“Those gullies southward look fresh.”

—You suresay this is the right vector?—

“Dead on.”

Arthur came in unbidden:

I’m recalculating every ten minutes. We are heading at the bearing I judge appropriate for the data the Crafter carried. Of course, the Crafter might have been confused, or erred—

“Beggin’ off now, uh?” Killeen muttered irritably.

I am not. I simply said—

Ledroff broke in, —You checking the route?—

Arthur was inaudible to anyone except Killeen, of course. It was uncanny, though, how Ledroff could gather what Killeen’s Aspect was saying. Maybe Killeen had been muttering over the comm. “Yeafold. See those green spikes? There were some like it in one of the Crafter’s pictures.”

—Huh.— Ledroff was a distant speck, his voice tinged with skepticism. Killeen could tell it would be a long while before Ledroff forgot the alky-drinking. The Cap’n would use it as a handy way to undercut Killeen. Already he was favoring Jocelyn, to keep Killeen in his place.

“Let’s go that way.”

—Might’s well.—

Killeen could hear Ledroff click his teeth together, which meant he hadn’t any better idea. Ledroff skip-walked, kicking up dust plumes. Beyond him chugged the transporter mech they had commandeered.

The older Family members rode on the copper-ribbed sides of the big hauler, clinging with slaptabs to the buffed aluminum tank walls. They swung like boughs of motley fruit, bobbing as the transporter lumbered with dogged persistence over the bumpy terrain. Iron-gray massifs towered on the far horizon like unreachable fortresses.

Killeen didn’t like jouncing along on the transporter and had given away his rest turns on it. He preferred to be in the open. If a Marauder chanced to intersect their path, it would see the outlying men and women first. It seemed to Killeen only right that he should be the most visible, while Toby walked closer to the transporter.

To a Marauder its barrel-shaped fellow mech would not be a target. Only on close inspection could a Marauder tell that the dull-witted transporter had been hijacked, redirected, and no longer dutifully carried cargo from the little factory to a regional depot.

—Heysay, Dad.— Toby waved from far away.

“Time to eat?”

Toby laughed. It was an old joke, from the time when the boy had wanted an extra snack every few klicks. That had been during the hard times after the Calamity. None of the Family had been truly prepared. None had imagined that their lot would be one of endless fleeing.

—Noway,— Toby said. —I’m no porker.—

“Whatsay then?”

—I’m just getting tired of running alongside this fat-pack on the ’porter.—

Nobody in the Family had a scrap of fat on them any longer, but their talk was full of references to carrying excess mass, to indulgence, to unsightly bulging clothes. It was a wan vestige of a time when fat had been possible, and valued as insurance against hard times. But now all times were hard, and the Family used the words of opulence with a certain longing, a hollow bravado, as if to keep the words alive was to preserve the promise that someday they could again amass an ample centimeter or two of girth.

“You’ll pick up the porkers when they fall off.”

—They’ll just go splat if they do.—

“Keep your eye peeled all the same.”

—I want be out with you.—

“Too dangerous.”

—Isn’t!—

“Is.”

—Isn’t! Nosay noway! Lookit the greenery sproutin'.—

“A damp patch, is all.”

—Isn’t! Ever’body knows mechs don’t like green.—

“Maybe.”

—They’re ’finid of it. Can’t see so good in green light.—

“Where it’s green there’s water. Which helps rust.”

—What I said, right? So lemme walk with you.—

The plaintive warbling note in Toby’s voice touched Killeen. As he opened his mouth to tell his son to stay put and safe near the transmech, he instead found himself checking the blue-dabbed overlay in his right eye. A good firm forward-pointing triangle stood out against the topo map of the rumpled valley.

“Okay. Cover on my left.”

—Hey jubil!— Toby leaped twenty meters into the clear, bright air and landed on the run. He yelped with sudden energy and in moments was alongside his father.

In his son’s voice Killeen had heard a treble of Veronica. Though he had recordings of her, he never called them up from his longstore chip at the base of his spine. Thus, the slightest trace of her could spear him bitter-sweetly. Toby was their full child. They had used no other genetic components in making him. Which meant that Toby was Veronica’s entire legacy.

For Veronica had perished in the Calamity and was suredead.

Most of the Clan had fallen then, scythed down by the deft cut and thrust of a mech onslaught against the Citadel. For hundreds of years before, the mechs had slowly claimed parts of Snowglade, and humanity had watched warily. Snowglade had been a cool, water-rich world with winds that stirred the moisture in great towering cottony clouds. Mechs did not like such planets, which is why humanity came to be there, to prosper in their own humble fashion.

So went as much of history as Killeen had ever heard—though in truth he cared little for it. History was tales and tales were a kind of lie, or else not much different from them; he knew that much. Which was enough. A practical man had to seize the moment before him, not meander through dusty tales.

Family Bishop had lived in rugged rockfastness and splendor in the Citadel. Killeen remembered that time as though across an impassable murky chasm, though in fact it had been only six years since the Calamity. All years before that were now compressed into one daybright wondrous instant, filled with people and events which had no substantial truth any longer, had been swept away as if they had never been.

Since then the Bishops were swept forward not so much by a victorious horde behind, but rather by the mounting tide of the names of battles lost, bushwhacks walked into, traps sprung, Family members wounded or surekilled and sometimes even left behind in a disheartening white-eyed dishonorable scramble to escape, to save the remnant core of the Family, to keep some slender thread of heritage alive.

The names were places on a map—Sawridge, Corinth, Stone Mountain, Riverrun, Big Alice Springs, Pitwallow—and maps were not paper now but encoded in the individual’s memorychip. So, through the six years of pursuit, as members of the Family fell and were swallowed up by the mechmind, the Family lost even the maps to understand where their forebears had stood and fought and been vanquished. Now the names were only names, without substance or fixity in the living soil of Snowglade.

In retreat the Family could carry little, and cast aside the hardcopy maps and other regalia which had once signified their hold upon the land. So a string of dropped debris stretched across years and continents.

Killeen’s father had vanished at the Citadel, gone into chaos. Veronica had been hit standing right beside Killeen. He had dragged her body with him, seeking a medic who could repair the damage. Only when he had fallen exhausted into a muddy irrigation ditch did he see that a burst had taken her sometime as he carried her. He had been too dazed and tormented to notice. Her eyes had bulged out, shockbright and with the pus dripping from them. Suredead.

Until the Calamity he had known countless cousins, Family that had seemed boundless. Now he had only Toby.

—Looksee. A navvy,— Toby called. He pointed and went bounding off

“Heysay!” Killeen shouted. “Check that thing first.” He leaped forward and overtook his son.

The navvy seemed innocuous. Its bright crosshatched carapace was freshly polished. Its stubby arms rummaged among scabbed mechwaste—cowlings, rusted housers, worn gray biojoints.