“White Head . . . Sims,” he said over his shoulder, not taking his eyes off the intruder. “What kind of thing is this?”
“There were metal mules, called trucks, as well as metal birds. That was how they rode,” White Head told him.
“Did you ride in them?”
“I never did.”
“I rode in trucks sometimes—when we worked making roads,” Sims said. “I never learned to drive one. After the Long Night and the Terror, I forgot much. Seeing this makes me remember things.”
“Are these your gods or your devils?” Gap Teeth asked, clutching his spear.
“We have nothing that devils would want,” White Head answered.
Parts of the wall on both sides of the truck swung outward to uncover openings. Two figures emerged, halted briefly, and then moved forward. A third appeared behind them but stayed back. Rakki’s eyes widened as he looked. The third was carrying a gun. Then, behind him, two females appeared from the truck. All except one of the females were lightskins, like Shell Eyes and Yellow Hair from the caves, and as Bo had been. The female who was different was not dark but colored a lighter brown. They were all wearing thick Oldworlder-style garments from their necks to their feet, and some had headdresses, in one case attached to the wearer’s garment. From somewhere to one side, Rakki caught a snatch in the wind of the droning sound that told him the gray metal bird had returned.
* * *
Keene came around in front of the Scout, and Naarmegen joined him from the other side, while Jorff climbed out with a rifle cradled non-threateningly at port-arms position and took up a watchful position just ahead of the Scout. Ivor remained in the driver’s station with a channel open to Serengeti and a couple of the Scout’s external cameras trained on the scene. Beth and Maria got out behind Jorff and stayed by the doors. Keene and Naarmegen went forward slowly, Keene with hands on hips, near his automatic, the holster flap open, Naarmegen showing empty hands. The hope was that Naarmegen’s earlier life in South Africa might have left him with the smatterings of some kind of speech that would be understood.
“How are we reading?” Keene checked, speaking to the wrist compad that he was wearing.
“Fine,” Ivor’s voice replied from the Scout. Then, after a short pause, “Gallian up in the ship says you might be about to make history. He wants to know what it feels like.”
“Tell him it’s not exactly the uppermost thing on my mind right now,” Keene replied.
Four had come up from the huts, all dark-skinned. Curiously, the two who appeared youngest were in the center and seemed to be the dominant ones. They were scantily clad in loin coverings made from skins, and ornamented head coverings, both ferocious in appearance, with wild manes of hair, muscular, sinewy limbs, and hefty shoulders in proportion to their relatively small physical size. Keene was unable to guess at their ages. He’d have said the bodies were in their teens, toughened and scarred, but the faces were those of hardened adults. One, he recognized by his headgear as one of the two riders caught in the first view from the probe. He seemed to be the leader and moved with a dragging limp, which from the shape of his leg was caused by a bad break that hadn’t been set properly. He was wearing a tattered cape-like garment and wielded as weapon what appeared to be an old machine part or maybe a structural member, with a wicked-looking cross-piece sharpened to an edge. The other, carrying a small hunting bow with a stone-tipped arrow strung and ready, had something like a vest, with armholes, open at the chest, and was making strange grimacing expressions that revealed discolored teeth, many missing.
Of the two older men, one was shrunken and wrinkled with white hair, probably the other rider from the probe’s picture, Keene guessed. The last, carrying a stone-tipped spear, was coffee-colored and looked dirty and somehow unkept, even for a place like this, his body emaciated by sickness or maybe simply the stresses of the past years.