Great Sky River

by Gregory Benford

  The Family was well dispersed. Even if a mech flyer spotted them and dropped an explosive bomb or a jammer, only a few could be within range.

  “Lookleft,” Ledroff called to Killeen. “See some-thin’?”

  The landscape leaped into bright focus as Killeen landed atop a rust-riddled hulk. It had been a crawler. Ancient in design, stripped of ore-rich parts, it rattled like a forlorn drum as he studied the far horizon.

  “Looks to be mechs, only…”

  “What’s your Far-Ranger say?”

  “Mechmetal, sure plenty that. But I’m not smellin’ mechthink.”

  Killeen’s sensors had a library of typical mech electronic signatures, and they sampled the tiny sputterings of unshielded emission ahead. Killeen could neither have read nor understood a graphics display detailing which signals were mechlike. The data flowed to him as cloying scents, laced with crisp darting odors.

  “Could be they’re downwindin’ you?”

  Killeen bristled. “I can tell a mechfart faster’n any,” he said. This was not true—Cermo-the-Slow had a better nose. But the big man lacked judgment and speed.

  Killeen reluctantly called up Arthur and asked for help.

  You ask if mechs could hide like this? No, I doubt they could fully shield their transmissions. Nor could they fully elude the sensors we carry.

  “You sure?”

  I participated in the development of these techniques, I’ll remind you.

  “If we let that many get within scannin’ distance…”

  I assure you—

  —Dad, I hear talking,— Toby called.

  “What kind?”

  —Some kind strange voices, I dunno who.—

  Ledroff sent, —Could be a mech trick.—

  Killeen was confused. His instincts said Run!—and he automatically bent down to check-tighten his boots, running gloved fingers along glassy fiberseals. He turned his head. A small shift in the capacitance of his sensorium brought him a tinny chime of talk. He froze. Overlapping, garbled, human voices:

  —They’re comin’.—

  —Too many. Can’t pick ’em off.—

  —I say we cut right now.—

  —Checkleft. Any sign they’re surroundin’?—

  —Might just be navvys.—

  —Naw, they step too high.—

  —I smell plenty mechmetal in ’em. Stinks powerful.—

  Toby cried, —They’re people!—

  And here they were, a thin wedge straggling across the deep-rutted plain. Killeen’s mouth formed an incredulous O.

  A distant ringing voice demanded, —What Family? What Family?—

  Ledroff answered, —Bishop! Six years from the Citadel!—

  A woman’s voice answered, —We’re Rooks.—

  —We have kin here, kin of yours.—

  —Cousins and uncles and aunts!—

  Boots dug into timeworn sand and the two triangles on the plain rushed at each other. Pellmell running, shouting.

  Questions about lost relatives yelled into the sensorium, and hoarse answers calling back. Windmilling of legs at the high point of high leaps. Then the tips of the spear-points met and men and women flung themselves at each other. Behind scratched helmets were faces half-remembered, people who were until a moment before only faded images from a wondrous life that had ceased to be. The faces carried furrows and brownscabbed rashes, sewn-up cuts and even hollowed-out eyesockets where no replacement parts could be found. Mouths showed ruined gray-stubbed teeth, blood-rimmed lips. They barked and called to one another, even though most of them in fact knew only a few of the bobbing faces coming across the broken plain. The Citadel had held thousands. They had gone so long in their own close and knotted company, their memories had been overladen by such a weight of daily terror, that any face was a sudden reminder, undeniable and fleshy, of the collectivity of their kind. Lost friends embraced. Shouts laced the air. Abruptly they saw themselves as far more than a straggling band of hunted creatures. Their yelps and startled joy celebrated humanity itself.

  Toby found immediately a boy and two girls, who came bounding out in front of even the fleetest of running men. They embraced and jabbered and capered and even wrestled in their unthinking frenzy, while about them the two Families collided, two long-separated fluids flowing in a throughstreaming torrent of bodies and talk and simple mindless whoops and cries and sudden tears.

