“Is that how they did it?”
“Yes,” said Cantabrigia Five.
“Energy intensive,” Arjun remarked. “They ran power down the tether to a production facility on the ocean floor.”
“They had workers living on the ocean floor?”
“Robots.”
“And therein lies an opportunity,” said Cantabrigia Five.
The producers of this spectacle had once again seized control of the povv and begun taking Kathree on a forced march up the length of the Gnomon, slowing down to linger on the good bits and zooming past what was repetitive. She got the idea, which was that it had a sort of carriage that could move north-south on a giant rail and connect with the ground along a range of latitudes. That it had its own internal train lines connecting residential pods, military installations, luxury resorts for the whole family, and so much more. It was obviously rendered—stuff that hadn’t actually been built yet. Her inability to control what the povv was doing made her a little queasy. She levered the earbuds up, closed her eyes, and carefully pulled the varp away from her face. Then she opened her eyes on reality: the beach, the islet, her two interlocutors. She handed the varp back. “What sort of opportunity?”
“If you are going to make first contact with an intelligent alien race,” said Cantabrigia Five, “dropping huge strip-mining robots into their homeland might not be your best move.”
Kathree pondered that one for a bit. “Ah,” she said.
“Yes.”
“So there’s a reason they were so keen to make nice with the Diggers.”
“Having fucked it up spectacularly with the Pingers. Yes.” Cantabrigia Five stared at her for a little while. Her silence and her gaze were impressive, yet Kathree did not feel wholly uncomfortable.
Finally she went on: “Actions taken here today will cast long shadows into the future of New Earth. With more resources here, we might have effected a more elaborate strategy, with less uncertainty. But the mere fact of having had more would have spoiled it.”
“HOW DID YOU GUYS COME UP WITH ALL THIS?” TY ASKED.
He was squatting on the islet next to the Cyc, who was still swaddled in sleeping bags, only her hands and head exposed. She was holding an instruction manual, angling it toward the light of the flynk chain. This was still illuminating the cove, but the crew of Ark Darwin had dimmed it so that people could sleep. She had to focus intensely to read the words, many of which must be unfamiliar to her. Her lips moved slightly as she parsed unfamiliar Cyrillic characters sprinkled through almost every word. Headphones buried her ears in great donuts of foam. She hadn’t heard Ty, didn’t know he was looking at her. So he had his fill of looking for a minute. She wasn’t his type, and anyway she was very young. But he was beginning to see what Einstein saw in her. Einstein had to know that there was nobody for him on his RIZ, no Indigen girl he could have an interesting conversation with. And yet if he were to somehow find his way to the habitat ring, he’d be looked on by all the smart girls there as a hillbilly.
The device in the box was a portable sonar rig. It was capable of sending out pings, but that wasn’t how they were using it. They were using it to listen. Sonar Taxlaw had virtually wrenched it from Ty’s grasp and mastered it. The arrival of Ark Darwin and the movements of the boats and the barge had caused her no end of annoyance, but with a little encouragement from Ty, she’d begun to see it as an interesting science experiment, a way of understanding what those technologies must sound like to Pingers and other mammals that frequented the deep.
Moving carefully on the steep, glassy surface of the islet, he edged into her peripheral vision and gave her a light tap on the shoulder. He hated to break her out of her reverie, but there were questions he needed answered. She was stunned for a moment, as if she’d just been teleported into this location from a thousand miles away, but rapidly she came around and pulled one of the headphones away from her ear. “Come again?”
“All of this.” Ty rested a hand on the battered plate atop the pipe, nodded toward the makeshift sledgehammer. “How did you come up with it? How do the Pingers know that when they want to talk to you they should build a cairn on the beach at such-and-such place?”
“We began sending out scout parties as soon as the atmosphere became breathable,” Sonar said.
“That’d be three hundred years ago,” Ty said.
“Two hundred and eighty-two.”
“Just making the point that this is old history.”
“Not that old.”
Ty heaved a sigh. “Not within living memory.”
