“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 going 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.
The boulder itself was too steep to climb, but ashy talus had spilled to either side of it, forming loose ramps. She churned up one of these and gained an altitude where she could flatten herself against the slope and peer across the battleground. It was contained within a broad, shallow sump where water finding its way down from the slopes of the coastal range was dammed up against the outer wall of the crater. It was heavily grown over, and so its boggy nature was not evident until one set foot in it. Bard, Beled, and Roskos Yur had moved aggressively forward, made a show of force, then withdrawn to let the Red force get literally bogged down. Acting in Blue’s favor were difficulties in communication between, on the one hand, tightly organized, high-tech Red troops and, on the other, aboriginal scouts who only knew about wireless communications because a long line of Cycs named Proboscidea Rubber had memorized the “Radio” entry.
Anyway Kathree was now well forward of her compatriots, off to what they would call the right side of the bog. In order to reach its opposite flank she could try going straight across, but this would bring her directly into the envisioned path of the Red grunts as well as trapping her in the marsh. She could cut back toward the sea and run along the camp where they’d slept last night, but she already knew that most of the buckies were stationed there. Or she could proceed farther inland and run through the pine forest that rose above the uphill side of the bog. That would take her directly across Red’s line of advance, which seemed like a bad idea on the face of it. But the Reds were just an isolated hit squad, not the vanguard of a larger force. They did not have lines of communication back to their rear. Once they had put ground behind them, they had no claim to it, no power there. Given that she could move over rough ground faster than even Beled, and given that she could hear the Neoanders a mile away, she liked her chances. So she kept moving uphill, rather than down, staying well off to the flank until she had gained a bit of altitude, then turning her attention inward.