Great Sky River Read online

  Killeen let his breath out slowly. Best to stall. If Hatchet found some way of going around Killeen, of get ting what the Kings wanted without using a translator, all hope for Toby was lost. “Yeasay… yeasay.”

  “Damn right,” Hatchet said severely. “Talk out loud, too. I want hear everything.”

  “Yeasay.”

  Hatchet nodded imperceptibly to the other Kings. They relaxed slightly.

  Wants you all come.

  Show you what to take.

  “How long will it be?”

  No measure.

  Killeen whispered, “Crafter won’t say.” The longer they spent here, the greater the danger. Some Marauder would see them.

  Have to march some.

  “How far from here?”

  Can’t understand its units.

  Some other stuff, too.

  I’m only getting about half what it puts out.

  Thinks boy important.

  It will give ride.

  “Good, we’ll ride. What’re we getting in return?”

  Everything on list

  But can get more.

  “Why’ll it give us more than we ask?”

  Has job for boy.

  No, Killeen thought emphatically. Tell it no. Then he said, “We won’t take unnecessary chances.”

  “Hey!” Hatchet said gruffly. “I’ll decide what’s too much risk.”

  You will like arrangement.

  Crafter must show you.

  Boy not hurt.

  He not vulnerable.

  Killeen suppressed a burst of wild laughter. Surrounded by mechs—talking with one!—and this puffed-up junkpile says Toby’s not vulnerable.

  Want I translate that?

  No. Killeen got control of himself.

  Hatchet was glowering at him. He fought down the urge to press the Crafter about Toby. “My leader says we can talk about it later.”

  Crafter says good.

  “That’s more like it,” Hatchet said. “Just tell him we’ll do as much as he likes.”

  Killeen breathed out carefully, thinking. He had to get this right. You can fix my boy? “Show us what to do.”

  Crafter can take us to special place.

  It can get tools to fix boy.

  Your arm, too.

  At what price?

  We’ll see.

  Crafter says no more.

  “Party!” Hatchet called briskly. “Mount the Renny. We’ll be done real soon.”

  We have to know what the Crafter means.

  You will.

  Crafter show.

  First must steal what it wants.

  As they climbed up the steep sides of the imposing, burnished mech, Hatchet glowered at Killeen. “Strikin’ a Cap’n, huh? I’ll have your ass for this. Wait’ll we get back Metropolis.”

  “If we get back,” Killeen said sourly.

  TWO

  Killeen could not get used to the feel of riding atop the Crafter. The haulers he had ridden before had been slow, easy.

  This Crafter rolled with a grating murmur and lurched heavily when it crossed an arroyo. The swaying nearly made him sick. He and Shibo kept Toby firmly pressed back into a cubbyhole where the rocking could not dislodge him. The boy’s legs stuck out like cordwood, stiff and useless. Around them the human party covered very little of the Renegade’s cylindrical bulk. They held on to the myriad pipes and masts and vent-valves in the Crafter’s ceramic skin.

  They crossed rough country because the Crafter carefully stayed away from mech roads. This was the most built-up complex Killeen had ever seen, a web of pale slab pathways and blank-faced, perfectly cubic buildings. Traffic fled down narrow gleaming rails. On the steep hillsides foundries rumbled. Through a gradually thickening activity the Renegade moved with crafty purpose. Its antennae cycled endlessly. Each time a mech came within view, Killeen heard sputterings. The Renegade was sending some IGNORE ME signal into each mechmind, making itself invisible.

  Killeen could not relax. His eyes leaped from each approaching mech to the next.

  “Ease off,” Hatchet whispered to him. “Renny knows how get us through.”

  Killeen studied a bulky mech, a kind he had never seen, racing along the nearby railline. It accelerated so fast it was a blur as it neared the far end of the worn valley.

  He asked, “How many times you done this?”

  “Must be thirty, forty.”

  “All like this?”

  “Mostly. Ever’ one’s different some way.”

  “How?”

  “New fac’try. Different tricks gettin’ in, too.”

  “You never gone back, hit the same place?”

  “Naysay. Too chancy.”

  “You figure the Renny leaves some kinda mark? So they’ll be waiting if it went back?”

