“Good.”
“But some of what you say confirms suspicions that I have harbored in my breast since the coming of the Red people, and so I have made up my mind to go back and speak to the others of these matters.” And then he simply turned his back on Kathree and began hiking back up into the mountains of Beringia.
“I KNOW YOUR STORY, TYURATAM LAKE,” SAID CANTABRIGIA FIVE, “OR at least the portions of it that have made their way into official records.”
“Half of it, then.”
“Be that as it may, I sense how distracting this must be for you.” She made the tiniest suggestion of a glance up the slope. Even though her eyes were screened by the lenses of a stylish varp, their golden hue magnified the gesture. “Part of you wishes to join the battle. That’s commendable, but I need you—the Purpose needs you—here.”
“Fine. You have my attention,” Ty said. Inappropriately, irrelevantly, he was wondering how old this woman was. Epigenetic shifts could roll back many of the visible effects of aging. At least one Moiran, Jamaica Hammerhead Twelve, had lived to the age of two hundred. Ty’s estimate of Cantabrigia Five’s age increased by a decade every time he interacted with her. Currently he was thinking that she might be eighty years old.
“What do you know of the Pingers?” she asked.
“In all honesty, they sound more myth than fact.”
“Myth carries more weight anyway, in times like these.”
“What do you know of them?” Ty demanded.
For once, Cantabrigia Five seemed a little off balance. She looked at him sharply, lifted her varp, rested it on the top of her head.
“I need to know,” Ty said, “whether they came out of some Red gene lab.”
“Red doesn’t even know they exist,” said Cantabrigia Five.
“Did we make them?”
“Blue? No, your hypothesis was correct, Ty.”
“And how would you know what my hypothesis was?”
Her eyes strayed to the pizza box, which was leaning against a boulder that protruded from the beach. “I know what is in there.”
“Thank you,” Ty said. He turned away from her and began striding in the direction of a tall young Ivyn, standing on the beach and gazing up nervously toward the sounds of battle. “Einstein! Eyes on me. Time for you to make history.”
CRACKING A WHIP MADE OF SMALL ROBOTS JOINED END TO END into a long, flexible chain was neither an especially bad nor an especially good way of engaging a foe in ambot-based combat. Extensive studies conducted within Blue military research labs had concluded that, on average, it was somewhat less effective than the more obvious procedure of just shooting individual ambots out of katapults. A dissenting opinion held that such studies were flawed because they failed to take into account two factors that were important in actual battle: One, the psychological impact on a defender who knew that the attack might literally whip around and come at him from any direction, including around corners or over barricades. Two, the element of skill, which was difficult to measure scientifically; the test subjects wielding those things in the lab were unlikely to have the same knack for it as Neoanders who had grown up using them and who had access to an ancient body of lore—a martial art, in effect—that they were disinclined to share with anyone else. If the whip was allowed to dissociate in midcrack, then its component ambots would be flung toward the target at supersonic velocity, which was as good as could be achieved by shooting the same objects out of a katapult. If it made contact with the target, direct physical damage would be inflicted and the ambots that had inflicted it could decouple themselves and carry out their usual programs. And if the whipcrack was off target, the chain could be recovered in full with no waste of ammunition. All the ambots came back for another attempt: something that certainly could not be said of ones that had been fired out of kats.