Текст книги "Ammonite"

Автор книги: Nicola Griffith

Соавторы: Nicola Griffith,Nicola Griffith
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“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.

The heat, and the way every woman she tried to talk to kept looking nervously at the sky, made Danner irritable.

“Later.” Cassil had said when they arrived, “we’ll talk later. There’s a storm on its way. There’s much to do.” Danner, expecting gratitude, had been annoyed. Now, after a mere six hours in the valley, she was sick of the sight of the place.

Sara Hiam, with Day interpreting, had been talking to the women who had been hurt by the tribes as they swept over the pastureland weeks ago. As Danner passed by, she overheard some of the notes the doctor was making into her wristcom. “Evidence of higher than Earth‑normal recuperative powers. Compound fracture of tibia and fibula sustained sixteen days ago already exhibits evidence of–”

Danner walked briskly. She did not want to hear how goddamn healthy these people were. She wanted the entrenchment phase to be over so she could start planning the native containment.

They were waiting for her in her tent: Captain White Moon, Lu Wai, Letitia, and T’orre Na. Danner was brusque.

“My immediate priority, until that satellite moves overhead and gives us communications with Port Central, has to be the reinstatement of the northern relay. Captain White Moon, I want you to take twelve officers to escort Dogias and Neuyen to the damaged site. Take Leap and a handful of her crossbow squad along.”

“With the commander’s permission–” Lu Wai began.

“No, Lu Wai. I need you here. A dozen officers are more than enough. It’s only preliminary reconnaissance by the communications team; there should be no danger.” Lu Wai looked like she was struggling with that, obviously unwilling to let Dogias go without her.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Danner wondered what she would have done if Lu Wai had refused.

“Do that now, Captain. Take two sleds.”

“We’ll take the gear,” Dogias said, “just in case. We could at least begin to rebuild while we’re there.”

“No. Examination of the site only. I don’t want my forces split for too long. This is reconnaissance only. Both sleds and all personnel to be back here, with a comprehensive report, this time tomorrow.”

Though the sun sank toward the horizon in bloody reds and oranges, the evening did not cool. Danner tried to ignore the feeling she had done the wrong thing when she saw the drawn look on Lu Wai’s face as the sleds headed north.

She went to find Hiam. The doctor was in the field hospital, sitting on one of the beds, absently tossing something from hand to hand. It was small and, whatever it was, it claimed all the doctor’s attention. Danner cleared her throat. Hiam spun around. “Oh. It’s you.” She dropped the object into the pocket of her white coat.

“You haven’t eaten yet, have you? Cassil wants us to dine with her and her kith this evening.”

“And is this the kind of place where we’re supposed to dress for dinner and overwhelm the natives with our aplomb?” Her voice was high and sharp.

“Are you all right?”

“No.” She fiddled absently with the thing in her pocket. “I’m supposed to be a doctor, but Lu Wai probably knows more about practical treatment than I do. I’m a researcher.” She pulled out the thing she had been playing with. A softgel. “Take a good look at it. FN‑17. My only claim to fame. Except it doesn’t work for the whole six months. I still don’t know why. I still don’t understand why it–” She shook herself. “I decided not to take any before I left Estrade” she said, “and on my recommendation neither did Nyo or Sigrid. It’s too late now, of course.” She dropped the softgel back in her pocket and stood up. “Statistically speaking, one of us is likely to die in a month or two. And that takes away my appetite for dinner.”

Danner did not know what to say. “Marghe lived. I lived. Everyone here lived. You should, too. With proper care. We’ve learned a lot about the virus since it first struck. Talk to Lu Wai about it.”

“I already have.”

“Then you know that we have a better idea than we did of how to care for its sufferers. The mortality rate dropped as we got more experience.”

“But it’s still high.”

“Yes, it’s still high. There’s nothing we can do about that. But if you want to talk about statistics, think of it this way: you’re much more likely to live than to die.”

“I know, I know. But I keep thinking: what will I do if Nyo dies, or Sigrid? I miss them already. The last five or six years, we’ve lived on top of one another day in, day out. There were times when I came close to killing them both, times when I think I would have given anything to see them make a mistake and explode into a cloud of fatty tissues and globules of blood as they EVAed to some satellite or other. But now that I’ve not seen them for three days, I miss them. I keep looking around, wondering where they are, why I can’t hear them or smell them. I feel lost.”

Lost, Danner thought to herself later as she dressed in her best uniform for the evening; we all feel lost. But we won’t always be. We’ll make this our home. Somehow.

