Great Sky River (21 page)

Shibo sent, —Toby safe.—

Killeen blinked. “I’m that obvious? But you’re right— I don’t like leaving him.”

—Mantis goes for elders, seems like.—

“That’s what I keep tellin’ myself. Worth the risk, I figure, if we get the jump on the Mantis.”

—Hope. We hope,— she said pensively.

They followed the navvy treads along an arroyo swampy from runoff. Streams broke freely from the loamy hills. The ice was
melting underneath and seepage
welled up in the low pockets, celebrated by flourishes of greenery.

They followed the treadmarks out onto a broad plain. Killeen got more and more exasperated as they searched the area. He knew
the navvys’ typical speed, their general ability to negotiate terrain. These tracks followed a clean, intelligent path between
outcroppings of ice-worn stone and the boggy low washes where treads would foul and jam. This navvy was smarter than any he’d
seen. As they covered the plain in lengthy, skimming, boot-boosted strides, the others noticed it too.

—Naysay,— one of the Rook women called over comm, —track stops here.—

—Wind erased,— Shibo sent.

The area was parched and took a print well. Where the firmly packed clay gave way to sand the treadmarks faded. Killeen sped
over the tawny stretch. “Can’t see where it came out,” he said.

—Perimeter it!— the other Rook woman called. She was in charge and seemed to take as a personal affront any delay in finding
their quarry.

They traced the outer boundary of the broad, shallow wash. Nowhere did a track emerge, yet in the wide area there was nothing
substantial to hide a navvy.

—Section search!— the Rook woman called. They divided the oblong area into pieces and paced off a regular grid search, peering
under every bush. Nothing.

The Eater and Denix were both low on the knobby horizon before she gave up. There was no sign of the navvy. —I hate going
back without even a sighting,— the woman said.

—No damn sense innit,— a Bishop man said in fa
tigued exasperation. —We’d’ve seen any transporter come, pick it up. No place navvy could go.—

Shibo said, —Air maybe.—

—Navvys that
fly!
— the second Rook woman snorted. —Never heard such.—

And a Bishop man added, —Navvys’re too dumb. Always were, always will be.—

On the march back they had to scale truly mountainous terrain. It was the first time Killeen could remember going over high
passes, for the Bishop tactic had been to keep to the valleys, avoiding conspicuous heights. The Rooks seemed more used to
it, and their woman leader made a good case that they had to go over the saddle-backed peaks if they were to reach the Families
by dusk.

On the long climb Killeen reflected on what the man had said. The Families had always carried in the backs of their minds
that assertion, uninspected and capricious:
always were, always will be.

Yet everything now pointed oppositely. It struck Killeen suddenly that they were always behind the zigs and zags of the mechciv.
Humanity needed the traditions and rituals which held the Families together, and had once united the Clans. Yet change was
their only true weapon now, not the puny and often ineffectual pistols and guns they carried. Or looted, rather—projectors
plucked from the inert carcasses of Marauders, or lasers ripped from ore-seeking burrowers like the dumb Snouts. Weaponry
adequate for the day but not for the slow steady passage of this unending war, a conflict desperate on one side and almost
casual on the other.

He called Shibo on close-comm and asked what she thought. Her self-sufficient, enclosed distance had melted slightly, and
Killeen had overcome some of his shyness.

Even so, he was gratified when she immediately answered, —Must learn mechtech, yeasay.—

“Y’mean scavenge better?”

—No,
build.
— Her voice was flat, firm.

“From mech parts we could build mech weapons, yeasay, but—”

—Build
human
weapons. Not just copy mechs.—

“People
hate
mechs, Shibo. Don’t want learn it. Can’t, anyway.”

He could hear her flinty
um-hummm
though she was some distance away. They had spread out to avoid ambush. The team was making quick time through a raw mountain
pass. Snowglade was so young a world that the mountains had no topsoil at all. —Mechs deliberately make understanding hard.—

This startled Killeen. “You figure?”

—They defend their tech against other mech cities. What’ll confuse them’ll confuse us.—

“Sounds hopeless, then.”

—Naysay. Human tech we could learn. Did learn, in the Arcologies.—

He didn’t want to hear about how great things had been in the old days. To keep her talking, though, he said, “You mean that
Taj Mahal thing we saw?”

