Great Sky River Page 12

  There was desultory talk between Ledroff and a member of the Rooks, but Killeen could not keep his attention from the cairn around whose base they had gathered. He had helped fetch and roll stones for it as halfnight gathered. The four-sided pyramid thrust up from the valley floor. Crude edges protruded. “Bad work,” he muttered to himself:

  “Naysay. Good,” Shibo whispered in response.

  The planes of the sides should have been flatter, and the edge-angles were off, but Killeen felt a warmth at hearing her words. He had gotten little praise lately. And he did feel some pride in having labored into the halfnight, just him and five others still strong enough. The Families had shared the carrying of the suredead, which exhausted many. Once Ledroff called a halt at this valley, some whined that it was too late, they were too tired to do the right thing. Killeen and Cermo and some Rooks had shaken their heads, silent in the face of such laxity, and had done what they knew to be correct.

  The pyramid rested on the suredead, encasing them protectively. No ordinary passing mech would dismantle a human burial site. That rule had been handed down from centuries before. It was the last vestige of a time when a grudging equilibrium had held between the human Arcologies and the machines.

  The dead would rest undisturbed. Killeen was tired and dragged in each breath as if it was a labor. But he was proud of having stuck to the old ways. A dim buried image came to him, of a far grander pyramid striking up from tawny sands, piercing a pale blue sky. It dwarfed the puny humans gazing up at it. Even the carved stone blocks that made it were taller than a man. He had seen it before, flitting before his eyes for an instant at earlier such burials, floating up unbidden from some deep Aspect. He did not know where the huge pyramid had stood, majestic in its silent and eternal rebuke to that which had struck down the humanity within it.

  “Killeen?”

  Ledroff’s voice carried mild irritation. Killeen realized his name had been called before and he had not answered.

  “Uh, yea?”

  “The Mantis. How long you think before navvys reassemble it?”

  “Never, I hope. Think we got it all.”

  “You yeasay, Shibo?” Ledroff asked.

  She shook her head. “Knownot this mechtech.”

  “You can’t say?” Ledroff looked annoyed that no one could give him clear answers.

  “Didn’t plug every ’ponent,” Killeen said. “Not enough ammo.”

  A man named Fornax leaned forward. The Rook Cap’n had died yesterday and this man seemed to step naturally into the position. He was worn and wiry, with a drawn look to his face as though he had seen too much he didn’t like and was going to see more. Long grooves ran from just below his eyes, creases like rivers which were fed by interlacing tributaries that spread across his cheeks. “This Mantis, figure it’s just passing?”

  Ledroff said, “Could be. We had a run-in with ’nother.”

  “Same Mantis,” Killeen said.

  Fornax scowled as if he didn’t want to believe it. “Sure?”

  “I took a leg strut from the first. This one had a gimped-up leg.”

  “Could be accident,” Ledroff said.

  “Damnsight strange, then,” Killeen said dismissively.

  Fornax said, “We never saw a Mantis. Heard ’bout somethin’ like it, though, from my mother.”

  Shibo murmured, “Mantis kill Knight.”

  Fornax looked puzzled. “Yousay Stalkers, Lancers, Rattlers did it. They surrounded you Knights, yeasay?”

  Shibo said impassively, “Mantis lead them. Mantis take us if escape.”

  Ledroff asked, “You mean Mantis led the Marauder group?”

  Shibo nodded silently.

  Killeen asked, “How’d you get away?”

  “Crawl into rocks.”

  Killeen remembered her sleeping place. “When was this?”

  She paused, consulting an Aspect. “Six years, ’bout.”

  He regarded her with respect. She had lived for years on her own. “Then the Knight Citadel fell ’bout same time’s ours. We call it the Calamity.”

  Fornax nodded, his eyes hooded. “Ours, too. We held the Marauders two days. Then they broke our walls and drove us out.”

  Killeen said, “We lasted three. Some said they saw somethin’ big, big as the Mantis, in the distance.”

  Fornax sighed. “Easy to mistake. Lots wild stories then. What’d Mantis be there for, anyway? Bunch of rods and pods. Don’t look much like a fighter.”