To her surprise, Danner found that many of the foods Cassil’s kith served them at the tables and benches set up outside a house made of a bent‑over skelter tree were already familiar. The Port Central cafeteria had been growing and serving native vegetables for years. She sat between Sara and T’orre Na, at the same table as Cassil and Lu Wai and Day, three other valley women, and a woman from the pastures, Holle, who still wore a bandage around her head. She enjoyed showing Sara how to eat the tricky goura with its big seeds, and how to pour from the huge pitchers of water without drowning their small goblets.

“No one seems to be talking much,” Sara said as she piled her plate with meat.

“Now is for eating,” T’orre Na said, “while the food’s hot and the water cold. We’ll talk when the food is finished.”

“Just one of many sensible arrangements you’ll find here,” added Day.

Danner’s wristcom bleeped. “Please excuse me,” she murmured to Cassil, and eased back a little from the table before taking the call.

“Teng here.” There was some interference, a thin whine weaving in and out of Teng’s words. “The gig’s ready to go.”

“Good.” She was glad they had communication again with Port Central, but wondered why her deputy had bothered her with this. “Is there something else?”

“I’ve delayed departure; someone’s tampered with the second gig.”

Danner swore, then realized everyone at her table was looking at her, and modulated her voice. “How badly, Teng?”

“Crippled.”

It had to be the other spy, the one Relman had mentioned. Coming out of the woodwork at last.

“Request orders regarding the departure of the first gig.” Teng’s voice slipped a little. “Commander, it’s our only way off this world now. We can’t let it go.”

“A moment.” The wristcom hissed with static while she thought. “Teng, ask Nyo if she can fix the autopilot on the gig so that it’s tamperproof.” If she could do it to the Estradesystems, she should be able to get the gig up and back down safely enough…

“That’s a negative, Commander. But she says she can do something with the systems, cripple them so they can only be flown from our uplink station.” There was a pause. “She says to assure you she’ll be able to restore the functions once it gets back.”

“Good. Then let them go.”

Silence. Then: “Commander, you haven’t asked if we caught the saboteur. Don’t you want to know who it is?”

And Danner realized she knew, had known all along, who it was. Who it had to be. Who had always been nearby, who had access to privileged communications. Who smiled at her every day in her offices. Vincio.

“Nevermind,” she whispered.

“What? I didn’t get that, Commander. Request–” A burst of static.

“Repeat that last.”

“… firm… let…”

“You’re breaking up.”

“It’s… storm. Think… your direction. Repeat. Please conf… let… gig go?”

“That’s an affirmative.” Pause. “Hello? Hello?”

Static crackled.

“Damn!” Danner turned to Lu Wai. “Lieutenant, please contact the repair party. Inform them that the storm seems to be headed in our direction. It’ll hit them first. Tell them to take shelter immediately.”

Lu Wai stood, bowed slightly to her dinner companions, and walked a few yards away. Danner watched her talking into her wristcom, then turned back to Sara.

“What’s going on?”

Danner picked up her knife but did not reply immediately. Vincio. Vincio who was always so helpful. For whom no request was too great.

“You look ill. Hannah, what’s happened?”

Danner shook her head, unable to speak. Vincio.

Lu Wai came back at a run. Her face was set and pale.“Commander, I couldn’t get through. There’s nothing but static.”

Marghe crawled from the old herder’s cot. The morning sky was blue, but the air was tight and hot. Ripe. There was another storm waiting, somewhere. But not today. Today they would walk to Holme Valley.

They walked steadily. Halfway up a rise of sun‑dried grass, Thenike stopped abruptly and turned her head this way and that, listening.

“What do you hear?” Not the other storm, surely. There was no shelter here. Marghe’s face was still sore from the wind and the rain of the previous night, and her shoulders ached from hunching away from the crashing thunder and lightning.

“I don’t know,” the viajera said. “Something…”

Marghe listened, thought she heard something, lost it, then heard it again: a faint up‑and‑down hum. She knew that sound. “It’s a sled.” A sled. They would be eating lunch with Danner. She brushed a stray hair from Thenike’s cheek, smiling. “Come on,” she said, partly eager, partly shy. She took Thenike’s hand and they walked over the rise together.

The sled was heading due south, and moving fast.

“Hoi!” Marghe shouted and waved her arms. The canopied sled turned in a wide hissing curve that flattened the grass. It did not slow down. Marghe and Thenike leapt out of the way.

The sled slammed to a halt and a Mirror leapt out, eyes wild, face smeared with dirt. Marghe crouched. This was not right. She rolled to her left and something thudded into the turf by her feet. A piece of wood. Like an arrow.

The Mirror was sobbing, trying to fit another quarrel to her crossbow.

