"You're not feral. You're not clave. You sure as hell aren't CSIRA or you'd be better equipped. Maybe you're TransAt—but that doesn't fit either." A faint smile passed across her face. "You don't know what you're doing, do you? You're making it up as you go along..."

Lubin kept his face neutral and his question on target. "Is there any reason not to believe that people might launch a biological attack against North America simply to—hasten things along?"

She seemed to find this amusing. "You don't get out much, do you?"

"Am I wrong?"

"You're not wrong." Ouellette spat on the ashy ground. "Lots of folks might help Providence along, if they had the chance. That doesn't mean this is an attack."

"What else would it be?"

"Maybe it's a counteragent."

Clarke looked up at that. "A cure?"

"Not so personal, maybe. Something that kills ßehemoth in the wild."

Lubin eyed Ouellette. She eyed him back, and answered his unspoken skepticism: "Of course there are crazies out there who want the world to end. But there have to be a lot more people who don't, wouldn't you agree? And they'd be working just as hard."

There was something in her eyes that hadn't been there before. They almost shone.

He nodded. "But if this is a counteragent, why do you suppose they tried to shoot it down? And why deliver it suborbitally? Wouldn't it be more efficient to leave deployment to the local authorities?"

Ouellette rolled her eyes. "What local authorities?"

Clarke frowned. "Wouldn't someone have told—everybody? Wouldn't someone have told you?"

"Laurie, you make something like this too public and you're painting a bullseye on your chest for the M&Ms. As for missile defense—" Ouellette turned back to Lubin— "Did the people on your planet ever mention something called the Rio Insurrection?"

"Tell us about it," Lubin said. Thinking: Laurie?

"I can't, really," Ouellette admitted. "Nobody really knows what happened. They say maybe a bunch of Madonnas got into CSIRA's Rio de Janeiro offices and went crazy. Launched attacks all over the place."

"Who won?"

"The good guys. At least, Rio got vaporized and the trouble stopped, but who knows? Some people say that it wasn't Lenies at all, it was some kind of civil war between rogue 'lawbreakers. But whatever it was, it was—way out there." She waved a hand at the horizon. "We had our own problems to deal with. And the only real moral of the story is, nobody knows who's running things any more, or whose side they're on, and we're all too busy hanging on by our fingernails to afford the time for any Big Questions. For all we know N'Am's battellites are running on autopilot, and ground control just lost the access codes. Or the Lenies are doing a little target practice. Or—or maybe the M&Ms have someone on the inside. The fact that something's shooting at these bugs doesn't prove anything, one way or another."