A grizzled crow landed on the ground nearby, and addressed Ty. “We are coming.”
THAT THESE DROP PODS WERE OF MILITARY DESIGN WAS OBVIOUS from the way they came in: fast. Each had a set of vanes, mounted near the top, that sprang out when it was a couple of thousand meters above the surface, slowing its fall. But not until the pod was just a few tens of meters above the ground did its retro-rockets come on: not just one but a circular array of thumb-sized solids that created a cylindrical piston of fire on which the pod eased to a stop, coming to light on a tripod of buglike legs that deployed themselves at the last possible moment and absorbed the shock of contact.
The first thirteen drop pods landed in a nearly perfect circular formation, about a kilometer down the valley. As soon as they touched down they sprang open. Their hatches faced inward. The pod-ring thus presented nothing but armored backshells to any foes outside of it. Any foes inside were in for a bad time.
Seconds later a fourteenth pod landed in the center and a man climbed out. On his signal, the thirteen somersaulted out of their pods and rolled sideways onto their bellies, looking outward into the space beyond, which was now well illuminated by blinding lights shining from the backshells. In actual battle the next procedure would have been to start killing anything they could see, but instead the leader shouted a command that caused all of them to stand up, holster their kats, and dust themselves off. Ten of the thirteen were Neoanders. Three others had the more normal modern-human look. Those, and the one in the middle, were likely B-types, or Betas: the most numerous of the Aïdan subraces.
The peloton—for that was the Aïdan term for a unit of this size—adopted a parade rest position, facing outward and resisting the temptation to watch as four more drop pods landed in the space they had just circumscribed. The occupants of these were a little slower to climb out. It seemed evident that they were civilians who hadn’t done it before. While they were doing so, another pod landed, this one outside the circle; it was of a somewhat different design, used to land cargo. The peloton moved forward to form a loose perimeter around this one. The civilians opened it and removed various items: most obviously, a few sections of tubing that they snapped together to form a pole. To the top of this, they affixed a circular hoop, creating a rather more stylish and high-tech version of the circle-on-a-stick totem that the Diggers favored. Below the hoop they tied on a red, fork-tailed streamer, known in Blue vernacular as the Serpent’s Tongue, frequently used as a Red emblem in battle or, more usually, athletic competitions. And below that they attached a large white flag.
The performance was so amusing that even Ty, who knew he should be attending to other things, was a little surprised when he noticed that the half-dozen Digger warriors surrounding their little camp were all lying on the ground twitching helplessly. This had occurred so recently that some of their handmade spears were still toppling to the ground. In one of those peculiar, focused insights that comes to one when things are happening very fast, he noticed that the leaf-shaped spearheads had been hand-forged, and wondered idly if the metal had been scavenged from the truck they’d excavated.
Naturally he looked toward the explosive device on the nearby cairn. He saw that the wires had been severed. A hand the size of a dinner plate appeared above the top of the cairn, scooped up the explosive charge, and hurled it into oblivion.
Beled had materialized near the wooden stake, which he was examining in something like wonder. After trying its connection to the end of the chain, he knelt down, gripped it with both hands, and began pulling. Langobard, now that he’d dispensed with the explosive, loped over to join him. Squatting, he scooped away some dirt to get better purchase, and added his strength. Half a meter of the stake suddenly emerged from the ground, causing both men to tumble back. From a semi-reclining position, Bard swatted at it with one hand, as if shooing away an insect, and snapped it off at ground level. Ty, Einstein, and Kath were still chained together, but free to move.
Since Bard was now operating in a more stealthy mode, he was not surrounded by a whining complex of aitrains; rather, he had gotten all of his flynks jacked together into a single long rope that was looped and draped around his torso in a complex pattern that Ty had seen before, and that he supposed had been developed by Neoanders over thousands of years.
