Legata keyed for the proper sensors and the screens flickered to re-form with views of the cleanup work on the damage left by the E-clone revolt. Orders from whom? she wondered. Crews were busy in every screen, mostly E-clones guarded by armed normals. Some worked in the open courtyard where the Nerve Runners had left nothing alive; others toiled along the shattered sections of the perimeter where temporary barriers had been erected. There were even some heavily guarded crews outside. No demons or hylighters interfered.

“Why aren’t they attacking?” Legata asked.

“We seem to be at a stand-off,” Lewis said.

“We’re saving our energy,” Oakes said. “My orders are not to shoot them at random. We cook them now only if they come within twenty-five meters of our people or equipment.”

“They can think,” Lewis said. “They think and plan.”

“But what are they planning?” Legata asked. She noticed that Oakes was going paler by the blink.

Oakes turned. “Jesus, we’d better do some planning of our own. Come with me.”

They left, but Legata did not notice. She remained at the screen, working through the outside sensors. The whole landscape had turned into a golden dazzle of suns and hylighters, black cliffs aswarm with demons, and a surging sea capped with white foam and spray.

Presently, Legata turned, realized that Oakes and Lewis no longer were in the Command Center.

I’ll have to act soon, she thought. And I have to be ready.

She worked her way through the activity in the Center, opened a main corridor hatch and hurried toward her own quarters.

Chapter 56

Chapter 56

Poet

You see bones up ahead

where there are none.

By the time we get there

so do they.

—Hali Ekel, Private Letters

HALI STUDIED the monitors on the reclining Waela with care. It was well into dayside, but Waela appeared to be asleep, her body quiet on the tightly stretched hammock which they had rigged in one of Ship’s rim compartments. Her abdomen was a mounded hillock. There was no hatch to this cubicle, only a fabric curtain which rustled in faint stirrings from the agrarium to which this extrusion was attached.

This is not normal sleep, Hali thought.

Waela’s breathing was too shallow, the passivity of her body too profound. It was as though she had slipped back into something approaching hyb. What did that mean for the fetus?

The compartment was slightly larger than a regular cubby, and Hali had brought in a small wheeled cart to support the monitor screen. The screen showed Waela’s vital signs as visible undulating curves with synchronous time-blips. A secondary set of lines reported on the child developing in Waela’s womb. A simple twist of a dial could superimpose one set of lines on the other.