  “Mantis quick,” Shibo said.

  Ledroff said. “I figure it got lucky, is all. Caught Fanny at a bad moment. Killeen got it with one shot, ’member.”

  Killeen said, “It was me was lucky, not Mantis.”

  Ledroff shrugged this off. “It jumped in right when we were distracted. Families meetin’.”

  Shibo shook her head again in a slow, sad way but again said nothing. Fornax was eyeing her closely, as though she were a rival. Killeen knew this could not be, though, for no matter how good Shibo of the now-gone Knights was, she could never be Cap’n of the Rooks. So Fornax must be learning things he had never heard, even though Shibo had been with the Rooks for quite a time.

  This didn’t surprise Killeen. She spoke little beyond the essential. Killeen had heard from Cermo that she had been living on her own, in the shadow of a mech factory, when the Rooks passed near. They accepted her, but the Knight ways were different. She ate and worked and marched and sexed her own way—in fact, was close with no Rook at all. Fornax felt that.

  Killeen said, “Mantis has brains in all parts. So we plugged as much as we could.”

  Ledroff said, “I grant we’ve seen no such mech before. But we got it this time.”

  Shibo shook her head. “Mantis replace.”

  Fornax twisted his face into a look of dismissal. “With what? We left its parts on the ground!”

  “Something could carry parts for it,” Killeen said mildly. “Maybe even mechminds.”

  “Easier to send ’nother Mantis,” Fornax countered.

  Killeen answered, “Not if it’s specially made.”

  “For what?” Fornax asked.

  “Hunting us.”

  Fornax slapped his knees in derision. “All Marauders hunt us.”

  “Marauders do jobs, not just look for us,” Killeen said. “If they see us, they track. Attack, if looks right. Not able to send illusions straight into us like Mantis, though.”

  Fornax sniffed and shrugged. “Lookyou, I know you downed the Mantis.”

  “Twice,” Killeen said.

  “Good. But no reason make big noise ’bout it.”

  Killeen knotted his fists and made himself say nothing. There was no room for dispute between Rook and Bishop.

  “How you suppose it knew where so many of us were together?” Ledroff said, obviously breaking in to soothe matters over.

  Shibo said, “Made.”

  “What?” Fornax asked.

  She looked at him with eyes of pearly white against a skin long tanned into a deep though somehow translucent mahogany. “Made us meet.”

  “Our two Families?”

  “Yeasay.”

  Fornax said loudly, “Nossir noway! We sighted a Baba Yagga two days back. Came this way, gettin’ clear. Saw a Rattler crossing on a far ridge, south. Just accident we come down that valley, makin’ distance from the Rattler before we turned south again. Just—”

  He saw the point then and stopped. There came a long silence as Killeen felt the true enormity of what they faced. The Mantis was using Rattlers and Baba Yaggas and all the other Marauders. That undoubtedly included whatever had cornered them back in the Trough, and surekilled Jake. All to drive the Bishops toward the Rooks and in the moment of their meeting harvest a field of death.

  Jake was a minor loss, compared to the catastrophe which had hardstruck them in the moment of their human vulnerability. The joy of reuniting and rekindling the human connections which were in the end what made them human at all. That had been slamshut
in a grotesque instant. And now the survivors carried the inner festering sore of that moment too well remembered, the acrid welding of jubilation with terror—and that union, too, would exact a price. Killeen felt without thinking through it that the Mantis was far more understanding of humanity than any mech had been. It knew how to wound them in their selfhood, their abiding sense of community. And was therefore far more dangerous than any crafty Lancer or Barb.

  TWO

  The two Families decided that morning to continue with separate Cap’ns. A single Cap’n would mean a single Family. Losing a full Family from the Clan was intolerable. Likewise, neither Family would accept its own formal end.

  The talking took hours. Ledroff and Jocelyn negotiated with the Rooks at a full Witnessing, since the Rooks had no Cap’n. They observed all titles and rituals and other proceedings, not hastening a single phrase or gesture. Each step carried the same liturgical gravity and sober, attentive detail as had been the tradition for centuries.

