Harman looked at Daeman again, obviously curious about the proxnet comment, but not asking any questions now.
“They’re following you, you know,” said Savi, pausing to look first at Daeman and then at Harman. The harsh flashlight beam made her face look even older and more skull-like.
“Not you?” said Daeman, surprised.
She shook her head. “I don’t register on any nets. The voynix don’t even know I’m here. It’s you two who are showing up out of bounds on their farnet and proxnet scans. I think the nearest faxportal is Mantua. They know you didn’t walk this far.”
“Where are we going now?” whispered Harman. “The sonie?”
Savi shook her head again. Her gray hair was wet with sweat or condensation and plastered to her skull. “These tunnels don’t go beyond the old city. And the voynix have rendered the sonie inoperable by now. I’m headed for the crawler.”
“Crawler?” said Daeman, but rather than explain, Savi turned away and began leading them through the tunnels again.
A hundred paces further and the round brick tunnel became a narrow corridor, thirty paces beyond that and the corridor became stairs, and then a wall stopped them.
Daeman felt his heart trying to pound through his chest wall. “What do we do?” he said. “What do we do? What do we do?” He spun away from the light, listening hard in the darkness for voynix sounds.
“Climb.”
Daeman turned back to see Savi being lifted into another vertical well—this one narrower than the one they had descended—and then the light was gone as the flashlight bobbed above them.
Harman jumped up for the lowest rung, missed, cursed softly, jumped again, caught it, and pulled himself up. Daeman could barely see the outline of the older man’s arm as he reached down. “Come on, Daeman. Hurry. The voynix are probably already up there, waiting for us.”
“Then why are we climbing up there?”
“Come on.” Harman seized Daeman’s forearm in the darkness and pulled him up.
The voynix broke through the wall of the building just as the three humans were scrambling onto the crawler.
The huge machine took up much of the space in the central area of what Savi said had once been a large church. When they came up the stairs from the cellar, Savi’s flashlight flicking this way and that, Daeman had paused on the steps, not sure of what he was seeing. The crawler filled the space like some giant spider, its six wheels—each at least twelve feet tall—linked by hinged spidery struts, its passenger sphere glowing milkily in the center of the struts like a white egg at the center of a web.
The battering against the church doors and walls began even before Savi began climbing the thin, metallic access ladder hanging from the struts. “Hurry,” she said, no longer whispering.
Third in line—again—Daeman thought that the old woman was the master of the unnecessary imperative. A boarded window sixty feet up a wall exploded inward and five voynix scrabbled in, their bladed manipulators hacking into stone like ice hammers. The eyeless, rust-red domes above their carapaces turned ponderously downward and fixed on the crawler and the three people trying to get to its passenger sphere. Stones burst from the far wall and half a dozen other voynix came in on two legs.
Savi touched a faded red circle on the underside of the sphere, tapped digits into a small yellow energy diskey that appeared, and a section of the glass globe slid open with an audible rasp. She crawled up and in, Harman followed, and Daeman got his legs in just as the first of the voynix hurtled across the dusty stones toward him.
The slice in the sphere slid closed. There were six cracked-leather contour seats in the center of the sphere, and he and Harman threw themselves into side seats as Savi ran her hand over a flat metal wedge protruding above the front seat. A softly glowing projection control panel—much more complicated than the one on the sonie—pulsed into life around her. She touched a virtual red dial, ran a bright yellow circle along a green slide, and slipped her hand into a form-fitting controller.
“What if it doesn’t start?” asked Harman, whom Daeman now nominated for master of the poorly timed rhetorical question. A score of voynix pulled themselves up and over the high black mesh wheels and jumped like giant grasshoppers onto the top of the glass sphere. Daeman flinched and ducked low.
“If it doesn’t start, we die,” said Savi. She twitched the virtual controller to the right.
There was no engine roar or gyro hum, just a soft buzz so low as to be almost subsonic. But searchlights stabbed out in front of the crawler and a dozen other virtual displays flicked into life.
The half-dozen voynix atop the passenger sphere had been pounding and clawing on the glass, but suddenly they slid away and fell to the ground twenty feet below. They weren’t injured or damaged—each voynix leapt to its feet and jumped for the sphere again—but each then fell away again, unable to gain purchase on the surface they’d been clinging to only a few seconds earlier.
“It’s a micron-thick forcefield,” muttered Savi, her attention on the glowing designs and icons appearing all over the virtual panel. “Frictionless. It was designed to keep snow or rain from accumulating on the canopy, but it appears to shed voynix as well.”
Daeman turned to watch a score of voynix scrambling up the huge wheels, battering at the metal mesh, pulling at the struts and braces. “We should go,” he said.
“Yes.” Savi pushed the virtual controller forward and the crawler crashed through the ancient church wall, fell a dozen feet before the wildly articulated wheels found purchase on the wall and ground, and then accelerated forward. The lane was slightly narrower than the crawler, but this didn’t slow the machine a bit. Walls several thousand years old collapsed on either side until the crawler lurched out onto David Street and Savi turned it left, toward the west, away from the blue beam still stabbing skyward behind them.
Countless voynix scrabbled in pursuit while dozens more threw themselves in front of the speeding crawler and leapt for the passenger sphere. Still accelerating, the crawler ran over those in the street that failed to dodge and left the rest of the pack behind. Half a dozen persistent voynix still clung to the struts and were hacking away at the metal, clawing at the spinning wheels.
“Can they do damage?” asked Harman.
“I don’t know,” said Savi. “We’re approaching the Sho’or Yafa—the Jaffa Gate. Let’s see if we can get rid of them.”
She swerved the still-accelerating crawler into walls on the left and then on the right side of David Street, finally smashing through an arch lower than the crawler. Vibration and falling masonry shook the clinging voynix off, but Daeman turned to see most of them rising out of the rubble and joining the pack giving chase. Then the crawler was through the gate, out of the old city, and picking up speed down the graveled hill where they’d left the sonie, but the only sign of their flying machine was a heap of rocks thirty feet high surrounded by forty or fifty more voynix. Immediately the creatures left the mound and rushed to cut off the crawler. Savi ran over some, dodged others, and found an ancient highway running west from the city.
“Tough machine,” said Harman.
“They built tough machines toward the end of the Lost Age,” said Savi. “With nano-maintenance, it should last damned near forever.” She’d pulled her thermskin night-vision lenses from her pack and was driving with the crawler’s headlights off now. Daeman found the effect of hurtling along in the dark unsettling as he heard the big wheels crunching over rusted artifacts on the road—probably ancient abandoned vehicles. Then he realized that they were hurtling over a bridge and then rumbling through a cut between hills. He couldn’t see the pursuing voynix now in the dark—only the receding blue blade of light leaping straight up from the dark hill of Jerusalem—but he knew the voynix were still back there, still coming on.