Killeen vectored right and in a moment landed beside his son. “Mechtypes?”

Toby’s voice skittered high and excited: “I pick up three them Fact’ry luggos.”

“Whatdoing?”

“Workin’.”

“Mining?”

“Looks be ’facturin’.”

“Manufacturing what?”

“Dunno. See that transporter they’re unloadin’?”

“Um. Bundles of…” Killeen amped up his eyes to max. He scanned the pale recesses for telltale tracks of large mechs.

“Plants,” Toby said excitedly. “They harvestin’ plants.”

Killeen squinted, still couldn’t pick up enough detail. He wondered if his eyes were losing their edge, going fuzzy on him. A man had to keep watching his ’quipment. Let it go awhile and it could kill you in a minute. Angelique, a young Bishop woman, could run some kind of internal program, unglitch eye trouble. He’d have to get a runthrough and checkout. He frowned, distracted by this annoyance.

“Naysaw that before,” he said.

“Nosee mechs usin’ plants?”

“Saw some cut trees, back when—” and he stopped, because that led to back when the Citadel held firm and my father went out on raids, when humanity held forests and crops and all the lost legacy, and that was something he didn’t talk to Toby about just casually, “—when there was any.”

“Wonder what they’re makin’?”

Killeen watched the five blocky buildings clustered together in a side arroyo. Two dust devils marched down from the hills. They swirled and glided near the brown clayformed buildings, upsucking cones of fine sand.

“Can’t say. Longtime back, mechs’d chop down crops the Clan tried grow, in the valley near the Citadel. They just left ’em, though. Didn’t make anythin’ from ’em.”

“Let’s do ’em!” Toby said brightly.

Killeen looked at his son’s thin face, splotched with the mossybrown suit-rub growths that everybody got now and then. He cuffed him on the shoulder and laughed. “We got a mechscourge here?”

“Yousay!” Toby laughed, too, and Killeen saw his mirth came in part from the fact that the boy could show his bravado and have it respected in a joshing way, without having it mean anything.

The Family would decide on any attack. Boys ran with the rest, of course—the Family was never split while in dangerous action. Humans now feared more than anything a division, a loss, a fractioning. Still, the youngers ran far back on any assault, and so their word carried little weight. In that there was some remnant of childhood freedom for Toby. Killeen instinctively tried to keep that alive. He knew how quickly the hardness of the world would come in upon the boy and make him finally no longer a boy.

Some Family arrived, coming down in low sloping curves, landing with pneumatic chuuungs. Ledroff conferred, talking with his helmet cocked back. A dozen Family clustered around him.

Toby waved a gloved hand at Ledroff. “Think he’ll go?”

“Dunno,” Killeen said.

“Lookit his beard, hey.”

The matted black hair was crimped in a curved line. Toby giggled. “Got it caught in his helmet ring.”

Killeen smiled. “Bet that yanks when he runs.”

An old tradition allowed mild joshing of a Cap’n, and Killeen felt a sizable pleasure in the joke. He still smarted from Ledroff’s adroit maneuver into the Cap’ncy.

Killeen imagined Ledroff thought the beard made him look older. Maybe the smelly, helmet-tangled mass had helped make him Cap’n. Toby said, “Ugly bush.”

But Killeen said, “Keeps down the sunburn.”

“When I get one, won’t let my suit grab it.”

“Naysay, I’ll do that—” and Killeen chucked Toby under the chin playfully.

Ledroff sent on general comm: —Situation still the same?—

Already Ledroff’s voice was acquiring a certainty of command.

There was no sign of interest or changed routine in the far-distant factory. Killeen eyed Ledroff and wondered what the man would do. This could be the first real engagement since he’d become Cap’n. The man looked wary, his eyes slitted, studying.

Scattershot talk laced Killeen’s sensorium. He murmured only to Toby, the two of them keeping track of the minute profiles of the mechs as the distant forms carried out tasks. Since Killeen’s dumbdrunk on watch, he had shied away from having much voice.

Ledroff broke into their twofold comm: “Those buildings look new.”

Toby said matter-of-factly, “Fused clay, looks to be.”

Killeen was mildly surprised; the boy picked up information everywhere.

Ledroff nodded. “Mechs using plants? Might ’facture something we could do with.”

Killeen called up Arthur and asked silently, How you figure it?

This Splash zone is perhaps a decade old. There surely has been time for mechciv to exploit the organic raw materials growing here.

“Let’s hit it,” Jocelyn said.

“Yeasay,” Cermo called, already edging downslope.

Killeen could feel the quickening in the Family. They felt stronger from a mere night in a Trough. Were Jake and Fanny forgotten, caution trampled? No. The Family did not truly need supplies badly, but something stirred in them, something ageold—a lust for clean victory, for revenge. They’d gutted the Crafter, but Ledroff had not let them vandal the Trough. Their blood still rang of retribution, and this could serve. Letting them go might be the best idea. At least it would get the sliteyed meanness out.

Ledroff glanced around, saw their impatiently shuffling feet, their thindrawn lips. Killeen felt the tide rising in them and knew it could either be seized or else would take a major clash to stop.

“Form the star!” Ledroff called.

“Yeasay!”

“I’ll frontline!”

“I’m point!”

“Hoyea! Hoyea!”

They downvectored on the factories, coming in along four axes to confuse any defenses. Nothing rose to meet them.

Orange firenets crackled from their shoulders, finding navvys. The mechs went into demented throes of indecision, driven into cyberclash.

The Family rushed through the construction yards, over racks of ceramo-tubing, down sheetcarbon assemblies. They kicked in partitions, searching for manager mechs. Killeen and Jocelyn split off and sped through a long hall crammed with vast machinery. Speed was the best tactic humans had. Labormechs were made to be sure and steady. They reacted a bit slowly, unless they were alerted to go to quick-time.

They came panting into an open bay. A manager mech rushed at them, clacking its recognition codes over the broadband comm lines. It turned an owlish set of glazed lenses on them and realized a fraction too late that they were not simply mechs wandering mistakenly where they were unneeded. The manager spun away, retreating. A copper panel snapped aside and something protruded, found Killeen as target—

Killeen leaped sideways. A rasp jarred him. He hit the deck before he sensed that the savage grating sound came to him electromagnetically. An acrid smell pricked his nose.

Jocelyn laughed, covering her mouth. “It was just tryin’ toughtalk you, is all.”

The rasping had been Jocelyn frying the manager with a crackling storm of microwave noise. It was frozen in a rigid, comic posture. Arms akimbo, one lone surviving sender bleated a symbol-call to NOTINTRUDE NOTINTRUDE.NOTINTRUDE.

“Clothes!” Jooelyn called. She stepped over Killeen, obliviously sure he was unhurt. He got up, ruefully rubbing a shoulder. He had slammed against a big steel-sheathed machine with enormous axle-rollers. He saw it was some kind of press. Fiber entered it at the far end of the factory. Whirling cylinders tugged and wove and mixed in acrid chemicals—and out the near end came glossy sheets of amber-gold tightweave.

Jocelyn tore some off admiringly. He left her to her rooting and found Ledroff nearby. Killeen tuned in to the comm. The Family crowded in, reporting.

Supervisors numbed. No higher mechs in the ’plex.