Great Sky River Page 11

  Killeen nodded. “Must be ’nother those—”

  “Watch!” the woman called.

  Killeen peered back at the sprawled carcass of the Mantis. Over the far brow of the hillside came four navvys. They picked their way down, stopping often for long moments. All of them had crosshatched side panels, much like the one Killeen had seen back at the ’plex.

  “Damnall!”

  The first navvy to reach the base encountered a piece of the Mantis and hoisted it aboard, fitting it securely atop the carryrack.

  “Assemble,” the woman said.

  “What?”

  She said nothing. They watched silently. Killeen helped Toby up onto the brow of the gully and a few others joined them. There were dozens of Mantis parts and the navvys carefully dealt with each one.

  Killeen studied the navvys with eyes slitted against the combined glare of Denix and the Eater. Too late now he understood that the Mantis had taken advantage of the two-star glare. Even augmented as they were, a heritage handed down from centuries before, humans could not see as well as mechs in either dark or searing bright. Against the Mantis’s illusions they were blind.

  And the Mantis had caught them when they were least guarded, most open and humanly vulnerable. Killeen clenched his jaw regularly, as though chewing on this fact.

  He did not want to walk back onto the plain behind them, to see who had fallen. He had seen too much of it in the last few days. The sensorium carried skittering wails of despair, of horrible surprise.

  There would be time for that. He watched as two navvys met and mutually put their loads on a bare rock platform. It would make as good a workbench as they seemed to require. One navvy sprouted a set of fine-pointed tools and began to take apart a chunky, half-ruined segment of the Mantis.

  “They’re fixin’ it,” Toby said wonderingly.

  “Seen before?” the woman asked.

  “Naysay, nothing like,” Killeen answered. “But the mainmind—”

  “Not one mind.”

  “Howcome?”

  “Easier heal.”

  Toby put in, “Easier bring it live again, too.”

  “That, yeasay.” The woman pursed her lips, as if tasting a possibility she didn’t like.

  “Looks like they’ve found a way to disperse the mind into different parts of the Mantis.”

  “One stupid, many smart?” she asked distantly.

  Killeen saw what she meant. If intelligence could be made up of many dispersed pieces, each of low level, but each contributing a vital fraction of what was needed for a much smarter mech… “Maybe. Then the navvys come in, fix it up. Maybe replace one of the small minds if it’s dead.”

  “Then waking again. Thinking. Hunting.” Her ebony hair was arabesqued in coils that had a blue sheen. It made a woven pattern almost like looking at tightweave with a close-eye.

  “A new kind Marauder?” Killeen asked.

  The woman arched her bushy eyebrows and said nothing.

  “We can’t kill it?” Toby asked, hobbling around to test his leg.

  “Not unless you skrag the whole works,” Killeen said, starting to figure in his head. He estimated without numbers, just judging by the feel of his memory. Answers popped into his head and he didn’t stop to wonder whether they came from Arthur or some other techAspect he carried. He simply said, with assurance, “We barely got enough ammo. Maybe could pound each piece of that Mantis. Be real close though.”

  Toby said, “I’ll help!”

  The woman frowned. “Too much.”

  Killeen agreed. “We skrag it, we’ll use up most our armament.”

  “Dangerous.”

  Killeen looked questioningly at her and saw she meant not immediate threat but rather the challenge that Marauders like this represented. A new mech idea.

  Toby scrambled away, looking for weapons, his leg working like a stiff rod but well enough to carry him. The woman said nothing, just watched the navvys slowly dragging parts together. Her breathing was so shallow it did not flex the exskell. Time-softened gray tightweave clung to her body. She was thin but her supple curves stood out against the unavoidable rigidities of her armor-web exskell, making her seem a feminine prisoner in a black cage. He wondered how she powered it. Then he noticed the back of her shirt zipped down; she must have opened it while she loped back from the Mantis. Photovoltaic eyes turned as she moved, following the ultraviolet mana of the Eater.