Marghe came back to her feet, arms spread, ready to roll again. A Mirror with a crossbow? She did not have time to wonder at it: the Mirror was raising the bow to her shoulder again, shouting and crying. “Don’t move, you bitches. Just don’t move. Don’t move. Don’t move. Don’t–”

“Chauhan!” Another Minor stepped carefully from the sled. Her hair was gray. One arm hung loose; one pointed a weapon steadily at Marghe.

Chauhan looked confused. The crossbow wavered.

“Chauhan, lower your weapon.” The older Mirror came closer. Marghe could see how much that arm hurt. “Identify yourselves.”

This Mirror seemed in reasonable command of her faculties. Marghe lifted both arms, spread her legs slightly, waited for Thenike to copy her. The Mirrors were nervous, and hurt. She and Thenike looked like natives. Better act like one, until they calmed down a little. “We have no weapons except a small knife each. I am Marghe Amun, a viajera out of Ollfoss, come to speak with Acting Commander Hannah Danner.” The older Mirror nodded. The other one, the crazy one, was staring at the ground, crossbow dangling from her hand. “You might recognize my other name more readily. I’m Marguerite Angelica Taishan, SEC representative.” She was surprised at how steady her voice was. “And you are…?”

“Twissel.” She pointed her weapon at Thenike. “And this?”

“I am Thenike. We bear soestre.”

“What?” Chauhan said. “Is that a weapon?” Her crossbow was back at her shoulder.

“Chauhan!” Then, more quietly, “Chauhan, go tend to Dogias.”

“Dogias?” Marghe dropped her arms; Twissel motioned for her to put them up again. “Letitia Dogias?”

Twissel studied them both a moment, then nodded once.

“Was it the storm? Did she have a… I mean, did she… Is she all right?”

“No,” Twissel said bluntly. “I think she’s dying.”

“Dying? Letitia? What happened?”

“Natives. Ten killed. No, keep still until I say different.”

Marghe stopped in midstride and made an effort to not shout at the Mirror. “And Lu Wai?”

“The lieutenant wasn’t with us.”

“But you do have a medic?”

“Dead.”

“Then let us see her, Twissel. Thenike here might be able to help. Please.”

“I’ll need your knives first. Take them from your belts, two fingers only. Drop them on the grass.” Marghe felt a flash of anger and realized this reminded her of the way Aoife had treated her. But this was not Tehuantepec. She tossed down her knife. “Good. Kick them over here.”

The sled, all alloys and plastics, felt hard and strange to Marghe. It was air‑conditioned and cool, but the smells were still there: alien, manufactured materials mingling with blood and excretia and rank sweat. Chauhan was crouched in the cab, blank‑faced. They squeezed past her and into the covered flatbed.

Two women lay side by side on inflated medical pallets. Thenike immediately knelt by the nearest, a blond‑haired woman in partial armor.

If Marghe had not known that the other was Letitia Dogias, she was not sure she would have recognized her. Her memory insisted that the communications technician was vibrant, alive, full of irreverence and crackling energy; she was not this, this thing breathing stertorously through an open mouth with a hole in her stomach that oozed dark, dark blood. She smelled terrible.

“She’s dead.”

For one hanging moment, Marghe thought Thenike meant Dogias, then realized she was talking about the other one, the Mirror. The viajera folded the woman’s hands on her breast, closed her eyes, had to use both hands to lift her jaw and close her mouth.

“What was your companion’s name?” Thenike asked Twissel.

“Foster. Alice Foster.”

“Then we should bury Alice Foster.”

“No. We have to take her back.”

“The heat…”

“We have a bag.”

Thenike looked at Marghe, who nodded. “Then put her in a bag.” She motioned Marghe away from Dogias and knelt.

Marghe marveled at her calm poise; she took Dogias’s pulse, listened to her breathing, lifted the tunic away from the awful wound in her stomach, pinched some skin and sniffed it, all as matter‑of‑factly as tuning a musical instrument. “I’ll need to get her outside in the light and air. Then I want water, and clean cloths, bandages if you have any. And I’ll need my knife back.”

Twissel must have been as impressed as Marghe with Thenike’s examination; the Mirror handed Thenike her knife without comment, then picked up one end of the pallet.

When they had Letitia outside, Thenike motioned Marghe over to the pallet lying on the grass. Letitia looked even worse in natural light. “I’ll do what I can here, but you must help the other one. Chauhan. She needs to be busy.” She opened the medical roll Twissel had found and picked out a swab. “She needs to stop thinking about what happened, just for a little while.”

Foster was already stiffening. It took three of them to strip her armor and clothes, her dog tag and wristcom, and get her inside the body bag. Twissel, with her injured arm, could not do much.

