Another flash caught his eye. Turning around and looking up, he could see a hot spot of bluish light scribbling all over the mountainside as Piet wiggled the mirror around. He must know it was hopeless to hit Rufus, or any other fixed target, with anything more than the odd lucky flash. There’d be no Morse code transmissions on this channel. But a lucky flash carried a lot of information. Rufus found a patch of ground where he could lie flat on his belly without collecting hundreds of barbed spines in his flesh. He stacked a rock on another rock and used that to steady the barrel of his rifle, then pulled the dust covers off the ends of the scope. He peered through it, sweeping it this way and that across the area where he thought he had seen the flash. This took several minutes. But finally he saw a human figure walking alone across the alluvial flat, headed down off the mountain. As best as he could tell at this range, he was not headed toward the gun, but rather toward Bunkhouse. Which fit with Rufus’s general picture of how this was going to go: personnel herded into a pen, and forced to remain there, by drones. At this range he could not see drones in the objective lens of the scope, but he knew they must be shadowing Piet. Piet must have slipped the mirror out of his pocket and used it while he was taking a piss break or something.