Great Sky River Page 26

  They had gone halfway across the plaza. The Crafter went even faster, as if it sensed something.

  A faint whoooong vibrated with reedy insistence through the sensorium.

  Killeen turned. He could see nothing on this side of the Crafter that could have made the sound. There were no mechs bigger than a navvy within sight.

  —See anything?— Hatchet sent.

  “Naysay.” Killeen pulled Toby closer.

  Shibo’s slitted eyes studied the high buildings. The plaza was so wide that the distance washed out the detail of the bioparts complex they were leaving behind.

  —Keep your…—

  —What’s that?— Cermo called. He was on the other side of the Crafter and Killeen could not make out anything.

  Something went by—tsssssip!—overhead.

  “Get over on this side,” Killeen called. “Whatever it is, the Crafter can give some shielding.”

  —Right, let’s move,— Hatchet sent.

  Shibo brought her weapon up. The Crafter plunged ahead. Its treads whined with exertion. Killeen thought he could hear them grinding against each other. If the treads froze up out here—

  Whuuuung. Louder now The pulse frenzied the air around them.

  Hatchet sent, —Watch out!—

  —No!—

  —ItgotVelez!—

  —Get over here! Over the top! The top! Scramble!—

  —What is it?—

  —Just go!—

  —Don’t look at it. That’ll open your ’ceptors, it’ll—

  Whuuuuuung.

  —Ah! Ah! My leg!—

  —I’m blind! Gimme hand! Blind!—

  —What is it?

  Killeen did not need to look. He knew the sound of the Mantis.

  FIVE

  The Crafter swerved. Its engines rose to a clanking, roaring din. Treads howled over the slick plaza tiles. Killeen could hear or taste nothing through his sensorium but the snap and sputter of electromagnetic warfare as the Mantis and Crafter dueled.

  The team clambered over the crest of the Crafter, dragging the two Kingsmen who had been hit. Killeen looked into the white-eyed, startled faces. “Dead,” Hatchet said.

  “Suredead,” Killeen added.

  The Mantis had extracted their memories, hopes, fears. It now knew of Metropolis, then.

  And it had their Aspects as well. An immense corridor of human time collapsed now into vacancy.

  The Crafter seemed immune to the hollow whoooooom bursts that drove livid tunnels through Killeen’s sensorium. It hammered across the plaza.

  They clung to its side like fluttering kites. Their leggings and pelvic cradles rang against the humming hull.

  “Toby!” Killeen grabbed just as the boy slipped.

  He got a hold on Toby’s right arm, hauled upward—and lost the grip. The boy fell a meter and snagged on an outjutting pipe fitting. Toby wrenched around, his hands scrabbling for a hold. Killeen hung from a ledge and scissored his legs, stretching.

  Toby reached up but lost his precarious hold. His right hand caught Killeen’s legs, gripping the niche where Killeen’s shock absorbers met the laminated boot guard. Toby whirled, spinning barely above tiles that flashed by below. Killeen swung him over to a vent collar and he grabbed it.

  Then the Crafter skidded.

  Killeen thought they were going to go over, roll with the Crafter on top. He sought a solid lip to brace his legs against. Before he could leap free the Crafter caught itself. It slid shrieking to a stop beside a monolithic slate wall.

  “Off!” Hatchet cried. “Something’s after the Renny!”

  Killeen called, “And us. It’s the Mantis.”

  Stunned silence. For the first time Killeen saw an uncomplicated, true expression in Hatchet’s eyes—simple fear. “Damn-all!”

  Shibo called, “We got no big weapons.”

  “Hey! Can’t leave the Crafter!” Hatchet shouted as some of the team jumped to the plaza floor. “Hafta protect it.”

  Killeen said, “Naysay. Shibo’s right. Our e-beams and cutters no use against Mantis.”

  “If the Crafter disables it—”

  “We’ll be better off spot if we can maneuver,” Killeen said.

  Cermo called, “Yeasay, go! Use Crafter for cover.”

  Hatchet hesitated, eyes darting to the crest of the Crafter, where the suredead hung among struts. Killeen thought the man was considering carrying them away. Kingsmen made a solemn point of never leaving dead behind.

