Barely listening to what Seeks-the-Moon was saying, Ravenheart holstered her weapon, dropped back into the chair, and ran one hand through her dark hair. She was running the razor's edge and completely exhausted. Kyle squatted down next to her. He knew she needed to rest and that he probably shouldn't press her, but he also knew that time was running out for Beth and Natalie.

"What time frame did they suggest?" he asked her.

She looked at him, now bleary-eyed and tired. He was glad to see some real emotion in her eyes. "The nerve agent is already being shipped to the area," she said, "so it can be used as soon as Steele decides to do so. The elves and the dragon told him that it wasn't used within seventy-two hours, the new cocoons would hatch."

"Does that sound right?" he asked her.

She nodded. "Based on what we know, yes. The process of investing the host with an insect spirit larva takes a couple of weeks, and more, depending on the power of the spirit in question. If they started a new 'crop' right away, the weak spirits could be ready to leave the cocoons any day now."

Kyle slowly sat back down in his chair. "Then we've got less than forty-eight hours."

"Probably closer to thirty-six," she said.

"We must find the main nest again," Seeks-the-Moon said. "Quickly."

Kyle shook his head. "They'd be stupid to re-form another main nest. If they were smart they'd create dozens of smaller nests to keep Knight Errant or anyone else from finding them all before the cocoons are ready."

"You'd be right," Ravenheart said, "except they don't trust each other."

Kyle looked at her. "What do you mean?"

"We've been tracking insect hives for about four years now. The first ones were nearly always single-type hives or nests. There was very little intermingling of insect types. In fact, it seemed that for the most part the different types didn't get along. Half the time the only reason we were able to find new nests was because interhive fighting broke out. The ants or the wasps usually start it.

"Then we learned about the Universal Brotherhood."

Kyle nodded. The same organization of which his sister-in-law Ellen had been a member and the one Dave Strevich at the FBI had refused to give him any information about He glanced at Seeks-the-Moon, but the spirit was standing quietly in the corner, listening.

"The frightening thing," Ravenheart said, "the thing that defied everything we thought we knew about the slotting bugs, was that the UB was a collective, a cooperation of a bunch of different types of insect spirits. Somewhere along the line some of the bug queens must have realized it was stupid for them to fight each other.

"Anyway, the Chicago hive we attacked north of the Core was, we now think, the primary Brotherhood hive in North America. We'd already dusted what we thought was the main hive in the Rocky Mountains a few months ago, after the Project Hope fiasco almost blew the lid off the whole thing."

"Project Hope?" Kyle echoed. He didn't remember hearing the name before.

She waved away his question. "Doesn't matter, long story. The point is that the UCAS government knew about the Brotherhood, and what they really were. That meant we had to work quickly, about eight months ahead of our plan, to deal with them."

Surprised, Kyle said, "Wait, the UCAS government knew about the Brotherhood, about the bugs, before this happened."

She nodded. "Chip-truth. Did they do anything except argue about what they should do? No. Were they working under a deadline now that the Brotherhood knew their secret was out? You bet your fraggin' hide they were. The best the government could agree to do was shut the Brotherhood down as a fiscal entity. Sure, they staged some raids, but they couldn't be convinced this wasn't a small, easily manageable problem."

"But if you people at Ares knew, why didn't you brief them earlier?" Kyle could barely control his anger.

Ravenheart's eyes hardened. "Do you really think their response would have been different? Please. With a wonderfully blind eye to its own history, the UCAS government barely acknowledges the fact that there's magic in the world, let alone that it's a real threat to national security on this kind of scale. Plus, if we'd told them, they'd have probably started taking steps to prevent us from dealing with the problem. You know how touchy they are about multinational strike teams hitting civilian targets."

"So now it's all gone to slot," Kyle said. "The bugs have torn this city apart and in less than two days everything in it is going to die. Why the frag didn't you at least tell them when you found the nest? And why the frag didn't you just roll in a couple trillion liters of that nerve agent instead of going in guns blazing?"

Ravenheart paused, visibly trying to calm herself. Kyle knew he was provoking her, but he didn't care. The bulldrek and the games that her company had been playing for years had cost untold thousands of lives, two of which were potentially more important to him than anything else in this world.

"I didn't know about the effectiveness of the pesticides until a few hours ago," she said in measured tones. "I presume our people were thinking like you had been, that chemicals wouldn't be a direct against spirits. As for why we didn't alert the government about the presence of a huge nest in a major urban center…" Ravenheart stopped, seeming to reflect for a moment. "I couldn't say. I've wondered myself, but you'd have to ask Roger Soaring Owl or Damien Knight. All I know is I had my orders then, and god help us all, I have my orders now."

Kyle glanced at Seeks-the-Moon, who returned the look with a tilt of me head. "And those orders are?"

She looked away and said nothing, but Kyle could see she was thinking. Her orders were probably confidential and she was debating whether to reveal them.

"Look," he said. "Something has to be done. If we're going to-"

She nodded vigorously and waved her hand at him. "I know. I know. I agree." She sighed and shook her head. "The pleasures of field command," she said half under her breath, and then shifted in her seat to more directly face Kyle.

"Soaring Owl believes, as we've discussed, that if this was the main nest, it will re-form for the same reasons that brought it into being in the first place. He wants us to find it and do something about it before the deadline."

"How the frag are we supposed to find it?" Kyle asked her, and then the answer hit him. “The garnering spots,” he said slowly.

She nodded. "We've been disrupting them as we find them, but if we watch them instead, we can follow a group as they're taken for investiture. That should lead us to the main hive."

"You're betting a lot on the hope that one of the spots you're watching will be tapped before time runs out."

She nodded again. "Yes, we are. But while you were gone we added two more sites to our list, and one of those is pretty much overloaded. I think that one will go next."

"Then what?"

"Then," she said, "then we deal with the fraggin' nest."

"How?" Kyle asked. "You had a small army before, and failed. How can you expect to take them on again with less man two dozen people?"

She tensed slightly. "We have a weapon…"

"Damocles?" Kyle asked, a numbness beginning in his stomach.

Her eyes widened and he saw her arm flinch toward her pistol. "How the frag do you know-"

"I was in the command van, remember?" he said. "Soaring Owl activated it just before the van got torn apart."

She looked away, nodding. "I thought it looked like it had been prepping for launch."

"I take it the drone was in a truck a few blocks away from the main trucks?"

She nodded again. "Yes. We recovered it and the launch system when we moved to the first safehouse."

"It's operational?"