Ryke's holiday lasted a grand total of 35 hours.

Just long enough for him to put the incident with the protestors out of his mind, and the squad seemed to have forgotten it too. No bickering, no fighting, just the usual good-natured wrestling and ribbing that followed the Hunter-Killers.

Outside the main pilot barracks in Stamm Basin, he lounged in the toasting evening sun, sipping at a canteen of lasher and grinning at the screen of the data slate. On it Ivy's smiling face loomed large, lying on her front on her bunk.

She looked tired, but satisfied, her brown hair hanging in a loose tangle about her face after the days exertions. In the background he could dimly make out the moving shapes of other expedition members in the makeshift sleeping quarters.

"So, you getting used to being out of the sun yet?" he asked.

"Don't think I'll ever get used to that," she chuckled. "It's cold and it's dark – Scraegans can keep it when we're done." Ivy leaned forward, peering at the screen. "Who's brewing while I'm gone?"

"I bought this batch in," Ryke answered, shaking the canteen in her field of view. "Scantlin tried this own a couple of weeks back and I thought I'd swallowed some reactor fluid."

"Everflowing, who let him near a bloody still?"

"Not guilty."

"Sorry I can't send any of mine. We're pretty tight for gear down here."

Ryke nodded ruefully. "How are things going down there?"

"We're making progress," she said, shrugging. "There's just a lot to get through here. You guys did a real number on this place."

"Yeah, sorry about that."

"Better than the alternative, Ryke."

"And how are the Scraegans treating you?"

"Well, I'm not gonna lie, it's pretty weird having them here," she admitted. "But we're making it work. Some of the gear they have – I wouldn't mind getting one back to the Forge for a proper tear up. I have no idea how that stuff works. But I think the real trouble's going to be trying to compare notes." Ivy ruffled a hand through her hair and dropped her chin up on her hands. "Can't believe I'm stuck in this hole for another month."

Ryke smiled. "You know I'll be waiting-,"

"Sarge!"

The urgent shout wrenched his attention away from the screen. He looked back over his shoulder at the entrance to the barracks and found Preese jogging towards him. An olive-skinned young man, his dark hair was sat in a series of short braids against his skull, his gaunt features set in an uneasy expression.

"Who's that?"

"Preese," Ryke murmured, glancing back at the screen. "Looking like somebody just drowned the world."

"Oh."

He gave her an apologetic look. "I better go."

"It's okay. I better get some sleep anyway." Ivy kissed her fingers and pressed them to the screen. "I'll speak to you soon. Love you."

"And I love you. Swim safe."

"You too, Ryke."

Then she was gone. The screen flicked to black just as Preese reached him. Bottling up his irritation, Ryke looked up at his second-in-command expectantly.

"Was that Ivy?"

"Yeah."

"Sorry, boss." Preese scuffed a foot awkwardly against the hard packed grit of the Stamm Basin training ground. "How's she doing?"

"She's managing." Ryke sighed, scooping up the data slate and swinging his legs off the bench. He stood up, fixing Preese with a pointed look. "Well?"

"Sorry," he repeated. "But they just put an urgent call through the base comms. They need you at command."

"Pissing Rivers, what for? I'm supposed to be on leave!"

Preese winced. "They didn't say. Just said it was high priority. Forge 1A Command Authority."

"Drown me." Ryke shook his head in frustration. He had no idea what could possibly be so urgent, but it wasn't as though he could say 'no' and carry on. Taking a small act of defiance, he took a final gulp of shiner and thrust the metal canteen into Preese's hands. "You might as well enjoy yourself while you can then. Odds are if they're calling me know, the squad's not going to be far behind. Make sure everyone's prepped for a quick deployment, just in case."

Preese saluted. "Will do, sir."

And just like that, his period of well-earned rest was over.

