After a minute of sizing them up, the older Digger stomped forward a couple of paces and spoke in the pre-Zero English that all Spacers knew from the Epic: “Cowards who ran away, you are trespassing on a world that is no longer yours to call home. Begone.”
“This is going well,” Ty remarked to Doc.
“He is putting on a show of strength for the others,” Doc said. “Best let him. If you would, please?”
He issued a command that caused his grabb’s legs to fold, bringing it as low to the ground as it could go, and extended a hand. Ty took his arm and steadied him as he stepped off the robot and found footing on the ground. He planted the stick with his other hand, then cautiously let go of Ty. Then he advanced a step. All of these actions produced murmurs among the Diggers. Perhaps they had seen Doc initially as some kind of cyborg, but now understood that he was just a very old man. He walked several paces until he found a flat spot that suited him, then planted the stick.
“I may look five thousand years old,” he began, “but I am in truth a mere descendant of those you style cowards. Though I daresay you would take a more charitable view if you knew of the deeds that they performed during their long exodus. Do I have the honor of addressing one whose ancestor was Rufus MacQuarie?”
“We are all of that lineage,” the old man boomed.
“Then I think I have something that belongs to you,” Doc said. Moving deliberately, he pulled the stick out of its purchase on the ground and hefted it up until it lay horizontally across both of his outstretched palms. “Please accept my apologies for having borrowed it without your remit.”
Had the Spacers been able to watch all of the Diggers’ reactions at once, it would have yielded a bonanza of intelligence about the workings of their minds and of their society. That degree of mind reading was, in general, the sort of task assigned to Julians, so it could be assumed that Ariane’s moiling brain and avid senses were running full blast.
The young males seemed divided between a more vindictive group who wanted the stick of Srap Tasmaner confiscated immediately, and others of a more chivalrous turn of mind.
The group at large comprised a minority who were indignant about Doc’s expropriation of their shovel handle, but—more significantly—a majority who felt ashamed at the idea that they would take away an old man’s walking stick.
What those two groups had in common was that they took what Doc had said at face value. A smaller inner circle—the old man, the younger leader, and a woman of intermediate age who had stepped forward to confer with them—had the wit to understand that Doc was playing to the crowd, and not actually trying to initiate a conversation about the ownership of a piece of wood.
In other words, the Diggers were, as a whole, reacting much as any other group of humans might have done. Which was interesting and important data in and of itself, since much might have changed during five thousand years in the mines.
The discussion among the three leaders went on at some length and led eventually to an epidemic of head nodding. The old man squared off, sticks planted, his face set in judgment. The younger man and the middle-aged woman advanced toward Ty and Doc respectively. The man came to a halt two paces away from Ty, just out of the range where shaking hands or fisticuffs might become plausible. The woman kept on coming and took the stick out of Doc’s outstretched hands. This touched off a wave of fascinated reactions among the Diggers watching at a distance.
In a quiet but clear voice, the woman said, “Old man, you have shamed us with your words and obliged us to answer in kind. No hand shall be laid on you by virtue of your age.”
She stepped forward past Doc, sliding her hands together at the blunt end of the shovel handle, and began to whirl it around. Then with a decisive lunge forward she brought it down on the side of Memmie’s head.
Memmie collapsed to her knees and then to all fours, her head—already dribbling blood—sagging almost to the ground, exposing the back of the neck. And that was where the woman drove the sharp end of the stick, ramming it in several inches deep, well into the center of the thorax where it would strike lung or heart or both. Remembrance did not topple but rather deflated, settling gradually to a fetal position on the ground.
