"Oh, you are certainly my better in such matters" Lemrae rejoins smoothly, smiling. "But only one of us was willing to climb."

Dropping the levity, he nods at Tamett. "Yes. There was a fork in the road a few minutes behind us; let's get away from the telegraph line as quickly as possible."

On this short section of line between the two stations, the logs record an immediate drop in the resistivity that matches up with the timing of the shot, to within the ten-second spacing between measurements. It's not all the way back to normal, but about halfway there. 

Tamett reads his notes aloud.

"- locusts clinging to the wires, on top or below like birds and bats, for miles on end... Lemrae fired the shot, almost unbalanced, striking several of the locusts on the line, causing them to fall dead. The others rose up into the air at once in a swarm, none undisturbed in sight, and swiftly dispersed, vanishing into the air."

Serna spreads out a telegraph map and traces the line with his fingertip. "Between stations 16 and 19 it's about ten miles, a short hop. With the resistance drop, would you reckon your shot scared off every bug along a five-mile stretch, sir?"

Lemrae looks abstractly at the map, calculating. "Perhaps. Perhaps a bit more. I don't know how many were on the wire, but it seems to me that doubling the number of bugs wouldn't quite double the resistance. If there's only a single locust on the wire, it seems to me it should eat more than if it's sucking on the same wire as thousands of others."

He shrugs. "Call it five miles, then. A few minutes' stop to load and fire every five miles... Depending on how long before the locusts come back, it would probably be worth it to the Partnership to hire a couple of riders to clear a wire and let messages be sent again."

"Do you think they'll - well, first, will they accept that as a solution, and second will they not have lots of questions about how and why it works?"

Lemrae looks a little embarrassed. "Well, I was thinking we could answer their questions with, ah... lies."

That gets an undignified snort out of Witred.

"...We should probably figure out which lies to use first."

"You could call it percussive maintenance, maybe. Say a sharp shock fixes the problem, like it does lots of misbehaving electronics, and shooting the gun along the wire is the best way to do it."

Tamett hesitates. "But then you might get frustrated technicians hitting the wire with hammers instead if they can't wait for a rider, and maybe getting savaged by a swarm they can't see. Or scientists trying to replicate it in a lab."

Lemrae is a little surprised that everyone accepts the deception matter-of-factly; but there isn't really another option. Making public information about the wire locusts would, at minimum, endanger every chronicler who reads the news. Pretending they'd discovered nothing would also be a lie -- and eventually would get their funding cut. Lying, it seems, is the only option.

"I'm thinking about the magnetic storm hypothesis. We can describe it, and then say that very fast-moving metal near the wire seems to temporarily clear the disruption. I can make some suitably speculative mathematics about creating eddies around the wire, little patches of calm. And we'll repeatedly emphasize that although we've found a solution, we don't understand everything about how it works." Lemrae smiles ruefully. "That part, at least, is true enough."

Tamett sighs. "I suppose nobody else seems to have found a way to reproduce and study the phenomenon, so we're probably safe." The idea of fake mathematics seems to upset him more than the broader lie.

"If you'll be needing some people to ride along the wires and shoot at the bugs, there's some names I could suggest. Lots of veterans out of work since the war who wouldn't mind a reason to get back in the saddle."

Lemrae nods at her. "That sounds excellent. And..." he trails off, thinking. "We want the sort of people who we trust to come to us if something odd happens, rather than immediately telling the company or the papers."

"Why would they do that? Invisible insects are odd, but hardly a secret worth a fortune."

She considers for a moment. "They wouldn't need to be loyal, either, we could get by with the kinds of people who nobody else would listen to. There's some old soldiers with wild shell-shock tales, nobody listened to those."

"Then again, if you were to get a cadre of mounted gunners personally loyal to you, there's plenty of other uses for that kind of private army," Witred adds, only half-joking. 

Lemrae nods. "Point taken. No need to screen for discretion, just... the ignored. Seen, heard, but not noticed."

Witred's joke unnerves him, but he doesn't say anything. He's used to those sorts of comments from her, and all of them (or at least Lemrae and Tamett) are feeling a little bit uncomfortable about their planned deception. Nervous jokes are understandable, though Witred would bite his head off if he implied she might be nervous.

On a drizzling overcast morning few days later, Lemrae arrives to find there is a horseless carriage parked on the road at the edge of the lab's land. A woman in servant's livery sits behind the steering levers, a waxed-paper umbrella propped up to shield the pages of the pulp she's reading. 

The carriage is, of course, exquisitely made. As Lemrae approaches curiously, he sees the elaborate carvings on the wooden panels, the embroidered seats. A curl of smoke rises from the funnel, and as Lemrae walks up to the driver, a valve automatically releases a small puff of steam.

"Excuse me." He gives her a few seconds to finish her sentence. "I wasn't expecting to have company today. May I ask who is visiting?"

The servant reflexively flips the book closed and tucks it away behind her before he can glimpse the cover.

She blinks at him owlishly, then her confusion fades. "Oh, you're the telegram-master. My mistress and her friend have come to visit Lord Vero."

Rummaging through the pockets of her riding skirt, the maid retrieves a couple of calling-cards. 'Baron Briele' and 'Lady Ulsi' are the visitors, apparently. The latter name is a familiar one: Vero's distant cousin. 

"It's not a problem if I keep the engine warm, is it? They said you were doing experiments." From the way she says the last word, it sounds like she's expecting something from the pulps to be lurking inside the farmhouse. 

Lemrae looks at the calling-cards with anxiety. He knows that there's a certain way you're supposed to take them, and a certain way you're supposed to respond -- but he doesn't know what it is. He's pretty sure you're also supposed to give your own card... and he doesn't have one. 

"Thank you." he says, wondering whether he's supposed to take the cards with one hand or both. He settles for one, and not wanting to risk folding them in a pocket, just lets his hand drop to his side as he holds them.

"No problem at all. Although the experiments aren't the sort of thing you'll need to run away from in a hurry... probably." Lemrae smiles. He should go and welcome Vero's friends at some point, but Vero never told him they were coming, so he hardly needs to do it right away.

"I've never seen a carriage like this up close." Lemrae's eyes run over the boiler sitting in front of the cab. Its length runs perpendicular to the direction of travel, instead of parallel like on a train. The funnel is off to the side, so that smoke doesn't bother the passengers. "How hard is it, to operate a steam engine?"

If he has made a misstep of etiquette somewhere, the chauffeuse doesn't seem to care.

"Once you have it running it's not too bad, all the trouble is in the planning ahead to make sure there's a supply of fuel at each rest stop to keep it topped up. Or if you mean in terms of driving it, it's not like horses where you can just nudge them with your knees to keep on track, you've got to use some force to get the wheel turning and adjust the speed and if it rolls into a ditch you've got nobody to blame but yourself. Milady likes riding in it, but I can't see them catching on myself."

Lemrae looks at the "wheel". It's about sixty centimetres in diameter, sitting horizontally in the centre of the carriage. A pair of handles would let her rotate it with either one hand or two.

"Interesting. Certainly seems more involved than a horse, but a larger one would probably be easier to maintain than eight horses. Perhaps it will find its niche in larger carriages."

He looks towards the house. "I really should go exchange introductions with Vero's friends. What's your name, by the way?"

"Olessi, good sir." 

"Lemrae. Pleased to have met you." Lemrae sets off towards the farmhouse. He hadn't heard anything about Vero having these people over, but as long as everything's safe it shouldn't be a problem.

"- a remarkable specimen!" Booms one of the guests, presumably the baron, his bass voice carrying as Lemrae approaches.