“They came to learn from mechs?” To Killeen this was as incomprehensible as learning from a stone, or the air. Mechs simply were, a force of nature beyond communication.

Well, admittedly—

Shibo’s high-pitched call came to him, —Duster!—from the other side of a narrow, stony valley. It jolted him from his running-reverie.

The Families instantly dropped to the ground and sought shelter. Over a far mesa drifted a four-winged thing that glinted like finespun copper in the Eater’s slanting hotblue radiance. It had a light and lazy look, Killeen thought. He had not seen one for some time but this one did not have the determined straightline way to it.

Shibo’s clipped voice showed she had made the same conclusion. —Duster empty. Looking.—

“Figure it’s on its way back home? Surveying?” Killeen squinted at the slender sweptback body. No signs of the pale white dust that usually descended in a thin, precise stream.

—It saw.—

“Dunno if it pick us up. Pretty far away.”

—Not dusting. Looking.—

The Families lay downdoggo for a long while as the craft swooped and glided in elegant curves. Killeen appreciated its movement, waiting silent and unthinking for it to go. They had all learned long ago to let mechs pass unopposed unless the odds were lopsided for them. Against Dusters there were never any advantages.

When the Duster dropped below the horizon they began a fast skip-walk in the opposite direction. Killeen had Toby come closer and watched the right near flank more often. The Marauders never worked with Dusters, as near as anyone could tell, but since the Mantis Killeen expected anything, everything.

So it was that he heard the sound of metallic agony before the others. It wafted over his sensorium in a high, skimming note and then was gone. Killeen signaled to the rest and compiled a vector fix. It pointed to a nearby brush-choked arroyo.

Killeen slipped through wiry brambles and glimpsed the source of the thin, microwave scream. A Rattler, absorbed in its work.

The thing had seized a whole squad of alloy-navvys. The navvys were apparently trying to set up a processing plant next to a rich ore seam. The Rattler was devouring each, its belly already fired up. Killeen could hear the deep bass ground-shaking tremor as it melted them down into easily portable assets. A gut-roar came from the Rattler as it digested, its ceramo-ribs contracting with pops and groans as it forced navvys into its innards.

Nearby, two burning hulks still fumed. They were the manager mechs that had been watching over this work crew. With these eliminated, the navvys could only squeak calls to their distant city. This far into the Splash, the Rattler’s own transport would be here to carry away the plunder before help arrived.

Killeen signaled the others to stay back.

Rattlers were not dangerous when working at their main tasks. Some Marauders were scavengers, like the Scrabblers or Snouts. They were fairly easy to avoid if you were quick and posted scouts. Others were agents in the incessant conflict between different mech cities. The Pickers and Rattlers and Stalkers had started to appear long before Killeen’s father’s time, seemingly in response to the inevitable scarcities of raw materials.

Rattlers were elongated, treacherous machines which seemed to coil and recoil as they moved. They searched out low-level mechs of other cities and dismantled them, breaking them down for spare parts or simple metals. Their jointed, slipsliding skins housed long tubular smelters and foundries.

Killeen had come upon one with his father, long ago. It had been trying to eat some minor mech. The Citadel had needed large-scale spare parts then, the kind that Marauders had in plenty.

So their band had waited until the Rattler was fully distended, lying like a gorged tube of scratched aluminum, beginning to excrete ingots of ore.

They had descended at that vulnerable moment and gutted it quick-clean, tearing away parts and frying its mainmind. They also ambushed the Rattler’s ore carriers, when they dutifully arrived.

That had been one of the best times he had ever had with his father. Just the two of them, prowling the flanks of the scavenging band. Killeen had potted a Snout that carried edible foods for its organic parts. They had both stuffed themselves with the greasy goo.

They had been out six days in all, and returning on the morning of the seventh they had learned that Killeen’s mother had died while they were gone. There was nothing they could have done. She had caught one of the plagues left over from the era when the mechs had tried to eliminate humanity through bioengineered virulence. Plagues seldom surfaced anymore, mostly because the biosphere was too weak to support them long. But even the old epidemics, lying dormant in some ditch, could mutate and infest again. Her death had brought Killeen and his father closer in the narrowing years before the Calamity.

Staring at the gorging Rattler, Killeen felt the old struggle within himself. His vision narrowed to a red-rimmed halo around the booming, insufferably ugly thing. The pipings of the Family dimmed, his sensorium world fell away. Crisp lightning forked bluehot in his eyes. He seemed pitched forward, balancing on the balls of his feet, ready to rush in a satisfying pureblind rage, to bring desolation and dismemberment to the self-absorbed and smug-ugly Rattler.

Then he felt a hand on his arm and Shibo whispered, “Still.”

“I, I got—”

“Go.”

“Kill ’em all, the damned—”

“Go now.”

“I… I just…”

Her hand lay cool and strong on him. He felt the tightness in him ebb. He sensed the others hanging back at the mouth of the arroyo, felt their puzzlement at why he had ventured this far in. “Needless. Rattler’s carriers arrive soon.”

“I…”

“Only way beat Marauders is learn them.”

“But—”

“Not risk self. Remember Toby.”

“I… yeasay. Yeasay.”

They left the Marauder to its meal.

THREE

They moved swiftly, driven by the mere glancing encounter with the Duster and Rattler. The slowly thickening vegetation around them had seemed an unspoken promise of verdant peace. Only as they put distance behind them did this assurance return.

The Families whispered among themselves about the air’s soft moisture, the pale emerald grass, the twisted brown vines and creepers which sprouted from crevices and small sheltered basins. To find a Rattler obliviously doing its job in this surrounding undercut their unvoiced dream. It propelled them faster toward the center of the Splash.

Killeen himself felt no such flight response. Marauders angered him without touching any longer the wellsprings of fear. To him they were a constant threat, hateful but natural.

Even in the first moment of glimpsing the Rattler he had thought it blandly evil, a scene without any possible protagonist. The navvys being eaten as they cried for their distant protector were no less an ancient enemy than the Rattler which digested them. And even as red rage had seized him and his memories had swelled, he had taken the time to notice that the Rattler’s treads were snarled with brambles caught in the links. it was harder for mechs to move in the plant-clogged terrain here. Another small advantage. Another way that Splashes revived the once-green world.

Ledroff called for a song. Across the comm sensorium soared an ancient Family march, composed far in the past by some great groundstriding marshal. Killeen let the pounding spirit of the music come into him. Family song poured from his throat.