“It is not merely an oral tradition, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Sonar said. “We maintain written records.”
“On one hundred percent cotton paper. Yes. Go on.”
“There was nothing for the scouts to eat, of course. So they could only range as far as they could go with food that they carried on their backs. But in time they discovered edible seaweed and bivalves along the coast.”
Ty nodded. “Once TerReForm’s engineered algae had done its job of building the atmosphere, it needed to be held in check. TerReForm seeded the coasts with filter feeders and the oceans with krill.”
“Those clams were the first meat anyone had eaten in forty-seven hundred years,” said the Cyc. “Scout parties that hugged the coast could stay out as long as they wanted, and roam for months or years, eating better than the Diggers who stayed in the Hole.”
“Being a scout must have been popular.”
“Too popular. Some went rogue, and had to be hunted down and subjected to the discipline of the Committee.”
“That sounds . . . unpleasant.”
“It was not a good time. A lot of what you see that is bad in our culture started in those years.”
“Anyway, the scouts would emerge from the Hole,” said Ty, “and make a beeline for the nearest coast.”
“Exactly, and this route we have been traveling is like a game trail for us—we know it backwards and forwards. Well, at some point, after discipline had been reestablished, a scout party was exploring the coast a few kilometers from here, making camp up in the trees. One of them looked down and saw a person just walk up out of the sea. This person carried a little shovel like you might use to dig clams, and had a basket, but no clothes. He or she dug some clams and tossed them into the basket and then strolled back down into the ocean and disappeared.”
“No scuba gear. No wet suit.”
“Correct, just a belt with a knife. Well, word of this got back to the Hole and they talked to a predecessor of mine.”
“A previous Sonar Taxlaw, you mean.”
“Yes. A scout party went back down to the same place the next year and set up a contraption like this one, except not as good, and used it to send signals out into the deep. Nothing. Years, then decades went by. All they had to go on was the one sighting. Some old Digger who had been on a lot of scouting parties came up with the idea of building a bigger and better noisemaker here—he reckoned that the shape of the crater would act as a horn, channeling the sound outwards. To make a long story short, it worked. Contact was made.”
“How recently?”
“About fifty years,” Sonar said. “Then it was broken off around the time that you had your war. Five years ago, though, we began to see cairns.”
KATHREE WAS AWAKENED MUCH AS KATH TWO HAD BEEN ON THE morning when she had seen the Digger from her glider: by a certainty that something was out there, supported by no real evidence. This time, she was responding to sound: something she’d heard while still asleep, accessible only through a memory that eluded her the harder she reached for it. She rolled over onto her belly, propped herself up on her elbows, aimed her face uphill, closed her eyes, opened her mouth, and froze. For the first few minutes she wasn’t trying to hear anything, just taking in the ambient soundscape so that she could detect any noises that did not belong in it. The flynk chain on that barge was still operating, producing a steady note that could be filtered out by the
mind’s neural circuitry. She was aware that Bard too had suddenly become very quiet, but she didn’t know whether he had heard something or was simply following her cue. Kath Two might have been bookish and unobtrusive, but Kathree was the sort of person who kept nearby men on their toes.
She heard it again: the same sound that had probably awakened her in the first place. And this time she knew what it was: hand-forged steel arrowheads clinking faintly in a quiver, like coins in a pocket. The dilemma of the Digger hunter being that those shafts had to be held loosely enough to be fluidly drawn and nocked, but not so loosely that they jangled with each footfall. In measured strides across level ground, their kit might make no noise, but in a breathless predawn descent of an uneven slope, things might work themselves loose. As that aural picture sharpened in her mind, she could sense footfalls too, and hear bodies pushing through brush. The party, she guessed, was more numerous than the jangling quivers.
Another Kath Two memory connected: preparing for Survey work in areas with a lot of Indigens, she had read ancient histories of the American West, where white men had made use of aborigines as scouts and guides.
