"Ekram's left the upcountry for town," she was told. The runner, a fourteen-year-old boy, looked at her with the steady blue eyes of the D'Aurois family.
"Why?" Amanda asked. "Did whoever passed the message say why?"
"He was at the Kiempü homestead, and he got a call from the military doctor," the boy said. "The other doctor's worried about identifying whatever's making people sick in town."
"That's all?"
"That's all Reiko Kiempü passed on, Amanda."
"Thank you," she said.
" - Except that she said the latest word is nothing's happened yet with Betta."
"Thanks," Amanda said.
She was a good hour of skimmer time from the Kiempü homestead, it was not far out of her way on her route to meet Lexy, Tim and Ramon once more above the meadow with the cantonment huts. She left her checking on the patrols and headed out.
When she got there, Reiko was outside, waiting, having heard Amanda was on the way. Amanda slid the skimmer to a stop and spoke eye to eye with the calm, tall, bronzed young woman, without getting out of the vehicle.
"The call went to Foralie first," Reiko told her, "but Ekram had already moved on. It finally caught up with him here, about two hours ago."
"Then you don't know what the military doctor told him?"
"No, all Ekram said was that he had to go down, that he couldn't leave it all to the other physician any longer."
Amanda looked at Maru Kiempü's daughter, bleakly.
"Three hours until dark," she said, "before I can get Lexy down to listen to what they're talking about in the cantonments."
"Eat something. Rest," said Reiko.
"I suppose so."
Amanda had never had less appetite or felt less like resting in her life. She could feel events building inexorably toward an explosion, as she had felt the long rollers of the Atlantic surf on the harsh seashores of her childhood, building to the one great wave that would drive spray clear to the high rocks on which she stood watching.
But it was common sense to eat and rest, with much of a long day behind her and possibly a long night ahead.
Just before sunset, she left the Kiempü homestead, and arrived at the meeting place with Lexy, Tim and Ramon before full dark. The clouds were thick and the air that wrapped about them was heavy with the dampness of the impending weather.
"Ekram still in town?" she asked.
"Yes," said Ramon. "We've got a cordon circling the whole area, outside the picket line the troops set up around the town. No one's gone out all day but patrols. If Ekram does, we'll get word as soon as he leaves."
"Good," said Amanda. "Lexy, Tim, be especially careful. A night like this their sentries could be in a mood to shoot first and check afterward. And the same thing applies to the soldiers in the cantonment area, itself"
"All right," said Lexy.
They went off, Amanda did not offer to talk and Ramon did not intrude questions upon her. Now that she was at the scene of some actual action, she began to feel the fatigue of the day in spite of her rest up at Kiempii homestead, and she dozed lightly, sitting on her skimmer.
She roused at a touch on her arm.
"They're coming back," said Ramon's voice in her ear.
She sat up creakily and tried to blink the heavy obscurity out of her eyes. But it was almost solid around her. The only thing visible was the line of the ridge-crest, some thirty meters off; silhouetted against the lighter dark of the clouded sky. The clouds were low enough to reflect a faint glow from the lights of the town and the cantonment beyond the ridge.
"Amanda, we heard about Cletus - " It was Lexy's voice, right at her feet. She could see nothing of either youngster.
"What did you hear?"
"Well, not about Cletus, himself, exactly - " put in Tim.
"Practically, it was," said Lexy. "They've got word from one of their transport ships, in orbit. It picked up the signal of a ship phasing in, just outside our star system. They think it's Cletus, coming. If it is, they figure that in a couple more short phase shifts he ought to be in orbit here; and he ought to be down on the ground at Foralie by early afternoon tomorrow, at the latest."
"Did they say anything about their transport trying to arrest him in orbit?"
"No," said Lexy.
"Did you expect them to, Amanda?" Ramon ill asked.
"No," said Amanda. "He's coming of his own choice and it makes sense to let anything you want all the way into a trap before you close it. Once in orbit, his ship wouldn't be able to get away without being destroyed by theirs, anyway. But mainly, they want to be sure to get him alive for that full-dress trial back on Earth, so they can arrange to have the rest of us deported and scattered. So, I wouldn't expect they'll do anything until he's grounded. But there's always orders that get misunderstood, and commanders who jump the gun."
"Tomorrow afternoon," said Ramon musingly. "That's it, then."
"That's it," said Amanda, grimly. "Lexy, what else?"
"Lots of people in town are sick - " Lexy's voice was unaccustomedly hushed, as if it had finally come home to her what this situation was leading to, with people she had known all her life. "Both docs are working."
"How about the soldiers? Any of them sick?"
"Yes, lots," said Lexy. "Just this evening, a whole long line of them went on sick call."
Amanda turned in the direction of Ramon's flitter and spoke to the invisible Ancient.
"Ramon," she said, "how many hours was Ekram in town in the afternoon?"
"Not more than two."
"We've got to get him out of there…" But her tone of voice betrayed the fact that she was talking to herself, rather than to the other three, and no one answered.
"I want to know the minute he leaves," Amanda said. "If he isn't gone by morning… I'd better stay here tonight."
"If you want to move back beyond the next ridge, we can build you a shelter," Ramon said. "We can build it up over you and your skimmer and you can tap heat off the skimmer. That way you can be comfortable and maybe get some sleep."
Amanda nodded, then remembered they could not see her.
"Fine," she said
In the shelter, with the back of her driver's seat laid down and the other seat cushions arranged to make a bed, Amanda lay, thinking. Around her, a circle of cut and stripped saplings had been driven into the earth and bent together at their tops to make the frame. This sagged gently over her head under the weight of the leafy branches that interwove the saplings, the whole crowned and made waterproof by the groundsheet from the boot of the skimmer. In spite of the soft warmth filling the shelter from the skimmer, humming on minimum power to its heater unit, the slight weight of her old down jacket, spread over her shoulders, gave her comfort.
She felt a strange sadness and a loneliness. Present concerns slid off and were lost in personal memories. She found herself thinking once more of Jimmy, her first-born - Betta's grandfather - whom she had loved more than any of her other children, though none of them had known it. Jimmy, whom she had cared for as child and adult through his own long life and all three of her own marriages, and brought at last with her here to the Dorsai to found a household. He was the Morgan from which all the ap Morgans since were named. He had lived sixty-four years, and ended up a good man and a good father - but all those years she had held the reins tight upon him.
Not his fault. As a six-month-old baby he had been taken - legally stolen from her by her in-laws, after his father's death, and the less than a short year and a half of their marriage. She had fought for four years after that, fought literally and legally, until finally she had worn her father and mother-in-law down to where they were forced to allow her visiting rights; and then she had stolen him back Stolen him, and fled off-Earth to the technologically-oriented new world of Newton; where she had married again, to give the boy a home and a father.