Henry Exline was still awake in the hills above the camp when Wash returned in the shuttle. Exline knew he would have to be back sometime soon, those shuttles didn’t have that long a range. Exline looked up when sometime close to midnight the shuttle buzzed overhead and down into the camp.

Who were these folks and what were they up to? They weren’t Alliance, that was for damn sure, and they weren’t planning to settle here, or they wouldn’t have landed inside the perimeter of a mined military camp. Did they know it was mined? In his considered opinion, they did know it was mined. They had settled right down with the water and the little bit of green grass, which suggested they had known what they were doing when they picked that spot.

Exline had kept watch until it was too dark to see. He had to hand it to whoever was in charge down there: Work happened briskly. They had totally emptied that boat of everything it contained by dark. Why, though? That was another perplexing question. Why had they emptied the boat? The way they had done it hadn’t looked like settling in to stay; it had looked more like people dragging their belongings out of a burning building, or carrying stuff that had gotten ruined out of a flooded house.

Way in the evening, getting on toward dark, Exline had seen two men, one of them the man who seemed to be in charge, go into the ship and come out an hour or so later carrying something. They stopped and spoke to another man and then carried whatever it was they had brought off around beyond the ship where Exline couldn’t see. He didn’t know if they returned that evening – they had not come back before it was too dark for him to see.

All the time Exline had watched, something about the man who seemed to be in charge was itching at him. He wasn’t close enough to see faces clearly, so it wasn’t the face he was recognizing, it was the way he carried himself. Wodema, they weren’t going anyplace anytime soon. He might have to slide in a little closer and see whether he could make an ID on