Langobard was hearing things too now, and had begun knuckle-walking along the little picket line that they had established below the rim of the crater, quietly waking Roskos Yur and Beled Tomov. Kathree followed him, going to each man in turn and saying in a low voice: “Maybe two Diggers with bows and arrows, guiding a small unit of Neoanders.”
“How small?” Beled asked.
“Probably not a full peloton. I will guess it is half of the group we observed landing.”
“Go and notify Ty,” Beled said. “Tell him to turn the light on.” And since it was too dark to see anything, he put a hand on the top of her shoulder, just where it curved up toward the neck, and gave the muscle there a pleasurable squeeze. Then he flattened his palm against her shoulder and gave her a firm shove downhill.
A minute later she was down on the beach. Sonar Taxlaw was still sitting out on the islet wearing headphones. Einstein was snoring in a sleeping bag. Ty was sleeping in one of the little pop-up shelters that had been supplied by the people from Ark Darwin, which was still anchored offshore, detectable by the slap of waves against its hull. As for Esa Arjun, she nearly collided with him, for he was simply standing there on the beach, robed in a sleeping bag. Odds were fifty-fifty that he was silently meditating, or that he had gotten up to take a piss. Ivyns could be a little funny when their brains got the better of them. Either way—whether he was pissing or thinking—he was temporarily useless, and so she went straight to the shelter and awoke Tyuratam Lake. That took a bit longer than she had been hoping for, which frustrated her greatly since it was now so obvious to her that something was happening up above: she could hear the building whine of the body-orbiting flynk chains that Neoanders employed as both armor and weapons, but could not tell whether this was Langobard getting ready to mount a defense, or the interlopers coming down the hill. The latter she could easily hear now; they had abandoned stealth in favor of haste.
“They’re coming,” she said. “Two Diggers, some Neoanders.”
Ty reached for his katapult, then remembered yet again that it had been taken by Ariane.
“Beled says to turn the light on.”
She was expecting him to use some sort of electronic device—the sort of thing the Diggers lumped together under the heading of “radio”—but instead Ty rolled up to a seated position, bolted out of the shelter, and simply walked down the beach, hopping and cursing as his bare feet unerringly found stones. “Turn the light on!” he shouted. He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hey! Turn the light on!” In this quiet cove, his words were loud as dynamite. Kathree heard some kind of answering shout from the direction of the barge. And from the boulder, a hissing noise. “Shh! Shh!” She thought it was waves surging against the stone until the flynk chain began to glow, illuminating Sonar Taxlaw, who had stood up and turned around to face them. She was shushing them with a finger pressed against her lips. “Shh, be quiet!” she insisted.
“Full blast!” Ty shouted. “All you got.”
“They’re coming!” said the Cyc. And seeing that no one else cared, she caught the eye of Arjun, who had dropped his robe on the beach like a puddle and was advancing toward her—striding directly into the surf. “We’re hurting their ears.”
She heard shouting up above: fighters who had dropped all pretense of stealth and were closing for combat. The timbre of their voices was that of Neoanders. Suddenly feeling a desperate need to be up there in the fray, Kathree spun on her heel, getting ready to sprint back up the slope. She nearly collided with Cantabrigia Five.
“You are going back up?”
“I feel like I have to,” Kathree said.
“Godspeed. Remember. No damaged Diggers.”
Cantabrigia Five pivoted away from her in a manner that made the long skirts of her warm cloak flare beautifully, and gave Kathree a last look at her regal profile, her excellent posture emphasized by close-cropped hair.
As Kathree scrambled back up she reviewed the more detailed instructions that Cantabrigia Five had given her some hours ago: Stay clear of our buckies. Those would be camera-carrying buckies, shooting video of whatever was about to happen. They’d be programmed to look for clear, high ground.
Kathree dropped to a low crouch perhaps fifty meters shy of Langobard. She could not see him, but she could hear the flynks careering around him as they whacked into small branches.
