Great Sky River (15 page)

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 paused 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.

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.

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.