Logan realized this was complicated. Part of Claire’s agitation had little to do with Daisy’s actual sins. “Your mother loves you,” he said.

But Claire only shrugged irritably, as if to say his statement was obvious, tendentious, and irrelevant. “I have a psycher program, Dad, thanks. I didn’t come all the way out here, beyond range of her local pickups, just to whine that my momma doesn’t understand me.”

That was sure what it had sounded like. But Logan held up both hands in surrender. “All right. Pipe me what you found. I’ll look it over.”

“Promise?”

“Hey,” he said, pausing to cross his heart. “Didn’t I pay off on the meteorite?”

That, at last, got a smile out of her. Claire brushed aside a lock of dark hair that had fallen over her eyes in her agitation. “Okay. Here it comes. I encrypted it inside a routine weather forecast, in case one of her ferrets happens across it on the way.”

If one of Daisy McClennon’s ferrets finds the blip, simple encryption won’t matter. But Logan kept the thought to himself. Almost as soon as she pressed a button, a thousand miles away, his own borrowed data plaque lit up.

INCOMING MAIL.

Logan thought he heard the sound of a copter’s engines. He looked up to scan the forest from this slight rise, but there was no sign yet of the pickup vehicle. There was still time to finish the conversation.

“I want to know if you thought about what I said last time,” he asked his daughter.

Claire frowned. “You mean about dragging Daisy with me on some sort of ‘vacation’? Daddy, have you any idea what my counselor in Oregon is like? I already missed one threshold exam this month because of the storm. Two more and I might have to go back to school. You know, high school!”

Logan was almost tempted to ask, What’s so bad about high school? I had some great times in high school.

But then, the mind has ways of locking out memories of pain and ennui, and recalling only the peaks. Prison for the crime of puberty — that was how secondary school had seemed, when he really thought back on it.

So how do 1 tell her I’m worried? Worried about things far worse than the off chance she might have to finish her diploma in some public warren? What’s six months of bored purgatory against saving her life?

One of Daisy’s surrogates might or might not at this moment be snooping the plaque he was using. But Logan knew for certain another force, even more powerful than his ex-wife, was listening to his every word. Glenn Spivey’s organization was fanatical about security, and its watch pro-grams would parse all but the vaguest warnings he might offer Claire. Still, Logan had to take a chance.

“I… do you remember what Daisy snooped, last time? My paper?” He furrowed his forehead until his eyebrows nearly touched.

“You mean the one about — ?” Then, miraculously, she seemed to read his expression. Her mouth went round, briefly. “Urn, yeah. I remember what it was about.”

“Well, just so you do.” Logan pretended to lose interest in the topic. “Say, have you been up to Missouri, lately. I hear they’re having a pretty good state fair up around New Madrid, these days. You might pick up some nice specimens for your collection there.”

Claire’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Um, Tony has to handle the fish harvest all alone since his uncle got laid up. So… I’m helping even on weekends. I probably won’t get to any fairs this year.”

He could see the wheels turning behind those blue eyes. Not even seventeen, and yet she knows how to read between the lines. Are the new schools doing this? Are teenagers really getting smarter? Or am I just lucky?

Obviously the reference to New Madrid was setting off alarm bells in Claire’s head. Now he had to pray Spivey’s spy software wouldn’t catch the same contextual cues. “Mm. Tony’s a good kid. Just remember, though, how we talked about boys, even the nice ones. Be sure you call the shots, kiddo. Don’t let anybody turn the ground to jello under you.”

With a show of irritation he could tell was calculated, Claire sniffed. “I can take care of my own footing, Dad.”

He grunted with fatherly curmudgeonliness. For the moment, that was all he could do. Let Claire evaluate his veiled warning, as he’d consider hers. What a team we’d make. That is, if we survive the next year.

From a distance, across the forested slopes, Logan now heard the real growl of the ’copter carrying the rest of his inspection team. He turned back to his daughter’s image. “Time to go, honey. I just… hope you know how very much I love you.”

He hadn’t intended getting so uncharacteristically mushy all of a sudden. But it turned out to be exactly the right thing to do. Claire’s eyes widened momentarily, and he saw her swallow, realizing perhaps for the first time just how seriously he took all this.

“Take care of yourself, Daddy. Please.” She leaned forward and whispered. “I love you too.” Then her image vanished from the small display.

Fallen pine needles blew across his ankles. Logan looked up as the hybrid flying machine — half helicopter, half turboprop — rotated its engines to descend vertically toward a clearing a hundred meters away. Leaning out the side door was Joe Redpath, Logan’s sardonic Amerind assistant, whose bored, sullen expression was just his version of a friendly greeting. No doubt Redpath brought news of the colonel’s next assignment now that their survey here was finished.

Between Logan and the clearing lay the emergence site — an area about equal to a city block. As usual, the gravity beam’s coupling with surface matter had been, well, peculiar. This time roughly a quarter of the pines within the exit zone had been vaporized, along with their roots. Those remaining — which had all been either taller or shorter than the missing trees — stood apparently unscathed amid the gaping holes.

Fortunately, no people had been in this remote mountain locale, so it hardly seemed a calamity. Logan would reserve judgment though, till the soil and underlying rocks were scanned by follow-up teams.

But of course, Colonel Spivey was less interested in mineralogical consistency than readouts from his instrument packages, which had been scattered across this mountainside just before the gazer beam was scheduled to pass through. Returning minutes after the event, Logan had dropped in to gather the mud-spattered canisters nearest the center while Redpath and the ’copter crew collected others farther out. Of those at ground zero, two were missing, along with the vanished trees.

The predictions made by Hutton’s teams grew sharper with each event. Soon, we won’t have to retreat so far for safety. Soon I’ll get to witness one happening up close.

The prospect was both chilling and exciting.

This improved predictability was helping keep collateral damage to a minimum, at least in alliance territories. Where the beam couldn’t be diverted to completely uninhabited areas, people could generally be evacuated on some pretext. It was different, of course, when the exit point lay in “unfriendly territory,” where a warning might arouse suspicion. In those cases, the resonator crews could only do their best with aiming alone.

Sometimes, that wasn’t enough. In China, an entire village had sunk out of sight last week, when the ground beneath it turned to slurry. And had the vibrations in an Azerbaijani earthquake been just a few hertz closer to the normal modes of certain large apartment buildings, the damage would not have been “minor,” but horrendous. Logan shuddered to think about that near catastrophe.

Maybe Spivey’s arranging for these close shaves, he pondered as he picked his way past the yawning gaps in the forest loam. After all, when you’re testing a weapon, an intentional “near miss” is just as good as a bull’s-eye.