Einstein seemed exotic to the Seven in that he had been born on the surface and had never left it. This was his first journey in an aircraft of any kind. Seeing the mountains from above demanded some mental adjustments, which he made quickly. And in any case he knew the latitude and longitude of the artifact. After they had passed over the crest of the mountains and gotten into clear air, he directed Kath Two toward a high valley slung between the coastal range and a subsidiary crest beyond. Its upper reaches were devoid of life, but farther down the slope, tundra and low scrub were beginning to take hold. That these had been seeded from space was obvious from their regular spacing. Robot pods had fallen out of the sky in precise geometric formations and slammed into the ground in a hexagonal array before breaking open to spill their seed on the ground. Some wag in the bureaucratic bowels of TerReForm had dubbed these things ONANs: Orbital Neo-Agricultural Nacelles. As the years went by and the ecosystem spread out from the ONANs, the hexagonal pattern disappeared into the natural chaos of life. But in a place like this where plants grew slowly it would still be visible centuries from now.
Kath Two made a few passes up and down the length of the valley and identified a stretch of smooth seasonal riverbed, paved with frozen ash-paste, where she thought she could land and take off. The glider’s energy storage devices had been charged up the night before and were still at 100 percent. So she made another long orbit to bleed off velocity and then landed while traveling in an uphill direction. She made a gentle touch first, just to verify that the riverbed was in fact frozen solid, then set the glider down decisively. The wingtips dragged at the very end and there was some concern that one of them might strike a protruding rock, but she was able to avoid this and bring the craft to a full stop without damage. Beled and Bard climbed out first, and jogged in opposite directions to the two wingtips. After picking these up off the ground they were able to rotate the glider by walking clockwise in a large circle. Kath Two told them when to stop.
Ty got out and opened a cargo hatch on the side, releasing a couple of siwis that began moving across the ground in their distinctive elbowing style of locomotion, as well as a couple of buckies that began rolling about seeking high ground from which to establish observation posts and communications links. Their main objective now was to get the glider tied down so it wouldn’t blow away in a stray gale. The siwis were essentially earth sciences robots, good at digging and tunneling. In a few minutes’ time, with a bit of guidance from Doc, they were able to plant anchors in some sturdy-looking boulders flanking the riverbed. Ty and Bard ran ropes from those to the ends of the glider’s wings and made it fast while Beled stalked restlessly around the perimeter. Kath Two and Ariane deployed the grabb that Doc used to get about in places like this. It served the same function as a wheelchair, only with legs, so that it could pick its way along terrain where even able-bodied humans would have difficulty making headway. Meanwhile Memmie got him bundled up and ready. Einstein watched it all and asked only a few hundred questions, most of which were cheerfully answered by Doc himself. Einstein would have seen much of this sort of technology on videos in the RIZ, but this was his first direct experience of it.
He knew better than to ask questions about the weapons. Kath Two, Ty, Beled, and Bard all had katapults of different descriptions. They did not arm themselves like soldiers going into war, but more in the precautionary style of Survey personnel venturing into places where large predators or even bad Indigens might be prowling around. Kath Two carried the same type of small katapult that she’d been packing on her recently concluded Survey mission: a sidearm that would use electromagnetic propulsion to hurl one particular kind of ambot toward a large, warm target. Steering itself toward the big infrared blob, the ambot would land on it, like a space probe touching down on an asteroid, and crawl around looking for ways to make it miserable. Any large animal with more than two or three of these things on its body would have other things on its mind than eating Kath Two. Tyuratam Lake had a somewhat older, heavier, and more battered version of a similar weapon. It had two magazines, one of which was exactly the same as Kath Two’s. The other presumably housed ambots of a different type, maybe for use against humans. Beled was slung with a considerably bigger two-handed katapult, whose long flexible magazine was draped about him like a bandolier. It was overkill, but it was what he had, and the weight didn’t bother him. Langobard, in a style traditional among Red Neoanders, simply had a menagerie of different ambots — perhaps a dozen all told — crawling around on his body, and a katapult strapped to the underside of his forearm, like a splint. When he told it to begin firing, which he would do by means of a control in the palm of his hand, the ambots would get word of it over their network and begin trying to find their way to his elbow so that they could insinuate themselves into the katapult’s projection mechanism. It seemed a bit indirect, but it had the advantage that when the ambots had nothing else to do they could patrol Bard’s body looking for foreign ambots that had been projected at him by the enemy, and join battle with them.
All of which, while fascinating to Einstein, and indeed to anyone who stopped to think about it, was so routine to the Seven that no one made any mention of it. The behavior of the ambots infesting Bard was somewhat novel and distracting at first to those who’d had little exposure to Red ways, but as they began their trudge down the valley it became clear that the ambots were all executing a program that cashed out in a few repetitive, stereotypical behaviors such as perching on his shoulders or running rings around his midsection. Sometimes a few would make a bid to form a train, but there weren’t really enough of them.
During spare moments in the trip from Cradle, Beled and Bard and Ty had sat down together in private rooms, opened up the equipment cases, and made efforts to get the different ambots accustomed to each other, so that the Blue-programmed ones that most of them were using wouldn’t identify Bard’s more Reddish ammunition as innately hostile, and vice versa. So far it seemed to be working. When the shape of the valley funneled them all together, as when squeezing through a passage between boulders, Bard’s ambots seemed to catch the scent of the ones reposing in Beled’s snaky bandolier, and would crawl around to that side of Bard’s anatomy and aim their sensors in that direction, but it did not seem as though hostilities were about to break out. Since any one communications system was likely to be jammed or hacked by the opposition, your more highly developed ambots communicated with one another in a number of different ways, including sound. Ultrasound was preferred, but all frequencies were used, and so it was occasionally possible to hear Bard’s botmo spewing noise as it tried to evaluate, or possibly just to confuse, the Blue botmo all around it. Sometimes it was a hiss and sometimes it was a mathematical tune played too fast for the human ear to process it. In any case, nothing — at least, nothing audible to humans — came back from Beled’s, Ty’s, or Kath Two’s arsenals. Broadly speaking, Blue armaments makers were biased toward the “lots of dumb ambots” philosophy while Red ones went the other way.
On broken terrain, Doc on his grabb made better time than anyone, with the possible exception of Einstein, who was a gifted scrambler. The two of them would surge ahead and then Beled would put on a loping burst and catch up, obeying some kind of instinct to take point. Langobard seemed more inclined to hang back and act as a rear guard, which meant he spent more time in the company of the slower Ariane. Sometimes he simply picked her up and carried her over rough patches. The valley had been flat higher up, but they had to negotiate a steeper transition down to the altitude where vegetation had been seeded by the ONANs. It then became easier going, though they had to find open trails among the dense low shrubs that had taken root in the ashy soil. Their feet and their noses told them that the ground had been preseeded with some kind of microorganism that had presumably been designed to convert volcanic ash — which tended to have toxic stuff like sulfur in it — to a more wholesome kind of soil.