  But no—Hatchet was watching for a sign from the Crafter. None came. The mech was busy filling the air with echoing booms.

  Hatchet grimaced and nodded. He led the team directly away from the motionless Crafter. They left the two suredead without speaking of it. Another Kingsman stumbled away with no control of his arms. He staggered grimly, eyes fixed.

  Killeen made sure Toby could move well. They headed for an alleyway in the slate wall.

  The Crafter’s antennae swiveled, sending sharp slaps through his sensorium.

  Shibo called, “EM only.”

  Killeen saw her point. He had heard only electromagnetic cracklings. Humans might not be vulnerable to the EM assault now raging. The Mantis was using no guns against the Crafter, though that would be the easiest way to immobilize it.

  Hatchet panted as he trotted toward the alley, “Cermo, you go left.”

  There was a loading dock for mechs left of the alley, covered with a jumble of yellow fan-shaped devices as big as a man. “Try hit the Mantis,” Hatchet ordered. He sent a Kingsman to a different angle from the right.

  Cermo started firing rounds at once. Killeen ducked down the alley and kept going. He dodged around large steel conduit housings, waving to Toby to follow.

  “Where you goin’?” Hatchet cried.

  “Mantis can’t get back in here,” Killeen answered. “Too tight for it.” He did not slow.

  “We got to help the Renny!”

  Shibo called dryly, “Mice don’t help mountains.”

  “Get your ass back here!”

  Cermo said coolly, “Mantis comin’.”

  The rest of the team glanced at one another. They had been readying their weapons. The Crafter had not moved since they jumped off. It blocked their view of the plaza.

  Now they heard through their sensoria regular thuds, like logs rolling over rocks. As though a giant were walking across the plaza. They started edging away from the mouth of the alley.

  Hatchet shouted, “Lay down some fire!”

  “Dumb,” Shibo said.

  Cermo came pounding over, yelling that the Mantis had disabled the Crafter’s treads.

  Hatchet looked wildly at the Crafter, then back at the beckoning alleyway.

  “Renny knows the way out,” he said desperately. “Back to Metropolis.”

  The team saw his confusion and took the opportunity to fall back a few paces. The thudding noise got louder. Killeen had never heard the Mantis make such a sound. Hatchet hesitated, then spat and backed down the alley. He stopped beside Killeen. “If you hadn’t—”

  “Look.” Killeen pointed.

  The Mantis reared into view over the riveted crest of the Crafter. Its antennae swept all angles methodically. Killeen whispered, “Shut down your systems. Quick!”

  His sensorium dwindled, a multicolored fluid sucked down a black drain.

  The Mantis was a spindly network of moving rods. Like carbosteel bones, they jointed at gleaming chrome sockets. Thin cables gave it jerky, oddly swift agility. This time it struck Killeen as more like a framework for a building, a mobile lattice, than an integrated mech.

  Its antennae swept past them without pausing. Did that mean it had not seen them?

  The Crafter still offered some combat. Killeen saw a small armament poke from a turret and fire at the Mantis. An instant later it dissolved in orange sparks.

  “Move,” Killeen whispered to Toby. They slipped around a bulky cylindrical array of valves and wheels, out of direct sight from the alle
y.

  The Mantis reached the Crafter. It towered over the crescent back and seemed to be working at the Crafter’s side.

  The team edged back, following Killeen. Hatchet saw that he could not stop them without either making a lot of noise or making a fool of himself. He trotted after them.

  Down a narrowing cleft between throbbing factories they ran. Muffled explosions followed them. Killeen thought it was the Crafter dying. He looked back and saw a small missile shoot down the alley they had just left. It was gone in an instant. Then it returned and hovered like a gleaming steel hummingbird at the intersection. Killeen felt a faint ping as it recognized them. The missile surged forward. Killeen had time to bring up his weapon. The missile vanished in a ball of white smoke and thunder slapped him in the face. The missile had detonated long before its fragments could have reached them. Killeen wasted no time wondering why. He ducked down a side passage, following the others, and gave himself over to running.

  Nothing pursued them. They retreated through a crowded factory complex ripe with acrid flavors. Mechs worked the catwalks and corridors, giving the fleeing human figures no notice. Whatever the Mantis’s powers, it evidently could not put all local mechs on alert. Or else did not feel it needed to.

