“Where are we? Any news?” she demanded as she took the sole open seat at the head of the table.

Desch shook his head, eyes lowered. “No news, Supervisor. Jin and Masters volunteered to stay at the portal. Last I talked to them, maybe fifteen minutes ago, they said that but for a couple of rumbles, the tunnel’s quiet. They’ve wired geophones into the rock. Clever of them, actually. But even with the extra sensitivity, there’s nothing resembling a human sound. No tapping, nothing rhythmic. Most of what they’re hearing sounds like fill settling. If they’re interpreting the sounds right, the void migration has slowed. The fill has probably about used up the volume.”

Kalico looked around, going from face to face. “Where’re Bogarten and Talovich? They should be here.”

Ghosh leaned forward at the table, rubbing his tired face with dirty hands. “They’re down at the river with a couple of aquajade beams that had been laying around. Talovich has taken this hard, Supervisor. He thinks it’s somehow his fault. That he didn’t figure the load-bearing design right. He’s trying—”

“Excuse me? You’re telling me that my structural engineer and my top chemist and fabricator are down at the river? Alone? That while we’re sitting here, some quetzal or flock of mobbers might be chowing down on two of my most important people? I gave them an order! They trying to get themselves eaten? Or shot?”

Ghosh gave her a bleary-eyed stare, a trace of a smile on his lips. “Talovich said you’d say that. Neither, ma’am. They took two of the marines, Abu Sassi and Dina Michegan, in armor and with tech, to watch their backs. That should keep them from being eaten. And Talovich said if he couldn’t figure out what he’d done wrong, he deserved to be shot.”

Kalico narrowed an eye, felt the building rage shift into a macabre sense of amusement. Piss in a pot, she’d been on Donovan for too long. That, and her people knew her too well.

“All right. They get a break this time. Unless this goes sideways, and we lose somebody else.” She considered as they watched her, their expressions running the gamut from worry to outright grief. “No one ever said that any of this would be easy. And I think we were getting too cocky. Think about it. We’ve won every battle. Built the smelter, beat back the forest, exterminated the local mobbers, learned how to mine the Number One and Number Two, made ourselves richer than half the Boardmembers in Transluna. We’re growing our own food. We’ve figured out how to build whatever we need, almost from scratch. We’ve got eleven families with kids.”