Are there any birds in the sky? 

 I haven't opened the comm link since this morning, so I don't blame Core for using the code phrase.

I'm alone, Core, fifteen kilometres east of town. I'm in the territory of the main cattleman of the area. He goes by Cargon – can you find any data on the name? 

First things first, m'love. You said ruins. What did you mean by that? 

Seated astride my rented horse, I stare down at the sunken land before me. Even without the remains of those weirdly wide and paved roads and stone walls – prickly with broken metal poles, gateposts, and antennae – it would be far to geometric to be a naturally created valley or sink. 

Ruins. Old. I see evidence of traffic signs, electricity poles. A few hundred years, I'd guess.  

Any other telling features? 

I run my hand down my horse's neck in slow strokes with even pressure, communicating confidence I decidedly don't have right now to calm it down. Its nostrils flutter as the wind carries the scent of rust, smoke, faint rotten-egg sulfur vapors, and an unmistakably sour odor that burns the back of my throat.

Nests. There must be dozens of them, Core. I lean over in the saddle to peer over the edge of the cliff-like drop before me. The yellow rock beneath gives way to buried cement ten metres down, and that to a black scar-like hole. I didn't see any on my way here, but they're all clustered here. 

Almost targeted... The comm-link connection seems shared by accident, Core's mental voice comes to me so softly. A pause, then he returns, louder. Are they centered on any one location?

Bracing myself, I turn the trace filter of my visor back on. Blazing orange lights hits me like a faceful of porcupine, but this time I'm ready. I blink a few times, eyes watering, then am able to focus enough to engage the settings of the filter and begin identifying the separate nests. Each unique splash of minerals and matter separated out from the others flickers through a growing tally in a column on the left side of my visor, and on the right, the same count runs through a steadily increasing row of figures - dates. My mouth drops open. 

Core, the nests are all located within the ruins, concentrated in the northeastern corner, and... and they date back as far as forty years. Soal has been falling here, unreported, for forty years. What is happening here?

This is bigger than Griswold. Frustration is clear in Core's comm link – the base of my skull vibrates as if brushed by a flying bee. There are too many coincidences - no Enforcers, an unreported soal hotspot, Guild all over... Listen, Duster will be done with the vital repairs on the Verve by tomorrow night. We'll come get you. I want you out of there, Viridian. Out. 

He's right. I lower my visor and stare at the massive, charred record of just how long the government has been blind to the goings on in this area. Forty years. And I thought I could blaze through the town like some old-time ranging gun, and win the day with some cunning and derring-do. Throw a few punches, beat the bad guy and his posse, and swagger off into the sunset to collect some praise from my commanding officer. 

I'm not even that good of a shot. 

I will get Wolf and Melna out, though. It's going to be more difficult than I anticipated, but I promised them I would, and I owe it to them and the other good folk who live under the Guild here to get the truth out. I remember how the recorodion at the pub died just after Wolf managed to get a longer-distance signal on it, and nausea swells in my stomach. 

"...they'll cut the soal first, like they do any time they don't like how we look at them, or something." 

Wolf's words echo in my mind, and I straighten in the saddle and grit my teeth. 

What's your projected ETA, Core?

Core is quiet for a moment, then returns in full military mode. Eighteen hundred hours. The Snipers won't be operational, but the hull and landing-gear will be exosphere-proof. We'll extract you and launch immediately, to throw their targeting systems. We don't have the firepower or shielding to withstand another dogfight. Is the transit-pass valley still the optimal extraction site? 

No. We'll be extracting two civilians, and getting them out there will be problematic. They've hidden my identity and been aiding me in my investigations this far, and I promised them I'd get them out in return. 

Viridian –

I know, Core. You're going to reprimand me for involving them. But they're not civilians, not really. Their home is a quiet war zone. Don't tell me they don't belong in this fight. This fight is theirs, really, and we've got to help them. We've got to get them to base and get the word on what is happening here out. 

Core falls silent again, doubtless mentally pacing the small confines of the med ward. Then he beings thinking aloud. 

So we'll need an extraction point closer to the town. We'll have to come in hot – they knew when we first arrived and sent Charon out as a lure for you, so they have to have radar and other scanners covering the place, and without knowing the scanners' range, we don't know how much time we have before they know our location. And we don't know what kind of firepower they have. You said they have a techforge?  They could have almost anything, then, even roof-mounted Snipers for all we know. 

Calm down, Core. We've got more than twenty-four hours before you get here. After I get some more readings and intel on this soal hot-spot, I'll check out the techforge, and the hangar, as well. Then I'll get out of town again to avoid being picked up when I report all my findings to you. 

I don't want you doing all that alone. 

We don't have a choice. But please don't worry about me.  I know the request is useless, given who I'm talking to, but I have to try. We've got to stay focused if we're going to get through this. I'll send you an update before I head back to town, otherwise the plan is to meet at the transit pass at eighteen hundred hours. You do what you got to to get the Verve in one functional pieces again, and I'll collect the intel and the two civilians. Understood? 

Core hesitates. 

Affirmative. But if I find any signs you're in trouble, I will have to take over the controls and come get you. 

I chirrup to my horse and start along the ruins' edge again, headed east. Then'll stay out of trouble. Easy. 

Core makes a mental noise like a duck being strangled. 