  Hatchet tried to slow them, make a stand to see if the Crafter had escaped. No one paid him any attention. They ran on. A desperate fever gripped them. Killeen saw in an abstract way how Hatchet felt, but his instincts told him otherwise.

  He remembered his father chuckling once and saying dryly, “Brave man fights, smart man runs.” Hatchet had not been on the march for years. Holed up in Metropolis, the Cap’n had lost his edge.

  After passing through three factories they reached the wall of the entire zone. It was ribbed and veined with intricately intersecting pipes. The wall thrummed with fluid gurgles. Cermo-the-Slow had belied his name and gotten there first. He found a hatch which had a manual override. Evidently maintenance mechs used it to get at the pipe complex innards. The passage was tight. They had to worm their way through one at a time.

  Without much discussion the team left the huge zone with its vast plaza. They had not revived their sensoria and had no idea how close the Mantis might be. Killeen sent Toby ahead with Shibo and stood rear guard beside Hatchet, looking back for a moment. “Damn close,” he said.

  “Don’t matter much.” Hatchet spat, puffing. “We’re dead anyway.”

  “Rather be dead than suredead.”

  “Shit.” Hatchet spat again. “Dead’s dead.”

  Killeen felt a cool rage rattling in his chest. But all he said was, “You keep nothing from them, you’re just like them.”

  “Crafter felt the same way,” Hatchet said sourly. “Funny, a mech bein’ just as crazy as you.”

  Killeen blinked. “Crafter wouldn’t go suredead? But they’re its own kind.”

  “Years back, when I was first talkin’ with it, through the translator, it said it was a Renny ’cause it wouldn’t give up its self”

  “Ever ask it what the ordinary mechs think?”

  Hatchet shrugged. “Near as I can tell, they don’t.”

  Killeen’s gaze swept the rectangular corridors that led away among ranks of noisily working cam-drive machines. A mech appeared but didn’t look at the two men. “What you mean?”

  “My father told me once. Mechs wear out, they’re ordered in. Don’t think ’bout it at all. Got a override command built in ’em. Get stripped for metals, raw parts.”

  “Same as they strip us down,” Killeen said. “Sure-death.”

  “Get on in. I’ll cover.” It was Hatchet’s right as Cap’n to be the last out, traditionally the most dangerous position. Killeen wriggled his way through the hatch. He had to work through tight intersections in complete darkness. Pipes poked his ribs, tried to trip him. The thought came that if the mechs wanted to take them one at a time this would be an effective trap. But then he saw a light ahead. A pipe caught his shock-absorber sleeve as he stumbled out into a ghostly ruby glow.

  He was in a long slab of a room. From its low ceiling hung oddly shaped bundles suspended by translucent threads. The walls and floor emitted smoldering dim light.

  The team had stopped, staring. Killeen, too, tried to see more detail. Hatchet emerged behind Killeen, took one long survey of the apparently limitless room, and whispered, “Get some cover. Quick!”

  Killeen followed Toby, who was recovering his speed. They stopped beside a large lumpy thing that revolved slowly in inky shadows. Its lower edge hung near Killeen’s head. He let his eyes ’scope out to detect any movement in the vast, stretching room. Even at max amp he could see no motion other than the achingly slow turning of the things suspended from the ceiling. Nothing touched the floor. A silky silence floated on chilled, antiseptic air.

  This place had a feel of obsessive exactness, the clean spaces and rigid perspectives making a frame for the oblong, misshapen masses that spun silently. But as Killeen stepped toward the nearest mass he caught a sharp scent that tainted his lungs with memories of wood rot and mold. He remembered crawling in a basement of the Citadel, a boy exploring the damp recesses in search of treasure and mystery. Thick smells had assaulted him, moist soil and rancid clothing, crusted old boxes and half-filled jars of moldy sluggish liquids.

  The faint, hellish light seemed to brighten. He held his breath.