  Killeen found a man he had known, had worked with in the fields: Sanhakan, heavybrowed and cleanshaven still, eyes dancing in a net of webbed, sunburned wrinkles. Sanhakan clapped him on the back, swore, swung Killeen off the ground in a bear grip. They both laughed wildly, peering at each other through filmed helmets, as if to be sure the other was in fact substantial and not a fever dream. They popped helmets, just as everyone was doing around them, and kissed in incredulous greeting. Only taste and touch were trusted now, the human press of warm and pungent flesh. Killeen breathed in the rank running-smell of Sanhakan. Then the slightly muskier odor of a woman who was suddenly at his elbow, heavy lips outthrust. Another woman, old and weathered and smelling of salty exertion, white hair, and something indefinably sweet. Slapping and patting and hugging, he made his way through the welter of closepressing bodies that knocked him about in their lurching joy. Faces, scabbed and furrowed. Sobbing. He came to an old man with eyes slitted nearly closed, but whose teeth sparkled with lustrous youth. Killeen embraced him, unable to hear what the man shouted over the babble-river around them. Then Killeen was passed by eager hands on to the next, and in turning away from the old man heard a sudden spang that sprang up from his lower spine and hurled itself through his head. Red filmed his vision. Something hit his nose, bringing the instant thick taste of blood into his mouth. He licked at it in wonderment. His tongue rasped on sand. His vision cleared slightly, clouds blowing away, and he saw he was facedown. He moved leadened muscles and rolled over. Next to him lay the old man, legs and arms stretched full out. The tongue protruded and there was a certain look to the face that struck a sudden coldness into Killeen, the awful twisted look that Fanny had.

  He struggled up onto an elbow. The streaming talk around him now had a harsh high register. Screams. Bod ies falling. Killeen tried to push the edge of his sensorium outward, find what was happening. It was thick, clouded, muffled, like swimming in dust. He got to his knees and saw that some of the Families were down, sprawled. Others fled. Some were frozen with shock.

  Toby.

  Brittle pain shot through his arms. Killeen groped around.

  And saw his son lurch up uncertainly, a bare short distance away.

  “Toby!” Killeen got to his knees. “Get behind something!”

  Toby saw him. “Which way?”

  “Come on!”

  Teetering unsteadily on feet of wooden weight, Killeen stumbled toward an outcropping of jagged boulders.

  “Get… there.” They both dropped weakly behind the largest stone. Then Killeen realized he did not know which direction the attack came from.

  Toby stared at the running figures, eyes white. “What… ?”

  “It’s the Mantis,” Killeen said.

  EIGHT

  Twenty-two bodies. His subsystems counted them automatically as he carefully surveyed the far hills.

  Twenty-two, all sprawled like loose bags. Suredead.

  They had been hit by something firing from long range, something with remarkable aim. To do that took size, to get good triangulation.

  Something big should be easy to spot. Even in the excitement, they should have seen it coming. As far as Killeen could see, there was nothing obvious, no crinkling play of sandy light.

  Mantis.

  Killeen heard/felt a thin, high, cold skreeeee. He ducked automatically. A passing fringe field. The Mantis could be behind him, could be anywhere.

  Toby was down, left leg stuck straight out. The boy pushed with both hands and rolled himself partway up the side of the boulder. He grimaced and almost lost his balance.


  Killeen reached for Toby’s arm. “Come on!”—and they went hobbling toward the nearest gully, crouched over.

  Running, Killeen felt:

  Low mutter of acousto-electro noise, like a Marauder strobesearching.

  Crackling hotstink.

  A hard thump in the lower spine—

  Skreeeee.

  Toby gasped in pain, “What was… what…”

  “Went over our heads. We caught the backwash.”

  Killeen remembered scrambled, spike-shot cues like this. They came when you were in the secondary emission lobe, where side-angling waves interfered with each other to build a small, fast-moving peak. Killeen’s father had explained it to him once and all he could remember to counter it was to shut down all your senses except vision, go numb.

  Killeen blotted out sound, smell, touch—and was instantly in a silent, numb world. He stepped down his vision. Color drained from the world.

  All the while he was half-carrying Toby, lunging forward awkwardly.

  He fought to keep his balance. His feet sent back only dull drumbeats.

  He cradled Toby close, trying to shield him from unknown vectors.