  All to drive a shell which brought her muscle power up to the level of others. In her, the genetic pruning for greater strength had failed. Her metabolism converted food less efficiently into power. She needed this ribbed husk to keep up with the rest of her Family. Their rules were harsh. A member who fell behind died.

  He asked, “Think we should skrag it?”

  “Must.”

  “I’ll get Ledroff, some others. Those navvys’re funny-actin’, too. We’d better plan on taking them out from a distance. No simple disconnect.”

  “Time.”

  “What? I figure hours before they’ve got all the parts—”

  “No. We mourn first.”

  He nodded. It had been better to stand here and think about the Mantis than to go and find the friends hurt or dead or even suredead. But now he had to.

  “You’re… ?”

  “Shibo.”

  “Family Rook?”

  “Family Knight.”

  “This isn’t your Family?”

  “I meet them. My Family gone.”

  Her eyes regarded him flatly, giving nothing away. She had not come from his Citadel, for there had been no Knights there. So the other Citadels had been destroyed, too.

  Killeen had come to feel that his loss was as great as anyone’s, but this woman before him had lost her entire lineage and faced as well the insurrection of her own weak body. He had myriad questions to ask her, but the wan and pensive gaze she turned on him erased all thoughts in the enormity of its unstated implications.

  “Let’s go. The Families’ll need help.”

  He helped her surmount the gully and cross the bleak landscape strewn with the newfallen dead.

  PART TWO

  The Once-Green World

  ONE

  He came awake but did not come alive. He heard and saw nothing.

  Killeen had to guide him only a seeping perception of gradients in temperature. He was lying on his belly and felt a thin chill steal up into him from the dank ground. It was as if the soil itself struck upward into him, slow and methodical, spreading through his jumpsuit, into groin and hip, creeping across his chest and into his shoulders. His arms were crossed, his forehead resting over them. In his nostrils the chill sank upward into his oozing sinuses. The sharp bite of it kindled spatterings of rosy heat in his eyes.

  He turned his head. No sight, no sound. The shredded heatspurts dwindled. As if in reply, crosscut sensations of bitter cold lashed over him. He felt crisp warm waves ripple his still-numb skin. Elusive traceries of dulling cold fought across his face. Thermal battles mixed the two in whirling knots he felt as pinprick flares, darting in hard vortices, sputtering. To his surprise the flux resolved not into minute threads of hot and chill but instead into what they had been all along: voices. The tiny, mingled, raucous speech of his Aspects.

  The Grail will brook no mealymouthed stalling now Arthur. We have got to force these people to move and right quick, too.

  Got to get shelter.

  Mantis—don’t understand it.

  Can’t take these losses.

  Of course, I feel quite as threatened as the rest of you by the reckless way they have been squandering opportunities. They could have followed the path we advised back at that place—what was it?—Lost Mother Ridge, that was the name. If they had, we would almost certainly have reached a Casa. I distinctly remember a Casa near there. Nialdi, your memory for the grand old days surpasses mine. What was that Casa called?

  It was Oasis Godstone. I blessed the site myself at its consecration to our cause.


  Ah yes, a lovely event, I’m sure. There were so many in those fine centuries, when we had proportioned way stations between the Citadels. What wealth! We traveled without fear nipping at our heels, never bothering to carry water or provisions, for we knew they lay a mere short-march away, in Casas or Citadels where—

  1. Stick to topic.

  Very well, Bud. You needn’t be snippish. As I see it, with the remaining maps, we could still retrace our steps and search for Oasis Godstone. Spotty and dated as the maps are, of course I cannot be sure, but my calculations—

  They’ve erred far more, Arthur, by ignoring the words of our Fellowship. The vouchsafed command we carry from the first days here—nay, from the Providential Truth made known unto us from aeons immemorial!—definitely shows that this wandering in a mechmade wilderness is a wrongful path to the eventual resurrection of us all. My halfdead brothers, if we are to walk the land in strength and fullness, we must pull together.

  I take offense at your hectoring, Nialdi. Your medical skills I respect and do not deny, but—

  I am a spiritual guide to the Family, as well! I was encased as Aspect for my moral sense, not merely—

  Pulpit-pounding not same as wisdom.