Ty reeled the stake fragment in, hand-over-handing the chain through his neck collar, and grabbed it in both hands like a club. He used its free end to scatter the campfire and darken the encampment. Kath, still half in her sleeping bag, was up on all fours, vomiting. Beled strode over to her, scooped one arm under her midsection, hoisted her up, and slung her over his shoulder. He had not really broken stride, and so the other two prisoners were now obliged to go with him. Langobard trailed the group, impulsively snatching up a spear—as a keepsake?
It had not been the most surgical extraction in the history of warfare. It was very far from being the most cack-handed, however. More fighting might have ensued had the main encampment of Diggers not been utterly transfixed by the approach of the Red delegation. Ty was just allowing himself to believe that they’d gotten away clean when he heard a voice from out of the dark, only a few meters away:
“I found this.”
Directly the speaker was painted by a crossfire of red lasers from Beled’s and Bard’s katapults. In the dark it was impossible to see her face, but Ty had already recognized the voice. “Hold your fire,” he said.
The Cyc stepped closer. Bard risked illuminating her with a dim light. She was holding the lump of explosive in her hand. It must have rolled down the slope toward the main Digger encampment.
“Sonar Taxlaw,” Ty said.
“You remembered!” she exclaimed. Then, apparently as some sort of explanation, she offered: “Volume seventeen.”
“Okay, Sonar,” Ty said, “you are free to go. Or you can come with us. As much as I would hate to deprive your folk of their knowledge of the last part of the S topics and the beginning of the Ts, I recommend coming with us.” He was working out how to explain matters to Sonar without taking all night, but Sonar abruptly said “Okay!” and, in her scurrying way, fell into step with them.
“You can leave that,” Ty said, nodding at the lump of explosive.
“A mixture of RDX with beeswax and vegetable oil,” Sonar said helpfully. “It will not detonate without—”
“I know,” Ty said, “but we don’t need it.”
Sensing eyes upon him, he looked toward the massive silhouette of Bard. The Neoander’s face was in darkness, but Ty could guess that it bore an incredulous expression. “I’ll explain later,” Ty said.
They walked briskly uphill for several minutes, their view across and down the valley improving as they went. Far below them, the Red delegation had been ascending toward the glider encampment at a stately pace, following in the footsteps that the Seven had made yesterday. Quite clearly, they wanted to be as obvious as possible, and so they were advancing in a pool of brilliant illumination made by portable lanterns, which the members of the peloton were aiming toward the center. The same goal—not seeming to sneak up on the Diggers—might have been achieved simply by waiting a few hours and doing it in daylight. But that was just typical Blue thinking. They were doing it at night for the sheer drama and pageantry of it, this being the sort of thing that Red, by and large, was simply better at than Blue. Ty almost laughed out loud when they got to a place where they could get their first clear look at the approaching spectacle. He was comparing it in his mind to the pitiful show that the Seven had put on yesterday. Of course, the Seven had been surprised, so it wasn’t a fair comparison. But the Diggers would not be making allowances for fairness. What they were seeing was probably a lot closer to how their folk, stuck underground, might have been imagining this moment during the last five thousand years. A tall Aïdan with a mane of glossy black hair preceded the rest. He wore some kind of ceremonial robe that streamed in the cold wind draining down the valley and glowed warmly in the light shone on him by t
he peloton. Advancing with a measured tread, he held the hoop standard in an absurdly dramatic pose with his upper hand reversed so that the thumb was down and the palm faced forward. It was meaningless but it looked great. A few paces behind him walked an older man with gray hair swept back from his high brow and a neatly trimmed beard. His robes were more subdued but, one suspected, really smashing if you could see them up close. A gold chain around his neck supported a medallion on his chest. His right arm was extended to cradle the left hand of none other than Marge the Digger, whom he was escorting up the hill in the manner of a dad giving away the bride. She was wearing what she’d last been seen in, supplemented with a warmer garment thrown over her shoulders like a cape. It kept trying to fall off as she waved her free hand over her head, signaling to her Digger kin that all was well. When they recognized her, they shouted words of greeting and she waved the more vigorously; her cape fell off and was replaced by one of the uniformed Betas.
