheres of authority, and the air still crackled with the static.

Handle this. Handle it well, they’d challenged each other.

Neither he nor Magdallen could afford a mistake in the next several days, and now they both knew it.

THE LAND GAVE ANOTHER SHIVER, sending little stones and slips of sand down the long face of the terraces, warning that massive slabs of Plateau Sandstone that had sat for millennia overhead might grow uneasy in their beds. Marak cast an anxious look up, as sand slid down to cross their intended path.

Wandering terraces a mile above the pans, the fugitives had stayed out of sight, now, behind the spires of rock. They might have delayed, eating the new growth that still grew atop old sand-slips, but a relentless series of tremors had spooked them onward, down and down toward the bitter water pans.

Water itself was not an attraction. A beshta carried water in its blood, and, well watered a few days ago, they were not that thirsty. But, free now of riders and burdens, they followed ancient instincts for reasons that no longer quite applied to their survival. And they would, being beshti, go down, and down, and likely easterly across the pans, heading toward their home range, the young bull increasingly anxious to keep his females well separate from Marak’s old one, and maybe smelling him on the fitful wind. He was taking skittishness to the extreme.

“They made it down that slope,” Marak said to Hati, seeing the evidence of unstable sand, where beshti had clearly fallen and wallowed getting up. “I distrust that slope. Let us go a little over.”

Warmer wind whipped at them, swept up from the depths of the pans. A gust caught the tail of Hati’s scarf and blew it straight up. It had been like that by turns, but this southerly wind brought, rather than sand, a clearing of the air, and the scent of growing things.

They turned about, which, with beshti in a narrow place, was best done slowly, letting the beshti fully voice their complaints and test the rein. A new shiver of the earth underfoot gave them no help in the matter.

“Marak,”Drusus said. “Are you hearing me?”

“I hear,” he muttered, fully occupied at the moment.

“We can confirm the Southern Wall has actually cracked, omi. The cold sea is pouring into the basin. Meteorology thinks your weather will change soon. The earliest flood will soak into the sand and much of it will evaporate and meet cold air aloft. Fog is certain. So is rain. A great deal of rain.”

“When?” Marak asked, overlooking the distance-hazed pans, and a drop off a sandstone ledge scarcely a handspan from his beshta’s broad feet.

“They think the wind will shift, coming at first from the southwest, and meeting a front coming down off the Plateau—a great deal of evaporation as the seawater warms on the pans. There will be limited visibility, wind, and torrential rain, omi. We are watching that situation carefully. We are in contact with your camp. We have advised them to take extreme precautions. We urge you consider the possibility of thick fog and very poor visibility in planning your emergency route back. Above all, you should not go down onto the pans.”

As the beshti completed their precarious turn.

“We are not on the pans,” he said irritably, and to Hati, “The Southern Wall has indeed broken. The sea is coming in.”

Hati frowned, vexed at their situation. “So let us find these silly beshti before they drown.”

“Drusus forecasts rain and fog,” he said. “As well as flood.”

“Then the beshti may come up on their own,” she said. Beshti from the Refuge had learned good sense about flood, if not about inconvenience to their riders. They had no particular liking for being cold, wet, and unfed, and he agreed: if cold rain came before the fog, the situation could work to their advantage.

“What does it look like?” Marak asked Drusus, aching with curiosity for the sight they had hoped to see themselves, from a safe distance, to be sure. “What can you see at Halfmoon?”

“The two thin waterfalls,”Drusus said. “Proceeding from the cliffs. Clearly seawater has won a passage of sorts through formerly solid rock. We can’t see the source, which seems about midway up the escarpment, but clearly a crack has opened between the sea and the southern basin. As a direct result of the waterfalls, cloud is forming that blocks our clearest view from the heavens. We’re having to go to other instruments, so our view is adequate, but not as good as we could wish. We believe the gap will rip much wider very quickly. The rock there may be the same basalt as that in the ridge. If it is, we fear it will not hold long against the rush of water. And if that happens faster than we think, weather calculations will change. I cannot say strongly enough, omi, all calculations may change without warning.”

Without warning. The chance of their being at the right place to see this wonder in person had, over all, been very small, unless they had been willing to camp at Halfmoon for a few centuries and wait for moving plates to move and geology to have its way. Ian had argued it would be later, rather than sooner.