  Stick to what we can do now.

  What we must do, my stunted little Face friend, is exert leadership. This blighted desolation wherein we so humbly lie is an abomination! Our dwindled-down Family still carries our honorable name and is still capable of attaining the heights humanity once harbored—

  How we go?

  Anyplace better than this.

  Maybe build ship.

  Lost lastship 269 years ago.

  You are leaping too far ahead, Bud. I am quite aware of the mech atrocities which resulted in our losing the last of the starships which bore us to this hive of gargantuan—

  Mech devils! Use no other nicey-nice word for it, Arthur! These are unholy—

  Hard to build ship.

  Have to make Citadel first.

  Nobody knows shipcraft now.

  Don’t talk so fast you two.

  I’m only a Face you know.

  All this went by in a shredded heatpricked blur. Killeen lay motionless.

  Somewhere in him sentience and volition were unjoined wires trying to snugfit again. The heat-spilling voices blended with chilly tremors in his eardrums. Their tangential argument resounded in sweeping thermal bellnotes—vexed, rambling, incoherent.

  He focused himself and wrestled back command of his sight. A square in his left eye filled with dawn-gray radiance and a fuzzy rounded edge of a stone.

  He felt the voices shrinking, talking even more rapidly now. His blunted, part-blinded sensorium translated their speech into waning thermal codes. Rude dashes of hot and cold rushed over his chest and neck, blaring. Arthur and Nialdi and Bud didn’t want to shrink back into their cramped cells. They called to him.

  Penitent you be who jostles into silence the word and wisdom of and from your forefathers! Dare you not—

  I believe you could benefit from this discussion yourself, Killeen. I fully grant your need to arise and see what is happening, but I suggest you will find much of what we say germane to the situation now faced by both Families. We need to work out a strategy based on careful assessments of potentialities and risks, including—

  Listen, Killeen, I can figure for you.

  You give me time I could take apart that Mantis.

  See how it works.

  He swept them away, squeezed them toward their crannies.

  Into Killeen’s eyes leaped angular blocks of light. His blindness fluttered away. The outside world rushed at him. He turned his head and saw the dry plain surge and twist, stretching away. The Family was sleeping. The Eater was a hazy violet whirlpool squatting above a distant mountain peak.

  As his Aspects relinquished his perception-processing space, he caught the dusty savanna scent, mingled with fragrant human musk. His ears crackled, letting in the wind-whisper.

  Aspects needed time to sense the world directly, not as mere leftovers. That kept them from becoming dry, husk like embodiments, slow to respond, little better than an ancient library book. When Killeen was awake, they got snippets of the world, sitting behind his consciousness. As he slept, they could raise his eyelids, catch glimpses that gave them a gratifying sliver of experience. Such thin gruel was all they got. They listened through his eardrums, savored his sensorium—while also providing the service of isolating him, ensuring deep sleep.

  Aspects craved the rush of perception, for it was all they now knew of life. As he awoke, Killeen could not hurry matters. He had to let them withdraw slowly, yielding up chunks of his sensorium sadly, one at a time, as they retreated into their bleak cells of chipstore.

  This last night, Killeen had let out two Aspects, Arthur and Nialdi. They were his strongest and needed the most airing.

  Bud, the Face of an engineer killed by a Snout centuries ago, was a powerful presence despite his limitations.

  Faces were partial recordings of the dead. A brain deprived of oxygen, or whose nervous system was badly shocked by death, could not be fully Aspected. Personality was far harder to extract from a mind sliding into the swarming dark. The Family saved only the dead’s expertise and craft.

  Such a recorded Face gave some dim aura of the original person, trimmed and slow-thinking. Bud had been a fine translator of mech signs. He had even mastered some mech languages, back when humanity had contact with renegade mechs. Killeen had grown impatient with the Face’s slowness. Sometimes he thought Bud was not even a Face, and belonged with the lowest personae, the Analogs. Still, Bud proved useful for finding an entry into a mech or figuring the arcane designations on mech parts.

