“Shall we bury the body?” Bruno asks Natan, who is the most senior Dolceti he feels he actually knows.
“If you like,” Natan replies, “but the Gillem patrols will do a better job of it when they find him. If the wolves don’t find him first.”
“Hmm. That seems a bit callous. Did you know him? Was he a friend?”
“We’re all friends,” Natan says with no particular emphasis. “I’ll miss him. But I’m embarrassed for him, too. That stupid son of a pig has eaten the berry and taken the training.”
“Had the reflexes and didn’t use them,” Zuq agrees, and there are murmurs of assent all around as the Dolceti walk their treaders off the road.
“Would you rather he’d died in battle?” Bruno asks, partly out of politeness and partly because he’s genuinely curious. This isn’t the reaction he would have expected.
And Natan compounds Bruno’s confusion by laughing. “In battle? Against whom? Dying is sloppy.”
“Er, perhaps if the odds were overwhelming?”
“All the more reason to duck out of the way, I’d say.”
And with that, Bruno feels his first tingling of unease about these Dolceti. Is this bravado a part of their esprit de corps, or do they simply lack a background in failure? “Anyone can die,” he cautions. “Everyone will, including yourself. If you fail to believe that, you’ll never take the proper steps to protect yourself.”
“You’re telling me?” Natan says, unimpressed. “I took a vow, sir. I’m dead already. But I’m still effective, see? Still enjoying the pleasures of life. When I finally screw up, I don’t want nobody being proud of me for it.”
“I’ll spit on your grave, sir,” Zug offers, to general laughter.
But Natan answers, “You’ll lose it before I do, boy. Even blind, you’re too slow on the left. Got a lazy limbic, you.” Then to Bruno he says, “Come on, I’ll show you how to recharge your treader.”
And this too is perplexing, because Natan is rolling his own vehicle into the trees. Is there some sort of fuel depot back there? In this nowhere spot on this nowhere road? But the man drops a kickstand, pulls out a pair of sharp metal spikes, and unreels a few meters of two-stranded, rubber-insulated cable. And finally Bruno understands.
“The trees store an electric charge.”
“Course they do,” Natan says, pulling out a mallet and driving the longer of the two spikes into the black-on-black trunk of the nearest specimen. “What do you think they’re for?” He pounds in the shorter spike a hand’s breadth below the longer one, and suddenly a yellow electric lamp is glowing where the handlebars of the treader meet in the center.
And now Bruno can picture it: a dielectric in the “bark” and “wood” which drives electrons inside the trunk and won’t let them back out again. Or ions, perhaps, if the storage medium is chemical rather than capacitive, but either way they’d be separated by a barrier layer, which the longer spike is designed to penetrate. Half of it had been insulated with some sort of tar compound, yes? To keep it from shorting against the outer layer, which makes contact only with the shorter spike. Current flows, yes, but only through the storage battery of the treader.
The electrical systems of Timoch suddenly make more sense to Bruno. Is electricity a harvestable commodity here, like grain or walnuts? Is it shipped to the city in barrels and consumed directly, without transmission over long wires?
“How long does it take to charge?” he asks Natan, whose shrug is barely perceptible in the darkness.
“Depends on the tree, but most will charge a lot more batteries than a treader can carry away. And the more charge they have, the faster they deliver it. Call it half an hour, more or less.”
Right away this tells Bruno that the trees and treader batteries are chemical in nature, because capacitors or superconductors could be slam-charged or discharged in mere fractions of a second. But they must be big, clever batteries to store so much energy, and the charging circuitry must be fairly sophisticated or the batteries would deteriorate in mere months. Yet again Bruno finds himself reassessing his opinions of Luner culture and technology.
So he hammers in his own spikes and goes off to look for Radmer, to obtain a complete explanation.
Unfortunately, Radmer isn’t in a talking mood. He’s found a laminated wooden helmet of the sort worn by civilian treader pilots.
“The force of the blow,” he’s saying to Bordi, and pointing to a gore-spattered gash across the laminate, “is considerable. The blood is still tacky. Bandits would hide such evidence, not leave it beside the road. There’ll be bodies nearby, and not a scrap of metal anywhere near them.”
“Alert for danger!” Bordi calls out to his men. “Search the area by fours!”
“The refugees?” Bruno asks.
Radmer looks up from the helmet and says nothing.
“Why would they target civilians?” Bruno presses. “What’s to be gained? They can’t be acting out of malice.”
“Greed,” Radmer corrects. “Civilians carry metal, and the robot scouts are careful not to leave witnesses behind. And if they were traveling on the road we’d’ve heard the alert drums; there’d be semaphore towers dropping off the network left and right. The patrol must have been traveling north, just cutting across the pass, and these people were simply unlucky. Wrong place at the wrong time. With a rich haul the robots would have turned back to the south, to deliver it to some Nubian foundry, or maybe take it all the way back to Astaroth. We don’t really know what they do with it, except that their numbers swell in proportion with the tonnage they cart away.”
“They’re feeding a fax machine,” Bruno says, eyeing a little termite mound beside the road. “Nothing else makes sense, and anyway it’s a fine, cheap way to conquer the world. To raze it, to impose a viewpoint upon it and build it afresh. If you had the machine, I daresay you’d be tempted to try a stunt like this yourself. All they need is metal.”
While he speaks, Bruno keeps his eyes on the termite mound. What do these creatures live on, he wonders, here in this solar-tree desert? He crouches to watch them streaming in and out of their nest, but in the darkness he can’t see what, if anything, they’re carrying. To feed themselves, to swell their ranks. To fill the planette to the very brink of its termite-carrying capacity. He’s impressed that they continue working in this total darkness, but given the trees, he supposes it might not be much brighter during the day.
“And it’s a bad sign,” he continues, “to find scouts this high, this far north. How many patrols are in these mountains right now? How long before they identify us as a strategic threat, as opposed to a merely tactical one?”
“These robots got eyes,” volunteers one of the Dolceti. “Not in their faces, maybe, but they see things.”
And Bruno says, grimly, “Perhaps more than you think. Even if these termites were natural, it would be a trivial exercise to reprogram their colonies to serve as sensor networks.”
“Well,” says Radmer, “aren’t you a barrel of laughs?”
From the forest comes a strange cry: Thawt! Thawt!
“The owls seem to think so,” Bruno says dryly. But Radmer and the searching Dolceti tense up at the sound, looking around nervously.
“What is it?” Bruno asks.
“A thrat,” says Bordi, his eyes on the forest.
“A threat?”
“A thrat,” Radmer corrects. “A sort of bird you find sometimes in the solar-tree forests, or the pine barrens. There it is. Do you see?”