The younger man meanwhile launched himself at Ty. It was not clear whether his intention was to inflict damage or merely to restrain him while Remembrance was sacrificed. In any case his foot dislodged a stone as he made his move, creating a sound that gave Ty a bit of warning. He was able to turn so that the attacker rolled around him rather than striking him dead-on. The Digger’s downhill movement became a disadvantage, overbalancing him. Hooking the man’s ankle and kicking upward, Ty made him fall hard on his face. Both of his feet were projecting up in the air, soles of his moccasins exposed to the sky. Ty hooked a leg through the crook of a knee and then dropped his weight, bending the foot forward; the man’s heel would have gone all the way to his buttock had Ty’s lower leg not been interposed behind the back of his thigh and his upper calf muscle, where it threatened to rip the man’s knee apart. The man scrabbled at the ground and so Ty put more weight on it, the stink of the old moccasin in his nostrils, and felt a preliminary pop inside of the joint. The man screamed and stopped struggling.
All of this happened in the same moments as the woman was killing Remembrance, and so Ty did not really take that in until he had placed the man fully under his control. He was just drawing focus on Memmie and understanding how bad it was when he saw a movement in his peripheral vision and looked over to see Doc telescoping to a seated position on the ground. He had turned around and witnessed the attack on Memmie.
“I want evac. I want evac,” Ariane was saying. Ty had no idea to whom she was talking.
Strange high whistling noises came from the sky. Ty looked up and saw a flight of arrows arcing over his head. They passed as well over the heads of Ariane, Kath Two, and Einstein and thunked into the ground or skittered on the rocks at the feet of Beled and Bard, who had been advancing until then.
The woman with the stick had been in a sort of trance, but now drew focus on Ty and saw how it had gone with him and the younger man. Rage flashed over her face. She aimed the sharp bloody end of the stick at Ty and began to run at him.
Ty heaved his full weight onto the younger man’s foot and snapped his leg. Then he stood up, getting clear of the screaming and flailing Digger. He had come up with a rock in his hand, which he flung at the woman’s face. His aim was off, but still it forced her to falter and dodge, and gave him time to snatch up two more and advance one pace. Two more rocks, one of which struck home on her collarbone, and two more paces. On her back heel she aimed a thrust at him, but she telegraphed it and he parried it easily with his left forearm, snaking the full length of his arm around the shaft so that its bloody tip was trapped against his body. He reached out with his free hand, poked her in the eye with his thumb, grabbed her ear, and wrenched her away from the stick like a discarded wrapper. The older man was coming at him with his sticks a-flailing in both hands, and more formidably, several of the young warrior types were running with lances leveled. Ty walked straight at the old man, knocking his sticks away with controlled strokes of the shovel handle, spun him around so that the man’s back was against his chest, brought the handle up across the man’s throat, and locked it in place, crooked in his elbow, his hand pressing against the back of the man’s bald head. He then began dragging the man backward and downhill toward the remainder of the Seven. For this human shield might work to protect Ty’s front, but the boys with the lances were already moving to circle around behind him, and he had to hope that the others would protect his rear.
One of the equipment boxes up by the glider now seemed to explode. But it was a strange sort of explosion with no flame, and little sound. Rather, the crate seemed to dissociate into a dense, gritty cloud, which became translucent as it spread. A moment later the same thing occurred with a second crate nearby. Both crates ended up lying on their sides, empty.
The Diggers in the vicinity of the glider were all exclaiming in surprise, or just plain screaming. The nature of what was happening was not clear, even to Ty. It was enough to put the lancers into a more cautious frame of mind, as it gave rise to fears that they were being attacked from behind. Their advance faltered and they looked to see what was the matter.
A thin gray layer was skimming over the ground, headed downhill toward them. It looked a little like a spent wave as it washes and foams over a flat beach just before settling into the sand, parting around rocks and recombining in their lee. More like an avalanche, though, in that it gathered speed as it came on. As it rushed past Ty and the old man, parting around their feet, he was able to focus and resolve it as a swarm of ambots of two different types—one type from each of the crates that had emptied themselves. They were all mixed together. Once they chittered past Einstein, Ariane, and Kath Two, they spread out across the flat open slope separating them from Beled and Bard. Those two were split out to the sides, just beyond arrow range. The swarm then forked as all the ambots of one type converged on Beled and all those of the other type made for Bard. The former group—the Blue-pattern ambots—were smaller, leggier, and quicker on broken ground. That swarm gathered itself together into a clicking, glittering, hissing firehose stream and leaped from the ground at Beled. Rather than striking him, though, it washed around him. In the interval of a few moments he was clothed from head to toe in an armor made of overlapping scales, each scale being the beetle-like back of an ambot. They had swarmed over him and locked themselves together. A few strays clambered over the others’ backs seeking, and plugging, holes.
