Seveneves - Страница 165

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Kathree resumed her headlong run through the trees. She bent her course back toward the sea, entering the final leg of a U-shaped career around the bog. She slowed down. If her conjecture was correct, she must be drawing close to the other Digger. And unlike Bard, Beled, and Roskos Yur, she had nothing to protect her from those steel-headed arrows.

She heard a creaking noise from uphill — behind her. She turned around to see a redheaded, blue-eyed Digger, no more than five meters away, holding an arrow at full draw, aimed right at her. The freshly sharpened edges of its hand-forged steel warhead made bright arcs as they reflected the light from the cove. She had holstered her katapult to leave both hands free for scrambling. She had nothing.

Cantabrigia Five hadn’t exactly commanded her to incapacitate both of the Digger scouts. Just to prevent them from doing harm, and to prevent their dead bodies from showing up on video screens around the ring.

“You’re making a terrible mistake,” she said.

The Digger didn’t move, but he did blink slowly. She took it as assent to keep talking. “Those people — the Reds — are only pretending to be your friends so that they can piggyback on your claim to the surface. They want to take it all for themselves.”

“And you?” he asked.

“Blue is no better, in some ways.”

“Then why should we heed your counsel?”

“You should heed no one’s counsel blindly. Neither mine — nor his.” She made a little movement of the head toward the Aretaic.

Silence as he considered it.

“Do you know Ceylon Congreve?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“Has Ceylon Congreve spoken to you of chess?”

“We do not need a Cyc to tell us of chess,” the Digger said. “We play it all the time.”

“Then you know that pawns are weak — except for when their position on the board gives them power. Early in the game they are sacrificed freely. Late in the game they may checkmate the king.”

She was interrupted by another whipcrack from below, followed by two more in rapid succession. She fought the temptation to turn around and look. The Digger’s blue eyes strayed toward the battlefield, took something in, then returned to her. At no time did the arrowhead waver.

Kathree continued: “You are pawns. You can’t begin to imagine how small and weak you are compared to the forces above. If you allow yourself to be played as such by Red, you will be sacrificed as soon as it suits their purposes. If you play a longer game, though, you can yet grow powerful. As powerful as the other human races.”

With a suddenness that made Kathree flinch, the Digger raised his weapon and relaxed the arm that had been drawing the arrow back. He plucked the nock off the string and placed the arrow back in his quiver.

“I take your words with a grain of salt,” he said.

“Good.”

“But some of what you say confirms suspicions that I have harbored in my breast since the coming of the Red people, and so I have made up my mind to go back and speak to the others of these matters.” And then he simply turned his back on Kathree and began hiking back up into the mountains of Beringia.

“I KNOW YOUR STORY, TYURATAM LAKE,” SAID CANTABRIGIA FIVE, “OR at least the portions of it that have made their way into official records.”

“Half of it, then.”

“Be that as it may, I sense how distracting this must be for you.” She made the tiniest suggestion of a glance up the slope. Even though her eyes were screened by the lenses of a stylish varp, their golden hue magnified the gesture. “Part of you wishes to join the battle. That’s commendable, but I need you — the Purpose needs you — here.”

“Fine. You have my attention,” Ty said. Inappropriately, irrelevantly, he was wondering how old this woman was. Epigenetic shifts could roll back many of the visible effects of aging. At least one Moiran, Jamaica Hammerhead Twelve, had lived to the age of two hundred. Ty’s estimate of Cantabrigia Five’s age increased by a decade every time he interacted with her. Currently he was thinking that she might be eighty years old.

“What do you know of the Pingers?” she asked.

“In all honesty, they sound more myth than fact.”

“Myth carries more weight anyway, in times like these.”

“What do you know of them?” Ty demanded.

For once, Cantabrigia Five seemed a little off balance. She looked at him sharply, lifted her varp, rested it on the top of her head.

“I need to know,” Ty said, “whether they came out of some Red gene lab.”

“Red doesn’t even know they exist,” said Cantabrigia Five.

