They Also Serve (11 page)

Five straight red lines appeared. "Mary will drill some holes where you see the red lines. There're not a lot of cracks in those areas. She'll set off small explosives to create more cracks," Ray finished with a glance at Annie. "I imagine they'll do the drilling where there's no grass."

"I don't expect anyone thinks she'll not harm a few blades of grass," Annie said practically.

"Oh, no," all three disagreed. "Mary said she wouldn't hurt a single blade," Rose said. "She won't," David assured them.

Jeff could not suppress a smirk. "Maybe we can get these kids to make your report to the Greens?" Annie deftly turned herself out of the arm he had around her waist, swatted him with her apron, and went back to unloading her wagon. Jeff followed, mouthing apologies Ray suspected were as ancient as language.

"Oh, look—one of the red lines is turning yellow." Jon's announcement kept the youngsters focused on what they considered the best show. Ray checked; yes, the drilling had started. He surveyed the hill and spotted a dust plume rising from behind a mixed bunch of green and blue trees. More excited oohs were his reward for pointing it out to the kids. Jeff also must have been successful. He returned with his reward, a large bucket of fried potato wedges. Annie followed with a much lighter handful of condiment. For the next half hour Ray divided his attention among three dramas: Mary's mountain preparation, the kids' reactions, and Annie's courtship. All were amusing.

"Fire in the hole. Fire in the hole," echoed over the hill. "Stand clear of trees and
anything else that might take it in its mind to fall on you," Cassie announced dryly on net.

Ray suggested the kids count off the seconds until the explosions. They were at twenty, after a bit of an argument about what came after ten, when the ground trembled beneath their feet for a long second, then went back to being terra firma. The children jumped, startled when the explosion came, then launched into a dance. "Mary said she wouldn't knock even us down. And she didn't," they chortled.

"What's 'fire in the hole' mean?" Nikki asked.

Daga shook her head. The others just stared back dumbly. Then the earth started doing a jig where they hid, watching. Nikki had not understood a thing of what was going on around them, and was growing more and more scared with each passing minute.

The thumps had been the first to jar Nikki's nerves, and they were none too good after hiking out here, listening to Jean Jock and Sean ramble on about the heads they'd knock to keep the fields their own. Every time Daga opened her mouth, Nikki shushed her, scared her friend would tell the others about how she could make mountains disappear. Daga didn't much care for Nikki's shushing, and took to swatting Nikki even before she opened her mouth.

Of course, Daga never said anything about the box.

It wasn't just the boys who bothered Nikki. Three strangers, familiar to the others, joined them. Wrapped in hooded cloaks that must have been horribly hot, they said not a word. The woman seemed to be the leader; at least she set the course, and the two men followed. Even Sean deferred to her. Daga said nothing when Nikki asked who they were.

When Nikki pointed out that her sister Annie was parking Da's rig under a great oak, and they must be where they were going, the three had stopped in the shadow of a Popsicle tree. Nikki listened to the wind whistle through the long, hollow sticks that gave the tree its name and waited for someone to say something. The three just stood, watching the starfolks as they disbursed over the next hill. The woman pointed and the three, closely followed by Nikki and the locals, silently took up their observation post in a shallow depression beneath a pine tree.

There they waited.

The thumps were the first things to get their attention. "Like they've got a giant over there, pounding around on the mountain," Daga joked. The two locals laughed as they usually did when Daga said outrageous things. The woman stranger turned to Daga, seeming to seriously consider her ridiculous comment, then went back to observing.

Nobody had an answer when Nikki asked, "Well, what is it?"

Then they let steam out of the mountain. At least that was what Sean said it looked like. He'd been around when Jeffs brother Mark had been prospecting in these hills. He'd seen the steam-driven hammers they brought in to drill holes and stuff. "They'd get a roaring fire going under this big cylinder, and have big, thick hoses leading off from it, with steam hissing and sizzling out of them wherever it could. I saw a guy get boiled just for standing too near one," Sean insisted.

