Mikhail had been in the mountains for three weeks.
Not the same mountains — the pattern of his operation required movement between positions the way a chess player moved between pieces, spending no more time in any single location than the location required before the exposure accumulated to the point where the location became a liability rather than an asset. He had been in the Appalachian position, then the Yellowstone position, then back to the Appalachian position because the Appalachian position was where the core of the operation lived and the core required more attention than a single visit. He moved through the positions with the quality he had always moved through difficult terrain — unhurried, precise, the man who had learned in Afghanistan that terrain was always the first ally or the first enemy depending on whether you understood it, and who had understood every piece of terrain he had ever operated in.
The Appalachian position was in the cave system above Pine Creek Gorge in north-central Pennsylvania.
He had found it through Jesper Vance.
Vance had grown up in the hill country south of the gorge — Hatfield and McCoy territory, the geography of people who had been settling grievances in these mountains since before the country around them had organized itself into states. He understood the Appalachian cave systems the way a body understood its own skeleton — not from study, from the accumulated presence of a life spent inside this geography, moving through it in every season, understanding its moods and its concealment and its approaches with the knowledge that people carried when they had lived inside something rather than learned about it from the outside. He had told Mikhail about the Pine Creek system on the second day of their operational planning in the minimum number of words required to convey the necessary information and then stopping. Deep. Dry. Two entrances that weren't obvious. Close enough to the gorge's water that resupply was practical. Far enough from the trail traffic that nobody looking casually would find it. Mikhail had gone to look. He had confirmed the assessment. He had told Vance to begin staging supplies immediately.
The staging was finishing now.
Jesper "The Wedge" Vance was in the gorge below with the last of the supply column.
He was a blocky weathered man in stained leather and salvaged unmarked gray coats that had belonged to at least two other people before they belonged to him. He smelled of black powder and wet wool and cheap tobacco — the smell of someone who had been living in rough country long enough that the country had gone into the clothing and stayed there. The short-barreled flintlock blunderbuss was across his back, loaded with scrap iron the way it was always loaded — in close terrain at close range it did not need to be precise, only present. The logging axe hung at his hip, massive and chipped, the edge maintained to functional rather than refined. A man who used tools rather than displayed them.
The red teardrops covered his arms from wrists to shoulders. Each one a kill mark. Each one representing a person Vance had ended — not notches on a gun, the marks in his skin, permanent and indisputable the way he kept all his counts. He had more of them than most men survived long enough to accumulate and when the arms ran out of room the marks moved to his face — three on his left cheek, two below his right eye, the document continuing where it had room to continue. He had been adding to it since he was nineteen years old in a correctional facility outside Yekaterinburg where the marks were the only language that mattered and the men who spoke it were the only men worth speaking to.
He moved through the gorge reading it the way he read all terrain — the choke points, the sight lines, the angles of approach from every direction, the places where the gorge's walls created advantages and the places where they created vulnerabilities, the whole tactical picture assembling itself through the soles of his boots and the quality of light on the exposed rock faces. He had been in this gorge for two weeks and knew it well enough now to move through it in the dark without slowing. He gave short blunt orders to the men moving the horses. Two words where other men used ten. The expectation of execution without question present in the delivery. The men executed without question. They had learned within the first week what the gap between Vance's orders and his response to non-compliance looked like. The gap was narrow.
He had no loyalty to any empire, god, or ideology. He had loyalty to Mikhail's strength and to the resources Mikhail provided because both were real and real things were the only things Vance had ever found worth his loyalty. He had defected from the United States military in Afghanistan because the United States military had been unwilling to put its boot on the throat and Vance had no use for a military that understood its own power and chose not to use it fully. He despised politicians — the slick careful men who built positions on managing perceptions. He despised uniform-wearing rulebook soldiers who believed the regulations were the war rather than a bureaucratic layer around it. He viewed the frontier not as a battlefield for glory but as a machine. Machines had gears. Gears could be smashed. When the gears were smashed the machine stopped. He had never needed a more elaborate philosophy than that.
He earned the name "The Wedge" in Afghanistan — his tactical specialty was finding the exact weak point in an enemy's physical or social structure and driving a cold piece of iron into it until it split. He had been doing this since before he had a name for it. He would be doing it here.