  Skreeeeeee—

  They crashed down the slope of the gully and ended in a tangled pile.

  Family were crouched all along the shelf of broken stone. Killeen and Toby lay panting, watching. Killeen let his senses ease back to full.

  The Families fought back defiantly. Some would jerk their arms up and fire off a humming round of electronoise without aiming. If your head wasn’t exposed, there was no easy route into your sensorium. But of course they had no good idea of what the Mantis could do. And this time it had them neatly pinned, bunched together.

  Killeen touched the boy’s knee carefully. “Feel this?”

  “Ah… ahhhh… it’s okay.”

  “You sure?”

  “Musta clipped me, going by.”

  “How’s this?” Flexing the leg a little.

  “All ri—ow!”

  “Let it rest. Prob’ly come back in a while.”

  “Ahhhhh…”

  “How bad’s it?”

  Toby’s eyes rolled up. His face paled. Killeen gripped him in blind fear. “Toby!”

  Inside the boy a struggle snarled through embedded metal and augmented brain and parts for which Killeen had no name. His fists clenched in impotent despair. His face twisted hopelessly. “Toby!”

  “Ahhhh…” A long sigh. Toby’s legs jerked.

  “Lie still.”

  “I… no…”

  It was always this way, complex surges running faster than human thoughts could follow. They were spectators to their own feverquick interior zones. To buried ancient crafts.

  The boy’s lips moved numbly. They reddened. The inner battle ebbed.

  Toby gasped, coughed. To Killeen’s astonishment he sat up, gloves digging into gray sand. A whisper: “We got it… yet?”

  “No, look, lie back—”

  Toby’s green eyes leveled, cleared. “Lemme…”

  “Now you just—”

  “Lemme shoot!” Toby demanded, voice strengthening.

  “Keep down. Dunno where it is yet.”

  “I heard somethin’ that way.” Toby pointed shakily at a distant rockslide. From this low in the gully they could see only the uppermost jagged rubble of it.

  “What’d it sound like?”

  “When people started fallin’,” Toby said wanly, “I heard metal tearin’ apart. Real loud. My leg wouldn’t move and I fell down and I heard that sound again, comin’ from over there.”

  Killeen sensed as a shifting haze the random cries of the two Families, bleeding humanity blending together.

  The wounded grunted. Some sobbed. A woman called Alex Alex Alex Alex in a brittle, thin panic.

  A few shouted for orders, plaintively seeking their Cap’n. Ledroff needlessly called for return fire but no one seemed to have a fix on what had happened, where to look.

  They were all strewn through gullies in the plain, unable to maneuver. With almost no shelter, the Families would have to crawl out. But the Mantis could keep the high ground and follow them.

  Killeen drew a long filament from his shoulder pack and hooked it into a steel eyelet at the tag end of his shirt cuff. It was a sensepipe his father had given him and its mico surface was scarred and yellowed. He snugged it into the eyejack in his temple.

  Toby asked weakly, “Whatcha…”

  “Looking.”

  Killeen closed his eyes and the sensepipe took over. He saw/heard quick snatches of his surroundings. Then he angled his arm up and poked it over the pebbled rim. He searched the far horizon, working the point of view down. He regularly twitched his hand, to mix up the data inflow. That would help find mirages.

  “Catching anything?” a deep woman’s voice asked behind him.

  “No. Leave me be.”

  “Can find, I hit.”

  “Can find, I’il hit.”

  “No. Better.”

  He didn’t open his eyes. The distant ruined hillsides jumped and melted and flashed through the hotpoint, overloaded spectrum of his search pattern. He inched up the slope to get a lower angle and started searching the bottom fan of the rockslide.

  A whisper of something metallic went by him, trailing away into a nervous rattling. A ranging shot, maybe. He kept riffling through his righteyed filters and was about to give up when he saw something move.

  It was gone in an instant but he brought it back. A gangly body. Tripod legs. An intricate pattern was nestled into the rocks, its antennae swerving in jerks.

