Page 7 of Warrior’s Mate

"I'm adapting to new evidence."

"A rare civilian skill."

"Careful. You almost earned half a sweet roll."

His mouth shifted. Not quite a smile. She was beginning to recognize the signs. That annoyed her more than it should have.

Maelis reached for the second tablet. "What's this?"

"Communications anomalies."

The humor left the room as he keyed in a sequence.

A traffic graph appeared, showing local transmission failures across several agricultural districts—not complete outages, but delays, rejected handshakes, and messages arriving long after their routing stamps.

"My convoys?"

"Part of it."

"You said off-world congestion."

"I said probably."

"You were wrong."

"I noticed."

There was no defensiveness in the answer, and Maelis looked at him again with reluctant interest. She had spent enough years dealing with institutional people to know how uncommon it was for someone with authority to admit an error without first explaining why it had not really been an error.

"What's causing it?"

"I don't know yet. Local relays are clean. Regional relays report normal throughput."

"But messages aren't arriving normally."

"Correct."

She pulled the graph toward herself.

"Show me source districts."

Kaiven did. Maelis studied the pattern.

Wasaytu, Teralin, and North Vey formed a line of small communities along the western irrigation basin, with a livestock collective farther south.

At first the pattern looked random. Then the distribution resolved in her mind, not as communications traffic but as the geography of production.

"These aren't communication centers."

"No."

"They're production zones."

Kaiven's gaze sharpened. "Explain." She brought up the agricultural network beside his traffic graph.

"Grain, medicinal roots, orchard produce, livestock feed, water-processing compounds. The delays are hitting districts that feed other districts."

"Coincidence?"