He came up from the gorge as the last supply load was secured in the cave system's deeper chamber. He found Mikhail at the cave's upper entrance with the maps spread across the flat rock — the elevated position, the sight line across the gorge's approach routes visible from this point and no other. He crouched at the map's edge and looked at it the way he looked at all maps — not at the lines but at what the lines represented, the gaps, the places where the map's representation of the ground diverged from the ground's actual quality, because they always diverged somewhere and the divergence was always where the thing you had not planned for arrived from.
He said: "Last load is in." Mikhail said: "How much." Vance said: "Three months at the tempo we discussed. Four if we're careful." Mikhail said: "We won't need to be careful." Vance looked at the map. He said nothing about this. He looked at the Western New York section. He looked at the node positions. He said: "The Sanctuary nodes are harder than the others." Mikhail said: "Yes." Vance said: "They know the ground." Mikhail said: "Yes." Vance said: "So we don't fight them on it." He put his finger on the map at the supply line positions — the routes between the nodes, the convoy paths, the things that moved through the ground rather than held it. "Burn the wagons. Not the town." Mikhail said: "That is the doctrine." Vance said: "I know it's the doctrine. I'm telling you why it's correct." He looked at the node positions. "Hit the supply lines long enough and the ground becomes untenable on its own. We don't need to take anything. We just need to make everything cost more than it produces." He picked up a stone from the cave entrance's floor and set it on the Sanctuary position. He looked at Mikhail. "How long." Mikhail said: "Until they break or come at us directly." He looked at the map. "Either outcome is acceptable." Vance looked at the stone. He said: "All right."
Mikhail looked at the map after Vance had gone back down into the gorge.
He had divided the operation into three geographic positions and one resupply architecture and each piece was now in place.
The Appalachian position — Pine Creek Gorge, two hundred and forty men under Vance's direct command — was the eastern pressure arm. The terrain was Appalachian hill country and a third of Vance's men had grown up in it and the remainder had spent weeks learning it under Vance's instruction. The cave systems provided the concealment the operation's doctrine required — hit and disperse, the men traveling individually or in small groups to predetermined reassembly points after each operation, the dispersal pattern making tracking impossible for anything that needed a clear operational signature to track. From this position Vance's element would run the asymmetric operations against the Western New York nodes and the Sanctuary corridor — the supply line strikes, the convoy burns, the sustained attrition that made holding the ground cost more than the ground produced.
The Yellowstone position was smaller — forty men placed in the high country terrain of the Yellowstone area with the assignment of maintaining pressure on the corridor's western approaches. They would not be running the primary node operations. They were maintaining the pressure of a threat from multiple directions simultaneously, keeping the corridor's defensive attention distributed rather than concentrated. A force that had to watch every direction at once could not concentrate in any single direction when the concentration was needed.
The Black Hills position served two functions. The first was the resupply architecture — the men cycling through the settlement network that Jiang Wu's operation was building, moving through Cutter's Bend and the surrounding positions in settlement clothing with settlement behaviors, resupplying and resting and re-equipping in the unremarkable way of traders and laborers and the various categories of moving people the current world produced in abundance. Nobody checked moving people carefully. The world had too many of them. The second function was harassment — the Black Hills element running hit and run operations against the plains corridor's outer nodes, targeting people in the open, supply movements, vulnerable positions, anything that created attrition without triggering the full divine response. Small unit work. Harassment rather than battle. The painted warriors in the corridor's nodes were going to find these operations more costly than the Black Hills element anticipated and Mikhail understood this was likely and had planned for the attrition on his own side as part of the operational budget. You did not run asymmetric operations against a spiritually fortified enemy without paying for the asymmetry.
The resupply architecture connected all three positions through routes that moved through the settlement cover and through terrain that surface observation could not adequately monitor. Vance had identified the routes. Mikhail had confirmed them. The gaps were there. They were always there. The question was whether you were willing to go where the comfortable routes did not go and Vance's men were constitutionally incapable of requiring comfortable routes.
Mikhail looked at the stone on the Sanctuary position. He thought about what Devin had said in the New Jersey installation — that the man running the corridor could read fate, that they stayed inside the windows, that the only approach against something that could read fate was making the cost too high and not stopping until the network broke. He thought about moving in the spaces between what fate was watching. He thought about what those spaces looked like in the Appalachian gorge below him and in the high country of Yellowstone and in the Black Hills settlements that Jiang Wu was building and what Vance would do to the things that moved through them.
He rolled up the map. He went back into the cave.
