Seveneves - Страница 164

164

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.

The Red Neoanders were clearly audible. All but one of them were below her, and as she paused and waited, she heard the thudding footfalls of the straggler going by her. They were getting orders from their B, or Beta, as per racial stereotype. To her credit, the B was not hanging back and commanding from the rear; she seemed to be in the thick of things, which placed her downslope just where the going started to get marshy enough to give them second thoughts about the way they were heading. They must have noticed by now that the native scout on their left had disappeared, which might encourage them to steer toward the right. In any case, they were briefly stymied. They were all downhill of Kathree. And they were all facing the other way.

Looking directly across the slope she saw nothing but tall pinelike trees, forming a canopy that had stifled development of undergrowth. It would be easy going. A traversing run would take her rapidly to the opposite side of the field of battle, where she ought to be able to follow the other Digger’s trail down to wherever he’d stationed himself and zap him with an ambot before he was able to do anything heroic and stupid.

The bang of a Neoander’s flynk whip sounded from below, and she heard someone cry out and a clamor of whanging noises as ambots were projected toward targets.

Feeling suddenly very late, she began to run through the trees, moving openly now. When gaps appeared, she looked down across the bog. The vantage from here was excellent.

Which explained why she nearly collided with a lone man who had stationed himself in one of those clear places, perfectly situated to overlook the bog and the cove below. His only company was a robot: a siwi with a video camera for a head, capable of rising up out of its coils like a cobra from a basket and aiming its lens in any direction. The man was standing with his back to the fight, facing his siwi, which was shooting down the hill. Kathree was quite close to that siwi when she stumbled upon this, and so, when she first took it all in, she understood the setup exactly, just as a billion Red viewers would be doing in a few minutes: in the foreground, the man, framed in rugged rocks and trees that would fill habitat dwellers with that aching need to come down here and colonize the surface. In the near background, the bog where the fighting was under way. Beyond that, the cove nestled between the pincers of wave-beaten rock, the flynk barge with its column of light making the whole scene into day, Ark Darwin farther out, rocking slowly on low seas, and the sky adding some light of its own as the dawn approached.

The man wasn’t expecting her. She got the impression, somehow, that he’d been rehearsing, going over his lines, clearing his throat, preparing for a performance. So she had a few moments in which to stare at him.

The three incarnations of Kath Amalthova had, in their collective lifespan, only laid eyes on live Aretaics a few times, and then only from a distance. So she had no clear measure of what counted as impressive or handsome among that race. But this one had to be one of the finer specimens. He must be over two full meters in height. His long raven hair was swept back from his forehead to make the most of a high noble brow, a strong prominent nose, large, jet-black, deep-set eyes. A few creases on his face gave him an air of sober maturity.

Five thousand years ago, aristocracy had died, along with almost everything else, and yet the idea of aristocracy — the aspirations that it, at least in an idealized form, drew out of the human psyche — lived on in everything about this man’s appearance, his attire, his posture, and the way in which he gazed upon Kathree when he had recovered from his astonishment and understood what was happening. The look on his face said that this unexpected encounter was fascinating, as well as slightly amusing, the sort of twist of fortune that happened from time to time to sophisticated persons, and that, political differences notwithstanding, the two of them might one day discuss the whole affair wryly over a glass of fine red wine from Antimer. Or at least that was the case until Kathree’s ambot struck him right in the middle of his forehead.

Sensing movement and hearing the discharge of her katapult, the siwi — which apparently had some rudimentary ability to follow what was interesting — swiveled in her direction, but she stomped at its neck from behind. It gave way beneath the impact of her heel and made a creditable effort to remain standing, but was forced to uncoil itself so as to effect a soft landing on the ground. From there it might have pursued her into the trees, had it been programmed for pursuit. But it was really nothing more than a moderately smart camera platform, and so it stayed where it was, doggedly trying to center the face of the Aretaic in the middle of its frame. Since the Aretaic was rolling and writhing like a man on fire, this gave its algorithms a vigorous workout.

164