Hatchet said finally, “Don’t figure it either way. Some things a Cap’n shouldn’t figure.”

Killeen felt cowed by this remark, simple and without the edgy proud bluster Hatchet faced the world with most of the time. There was nothing to say in reply.

He swung away, holding to some gas lines with his good hand. Moving was harder than he had thought it would be. The right arm was tiring already. He found Shibo cradling Toby where most of the party rested on a broad, grainy manifold cover. The Crafter was running flat and fast now with just a drumming coming up through its body. The tremor brought soft curves of sleep to Toby’s pale face.

Killeen squatted to speak and abruptly the Crafter braked. They all pitched forward, clinging to whatever they could. Toby came awake and automatically grasped at his father as the two of them rolled forward, over a polymer manifold hatch. They fell a meter. Killeen landed with jarring pain. But he had gotten under the boy so Toby merely had the wind knocked from him. They lay together, panting.

“Pile off!” Hatchet called. “Inside! Quick now!”

They had stopped near a factory. Killeen and Shibo carried Toby down the side. Most of the party was already running the short distance to an open grate-door that clattered up as they approached. Killeen tried to survey the area but Hatchet was yelling at them to hurry. The grate-door started chugging down like slow teeth even before they were through it.

“Renny, he don’t like this part,” Hatchet said. “Closes doors fast. Goin’ in and out’s the most tricky, he says.”

“For it, sure,” Shibo said dryly.

Killeen carried Toby into the shelter of a cluster of stacked polyplastic canisters. He did not like the way Hatchet kept calling the Crafter “he”—a symptom of thinking of mechs as manlike, of imagining that you could deal with them in terms a human would accept. Killeen’s father had said to him once, Biggest fact about aliens is, they’re alien—which was one of the reasons Citadel Bishop had made fewer contacts with Renegades than the Kings had. Killeen reminded himself to not fall into Hatchet’s way of thinking about the Crafter. That was why he asked for the facts behind everything Hatchet said. Facts were more use than opinions.

The party moved away from the lowering grate-door. Feet scuttled down narrow crannies in the crowded bay. Killeen had bent over to put Toby on the floor when he felt a powerful jjjjjaaaattttttt explode in his head. Faint cries skittered in the humming silence that followed the soundless knife-edge violence. “What was—”

Hatchet’s voice came as a dry rasp. “Crafter. Musta shot at a mech.”

Shibo said, “Electromag kill.”

Killeen got up unsteadily and saw the Crafter crowding the stilled grate-door. Its antennae and sensor-snouts were all trained into the factory. They fanned and fidgeted with quick energy.

Cermo-the-Slow called from farther in, “There’s a mech here. Burned out!”

Hatchet got up from behind a large crate and went to see. “Crafter can pick off these li’ 1 guard mechs. He’s too fast for ’em.”

Shibo said worriedly, “Didn’t see even mech tracer.”

Killeen shook his head, his ears still ringing. “Me either.”

Toby looked unconcerned. He pointed at the Crafter, which now was backing away. “What’ll it do while we’re inside?”

Hatchet had ignored the boy so far. It startled Killeen when he answered Toby’s question with an offhanded kindliness. “It’ll lie doggo. Freeze its externals. Make like it’s dead, just used for spare parts.”

“Like that yard we saw? With all the old mechs?”

“Guess so. Only it’ll hunker down in some shed, I seen it do that. Guess that’s why it lets its carapace get so rundown-lookin’.”

“Fools the other mechs?” Toby asked.

“That’s my guess.”

“Hey, let’s go see what’s in here.”

“Now you be quiet, boy. Rest yourself.”

Killeen watched the Crafter lumber away. He was eternally astonished at the resilience of the young, at how they could take the completely new and blindingly dangerous and simply live with it. He wondered how he had lost that unthinking certainty. Something had worn it away in abrasions so subtle that you never noticed the loss until it was far too late.

The scorched guard mech had an odd look to it. Shibo approached as Cermo-the-Slow was wrenching at one of the mech’s side housings. It came away with a clatter. Inside were exposed joints and thick, leathery pads. An oily sheen coated them.

“This’s cyborg,” Cermo said. “Lubed up, too.”

Shibo kicked one of the joints. It gave, flexed, and returned to its original alignment with a persistent fluidity. “Organic parts.”

Hatchet seemed unsurprised. “Seen that a lot in fac’tries. Don’t get many these in the field.”

“Let’s go,” Killeen said.

Hatchet looked faintly amused. “In a big hurry, huh? Wait’ll the two men up front figure the tracer.”

The Crafter had transmitted to the lead man a flatmap of where they were to go in the factory. It was recognition-keyed so they got a telltale in their eyes when they were going the right way. A flatmap was language-independent. The Crafter used comman deered navvys to search and make the map; entering a storage zone was far too dangerous for a Renegade.

The party followed the two lead men through a high, arched bay that slumbered in soft orange-green gloom. No mechs moved among the catwalks and bar-rigged balconies that punctuated the immense rising curves of the walls.

“Not much going,” Shibo said.

“Old fac’try,” Hatchet said. “The Renny sends us mostly places like this. Mechs use ’em for storage.”

“Had a guard, though,” Killeen observed.

“Just keep movin’,” Hatchet called.

They slipped down dark corridors. Inky shadows stretched among old, abandoned manufacturing lines. Drums half-filled with sulfurous colloids leaked across broken decks. The two Kingsmen who led brought them deftly to a dank underground warren.

At the entrance a portal gaped, rimmed with detection gear. Killeen recognized some of the standard parts from mechs he had stripped. Their party stopped and each person slipped through the portal carefully, moving slowly. Hatchet explained to Shibo and Killeen that the detectors were set at mech levels. They sensed not simply metal, but the network of electronics that any mech carried. Humans had so relatively little of this that they seldom registered on such automatic watchdogs. This was their primary use to the Crafter.

In the tunnels beyond the portal their work began. Long racks of modular parts lined the intersecting tunnels. The lead man located the items the Crafter wanted. The party split into teams to carry out the heavy items. Killeen paired with Shibo after they put Toby in a spot near the portal, where he could watch them work, and, not coincidentally, where they could check on him frequently.

Killeen felt the presence of the mech factory as a cold pressure seeping into him. His apprehension had subsided but it sprang forth with every distant flicker of movement or unexpected sound. Twilight tunnels ricocheted the clatter of their labor, making odd, whining notes. Worse, a few small robomechs worked in the tunnels. The first time Killeen came upon one he very nearly killed it.

Shibo caught his gun hand and whispered, “Doesn’t see us!” She was right. Robos were low on image sorting and texture definition and too dumb to sound an alarm. They simply fetched and stored, on orders from some distant inventory link. Still, their rattling, spidery gait unnerved Killeen in the shadowy tunnels.

The Crafter wanted parts that ranged vastly in scale. Tiny embedded polytron boards. Greenish, marbled photonic slabs no bigger than a hand. Ribbon-ribbed condensers that took three men to carry.

Killeen and Shibo hauled the Crafter’s replacement parts out on their backs, or sometimes between the two of them, carrying a short distance and then stopping to let arms and backs rest.