Seveneves - Страница 149

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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.

THE MECHANISM THAT ARIANE HAD SUMMONED WAS CALLED A Thor. It consisted of a big rock — the head of a god-sized maul — with a very long and lightweight “handle” capable of reaching all the way to the surface even while the “head” was just grazing the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The whole thing spun like a thrown hammer, which was to say that the long handle flailed in a large circle around the head.

At the end of the handle was the capture booth, large enough to accommodate three people if they stood close together. During descent and ascent it was enclosed within an outer shell designed to survive the rigors of passage through the atmosphere. The handle would stride down out of space in the same general style as the hanger bolo that Kath Two and Beled had recently used, except that instead of pausing in the upper atmosphere to collect aircraft, this one would spear all the way down to the surface and grab whatever happened to be standing in the target zone — which it would paint beforehand with lasers so that the passengers would know where to stand. The head of the hammer would subsequently pivot forward into the atmosphere, catch air, and slow down, levering the handle sharply upward and catapulting the payload into a much higher orbit. The head would detach itself and fall downrange as a meteorite. This, of course, made it a single-use device, used only in emergencies, and even then when the need was so extreme that it was considered worth the risk of dropping a bolide on some basically random spot downrange.

So it could be assumed that a fresh crater now decorated the interior of North America somewhere to the east of here, and that Ariane and her captive were en route to a safe haven in the Red segment of the ring. What awaited them there could only be guessed at, but for Ariane it was probably going to be a substantial reward, a medal, and a promotion to some high rank in Red’s military intelligence branch.

Doc never spoke another coherent word. Seeing what had happened to Memmie, he had suffered a stroke that had immediately rendered him aphasic. Swelling of the brain killed him an hour later. The Diggers buried him and Memmie together in the place where they had fallen.

The old Digger looked better after a few hours, aside from some symptoms indicative of a concussion. The younger one got his leg splinted. Both were in a murderous frame of mind toward the three remaining captives. But it seemed that the majority of the Diggers were taken aback by what had happened, and were advocating a more level-headed approach to future relations between their tribe and the sort of civilization that could produce things like Ariane’s Thor and Beled’s and Langobard’s weaponized ambot swarms.

As a way of demonstrating their own technological prowess, or perhaps simply to blow off steam, the Diggers detonated a lump of some kind of home-brewed explosive in the open space between the glider and the fresh graves. Evidently this was meant as a warning for Bard and Beled, who were presumed to be watching from nearby cover.

Ty, Einstein, and Kath Two were fitted with hinged collars of bent steel. When these were closed around the neck, loops in the free ends came into alignment so that a chain could be run through them, locking them shut while stringing all the captives together. At one end, the chain was terminated by an ancient padlock that was too large to pass through the loops on Kath Two’s collar. The other end was then affixed, by means of a bolt, to a large wooden stake that an especially burly Digger had pounded into the ground with a stone-headed maul that looked like a miniature Thor.

Just uphill of this, and out of the prisoners’ reach, other Diggers constructed a little cairn. They topped it with another lump of explosive. They attached wires to the lump for detonation and ran them down to the main Digger camp, which was under the wings of the glider some fifty meters away.

“What just happened?!” Einstein wanted to know, as soon as the Diggers had left them alone. “I mean, that was obviously a Thor. I’ve heard of them. But. .” and he threw his hands up in the air.

“Ariane is a mole,” Ty said. Then he corrected himself: “Was a mole. Now she’s probably a hero. A Red hero.”

“Red sent the Thor down to, what do you call it, extract her.”

“Yeah. Her and, more to the point, a living, breathing biological sample.”

Kath Two, at one end of the string, climbed into a sleeping bag and fell asleep. Ty did not expect her to wake up for a long time. He and Einstein moved down-chain as far as they could, to leave her in peace, and squatted on their haunches. The Diggers had left them firewood and kindling. Without discussion, they began laying a fire. It became clear that Einstein had done it before, and so Ty just let him do it. The young Ivyn had very particular ideas about fires.

“Where did you learn how to fight like that?” Einstein asked him. “Are you part Teklan or something?”

“Fighting isn’t about knowing how,” Ty said. “It’s about deciding to.”

“Well, I was frozen, man.”

“Look, these are times when the decisions that our Eves made five thousand years ago control our actions to a degree that renders us basically helpless. You were meant to stand back and observe and analyze.”

“And you were made to be a hero,” Einstein said.

“A hero would have saved Memmie.”

“But no one could have seen that coming! The way that woman just went crazy on her. .”

“We’ll be asking ourselves that for a long time.” Ty sighed and looked over to the encampment where the Diggers were going about life as if nothing had happened. Some of them were roasting kebabs that they had cut from the carcass of a big herbivore killed down in the woods. There were a lot of kids under ten years old, but few teenagers. Half of the women looked pregnant. “Play your role, Einstein. You’re the Ivyn in our group now that Doc’s gone. What do you see?”

Einstein seemed reluctant to speak, so Ty prompted him: “I see a population explosion.”

Einstein snapped into focus and nodded his head.

“You’ve never heard of these people,” Ty went on, “even though your RIZ is just on the other side of these mountains and your people patrol up here all the time.”

“Rufus MacQuarie’s mine was far to the north,” Einstein offered. “These people must have just come out into the open recently.”

“Look for the oldest child down there and that probably tells you the date.”

“But the atmosphere’s been breathable for three hundred years! Why would they wait until now?”

Ty nodded toward the center of the Digger camp: the big bed of coals, the meat roasting over it.

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