Even at a distance it was obvious that the standard bearer and the one escorting Marge were Aretaics, which was to say, Aïdans of the first line of descent, presumably conceived as competitors to the children of Eve Dinah. They were tall and long-maned, with magnificent noses and excellent posture.
A few paces behind Marge and the senior Aretaic were a Camite and one of the Betas, walking abreast. They were joined by a pole about two meters long; each of them supported an end in the crooks of her elbows. In the pole’s center was a gleaming lump about the size of a person’s head, which any Spacer would recognize as a small nickel-iron asteroid, as common in space as dead leaves were on the reforested surface. But rare down here, even after the Hard Rain. Ariane must have told her higher-ups about the truck, what the excavation of its engine block said about the lengths that the Diggers would go to in order to get their hands on a bit of metal, and how grateful they would be for such a gift. Or perhaps Ariane had been broadcasting the entire mission to Kyoto through some covert, encrypted channel. Anyway, it would make a better token of friendship than a busted shovel handle.
Two of the members of the peloton were musicians. At a certain point one of them began to beat a drum that was harnessed to his midsection, and another began to play a melody on a shiny horn. Ty was convinced he’d heard it in the Epic somewhere, but it took Bard to place it.
“‘Bread of Heaven,’” he said. “It’s what Rufus and company were singing when they welded themselves in.”
“Also known as ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah,’ or in the original Welsh, ‘Cwm Rhondda,’” added Sonar Taxlaw.
“Fuck, these people are good!” Ty exclaimed.
“How long do you suppose they’ve been preparing this?” Bard asked.
“They have been way ahead of us for months. Maybe years,” Ty said. “But having said that, there’s little in what we’re seeing that couldn’t have been thrown together in a few hours.”
“Confirmed,” said Beled. He had let Kath gently to the ground, where she now lay in a fetal position curled about his shin. He was looking at the procession through optics. “The ring at the top of the standard? It is an exercise hoop covered in silver tape. The white flag? A bedsheet.”
“Do we even need to bother watching how this goes?” Bard asked.
And then he looked to Ty to give the answer. It had not been a rhetorical question. He was awaiting orders.
Beled Tomov looked at him too.
“How is she?” Ty asked. “Pulse, respiration okay?”
“I think it is the usual,” Beled said with a nod. Meaning that abrupt hormone shifts in Kath’s system were giving her something akin to morning sickness. Her microbiome—the ecosystem of bacteria that lived in her gut and on her skin—had been thrown into disarray, and she was being colonized by any old germs, including ones from the Diggers that had never been exposed to a Moiran body.
“Can you put her on your back or something?”
Beled nodded and dropped to one knee. He had been carrying a pack on his back. He emptied its contents on the ground and began slashing leg holes in its bottom corners so that Kath could just be inserted into it, like an infant into a carrier.
“We can’t rule out that our guys will show up in force,” Ty said, referring to Blue military. He looked south over the mountains, but didn’t see anything coming. Nor would he, of course; anything headed their way from Qayaq would be running dark. “Have you been in touch with them?”
“Yes,” Bard said. During this little pause he had been rooting a multitool out of his belt. He approached Ty, who held out the broken stake. Bard got his tool clamped around the head of the bolt and began to twist it out.
Ty nodded wearily. On one level, he had just asked a stupid question. But the Diggers’ attack—hell, for that matter, their existence—had taken them by surprise, and since then he’d been preoccupied with being a prisoner under conditions so primitive as to verge on slapstick. He ought to have been thinking about the larger picture.
Blue might bomb this whole valley into the Stone Age. But probably not. It was already in the Stone Age.