The horses were saddled before dawn.
Four adult redbones moved through the compound yard with the working attentiveness of animals that understood something was happening and had oriented toward the happening with the focused quality of dogs whose capabilities had been deepening for years alongside the people they lived with. King was at Dave's left — the largest of the four, Duke's line present in the coat and the bearing, the dog that had been Dave's since before the Shroud and that carried what years of living alongside someone with the Focus of the Pack produced in an animal sensitive enough to receive it. The other three ranged the yard's edge in the pre-dawn dark, noses working the morning air with the professional attentiveness of animals whose hides had been bulletproof since birth and who understood at some level below conscious awareness that their physical nature was not what other animals carried.
Dave was at the near horse checking the load distribution with the quality of a man who had been running convoys long enough that the checking was simply how he touched equipment before a significant departure. Clint beside him — his son, the family quality between them visible in how they occupied the same space, the ease of two people who had been moving through difficult situations alongside each other for long enough that the movements had synchronized without requiring discussion. They worked through the tack and the supply distribution with the focused economy of people who had somewhere to be and were going there correctly.
Hill was at the gate with Thrud.
She had the Jafna-Gaddr across her back — not the fighting carry, the travel carry, the natural position of someone who had been integrating a significant object into their physical vocabulary for days and had arrived at the version of carrying it that the body found correct. The internal blue vibration ran its steady hum through the density-iron at the frequency that the pup near Martin had been dampening in the compound yard — outside the gate the dampening would not be required, the distance sufficient, the thread quiet. Hill had his rifle and his tracking range running its full two-mile circuit, the perimeter picture of the corridor present in his awareness in the pre-dawn dark. He read the approach routes south with the focused attention of someone who had been given wildlife signs to follow and was already following them before the departure was complete.
Jade was at the gate with Mia on her hip and Pip beside her, both girls with the early morning quality of children who had been woken before they were ready and were managing the waking with the variable success that children managed early mornings. Mia looked at the horses and the dogs and the four people preparing to leave with the focused read she brought to everything — the group dynamic assessment, the quality of an almost-four-year-old who was cataloguing the departure for reasons she could not articulate and did not need to. She looked at Dave with the expression she had for him specifically, which was the complete version of what it was, and put her hand flat against his chest when he crouched to say goodbye. She said nothing. She held her hand there for a moment. Dave held her eyes. He kissed her forehead. He stood.
Camille was with Clint and Rosa — the child in her arms with the focused attention she brought to things she was watching her parents prepare for, the eighteen-month-old's version of Mia's cataloguing, less refined and equally complete in its commitment. Camille held Clint's face in both hands briefly — the direct contact of someone who had something to say and was saying it through the hands rather than through language because the hands were more accurate for this thing. He held her eyes. He nodded. She released him. He went to check the last of the tack.
Thrud looked at the gate. She looked at Hill. She said: "Ready." Hill said: "Yes." They looked at Dave and Clint finishing the final checks. Dave signaled King. King came to the heel with the complete efficiency of an animal that had been waiting for exactly this signal and had been ready for it since before the signal arrived. The three other redbones found their positions around the group's perimeter with the working attentiveness of dogs that understood perimeter. The gate opened. The group moved through it into the pre-dawn corridor with the quality of people going somewhere that required them to be exactly what they had been building themselves to be.
Shane was at the operations building's exterior with the tattoo equipment and the thermos when Mike came across the yard.
Freya was beside him with the rune designs in the traveling case — the work of weeks compressed into the portable version, the designs for the marks they were going to be putting on the node people who had been waiting for them. Big Ed had the needle equipment at his belt — the same needle, maintained the way Big Ed maintained everything, which was correctly and without ceremony. Johnny Rotten had his right palm running its passive read of the equipment cases — the machinery mastery finding the inventory of what they were carrying and confirming it against what they needed and producing the confirmation without comment. Rachel and Kelly completed the group with the quality of people who had been briefed and were ready and were not performing their readiness.
Mike came across the yard with the quality he had been carrying since the meeting — the contained grief and the contained fury in their sustained forms, the Shattering Hand rune on his dominant forearm and the Earthen Bastion running its background read through the compound's foundation and the wall and the approaches, the man who had been told to stay and had accepted the staying and was living in the acceptance with the full weight of what acceptance cost him.
