The Indowy she passed on the way were all people she recognized by name. Even after so long, they still traveled the corridors in pairs or triads where possible. She had been told it helped to cut the risk of agoraphobia.There had been initial talk about establishing breeding groups in the Base, but for some Indowy reason no one had explained to her it hadn’t happened. Maybe it still would. She didn’t know and for some reason had always felt it would be rude to ask. Instead, once or twice a year when a Himmit scout ship came through another one of Aelool’s people would come inside, or two or three from Clan Beilil.

The other operatives had, in a way, had more time to adjust to the change. Since she had been home with the girls, not on base, for most of the past seven years, it always hit her as a shock to see the emptiness of Earth’s central Bane Sidhe base since the split. It was very hard not to take that split personally, as centrally located in the whole mess as she had been.

First, her decision to kill the traitorous Colonel Petane, who had been partly responsible for the death of a Bane Sidhe team that had saved her life. The assassination had not only been without orders, but she’d done it after the leadership of the Bane Sidhe, the entire Bane Sidhe, had gone to considerable lengths to make her and Granpa think he was already dead. They had considered him an intelligence asset, and never revisited that decision after he turned out to be basically worthless. In retrospect, she agreed he was not only a fucking traitor, but a harmless schmuck. It wouldn’t really have hurt anything to leave him alive. At the time, however, she had been truly livid at the deception that had deprived her, and Granpa, of giving their input to the decision.

That was the moment when the building tensions in the Indowy about how to relate to humanity, or whether they even wanted to relate to a species of carnivores that could and did kill other sophonts, finally started to come to a head.