Above and to her right, a boulder projected from the slope. It was too hard and too steep to support anything except moss. The pale stone was prominent in the directional light of the big aitrain below. A sapling had found a perch on its top, grappling the rock with a mostly exposed root system, and reaching toward the sky with a few straggly boughs that had been sculpted by the wind from the sea. Near it she saw movement, which she identified as a bucky rolling into position atop the boulder. She could see it, so it could see her. She flattened herself behind a particularly dense knot of shrubs and grass, and used her ears, which was about all she had to go on just now.
Clink, clink. There it was. The sound, again, of those hand-forged Digger arrowheads jostling in their quiver. Drowned out by the building whine of a nearby flynk chain, reconfiguring itself under the command of its owner.
She risked looking up and saw a Neoander coming out into a place from which he had clear air to that bucky on the boulder. It wasn’t Bard. It was a Red grunt in military kit. He reached out and closed his right hand on one of the chains flying around him, arresting its movement. At the same time the chain parted on the opposite side of his body and turned into a whip. It lashed out directly at the bucky on the boulder. Its shape and course were visible at first. Then it accelerated through the sound barrier and became invisible, known only by its results: a sonic bang, the complete disintegration of the bucky, and the toppling of the little sapling, cut clean through. The whip slowed as it arced back in the general direction of its owner, and, like a snake in space, reorganized itself into another flying aitrain spinning in the opposite direction from before. Having thus eliminated a robotic sentry on what to him was the left flank, the Neoander drew back toward the center of the action and disappeared from Kathree’s view.
Kathree moved toward the boulder. The destruction of one of Cantabrigia Five’s video buckies made it a good place for her to be. She was churning headlong toward the base of the rock, wondering how she was going to find her way to the top, when movement above caught her eye. She stopped and looked steeply upward at a Digger who had just emerged onto its crown to claim the vacated high ground. He had come down the slope so impetuously that he nearly overran the top of the boulder. He had to plant a foot just short of disaster and wheel his arms backward to regain his balance. As he did so the arrowheads clinked together in his quiver. Kathree froze and crouched, watching him regain his equilibrium. Had he looked straight down he’d have seen her, but he had eyes only for what was goin
g on to his right: judging from sounds, the beginnings of a confused fight in a cluttered place. The Digger reached back, drew out a single shaft, and nocked it to his steel bow, looking out over the scene of the action below. He was thinking about choosing a target when Kathree’s ambot hit him in the shoulder and sent him down twitching.
Shooting the man had been easy. Not in the physical sense—that would have been easy in any case, since he was standing right there, and the ambot was largely self-aiming. It had been psychologically easy. Days ago, when she’d been in the worst part of her shift, barely conscious, she’d overheard Ty speaking to Einstein: Fighting isn’t about knowing how. It’s about deciding to. Even in her delirium she had understood that the decision Ty spoke of wasn’t an intellectual one. It was an overcoming of the emotional barrier that, in any civilized society, prevented people from doing damage to each other. She knew that because, hours earlier, she had done it. During that shocking initial combat between the Seven and the Diggers, she had stepped in to protect Ty after Ariane had shot him, and the old Digger had struck her on the arm with the Srap Tasmaner, bruising the bone, and something about that intense physical contact had pushed her through the barrier, made it easy to aim her katapult at the man and fire it. Since then, well-meaning members of the group had approached her to offer their sympathies. All they’d wanted to talk about was Doc and Memmie, and what a shock it must have been for Kath to lose them so suddenly. Implicit was that Kath had gone epi because of their deaths. A reasonable-seeming assumption. But wrong. It had happened, rather, in the moment when the old man had attacked her and she had fought back. Doc, at the time, had still been alive, and Memmie, though mortally wounded, had still been breathing. So Kath Two had actually been the first member of the Seven to die.
Anyway, she was now the sort of girl who shot people. Useful to know.
This all happened on what Blue would consider its right flank and Red would call its left. As aboriginal scouts supporting regular forces, the Diggers would stay on the wings or out in front. Which would imply that the other Digger—she was increasingly certain that there were exactly two of them—was likely to be on the opposite flank.