Killeen wordlessly sent her his own short-time stored image of the Mantis. In the frame was a notation RANGE 2.3275 ZONE KM but he did not know what that meant.
She nodded slightly, her eyes closed. She fired.
The copper bird seemed to spin off its rod and glide away. It accelerated with a rush and before Killeen could stand up he heard a muffled crump.
A low tone vanished from his sensorium. He realized that the whole time since the attack he had been in the scan-fan of the Mantis, feeling its persistent probing.
The woman got slowly, achingly, to her feet.
“Damnfine weapon you got there.”
Her dark, heavy-lidded eyes blinked languidly. “Killed.”
With a releasing sigh he said, “Yeasay, yeafold.”
The Mantis was a jumble at the foot of the rockslide. Parts had sheared off from heavy steel lug nuts and crashed among tumbled boulders.
Killeen said slowly, “Could be the same’s hit us a few days back.”
The woman raised a thin, jetblack eyebrow. “Is?”
“Mantis. But we drilled the mainmind with a thumper!”
“Sure?”
“I saw it.”
She whirred and clicked as she walked, her exskell giving her a strange stiff grace. Her face angled down to a pointed chin which was covered by a red rash. To Killeen she seemed like a lattice, even her bones simply calcium rods in an onworking machine. Yet something tugged at him when the cool bluegray eyes studied his face.
“This piece here”— he poked at a rivet-ribbed steel ellipsoid—“I thought was the mainmind.”
She swung her head swiftly; yet in short jerks, as though taking pictures of each piece of the shattered Mantis.
Borers spun at the base of the Mantis’s central, glass jacketed ellipsoid. The thing was trying to burrow into a sandy spot it had found. Killeen pressed his scrambler against the access lobe of the ellipsoid and fired. The thing shuddered and stopped.
“Hiding now,” she said, and with surprising speed loped back toward the distant gully where the Families still crouched. Killeen followed, not understanding. He felt seeping gray fatigue as he crossed the bleached plain.
Toby hadn’t moved but was testing his leg, thumping it against the ground to bring back feeling. “Heysay! Got it?”
Killeen nodded. “Must be ’nother those—”
“Watch!” the woman called.
Killeen peered back at the sprawled carcass of the Mantis. Over the far brow of the hillside came four navvys. They picked their way down, stopping often for long moments. All of them had crosshatched side panels, much like the one Killeen had seen back at the ’plex.
“Damnall!”
The first navvy to reach the base encountered a piece of the Mantis and hoisted it aboard, fitting it securely atop the carryrack.
“Assemble,” the woman said.
“What?”
She said nothing. They watched silently. Killeen helped Toby up onto the brow of the gully and a few others joined them. There were dozens of Mantis parts and the navvys carefully dealt with each one.
Killeen studied the navvys with eyes slitted against the combined glare of Denix and the Eater. Too late now he understood that the Mantis had taken advantage of the two-star glare. Even augmented as they were, a heritage handed down from centuries before, humans could not see as well as mechs in either dark or searing bright. Against the Mantis’s illusions they were blind.
And the Mantis had caught them when they were least guarded, most open and humanly vulnerable. Killeen clenched his jaw regularly, as though chewing on this fact.
He did not want to walk back onto the plain behind them, to see who had fallen. He had seen too much of it in the last few days. The sensorium carried skittering wails of despair, of horrible surprise.
There would be time for that. He watched as two navvys met and mutually put their loads on a bare rock platform. It would make as good a workbench as they seemed to require. One navvy sprouted a set of fine-pointed tools and began to take apart a chunky, half-ruined segment of the Mantis.
“They’re fixin’ it,” Toby said wonderingly.
“Seen before?” the woman asked.
“Naysay, nothing like,” Killeen answered. “But the mainmind—”
“Not one mind.”
“Howcome?”
“Easier heal.”
Toby put in, “Easier bring it live again, too.”
“That, yeasay.” The woman pursed her lips, as if tasting a possibility she didn’t like.
“Looks like they’ve found a way to disperse the mind into different parts of the Mantis.”
“One stupid, many smart?” she asked distantly.
Killeen saw what she meant. If intelligence could be made up of many dispersed pieces, each of low level, but each contributing a vital fraction of what was needed for a much smarter mech… “Maybe. Then the navvys come in, fix it up. Maybe replace one of the small minds if it’s dead.”
“Then waking again. Thinking. Hunting.” Her ebony hair was arabesqued in coils that had a blue sheen. It made a woven pattern almost like looking at tightweave with a close-eye.
“A new kind Marauder?” Killeen asked.
The woman arched her bushy eyebrows and said nothing.
“We can’t kill it?” Toby asked, hobbling around to test his leg.
“Not unless you skrag the whole works,” Killeen said, starting to figure in his head. He estimated without numbers, just judging by the feel of his memory. Answers popped into his head and he didn’t stop to wonder whether they came from Arthur or some other techAspect he carried. He simply said, with assurance, “We barely got enough ammo. Maybe could pound each piece of that Mantis. Be real close though.”
Toby said, “I’ll help!”
The woman frowned. “Too much.”
Killeen agreed. “We skrag it, we’ll use up most our armament.”
“Dangerous.”
Killeen looked questioningly at her and saw she meant not immediate threat but rather the challenge that Marauders like this represented. A new mech idea.
Toby scrambled away, looking for weapons, his leg working like a stiff rod but well enough to carry him. The woman said nothing, just watched the navvys slowly dragging parts together. Her breathing was so shallow it did not flex the exskell. Time-softened gray tightweave clung to her body. She was thin but her supple curves stood out against the unavoidable rigidities of her armor-web exskell, making her seem a feminine prisoner in a black cage. He wondered how she powered it. Then he noticed the back of her shirt zipped down; she must have opened it while she loped back from the Mantis. Photovoltaic eyes turned as she moved, following the ultraviolet mana of the Eater.
All to drive a shell which brought her muscle power up to the level of others. In her, the genetic pruning for greater strength had failed. Her metabolism converted food less efficiently into power. She needed this ribbed husk to keep up with the rest of her Family. Their rules were harsh. A member who fell behind died.
He asked, “Think we should skrag it?”
“Must.”
“I’ll get Ledroff, some others. Those navvys’re funny-actin’, too. We’d better plan on taking them out from a distance. No simple disconnect.”
“Time.”
“What? I figure hours before they’ve got all the parts—”
“No. We mourn first.”
He nodded. It had been better to stand here and think about the Mantis than to go and find the friends hurt or dead or even suredead. But now he had to.
“You’re… ?”
“Shibo.”
“Family Rook?”
“Family Knight.”
“This isn’t your Family?”
“I meet them. My Family gone.”
Her eyes regarded him flatly, giving nothing away. She had not come from his Citadel, for there had been no Knights there. So the other Citadels had been destroyed, too.
Killeen had come to feel that his loss was as great as anyone’s, but this woman before him had lost her entire lineage and faced as well the insurrection of her own weak body. He had myriad questions to ask her, but the wan and pensive gaze she turned on him erased all thoughts in the enormity of its unstated implications.