“Did we make them?”

“Blue? No, your hypothesis was correct, Ty.”

“And how would you know what my hypothesis was?”

Her eyes strayed to the pizza box, which was leaning against a boulder that protruded from the beach. “I know what is in there.”

“Thank you,” Ty said. He turned away from her and began striding in the direction of a tall young Ivyn, standing on the beach and gazing up nervously toward the sounds of battle. “Einstein! Eyes on me. Time for you to make history.”

CRACKING A WHIP MADE OF SMALL ROBOTS JOINED END TO END into a long, flexible chain was neither an especially bad nor an especially good way of engaging a foe in ambot-based combat. Extensive studies conducted within Blue military research labs had concluded that, on average, it was somewhat less effective than the more obvious procedure of just shooting individual ambots out of katapults. A dissenting opinion held that such studies were flawed because they failed to take into account two factors that were important in actual battle: One, the psychological impact on a defender who knew that the attack might literally whip around and come at him from any direction, including around corners or over barricades. Two, the element of skill, which was difficult to measure scientifically; the test subjects wielding those things in the lab were unlikely to have the same knack for it as Neoanders who had grown up using them and who had access to an ancient body of lore — a martial art, in effect — that they were disinclined to share with anyone else. If the whip was allowed to dissociate in midcrack, then its component ambots would be flung toward the target at supersonic velocity, which was as good as could be achieved by shooting the same objects out of a katapult. If it made contact with the target, direct physical damage would be inflicted and the ambots that had inflicted it could decouple themselves and carry out their usual programs. And if the whipcrack was off target, the chain could be recovered in full with no waste of ammunition. All the ambots came back for another attempt: something that certainly could not be said of ones that had been fired out of kats.

On Kathree’s list, if they ever got out of this, was to sit down over a glass of pinot noir with Langobard and ask him where he had picked up his skills in this department, since, until recently, he had been sustaining a fairly credible cover story about being a peaceful wine merchant in Cradle. She already suspected that he would deflect any such questions by saying that the Antimer Neoanders, like many cultures throughout human history, had a tradition of teaching martial arts to their young ones.

A skeptic might remark that fighting with whips made of little robots might be all well and good in the clean and well-ordered confines of a space habitat or a hollowed-out asteroid, or when dueling in space suits in a vacuum, or in relatively uncluttered places, such as deserts and icecaps on the surface. But in a bog full of dense, head-high vegetation it was simply a mistake. Kathree’s ears were taking in vast amounts of data that her brain didn’t know what to do with. Someone who had grown up practicing these arts, as Langobard apparently had, might have been able to hear nuances in these repetitive bangs. A crack that landed on its target would sound different from one that dissociated into a burst of flying ambots, which in turn would sound different from one that had whipped back toward the attacker or gotten fouled up in vegetation. Instead of which, all she could tell was that they were fighting down there. By the time she had completed her circuit of the bog and returned to their original line of defense above the cove, they had been fighting for rather a long time, which she interpreted as good news. She was trying to think like Cantabrigia Five, who probably wouldn’t worry so much about trivial matters like casualties and the control of the battlefield. More important was the narrative of the battle. And so far what it looked like was that a small Blue group, conducting Treaty-approved survey operations on their side of the Treaty-defined boundary, had been pursued by bloodthirsty Red Neoanders until trapped against the ocean, where they were now putting up a heroic and surprisingly prolonged last-ditch stand to protect a few noncombatants. Ka-three didn’t wish to be this cynical, for Cantabrigia Five really was a fantastically appealing and charismatic person, but she suspected, at some level, that a Blue fatality or two, up in the bog, and perhaps an on-camera interview with a maimed and bereaved survivor, might be the perfect counter for the propaganda coup that the Aretaics had scored a few days ago.

Thoughts such as those were luxuries she did not afford herself until she had reached a position above the cove, well behind the battle zone. And — no coincidence — also behind the line of camera-carrying buckies recording the heroic rearguard action.

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