None of the scouts who went out looking for Bard and Beled returned. It was beginning to raise the question of who was really holding whom hostage. The ones who’d gone missing had friends, parents, and children who soon became desperate to know what had become of them and began asking awkward questions of those in command. Late in the afternoon, the Diggers were reinforced by a band of some twenty additional warriors coming up the valley, carrying dead animals on long sticks. The Diggers all held a parley around their cookfire. After they had eaten their fill, Donno came up alone, using a short spear as a walking stick or a wizard’s staff. The sun had gone down, so Ty heard him before he saw him.
“We carry out an exchange,” Donno announced, “and you people get out of here without further casualties.”
Is that what you call murdering people? Ty wanted to ask. Instead, he said, “Very well. How would you like to proceed?”
“Well,” Donno said, beginning to sputter a bit, “we need to be able to communicate with them! But everyone we send out disappears!”
“Would you like me to do it?”
“Then you’ll just run away.”
“It is not necessary to talk face-to-face,” Ty said.
“You have radios?” Donno asked suspiciously.
Radio. A queer old word. The Diggers had searched them all, made sure they had no communication devices.
“No,” Ty said. He leaned back and reached into an open ration pack, took out a piece of bread, tore off a bit of it. Dual sparks, all around, shone in the retinas of grizzled crows. They’d brought a dozen of them on the glider, in modular cages made for traveling. The Diggers had inadvertently released them, and they’d been hanging around the campsite ever since. They knew what Ty was doing and were already jockeying for position, smacking one another with their wings and squawking. Ty held out his hand with the piece of bread on it, and almost before he’d unfurled his fingers the morsel had been pecked out by a crow who was now regarding him intently. “Beled. Bard,” he said. The normal procedure was to display a picture of the recipient, but these birds had some ability to recognize names and map them onto faces, and during spare moments on the journey, the Seven had been training them. “Our hosts wish to negotiate an exchange of prisoners.”
Ty closed his hand and waved the bird away. It flapped off into the gloom screaming the message. He looked at Donno and enjoyed the consternation on the Digger’s face. “We should hear back soon,” he said.
Donno turned without a word and strode back to the Digger campfire.
Half an hour passed. It became fully dark. The canids began howling. Ty looked up into the sky expecting to see the habitat ring coming out. So did all the Diggers. But the ring was not the only bright thing in the sky tonight. There was also a meteor shower. A strangely orderly one. It seemed to be headed directly for them.
Donno came running back, accompanied by more spearmen, all in an ugly mood. “Is this an attack force?!” he demanded. “Coming to rescue you?”
“So,” Ty said, “you know what those are?”
“The pods you use to fall out of orbit, when you want to land a person quickly. Now, answer my question.”
“This is Blue territory,” Ty said, then held up a hand to suppress Donno’s inevitable protest. “According to Treaty. If Blue forces were coming to rescue us, they would simply fly over the mountains from Qayaq — much easier than dropping people forty thousand kilometers from the habitat ring.” He was willing himself to maintain eye contact with Donno and to keep his voice as relaxed and conversational as he could manage. The spearmen had fanned out to form a ring around their little camp, aiming the points of their weapons inward. Einstein really didn’t like that, and Ty could hear links of chain clicking through the loops on the younger man’s collar as he edged closer.
“Who are they, then?” Donno demanded.
“By process of elimination,” Ty said, “they are Red.”
“But you said you consider this Blue territory!”
“Yes. You might be interested to know,” Ty said, “that this makes it a breach of Treaty, and an act of war.”
Donno stood gobsmacked. Ty was tempted to say Welcome to the modern world! but instead he added, “You might wish to keep this in mind, if you sign a treaty with them.”
A grizzled crow landed on the ground nearby, and addressed Ty. “We are coming.”
THAT THESE DROP PODS WERE OF MILITARY DESIGN WAS OBVIOUS from the way they came in: fast. Each had a set of vanes, mounted near the top, that sprang out when it was a couple of thousand meters above the surface, slowing its fall. But not until the pod was just a few tens of meters above the ground did its retro-rockets come on: not just one but a circular array of thumb-sized solids that created a cylindrical piston of fire on which the pod eased to a stop, coming to light on a tripod of buglike legs that deployed themselves at the last possible moment and absorbed the shock of contact.
The first thirteen drop pods landed in a nearly perfect circular formation, about a kilometer down the valley. As soon as they touched down they sprang open. Their hatches faced inward. The pod-ring thus presented nothing but armored backshells to any foes outside of it. Any foes inside were in for a bad time.
Seconds later a fourteenth pod landed in the center and a man climbed out. On his signal, the thirteen somersaulted out of their pods and rolled sideways onto their bellies, looking outward into the space beyond, which was now well illuminated by blinding lights shining from the backshells. In actual battle the next procedure would have been to start killing anything they could see, but instead the leader shouted a command that caused all of them to stand up, holster their kats, and dust themselves off. Ten of the thirteen were Neoanders. Three others had the more normal modern-human look. Those, and the one in the middle, were likely B-types, or Betas: the most numerous of the Aïdan subraces.
The peloton — for that was the Aïdan term for a unit of this size — adopted a parade rest position, facing outward and resisting the temptation to watch as four more drop pods landed in the space they had just circumscribed. The occupants of these were a little slower to climb out. It seemed evident that they were civilians who hadn’t done it before. While they were doing so, another pod landed, this one outside the circle; it was of a somewhat different design, used to land cargo. The peloton moved forward to form a loose perimeter around this one. The civilians opened it and removed various items: most obviously, a few sections of tubing that they snapped together to form a pole. To the top of this, they affixed a circular hoop, creating a rather more stylish and high-tech version of the circle-on-a-stick totem that the Diggers favored. Below the hoop they tied on a red, fork-tailed streamer, known in Blue vernacular as the Serpent’s Tongue, frequently used as a Red emblem in battle or, more usually, athletic competitions. And below that they attached a large white flag.
The performance was so amusing that even Ty, who knew he should be attending to other things, was a little surprised when he noticed that the half-dozen Digger warriors surrounding their little camp were all lying on the ground twitching helplessly. This had occurred so recently that some of their handmade spears were still toppling to the ground. In one of those peculiar, focused insights that comes to one when things are happening very fast, he noticed that the leaf-shaped spearheads had been hand-forged, and wondered idly if the metal had been scavenged from the truck they’d excavated.
Naturally he looked toward the explosive device on the nearby cairn. He saw that the wires had been severed. A hand the size of a dinner plate appeared above the top of the cairn, scooped up the explosive charge, and hurled it into oblivion.