It was Foster’s left hand Marghe would always remember. It stuck out awkwardly, and Marghe had to wrestle it into the slick black plastic bag: she noticed that two fingernails were broken, that Foster had chewed her cuticles, that there was a pale band of skin around the wrist where she had worn her wristcom. The mark of civilization, Marghe thought, then looked at her own, evenly tanned wrist, and how easily it is lost.

With the motor off, the sled began to warm. The smell got worse. Marghe left the Mirrors scrubbing at the flatbed with bundles of spare uniform dipped in water and alcohol and went outside.

Thenike was squatting on her heels, running her hands, palm down, through the air an inch or so above Dogias’s body. She had stripped Letitia’s stained clothing, all of it, and washed her down. The wound was clean, still leaking a little blood, but Dogias looked… better. She seemed to be breathing more easily. Marghe crouched down next to the pallet; when Thenike’s hands passed near her, she felt as though someone had run a powerful magnet over her skin.

“She’s stable now,” Thenike said. She sounded shockingly tired. Whatever she had done to help Dogias had taken a great deal of energy. “Help me get a compress on her wound.”

Marghe lifted Dogias enough for Thenike to pass the roll of bandage under her ribs. The technician seemed heavier than the last time, when Marghe had dangled her over the rock edge and lowered her into Lu Wai’s arms, and her skin felt different: slack, clammy. “Will she be all right?”

Thenike nodded tiredly, tied the bandage, and tested the tightness of the compress.

Chauhan took the stick. The others stayed in the back where it was once again cool and dry. The body bag was tucked out of the way in an overhead storage bin.

Thenike checked Dogias’s pulse, then motioned for Twissel to come and sit by her. Marghe helped to get the Mirror’s armor off. Thenike examined the swollen forearm and frowned. “Lean forward.” She probed at the back of Twissel’s head. The Mirror winced, and Thenike’s fingers came away with dark flecks of dry blood on the tips. “There’s nothing wrong with your head. But the bones in this arm are broken.”

Twissel just nodded. “Thought they might be.” She watched Thenike clip on splints and start to make a sling. “My own fault, this broken arm,” she said to Marghe. “Fell on it, when I got hit by the stone that bloodied my head. I know how to fall. Should have managed not to break my own damned arm.”

“You were probably half conscious.”

“Still, I know better.”

“Shouldn’t the suit have protected you?”

“It would have, if it was turned on. If I’d been all armored up. I wasn’t. None of us were, not fully. You just don’t expect to need full armor on a backward world like this. Anyone wants to play rough and all you have to do is pull one of these.” She pointed with her left hand at the weapon on her hip.

“So what happened?”

“I don’t really know. Danner sent us, Sergeant Leap’s squad, out under Captain White Moon. We were escorting Dogias and that other technician to the relay. To check it over. So we were lounging around, keeping an eye out, you know, while the two did their checking. Though I don’t know why they both–it was just a pile of slag. Useless. So anyway, they were doing that, we were talking, some of us playing a game of chicken with the crossbows–”

“When did Mirrors start using crossbows?”

“One of Danner’s ideas. A morale thing. Though now I’m not sure… Anyway, we were relaxed, but still keeping an eye open. You know. I mean, we weren’t worried, but you never can tell, not on a world like this. And we’d been told there were hostiles in the area.”

The tribes. Marghe nodded.

“And then the storm hit. The noise, the wind, it… It’s different out here, not the same as being safe in Port Central while the, wind tries to rip the grass out by the roots and the thunder rolls the hills flat. It was like the sky opened its mouth and roared. And out of the dust and roar, the flash of light, came those natives on horses. Like devils.” She shook her head.“We were disoriented, deaf, blind, surrounded by women like demons yelling, riding at us. Still, it takes more than hostiles and a bit of weather. We’re professionals. I’d seen worse. I pulled out my weapon. I wasn’t the only one. I fired.”

Twissel raised her free arm, reliving it.

“I fired, but nothing happened. Nothing. I thought it was a damaged power pack. I had it stripped out and replaced in three seconds.” Marghe tried to imagine managing that in the middle of an attack and a storm, failed. “It still didn’t work. I couldn’t believe it. I just kept pointing that thing and pressing the stud. Nothing. Nothing from anyone else’s, either. We all stood there, pointing weapons that wouldn’t work. Like a nightmare. The only guess I can come up with is that the storm somehow shorted them. Then I remembered my crossbow. I ran to get it out of the sled, yelled for the others to do the same. They didn’t.”

She winced as Thenike lifted her arm into position.