Langobard’s swarm was a little longer in reaching him. During the final fifty meters or so it became ropy as it passed through a kind of phase transition. Where possible, ambots were copulating, jacking the couplers on their snouts into matching ones in the tails of those ahead of them, forming pairs, then strings of three and four that combined with others, so that by the time the swarm came close to its master it had converged into half a dozen long, whippy ropes, and as many shorter segments. These ambots were basically flynks, more at home flying than crawling. They had some limited ability to fly solo, but were much happier when combined into aerial trains. During their career down the slope they’d picked up a decent amount of energy just by losing altitude, and so in the last few meters they were able to rear up off the ground like cobras and leap into the air, shooting past Langobard but banking into tight turns behind him, curving round, nose seeking tail, until they had formed aitrains: closed loops, fully airborne, flying endless circles around his body, defeating gravity with the modest amount of lift provided by their stubby winglets. He gave them greater speed by the simple expedient of pawing at them from time to time, but they also drew energy from a field being generated by a power plant on his back. Perhaps a third of the flynks had failed to find their way into chains sufficiently long to form aitrains, and so a few shorter segments found his ankles and spiraled up his legs, like snakes climbing trees. There were also some singletons who had not been able to join even a short chain; these found their way to him and climbed as high as they could, competing noisily for perching space on his shoulders. As Bard now moved across space he looked like a combination of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, inscribed within a system of circles, and early depictions of the atom, surrounded by an array of circular orbitals. Each aitrain sang a different note as its flynks sawed through the air, the pitch rising as it absorbed energy and built velocity. He and Beled were moving to join forces, both edging closer to the Diggers as their defenses came online. A single exploratory shaft, fired at a high arc by the foremost of the archers, plunged toward Langobard, but was casually flicked out of the way by a momentary deflection of an aitrain.
It was nothing Ty hadn’t seen before, but it was nonetheless distracting. Forcing himself to attend to things nearer and more pressing, he saw that a warrior had advanced to Doc, who was lying on his side struggling feebly, and raised his lance as if to strike him dead with a single downward thrust. But he had paused. Perhaps he only intended to create a threat. Perhaps he was gobsmacked by what had just happened with the ambot swarms.
Ty was dragging the old Digger back toward Ariane and Kath Two and Einstein, who had prudently flattened themselves behind a brow in the slope that afforded some minimal protection against direct arrow shots—though none against plunging shafts. The next time he turned around to look downhill, Bard and Beled had vanished, and the only clue as to where they had concealed themselves came from the movements of a few straggler ambots striving to catch up with them. Part of him felt let down that they had not advanced in force and simply destroyed the Diggers. A better part of him understood that they were too smart and too professional for that; they would find cover, hang back, observe, and wait for cooler heads to prevail.
Ariane was darting back down the hill. She picked up Ty’s katapult from the rock where he had set it down. Good.
Excited sentries, posted up in the rocks that flanked the valley, were hollering news of Bard’s and Beled’s movements in the Diggers’ oddly biblical phrasings. It sounded as though the Teklan and the Neoander were moving rapidly to high ground.
One of the sentries blurted out a sharp cry and went silent. This distracted all the other Diggers for a few moments.
Ariane ran uphill a little past Ty, dropped to a knee, and pressed the muzzle of Ty’s katapult against the back of the neck of the woman who had killed Memmie. This woman had collected herself to a seated position on the ground and had been holding one hand over the eye that Ty had earlier poked.
