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.