In the meantime he had a perimeter to patrol. He'd come in from the west, along Dyer Road; there'd been no outgoing traffic. Now he banked south, bypassing the firestorm on a vector that would intercept I-95. The lifters had approached from the north. Any refugees with wheeled transportation would most likely be fleeing in the opposite direction.

Maybe one of them would give him an excuse.

Thirteen kilometers down the track he got a hit on long-range motion. It was a heavy return, almost a truck, but it dropped off the scope just a few seconds after acquisition. He climbed and did a lateral sweep at one-fifty; that netted him two intermittent contacts in quick succession. Then nothing.

It was enough. The target had deked east off the highway and disappeared into ground clutter, but he had a fix on the last hit. With any luck those coordinates would lie on a side road without too many intersections. With any luck the target was down to a single degree of freedom.

For once, luck was with him. The road was a winding thing, obscured by the tangled overreaching arms of dying trees that would have hidden it completely in greener days. Those branches were still thick enough to scramble any clear view of a moving object, but they couldn't hide it entirely. At its current speed the target would reach the coast in a few minutes.

The ocean sparkled in the distance, a flat blue expanse picketed by rows of ivory spires. From here those spires were the size of toothpicks; in fact, each stood a hundred meters tall. Trifoliate rotors spun lazily atop some, each slender blade as long as a ten-story building; on others the rotors were frozen in place, or missing a foil. A few had been entirely decapitated.

Some kind of industrial complex nestled amongst the staggered feet of the windmills, a floating sprawl of pipes and scaffolds and spherical reservoirs. Coarse details resolved as Lubin neared the coast: a hydrogen cracking station, probably feeding Portland a discreet fifteen or twenty klicks to the south. It was dwarfed by distance and the structures that powered it, although it was easily several stories tall.

Over the water now. Behind him the road broke free of the necrotic forest and curved smoothly along the coast. It ended at a little spill of asphalt that bled out and congealed into a parking lot overlooking the ocean. No way out except the way in; Lubin banked back and down into position as the target emerged from cover and passed beneath him.

It was Miri.

I might have known, he thought. I never could trust that woman to stay put.