Killeen pondered for a moment the possibility that the thing trailing them was a lone Lancer, summoned by a minor pillage the Family had made a few days before. He checked the faint, flickering tracers behind.

No, nothing like a Lancer. Something smaller, certainly. It gave off hardly any image at all. Still…

“Yea!” he called. Tapping his right temple twice with a forefinger, he sent his scan topo map to the entire Family. “We’re bunching up!”

With muttered irritation they spread out, dissolving their moving beeswarm triangle. They formed the traditional concentric rings, ragged because the Family numbered a mere 278 now. And some of them were achingly slow—gimpy, or old, or wounded from past scrapes and fights and blunders.

Fanny saw the problem and called, —Show the wind our heels!—

The old saying worked. They began to run faster now, a keen unspoken fear at their backs.

He sent the latest topo to Fanny. It showed a muddle of bluewhite tracers behind them.

Fanny sent, —Where’s it?—

Killeen admitted, “Dunno. Looks to be some kinda screen.”

—Deliberate confusion?—

“Don’t think so. But…”

—Situation like this, your topo’s no good for figurin’ size. Go by speed. No ’facturing mech moves quick as a Marauder.—

“This one’s slow, then fast.”

—Must be a Marauder.—

“Think we should stand ’n' wait for it?”

He felt her assessing regard like a cool wedge in his sensorium.

—What you think?—

“Well… it might just be reconning us.”

—Could be.—

She was giving nothing away. “So’d be best if we keep on, make like we don’t see it.”

—Long’s we can keep track of it, sure.—

Killeen wondered what Fanny meant by that, but he didn’t want to ask, not with Ledroff listening. He said guardedly, “It keeps jumpin' round.”

—Might be some new mechtech.—

So? he thought. How do we respond? He kept his voice flat and assured, though, as he said, “I figure we don’t give away that we see it. If it’s just checkin' its ’quipment, it’ll go away.”

—And come back when we’re sleepin',— she said flatly.

“So? Our watch’ll pick it up. But if we take a shot at it now, when we can’t see it so good, maybe it gets away. Next time it comes back with better mechtech. So then we don’t pick it up and it skrags us.”

Fanny didn’t answer for a long moment and Killeen wondered if he had made a fool of himself. She had coached him in the crafts and he always felt inadequate compared with her sure, almost casual grasp of Family lore. She could be a stern Cap’n, a shrewd tactician, firm and fast. And when they had fought or fled, and again gathered around nightfires to tell their tales, she could be warm and grandmotherly. Killeen would do anything to avoid disappointing her. But he had to know what to do, and she was giving him no easy answers.

—Yeasay. That’s best, long as this’s a reg’lar Marauder.—

Killeen felt a burst of pride at her approval. But a note of concern in her voice made him ask, “What if it’s not?”

—Then we run. Hard.—

They were out of the foothills now. The Family sprinted across eroded flatlands.

Fanny asked as she panted, —See it yet?—

“Naysay.”

—Should’ve climbed the ridge by now. Don’t like this.—

“Think maybe a trap?” Killeen cast about for possibilities as he searched his topo display. Again he wished Jo-celyn or even goddamn Ledroff had this job. If an attack came he wanted to be near his son. He scanned ahead and found Toby in the middle of the moving Family formation.

Fanny dropped back, scanning the ridgeline.

Killeen searched again for the elusive pursuer. The topo danced in his eye, speeding ribbons of light.

More cloudy tracers.

To the right came a dim speckling of pale blue.

Killeen realized too late that it would have been better to hold the ridgeline. They were exposed and had lost the enemy. He grunted in frustration and sped forward.

They were partway down the broad valley when he looked right and saw first the overlay winking green and then the far rocky scarp. It was fresh rock, cleaved by some mining mech, its amber faces gouged and grooved.

But the clear bare cut hadn’t been there moments before. Killeen was sure of that.

“Bear on my arrow!” he shouted to the whole Family. He cut toward a low hill. “Fanny, you’d—”

Killeen heard a sharp crackling.

He saw Fanny fall. She gave a cry of surprise. Then her voice sharpened, riding an outrushing gasp of startled pain.

He turned and fired at the distant carved hills, where stood half-finished blocks of rhomboid stone.

Back came an answering echo of snapping, crisp circuit death.

A hit. Probably not enough to drop the thing dead, but it would buy some seconds.

He shouted, “Max it!”

With Fanny down, he’d have to get the Family away, fast. Killeen blinked, saw the blue dots of the Family swerve toward broken terrain that provided some shelter. Good. But where was—?

“Toby! Hug down in that stream bed, see?”

A klick away, his son hesitated.

“To your right!”

—and for a moment that seemed balanced forever beside a harrowing abyss, Killeen was sure his son’s gear was blown or overloaded, making it impossible to hear the warning. Or that the boy was confused by the scramble of electronoise. Or weary from the run. And so would remain standing while on the dry rutted plain no other simple unmoving target would leap into the fisheye lens of the unseen Marauder mech. His son’s frozen indecision would recommend itself as a target.

Hanging there on the instant, Killeen remembered a time when he had been on a scavenging expedition with his father, a mere short foray for needed chip-parts, so easy his mother consented to her son’s going along. And there a Marauder had chanced upon them as they looted an isolated ramshackle field station where navvymechs labored in mute dumb servitude. Killeen had been on a small side trip to snag servos from a dusty storage shed, and in the attack the Marauder (a Rattler, old but fully armed) had seen him and run him down. Three men and a woman had blown the Rattler to spare parts, catching it two steps away from Killeen’s frantically fleeing form. He had been scared so badly he shat his suit. But what he remembered now was not the embarrassment as the shitsmell got out, and not the taunts of his friends. Instead, he recalled in a spirit-sucking instant his own father’s look: eyes burned into the sockets, deadwhite. Eyes that had drilled into him with their desperation. And Killeen knew his own face now locked into the rictus of foresighted horror as his own son stood, unmoving, for one solid thudding heartbeat of immutable lost time—

“Toby!”

—Uh, yeasay.—

The distant figure scrambled down an embankment, into the fossil snaketwist of an ancient waterway.

Killeen could not breathe. He realized he had gone rigid himself, a perfect target.

“Hunch ’n’ go, boy,” he called as he swerved and dodged away.

And felt something go by—tssssip!—in the still air.

He saw quick darting orange sparks in his right eye. That meant something was poking, trying to find a way into him. But fast, faster than he’d ever known.

A prickly coldsweat redness skittered through him with a grating whine.

Killeen dropped to the ground. “Fanny! How you?”

—I… auhhhh… can’t…—

“This thing—what is it?”

—I… haven’t seen… years…—

“What’ll we do?

Ledroff tried to cut in on the narrow-cone comm-line. Killeen swore and blanked him out.

—Don’t… believe… what you… see…—

“What’s—”

She coughed. Her line went silent.

Fanny knew more than anybody in the Family about the rare, deadly mechs. She’d fought them a long time, back before Killeen was born. But Killeen could tell from her sluggish voice that this thing had clipped her solid, blown some nerves maybe.