They drove south of Senzeni Na, and near dawn were weaving between rocky ancient hillocks. But when they came to the bottom end of a landslide coming off a low broken scarp, Coyote started cursing. The ground was marked by rover tracks, and a scattering of crushed gas cylinders, food boxes and fuel containers.

They stared at the sight. “Your cache?” Art asked, which provoked another outburst of swearing.

“Who were they?” Art asked. “Police?”

No one answered immediately. Sax went to one of the drivers’ seats to check supply gauges. Coyote continued cursing furiously, plopping meanwhile into the other driver’s seat. Finally he said to Art, “It wasn’t police. Not unless they’ve started using Vishniac rovers. No. These thieves were from the underground, damn them. Probably an outfit I know based in Argyre. I can’t think of anyone else who would do it. But this crowd knows where some of my old caches were, and they’ve been mad at me ever since I sabotaged a mining settlement in the Charitums, because it closed down after that, and they lost their main source of supplies.”

“You folks should try to stay on the same side,” Art said.

“Fuck off,” Coyote advised him.

Coyote started up the boulder car and drove away. “It’s the same old story,” he said bitterly. “The resistance begins fighting itself, because that’s the only thing it can beat. Happens every time. You can’t get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.”

He went on in that vein for quite some time. Finally Sax tapped at one of the gauges, and Coyote said roughly, “I know!”

It was full daylight, and he stopped the car in a cleft between two of the ancient hillocks, and they blacked the windows, and lay in the dark on their narrow mattresses.

“So how many underground groups are there?” Art asked.

“No one knows,” Coyote said.

“You’re kidding.”

Nirgal answered before Coyote started in again. “There’s about forty in the southern hemisphere. And some long-standing disagreements among them are getting nasty. There are some tough groups out there. Radical Reds, Schnelling splinter groups, different kinds of fundamentalists . . . it’s causing trouble.”

“But aren’t you all working for the same thing?”

“I don’t know.” Nirgal recalled all-night arguments in Sabishii, sometimes quite violent, among students who were basically friends. “Maybe not.”

“But haven’t you talked it over?”

“Not in any formal way, no.”

Art looked surprised. “You should do that,” he said.

“Do what?” Nirgal asked.

“You should convene some kind of meeting of all the underground groups, and see if you can’t agree about what you’re all trying to do. How to settle the disputes, and like that.”