Ammonite

“But she’s pregnant!”

T’orre Na looked at Da

“I mean… Oh, curse the woman! This is the last thing I need! A pregnant SEC rep who’s gone native, swa

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? “Da

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

“Gone? What do you mean, gone?”

“Gone. Phht. Kaput.”

Da

“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 Da

The room was crowded: Dogias, Da

“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.” Da

“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?” Da

There was a sudden thick silence; Da

“No,” T’orre Na said, mildly enough, but Da

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,” Da

“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 ru

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 perso

“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.”

Da

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 Da

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, Da