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.