Ariane’s gesture was a curious one, recognizable from pre-Zero filmed entertainment as the sort of thing you would do with the sort of firearm that projected dumb lead bullets at high speed. It made less sense with a katapult. But as nonverbal communication with the Diggers, it worked.
“Three hundred meters downhill of the glider,” Ariane was saying, presumably to the same imaginary friend she had addressed a little earlier. Then, to the woman, “Get up. One way or another, your mind is about to get blown.”
Ty heard himself let out a little snort of suppressed laughter. Apparently the part of the brain that identified things as funny kept running as a background process even when its contributions were useless. The way Ariane was moving, the things she was saying, were so out of character for her that Ty’s higher brain didn’t know what to make of it; in the meantime he was chuckling as if watching some sort of comedy sketch.
The woman got her feet under her. Ariane grabbed her by the hood of her parka and pulled her fully upright, then began marching her down the hill with the kat’s muzzle pressed against the side of her head. Ty stood there and watched her go by.
“Ariane,” he said, “what are you doing?”
“You don’t seem to realize,” she said, “that this changes everything.” She let the katapult drop away from the woman’s head for a moment, then swung it up and aimed it at Ty. It gave off the characteristic whang of an ambot being shot out of its muzzle and then she put it back against the woman’s head.
Ty felt the impact like a punch in the rib cage and recoiled from it instinctively. But even before he could recover from that, the ambot had entrenched itself in his clothes, extruded a couple of needle-sharp probes into his side, and begun jamming his nervous system. Having been hit by these before, he knew that the best he could hope for was to strike the ground with something other than his face, so he released his grip on the shovel handle, and on the old Digger, and went down.
Had he been able to speak, he’d have told Kath Two not to worry about him—to do something about Ariane. But his teeth were banging together too hard to form words, and it was all he could do to keep his breathing muscles working.
The old man staggered away, fell to his knees, and found the shovel handle on the ground right in front of him. He grabbed it with one hand, planted it, grabbed it with the other, and used it to lever himself back up. He advanced on Ty, who
was just lying on the ground in spasms. Ty was then aware of a dark shape above him, and looked up to see Kath Two standing over him, facing the old man, raising an arm instinctively to defend herself. The shovel handle struck that arm with a thud and sent Kath Two stumbling away, crying out in pain. The man then raised the pointed end of the stick above Ty.
“Iniquitous mutant!” he cried. Then he added something that was drowned out by the whang of a katapult. Kath Two, using her own sidearm, had shot him in the belly from point-blank range. The stick dropped from the man’s hands and added to Ty’s inventory of minor aches and pains as it came down point first on his chest. The man toppled next to Ty, going down hard and banging his head on a rock.
Suddenly Ty was in the clear, at least neurologically. Einstein, kneeling above him with a bone-handled knife, had pried the ambot off him, and now used the knife’s steel pommel to smash it to bits against a rock.
Kath Two was down on one knee moving her damaged arm about in slow motion, her mouth frozen in the O of a suppressed scream.
Ty’s gaze was drawn to movement in the clouds above Kath Two’s head: a glowing rod levering down out of the sky. Visually it was a near match for what had just happened with the shovel handle, except that in this case the object was kilometers in length and incandescing as if it had just been pulled from the bed of coals at the foundation of a bonfire.
He understood now. He swiveled his head sideways so that he could look down the slope. In a clear patch a stone’s throw away—about three hundred meters downhill of the glider—the ground was glowing ruby red where it was being painted from above by lasers: three bright spots forming an equilateral triangle, and a grainy circle centered in that. The light washed briefly over Ariane’s head and shoulders as she shoved her hostage into the middle of the circle.
The glowing stick came straight down on top of them, enveloping them in its hollow end, and then sprang back up into the sky, leaving nothing save a trail of footprints that terminated in the center of a perfectly circular depression in the ground. Around that was a penumbra of vegetation that had been toasted by radiant heat. In the moments before the device was drawn back up through the cloud cover they were able to see the booth that had scooped up Ariane and her hostage, telescoping back up inside the red-hot tube in preparation for its departure from the atmosphere.
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