Great Sky River (28 page)
Authors: Gregory Benford
- Boy is like animal then.
- Crafter says is useful.
We’re not animals! You
—
- No.
- Says is
like
animal. - If boy without Aspect disks in head.
I asked for help, I’ll bargain for it, see? We steal for the Crafter, it fixes my boy.
“Killeen! What’s—”
- Crafter says you not understand.
- Boy is to help steal.
Killeen forgot himself and spoke out loud. “The boy isn’t part that!”
- Boy must steal.
“Look, he’s not part of the deal,” Killeen said angrily. “We want—”
Hatchet shoved Killeen. “Dammit, what’re you—”
Killeen batted at the man with one hand, still looking up at the Crafter. He wished he knew which sensor to address.
Hatchet punched Killeen in the gut. Killeen hooked his boot behind Hatchet’s leading foot and yanked it off the concrete.
Hatchet fell. Killeen kicked him in the side and backed away. “Shibo!”
She glided between them from nowhere, hands held out in what seemed a casual way. But her fingers were rigid, curved cutting
edges. Her exskell hummed. It would be good armor in a hand-to-hand fight.
Hatchet sputtered, swore. Cermo-the-Slow edged closer, automatically moving to help his fellow Bishops.
Killeen watched Hatchet get up on hands and knees, his big eyes judging the situation. Striking a Cap’n was a major offense.
Hatchet might call on the other Kings to rush both of them. Killeen could see Hatchet think this through, his wobbly chin
tucking under, and decide against. Then the chin bobbed up as Hatchet reset his face to mask some of his anger. “You make
the deal straight, hear?”
“I am. Crafter’s got some fool idea.”
“You listen him!” Hatchet got up, dusting his palms. He stayed in a crouch. Killeen saw that if Hatchet gave the sign the
others would come at them.
“I will. But—”
“Listen good!”
“It’s talking about using Toby. The boy’s in no condition—”
“You listen.”
“I won’t—”
“The Renny knows lots more’n you.” Hatchet frowned, thinking. His face went suddenly blank. “Ah, right.”
Hatchet had somehow understood what the Crafter meant. Killeen wanted to ask but knew he could not trust the answer. The man’s
face was now impassive. His chin was underslung, as if to disown what the mild expression implied.
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.
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—”
