It was more evidence supporting the answer he already had.

"Of course" Marn murmured as he redirected the probe west.

The little unit followed the remains of the irrigation trench toward the settlement, where its view became worse almost immediately. Rubble interrupted line of sight, surviving walls created sensor shadows and residual energy noise made passive collection unreliable. The probe showed almost nothing behind the first ruined wall, but Marn kept watching anyway. Sensors reported what they could detect. They did not report what someone had successfully hidden.

He left the probe working west while moving farther south along the ridge. Once he reached another patch of cover, Marn fixed one of his passive beacons low against a rock face where it could continue watching the northern approach. Between the beacon, the probe and his own position, he could keep more than one possibility alive.

The western probe eventually found a partial footprint near structure four, a window that might have been broken recently and a brief thermal return that disappeared before it could classify it. There was considerably less evidence there than on the ridge, and after another pass Marn recalled the drone.

It returned along the same low route and settled into his hand. Marn powered it down and returned it to his harness while considering what it had actually given him. The probe had gathered information, but gathering information and deciding what that information meant were two different jobs. The second one still belonged to him.

Over the next twelve minutes the northern ridge continued accumulating evidence while the western settlement offered scraps by comparison. From a planning perspective, north was superior in almost every way. Better line of sight, better concealment, better withdrawal. If Marn had been writing the report at that moment, he would have classified it as the most probable hostile engagement area with high confidence.

That phrase caught him off guard.

High confidence had once meant something very different.

The enemy had been expected to withdraw east that day. The terrain supported it, their previous behavior supported it and every useful route supported it. Marn had said so, and nobody had disagreed because there had been no reason to disagree.

They went west anyway.

Not because west was better or because Marn had missed some brilliant deception. The man commanding them had panicked and chosen the worse route simply because people occasionally made bad decisions. Marn's assessment hadn't allowed for it because there had been no rational reason for anyone to do what the enemy had done.

People had still died.

He had spent a long time afterward looking for the piece he'd missed because finding one would have been easier than accepting there hadn't been one. A flaw could be corrected. The harder lesson was that sometimes the reasoning was sound and the person on the other side simply refused to behave sensibly.

Marn looked toward the northern ridge again. "The northern approach is the correct position" he said quietly. "Which is why I'm not convinced they're there."

He shifted his attention west. The settlement restricted visibility, withdrawal would be slower and the irrigation trench offered only partial protection. A disciplined force should not choose it over the northern ridge, but the briefing had only said the enemy historically favored certain tactics. It hadn't promised the people in this valley would use them.

Maybe they valued concealment more than withdrawal. Maybe they expected Blackwatch to identify the northern ridge for exactly the same reasons Marn had.

Or maybe their commander simply wasn't very good.

People always wanted the clever explanation. Sometimes somebody was just bad at their job.

Marn attached the compact optical sensor to the recon probe and sent it down toward the western settlement. The drone placed the unit behind a broken section of masonry and withdrew, giving him a second view into structure four and the irrigation trench.

For almost two minutes the feed showed nothing. Then a patch of shadow beside the trench changed.

Marn replayed the previous few seconds and caught it on the second pass. A strip of fabric had moved in the opposite direction from the surrounding brush.

Camouflage.

"Better" he said.

The sensor hadn't identified anything for him. It had simply given him the view. Marn sent the probe west again from another angle, and this time a weak power fluctuation appeared inside structure four before another followed deeper in the settlement.

Once he knew where to look, the rest came slowly. A sensor shadow behind the southern wall, disturbed dust in a doorway and something metallic reflecting for half a second from the upper floor gave him at least four personnel, probably more.

It was still a terrible ambush position, but that didn't make it empty.

Marn touched the communications control on his wrist. "Prophet to Bulwark Actual."