“Captain White Moon, Sergeant Leap, all of them, they were shaking their weapons, stripping them down, staring at them unbelievingly. I understood how they felt; weapons don’t just stop working. They just don’t. Only they did. They couldn’t get over that. I mean, it just doesn’t happen. And meanwhile they were on us, waving their spears, whirling slings around their heads. Seemed like hundreds of them, coming out of the teeth of the storm, yelling. And you know what, all I could think as they came at us was: they stink. Like rancid grease. That’s when I realized they were real. They might not be wearing armor, they might not have beam weapons, but they were armed and they were coming for us, and those funny‑looking spears and stones could kill.”

Twissel paused. Marghe handed her the water bottle. The old Mirror took a deep swig, wiped her mouth. “I was just about at the sled when I got hit. A stone, from a sling. Fell on my damn arm. A stone, goddammit, a stone! When I was wearing state‑of‑the‑art gear and carrying a weapon that could kill half‑a‑thousand crazies at two hundred yards. A stone.” She shook her head, “But I got up again, and I got into that sled and I managed to carry out two bows. I threw one to Chauhan. And all the time I was yelling, yelling at those people to get their bows, get their bows. They just wouldn’t. You know what I saw? Women using their weapons as clubs. Clubs. Do you believe that?”

Marghe shook her head.

“It’s hard, winding up a bow and fitting a quarrel with one hand. But I did. And Chauhan did, too. She sort of follows me around, does what I do. Bit like a kid sister. Lucky. So we started firing. Then one or two others got the idea, Foster, Leap… and Dogias. She was yelling and laughing fit to bust, but she could fire that bow. And she had a knife. Don’t know where that came from.” Twissel looked at Thenike. “Most of that blood you washed off her wasn’t hers. But then she came up against the maddest native of all, long red hair, weird eyes, walked her horse slow as you please through the mess, leaned sideways out of her saddle, and shoved her spear into Dogias’s stomach cool as if it were target practice. I lifted my bow, but then she was gone, off into the wind. They were wrecking one of the sleds, didn’t seem bothered with us anymore. Then they whirled off. Gone.”

Again, she was quiet.

“It took maybe ten minutes. One minute, it was a quiet evening, the next I was standing there with my arm broken, wind howling and lightning crashing, looking at dead bodies. The only ones alive were Chauhan, me, Dogias, and–” She looked at the body bag, and was quiet. “I don’t really remember how I got us all into the sled. But I do remember stopping in the middle of the night and feeling this laughter, this hysteria, trying to crawl up out of my throat, and I knew that if I let it, I’d go mad. So I climbed down out of the cab with my weapon and shot it at the stones and the trees, anything. This time it worked. So it must have been the storm.” She shook her head again. “But I don’t think Chauhan will ever trust anything but her crossbow again.”

Thenike finished with the sling and leaned back.

“Captain White Moon, Leap, the others,” Twissel said, “they were my friends. I found Leap, she’d been gutted. Never did find Captain White Moon.” She frowned briefly, shook her head, went on. “They’re all dead. And I don’t know why. There wasn’t any reasonbehind any of this. I could maybe accept it if there were. If we’d been defending something important. But they just attacked us because they wanted to.”

Marghe did not know how to begin to go about explaining Uaithne, and the legend, and the Echraidhe woman’s charismatic madness.

“If there was just a reason. If I could just make sense of it. They rode away laughing. Laughing.”

Marghe wondered if Aoife had been laughing.

The morning in Holme Valley dawned blue and hot. Danner listened to a report from Lu Wai: no contact with Captain White Moon’s party as yet. She told her to keep trying, then checked the temporary quarters and the sled moorings, finding that everything seemed to have held up well in last night’s storm. She found Sara Hiam in the field hospital, taking the equipment through a hypothetical diagnostic run.

Danner watched quietly for a while. The doctor worked steadily, competently. “For a researcher you seem to me to know what you’re doing.”

“The machine does it all.” Hiam hit a couple of studs, watched the display. “You know what the most serious thing is I’ve dealt with in the last six years? Sigrid’s tonsillitis.”

“Did you fix it?”

“Yes. Actually, I did more than fix it. I set up a culture and modified those bacteria so that their RNA couldn’t do anything. Then I reintroduced–Well, it took me two days. And after that, none of us will get tonsillitis again. It seemed more elegant than using drugs.”

“Lu Wai couldn’t have done that.”

Hiam paused. “No. No, I don’t suppose she could.” Her half smile turned to a frown as she looked at an anonymous dispenser on the wall. “Now what do you suppose these are? Ah, skin patches.” She pulled the lever and examined the slippery square that fell into her hand.