Memmie collapsed to her knees and then to all fours, her head — already dribbling blood — sagging almost to the ground, exposing the back of the neck. And that was where the woman drove the sharp end of the stick, ramming it in several inches deep, well into the center of the thorax where it would strike lung or heart or both. Remembrance did not topple but rather deflated, settling gradually to a fetal position on the ground.
The younger man meanwhile launched himself at Ty. It was not clear whether his intention was to inflict damage or merely to restrain him while Remembrance was sacrificed. In any case his foot dislodged a stone as he made his move, creating a sound that gave Ty a bit of warning. He was able to turn so that the attacker rolled around him rather than striking him dead-on. The Digger’s downhill movement became a disadvantage, overbalancing him. Hooking the man’s ankle and kicking upward, Ty made him fall hard on his face. Both of his feet were projecting up in the air, soles of his moccasins exposed to the sky. Ty hooked a leg through the crook of a knee and then dropped his weight, bending the foot forward; the man’s heel would have gone all the way to his buttock had Ty’s lower leg not been interposed behind the back of his thigh and his upper calf muscle, where it threatened to rip the man’s knee apart. The man scrabbled at the ground and so Ty put more weight on it, the stink of the old moccasin in his nostrils, and felt a preliminary pop inside of the joint. The man screamed and stopped struggling.
All of this happened in the same moments as the woman was killing Remembrance, and so Ty did not really take that in until he had placed the man fully under his control. He was just drawing focus on Memmie and understanding how bad it was when he saw a movement in his peripheral vision and looked over to see Doc telescoping to a seated position on the ground. He had turned around and witnessed the attack on Memmie.
“I want evac. I want evac,” Ariane was saying. Ty had no idea to whom she was talking.
Strange high whistling noises came from the sky. Ty looked up and saw a flight of arrows arcing over his head. They passed as well over the heads of Ariane, Kath Two, and Einstein and thunked into the ground or skittered on the rocks at the feet of Beled and Bard, who had been advancing until then.
The woman with the stick had been in a sort of trance, but now drew focus on Ty and saw how it had gone with him and the younger man. Rage flashed over her face. She aimed the sharp bloody end of the stick at Ty and began to run at him.
Ty heaved his full weight onto the younger man’s foot and snapped his leg. Then he stood up, getting clear of the screaming and flailing Digger. He had come up with a rock in his hand, which he flung at the woman’s face. His aim was off, but still it forced her to falter and dodge, and gave him time to snatch up two more and advance one pace. Two more rocks, one of which struck home on her collarbone, and two more paces. On her back heel she aimed a thrust at him, but she telegraphed it and he parried it easily with his left forearm, snaking the full length of his arm around the shaft so that its bloody tip was trapped against his body. He reached out with his free hand, poked her in the eye with his thumb, grabbed her ear, and wrenched her away from the stick like a discarded wrapper. The older man was coming at him with his sticks a-flailing in both hands, and more formidably, several of the young warrior types were running with lances leveled. Ty walked straight at the old man, knocking his sticks away with controlled strokes of the shovel handle, spun him around so that the man’s back was against his chest, brought the handle up across the man’s throat, and locked it in place, crooked in his elbow, his hand pressing against the back of the man’s bald head. He then began dragging the man backward and downhill toward the remainder of the Seven. For this human shield might work to protect Ty’s front, but the boys with the lances were already moving to circle around behind him, and he had to hope that the others would protect his rear.
One of the equipment boxes up by the glider now seemed to explode. But it was a strange sort of explosion with no flame, and little sound. Rather, the crate seemed to dissociate into a dense, gritty cloud, which became translucent as it spread. A moment later the same thing occurred with a second crate nearby. Both crates ended up lying on their sides, empty.
The Diggers in the vicinity of the glider were all exclaiming in surprise, or just plain screaming. The nature of what was happening was not clear, even to Ty. It was enough to put the lancers into a more cautious frame of mind, as it gave rise to fears that they were being attacked from behind. Their advance faltered and they looked to see what was the matter.
A thin gray layer was skimming over the ground, headed downhill toward them. It looked a little like a spent wave as it washes and foams over a flat beach just before settling into the sand, parting around rocks and recombining in their lee. More like an avalanche, though, in that it gathered speed as it came on. As it rushed past Ty and the old man, parting around their feet, he was able to focus and resolve it as a swarm of ambots of two different types — one type from each of the crates that had emptied themselves. They were all mixed together. Once they chittered past Einstein, Ariane, and Kath Two, they spread out across the flat open slope separating them from Beled and Bard. Those two were split out to the sides, just beyond arrow range. The swarm then forked as all the ambots of one type converged on Beled and all those of the other type made for Bard. The former group — the Blue-pattern ambots — were smaller, leggier, and quicker on broken ground. That swarm gathered itself together into a clicking, glittering, hissing firehose stream and leaped from the ground at Beled. Rather than striking him, though, it washed around him. In the interval of a few moments he was clothed from head to toe in an armor made of overlapping scales, each scale being the beetle-like back of an ambot. They had swarmed over him and locked themselves together. A few strays clambered over the others’ backs seeking, and plugging, holes.
Langobard’s swarm was a little longer in reaching him. During the final fifty meters or so it became ropy as it passed through a kind of phase transition. Where possible, ambots were copulating, jacking the couplers on their snouts into matching ones in the tails of those ahead of them, forming pairs, then strings of three and four that combined with others, so that by the time the swarm came close to its master it had converged into half a dozen long, whippy ropes, and as many shorter segments. These ambots were basically flynks, more at home flying than crawling. They had some limited ability to fly solo, but were much happier when combined into aerial trains. During their career down the slope they’d picked up a decent amount of energy just by losing altitude, and so in the last few meters they were able to rear up off the ground like cobras and leap into the air, shooting past Langobard but banking into tight turns behind him, curving round, nose seeking tail, until they had formed aitrains: closed loops, fully airborne, flying endless circles around his body, defeating gravity with the modest amount of lift provided by their stubby winglets. He gave them greater speed by the simple expedient of pawing at them from time to time, but they also drew energy from a field being generated by a power plant on his back. Perhaps a third of the flynks had failed to find their way into chains sufficiently long to form aitrains, and so a few shorter segments found his ankles and spiraled up his legs, like snakes climbing trees. There were also some singletons who had not been able to join even a short chain; these found their way to him and climbed as high as they could, competing noisily for perching space on his shoulders. As Bard now moved across space he looked like a combination of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, inscribed within a system of circles, and early depictions of the atom, surrounded by an array of circular orbitals. Each aitrain sang a different note as its flynks sawed through the air, the pitch rising as it absorbed energy and built velocity. He and Beled were moving to join forces, both edging closer to the Diggers as their defenses came online. A single exploratory shaft, fired at a high arc by the foremost of the archers, plunged toward Langobard, but was casually flicked out of the way by a momentary deflection of an aitrain.