The one wherein some things change, whilst others stay the same. Or maybe not.

Admiral Leitner and the 12th Air Cav have pulled back from Shadow. It happened quietly, days ago now, but I'd known it was coming. It was inevitable. They'd managed to keep Elindor in good condition since the war with loving hands, rather than yard maintenance. She was a fine ship, but no match for the four Cruisers that had been ordered to head to Shadow.

The Admiral did the only thing he could reasonably be expected to do: fall back. The orders to the Cruisers Copernicus, Magellan, Arc Royal, and Jeanne d'Arc, for redeployment to the vicinity of the Murphy protostar in the Georgia system, was in the clear. Leitner's crew had to intercept it. Strong tactics and a skilled crew could have stood against one of those Cruisers and won the day. Against two? It would have taken a Master tactician and a crew willing to fight against overwhelming odds to work a miracle. Against four?

Leitner was a smart man. He believed in the dream of independence, and was no martyr. More important, he wouldn't throw away the lives of the men and women who served under him in a lost cause. The Alliance didn't even need to actually send the four big cruisers to Shadow. The threat was enough for the Independents to fall back to a more tenable position.

Where would they go? I didn't know. At a guess, they'd hide the squadron in the Oroborus. Qing Long was the least populated star of the five in the 34 Tauri system, and if anywhere was safe from Alliance intrusion it would be there. In any case, I had to wish them luck and admire the gāo it had taken to do it in the first place.

Of more immediate concern was the situation here on Hale's Moon. My Mei Mei was still out there, alone on that Reaver boat. Not scared. Lily didn't really know Fear. She was so much like the Kender of those old stories from Earth that Was. Childlike and fearless. A ray of sunshine in an often dark world. But I still wanted her home.

Over the last couple days, there had been reports of lone mechanicals skulking around town. Sobi says he'd shooed one off the skylight at Fook's. Jai and Reese reported they'd engaged one as well, but there was some confusion as to who opened fire first. Other townsfolk had reported seeing various models moving around the edge of town, out near the mines, or out on the pads. Including a small flier. But with one exception, they hadn't engaged.

Scouts?

Was Mother Bot scouting for an upcoming attack? it would make sense. With the exception of the swarm of KM Series knock-offs, or the occasional Wasp attacks, all the larger more sophisticated machines had attacked in what would classically be considered a Recon in Force mode. Engaging the opponent to test their defenses, rather than just sneaking around to take a look.

This was different. Much more of a reserved approach. But why? Aurora had as much as said this was coming: that Mother Bot was ready to strike. The seventeen. Seventeen what wasn't clear. At least a few seeders in the mix, but the rest? If they were heavy Anthro machines like that partially downchecked unit Nack had secured on Blackburne, we would have some real trouble. Fast, heavily armed and even more heavily armored, a platoon of those things would probably be more than our militia could take.

Regardless, I'd already started to make preparations. Sabrina had the updated intel and comms patterns we'd managed to identify for the machines here, so there was a chance the virus she'd concocted for the machine on Blackburne would work here. No guarantee, but it would be worth a shot. Plus the crowbar. I'd had several of them tucked away for months, cold and idle. Regular surreptitious checks had all come away clean. If anyone even knew about them, they had't tampered with them that I could tell.

I had to hope so, anyway. They were a weapon of last resort: a way to dig out a deeply buried factory machine through a couple kilometers of lunar crust. If the first one didn't get deep enough, there was a very high probability I could put a second one down the same trajectory and reach even deeper. But would it be enough?

I didn't know. Aurora had said we couldn't act against them until they started to act against us. I knew what she meant. We didn't know enough to accurately target a crowbar, or get a vector back for a virus. Once they started to move against us, we'd have the intel we needed to move against them.

I just had to hope there was only one.