Every now and then Taka would glance absently at the windshield as she moved among her patients. Sometimes she caught sight of two faint, glimmering pinpoints looking back, motionless and unblinking behind the dark reflections.

She didn't know what he might be doing in there. She didn't ask.

It was as if night were a black film laid over the world, and the stars mere pinpricks through which daylight passed.

"There," Ken said, pointing.

Fine needles, three or four of them. Their tips etched the film high in the west, left faint scratches across Bootes. They faded in seconds; Taka would never have seen them on her own.

"You're sure we're safe," she said.

He was a silhouette, black on black against the stars to her left. "They're past us already," he told her. Which was not the same thing.

"There go the intercepts," Laurie said behind them. Brief novae flared near Hercules—not contrails, but the ignition of antimissile salvos dropped from orbit. They'd be below the horizon by the time they hit atmosphere.

It was after midnight. They were standing on a rocky hill south of Freeport. Almost everything was stars and sky; the insignificant circle of earth below the horizon was black and featureless. They'd come here following the beeping of Ken's handpad, linked to a periscope floating somewhere in the ocean behind them. Evidently their submarine— Phocoena, Laurie had called it— was a stargazer.

Taka could see why. The Milky Way was so beautiful it hurt.

"Maybe this is it," she murmured. It was unlikely, she knew; this was only the second attack since they'd put their plan into motion, and how far could the word have spread by now?

And yet, three attacks in as many weeks. At that rate, they had to get lucky before too long...

"Don't count on it," Ken said.

She glanced at him, and glanced away. Not so long ago this man had stood at her back, one hand clamped easily on her neck, instructing Laurie in the disassembly of weapons systems that Taka could barely even name. He had been pleasant enough, then and since, because Taka had cooperated. He had been polite because she'd never stood in his way.

But Ken was on a mission, and Taka's little experiment in grass-roots salvation didn't seem to factor into it. He was playing along with her for some indecipherable reason of his own; there was no guarantee that tomorrow, or the next day, he wouldn't run out of patience and go back to his original game plan. Taka didn't know what that was, although she gathered it had something to do with helping Ken and Laurie's waterlogged kindred; she had learned not to waste time pressing either of them for details. It had involved getting into the Portland clave, which evidently Ken had not been able to do on his own.

It had also involved hijacking Taka's MI, which he had.