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 A?dan subraces.
The peloton—for that was the A?dan 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.
Beled had materialized near the wooden stake, which he was examining in something like wonder. After trying its connection to the end of the chain, he knelt down, gripped it with both hands, and began pulling. Langobard, now that he’d dispensed with the explosive, loped over to join him. Squatting, he scooped away some dirt to get better purchase, and added his strength. Half a meter of the stake suddenly emerged from the ground, causing both men to tumble back. From a semi-reclining position, Bard swatted at it with one hand, as if shooing away an insect, and snapped it off at ground level. Ty, Einstein, and Kath were still chained together, but free to move.
Since Bard was now operating in a more stealthy mode, he was not surrounded by a whining complex of aitrains; rather, he had gotten all of his flynks jacked together into a single long rope that was looped and draped around his torso in a complex pattern that Ty had seen before, and that he supposed had been developed by Neoanders over thousands of years.
Ty reeled the stake fragment in, hand-over-handing the chain through his neck collar, and grabbed it in both hands like a club. He used its free end to scatter the campfire and darken the encampment. Kath, still half in her sleeping bag, was up on all fours, vomiting. Beled strode over to her, scooped one arm under her midsection, hoisted her up, and slung her over his shoulder. He had not really broken stride, and so the other two prisoners were now obliged to go with him. Langobard trailed the group, impulsively snatching up a spear—as a keepsake?
It had not been the most surgical extraction in the history of warfare. It was very far from being the most cack-handed, however. More fighting might have ensued had the main encampment of Diggers not been utterly transfixed by the approach of the Red delegation. Ty was just allowing himself to believe that they’d gotten away clean when he heard a voice from out of the dark, only a few meters away:
“I found this.”
Directly the speaker was painted by a crossfire of red lasers from Beled’s and Bard’s katapults. In the dark it was impossible to see her face, but Ty had already recognized the voice. “Hold your fire,” he said.