—Yeasay.—

“If humans could do that once…”

—We could again,— she said simply.

“That weapon yours—how’s it work?”

—I’ll show you tonight.— She hefted the long, tubular gun. —I sized it out for human use.—

“Damnfine.” Killeen was impressed.

They reached camp as the small sheltered fires started. There were burnable brambles in the sequestered notch
Fornax had found for the Rooks, and over a nearby hill spread the Bishops. It would be demeaning to give up the dignity of
separate and defensible campsites, no matter how diminished the resources of each Family. So each built the ordained three
fires and covered them with a stretched-frame tent of tightweave. The flame was far too visible in the infrared, but the wide
and steepled tent would disperse the image too broadly for a mech sensor to pick it out. Or so went the litany.

As he clumped heavily into camp, shrugging off his equipment, Killeen was acutely aware of the curiously comfortable way the
Families bedded down among their own softening assumptions. They used rules of thumb inherited from grandfathers who had fallen
in conflicts which now, in the swift compression of their own legacy, were but names: Skipjohn’s Draw, Stonewall, Grammaw’s,
Bowles-son’s Surprise, The Three-Rattler One, Chancellorsville. Fine names, spoken of reverently around the fires. Killeen
wondered, though, if for each name they also inherited in equal measure an unseen vulnerability. This thought troubled him,
for until now he too had felt without thinking that the Family’s survival lay in their traditions.

He ate with Toby and Jocelyn and Shibo. They all scavenged for roots or berries that could mix agreeably with the hardpack
grub brought from the last Trough. Checked for human biocompatibility, mashed and heated with streamwater, the paste gave
off a fructifying aroma. They made short work of it.

Then the Family entered into that most pleasurable of hours in their days, a time of relaxed muscles and the loggy stuffed
feel that casts an obliging film over the coming sleep. The talk began then. It stirred around the three encased fires like
whorls of enchantment, taking them
away from their sore bodies and constant low apprehension. Two Rook visitors described their flights and battles. Rook women
traded stories of mech giveaway smells and signs, how to read their tracks for age and intent, how sometimes they would lie
craftily in wait near springs and ponds. First Fornax led a mild ranking, then Ledroff.

They all savored the blending of Families, for it meant the wash of new tales, jokes, stories. There was rumor of romance,
too, though this Ledroff cut short with a raised eyebrow and bemused scowl. Better not bring this up. Despite their adversity,
the Rooks were not all down-tuned in the sexcen, and the Bishops could scarcely reply with intimations of their own dehydrated
lusts. This might provoke a certain wan and wistful discontent.

Success has many voices but failure is mute. It would have been good to have a tale to tell from the day’s tracking team.
Killeen brooded over their losing the navvy’s trail. He took only nominal part in the singing after dinner, and listened to
only the first of the talk, before sneaking off.

Cermo saw him go and caught up, offering a flask of coarse but powerful brandy. Killeen felt a quick, darting hunger for it,
reached out—and drew back his hand. “Don’t think so.”

“Aw, c’mon. Hard day. Li’l alky’ll set you right.”

“Set me on my ass. Set me dumb. Get me started, I’ll slurp up all you got.”

“Not ’fore I do,” Cermo said merrily, and Killeen could see the man was already far gone.

“Sorry, Cermo,” he said gently.

He had to consciously make himself walk away from it. He could already taste the rough cut of the brandy,
smell its thick vapor. But he knew what it would do and what he would keep on being if he took it.

Running away into the mind’s own besotted refuges was too easy. He had been damned lucky so far. Nothing dangerous had happened
when he had been drinking, or hung over, or tapped in to a stim circuit in a Trough.

But nobody’s luck held forever.

He would have to keep his head clear if he was ever to learn. He made himself go over to where Shibo sat alone. Her high cheekbones
caught the dim halflight, shrouding her eyes and making them unreadable, mysterious. As the last Knight, she would always
be welcome around the campfires. But she seldom went, preferring to tinker with mech parts she carried in a black knapsack.

He spent an hour with her but it felt more like a day. He had not felt so daunted and humble since the days when he first
went out with his father on simple scavenging raids.