  There was a quietly forlorn and obliging comfort in this. Humans used the shaping and polishing of phrases as a refuge from the raw rub of their lives. The telling of stories, the artful arch of talk—these made ornate and prettily baroque what otherwise and most logically would be usually a swift and simple business. This, too, gave them the momentary soft shelter of the vast human heritage, even though only half-remembered, fogged and blunted. They talked on, relishing.

  In the Citadels such conversations had followed on a month’s rapt preparatory gossip. Witnessings were once wreathed by ceremony in arched, chromed vaults. Now their high officers conferred as they squatted, scratchy and grimed, about the rude pyramid of the newdead. Once each Family had numbered thousands. In this tribal talk no one yielded even a phrase which admitted to their shrunken status.

  The Rooks made Fornax their Cap’n. They would have integrated the Family Rook topo display into his sensorium, too, as was traditional. But the woman who knew how to do that was a wizened old techtype named Kuiper, and she had fallen the day before.

  Fornax and Ledroff seemed not to get on well. They did agree that the Families should march. It was risky to remain anywhere near the Mantis carcass, even after its dismemberment. Passing Marauders could perhaps repair it. And there might be more than one Mantis.

  Killeen felt a vague unease, for no one seemed to have grasped the essential difference between it and the other Marauders. The Mantis died but rose again. It seemed to have been designed for persistence, for unflagging and remorseless energy and especially for tracking humans.

  Only the narrow human sense of category had lumped it together with the Marauders, as though the Clans were unwilling to grant it in their language the status of a preserve beyond and above the well-known pillagers of human destiny. Though they knew of vast mech cities, of bewildering constructions and enterprises unfathomable, something in the human spirit drew back from assigning a name or emblem to the unreachable heights a Mantis might imply.

  No one had ever seen anything like a Mantis scavenging or navvy-policing or hunting the assets of other mech cities. It was not from a class of laborers. Unlike Marauders, it did no apparent work. It had no known interest but human-hunting. Killeen’s own father had sighted something resembling the Mantis a few years before and lived to report it. Clannish legend spoke of various seldom-seen mechs, striding down through centuries of obliterated foraging parties and terrifying moments when many-legged silhouettes scrambled across a distant horizon. These higher orders left broken lives and widestrewn suredeath, but even more tangibly now they bequeathed to the Families a tradition of inherited horror, both ghostly and undeniable, living in the dry sure images of Aspect memory as well as in rumored encounters which few humans ever survived.

  It was impossible for Killeen to believe all this could be due to the Mantis.

  Killeen’s own father had carefully laid out for his son the whole litany of Marauder types, the slow, resonant precision of his voice bespeaking the high human price that learning each facet had cost—and, if forgotten even for a terrible moment, could cost again.

  Killeen now knew each Marauder signature from experience in the open ground. But even more strongly he felt it in the remembered mournful way his father’s voice had lowered as he gave over to his son the ancient folklore and skills. Thing about aliens is, they’re alien, he had said innumerable times. With a gravelly chuckle he would add, Plan on bein’ surprised.

  The most terrible fact of all was that Marauders killed only as a side task. Even Lancers, the vicious, darting, smalleyed protectors of factories, would attack humans only at the factory site.

  Only the Calamity contradicted this rule. Perhaps it was fitting that his father had fallen at the Citadel Bishop, for that had ended an era. Killeen had not seen his father’s end, had caught only scattershot words over the comm while himself fleeing with Toby, and heard later the lists of those gone. So the details, perhaps best not known, had mingled with so many other questions, lingering in the twilight of all things unfathomable.

  In the freshening air of halfmorning they harvested the property of the dead. Killeen found himself a bubble pack made of some shiny mechstuff he had never seen before. It saved him kilos of carrymass and caught snugly at waist and hips and shoulders. Each of the dead yielded up their compacted food and water flasks, by far the most useful of the mute legacy.

