Bud, the Face of an engineer killed by a Snout centuries ago, was a powerful presence despite his limitations.

Faces were partial recordings of the dead. A brain deprived of oxygen, or whose nervous system was badly shocked by death, could not be fully Aspected. Personality was far harder to extract from a mind sliding into the swarming dark. The Family saved only the dead’s expertise and craft.

Such a recorded Face gave some dim aura of the original person, trimmed and slow-thinking. Bud had been a fine translator of mech signs. He had even mastered some mech languages, back when humanity had contact with renegade mechs. Killeen had grown impatient with the Face’s slowness. Sometimes he thought Bud was not even a Face, and belonged with the lowest personae, the Analogs. Still, Bud proved useful for finding an entry into a mech or figuring the arcane designations on mech parts.

Killeen got up, feeling muscles knot. Yesterday’s terrors had become morning aches. He blinked his left eye and called up the Bishop Family topo. Toby’s orange icon said he was still sleeping, halfway up a sheltering arroyo. Good. The boy needed his rest.

Killeen walked stiffly toward a distant knot of Family. They had all dispersed for the night. The two Families were spread down a ridgeline and a sloping valley, an hour’s hardmarch from the destroyed Mantis carcass. Any hunting Marauder-class mech would stumble on at most a few of them, and alert the rest. Killeen switched on his functions as he walked, bringing himself back to full sensorium. Sleeping in the open, their best defense was to shut down any inboard systems that the mechs could sniff. As he rounded a wind-worn rock jut he felt the reassuring ping of his abilities returning.

He was startled when a form unfolded from an impossibly narrow crevice. It was Shibo.

“How you get in there?”

“Curl. Safer.” Her eyes were red from crying but her face bore no memory of it.

“Any trouble last night?”

“No.”

“The watch see anything?”

“No.”

Killeen wanted to talk to her but his mind whirled, empty. Her one-word replies didn’t help.

“Wakin’ up, I’m always ’fraid I won’t get all my ’quip-ment up and running.”

“Yes.”

“Always has so far, though,” he said lamely.

“Yes.”

“You ever have any go bust overnight?”

“Yes.”

“Fix it?”

“Face did.”

Without even an extra Um-hmmm to help he found it hard to go on. Yet something about her made him keep rummaging for things to say. Her finely made weapon bespoke abilities unknown to Family Bishop. And her cool, self-contained certainty was intriguing.

He gestured at his left eye. “What’s your count?”

Shibo blinked, one eye gazing distantly at her Family scan, and a moment later she said, “Eighty-seven.”

From the pause he knew she relied on an Aspect or subself to give the number, the same as he. “Family Bishop’s down to one six six in number. We lost twelve yes’day.”

“Family Rook, twenty-six.”

He paused as Arthur did the arithmetic for him. “Thirty-eight gone in all. Damn!”

“Together now two five three.”

“Yeasay, sadsay. And of two five three we got maybe a hundred really workin’. Rest are hurt or old or kids, like Toby.”

She nodded and then said, “Good. Children.”

Killeen saw what she meant. “Yeasay. Least the Rooks got children. We had nine babies born since the Calamity. Two were stillborn. Rest were feeble or deformed or died on the march.”

They walked for a moment in silence. To be born on the march with any shortcoming meant the mothers killed them. Killeen did not want their conversation to end there. He was breathing a little deeper with the exertion of keeping up with her. She moved with a quick, efficient scissoring of muscled legs. Her exskell whirred like a strange mechanical pet.

He tried again. “Wonder why the Mantis didn’t hit any kids yes’day?”

Whereas Family Bishop had lost all but Toby, the Rooks had, through luck or some intuited skill, kept some young ones from the Marauders. But they had no babies.

“Smaller target.”

“Don’t think that’s it.”

“Puzzle.” Shibo shook her head at this further unfathomable facet of the mechs. The Mantis had surekilled the oldest in the two Families. Some said that the elders had died first, and that the Mantis then worked its way through the clotted throng of merged and still jubilant Families, striking down humans as though it sensed their age. Moase, the aged woman who had the best mech translating skills, had fallen.

The Mantis had seemed to skip over easy young targets, even if they were standing next to the newfallen. Killeen doubted that such shooting was possible in the swirl of suddenly frightened, scattering humanity. Still, it was easier to think of the children’s survival as great luck than as another troubling feature of the Mantis.

They reached the huddled members of both Families. Quietly they sat, obeying an old rule that no one stood while rest was possible. Killeen felt his calf muscles stretch with the night’s cold still in them.

Tutored by Nialdi, he had used pressure at skull and spine to temper the strain. But the old ways could not erase all the damage.

There was desultory talk between Ledroff and a member of the Rooks, but Killeen could not keep his attention from the cairn around whose base they had gathered. He had helped fetch and roll stones for it as halfnight gathered. The four-sided pyramid thrust up from the valley floor. Crude edges protruded. “Bad work,” he muttered to himself:

“Naysay. Good,” Shibo whispered in response.

The planes of the sides should have been flatter, and the edge-angles were off, but Killeen felt a warmth at hearing her words. He had gotten little praise lately. And he did feel some pride in having labored into the halfnight, just him and five others still strong enough. The Families had shared the carrying of the suredead, which exhausted many. Once Ledroff called a halt at this valley, some whined that it was too late, they were too tired to do the right thing. Killeen and Cermo and some Rooks had shaken their heads, silent in the face of such laxity, and had done what they knew to be correct.

The pyramid rested on the suredead, encasing them protectively. No ordinary passing mech would dismantle a human burial site. That rule had been handed down from centuries before. It was the last vestige of a time when a grudging equilibrium had held between the human Arcologies and the machines.

The dead would rest undisturbed. Killeen was tired and dragged in each breath as if it was a labor. But he was proud of having stuck to the old ways. A dim buried image came to him, of a far grander pyramid striking up from tawny sands, piercing a pale blue sky. It dwarfed the puny humans gazing up at it. Even the carved stone blocks that made it were taller than a man. He had seen it before, flitting before his eyes for an instant at earlier such burials, floating up unbidden from some deep Aspect. He did not know where the huge pyramid had stood, majestic in its silent and eternal rebuke to that which had struck down the humanity within it.

“Killeen?”

Ledroff’s voice carried mild irritation. Killeen realized his name had been called before and he had not answered.

“Uh, yea?”

“The Mantis. How long you think before navvys reassemble it?”

“Never, I hope. Think we got it all.”

“You yeasay, Shibo?” Ledroff asked.

She shook her head. “Knownot this mechtech.”

“You can’t say?” Ledroff looked annoyed that no one could give him clear answers.

“Didn’t plug every ’ponent,” Killeen said. “Not enough ammo.”

A man named Fornax leaned forward. The Rook Cap’n had died yesterday and this man seemed to step naturally into the position. He was worn and wiry, with a drawn look to his face as though he had seen too much he didn’t like and was going to see more. Long grooves ran from just below his eyes, creases like rivers which were fed by interlacing tributaries that spread across his cheeks. “This Mantis, figure it’s just passing?”