Ven squeezed inside before the signalman sealed the tent flaps and joined her commander at the wire-talkie station. Deschane was angrily poking a runty signalman in the chest with his finger.

“I want immediate confirmation on this!” Deschane said, holding the crumpled paper up to the man’s face, “Message them back at once!”

“W-w-we can’t!” the signalman stammered, “We’re not supposed to be tapping into official military cables! A reply would give us away.”

“What’s this idiot blathering on about?”

The terrified tech gave Nong a pleading look.

“C-Commissioner, tell him! Please!”

“I’ve explained this to you at length,” Nong clicked his tongue in annoyance, “Navigator, this operation isn’t sanctioned by Fleet Command. We aren’t even part of the Expeditionary Force. If they catch us listening to their top-secret dispatches, we’ll all be court-martialed and, very probably, hung. This entire operation will be totaled. Kaput! Do you understand?”

“This is MY regiment we’re talking about here,” Deschane said, shoving the signalman away and getting right up into Nong’s face, “Eighty-three troopers? Commissioner, that’s a whole company gone! I need to know what’s going on out there!”

“As do I,” Pretty Boy rasped, unexpectedly materializing next to Ven.

“What?” he demanded as Deschane and Nong stared at him in silence, “We’re the ones heading out there, so we deserve to be in the loop. Or am I wrong?”

For a moment Deschane looked as if he would shout Doyd down as well. Then his shoulders slumped and he handed the paper to Ven, who read it out loud for Pretty Boy’s benefit:

“Forward elements of 3rd Pathfinder Regiment report first contact with enemy in vicinity of Shogun Creek. 2nd Battalion supported by an artillery section engaged hostile lifeform of unknown origin, taking heavy losses. 83 missing in action, presumed dead, 5 wounded. Colonel Moch Leelan to withdraw his forces back south across the Foss. Requesting immediate cavalry support to screen his retreat.”

“Lifeforms,” Pretty Boy corrected her, with emphasis on the plural.

“No, that wasn’t a misspelling,” the signalman insisted, “The transmission came through very garbled, so your regiment’s signalmen had to send it in three different versions. What’s more, the section lieutenant overseeing the artillery confirmed it in a separate message.”

“Bollocks. Ain’t no way a single Amit kills that many of our boys,” Pretty Boy said.

“Unless…” Nong ventured, then stopped.

“What is it? What?” Deschane snarled. The navigator was visibly struggling to contain his fury and impatience.

“I think we’ve found it at last,” Nong sat down heavily, his cheeks having gone the color of ash, “Our ancient eradicator.”

“You mean that nutty idea your jolly-gists dug up out of the mud?” Pretty Boy sneered, “Them demons from the past what cleanses the all and everything? Midnight Madness, that’s all that is.”

“Something out there is killing our brothers and sisters,” Deschane’s look of cold efficiency had returned, “I intend to do something about it. Doyd, gather the platoon.”

“Who, me?” Pretty Boy gave a start.

“Yes, you!” Deschane strode purposefully towards the tent flaps, “I’m promoting you to sergeant-major. Field commission, effective immediately. Who’s your choice of first sergeant?”

“Err…” Pretty Boy gulped, “Uhh…Harmer! Yes, she’ll do. Hell, why don’t you make her sergeant-major instead?”

“She wasn’t at Assail.”

“If that’s how you’re picking em, then choose Greymoss! He was there too, wasn’t he?” Pretty Boy cried, floundering for any excuse within reach. Deschane didn’t even bother to dignify that suggestion with a response.

“I want them armed, outfitted and ready to go within the hour,” the navigator told him, “We’ll establish communication with the artillery section and move along the river Foss till it cuts Shogun Creek, then fan out from there.”

Deschane made for the tent flap only to find Nong standing squarely in his way.

“You’ll do no such thing,” the Commissioner said, his thumbs hooked into his waistband close to his pistols.

“That coward Leelan left our people to die,” Deschane said, veins pulsing on the sides of his temples, “I’m getting them back.”

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The navigator tried to walk through him, but at a wave of Nong’s hand the black suits stepped forward, their quicktimers held ready at the waist. Pretty Boy immediately stepped up, but luckily Ven was able to place a restraining hand on his elbow.

“Navigator, I cannot permit you to establish contact with your superiors nor any other officer of the Expeditionary Force,” Nong said with finality, “I am sorry to hear that your regiment has sustained losses and I understand you have a personal attachment to those men, but at the risk of sounding callous, I must to ask: aren’t casualties to be expected in any largescale surface operation? I don’t see how your personal presence on the battlefield might change that unfortunate reality. The only thing you would accomplish is placing your platoon directly in harm’s way and thus jeopardizing our mission—a mission that has been decades in the making and upon which the very fate of humanity may hinge. 83 dead men is a tragedy, I agree. But on the scale at which we are operating, it becomes a mere statistic.”

Pretty Boy gave Ven a meaningful look, as if to say: “I told you so.” The newly promoted sergeant-major crossed his arms as if to show his disdain for Nong’s hired goons, but Ven knew that he had done it to have access to his concealed dirk.

