—Wanna frizz it?— she called. She was a small dot across the valley. They would get good triangulation on the Mantis.

“Naysay. Let’s blow the bastard.”

—Ayesay. Go!—

He fired. Sharp claps in the stillness.

The two old-style charges smacked the mech fore and aft.

Legs blew away. Antennae slammed to the ground.

Killeen could see the Mantis’s blue-green electric life droop and wink out, all its internals dying as the main-mind tried to stay alive by sacrificing them. But mechanical damage you couldn’t fix with a quick reflowing of ’tricity, he remembered grimly.

The mechs were often most vulnerable that way. Killeen liked seeing them blown to pieces, gratifyingly obvious. Which was the real reason he used charges when he could.

He bounded up, running full tilt toward the still-slow-dissolving Mantis. Popping ball joints let the legs go. Its trunk hit the ground rolling. The mainmind would be in there, trying to save itself.

Killeen approached gingerly, across sandy ground littered with mechwaste jumble. He kicked aside small machine parts, his eyes never leaving the Mantis. Jocelyn came pounding in from the other side.

“Booby trap, could be,” he said.

“Dunno. Never saw anythin’ this big.”

“I’ll yeasay that,” Killeen murmured, impressed.

All splayed out, the Mantis was longer than ten humans laid end to end. For him the heft and size of things went deadsmooth direct into him. Without thought he sensed whether something weighed too much to carry a day’s march, or if it was within range of a given weapon.

Numbers flitted in his left eye, giving the Mantis dimensions and mass. He could not read these ancient squiggles of his ancestors, scarcely registered them. He didn’t need to. His inner, deep-bedded chips and subsystems processed all this into direct senses. They came as naturally and unremarkably as did the brush of the warm wind now curling his faded black hair, the low electromagnetic groans of the Mantis dying, the dim irk that told him to pee soon.

“Look,” Jocelyn said. This close he heard her through acoustics, her voice a touch jittery now from the exertion and afterfear. “Mainmind’s in there.” She pointed.

A coppery cowling was trying to dig its way into the soil, and making fast work of it, too. Jocelyn stepped closer and aimed a scrambler at it.

“Use a thumper,” Killeen said.

She took out a disc-loaded tube and primed it. The disc went chunk as she fired it into the burnished, rivet-ribbed cowling. The carapace rocked from the impact. Steel-blue borers on its underside whined into silence.

“Good,” Killeen said. Nearby, two navvys scuttled away. Both had crosshatched patterns on their side panels. He had never seen navvys traveling with a high-order mech. “Hit those two,” he said, raising his gun.

“Just navvys—forget ’em.”

“Yeasay.” He ran to Fanny. He had been following Fanny’s long-established rules—secure the mainmind first, then look to the hurt. But as he loped toward the still, sprawled form his heart sank and he regretted losing even a moment.

Fanny lay tangled, head lolling. Her leathery mouth hung awry, showing yellowed gums and teeth sharpened by long hours of filing. Her lined face stared blankly at the sky and her eyes were a bright, glassy white.

“No!” He couldn’t move. Beside him, Jocelyn knelt and pressed her palms against Fanny’s upper neck.

Killeen could see there was no tremor. He felt an awful, draining emptiness seep into him. He said slowly, “It… blitzed her.”

“No! That fast?” Jocelyn stared up at him, eyes fevered and wide, wanting him to deny what she could see.

“Mantis…” The realization squeezed his throat. “It’s damn quick.”

“You hit it, though,” Jocelyn said.

“Luck. Just luck.”

“We’ve… never…”

“This one’s got some new tricks.”

Jocelyn’s voice was watery, plaintive. “But Fanny! She could protect herself better’n anybody!”

“Yeasay. Yeasay.”

“She knew everything.”

“Not this.”

In Fanny’s half-closed, fear-racked eyes Killeen saw signs which the Family had been spared for months. Around her eyes oozed pale gray pus. A bloodshot bubble formed in the pus as he watched. The bubble popped and let forth a rancid gas.

The Mantis had somehow interrogated Fanny’s nerves, her body, her very self—all in moments. Mechs could never before do that swiftly, from a distance. Until now, a Marauder mech had to capture a human for at least several uninterrupted minutes.

That had been a small advantage humanity had over the roving, predator mechs, and if this Mantis was a sign, that thin edge was now lost.

Killeen bent to see. Jocelyn peeled back the hard-webbed rubbery skinsuit. Fanny’s flesh looked as though thousands of tiny needles had poked through it, from inside. Small splotches of blueblack blood had already dried just under the skin.

The Mantis had invaded her, read all. In a single scratching instant it had peeled back the intertwined neuronets that were Fanny and had learned the story of her, the tale each human embeds within herself. The ways she had taken pleasure. How she had felt the sharp stab of pain. When and why she had weathered the myriad defeats that were backrolled behind her, a long undeviating succession of dark and light and swarming dark again, through which she had advanced with stolid and unyielding pace, her steady path cut through the mosaic of worlds and hopes and incessant war.

The Marauder-class mechs sometimes wanted that: not metals or volatiles or supplies of any sort. Nor even the tiny chips of brimming ’lectric craft which mere men often sought and stole from lesser mechs, the navvys and luggos and pickers.

The suredeath. Marauders wanted information, data, the very self. And in questioning each small corner of Fanny the Mantis had sucked and gnawed and erased everything that had made her Fanny.

Killeen cried in confused rage. He sprinted back to the fragmented Mantis and yanked free a leg strut.

Chest heaving, he slammed the arm-length strut into the wreckage, sending parts flying. Ledroff tried to call to him and he bellowed something and then shut down his comm line entirely.

He did not know how long the smashing and shouting lasted. It filled him and then finally emptied him in the same proportion, expending his rage into the limitless air.

When he was done he walked back to Fanny and raised the strut in mute, defeated salute.

This was the worst kind of death. It took from you more than your present life, far more—it stole also the past of once-felt glory and fleeting verve. It drowned life in the choking black syrup of the mechmind. It laid waste by absorbing and denying, leaving no sign that the gone had ever truly been.

Once so chewed and devoured, the mind could never be rescued by the workings of men. If the Mantis had merely killed her, the Family could probably have salvaged some fraction of the true Fanny. From the cooling brain they could have extracted her knowledge, tinted with her personality. She would have been stored in the mind of a Family member, become an Aspect.

The Mantis had left not even that.

The suredeath. Tonight, in the final laying-low of Fanny, there would be no truth to extract from the limp hollowed body which Killeen saw so forlorn and crumpled before him. The Family could carry none of her forward and so it was almost as though she had never walked the unending march that was humanity’s lot.

Killeen began to cry without knowing it. He had left the valley with the Family before he noticed the slow-burning ache he carried. Only then did he see that this was a way that Fanny still lived, but all the same it was no comfort.