"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."