  Killeen stood and chewed on a wad of tough gum that Old Robert had been carrying. He watched Cermo fit himself with a carbo-aluminum set of shank compressors, clasping the mechmetal so it snugged into his flared-out boot cuffs. Others wore makeshift hip shock absorbers and double-walled helmets, loading themselves up with equipment Killeen full well knew they would spend a week discarding as it proved heavy or vexing. Killeen preferred to carry food and fluids and forget the extras. Twice he had broken ribs in falls because he’d worn no chest protector.

  While others hammered and fitted, Killeen rested, using only his web-jacket as a pillow, and hooked a derisive eyebrow at the softrolls some toted to sleep on. He had to stop Toby from trying to load on a cook-kit. It was a marvelous little thing, subtly shaped from flexmetal by some ancient hand. It would flare into life with bluehot flame. But it gave the boy too much packmass and Killeen had no idea how to find the fuel for it. He seldom ate cooked food anyway. Marauders could sniff the fumes halfway around Snowglade, he suspected.

  The Families slowly pulled themselves together as morning stretched into noon. Ledroff and Fornax consulted their Aspects and argued over what route to take. Killeen stayed out of it. Jocelyn invariably backed Ledroff’s ideas, and gave other small signs that her relationship with Killeen was now cool at best. Killeen shrugged this off, though it hurt a little.

  The Families were listless, the emotional backwash of yesterday leaving them pensive and slow. He felt some of it himself. It mingled with his hangover, from a small transparent vial of aromatic fruit wine he had found on the body of Hedda, a woman of the Rooks. He had shared it out with three Rooks and Shibo. Even a cup of its amber silkiness held a vicious punch. He had not sipped much but still he was ashamed that he had fled into drink again. A thickening headache spread across his brow and burrowed into his eyes. That reminded him of his trouble seeing detail at long distances, so he went in search of Angelique.

  She seemed to welcome his asking, and broke out her tools. Killeen had always rather liked the feel of being worked on as the camp commotion around him gradually quickened. He relaxed into the softness of humanity, the implicit reassurance of daily ritual.

  He was sitting rock-still when he noticed the woman nearby. Angelique was tinkering with the farseer at the back of his neck. He couldn’t turn his clamped head but he did shift his eyes a fraction. The woman was unnaturally still. He swiveled his eyes farther. Even this made Angelique grunt and hoarsely swear at him. She was the last Bishop who knew anything about farseers. She made a few adjustments in his neck, slapped the fleshmetal cover closed, and poked him sharply in the ribs with h
er fibertool. Killeen yelped.

  Angelique said coolly, “Just checking your reflexes. Seem fine.”

  “Like hell.”

  “Next time sit still.” Angelique grinned and walked away, her chromed leggings reflecting crisp Denix-light.

  Killeen massaged his neck and tested his eyes by closeupping the woman nearby. She was a Rook, young and well muscled. Her black hair swirled up from her temples like an ebony firestorm, poking jagged teeth into the air. He zoomed in on her eyes and saw there blueblack threads entwining with crimson blood vessels. She sat stiffly, unmoving, head canted as if she were listening to someone unseen.

  She was. Her lips moved rapidly, soundlessly, as she tried to give voice to the torrent of Aspect talk that raged through her.

  Killeen had not seen anyone so possessed in a long time, not since the retreat from the unfolding disaster of Big Alice Springs. Drool formed on the woman’s lips. Her left hand began to jump. In a moment a twitching around her right eye seemed to answer the hand.

  Killeen sent a signal to Fornax. It was his job to take care of his own. Toby came ambling over, his pack already mounted, and stared at the woman. “Jazz, a clowner,” he said.

  “Don’t call them that.” Killeen said, watching the woman carefully.

  “She’s really goin’.”

  “Be okay.”

  “Don’ look it.”

  “Gotta expect some of this.”

  “I don’t’spect it.”

  “Aspects die if their hosts die, y’know. They got a righta be scared.”

  “What’re they doin’?”

  “If they get panicked, they start talking all at once.” Killeen felt awkward apologizing for somebody else’s Aspects.

  Toby stared with the unashamed fascination of the young. “Can’t she turn ’em off?”

  “Not if they’re all goin’ at once.”

  “Why’re her eyes rollin’ up?”

  White showing all around her irises. Lips pulled back in a rictus from yellowed teeth.