Ty was dragging the old Digger back toward Ariane and Kath Two and Einstein, who had prudently flattened themselves behind a brow in the slope that afforded some minimal protection against direct arrow shots—though none against plunging shafts. The next time he turned around to look downhill, Bard and Beled had vanished, and the only clue as to where they had concealed themselves came from the movements of a few straggler ambots striving to catch up with them. Part of him felt let down that they had not advanced in force and simply destroyed the Diggers. A better part of him understood that they were too smart and too professional for that; they would find cover, hang back, observe, and wait for cooler heads to prevail.
Ariane was darting back down the hill. She picked up Ty’s katapult from the rock where he had set it down. Good.
Excited sentries, posted up in the rocks that flanked the valley, were hollering news of Bard’s and Beled’s movements in the Diggers’ oddly biblical phrasings. It sounded as though the Teklan and the Neoander were moving rapidly to high ground.
One of the sentries blurted out a sharp cry and went silent. This distracted all the other Diggers for a few moments.
Ariane ran uphill a little past Ty, dropped to a knee, and pressed the muzzle of Ty’s katapult against the back of the neck of the woman who had killed Memmie. This woman had collected herself to a seated position on the ground and had been holding one hand over the eye that Ty had earlier poked.
Ariane’s gesture was a curious one, recognizable from pre-Zero filmed entertainment as the sort of thing you would do with the sort of firearm that projected dumb lead bullets at high speed. It made less sense with a katapult. But as nonverbal communication with the Diggers, it worked.
“Three hundred meters downhill of the glider,” Ariane was saying, presumably to the same imaginary friend she had addressed a little earlier. Then, to the woman, “Get up. One way or another, your mind is about to get blown.”
Ty heard himself let out a little snort of suppressed laughter. Apparently the part of the brain that identified things as funny kept running as a background process even when its contributions were useless. The way Ariane was moving, the things she was saying, were so out of character for her that Ty’s higher brain didn’t know what to make of it; in the meantime he was chuckling as if watching some sort of comedy sketch.
The woman got her feet under her. Ariane grabbed her by the hood of her parka and pulled her fully upright, then began marching her down the hill with the kat’s muzzle pressed against the side of her head. Ty stood there and watched her go by.
“Ariane,” he said, “what are you doing?”
“You don’t seem to realize,” she said, “that this changes everything.” She let the katapult drop away from the woman’s head for a moment, then swung it up and aimed it at Ty. It gave off the characteristic whang of an ambot being shot out of its muzzle and then she put it back against the woman’s head.
Ty felt the impact like a punch in the rib cage and recoiled from it instinctively. But even before he could recover from that, the ambot had entrenched itself in his clothes, extruded a couple of needle-sharp probes into his side, and begun jamming his nervous system. Having been hit by these before, he knew that the best he could hope for was to strike the ground with something other than his face, so he released his grip on the shovel handle, and on the old Digger, and went down.
Had he been able to speak, he’d have told Kath Two not to worry about him—to do something about Ariane. But his teeth were banging together too hard to form words, and it was all he could do to keep his breathing muscles working.
The old man staggered away, fell to his knees, and found the shovel handle on the ground right in front of him. He grabbed it with one hand, planted it, grabbed it with the other, and used it to lever himself back up. He advanced on Ty, who was just lying on the ground in spasms. Ty was then aware of a dark shape above him, and looked up to see Kath Two standing over him, facing the old man, raising an arm instinctively to defend herself. The shovel handle struck that arm with a thud and sent Kath Two stumbling away, crying out in pain. The man then raised the pointed end of the stick above Ty.
“Iniquitous mutant!” he cried. Then he added something that was drowned out by the whang of a katapult. Kath Two, using her own sidearm, had shot him in the belly from point-blank range. The stick dropped from the man’s hands and added to Ty’s inventory of minor aches and pains as it came down point first on his chest. The man toppled next to Ty, going down hard and banging his head on a rock.
Suddenly Ty was in the clear, at least neurologically. Einstein, kneeling above him with a bone-handled knife, had pried the ambot off him, and now used the knife’s steel pommel to smash it to bits against a rock.
Kath Two was down on one knee moving her damaged arm about in slow motion, her mouth frozen in the O of a suppressed scream.