He reached Shane. He said: "Say hello to Roger. And the rest of them in Geneseo." Shane looked at him. He put his hand on Mike's shoulder. He held his eyes. He said: "They need you here, Mike. They need all of you." He paused. "We will get our vengeance. But only if you focus on the correct thing and not only on that." He held the eye contact with the full weight of it — not a dismissal, the other version, the acknowledgment of what Mike was carrying and the instruction of someone who understood the carrying and was asking for it to be redirected rather than released. "Go build our defenses. Remember what I said." Mike looked at the ground for a moment. The full weight of it in his frame. Then he looked up. He made eye contact. He said: "You got it." Shane said: "For Rick." Mike nodded once — the complete version of what the nod contained, which was everything the two words had been meant to contain and more than the two words could fully carry. Shane released his shoulder. He said: "Focus on the approaches. When you terraform think small and in waves — like ripples in a lake. Make one every few rings run deeper than the others." Mike looked at him with the questioning quality of someone receiving an instruction they have not fully assembled yet. Shane said: "Take Cory and Gary with you when you do it." Mike said: "Ok." Shane looked at the gate. He looked at the tattoo group. He Norn-stepped.
Mike stood in the compound yard for a moment after they were gone. He looked at the gate. He looked at the wall. He looked at the ground under his boots — the compound's packed earth, the foundation stone Mike had built into everything the compound was, his hands in the material of every course of every wall from the outer perimeter to the inner ring. He felt the Earthen Bastion running its read through all of it the way it always ran, the background assessment of every load-bearing element in the compound's architecture present in his awareness without requiring his direction.
He went to find Cory and Gary.
He found Cory at the compound's eastern wall and told him what Shane had asked — the terraforming outside the perimeter, the wave rings, the deeper one every few rings. He said he needed the Audit Eye running on the surrounding area while he worked. Cory said: "I can do that." Mike found Gary at the motor pool and told him the same thing. Gary looked at his rifle. He said: "Overwatch." Mike said: "Yes." Gary said: "Let's go."
They went through the gate into the corridor's open ground south of the compound. The morning was fully light now — the spring air carrying the quality of a day that had not yet decided what it was going to do with itself, the lake visible to the north through the tree line, the approaches running their natural geometry from every direction through the terraformed landscape that Mike had been building into since before the war started.
Mike put his boots on the earth and felt it the way he felt it — completely, through the contact, the Earthen Bastion running its read of the ground's depth and composition and the water table below it and the drainage that Shane had built into the corridor years ago still present and functioning in the soil. He looked at Cory. He said: "Watch the perimeter. Tell me if anything reads wrong in the people." Cory said: "I'll know." He looked at Gary. Gary said: "I'm here." He looked at the corridor. He had his rifle. He had the kinetic dampening running its passive function. He was standing overwatch the way Gary stood overwatch, which was with the complete attention of a man who understood that his job was not exciting and that the not-exciting quality of it was the point.
Mike looked at the ground. He thought about what Shane had said. Waves like a lake. Small. One deeper every few rings. He thought about the lake to the north — the way Onondaga's surface moved on a morning with light wind, the concentric rings spreading from a disturbance outward and overlapping, the rhythm of it. He thought about that rhythm translated into the earth's material — the rings of disturbed ground spreading outward from the compound's perimeter, the slight undulations that an advancing force would feel in the ground before they understood what they were feeling.
He began.
The first ring went in at sixty yards from the outer wall — the subtle rise and fall of earth that surface observation would miss and that ground contact would not, the wave quality present in the terrain's new surface at a depth that the eye did not read but that a foot or a wheel or a vehicle's suspension would read immediately and unmistakably. He moved around the compound's perimeter as he worked, the ring following him the way his work always followed him — present in the ground behind him, completed, doing what it had been made to do. He did five rings. He felt the sixth coming and deepened it — not a subtle rise and fall but the descent, the ground going twelve feet down in a ring that ran the full circuit of the compound's outer perimeter at the depth that the physics of a vehicle's approach produced the worst possible outcome. Not a trench — the wave ring, but deep, the earth's natural continuation of the pattern until the pattern hit the depth Shane had named and produced the consequence it was designed to produce.
He kept moving. Ring after ring after ring, the pattern spreading outward from the compound with the rhythm of something that had been thought about correctly before it was built, which was the only kind of building that lasted.
Cory watched the perimeter. Gary watched the approaches. The compound stood in the morning light above the rings Mike was building into the ground around it — the wave pattern running outward from the outer wall in the geometry of a lake disturbed by something significant and still spreading.
