Great Sky River (3 page)

Hanging there on the instant, Killeen remembered a time when he had been on a scavenging expedition with his father, a mere
short foray for needed chip-parts, so easy his mother consented to her son’s going along. And there a Marauder had chanced
upon them as they looted an isolated ramshackle field station where navvymechs labored in mute dumb servitude. Killeen had
been on a small side trip to snag servos from a dusty storage shed, and in the attack the Marauder (a Rattler, old but fully
armed) had seen him and run him down. Three men and
a woman had blown the Rattler to spare parts, catching it two steps away from Killeen’s frantically fleeing form. He had been
scared so badly he shat his suit. But what he remembered now was not the embarrassment as the shitsmell got out, and not the
taunts of his friends. Instead, he recalled in a spirit-sucking instant his own father’s look: eyes burned into the sockets,
deadwhite. Eyes that had drilled into him with their desperation. And Killeen knew his own face now locked into the rictus
of foresighted horror as his own son stood, unmoving, for one solid thudding heartbeat of immutable lost time—

“Toby!”

—Uh, yeasay.—

The distant figure scrambled down an embankment, into the fossil snaketwist of an ancient waterway.

Killeen could not breathe. He realized he had gone rigid himself, a perfect target.

“Hunch ’n’ go, boy,” he called as he swerved and dodged away.

And felt something go by—
tssssip!
—in the still air.

He saw quick darting orange sparks in his right eye. That meant something was poking, trying to find a way into him. But
fast,
faster than he’d ever known.

A prickly coldsweat redness skittered through him with a grating whine.

Killeen dropped to the ground. “Fanny! How you?”

—I… auhhhh… can’t…—

“This thing—what is it?”

—I… haven’t seen… years…—

“What’ll we
do?

Ledroff tried to cut in on the narrow-cone comm-line. Killeen swore and blanked him out.

—Don’t… believe… what you… see…—

“What’s—”

She coughed. Her line went silent.

Fanny knew more than anybody in the Family about the rare, deadly mechs. She’d fought them a long time, back before Killeen
was born. But Killeen could tell from her sluggish voice that this thing had clipped her solid, blown some nerves maybe.

No help from the fine, wise old woman, then.

Killeen looked back at the warped, worked shapes of stone on the far hillside. There were contorted planes, surfaces carved
for purposes incomprehensible to humans. He thought of them not at all, had long ago learned to look past that which no man
could riddle out. Instead he searched for the freshness of the cleavecuts, the telltale signs of autochisel.

Which weren’t there.

“Jocelyn!”

The scraped stone surfaces thinned. Shimmered. Killeen had the dizzying sensation of seeing through the naked rock into a
suddenly materializing city of ramparts and solid granite walls. It hummed with red energy, swelled as he watched.

“Damnall what’s that,” he muttered to himself.

The city shimmered, crystal and remote. Plain rock melted to glassy finery.

And then back again to chipped stone.

Jocelyn called, disbelieving, —The whole hillside?—

Killeen grunted. “Mirage that size takes a big mech.”

—Or new kind,— Jocelyn said.

She came in from his right, bent low and running with compressors. Behind them the Family fled full bore, their pantings and
gaspings coming to Killeen in proportion to their distance. They were a constant background chorus,
as though they all watched him, as though all the Family was both running for safety and yet still here, witness to this latest
infinitesimal addition to the long losing struggle with the machines. He felt them around him like a silent jury.

Jocelyn called, —You hit somethin’?—

Killeen ducked behind an outcropping of ancient, tortured girders. Their thick spans were blighted with scabs of burnt-red
rust. “Think so.”

—Solid?—

“Naysay. Sounded like hitting a mech circuit, is all.”

—It’s still there, then. Hiding.—

No chance to try for Fanny yet. He kept a safe distance from her crumpled form, sure she would by now be a well-found target
point.

—I can smell it.— Jocelyn’s alto voice, normally so cottonsoft, was stretched thin and high.

He could, too, now that he’d calmed a fraction. A heavy, oily flavor. His inbuilt detectors gave him the smell, rather than
encoded parameters; humans remembered scents better than data. But he could not recognize the close, thick flavor. He was
sure he had never met it before.