I have to ride almost all the way around to the northeastern side of the ruins before I find a way into them that's gentle enough in incline to allow my horse down. The black-scarred walls rise up around me, so high I see only a fringe of wind-swept grass and the sky. It's eerie. Like all that exists is the rubble-filled hole and the flat blue lid above. The jingle of my horse's bridle as I halt it is dampened by the closeness of the earth around us, and the same happens to the sound of my boots hitting the ground when I dismount. I tie the reins to a bent metal bar sticking from a pockmarked wall, check on my prods and pistol, then begin exploring. 

The nests are thicker here than anywhere else among the rubble. It reminds me of one of my ancestors' legends, which I heard about in history and culture classes during grammar school. The gods had quarreled, and threw their fires (which my professor had said was symbolic of their hearts, or the source of their powers) at each other, but missed. The fire fell on the then uninhabited earth and did a number of different things. What I remember best is that the fire created ash that provided nutrients for the first growing things, and sparks for the souls of the first people. And I only remember that because we had to stand during the entire recitation of the traditional poem about the whole thing every spring during the torch-running festival. I hated all that standing still.

Now, as I climb crumbling stairways and lower myself over listing walls, the ash clings thick to my clothes. My visor filters the air so my breathing is clear, but it's hot work, and soon I'm a dark-grey, sweaty, panting mess. If anybody sees me like this, there's no way I'll pass as a Nose.

But I'm quite alone. My scanners show nothing but my horse behind me and my own pinprick heat signature, and the glowing sea of soal trace I'm wading through. I'd be afraid of the footsteps I leave behind as I crunch through the charcoal-like remains of the soal-fall, but there is plenty of other disturbance in this place. Bison tracks, jackrabbit, wildcat, and even – I have to stand still and breathe deep for a moment – procarne tracks lead up stairways and cross weed-littered expanses of cracked pavement. Those long, four-toed footprints are a good eight feet apart, and dug deep into what soft earth is left among the fallen walls, like blows from narrow spades. But the tracks are old, criss-crossed by the scurryings of mice and wind-shifted scree. I can study my location without fear of discovery.

Here in the northeastern corner, several wide, smooth inclines reach down into the angular-edged valley, each the same width and length. Ramps, maybe. Then two rows of cracked-off stone pillars march into the middle of the ruins before me, with trailing lengths of old electric wiring falling of some of them. Similar wiring dangles in fray-ended bits off the corners of smashed-in walls and from one particularly large pillar a stone's throw ahead of me. A jumble of walls and gaping window-openings and doorframes lies beween me and it, like a half-finished jigsaw puzzle, but I reach it in a quarter of an hour at the cost of only two bruises and a stubbed toe. A quick scan with my visors shows the pillar is actually hollow, like some kind of silo. I don't know how high it must have originally stood, since the top is sheered off at a level with the ground several stories above, and neither can I see anything like a door or entrance. Rubble is piled around the base. What I do find is a crack about twenty metres back amongst the rubble. Well, more accurately, my boot gets caught in it and I fall on my face in a twenty-seven-year-old nest. My hands glow with trace in my visor as I dig at the rocks covering more of the crack, and gradually, they slide and fall inward by themselves. The crack isn't too big, maybe three metres long and one wide, but another scan shows a hollow space beyond it. 

Trying not to think about spiders, I ease myself into the crack and poke my head into empty space. Dust motes and grey rock meet my vision. Trace glimmers opposite me and off into the darkness, but I turn off the filter in order to see better and I find a flat, largely intact floor a short drop beneath me. Tiles. Pale blue, like morning sky. I wonder, as my horse-shite-crusted boots hit them, when someone last stepped on those tiles. The echo of my movements here are different than outside in the valley. They're sterile, staccato, and too big for the small space. My breathing is loud as static in my visor. 

Calm down, it's just an old hallway. I pull out one of my prods, anyway, and turn to my left to head in the direction of the silo.

 I think its a trick of my visor in the dim light at first, but after a few more steps, I realize its true: there's light ahead of me. Faint, but there. I head towards it. 

There's not much rubble down in here, aside from several millimeters of dust. The ceilings are reinforced with metal beams, and the walls are draped with wires that are rusted to almost cobweb frailty. I've never seen tech so old. Not even in the Platinova City Museum of History. The wires run the length of the hallway, growing thicker and more numerous the closer I get to the light. Soon after first noticing it, I realize the light is the outline of a door. I see they were originally double doors upon getting closer, but one of them has dropped from its hinges and the window panels in both are smashed. Glass crunches under my boots. I step through the door. On either side, the walls open up wide to become a circular room. It's sixty or so metres across, reaches up to a patch of afternoon sky visible far above, and been filled, absolutely pounded, with empty soal nests. They're everywhere. The blue tiles are obliterated by craters. Black scars the massive splinter-cracked screens on the walls. Fragments of soal cling to what's left of a railing surrounding a circular, metal-lined hole in the middle of the floor and the mess of table legs radiating out around it. Old, wire-and-computing heavy tech lie scattered about like charred bones. 

But despite the destruction, I recognize the place - its layout and function, that is. Rows and rows of screens, albeit with huge monitors and clunky buttons. Desks surrounding a central port that could have been a conductor, a launch pad, a hologram projector. This was a base of some kind, a long time ago. Somebody's gods were angry. 

I turn on my visor's trace filter, but the results are still underwhelming. Nothing's landed here in several months. Frustration twists my stomach. 

"This is supposed to be your big soal-mine, Cargon! Where are you getting it from if it's not landing here?" I somehow keep myself from flipping the nearest still-intact computer table. "It's bloody soal, it doesn't just vanish! Where is it?" 

My visor pings. 

Two heat signatures southwest of my location. Twenty kilometres off and closing.

I moan.

"Well, it's not like you had to come and tell me."