They had already been to Elmira and Corning — the same work at each node, the marks going on in the order the fit required, the capability arriving in each person the way it always arrived. By the time they stepped to Dansville the tattoo group had the rhythm of people who had been doing the same thing correctly for hours and were continuing to do it correctly.
Lance had twelve people waiting in the community building.
Lance's community building had the quality it always had — the maps on the wall, the operational picture maintained with the habit of someone who had been keeping the picture accurate since before there was anyone to show it to, the hive channel running its background frequency through the people in the building and the fields beyond it in the way that Lance's capability ran when it was active, which was continuously and without requiring direction. He had twelve people waiting when Shane stepped in with Freya and Big Ed and Johnny and Rachel and Kelly — twelve people who had been told what was coming and had been waiting with the patient quality of people who understood that what they were waiting for mattered and were giving the waiting the seriousness it deserved.
Shane looked at the twelve. He looked at Lance. He said: "Any of them already marked." Lance said: "No." Shane looked at the twelve with the read he brought to everyone before a mark — the complete assessment of the person against the mark's requirements, the question of fit running through his awareness the way the Loom ran, present and directing without requiring conscious management. He looked at Freya. She opened the traveling case with the rune designs and laid them on the table with the focused economy of someone who had been doing this for long enough that the setup was simply the setup. Big Ed had the needle equipment ready. Johnny's right palm ran its passive read of the equipment — the machinery mastery confirming the needle's condition and the ink's temperature and the setup's readiness before anyone asked it to confirm.
They began.
The marks went on in the order the fit required — Lance's people receiving what they received with the quality of people who had been watching the corridor's network produce results for years and understood at a practical level what the marks meant without requiring the theology behind them to be explained. The capability arrived in each person the way it always arrived, which was completely and without ceremony, the power settling into the body the way a load settled into correctly built foundation — present, distributed, doing what it had been made to do. A woman who had been running Lance's northern field crews received her mark and felt the thing it gave her arrive in her forearms and her hands and stood with it for a moment with the quality of someone discovering that a tool they had always needed had just been given to them and the fit was exact. A man who had been managing Lance's eastern approach security received his and looked at his hands and looked at Lance and said nothing because the nothing was the complete version of what he meant. Lance watched each one with the hive channel open — the capability running its read of what his people were receiving and filing it the way Lance filed everything, which was in the operational picture, the understanding of his community's defensive capacity updating in real time as the marks went on.
Shane worked through the twelve with Big Ed beside him — the blood in the ink, the rune set into the skin, the capability arriving through the contact. He thought about the recon group moving south. He thought about the wave rings Mike was building into the ground around Sanctuary. He worked through the twelve and did not perform the working — it was simply the work, the daily application of what the corridor required, the building that did not stop.
The hive channel lit up at midday.
Lance felt it before the message fully formed — the capability running its read of his people in the fields and finding something in the field workers' awareness that was not the normal field picture, the hive channel carrying the quality of people who had encountered something unexpected and were communicating the unexpected through the channel before they had fully processed what they had encountered. He said: "Wait." The room stopped. He held the channel. The message came through from the Columbian workers in the eastern fields — three men who had been working the corridor's agricultural infrastructure since Bochica's trade arrangement had brought them north, whose connection to the channel had been one of its earliest and most consistent feeds. They were not panicking. They were reporting. The animals in the eastern fields were behaving in a way the workers had not seen before — the elk herd that grazed the field's far edge had oriented in unison toward the south and held the orientation without grazing, the wolf pack that ran the field's northern tree line had gone completely still in the way they went still when something significant was in their territory and they were reading it before deciding what to do with the reading. The cattle that the Columbian workers managed had moved to the field's center without being directed and were standing in the tight formation they used when predators were near — but there were no predators near. The cattle were responding to something the workers could not see.
Lance looked at Shane. Shane was already reading the Loom — the internal turn of attention, the instant read. He held what the Loom showed for three seconds. He said: "Tell your people in the eastern fields to move to the community building. Now. Quietly." Lance opened the channel. The message went out at the frequency below words. In the eastern fields three Columbian workers set down their tools and walked toward the community building without running because running communicated alarm and alarm changed what the thing they could not see did with the information that alarm provided.