Shibo had not merely mastered mechtech, she had made it comprehensible. She could recase her own ammo for her gun. She knew
how to realign its bore. From mech scrap she had fashioned a self-loader that folded neatly into the gun stock. It fit snugly
into her exskell, so to load while firing she had only to breathe. Killeen admired how deftly she had made her deficiency—the
ever-moving exskell ribs—into an asset. Her rate of fire was higher than any Killeen had ever seen.

As she taught, she spoke more than she ever had. She had been fitted with the exskell as a girl. A craftswoman had made her
exskell of foam polycarbon, worked from Snout debris. Killeen suspected that had kindled Shibo’s ability to translate mech
tangles into human terms. Perhaps this had saved her after the Knight Calamity.

As she taught him she showed no smugness, no preening pride, nothing but a penetrating attention to the job at hand. Many
in the Families disliked mech artifacts and tolerated only those clearly shaped to human use. Leggings, calf-clasping shock
absorbers, moly-vests—these Killeen was used to. He had to overcome his distaste as Shibo taught.

Then, slowly, he became intrigued. In her hands the alien objects took on a redeeming human dimension. Her quick, incisive
thinking opened paths for him, banished mech mysteries. When she said, “Well, done. Sleep now, yeasay?” he was sorry the time
was over.

Cermo snored as Killeen passed by him. The big man’s mouth yawned slackly at the sky.

Killeen felt restless despite his fatigue, yet he did not want to join the figures around the campfires. Though he did not
mind the stink he carried from days of hard-marching, he remembered his mother’s old rule—bathe when you could, because no
one knew how well Marauders could smell.

He found a small stream nearby that gushed out of a horn-shaped rock formation. The water numbed him immediately and then
brought pain seeping into his feet. Still he stayed in for long, agonizing minutes, savoring the sparkling lap of more water
than he had seen since the Trough.

After, he had to walk awhile to bring the circulation back into his legs and stop the quiet ache in them. That was why he
was standing some distance from the fire tent and alone among the Bishops could see the Duster coming, though he was nearly
naked, without equipment, and could do nothing about it.

The Duster was on top of them before Killeen, running
among the bushes toward his weaponry, could do more than shout. Bishops came spilling from the ruby-walled fire tents. The
Duster came in low from the north and was spewing a dark cloud behind it even as it breasted the horizon. It whirred and droned,
approaching with stolid momentum. Killeen could not tell if it had made a particular target of them, for it did not appear
to slow as it swept over the Rook and Bishop camps. The black fog billowed behind it and then fell with a graceful buoyancy,
as though in no particular hurry to reach the ground and begin its work. Killeen saw the darkness advancing and swept up as
much of his gear as he could. He took several steps, realized he would do better with his boots on, and so made himself methodically
sit down and put on the boots despite the pandemonium which ricocheted through his sensorium from the outfanning Family.

When he stood up Toby was running toward him and the cloud was descending over the Family like a huge black hand. It came
down in the Eater’s blue-shot twilight, catching the last incoming horizontal yellow shafts of radiance from Denix, which
cut across the descending swarm. For swarm it was now, not the simple layers of corrosive chemicals Killeen had experienced
before and which had killed his grandmother. This was not alkaline dust but rather nuggets that seemed to writhe and murmur
in the air. Toby reached Killeen and for once the father was glad to see that the ageold and sometimes even endearing sloppy
habits of a boy were of use, for Toby’s boots were still on and he had only half-shucked his marching gear.

Toby scooped up his mainbelt and shrugged on his harness, which carried some weaponry. Against chemicals this would have been
utter useless deadweight, for the thing to do then was to run fleet and upwind. But they both agreed
without wasting breath to speak that this settling threat was fresh. The things that came coasting from the sky hit the ground
with rebounding skill. They were no bigger than three hands across. One rushed at Toby’s leg, extruding blunt dowels. It was
about to attack his boot when Toby blew it to pieces. But by then three more had landed around them and one more came down
on Killeen’s back.

It knocked him flat. A gust of horror shot through Killeen as he grabbed at the thing. He could feel the snub-ended arms press
against his neck. A smell like sharp, corroded tin filled his nostrils. His hand slipped on slick cowling and something whirred
at his neck. It brought a steel-cold pinprick that spread into a roaring, hot pain. He got a grip on the thing and wrenched
hard and down. It held on. He found a hold with his other hand and heaved at it. Still the weight pressed down on him. He
tried to roll over but the machine somehow thrust against his roll and held on.