  “Could be. Mostly I think he doesn’t take chances. Not when he can get the stuff he wants somewhere else.”

  “What kind stuff?”

  “Parts, looks like.”

  “Replacement parts?”

  “Prob’ly. Thing’s trying stay alive.”

  “Ever get trouble? Mechs catch on?”

  Hatchet’s words came a little slower. “Don’t know as I could tell. Things happen pretty damn mechfast sometimes.”

  Killeen hadn’t heard anyone say “mechfast” since the Citadel. On the march there was no comparison between human speed and the blinding quickness of the Marauders.

  “Any people hurt?”

  Hatchet didn’t answer for a long moment. He clung to a brown vent-valve beside Killeen’s perch on a level housing. The Crafter was plunging down a rough grade. Tan mechwaste clogged the shallow gullies. Coiled blue-green packing material blew in a thin, chilly breeze. It was colder and drier here. Mech weather.

  “Lost two,” Hatchet said at last.

  “How?”

  “Family business,” Hatchet said adamantly.

  “My people at risk, makes it Bishop Family business.”

  Hatchet didn’t like this. He couldn’t find a way to argue around it, though. His mouth twisted to one side as if he was remembering something he didn’t want to.

  “Sometimes there’s mech guards. Twice they come up on us, right in the middle. We ran. They got somebody each time.”

  “How?”

  Hatchet looked irritated. “Shot ’em, course.”

  “With what?”

  “I wasn’t takin’ notes, see? Just tryin’ keep my head from gettin’ blowed off.”

  “Were they firing solid shot at you?”

  Hatcher smiled icily. “Sorry I didn’t snag one for you so’s I could fish it out my pocket, show you.”

  “No, I mean, were they using guns like ours? Or e-beams? Cutters?”

  Hatchet was irritated now. It wasn’t like a moment before, when he had been trying to keep from telling Killeen something. Now he didn’t see the point to the questions. “Couldn’t tell.”

  “Did you recover the bodies?”

  “Damn, we were runnin’.”

  “I know. Point is, I wonder if it was just mech guards you ran into, or something worse.”

  “What… Marauders?”

  “Could be. You get a look at what was after you?”

  “Naysay.” Hatchet’s pride had resisted telling much about their past failures. But now he saw a pattern to Killeen’s interest and his voice lost its tight, suspicious edge. “Shot at us from way up in the girders.”

  Killeen nodded. Just the way something had fired on the Bishops back in the last Trough they’d rested in. So whatever had killed the two Kings were not ordinary mech guards. They had hunted the humans. Yet they were small enough to climb on narrow girders. Which meant there was a new kind of hunter mech.

  “You see your people get hit?”

  “Naysay. Saw ’em down. No tracer from ’em in the sensorium.”

  “Could be you’re right,” Killeen said in a conciliatory tone, but not so obviously that Hatchet would see that was what he was doing. “They
were just dead.”

  “You mean, ’stead of…”

  “Suredead.”

  “Not much difference, is there?” Hatchet said. A deepening in his voice suggested a layer of sorrow carried but not revealed. “Either way, we got no Aspect of ’em. They’re gone.”

  Killeen could not stop himself from saying with a flinty look, “You figure having your mind ripped apart by a Marauder is same as just dying?”

  Hatchet didn’t reply immediately. Both fell silent as they looked out at a passing yard of grease-filmed, partly dismantled machines. Skeletal ranks stretched to the distant hills, a gray, damaged army momentarily halted in its conquest. Each body was missing a hull or treads or, most often, sensors. Their arrogant juts and angles had struck fear into Killeen more times than he could recall. Now they seemed vacant gestures; forlorn. He imagined the Crafter scavenged such yards for parts, picking over the rusting, unresisting dead.

  Hatchet said finally, “Don’t figure it either way. Some things a Cap’n shouldn’t figure.”

  Killeen felt cowed by this remark, simple and without the edgy proud bluster Hatchet faced the world with most of the time. There was nothing to say in reply.

