Neal Stephenson - Seveneves

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.

The Cyc stepped closer. Bard risked illuminating her with a dim light. She was holding the lump of explosive in her hand. It must have rolled down the slope toward the main Digger encampment.

“Sonar Taxlaw,” Ty said.

“You remembered!” she exclaimed. Then, apparently as some sort of explanation, she offered: “Volume seventeen.”

“Okay, Sonar,” Ty said, “you are free to go. Or you can come with us. As much as I would hate to deprive your folk of their knowledge of the last part of the S topics and the beginning of the Ts, I recommend coming with us.” He was working out how to explain matters to Sonar without taking all night, but Sonar abruptly said “Okay!” and, in her scurrying way, fell into step with them.

“You can leave that,” Ty said, nodding at the lump of explosive.

“A mixture of RDX with beeswax and vegetable oil,” Sonar said helpfully. “It will not detonate without—”

“I know,” Ty said, “but we don’t need it.”

Sensing eyes upon him, he looked toward the massive silhouette of Bard. The Neoander’s face was in darkness, but Ty could guess that it bore an incredulous expression. “I’ll explain later,” Ty said.

They walked briskly uphill for several minutes, their view across and down the valley improving as they went. Far below them, the Red delegation had been ascending toward the glider encampment at a stately pace, following in the footsteps that the Seven had made yesterday. Quite clearly, they wanted to be as obvious as possible, and so they were advancing in a pool of brilliant illumination made by portable lanterns, which the members of the peloton were aiming toward the center. The same goal — not seeming to sneak up on the Diggers — might have been achieved simply by waiting a few hours and doing it in daylight. But that was just typical Blue thinking. They were doing it at night for the sheer drama and pageantry of it, this being the sort of thing that Red, by and large, was simply better at than Blue. Ty almost laughed out loud when they got to a place where they could get their first clear look at the approaching spectacle. He was comparing it in his mind to the pitiful show that the Seven had put on yesterday. Of course, the Seven had been surprised, so it wasn’t a fair comparison. But the Diggers would not be making allowances for fairness. What they were seeing was probably a lot closer to how their folk, stuck underground, might have been imagining this moment during the last five thousand years. A tall Aïdan with a mane of glossy black hair preceded the rest. He wore some kind of ceremonial robe that streamed in the cold wind draining down the valley and glowed warmly in the light shone on him by the peloton. Advancing with a measured tread, he held the hoop standard in an absurdly dramatic pose with his upper hand reversed so that the thumb was down and the palm faced forward. It was meaningless but it looked great. A few paces behind him walked an older man with gray hair swept back from his high brow and a neatly trimmed beard. His robes were more subdued but, one suspected, really smashing if you could see them up close. A gold chain around his neck supported a medallion on his chest. His right arm was extended to cradle the left hand of none other than Marge the Digger, whom he was escorting up the hill in the manner of a dad giving away the bride. She was wearing what she’d last been seen in, supplemented with a warmer garment thrown over her shoulders like a cape. It kept trying to fall off as she waved her free hand over her head, signaling to her Digger kin that all was well. When they recognized her, they shouted words of greeting and she waved the more vigorously; her cape fell off and was replaced by one of the uniformed Betas.

Even at a distance it was obvious that the standard bearer and the one escorting Marge were Aretaics, which was to say, Aïdans of the first line of descent, presumably conceived as competitors to the children of Eve Dinah. They were tall and long-maned, with magnificent noses and excellent posture.

A few paces behind Marge and the senior Aretaic were a Camite and one of the Betas, walking abreast. They were joined by a pole about two meters long; each of them supported an end in the crooks of her elbows. In the pole’s center was a gleaming lump about the size of a person’s head, which any Spacer would recognize as a small nickel-iron asteroid, as common in space as dead leaves were on the reforested surface. But rare down here, even after the Hard Rain. Ariane must have told her higher-ups about the truck, what the excavation of its engine block said about the lengths that the Diggers would go to in order to get their hands on a bit of metal, and how grateful they would be for such a gift. Or perhaps Ariane had been broadcasting the entire mission to Kyoto through some covert, encrypted channel. Anyway, it would make a better token of friendship than a busted shovel handle.

Two of the members of the peloton were musicians. At a certain point one of them began to beat a drum that was harnessed to his midsection, and another began to play a melody on a shiny horn. Ty was convinced he’d heard it in the Epic somewhere, but it took Bard to place it.

“‘Bread of Heaven,’” he said. “It’s what Rufus and company were singing when they welded themselves in.”

“Also known as ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah,’ or in the original Welsh, ‘Cwm Rhondda,’” added Sonar Taxlaw.

“ Fuck, these people are good!” Ty exclaimed.

“How long do you suppose they’ve been preparing this?” Bard asked.

“They have been way ahead of us for months. Maybe years,” Ty said. “But having said that, there’s little in what we’re seeing that couldn’t have been thrown together in a few hours.”

“Confirmed,” said Beled. He had let Kath gently to the ground, where she now lay in a fetal position curled about his shin. He was looking at the procession through optics. “The ring at the top of the standard? It is an exercise hoop covered in silver tape. The white flag? A bedsheet.”

“Do we even need to bother watching how this goes?” Bard asked.

And then he looked to Ty to give the answer. It had not been a rhetorical question. He was awaiting orders.

Beled Tomov looked at him too.

“How is she?” Ty asked. “Pulse, respiration okay?”

“I think it is the usual,” Beled said with a nod. Meaning that abrupt hormone shifts in Kath’s system were giving her something akin to morning sickness. Her microbiome — the ecosystem of bacteria that lived in her gut and on her skin — had been thrown into disarray, and she was being colonized by any old germs, including ones from the Diggers that had never been exposed to a Moiran body.