The machine beeped again, and Kyle saw the data display change, and a couple of words on it began to flash.

"Tox," Ravenheart said, her eyes widening slightly. "The message is cyber-encoded." She reached down and pulled out the retinal scanner unit, but detached the optical cable from it. From the same compartment she removed a small adapter plug with a round swivel-pad attached. She connected it to the end of the optical cable and then slotted the entire attachment into a jack behind her right ear, from which it hung. That done, the displays on the communication rig changed, and Ravenheart's eyes became unfocused. Her jaw, though, suddenly clenched.

Kyle turned toward the Asian trooper. "Induction link?" he asked.

The trooper nodded. "Easier to interface with helmet gear I and the like."

Kyle nodded and then leaned in toward the man, extending his hand. "Kyle Teller," he said.

The trooper shook Kyle's hand. "Corporal David Lim."

While Ravenheart stared into nowhere, Kyle exchanged introductions with the rest of the troopers present. Vathoss merely gave him a grim smile when Kyle came to him. "Yes, I suppose we do already know each other," Kyle said, turning away just as Ravenheart yanked the cable out and stood up quickly. Her body was tense, and her eyes hard. She looked around at the other troopers, and then at Kyle. "I need to talk with my team," she told him tersely. "Why don't you go get your friend?"

Kyle nodded and turned to leave the room. "Soaring Owl did get out," he just barely heard Ravenheart say. "The message was from him. He sends his condolences that we survived."

Seeks-the-Moon was waiting on Beth's porch when Kyle finally returned. The sight of the spirit standing there in the slowly growing morning light somehow reminded him of his father. Stern and silent, conveying everything with a glance and a tilt of the head, expecting everyone to understand him implicitly. The spirit said nothing as Kyle climbed the short stair and began describing what he'd seen and where he'd been.

"But you don't trust them," the spirit said as soon as he'd finished.

Kyle sighed. "No… I…" He looked away, seeing nothing. "I just don't know. I'm beginning to think that their mysterious behavior was them trying to conceal the fact that they were hunting the insect nest."

"Why would they do that?"

Kyle shrugged. "I don't know. They're a megacorp-who knows why the frag they do anything? When I was with the FBI it baffled the drek out of us half the time. We rarely had enough information to evaluate their actions, so a lot of it seemed to come from nowhere. It will be interesting to see whether or not Ravenheart tells us what the message from her boss was."

Just over an hour later, Kyle and Seeks-the-Moon reached the Knight Errant safehouse. This time Kyle knocked.

When they entered, and Kyle began introducing the spirit around, he noticed a decided tension in the group and a remoteness in Ravenheart. The watch shift had changed and there were two new troopers there he hadn't met before. One was an ork, Trooper Allen Douglas, and the other a black elf woman, Trooper Deena Reaves. Kyle also noticed that some of the heavier weapons, most of which he recognized by type rather than name, were being field-stripped or serviced.

Once the introductions were over, Ravenheart wandered up alongside him and said in a low voice, "We need to talk."

Kyle nodded, and followed her into a small office in the rear of the storage area. From the looks of things, she apparently claimed it as her own. "Soykaf?" she asked, stepping up to the maker and dispensing a cup.

"No, thanks."

Blowing on the hot liquid, she sat down, not behind the desk as he'd have expected, but on a metal folding chair near the far corner. She placed the steaming cup on an adjacent file cabinet, then pulled a pill dispenser from a vest pocket, shaking two small round green ones into her hand. She popped them in her mouth and saw Kyle looking at her. "You don't want to know," she said, then took a slug of soykaf to wash them down.

"What's going on?" he asked her.

Ravenheart held her hand up for him to wait a second, and took another drink of the hot liquid. "I wasn't sure what would happen when the soykaf and those pills hit my stomach together. They're only supposed to be taken with water. But frag it."

Kyle meanwhile had pulled up another folding chair alongside her and settled into it.

Finally, after a few moments of silence, she said, "According to Soaring Owl, the government is paralyzed. Everyone is advising something different.”

"Disease Control in Charlottesville has given the go-ahead to start bringing refugees through the line, but the Army says its people think that would be suicide for the rest of the country. Amazingly, there's been enough disinformation spread about that the public still doesn't have an accurate or truthful picture of what's going on here. The National Security Agency's worried about the long-term social impact of the truth that the government can't handle a magical threat of this nature."

"Great," said Kyle. "So nothing's been decided, and in the meantime more people die and the hive gets stronger."

"Wait," she said. "It gets worse."

Kyle stiffened. Anne Ravenheart was staring straight at him without the slightest trace of emotion in her eyes. He could hear some in her voice, but it was as if she'd put it there purely for his benefit

“Two days ago,” she continued, "a joint delegation from the elven nations of Tir Tairngire, led by Prince Ehran the Scribe, and Tir Na Nog, led by Caoimhe O'Dunn, daughter of the High Steward, had a private audience with President Steele that lasted six hours."

"I suppose Ares has a transcript."

Her face betrayed no sign she'd heard the jibe. "Sometime during the meeting the White House received a call from the great dragon Lofwyr. What I've been told is that the joint delegation, and Lofwyr recommended to Steele that the area inside the Containment Zone be saturated with ANVAR-TFM, Saeder-Krupp's most powerful pesticide, which will turn the area into a toxic waste zone for centuries."

Kyle froze. "But the people…"

"Dead," she said. "Like most pesticides, ANVAR-TFM is a nerve agent, except this one will kill most living things within a few seconds, and the rest within a few minutes. People, I'm told, take two to six minutes."

"But… that's absurd," Kyle sputtered. "How the frag can they believe that pesticides, fraggin' chemicals, will kill an insect spirit."

"As below, so above," came a voice from the shadows.

Both Kyle and Ravenheart jumped up and pulled their pistols, aiming in the direction of the voice. Standing in a darkened corner, Seeks-the-Moon stared back at them. Kyle immediately flipped his line of fire away from the spirit but Ravenheart kept hers trained on him. The small subdued lights on the side of the combat pistol told him it was armed and ready to fire. Her hand shook slightly, and Kyle gently reached out to grasp her wrist. That motion alone, even before his hand actually touched hers, was apparently enough to break her out of whatever fugue state she'd entered.

Cursing, she snapped her hands and the pistol away, pointing it at the ceiling. Kyle expected her to say something, but she just glared at the spirit. He noticed, though, that her weapon's status lights indicated that the firing mechanism had been disarmed. Kyle holstered his own weapon.

"What did you just say?" he asked, as calmly as he could.

"I believe I was paraphrasing an axiom of magical theory you once taught me," the spirit replied. "These creatures look like insects native to this plane, yet they are from somewhere else. Fire elementals are vulnerable to water, as natural fire is, so maybe these spirits are vulnerable to the things that natural insects are."