Have to march some.

“How far from here?”

Can’t understand its units.

Some other stuff, too.

I’m only getting about half what it puts out.

Thinks boy important.

It will give ride.

“Good, we’ll ride. What’re we getting in return?”

Everything on list

But can get more.

“Why’ll it give us more than we ask?”

Has job for boy.

No, Killeen thought emphatically. Tell it no. Then he said, “We won’t take unnecessary chances.”

“Hey!” Hatchet said gruffly. “I’ll decide what’s too much risk.”

You will like arrangement.

Crafter must show you.

Boy not hurt.

He not vulnerable.

Killeen suppressed a burst of wild laughter. Surrounded by mechs—talking with one!—and this puffed-up junkpile says Toby’s not vulnerable.

Want I translate that?

No. Killeen got control of himself.

Hatchet was glowering at him. He fought down the urge to press the Crafter about Toby. “My leader says we can talk about it later.”

Crafter says good.

“That’s more like it,” Hatchet said. “Just tell him we’ll do as much as he likes.”

Killeen breathed out carefully, thinking. He had to get this right. You can fix my boy? “Show us what to do.”

Crafter can take us to special place.

It can get tools to fix boy.

Your arm, too.

At what price?

We’ll see.

Crafter says no more.

“Party!” Hatchet called briskly. “Mount the Renny. We’ll be done real soon.”

We have to know what the Crafter means.

You will.

Crafter show.

First must steal what it wants.

As they climbed up the steep sides of the imposing, burnished mech, Hatchet glowered at Killeen. “Strikin’ a Cap’n, huh? I’ll have your ass for this. Wait’ll we get back Metropolis.”

“If we get back,” Killeen said sourly.

TWO

Killeen could not get used to the feel of riding atop the Crafter. The haulers he had ridden before had been slow, easy.

This Crafter rolled with a grating murmur and lurched heavily when it crossed an arroyo. The swaying nearly made him sick. He and Shibo kept Toby firmly pressed back into a cubbyhole where the rocking could not dislodge him. The boy’s legs stuck out like cordwood, stiff and useless. Around them the human party covered very little of the Renegade’s cylindrical bulk. They held on to the myriad pipes and masts and vent-valves in the Crafter’s ceramic skin.

They crossed rough country because the Crafter carefully stayed away from mech roads. This was the most built-up complex Killeen had ever seen, a web of pale slab pathways and blank-faced, perfectly cubic buildings. Traffic fled down narrow gleaming rails. On the steep hillsides foundries rumbled. Through a gradually thickening activity the Renegade moved with crafty purpose. Its antennae cycled endlessly. Each time a mech came within view, Killeen heard sputterings. The Renegade was sending some IGNORE ME signal into each mechmind, making itself invisible.

Killeen could not relax. His eyes leaped from each approaching mech to the next.

“Ease off,” Hatchet whispered to him. “Renny knows how get us through.”

Killeen studied a bulky mech, a kind he had never seen, racing along the nearby railline. It accelerated so fast it was a blur as it neared the far end of the worn valley.

He asked, “How many times you done this?”

“Must be thirty, forty.”

“All like this?”

“Mostly. Ever’ one’s different some way.”

“How?”

“New fac’try. Different tricks gettin’ in, too.”

“You never gone back, hit the same place?”

“Naysay. Too chancy.”

“You figure the Renny leaves some kinda mark? So they’ll be waiting if it went back?”

“Could be. Mostly I think he doesn’t take chances. Not when he can get the stuff he wants somewhere else.”

“What kind stuff?”

“Parts, looks like.”

“Replacement parts?”

“Prob’ly. Thing’s trying stay alive.”

“Ever get trouble? Mechs catch on?”

Hatchet’s words came a little slower. “Don’t know as I could tell. Things happen pretty damn mechfast sometimes.”

Killeen hadn’t heard anyone say “mechfast” since the Citadel. On the march there was no comparison between human speed and the blinding quickness of the Marauders.

“Any people hurt?”

Hatchet didn’t answer for a long moment. He clung to a brown vent-valve beside Killeen’s perch on a level housing. The Crafter was plunging down a rough grade. Tan mechwaste clogged the shallow gullies. Coiled blue-green packing material blew in a thin, chilly breeze. It was colder and drier here. Mech weather.

“Lost two,” Hatchet said at last.

“How?”

“Family business,” Hatchet said adamantly.

“My people at risk, makes it Bishop Family business.”

Hatchet didn’t like this. He couldn’t find a way to argue around it, though. His mouth twisted to one side as if he was remembering something he didn’t want to.

“Sometimes there’s mech guards. Twice they come up on us, right in the middle. We ran. They got somebody each time.”

“How?”

Hatchet looked irritated. “Shot ’em, course.”

“With what?”

“I wasn’t takin’ notes, see? Just tryin’ keep my head from gettin’ blowed off.”

“Were they firing solid shot at you?”

Hatcher smiled icily. “Sorry I didn’t snag one for you so’s I could fish it out my pocket, show you.”

“No, I mean, were they using guns like ours? Or e-beams? Cutters?”

Hatchet was irritated now. It wasn’t like a moment before, when he had been trying to keep from telling Killeen something. Now he didn’t see the point to the questions. “Couldn’t tell.”

“Did you recover the bodies?”

“Damn, we were runnin’.”

“I know. Point is, I wonder if it was just mech guards you ran into, or something worse.”

“What… Marauders?”

“Could be. You get a look at what was after you?”

“Naysay.” Hatchet’s pride had resisted telling much about their past failures. But now he saw a pattern to Killeen’s interest and his voice lost its tight, suspicious edge. “Shot at us from way up in the girders.”

Killeen nodded. Just the way something had fired on the Bishops back in the last Trough they’d rested in. So whatever had killed the two Kings were not ordinary mech guards. They had hunted the humans. Yet they were small enough to climb on narrow girders. Which meant there was a new kind of hunter mech.

“You see your people get hit?”

“Naysay. Saw ’em down. No tracer from ’em in the sensorium.”

“Could be you’re right,” Killeen said in a conciliatory tone, but not so obviously that Hatchet would see that was what he was doing. “They were just dead.”

“You mean, ’stead of…”

“Suredead.”

“Not much difference, is there?” Hatchet said. A deepening in his voice suggested a layer of sorrow carried but not revealed. “Either way, we got no Aspect of ’em. They’re gone.”

Killeen could not stop himself from saying with a flinty look, “You figure having your mind ripped apart by a Marauder is same as just dying?”

Hatchet didn’t reply immediately. Both fell silent as they looked out at a passing yard of grease-filmed, partly dismantled machines. Skeletal ranks stretched to the distant hills, a gray, damaged army momentarily halted in its conquest. Each body was missing a hull or treads or, most often, sensors. Their arrogant juts and angles had struck fear into Killeen more times than he could recall. Now they seemed vacant gestures; forlorn. He imagined the Crafter scavenged such yards for parts, picking over the rusting, unresisting dead.