Ty unlatched the lid of the box and began to take out pieces of equipment and to peruse instructional brochures. Kathree was too far away to see the details, and in any case it was getting dark. As the sky faded, she could see Ty sitting on the shore of the islet, facing out toward the sea, occasionally flicking on a small light and fussing with equipment. Perched next to him, swaddled in sleeping bags that Einstein had brought out to her, was the Cyc. She wore a bulky pair of headphones, occasionally turning her head toward Ty in an alert birdlike way to make some sort of comment. Esa Arjun paced slowly back and forth on the beach, just out of the waves’ reach, passing occasionally near Einstein, who just stood there gazing fretfully at his beloved. Hope had gone to ground in a small tent pitched a few meters higher up, on drier sand; a bluish flicker through its walls suggested he was working with a tablet, maybe trying to learn something about POTESH management.
So much for the lower camp where Hope, Ty, Einstein, Sonar Taxlaw, and Arjun had made themselves at home. Beled had followed Kathree uphill. Langobard and Roskos Yur later followed him. Spreading out, bushwhacking in all directions, they identified a curved brow in the slope: the line of demarcation between the crater’s inland edge and the preexisting landscape from which it had been blasted. Above it, the slope was much gentler. Indeed, the first thing one saw upon cresting the rim was a slight drop in altitude. Before them, as they stood with their backs to the sea and their faces to the mountains, was a bog a few hundred meters in extent, with a pine forest rising up on its far side. They backpedaled a few paces and set to work establishing an upper camp just below the summit of the rim. Few words were spoken, but it was obvious that its purpose was to defend the beach if and when Red forces approached. If the foe came straight down out of the mountains, they would have to cross the bog. If they came along the beach, they would have to scale or circumvent a prong of the crater’s rim. Either way, they would be clearly visible from this vantage point.
It could be guessed that an ONAN had struck the ground somewhere nearby, several decades ago. Seed-packed siwis had slithered out of it, roaming about, mapping elevations and soil moisture, comparing notes over a mesh network. The collective had noticed the break in the slope leading down to the sea. Following a program drilled into it by some coder up on the ring, it had decided that the coastline might be stabilized here by planting some seeds that would grow up into tough, low, scrubby vegetation. And so it had all come to pass. Siwis that happened to wander away from the beach had found the flat ground beyond the rim and planted it with different species that would thrive in a wet environment. The vegetation had created a bit of a natural dam, holding back water coming down out of the mountains above them. One day it might be a lake, but for now it was a black bog, squishy and knee-deep and screened with grasses and reeds that favored that sort of ground.
Kath Two had not been a fighter. Her weapons training had given her the bare minimum of skill needed to discharge a katapult in the direction of a hungry canid. Kathree didn’t know, yet, whether that was one of the things that had shifted. In a sense it did not matter. No matter how good she might turn out to be at combat, she would never be as effective as Beled, Bard, and — judging from appearances — Roskos Yur. She was, however, finding them to be a dull, slow bunch. They failed to notice much that was obvious to her. And it was clear that they were tired and fading toward sleep. After it had gotten fully dark, Kathree consumed three consecutive full meals from the rations that Roskos Yur had brought with him, then slipped away and climbed a short distance farther up, to the very top of the rim, from which she could look and listen inland.
When she returned, she startled Roskos Yur, whose steady breathing had been audible from a thousand paces away. He’d been asleep, or close to it.
“You should warn me when you are approaching, Kath Two!” he hissed.
“She’s dead.”
“Kath Three, then.”
“No one is coming,” she said, “at least not for a few hours.”
“Not unless they drop from the sky,” he retorted.
Langobard, ever sociable, had approached. “They will not come by air,” he said. “If they can take us out quietly, they will do so — and never say a word of it. But to make a full assault? That would clash with the narrative that they are building for the consumption of the people of the ring.”
“When are we going to begin writing our own fucking narrative?” Yur said. And there the conversation stalled.
But his question was answered an hour later when Kathree, then the rest of them, discerned a whine and a rumble coming from the direction of the water. Running lights appeared over the horizon, coming from the south over the limit of the world, but then winked out as the pilot made the decision to run dark. It was clear from the sound, and from the way it hugged the water, that this thing was neither an airplane nor a ship but the in-between thing known as an ark. They heard it sough into the water a kilometer away and switch over to the chugging engines it used to maneuver on the surface. It dropped anchor several hundred meters offshore: well away from the land, so as to respect the hair-trigger sensibilities of the Diggers, but close enough that people and gear could be ferried to and fro on small boats. It opened its big rear cargo ramp, allowing the sea to flood its interior and float a collection of small boats and barges that had been packed aboard. On one of these, a small party came ashore. Kathree heard them conversing, mostly with Ty and Arjun, though Einstein as usual found a way to make himself part of the action.
A barge from the ark had been towed into the open water between it and the shore, and anchored. The sounds coming from it spoke of complex mechanical internals. After a few minutes it began to rumble and hum, and a fountain of glittering flynk chain, an upside-down U, grew out of its top and began to extend skyward as its velocity built and its sound sharpened into a steady keening note. Within a few minutes the aitrain had elevated to a height of perhaps a hundred meters and begun to give off a soft light, filling the cove and the beach with enough illumination for people to move about easily and read documents. Kathree could now read the name of the ark, blazoned on its fuselage near the nose: Darwin. It must have been sent out from a big TerReForm base — most likely Haida, which served the northern Pacific coast.
The aitrain that they had deployed on the barge was a common enough military device. As such it was probably radiating in other wavelengths besides just visible light. It was a sort of all-in-one communications hub that was interconnecting everything that had line of sight to it, as well as uplinking to Denali and other installations in the ring.
Sleep was now out of the question for Kathree, and so she made her way down the crater to the beach. When she emerged from the brush she discovered Einstein and the Cyc, standing next to each other in a crossfire of lights, facing a camera. To one side, sorting through notes, was a new arrival, a tall Moiran woman with the posture, the self-possession, and the golden eyes of a fashion model. She wore clothing suited for the chilly, damp coast of Beringia. It hung on her slender but strong frame in a way that suggested it had been made for her, probably by a clever designer on the Great Chain.
Kathree didn’t have to get any closer to understand what was happening: the tall Moiran woman was producing just what Roskos Yur had asked for. She began by talking directly into a camera for some time, then interviewed Einstein and the Cyc. It was all being beamed live to the ring.
Kathree sat alone on the beach, hugging her knees and watching the woman do what she did and wondering what events in her life had caused her to shift into what she was now, so tall, so lovely, so watchable. She did not have the manner of one who had been born beautiful, which made Kathree suspect that she had come by it through some kind of personal disaster. After she was finished doing her interviews, she shut down the lights and the cameras, approached Esa Arjun, and stood face-to-face with him for a while, just talking. Both of them had put on varps and Kathree got the idea that they were conversing about whatever it was that the devices were projecting into their eyes.