  He swung away, holding to some gas lines with his good hand. Moving was harder than he had thought it would be. The right arm was tiring already. He found Shibo cradling Toby where most of the party rested on a broad, grainy manifold cover. The Crafter was running flat and fast now with just a drumming coming up through its body. The tremor brought soft curves of sleep to Toby’s pale face.

  Killeen squatted to speak and abruptly the Crafter braked. They all pitched forward, clinging to whatever they could. Toby came awake and automatically grasped at his father as the two of them rolled forward, over a polymer manifold hatch. They fell a meter. Killeen landed with jarring pain. But he had gotten under the boy so Toby merely had the wind knocked from him. They lay together, panting.

  “Pile off!” Hatchet called. “Inside! Quick now!”

  They had stopped near a factory. Killeen and Shibo carried Toby down the side. Most of the party was already running the short distance to an open grate-door that clattered up as they approached. Killeen tried to survey the area but Hatchet was yelling at them to hurry. The grate-door started chugging down like slow teeth even before they were through it.

  “Renny, he don’t like this part,” Hatchet said. “Closes doors fast. Goin’ in and out’s the most tricky, he says.”

  “For it, sure,” Shibo said dryly.

  Killeen carried Toby into the shelter of a cluster of stacked polyplastic canisters. He did not like the way Hatchet kept calling the Crafter “he”—a symptom of thinking of mechs as manlike, of imagining that you could deal with them in terms a human would accept. Killeen’s father had said to him once, Biggest fact about aliens is, they’re alien—which was one of the reasons Citadel Bishop had made fewer contacts with Renegades than the Kings had. Killeen reminded himself to not fall into Hatchet’s way of thinking about the Crafter. That was why he asked for the facts behind everything Hatchet said. Facts were more use than opinions.

  The party moved away from the lowering grate-door. Feet scuttled down narrow crannies in the crowded bay. Killeen had bent over to put Toby on the floor when he felt a powerful jjjjjaaaattttttt explode in his head. Faint cries skittered in the humming silence that followed the soundless knife-edge violence. “What was—”

  Hatchet’s voice came as a dry rasp. “Crafter. Musta shot at a mech.”

  Shibo said, “Electromag kill.”

  Killeen got up unsteadily and saw the Crafter crowding the stilled grate-door. Its antennae and sensor-snouts were all trained into the factory. They fanned and fidgeted with quick energy.

  Cermo-the-Slow called from farther in, “There’s a mech here. Burned out!”

  Hatchet got up from behind a large crate and went to see. “Crafter can pick off these li’ 1 guard mechs. He’s too fast for ’em.”

  Shibo said worriedly, “Didn’t see even mech tracer.”

  Killeen shook his head, his ears still ringing. “Me either.”

  Toby looked unconcerned. He pointed at the Crafter, which now was backing away. “What’ll it do while we’re inside?”

  Hatchet had ignored the boy so far. It startled Killeen when he answered Toby’s question with an offhanded kindliness. “It’ll lie doggo. Freeze its externals. Make like it’s dead, just used for spare parts.”

  “Like that yard we saw? With all the old mechs?”

  “Guess so. Only it’ll hunker down in some shed, I seen it do that. Guess that’s why it lets its carapace get so rundown-lookin’.”

  “Fools the other mechs?” Toby asked.

  “That’s my guess.”

  “Hey, let’s go see what’s in here.”

  “Now you be quiet, boy. Rest yourself.”

  Killeen watched the Crafter lumber away. He was eternally astonished at the resilience of the young, at how they could take the completely new and blindingly dangerous and simply live with it. He wondered how he had lost that unthinking certainty. Something had worn it away in abrasions so subtle that you never noticed the loss until it was far too late.

  The scorched guard mech had an odd look to it. Shibo approached as Cermo-the-Slow was wrenching at one of the mech’s side housings. It came away with a clatter. Inside were exposed joints and thick, leathery pads. An oily sheen coated them.

  “This’s cyborg,” Cermo said. “Lubed up, too.”

  Shibo kicked one of the joints. It gave, flexed, and returned to its original alignment with a persistent fluidity. “Organic parts.”

  Hatchet seemed unsurprised. “Seen that a lot in fac’tries. Don’t get many these in the field.”