"Go long with ya," Daga insisted.

"Maybe they're setting up a thing, like you know?" Nikki whispered to Daga.

"Why would they be doing all this if they had something like, you know?"

"Maybe they want to aim it right," Nikki shot Daga the dirtiest look she could manage.

"What are you girls babbling about?" Jean Jock wanted to know. The woman stranger flashed Nikki a look that chilled her.

"Nothing," Daga answered. '"Nothing at all," she said, shooting Nikki back just as mean a look. "They don't have anything like it," Daga whispered.

"You hope," Nikki said, looking purposely over her shoulder, as if to see a bunch of marines setting up a hill leveler behind them. Daga looked, too.

"See, nothing."

"They have a ship up in the sky," Nikki reminded Daga, almost hoping something would go wrong, something would show her friend there were things to be afraid of.

"What are you two girls gabbing about?" This time it was Sean. He wouldn't be put off with a "nothing."

Then the earth started dancing.

Nikki and Daga took off running, the young men right behind them. Even the strangers hauled up their cloaks and hoofed it like mad. Nikki swore she wouldn't stop running until she got back to the fields. If they wanted to stop her, they'd have to kick her feet out from under her, like the boys sometimes did in football when the umpire wasn't looking.

* * *

"Who are they?" David asked, stopping his dance and pointing to a bluff just across the stream. Ray looked where David pointed, catching sight of dull-colored clothes just as they disappeared over the hill.

"Some other Green observers," Jeff suggested, glancing at Annie. She shrugged.

Ray scratched his chin; the show hadn't really begun. Maybe he should send a marine to round them up, bring them down here, where he could make sure they got the full story. He glanced at Annie. "Should I get them back?"

Annie laughed. "I doubt you could catch them, from the flash of their heels as they headed over that hill" Ray turned back to his reader. New lines appeared on it. Black lines. Ray told the reader to rotate the picture. Soon they were viewing it from a bird's perspective. "Those are the insertion points, pretty evenly spaced across the hill. The miners will pour the nanos down those holes, and drain them out the bottom of the mountain."

"How?" David asked. "I know Mary told us last night, but I still don't get how the little miners know where Mary wants them to go once they have a load of stuff."

"Gravity is part of it," Ray tried to explain. 'They know to go downhill, just like water knows to flow downhill."

"Water doesn't know anything," Rose said with the sophistication of her city education.

"Who says water doesn't know to go downhill? It always does," David insisted.

Ray's respect for anyone who could teach children was rapidly climbing. Now if he could just find someone to respect. Jeff knelt between David and Rose. "What we're trying to say is that gravity pulls everything down, water, a leaf, you, Rose, when you hopped off the priest's cart, the nanos in the hill. I imagine she's also told the nanos that she wants then to head for the east side of the hill." He glanced at Ray, who nodded solemn agreement. "Not all the nanos will make it to the tunnel that Mary digs to drain them out. What's her normal attrition? I mean, how many does she normally lose?"

Ray grinned as even Jeff had trouble finding small words for little ears. "Sometimes as few as one in a hundred."

Jeff whistled low. "That good. I've read science articles from the Landers' time. They talked about that kind of stuff in the future. I wondered if you ever got it."

"It's working up there right now," Ray assured him.

David's "wow" was quickly echoed by Rose and Jon.

Mary was bringing the crew down off the mountain. They collected at the base, where Mary personally supervised the drilling of three twenty-centimeter conduits into the mountain—one directly in, the others at thirty-degree angles to the right or left. Once those main taps were almost halfway through the mountain, Mary turned loose remote drillers— ferrets, she called them—to drill ten- or twenty-millimeter holes in a wider pattern.

Ray scowled at the ferrets. They, and the sensors and laser designators Mary had used to defend her pass, were what had put Ray flat on his back by the end of the battle.
Live and learn, old man, live and learn
. While the ferrets were busy at work, Mary called it a morning and brought the work crew back to camp.

