A thin gray layer was skimming over the ground, headed downhill toward them. It looked a little like a spent wave as it washes and foams over a flat beach just before settling into the sand, parting around rocks and recombining in their lee. More like an avalanche, though, in that it gathered speed as it came on. As it rushed past Ty and the old man, parting around their feet, he was able to focus and resolve it as a swarm of ambots of two different types—one type from each of the crates that had emptied themselves. They were all mixed together. Once they chittered past Einstein, Ariane, and Kath Two, they spread out across the flat open slope separating them from Beled and Bard. Those two were split out to the sides, just beyond arrow range. The swarm then forked as all the ambots of one type converged on Beled and all those of the other type made for Bard. The former group—the Blue-pattern ambots—were smaller, leggier, and quicker on broken ground. That swarm gathered itself together into a clicking, glittering, hissing firehose stream and leaped from the ground at Beled. Rather than striking him, though, it washed around him. In the interval of a few moments he was clothed from head to toe in an armor made of overlapping scales, each scale being the beetle-like back of an ambot. They had swarmed over him and locked themselves together. A few strays clambered over the others’ backs seeking, and plugging, holes.