  “Let’s go,” Killeen said.

  Hatchet looked faintly amused. “In a big hurry, huh? Wait’ll the two men up front figure the tracer.”

  The Crafter had transmitted to the lead man a flatmap of where they were to go in the factory. It was recognition-keyed so they got a telltale in their eyes when they were going the right way. A flatmap was language-independent. The Crafter used comman deered navvys to search and make the map; entering a storage zone was far too dangerous for a Renegade.

  The party followed the two lead men through a high, arched bay that slumbered in soft orange-green gloom. No mechs moved among the catwalks and bar-rigged balconies that punctuated the immense rising curves of the walls.

  “Not much going,” Shibo said.

  “Old fac’try,” Hatchet said. “The Renny sends us mostly places like this. Mechs use ’em for storage.”

  “Had a guard, though,” Killeen observed.

  “Just keep movin’,” Hatchet called.

  They slipped down dark corridors. Inky shadows stretched among old, abandoned manufacturing lines. Drums half-filled with sulfurous colloids leaked across broken decks. The two Kingsmen who led brought them deftly to a dank underground warren.

  At the entrance a portal gaped, rimmed with detection gear. Killeen recognized some of the standard parts from mechs he had stripped. Their party stopped and each person slipped through the portal carefully, moving slowly. Hatchet explained to Shibo and Killeen that the detectors were set at mech levels. They sensed not simply metal, but the network of electronics that any mech carried. Humans had so relatively little of this that they seldom registered on such automatic watchdogs. This was their primary use to the Crafter.

  In the tunnels beyond the portal their work began. Long racks of modular parts lined the intersecting tunnels. The lead man located the items the Crafter wanted. The party split into teams to carry out the heavy items. Killeen paired with Shibo after they put Toby in a spot near the portal, where he could watch them work, and, not coincidentally, where they could check on him frequently.

  Killeen felt the presence of the mech factory as a cold pressure seeping into him. His apprehension had subsided but it sprang forth with every distant flicker of movement or unexpected sound. Twilight t
unnels ricocheted the clatter of their labor, making odd, whining notes. Worse, a few small robomechs worked in the tunnels. The first time Killeen came upon one he very nearly killed it.

  Shibo caught his gun hand and whispered, “Doesn’t see us!” She was right. Robos were low on image sorting and texture definition and too dumb to sound an alarm. They simply fetched and stored, on orders from some distant inventory link. Still, their rattling, spidery gait unnerved Killeen in the shadowy tunnels.

  The Crafter wanted parts that ranged vastly in scale. Tiny embedded polytron boards. Greenish, marbled photonic slabs no bigger than a hand. Ribbon-ribbed condensers that took three men to carry.

  Killeen and Shibo hauled the Crafter’s replacement parts out on their backs, or sometimes between the two of them, carrying a short distance and then stopping to let arms and backs rest.

  They worked through a time that was for both of them wearying labor threaded by quicksilver instants of fear. The dulling rhythm of hauling without any mechanical aid numbed them. There were no metal carts around to help, and in any case Hatchet ruled out using any. No one knew precisely what triggered the portal alarm, so anything beyond the minimum was a risk. It took several hours to produce the mound of replacement parts they gradually built up near the grate-door. The Crafter would reappear only when the job was done. That minimized its exposure.

  Luckily, Toby had fallen asleep again. Killeen checked him on each circuit between the tunnels and the exit bay. He and Shibo at last took a quick break in the depths of the tunnels to eat some dried concentrate bars. Killeen’s throat was raw from breathing the acrid fumes of the factory.

  “You do this much?” Killeen wheezed as Hatchet passed them.

  “Whenever the Renny wants.” Hatchet’s eyes narrowed. “Listen, we’ll do it much as we can. Without the Renny’s help, we’d be busting ass runnin’ from Marauders.”

  Killeen nodded mutely, saving his breath, and that was when he saw the approaching mech. It was no robo or navvy. He could make out a carapace as long as a man, with a set of tools bunched in front like a tangle of briars. It was coming toward them down a distant lane between storage racks, either oblivious or not expecting anything unusual. “Hatchet!” Shibo whispered.