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"Closer to twelve," said Patel.

"Closer to twelve," Melessra agreed, after a moment. "Yes."

"Then put closer to twelve in the summary line, put the range underneath it, put cycle sixty-one in an appendix, and I'll walk Boradrith through the appendix myself." Athena pushed off the doorframe. "And Patel, eat something, because if you fall over in a cave, I have to explain to Marina why her xenobiologist collapsed on my watch, and I would honestly rather fight seven more Drogs."

"That is emotional manipulation," Patel said.

"It's management. Eat."

* * *

Varek was sitting on a rock.

He was doing it badly. He was seated on a flat basalt shelf in plain view, maybe eighty feet off the trail, in the open, hands on his knees, facing the exact direction her patrol would come from, and when she stopped the line and looked at him, he had the nerve to look mildly surprised to see her.

"Ambassador."

"You're sitting on a rock."

"I'm surveying."

"You're facing the trail."

"The trail is a feature of the terrain, and a responsible surveyor accounts for all the features."

"Varek." She came off the line and walked up to him and stopped with her hands on her hips. "It's a nine-hour rotation, and you're sitting on a rock at the top of hour one, facing the one direction anybody could possibly arrive from. You've got a mapped route network covering four hundred square miles. You could be anywhere on this entire planet. You're on this rock."

He looked at her a second, and she watched him decide to tell the truth.

"There's a new brood site in the western canyon," he said. "Three adults and a laying female. They marked it out four days ago. Once the brood comes off, they'll hold a radius of about five hundred yards, and your northern loop clips it by two hundred."

"That's a real thing you actually needed to tell me."

"It is."

"You could have told me that from anywhere."

"I couldn't, actually. There's no mechanism by which I tell you things." He said it flatly, with no self-pity in it, which somehow made it land harder than if he'd loaded it up. "I don't have a relay. I can't come through the gate. If I want to tell the Colony there's a brood site sixty yards off a patrol route, the only method available to me is to go sit on a rock in the open, on the morning you walk past it, and hope somebody stops to talk."

Athena stood there. "Right. Okay. That's fair."

"It's also true that I'd have picked this rock regardless."

"I know."

"I thought I should say that part out loud, instead of letting you find it in an archive later."

"I know that too."

* * *

He took them to the western canyon and showed her the brood site from the ridge above it.

She had never seen one. She used binoculars and found the alcove in the canyon wall. The acid marking burned into the stone around it in a rough band. The three adults were working the perimeter in a pattern that was clearly a pattern and clearly not random.

"They're rotating," she said.

"Yes."