He stomped grimly across the concourse of Stamm Basin, following the precisely painted pathways through the constant flow of military deployment. Flights of knife-hulled Scout skiffs zipped past him, moving between the chugging columns of militia jeeps and clanking columns of Hunter-Killers. It was never truly quiet here – always filled with the crash and clang of repair work, the growl of reactors and the thunder of drills on the wide-ranging training fields.

Stamm Basin was the engine of Brekka's war machine.

The command building was a stacked fortress of dark metal and stone, studded with gun emplacements and with a constant guard patrol of heavily armoured soldiers. Seeing his Hunter-Killer jacket they didn't stop him when he approached the entrance, and in the main lobby he found a young woman in a crisply pressed blue adjutant's uniform waiting for him.

"Sergeant Vannigan?" she said with a prim salute.

He returned the salute, trying not to let his irritation show. "Yeah. What's this all about?"

"Please follow me. You'll be fully briefed on the situation shortly."

Ryke bristled, but did as she asked, falling into step with her as she set off through the halls of the command building. Soldiers, technicians and analysts bustled back and forth, ignoring anyone and anything that wasn't a part of their current assignment.

The adjutant let him up through three levels, passed analysis and planning rooms, tech workshops, mapping suites, R&D offices and a lot of locked doors he could only guess at. Eventually they reached a plain armoured slab that protected one of the dozens of briefing rooms scattered throughout the building, this one sequestered away from the main hubbub. He only saw a handful of officers and a couple of Blackwater specialists pass them before his guide keyed in a passcode to the door control.

It slid open, and Ryke's foul mood abated somewhat at the sight of a familiar face.

Kaydie Brackenshaw turned to face him, and her scarred face split into a grin. Whatever was going on, he was glad to know that he'd have Brackenshaw working alongside him. An officer in the Scout Cadre, she'd been on several joint operations with him – a veteran soldier that he trusted implicitly.

"Well, well, look what the currents washed up," she said, saluting. "Good to see you, Vannigan."

"It's good to see you, too." Ryke snapped smartly to attention, a mischievous smile on his face. "Lieutenant Brackenshaw."

"Everflowing, knock that off." Brackenshaw gave him a playful, but solid punch on the arm.

He sucked in a sharp breath, laughed, then slammed his palm into hers, pulling her into a firm embrace. "Swimming safe, I hope."

"I was, until about two days ago." They stepped apart and he found her face had lost a lot of its levity. She gestured to the table. "Take a seat, Vannigan. We've got a lot to talk about."

With unease crawling back under his skin, Ryke did as he was bidden, lowering himself into one of the chairs at the oblong table. As he sat, he quickly took in the remaining occupants of the room, and it didn't make him feel any better.

Colonel Vandeleen Hackley sat at the far end of the table, the senior commander of Brekka's scout troops, and she didn't look very happy. She was built like a coil of wound steel, with a bun of short brown hutting out from beneath her crimson beret. Her rough features bore numerous scars, culminating in the oblong plate of metal over the space where her left eye ought to have been.

Next to her was a Scout Captain named Prentice and skeletal older man in the uniform of the Blackwaters that he'd never seen before. The final member of their little gathering wore the deep gore-red uniform of Brekka's Commissariat representatives: a portly man with dark skin and a greying goatee around his small mouth. Ryke dimly recognised him – Commissariat Minister Khazwari.

"Sorry to cut your leave short, Sergeant," Colonel Hackley said, and she at least sounded like she meant it. "But this couldn't wait. And it needs you, specifically."

Ryke spread his hands. "Well, here I am. What happened? We just finished stamping out the Crawler nests in the Western Reach. My people are exhausted – they need a proper rest before we redeploy-"

"Sergeant," Hackley snapped. "I'm well aware of all recent operations. Now contain yourself and listen." As he subsided into a bitter silence, she turned to Brackenshaw. "Lieutenant?"

"Ma'am." Brackenshaw loped around to the front of the room where a display screen loomed on the far wall. She scooped up its control and thumbed the activation switch, bringing up an image of Rychter's badlands. Ryke straightened in his seat, examining the image. He could see the distinctive light pinpricks of distant furnace-cannon fire, even from the range in this still.

