Unlike the prim dormitory suburbs of Killeen, the ruination of Temple announced itself from a great distance. They approached from the south-west, sweeping up along Interstate 35, the wheels of the Humvee throwing up small fantails of water from the puddles that had gathered on the tarmac. Caitlin could tell from a few minutes out that large parts of the town had burned back in ’03. The southern suburbs seemed to grin at her through the rain like shattered teeth in a skull. Thick stands of trees grew up through the foundations of houses that were now no more than blackened stumps and stagnant pools of run-off, festering in former cellars. The site reminded her of ruins she had seen in the jungles of South America and Asia.

‘Looks a little shabby,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t have tidied up before I got here?’

‘We really are a pretty minor operation here,’ replied Tusk Musso. ‘It’s just my eighty-seven staff, two platoons of army Rangers to provide security and a floating population of about a dozen ring-ins, who might be here at any time on temporary assignment.’

‘Rangers? That’s a little excessive for garrison duty.’

‘You’d think so, but a lot of my people are out in the field and they need class-A security out there. Standard procedure is to send a stick of Rangers out to scout ahead while another one rides shotgun over the resettlement teams.’

‘What’s your problem? Bandits? Road agents?’

‘Mostly both, yeah,’ said Musso. ‘But we’ve had to stand down the occasional TDF unit as well. Turf disputes. Misunderstandings about exactly how much autonomy federal officers have, even outside the Mandate. Some of these guys forget that Texas is still part of the US.’

They rolled through the remains of a former commercial precinct, or perhaps a light industrial neighbourhood, on the very edge of town. Weeds and saplings grew thick within the ruins.

‘So how much of the place burned?’ she asked, looking ahead out of the windshield.

‘A lot of the suburbs in the north, and maybe about a third here on the southern edge,’ he said. ‘The centre of town, where we are, isn’t as bad. There was some fire damage back on the day, but a lot of the commercial buildings were protected by their automated systems. There’s been some flash flooding in the intervening years, however. That messed up the road network worse than all the crashes on Wave Day.’

Some major ground-zero effects could be seen at the intersection of I-35 and a multi-lane loop road – the Dodgen Loop, if she recalled from the briefing notes. It looked like a couple of acres had been bulldozed. Musso saw her frowning at the devastation.