Shane looked at Freya. Freya looked at the rune designs on the table. She looked at Shane. She said: "The thrum." Shane said: "Yes."
Outside Sanctuary Mike was on the seventh wave ring.
He felt it through the ground before he understood what he was feeling — the terraforming running its read through the earth the way it always ran, the full picture of the ground's depth and composition and movement present in his awareness. Something was in the ground's picture that had not been in the ground's picture sixty seconds ago. Not a person — the movement of people produced a different signature in the ground's read than this. This was the thrum that Shane had described to Hill — the baseline frequency shifting in the corridor's terraformed earth as the animals responded to something entering the outer perimeter that did not carry the corridor's frequency.
He stood up from the earth. He looked south. He looked at Cory. Cory had felt it through the Audit Eye — not a corruption pattern in people, the absence of the corridor's frequency in something entering the edge of his range. He looked at Mike. He said: "South. Moving." Mike looked at Gary. Gary already had the rifle up — not aimed, the ready position, the overwatch becoming the active watch. He was looking south with the flat professional attention of a man who had been given a job and was doing it.
Mike reached for the relay.
The recon group had been moving south for six hours.
The NY/PA border country ran its familiar geometry — the hill topography of the Allegheny plateau's edge, the tree cover thickening as they moved further south, the terrain producing the concealment that concealment-dependent operations used and that the recon group was using now, moving through it with the quality of people who understood that their value was in what they found and brought back rather than in any engagement they might initiate. Dave had King at his side and the Focus of the Pack running its read of the surrounding ground — not just the dogs, the broader capability, the pack awareness extending through King and the three other redbones to the animals they encountered in the territory they moved through, the corridor's enhanced wildlife feeding their positions and movements into Dave's awareness through the capability's extended reach.
They had been following wildlife signs since the crossing into Pennsylvania.
Hill had been reading them the way Ullr had taught him to read them — not the surface signs, the deep picture, the behavior of the animals against the baseline he had been building across years of running Sanctuary's perimeter. The birds first — the specific circuit pattern that told him the birds were watching something rather than simply moving. Then the deer — a small group that had moved from their established grazing position to a position that made no sense for grazing but made sense for observation, the animals placing themselves on elevated ground with a clear sightline south. Then the wolves — a pack that had been running east to west across their path and had stopped running and gone still in the tree line to the south with the complete stillness of animals that had identified something in their territory and were in the assessment phase before the response phase.
Hill held up his hand.
The group stopped. No sound — the redbones had gone still the moment Hill stopped, the working dogs' read of the halt communicating itself through their stilled bodies to the surrounding air. Dave felt it through King a half-second before he consciously processed it — the Focus of the Pack receiving what King was receiving from the territory ahead, the dogs' awareness feeding into Dave's awareness through the capability's reach. Something was in the forest ahead of them. Not one thing — the dogs' read communicated multiple positions, the spacing of something that had been placed rather than arrived, the discipline of a distribution pattern that people produced when they were doing something they did not want to be seen doing.
Hill turned to the group. He kept his voice at the level that the trees would not carry. He said: "People. Ahead. Moving through the cover." He looked at Dave. Dave's eyes had the quality of someone receiving information through a channel that was not his ears — the Focus of the Pack running its full picture of what the redbones were reading in the territory ahead, the positions feeding into his awareness with the clarity of something that had been built for exactly this. He held up four fingers. He held up four more. He looked at Hill. Hill looked at the tree line to the south. He looked at Thrud. The Jafna-Gaddr was in her hand — not raised, the ready carry, the density-iron running its internal blue vibration at the frequency that the territory around them was already registering through the thrum that Hill could feel in the ground under his boots, the baseline shifted from the moment the people in the forest ahead had moved into the corridor's outer perimeter range. Thrud looked at the tree line. She looked at Hill. She said nothing.
The redbones were still. The forest was still. The birds in the canopy above the tree line to the south had gone quiet in the way birds went quiet when the thing they had been watching had moved into the range where going quiet was the correct response.
Eight people in the forest ahead moving through the cover with the discipline of people who had done this before and understood that the terrain was their concealment and were using it correctly.
Dave looked at Hill. Hill looked at the tree line. He looked at the ground under his boots. The thrum was running its frequency through the earth — the corridor's terraformed land communicating the presence of something that did not carry the corridor's frequency, the signal clear and directional and pointed at exactly the section of forest the redbones were already watching.
Nobody moved.