“And it stands for something?” Nat asked.

“Monitoring Outer-Space Biological Incursions from Unknown Systems. Or something. I’m still working on it.”

Nat made a face. “That’s pretty lame.”

“But a cool name,” Patrick replied. “Maybe we can keep working on what it stands for.”

We continued trying variations on the aerial survey, but eventually ran out of ideas.

“Let’s pack it in,” I said. “Sheldon, take us back to the barn.”

The re-hangaring of the Halo was as big a pain as the de-hangaring, just in reverse. Patrick and I finished by getting out the ladder and the WD-40 and doing a thorough coat on the rails.

Finally, with everything put away and the Halo once again invisibly parked in the barn, we settled back into our chairs.

Nat, who hadn’t been involved with the doors, was working on her laptop. “Sheldon airdropped the vids and pics to me. I’ll share them out to you guys once I have them organized. Then how about if the two of you go through them while I work on the data analysis?”

Patrick grinned widely. “Now that’s a plan I can get behind. You do the homework while we watch videos.”

“Asshole.”

After a couple of hours of silent concentration, I sat back with a groan. “I got squat. Patrick?”

“Nada. Lots of home construction, some occasional commercial or infrastructure construction, but nothing worth a raised eyebrow. No missile silos, military installations, castles, open-pit mines, no nothin’.”

Natalie looked up. “What kind of infrastructure?”

“Roads, the levee on Archer Lake at the outflow point, some drainage canals they put in after the big floods five years ago.”

“And commercial construction?”

“Valley Mall at the other end of town, and the Tate Industrial Park. Probably the only things that have been built in the county since the Civil War.”

“That may be a slight exaggeration,” Nat said, “but I get your point. And not surprising, really. Neither place is doing fantastically. Hard to see why they’d build more.”

“The mall is doing better since they brought in Walmart,” I said.

Patrick nodded. “It needed a big-time lease like that.”

“And the industrial park?” I inclined my head in the general direction of McArthur’s Knob, the closest thing to a terrain feature in this part of the world. Nat’s employer, and in fact the entire complex, sat just on the other side of the hill from our property.

“I don’t exactly wander around a lot at lunch, but it mostly seems to be hole-in-the-wall operations—mail-order businesses, specialty fabrication, a dojo or two, stuff like that. Like with the mall, they needed one big lease like the Harris Institute to get ahead of breakeven.”

“And what about your employer?”

“What? They’re a marketing firm, Patrick. They figure out how to sell more soap to people who already have soap.”

“Must be fulfilling.”