"Two days ago," Brackenshaw said. "My battle group were on patrol at Coaler's Basin. During that patrol, we were engaged by a Scraegan war pack."

Ryke felt his stomach lurch. "Engaged?"

"Afraid so, Vannigan. They just opened up on us when we got close."

"What in the Everflowing for?! We've been running joint ops with them for months now! What happened?"

"Drowned if I know." Brackenshaw shrugged. "Now, I managed to pull my people out without casualties, so we didn't end up in an all out shooting match, but we were very, very lucky. This is going to happen again, and next time we won't get out so clean. And if we start skirmishing with them in contested regions then this whole thing is going to fall apart all over again."

"What's at Coaler's Basin? Why would they pick a fight there?"

Captain Prentice made a vague gesture to the image with one hand. "Coaler's has been a contested area for years. There's no clear border that we can really mark. But that doesn't explain anything – your last op was deep in what's been considered Scraegan territory for more than a decade. Clearly they are willing to allow our troops passage if we're working with them."

"We can't be sure why they attacked," the Blackwater agent interjected. His voice was coarse from years of badlands air, and he evidently didn't feel the need to introduce himself. "There are several theories, and to be frank, there is still a lot we don't know about the Scraegans. It's possible that Lieutenant Brackenshaw's patrol got too close to something they're still not ready to share with us.

Maybe there are warrens out there that we haven't marked out and they believed they were defending their homes. Our communication is with the Scraegan commanders is still rudimentary, at best, so they may not have understood why an armed human column drew so close. However, there are other explanations not so innocent." He inclined his head to Ryke. "I understand you had a run in with some of our protestors recently."

"The ones still spoiling for a fight?" Ryke nodded. "Yeah, what about them?"

"Sergeant Vannigan," Minister Khazwari put in. "If we have factions who still want war with the Scraegans, I believe it would stand to reason that they may have the same problems. We've viewed the Scraegans for a long time as a single unified force. When they were fighting against both us and the Crawlers that might have been true. Perhaps by eliminating one threat we've unwittingly created another."

"So we're talking about factions," Ryke said. "So what, Scraegan civil war?"

"We can't say for sure," Hackley admitted. "We just don't know enough about their society to really know the allegiances of particular warbands. What I do know is that the last thing we need is to go back into a full blown war with the Scraegans all over again. In a practical sense, we're still rearming and refitting almost a third of our standing forces after the last campaign. But more importantly, if there's a chance we can actually keep this peace, we have to do it."

"I have to warn you all," Khazwari put in. "That the mood in the Commissariat is far from unified, and that mood is reflected in the city. A lot of people are not ready to forgive and forget, and I can hardly say that I blame them. The situation is... volatile. I worry about what some of the agitators might do if the military continues to cooperate with the Scraegans. If word of this gets out, things will just get worse."

Ryke rubbed his eyes with both hands, and let out a heavy sigh. Everflowing, he was tired. If they could have given him a week – even a few days he might have felt ready to hurl himself into the teeth of the next crisis, but right now he just felt angry, petulant about the unfairness of it all.

But eventually, as he sat there, the discipline drilled into him through his Hunter-Killer training reasserted itself. He looked up at Brackenshaw, cracked a thin smile, then nodded to the others.

"So what do you need from me?"

"You've got more experience than anyone dealing with the Scraegans face to face," Hackley told him, her voice heavy with regret. "And I'm sorry to say, that makes you the best candidate for our next step. We're sending a fresh delegation to meet with the Scraegan Alpha who appears to be in nominal command of the Scraegan warpacks. We need to understand – we need to know if these Scraegans are just a gang of rogues, or if they're getting ready to kick off another war."

"Talk about the short straw," Ryke chuckled bleakly, knowing there was no universe where he could refuse such an order. Straightening in his seat, he saluted. "Alright, ma'am. Just tell me where and when."