Zanele had been told to be careful, but caution was the last thing this town needed. The CSF was up to no good, and yet everyone was giving them a long leash. The mayor hadn't believed her. Mapula hadn't entirely believed her. Morgan seemed to believe her, but that wasn't worth much. This time, she was on her own. If she didn't expose the CSF for the backstabbers they were, no one would.
By now, the sun was completely gone. After sixty Earth-days of sunlight, the ground was still warm, but in a few months, the heat would be gone with the light. It was the perfect time for stealth. With a pair of cheap civilian night-vision goggles rendering the world in green-tinted low resolution, she stalked toward Old Ndashi's backyard, where the CSF had set up what they claimed was a surveyor, but which never produced any information that the CSF shared with anyone. The rest of the town had let it slide, but Zanele never let anything slide-- not until she knew the details.
One last time, she scanned her surroundings, seeing no one who might be with the CSF. She jogged over grassy soil, past crops that were due for harvest, up to Old Ndashi's porch. Leaning against the house to look inconspicuous, she looked at the surveyor, a little suite of computer equipment topped by a clear plastic dome housing a sensor array.
And the sensor array was facing the town, not the jungle.
Zanele scanned for CSF soldiers, then scanned again. She looked one more time, promising herself she'd go to the surveyor and do what she had come to do. A few seconds passed, and she was still standing there on the porch. Being brave had been much easier in front of Morgan than out here alone.
Finally, she acted on an impulse and took off running for the surveyor, circling around behind it in case it could detect heat signatures, then grabbed at the computer underneath until she found what she was looking for. She almost whooped with relief-- the device had a universal serial port. Hastily, she plugged in her transmitter, then sprinted off until she was far enough from the scanner that she no longer felt watched.
Her next stop, to her irritation, was all the way across town.
A few tiresome minutes later, she reached it. It was not Morgan's house or her own, nor did it belong to anyone she had known a year ago. It was a new shelter, hastily thrown up for the immigrants in a gesture of solidarity that never could have happened without the bandit clan invasions to unify the town. Even the goodwill of Bonde Wakulima, however, could do no better than to throw up a flimsy sprawl of shanties and then pray there wasn't a fire. So far, there hadn't been, but all the rope, cardboard and paper was begging for it.
Seeing her, the buck-toothed gunwoman at the door bristled, but then relaxed. "Oh, Zanele," she said. "Sorry, I didn't see you right. Come on in."
"Thank you," Zanele returned. "I'm looking for someone. Is there a Lelee here?"
"Lelee? From Sami's Dozen?"
Zanele nodded. "I'm told she's a hacker. Somehow."
"Oh, it's not weird. She was a city girl before she came here. Anyway, yeah, yeah, she's this way."
Behind the guard, Zanele ducked under the meter-and-a-half-high roof, around refugees huddled around battery-powered space heaters, past a stretched animal hide where a projector played a movie for a crowd of dozens. The guard motioned her to be silent as they stepped through a comfortable-looking nursery where infants slept bundled in blankets. In a shadowy corner, a woman with bright Indian skin lay on her stomach under a scratchy-looking sheet, tapping at a projected keyboard. The keys were almost too dim to see-- to save power, Zanele figured.
"Hey, Lelee," said the bucktoothed guard. "Got a visitor. Zanele. A friend of Sami.
Lelee perked like a meerkat. "Oh!" she squeaked, through a mouth that was several sizes too small for her eyes. "Oh, hello. Zanele, it's... it's good to meet you." She cocked her head. "What's wrong?"