  Killeen unjacked and rolled down the slope, warm sand trickling at his neck and into his suit. “Okay, let’s see—”

  Beside Toby, hands cradling the boy’s calf muscle, knelt the woman. She wore faded gray tightweave. It clung to an exoskeleton which clasped her like a many-fingered fist. He had seen such before, but never so finely made. The exskell ribs wrapped around her long thin body and shooting down her legs in a cross-laced spiral. At her throat the black rib-fingers tapered into flexible strands that coiled in at the back of her neck. They twitched slightly as she looked up at him, her muscles pulled and bunched by them. The bluegray eyes were level and assessing.

  “—see what you’ve got,” he finished, in the heartbeat’s pause taking in her worn backpack stuffed with lumpy gear, her bony black exskell, her coiled and pin-tucked ebony hair.

  “That you see now.” As she said it she sent two signals: A rawboned hand came up to pluck from the scuffed backpack a slender pressed-plastic rod. And she gave him a wolfish grin, all sharpedge and strungwire.

  “I…” he gestured vaguely over his shoulder, “found it. What’s that?”

  “Bird,” she said curtly.

  Toby was watching her peacefully with a wobbly smile, as if her touch had calmed him. Killeen guessed the boy was starting to feel the afterrush, as sensation flooded back into the leg and the muscles went slack.

  She stuck the rod into a shiny cylinder which lay at her feet. Killeen recognized these parts as scavenged Marauder parts, fitted ingeniously into a weapon different from any he had ever seen. As she hoisted it up at the sky the exskell flexed and purred and corrected a momentary imbalance in her legs.

  “Sure you don’t want…”

  The eyes glinted proudly. “I can.”

  “Okay.”

  She duckwalked partway up the tawny sandstone slope. Stiffly she sprawled forward, the exskell grinding against stones as it stretched. The black-sheened ribs kept her real ribs from jagging into the stubby rocks. She cradled the rod forward, the end of it heavy with the copper-jacketed cylinder. Her right hand popped a molded handgrip from the stock of the rod. Cradling the rig, she sighted along it. She had two eyejacks, like cosmetic pimples set just outside her dark-rimmed eyesockets. Both snugged into the mounts on the upper dowel of the stock.

  Killeen wordlessly sent her his own short-time stored image of the Mantis. In the frame was a notati
on RANGE 2.3275 ZONE KM but he did not know what that meant.

  She nodded slightly, her eyes closed. She fired.

  The copper bird seemed to spin off its rod and glide away. It accelerated with a rush and before Killeen could stand up he heard a muffled crump.

  A low tone vanished from his sensorium. He realized that the whole time since the attack he had been in the scan-fan of the Mantis, feeling its persistent probing.

  The woman got slowly, achingly, to her feet.

  “Damnfine weapon you got there.”

  Her dark, heavy-lidded eyes blinked languidly. “Killed.”

  With a releasing sigh he said, “Yeasay, yeafold.”

  The Mantis was a jumble at the foot of the rockslide. Parts had sheared off from heavy steel lug nuts and crashed among tumbled boulders.

  Killeen said slowly, “Could be the same’s hit us a few days back.”

  The woman raised a thin, jetblack eyebrow. “Is?”

  “Mantis. But we drilled the mainmind with a thumper!”

  “Sure?”

  “I saw it.”

  She whirred and clicked as she walked, her exskell giving her a strange stiff grace. Her face angled down to a pointed chin which was covered by a red rash. To Killeen she seemed like a lattice, even her bones simply calcium rods in an onworking machine. Yet something tugged at him when the cool bluegray eyes studied his face.

  “This piece here”— he poked at a rivet-ribbed steel ellipsoid—“I thought was the mainmind.”

  She swung her head swiftly; yet in short jerks, as though taking pictures of each piece of the shattered Mantis.

  Borers spun at the base of the Mantis’s central, glass jacketed ellipsoid. The thing was trying to burrow into a sandy spot it had found. Killeen pressed his scrambler against the access lobe of the ellipsoid and fired. The thing shuddered and stopped.

  “Hiding now,” she said, and with surprising speed loped back toward the distant gully where the Families still crouched. Killeen followed, not understanding. He felt seeping gray fatigue as he crossed the bleached plain.

  Toby hadn’t moved but was testing his leg, thumping it against the ground to bring back feeling. “Heysay! Got it?”