Bard and Beled had gotten a message up to Denali, which was the closest major Teklan military habitat to 166 Thirty. Everyone of consequence in Blue would now be aware that the Diggers existed, that the initial contact had been botched, and that there was a hostage situation. The Thor would have made it clear that Red was a step ahead of them. The descent of those drop pods, a few minutes ago, would have made it clearer. The brilliant pool of light in which the Red delegation moved was as much for the benefit of long-lensed video cameras peering down from orbit as for the Diggers.
It was a fait accompli that Red would make formal contact, in about thirty seconds, with the Diggers, and that it would go a lot better than yesterday. Ariane would have prepped them, told them what to say: Yes, of course we accept your claim to the Earth’s surface. Its justice is self-evident. We have plenty of room in orbit. No need for habitations on the planet. Of course, as you’ve already learned firsthand, you can’t trust those people from Blue. We might be persuaded to install a discreet military presence just to keep them from encroaching on your territory. As long as we’re there, some cultural exchange programs might be in order. We could offer medicine. Dental care. Technical advice in rebuilding your civilization. How may we be of assistance?
“Blue isn’t coming tonight,” Ty said. “It would just play into their hands.” He nodded down at the procession, which was only a few meters away from making first contact with an equally sized group of Diggers. “But some members of that peloton might come after us. They’d look like heroes if they could march us back into camp in shackles.”
“Or carry our heads in on spikes,” Bard suggested in a casual tone.
“Shh!” Ty said, with a glance toward the newest member of their band. But the Cyc looked unconcerned.
“Sonar,” Ty said, “we are going to have to move. Get away from any patrols those guys might send out, while it’s still dark. Can you do that? Move rapidly over rough terrain, in the dark?”
“Sure,” Sonar said, a little too blithely for Ty’s taste. But before he could press her, she added: “Guess we’ll be going north then?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because the main group is going south. Probably as soon as the sun is up.”
“How far south were they thinking of going?” As it was, they were less than a hundred kilometers from the southern coast of Beringia.
“To the sea,” Sonar said, as if this were self-evident.
“What’s going to happen then?”
The question seemed simple enough, but it led to an outburst of chuckles from Sonar. “They’re going to wonder what became of me, that’s what!” she said, when she could get her mirth under control.
“They’re probably wondering that already,” Einstein remarked.
“No, I mean they’ll be needing me then!”
“Why?” Einstein asked.
“It’s a riddle.”
The
bolt had been removed now, freeing the end of the chain, which Ty pulled clear of his collar. He opened the thing up and tossed it on the ground. The gesture caught the eye of the Cyc, who probably saw it as a shocking way to treat valuable metal. Ty was now free, holding the massive stake fragment and managing to control a certain natural impulse to bash her head in. This was not a time for riddles.
Einstein got the chain out of his own collar, then carried it in the direction of Kath so that he could help her.
“The purpose of your expedition—before we blundered into your path, that is—was to go to the edge of the water and make contact with the Pingers,” Ty ventured.
“Pingers?” Bard asked.
Ty ignored him, maintaining his focus on the Cyc. “You, by virtue of your mastery of volume seventeen of the Encyclopædia Britannica, are the closest thing your folk have to an expert on the only technology capable of summoning them.”
“Oh, I’m an expert on other topics as well!” Sonar said. “Sophism, South Carolina, Pope Sylvester II . . .”
Ty decided to let the witticisms go by without positive or negative reinforcement. “What were you guys going to say to them?”
“It’s they who want to talk to us!” Sonar said. “They left us a message—a cairn on the beach. We are coming to respond.”
The ensuing silence lasted a long time: long enough for the final stanza of “Bread of Heaven” to stop reverberating from the mountain walls, long enough for the Aïdan leader’s opening greeting—written and pronounced in flawless pre-Zero English—to move through a solid paragraph of awe-inspiringly sycophantic salutations. Long enough for Bard to get the unchained Kath socketed into his backpack.
“We move south,” Ty announced. “Bard, you keep pace with the Cyc. If she slows us down, carry her. I’m going to need your radio.”
“My what?!” Bard exclaimed.
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