“Hear that, navigator? This shit-for-brains just called us a statistic,” Pretty Boy smiled, “That sounds like mathematricks. I hates mathematricks.”

“I know what he said, sergeant-major,” Deschane said quietly, “Try not to take it too personally.”

Deschane’s shooting arm had gone as rigid as a viper poised to strike, hovering over the sandalwood grip of his cycler pistol. Ven doubted he had more than two shots left in the cylinder—she hadn’t seen Deschane reload after the shooting contest. From the sound of gunfire and excited yells, the other pathfinders were still enjoying themselves outside. If worst came to worst, everything in here would be over by the time the platoon realized what was happening.

The corporal realized with embarrassment that she was the only one present who hadn’t thought to secure a weapon. So much for being one of the best. Even the signalman behind her had surreptitiously reached into the drawers of his desk. She slowly turned to cover Deschane’s six, feeling foolish confronting them with only her bare hands.

“Consider the bigger picture,” Nong urged them.

Deschane scanned the room and seemed to reach his own conclusions. He held up his palms to defuse the situation and everyone relaxed slightly.

“I already have,” Deschane said in reply to the commissioner, “And I must confess that I find your reasoning flawed.”

“Explain,” Nong’s nutbrown face crinkled up in curiosity.

“In order to recover the Divine Engine, our platoon will be making an aerial insertion inside uncharted territory. But if this latest transmission is to be taken at face value, then my regiment has just encountered something new and incredibly dangerous. Perhaps it’s a subspecies of Amit never before seen, something endemic to the Northern Hinterlands and found nowhere else. It may even be that eradicator that you’re so concerned about. Regardless, we know that a single specimen managed to defeat a battalion that was five times larger than the force currently at our disposal.”

“My platoon might not even stand a chance against one of them, and who knows how many more of these creatures are out there? The landing zone could be crawling with them. It’s clear that we cannot proceed with the mission at hand until we understand the magnitude of this threat and devise appropriate countermeasures.”

“That is why we’ve prepared all this equipment for you, so that you can deal with every eventuality. As I promised, your men can have their pick of my arsenal,” Nong countered, “You will lack for nothing on this expedition.”

“Most of your weapons are experimental,” Deschane insisted, “I’ve only ever seen rearloading rifles in the hands of cavalry officers, and even they had to purchase them with their own money. Some of these prototypes don’t even have serial numbers on them, so they certainly didn’t come out of the Gunnery Department. That contest we did earlier won’t cut it. I’m not dropping twenty klicks inside the pheromone kill-radius until I’m absolutely sure my hardware will work.”

Nong considered Deschane’s points and eventually nodded.

“So you are proposing that we—”

“Think of it as a field test. Live fire, limited in scope. Colonel Moch Leelan has pulled the rest of my regiment back across the safety of the river, so there’s no chance we’ll be spotted by them.”

“Even if you do find your missing men, how can you ensure their silence? I know soldiers, Deschane. You are all hopeless gossips.”

“They’d owe me a debt of life. They’ll bite out their own tongues if I ask it of them. On that you may depend.”

“And if you don’t return?”

“Then you’ll just have to find another set of willing fools, now won’t you?”

Nong and Deschane locked eyes, each searching for the slightest change in the other’s expression. The commissioner must have seen something he liked, for he gave in, saying:

“Fine. But make certain you come back. I can’t afford to lose you people.”

“Got a peculiar way of letting us know how valuable we are, don’t he?” said Pretty Boy as they walked towards the exit, the black suits standing wordlessly aside. At the tent flap Deschane paused and turned back.

“Oh, and commissioner?”

His right hand blurred, the edge of his left fanning the hammer of the cycler as he drew and fired twice from the hip, making the black suits dance and yelp as his bullets kicked up the dust between their feet. In an instant Pretty Boy was on the third gunman, snatching the quicktimer out of his grip and cracking its owner across the face with the stock.

Ven saw the scrawny signalman reach down and kicked the drawer shut, trapping the man’s wrist in place. She snatched a quill off the table and got the man in a headlock.

“I’ll put your eye out with this,” she told him, pricking him in the cheek till it drew blood “Let it go.”

She heard the pistol clatter to the bottom of the drawer. Nong reached for the sky as Pretty Boy levelled the rifle at him, Deschane forcing the other black suits at gunpoint to drop theirs.

“I’ll say this once,” Deschane told Nong, “Never threaten me or my people again.”

“Stand down!” Nong snapped irritably at the black suits who had come running up at the sound of gunfire, “All of you, stand down! You think we’d still be breathing if they wanted us gone? Alright, Deschane. You’ve made your point. Go on. Find out whatever you can about the lifeform and retrieve samples if you can. Our biologists will want to take a closer look.”

“Right. Just so long as we understand each other,” Deschane said warily.

“Say…can I have that back now?” the black suit asked Pretty Boy, pointing at his quicktimer.