"Chow ready?" she called.

"Waiting for you!" Annie shouted.

"We have stew," Annie announced as the women and men trooped up to the tree. "We have a turkey sliced thin for what we call sandwiches. And me mother personally prepared chicken to her family's special southern fried recipe. Potato salad goes great with that, but we also have them fried, baked, and mashed." Apparently no dinner here was complete without potatoes. Most of the crew was in, but not all. Ray watched two figures, locked in energetic conversation, slowly follow the rest. Dumont and the padre, if Ray made them out The priest's gestures were slow, measured. Dumont's gesticulation was wild, including a rapid series of shaken fists at the blue sky. As they approached camp, their talk became lower, if no less animated.

Ray did not wonder at the topic. Dumont was Mary's murderer. Without a moment's hesitation, he had followed an admiral's order to shoot
Sheffield
's gunnery officer, an illegal order if Ray had ever heard of one. The only mitigation Mary could offer for her sergeant was that their basic training had been abbreviated, stripped of anything not relating to how they might kill the enemy. Ray couldn't throw too many stones Humanity's way; Unity had pulled some pretty raw and illegal things out of the shadows before he'd succeeded in putting it out of business. And late at night, Ray sometimes didn't feel all that good about what he'd done, either. Maybe he could spend some time with the little padre himself.

Jeff offered Ray a hand up; he took it. Mary met them with a question. "Southern fried chicken—south of what?"

Annie shrugged. "South of the Covenanters, I guess."

Whatever it was south of, the north had lost out. Jeff helped Annie tap a keg. "One glass, and a small one at that!" Mary shouted. "We got work ahead of us and I'll have none of my good metal going back into the ground because you had to belch." That brought good-natured grumbling that turned to happy noises when Mary promised no limits once the day's work was done.

The kids ate like they'd never eaten before, then dashed off to see what was happening. Mary assured Ray that the gear was both kid-proof and unable to hurt them. David was back in a few minutes, announcing that they had found a pond, and could they go swimming? Jeff and Annie galloped off after the kids to make sure they hadn't gone in alone. Mary assured David that the day was hot and everyone would want to swim later, but only after all the work was done.

Jon and Rose came dashing back ahead of their elders dispatched to corral them. "We found a cave. Can we explore it?"

Mary shook her head. "Caves can be dangerous. There might be a bear hiding in the back."

"What's a bear?" Rose asked.

"Something big and hairy that eats little girls who ask too many questions," Jeff said. Having finally caught up, he grabbed Rose from behind and whirled her over his shoulder as she shrieked and giggled.

"It's not really a cave," Annie explained. "Just a bit of an overhang left from the landslide that dammed the stream."

"I'll look at it later," Mary said. The kids found that half promise acceptable. After lunch they joined the workers as they trooped down to the minehead to see what had happened while they ate. A trickle of muddy water was flowing out of all three tap pipes, gathering in a catch basin that one of the trailers had turned out to be.

"A lot of work for dirty well water." Jeff raised an eyebrow to Mary.

She only grinned. "Jeff, you come over here and throw the switch yourself. Nanos are programmed to hold on to their load until we tell them to let go. Why don't you do that yourself."

Jeff's eyes lit up until Mary lifted a flap and he found himself facing a massive keyboard. "What do I do?" he squeaked.

"Don't worry. One of the kids could do it." Which got shouts of "Me! Me! Me!" from all three. Annie held them off while Mary walked Jeff through a dozen or so keystrokes. Then Jeff, Mary, and Annie held the kids up to watch as the muddy water in the tank changed. Multicolored sand precipitated to the bottom, and an oily film collected at each corner of the tank where vents drew them off. The resulting water was crystal clear.

"I'm thirsty. Can I have a drink?" Jon asked.

"Not of this." Mary was quick to pull back a hand dipping into the water. "I'll want to
run it through the filters several times to make sure we get all the nanos out. You wouldn't want to drink a nano, would you?"