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."
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?"
"The payload is, and I've been ordered to use it," Ravenheart said. "I've been ordered to find the new main hive and nuke the thing straight to hell."