Oblivious to the swathe his influence had cut through the ranks of senior officers within the Pale, Hector continued walking throughout the first night. Making his own observations about the landscape, he wondered about Tad, and reckoned that there was little chance the humachine still lived. After all, he had been sent Outside with no food and no fuel, no weapons and no means of returning to shelter. That was surely a plan designed to dispatch him as quickly as possible. If ferals didn’t attack him—and, Hector knew, an unarmed humachine would be relatively easy prey for some of the larger ferals—then he would die of starvation. Tad had much more hardware than Hector, and needed more in the way of fuel, biofuel that just wasn’t available Outside. Although he kept following the tracks, Hect
