“Uh?”

See? Views the Crafter had gathered.

His eyes filled with yellow-green still-lifes: a journal of repairs made and things shaped. There were closeups of complex machine parts. Tangles of circuitry. But beyond, as needless incidental background, were hills of florid green and even windblown silver-yellow growths that Killeen recognized. Trees.

“These… they’re not from the oldtimes?”

No. From the Crafter’s encrypted data, I gather these are recent. They are from sites only a few days’ march from here.

“Great!”

Abruptly the lush still-life switched off. Arthur sensed an approach even before the still-fuzzy Killeen could. Ledroff loomed before him, the thick black beard like a shield to hide the man’s true expression.

“What’s great?” Ledroff demanded. “You near ready?”

“Uh, yea… Cap’n.” Killeen made himself say it. The word was hard to get out. “Look, I was just processing some quickgrit from that Crafter.”

Ledroff shrugged. “Crafters dunno nothin’.” He turned away.

“Naysay! This one attacked, didn’t it?”

Ledroff turned, hands on hips. “It made a mistake.”

“It organized those navvys. Took Jake.”

“So?”

“I think it’s something new.”

“Programmed to recognize us?”

“Yeasay, if it chances on us. And then not just call for a Marauder and wait. It recruits some navvys and strikes.”

Ledroff frowned. “Yea, so I’ve thought as well.”

“I sliced a frag from its memory.”

Ledroff looked guarded, as though Killeen was lying. “You’ve been downdoggo.”

Killeen answered sheepishly, “Just a rest, that’s all.”

Ledroff was a big man but seemed now curiously unsure of himself. He did not welcome new information, but instead distrusted it. Killeen realized that the man had finally gotten what he wanted for so long—the Cap’ncy—but had no clear idea of what to do next. And feared that this fact would come out. This was in his voice, a mere shade of defensiveness. “So?”

“Can read some.”

Gruffly: “Do.”

“Have.”

Suspiciously: “And… ?”

“Big green valley. Three-, four-day march.”

Ledroff looked startled, then beamed with sudden relief. The Family had been without good maps or sure direction ever since the Calamity, when all humanity’s orbiting satellites were destroyed. They had wandered, using only old maps and surveys. Their only certain guide was the need to avoid the mech cities, where surely they would be killed. Yet the ever-shifting weather of their world, Snowglade, had by now confused their remaining maps. They had no true vector any longer.

Ledroff thought out loud, “A transmech just came in at the factory outside. If we can redirect it, override its routine…”

“This greenland, it could be a fringe of a Splash.”

“Yeasay, yeasay.” Ledroff looked relieved.

Killeen smiled, glad to be for once not the layabout he knew Ledroff had always thought him to be. “Let’s go. Come on!”

FIVE

Jake-the-Shaper’s laying-low had taken a while, and then the grumbling of the Family took more as they got ready to move again. Voices rose in fatigued dissent. Tired, sun-browned faces knotted. Eyes narrowed, considering hangdog resistance.

The Family was only beginning to shake off the dust of the last several weeks. Legs ached from the long shuffling march. Bellies growled for more of the vatsoup, the protein cakes, the spongy sourbread. They hungered for the Trough’s moist illusion of security and wanted to cling to it.

Ledroff showed some leadership then. He had stopped several from trashing the Trough itself, after the Crafter attack. Such fever-blind revenge might well have raised an alarm, brought a Marauder to answer it. Ledroff calmly disarmed the alky-soaked few, set them to useful work.

He also tolerated no mean, spiteful talk. In the years since the Calamity the Family had learned that aimless jawing had to be carefully controlled. In a crisis—slowcoming or quick, no matter—it was always better to run than to talk.

Someone had to cut off the winding jabber that passed for discussion. This Ledroff did, using his booming voice to override.

The Family meandered to their gear and reluctantly figured how much they each could carry away from the Trough. They dallied, ate some more, took every chance to stop and sit and fidget with their harnesses, their’matics, their carefully tended boots. Ledroff’s voice boomed again then, cajoling them to resuit and pack away foodstuffs for a march of uncertain end. Killeen nodded, still smarting from his humiliation, but he saw what had to be done.

There were jobs. Ledroff assigned some to covering their tracks in the Trough. The worst task fell to Killeen and Cermo-the-Slow: disposing of Jake. There was no place to bury the carcass, a stiffening, stilled clockwork whose skin was a patchwork of blotchy browns and oblongs of stark white. As he hoisted it, Killeen felt Jake’s deadweight as a thing more solid and bulky than the living Jake had been.

They had to feed Jake slowly into one of the vats, letting the flesh dissolve into a ruddy mucus. It was wrong to waste flesh in the soil, that they knew and felt deeply. What went into a Trough could someday come out of it.

Still, watching Jake blur and bleed, the ghostwhite bones first poking up through translucent papery skin, and then splitting it, the peeling parchment curling away—

Killeen’s heart had climbed into his throat. His hands were slippery on Jake’s ankle. The harsh fumes that rose from the waxy vat scum found their way high up into his head and fogged his eyes, leaked tears from his eyes.

Yet it was Fanny he wept for, not Jake.

Time ticked on. The smell cut sharper. At last he could let Jake go. As a foot and spindly calf sank into brown, crusted mire, Killeen said goodbye to Fanny as well. Then he stumbled away.

He helped Toby suit up, carefully sealing his son’s pullpoints, letting the details of preparation fill up his mind.

Only when they were moving again did he think.

Across the sloping valleys they came. Killeen carried his punishing penalty load on upper and lower back. He huffed in air as he took long strides, letting his percussive landings exhale it.

He had long since learned from his father the effort-saving, forward-tilted stride. In Snowglade’s low gravity the muscles of humanity, augmented with servos and cobbled-together suits, made them stride like giants. The parts were filched from mechs and hand-wrought to human calves and shoulders. Shapemetal blended and smoothed like a soft chrome clay, when it was triggered with the right de-poly signal.

This was the principal craft the Family still retained— indeed, would die without. Jake-the-Shaper had been best at it. Jocelyn, Cermo, and a few more knew the shaping art. The talent lived mostly in the hands, so the Family carried it as an ongoing dexterous art. Many of the Aspects which rode in the backminds of the Family members knew as much. But mere talksay was not enough. Aspects could not work your muscles. You had to have the feel of it, or else seams would pop, burrs would rub at bunching muscles, servos would clog and freeze.

Killeen listened with a fraction of his mind to the hum and work of his suit, letting his senses range over the land ahead. Tawny scrub bushes dotted the hills, life persistent and uncrushed, though the orange clay was crosscut by myriad mech treads.

“Looking damper,” he sent.

—See any streams?— Jocelyn answered.