  He was watching something like a large mass of tightly wound conduits. That was his first perception, and as his eyes adjusted further he could see their rubbery elastic sheaths. An oily sheen lubricated their gray, mottled surfaces. They moved. Slid and groped persistently, blindly. A machine. Bent on some purpose he could not imagine, not made of metal, veined and turgid, yes. But it had that strange machinelike, nonliving way of motion. It did not occur to him that this could be anything else. The coiled tubes were waxy in the dim buttery glow. Jelly lubricated their movements. Their slippery heave and slide had the momentum of programmed purpose. Thicker tubes wound among the slim ones. Accordion-pleated extrusions branched off to other joinings. With gravid slowness, oval fissures opened in the large tube nearest to Killeen, breaking the oily glaze. It was swelling. It sighed faintly and a fine blue mist rose from it. He caught the sweet sewer smell he remembered from the drop tower in the Citadel, a heavy lush hint of what would assault the nose if you ever leaned over the long drop and caught the flavored breeze.

  His eyes moved beyond, trying to grasp overall movement.

  The tubes pulsed. Here and there a spot on a slippery conduit showed pale porosity. As Killeen and Toby watched, a fissure broke open. It worked wider. Killeen saw that the tubes were hollow, flexing coils. The nearest made a wet, sucking noise. It writhed from the snakelike embrace of another and coiled away. Rings rippled in its skin.

  Killeen sensed coiling momentum gather through the entire mass before him. Another tube broke free. It had a slick globular head which he saw only for a moment because it buried itself in a new, still-widening fissure nearby.

  A furious clenching began in the surrounding mass. Killeen had the impression of a muscular gathering. Currents of moist, sour air brushed him. He heard faint smacks and slides. Then a soft, quickening, wheezing undertone. Like the breathing of a giant.

  More fissures puckered in the walls of nearby tubes. They grew, their oval mouths ridged by ropy pink cords. They yawned, red-rimmed and slick, pocked. More wrinkled tubes wrenched free of the mass and waved in the thick air. Their blunt heads swelled. They sought and quickly found fissures that seemed to break and grow in answer to the freed tubes. The heads wormed among the working mass and plunged into the yawning fissures. A long shuddering accompanied each entry. The writhing pink mass shivered unspeakably. Killeen saw almost against his will that each was a coupling, male and female organs that formed of the gelatinous mass and met in a grotesque slithering, each calling up the other from the unshaped ooze that palped and stroked itself in jellied, blunt frenzy.

  Killeen grasped Toby’s arms and pul
led him away. “Get… get back.”

  “What is it?” Toby’s voice rasped.

  “Something… awful.”

  As they backed away he could see round, leathery bulges hanging from some of the tubes. Balls. Balls conjuring some foul semen.

  The engorged fissures were growing hair. Matted black wire sprouted along the tubes as he watched.

  The waxy light around them quickly faded. Toby asked more questions for which Killeen had no answers and he shushed the boy. He took two steps forward. The light brightened. Did the restless slithering of the suspended mass quicken? He moved away. Yes, the diffuse glow ebbed. The mindless motion slowed.

  “It’s made to… operate… when somebody’s near.”

  “Thought it was a machine,” Toby said matter-of-factly.

  “So did I… not sure now.”

  The others stared at other nearby shapes, frowning. Only a moment had passed but to Killeen it seemed a yawning, stretched time. Hatchet called shakily, “Form up! We got to move.”

  They obeyed mutely. Long lanes of the suspended masses stretched away. As they approached, each mass in turn stirred in sullen, waxing light. They soon learned to move quickly past.

  Cool quiet enveloped them. Mist rose from the hanging masses, layering the air with acrid traceries. Their steps rang hollowly.

  They knew they had no plan, that Hatchet was leading them without a clear goal. But it was better to go on than to endure the strangeness here, and the enveloping sense of awful forces moving with purposes beyond human understanding.

  They walked quickly. Pools of brimming glow dogged them as the masses began their performances, then ebbed. The sensation of being followed, if only by automatic mechanisms, hastened their steps.

  Ahead a dark blankness grew. It was a grainy wall of black mesh.

  Hatchet dispatched Cermo to the right and the wounded Kingsman to the left to find a way through. The Kingsman was back within moments, gesturing silently. No one spoke. Hatchet revived their sensoria long enough to cast tentatively along the wall. Nothing showed. He sent a darting yellow call-back to Cermo, then let the web of sensoria dwindle to a pale nothingness.