A fevered hollow
whuuung
twisted the air. It came to Killeen as a sound beyond anything ear could capture, a blend of infra-acoustic rumble at his
feet and electromagnetic screech, ascending to frequencies high and thin in the roiling breeze.

“It’s throwing us blocks,” he said. “Musta used a combination on Fanny, but it don’ work on us.”

—She got old ’quipment,— Jocelyn said.

“It’s prob’ly sweeping keys right now,” Killeen said, breathing hard and wanting something to do, anything.

—Looking for ours.—

“Yeasay, yeasay,” Killeen muttered. He tried to remember. There had been some mech who’d done that, years back. It broadcast
something that got into your
self,
worked right on the way you saw. It could make you believe you were looking at the landscape when in fact the picture was
edited, leaving out the—

“Mantis,” he said suddenly. “Mantis, Fanny called it. She’d seen it a couple times.”

The Mantis projected illusions better than any mech ever had. It could call up past pictures and push them into your head
so quickly you didn’t know what was real. And behind the picture was the Mantis, getting closer, trying to breach you.

—Figure to run?— Jocelyn called. She was a distant speck and already backing off, ready to go.

“Not with a big green spot on my back.”

Killeen laughed crazily, which for this instant was easier than thinking, and he had learned to take these things by the instant.
Any other thinking was just worry and that slowed you when you needed to be fast.

His problem was the topo and mapping gear, which he alone carried in the Family. He backpacked his on his lower spine.

Legend had it that the topo man was the first to fry. The story was that hunter mechs—Lancers, Stalkers, Rattlers—saw the
gear as a bright green dot and homed in on it. They could bounce their low hooting voices off the stuff, get some kind of
directional sense from that. And then hoot louder, sending something that invaded the topo man’s gear and then slithered into
his head.

—What do then?—

“Got to shoot.”

He heard Jocelyn’s grudging grunt. She didn’t like that. For that matter, he didn’t either. If this Mantis thing was half
as good as Fanny’d said, it could trace your shot and find you before your defenses went up.

But if they didn’t kill the Mantis now, it would track them. Hide behind its mirages at night. It could walk up and pry them
apart with its own cutters, before they even laid eyes on it. “Wait. Just ’membered something Fanny said.”

—Better ’member fast.—

Fanny’s way of teaching was to tell stories. She’d said something about the Calamity, about how in the midst of humanity’s
worst battle some Bishops had found a way to penetrate the mirages.

He tapped his teeth together carefully, experimentally—one long, one short. That set his vision so the reds came up strong.
Blues washed away, leaving a glowing, rumpled land seething into liquid fire. The sky was a blank nothing. Across the far
hillside swept crimson tides of temperature as his eyes slid down the spectrum.

—Fanny’s hurt. Think we should try for her?—

“Quiet!”

He shook his head violently, staring straight ahead, keeping his eyes fixed on one place. What had Fanny said… ? Go to fastflick
red, watch out of the corners of your eyes.

Something wavered. Among the sculpted sheets of wintry-gray stone stood something gangly, curved, arabesqued with traceries
of luminous worms. The image merged with the rock and then swam up out of it, coming visible only if Killeen jerked his head
to the side fast.

The illusion corrected quickly but not perfectly, and for fractions of a second he could see the thing of tubular
legs, cowled head, a long knobby body prickly with antennae.

—Gettin’ much?—

“Lessee, I—”

Something punched a hole in his eye and went in.

He rolled backward, blinking, trying to feel-follow the ricochet of howling heat that ran in fast jabbing forks through his
body.

Molten agony flooded his neural self. It swarmed, spilling and rampaging.

He felt/saw old, remembered faces, pale and wisp-thin. They shot toward him and then away, as though a giant hand were riffling
through a deck of cards so that each face loomed sharp and full for only an instant. And with each slipping-by memory there
came a flash of chrome-bright hurt.

The Mantis was fishing in his past. Searching, recording.

Killeen yelled with rage.

He fought against a grasping touch.

“I—it got in—” and then he felt the pain-darter clasped by a cool quickness in his right leg. He sensed the roving heat-thing
sputtering, dying. It was swallowed by some deeply buried, spider-fine trap, fashioned by minds long lost.

