When they entered, and Kyle began introducing the spirit around, he noticed a decided tension in the group and a remoteness in Ravenheart. The watch shift had changed and there were two new troopers there he hadn't met before. One was an ork, Trooper Allen Douglas, and the other a black elf woman, Trooper Deena Reaves. Kyle also noticed that some of the heavier weapons, most of which he recognized by type rather than name, were being field-stripped or serviced.
Once the introductions were over, Ravenheart wandered up alongside him and said in a low voice, "We need to talk."
Kyle nodded, and followed her into a small office in the rear of the storage area. From the looks of things, she apparently claimed it as her own. "Soykaf?" she asked, stepping up to the maker and dispensing a cup.
"No, thanks."
Blowing on the hot liquid, she sat down, not behind the desk as he'd have expected, but on a metal folding chair near the far corner. She placed the steaming cup on an adjacent file cabinet, then pulled a pill dispenser from a vest pocket, shaking two small round green ones into her hand. She popped them in her mouth and saw Kyle looking at her. "You don't want to know," she said, then took a slug of soykaf to wash them down.
"What's going on?" he asked her.
Ravenheart held her hand up for him to wait a second, and took another drink of the hot liquid. "I wasn't sure what would happen when the soykaf and those pills hit my stomach together. They're only supposed to be taken with water. But frag it."
Kyle meanwhile had pulled up another folding chair alongside her and settled into it.
Finally, after a few moments of silence, she said, "According to Soaring Owl, the government is paralyzed. Everyone is advising something different.”
"Disease Control in Charlottesville has given the go-ahead to start bringing refugees through the line, but the Army says its people think that would be suicide for the rest of the country. Amazingly, there's been enough disinformation spread about that the public still doesn't have an accurate or truthful picture of what's going on here. The National Security Agency's worried about the long-term social impact of the truth that the government can't handle a magical threat of this nature."
"Great," said Kyle. "So nothing's been decided, and in the meantime more people die and the hive gets stronger."
"Wait," she said. "It gets worse."
Kyle stiffened. Anne Ravenheart was staring straight at him without the slightest trace of emotion in her eyes. He could hear some in her voice, but it was as if she'd put it there purely for his benefit
“Two days ago,” she continued, "a joint delegation from the elven nations of Tir Tairngire, led by Prince Ehran the Scribe, and Tir Na Nog, led by Caoimhe O'Dunn, daughter of the High Steward, had a private audience with President Steele that lasted six hours."
"I suppose Ares has a transcript."
Her face betrayed no sign she'd heard the jibe. "Sometime during the meeting the White House received a call from the great dragon Lofwyr. What I've been told is that the joint delegation, and Lofwyr recommended to Steele that the area inside the Containment Zone be saturated with ANVAR-TFM, Saeder-Krupp's most powerful pesticide, which will turn the area into a toxic waste zone for centuries."
Kyle froze. "But the people…"
"Dead," she said. "Like most pesticides, ANVAR-TFM is a nerve agent, except this one will kill most living things within a few seconds, and the rest within a few minutes. People, I'm told, take two to six minutes."
"But… that's absurd," Kyle sputtered. "How the frag can they believe that pesticides, fraggin' chemicals, will kill an insect spirit."
"As below, so above," came a voice from the shadows.
Both Kyle and Ravenheart jumped up and pulled their pistols, aiming in the direction of the voice. Standing in a darkened corner, Seeks-the-Moon stared back at them. Kyle immediately flipped his line of fire away from the spirit but Ravenheart kept hers trained on him. The small subdued lights on the side of the combat pistol told him it was armed and ready to fire. Her hand shook slightly, and Kyle gently reached out to grasp her wrist. That motion alone, even before his hand actually touched hers, was apparently enough to break her out of whatever fugue state she'd entered.
Cursing, she snapped her hands and the pistol away, pointing it at the ceiling. Kyle expected her to say something, but she just glared at the spirit. He noticed, though, that her weapon's status lights indicated that the firing mechanism had been disarmed. Kyle holstered his own weapon.
"What did you just say?" he asked, as calmly as he could.
"I believe I was paraphrasing an axiom of magical theory you once taught me," the spirit replied. "These creatures look like insects native to this plane, yet they are from somewhere else. Fire elementals are vulnerable to water, as natural fire is, so maybe these spirits are vulnerable to the things that natural insects are."
Barely listening to what Seeks-the-Moon was saying, Ravenheart holstered her weapon, dropped back into the chair, and ran one hand through her dark hair. She was running the razor's edge and completely exhausted. Kyle squatted down next to her. He knew she needed to rest and that he probably shouldn't press her, but he also knew that time was running out for Beth and Natalie.
"What time frame did they suggest?" he asked her.
She looked at him, now bleary-eyed and tired. He was glad to see some real emotion in her eyes. "The nerve agent is already being shipped to the area," she said, "so it can be used as soon as Steele decides to do so. The elves and the dragon told him that it wasn't used within seventy-two hours, the new cocoons would hatch."
"Does that sound right?" he asked her.
She nodded. "Based on what we know, yes. The process of investing the host with an insect spirit larva takes a couple of weeks, and more, depending on the power of the spirit in question. If they started a new 'crop' right away, the weak spirits could be ready to leave the cocoons any day now."
Kyle slowly sat back down in his chair. "Then we've got less than forty-eight hours."
"Probably closer to thirty-six," she said.
"We must find the main nest again," Seeks-the-Moon said. "Quickly."
Kyle shook his head. "They'd be stupid to re-form another main nest. If they were smart they'd create dozens of smaller nests to keep Knight Errant or anyone else from finding them all before the cocoons are ready."
"You'd be right," Ravenheart said, "except they don't trust each other."
Kyle looked at her. "What do you mean?"
"We've been tracking insect hives for about four years now. The first ones were nearly always single-type hives or nests. There was very little intermingling of insect types. In fact, it seemed that for the most part the different types didn't get along. Half the time the only reason we were able to find new nests was because interhive fighting broke out. The ants or the wasps usually start it.
"Then we learned about the Universal Brotherhood."
Kyle nodded. The same organization of which his sister-in-law Ellen had been a member and the one Dave Strevich at the FBI had refused to give him any information about He glanced at Seeks-the-Moon, but the spirit was standing quietly in the corner, listening.
"The frightening thing," Ravenheart said, "the thing that defied everything we thought we knew about the slotting bugs, was that the UB was a collective, a cooperation of a bunch of different types of insect spirits. Somewhere along the line some of the bug queens must have realized it was stupid for them to fight each other.
"Anyway, the Chicago hive we attacked north of the Core was, we now think, the primary Brotherhood hive in North America. We'd already dusted what we thought was the main hive in the Rocky Mountains a few months ago, after the Project Hope fiasco almost blew the lid off the whole thing."