Page 19 of Warrior’s Mate

The words tasted wrong. Officers were supposed to know enough to act, or at least enough to make uncertainty useful. Kaiven looked at her, at the woman his body had just identified as the most important person he would ever meet, and understood with sudden clarity that he could not promise to keep her safe.

If the threat was larger than Wasaytu—and if Maelis refused, as he already knew she would, to become small enough for him to protect—then certainty would be another thing he could not offer her. So he gave her the only promise he had any right to make.

"Stay with me until we understand what's happening."

Maelis studied him.

"As long as you understand that means you stay with me too."

He nodded.

"Agreed."

Together they ran toward the southern pumping station while the first real emergency sirens began to sound across Wasaytu.

Chapter 4 — Twelve Hours

The southern pumping station had been built for floods, droughts, and the occasional irrigation malfunction. It had not been built for a military officer to turn its maintenance room into a command post. Kaiven did it anyway.

By the time Maelis arrived, two wall displays were showing district traffic, a third carried emergency-service channels, and a Brigade field terminal sat open on a workbench beside a tray of pipe couplings. A maintenance supervisor with oil on both sleeves stood in the corner, watching Kaiven appropriate his equipment with the expression of a man trying to decide whether patriotism required him to object.

Maelis barely noticed. The station's civilian message queue filled half the nearest display. Red markers pulsed among the ordinary green and amber traffic.

"Those weren't there ten minutes ago," she said.

Kaiven looked over. "What are they?"

"Delayed family and supply acknowledgments."

"How delayed?"

"Some by eight minutes. Some by twenty." She moved to the display and enlarged the queue. "This one is from a livestock cooperative east of the ridge. They sent a routine feed request at 0613. The exchange logged it at 0649."

"Could be a routing fault."

"It could." Maelis opened another message. "This is a school attendance packet from a village less than forty kilometers away. Eleven-minute delay."

"Still possible."

"This is a reservoir telemetry confirmation." She opened a third. "Twenty-six minutes."

Kaiven's expression tightened. Maelis pointed to the time stamp. "That system doesn't use the public district network." He stepped beside her.

The pumping station smelled faintly of metal, mineral water, and the sharp cleaning solution the maintenance crews used on filters. Outside the heavy windows, Wasaytu still looked normal. A freight crawler passed on the lower access road. Two technicians crossed between buildings carrying a sensor housing. Above the western terraces, the morning was clear enough that Maelis could see the white caps of irrigation towers in the distance.

Normal, she thought, had become an accusation.

"Show me everything," Kaiven said.

She did.

For the next twenty minutes they sorted messages by origin, system, delay, and intended destination. The pattern resisted them at first because it was not uniform. Some traffic moved normally. Other packets vanished for minutes before arriving intact. A few messages appeared to have been acknowledged by nodes that should never have handled them.

Maelis pulled up the district routing architecture and stared.

"What?"

She expanded a chain of handoffs.