Killeen did not consider what had saved him. He understood his own body no more than he understood the mechs. He simply sprang
up again, finding himself at the bottom of a crumbling sandy slope which his spasms had taken him down. In his sensorium strobed
the afterimage of the pain-darter.

And his directional finder had followed the telltale pulses to their source.

“Jocelyn! I can get a fix,” he called.

—Damnfast it, then.—

“It’s moving!”

In the glowering ruby twilight the Mantis jerked and clambered toward Fanny’s sprawled body. Killeen heard a low bass sawing
sound that raised the hair on the back of his neck.

Like yellowed teeth sawing through bone. If it got close to Fanny—

Killeen sighted on the flickering image of the moving Mantis while his left index finger pressed a spot in his chest. In his
left eye a sharp purple circle grew, surrounding the volume where the Mantis image oozed in and out. He tapped his right temple
and Jocelyn got the fix.

—Wanna frizz it?— she called. She was a small dot across the valley. They would get good triangulation on the Mantis.

“Naysay. Let’s blow the bastard.”

—Ayesay. Go!—

He fired. Sharp claps in the stillness.

The two old-style charges smacked the mech fore and aft.

Legs blew away. Antennae slammed to the ground.

Killeen could see the Mantis’s blue-green electric life droop and wink out, all its internals dying as the main-mind tried
to stay alive by sacrificing them. But mechanical damage you couldn’t fix with a quick reflowing of ’tricity, he remembered
grimly.

The mechs were often most vulnerable that way. Killeen liked seeing them blown to pieces, gratifyingly obvious. Which was
the real reason he used charges when he could.

He bounded up, running full tilt toward the still-slow-dissolving Mantis. Popping ball joints let the legs go. Its trunk hit
the ground rolling. The mainmind would be in there, trying to save itself.

Killeen approached gingerly, across sandy ground littered with mechwaste jumble. He kicked aside small machine parts, his
eyes never leaving the Mantis. Jocelyn came pounding in from the other side.

“Booby trap, could be,” he said.

“Dunno. Never saw anythin’ this big.”

“I’ll yeasay that,” Killeen murmured, impressed.

All splayed out, the Mantis was longer than ten humans laid end to end. For him the heft and size of things went deadsmooth
direct into him. Without thought he sensed whether something weighed too much to carry a day’s march, or if it was within
range of a given weapon.

Numbers flitted in his left eye, giving the Mantis dimensions and mass. He could not read these ancient squiggles of his ancestors,
scarcely registered them. He didn’t need to. His inner, deep-bedded chips and subsystems processed all this into direct senses.
They came as naturally and unremarkably as did the brush of the warm wind now curling his faded black hair, the low electromagnetic
groans of the Mantis dying, the dim irk that told him to pee soon.

“Look,” Jocelyn said. This close he heard her through acoustics, her voice a touch jittery now from the exertion and afterfear.
“Mainmind’s in there.” She pointed.

A coppery cowling was trying to dig its way into the soil, and making fast work of it, too. Jocelyn stepped closer and aimed
a scrambler at it.

“Use a thumper,” Killeen said.

She took out a disc-loaded tube and primed it. The disc
went
chunk
as she fired it into the burnished, rivet-ribbed cowling. The carapace rocked from the impact. Steel-blue borers on its underside
whined into silence.

“Good,” Killeen said. Nearby, two navvys scuttled away. Both had crosshatched patterns on their side panels. He had never
seen navvys traveling with a high-order mech. “Hit those two,” he said, raising his gun.

“Just navvys—forget ’em.”

“Yeasay.” He ran to Fanny. He had been following Fanny’s long-established rules—secure the mainmind first, then look to the
hurt. But as he loped toward the still, sprawled form his heart sank and he regretted losing even a moment.

Fanny lay tangled, head lolling. Her leathery mouth hung awry, showing yellowed gums and teeth sharpened by long hours of
filing. Her lined face stared blankly at the sky and her eyes were a bright, glassy white.

“No!” He couldn’t move. Beside him, Jocelyn knelt and pressed her palms against Fanny’s upper neck.

Killeen could see there was no tremor. He felt an awful, draining emptiness seep into him. He said slowly, “It… blitzed her.”