  Killeen got up, feeling muscles knot. Yesterday’s terrors had become morning aches. He blinked his left eye and called up the Bishop Family topo. Toby’s orange icon said he was still sleeping, halfway up a sheltering arroyo. Good. The boy needed his rest.

  Killeen walked stiffly toward a distant knot of Family. They had all dispersed for the night. The two Families were spread down a ridgeline and a sloping valley, an hour’s hardmarch from the destroyed Mantis carcass. Any hunting Marauder-class mech would stumble on at most a few of them, and alert the rest. Killeen switched on his functions as he walked, bringing himself back to full sensorium. Sleeping in the open, their best defense was to shut down any inboard systems that the mechs could sniff. As he rounded a wind-worn rock jut he felt the reassuring ping of his abilities returning.

  He was startled when a form unfolded from an impossibly narrow crevice. It was Shibo.

  “How you get in there?”

  “Curl. Safer.” Her eyes were red from crying but her face bore no memory of it.

  “Any trouble last night?”

  “No.”

  “The watch see anything?”

  “No.”

  Killeen wanted to talk to her but his mind whirled, empty. Her one-word replies didn’t help.

  “Wakin’ up, I’m always ’fraid I won’t get all my ’quip-ment up and running.”

  “Yes.”

  “Always has so far, though,” he said lamely.

  “Yes.”

  “You ever have any go bust overnight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fix it?”

  “Face did.”

  Without even an extra Um-hmmm to help he found it hard to go on. Yet something about her made him keep rummaging for things to say. Her finely made weapon bespoke abilities unknown to Family Bishop. And her cool, self-contained certainty was intriguing.

  He gestured at his left eye. “What’s your count?”

  Shibo blinked, one eye gazing distantly at her Family scan, and a moment later she said, “Eighty-seven.”

  From the pause he knew she relied on an Aspect or subself to give the number, the same as he. “Family Bishop’s down to one six six in number. We lost twelve yes’day.”

  “Family Rook, twenty-six.”

  He paus
ed as Arthur did the arithmetic for him. “Thirty-eight gone in all. Damn!”

  “Together now two five three.”

  “Yeasay, sadsay. And of two five three we got maybe a hundred really workin’. Rest are hurt or old or kids, like Toby.”

  She nodded and then said, “Good. Children.”

  Killeen saw what she meant. “Yeasay. Least the Rooks got children. We had nine babies born since the Calamity. Two were stillborn. Rest were feeble or deformed or died on the march.”

  They walked for a moment in silence. To be born on the march with any shortcoming meant the mothers killed them. Killeen did not want their conversation to end there. He was breathing a little deeper with the exertion of keeping up with her. She moved with a quick, efficient scissoring of muscled legs. Her exskell whirred like a strange mechanical pet.

  He tried again. “Wonder why the Mantis didn’t hit any kids yes’day?”

  Whereas Family Bishop had lost all but Toby, the Rooks had, through luck or some intuited skill, kept some young ones from the Marauders. But they had no babies.

  “Smaller target.”

  “Don’t think that’s it.”

  “Puzzle.” Shibo shook her head at this further unfathomable facet of the mechs. The Mantis had surekilled the oldest in the two Families. Some said that the elders had died first, and that the Mantis then worked its way through the clotted throng of merged and still jubilant Families, striking down humans as though it sensed their age. Moase, the aged woman who had the best mech translating skills, had fallen.

  The Mantis had seemed to skip over easy young targets, even if they were standing next to the newfallen. Killeen doubted that such shooting was possible in the swirl of suddenly frightened, scattering humanity. Still, it was easier to think of the children’s survival as great luck than as another troubling feature of the Mantis.

  They reached the huddled members of both Families. Quietly they sat, obeying an old rule that no one stood while rest was possible. Killeen felt his calf muscles stretch with the night’s cold still in them.

  Tutored by Nialdi, he had used pressure at skull and spine to temper the strain. But the old ways could not erase all the damage.