The Crafter still offered some combat. Killeen saw a small armament poke from a turret and fire at the Mantis. An instant later it dissolved in orange sparks.

“Move,” Killeen whispered to Toby. They slipped around a bulky cylindrical array of valves and wheels, out of direct sight from the alley.

The Mantis reached the Crafter. It towered over the crescent back and seemed to be working at the Crafter’s side.

The team edged back, following Killeen. Hatchet saw that he could not stop them without either making a lot of noise or making a fool of himself. He trotted after them.

Down a narrowing cleft between throbbing factories they ran. Muffled explosions followed them. Killeen thought it was the Crafter dying. He looked back and saw a small missile shoot down the alley they had just left. It was gone in an instant. Then it returned and hovered like a gleaming steel hummingbird at the intersection. Killeen felt a faint ping as it recognized them. The missile surged forward. Killeen had time to bring up his weapon. The missile vanished in a ball of white smoke and thunder slapped him in the face. The missile had detonated long before its fragments could have reached them. Killeen wasted no time wondering why. He ducked down a side passage, following the others, and gave himself over to running.

Nothing pursued them. They retreated through a crowded factory complex ripe with acrid flavors. Mechs worked the catwalks and corridors, giving the fleeing human figures no notice. Whatever the Mantis’s powers, it evidently could not put all local mechs on alert. Or else did not feel it needed to.

Hatchet tried to slow them, make a stand to see if the Crafter had escaped. No one paid him any attention. They ran on. A desperate fever gripped them. Killeen saw in an abstract way how Hatchet felt, but his instincts told him otherwise.

He remembered his father chuckling once and saying dryly, “Brave man fights, smart man runs.” Hatchet had not been on the march for years. Holed up in Metropolis, the Cap’n had lost his edge.

After passing through three factories they reached the wall of the entire zone. It was ribbed and veined with intricately intersecting pipes. The wall thrummed with fluid gurgles. Cermo-the-Slow had belied his name and gotten there first. He found a hatch which had a manual override. Evidently maintenance mechs used it to get at the pipe complex innards. The passage was tight. They had to worm their way through one at a time.

Without much discussion the team left the huge zone with its vast plaza. They had not revived their sensoria and had no idea how close the Mantis might be. Killeen sent Toby ahead with Shibo and stood rear guard beside Hatchet, looking back for a moment. “Damn close,” he said.

“Don’t matter much.” Hatchet spat, puffing. “We’re dead anyway.”

“Rather be dead than suredead.”

“Shit.” Hatchet spat again. “Dead’s dead.”

Killeen felt a cool rage rattling in his chest. But all he said was, “You keep nothing from them, you’re just like them.”

“Crafter felt the same way,” Hatchet said sourly. “Funny, a mech bein’ just as crazy as you.”

Killeen blinked. “Crafter wouldn’t go suredead? But they’re its own kind.”

“Years back, when I was first talkin’ with it, through the translator, it said it was a Renny ’cause it wouldn’t give up its self”

“Ever ask it what the ordinary mechs think?”

Hatchet shrugged. “Near as I can tell, they don’t.”

Killeen’s gaze swept the rectangular corridors that led away among ranks of noisily working cam-drive machines. A mech appeared but didn’t look at the two men. “What you mean?”

“My father told me once. Mechs wear out, they’re ordered in. Don’t think ’bout it at all. Got a override command built in ’em. Get stripped for metals, raw parts.”

“Same as they strip us down,” Killeen said. “Sure-death.”

“Get on in. I’ll cover.” It was Hatchet’s right as Cap’n to be the last out, traditionally the most dangerous position. Killeen wriggled his way through the hatch. He had to work through tight intersections in complete darkness. Pipes poked his ribs, tried to trip him. The thought came that if the mechs wanted to take them one at a time this would be an effective trap. But then he saw a light ahead. A pipe caught his shock-absorber sleeve as he stumbled out into a ghostly ruby glow.

He was in a long slab of a room. From its low ceiling hung oddly shaped bundles suspended by translucent threads. The walls and floor emitted smoldering dim light.

The team had stopped, staring. Killeen, too, tried to see more detail. Hatchet emerged behind Killeen, took one long survey of the apparently limitless room, and whispered, “Get some cover. Quick!”

Killeen followed Toby, who was recovering his speed. They stopped beside a large lumpy thing that revolved slowly in inky shadows. Its lower edge hung near Killeen’s head. He let his eyes ’scope out to detect any movement in the vast, stretching room. Even at max amp he could see no motion other than the achingly slow turning of the things suspended from the ceiling. Nothing touched the floor. A silky silence floated on chilled, antiseptic air.

This place had a feel of obsessive exactness, the clean spaces and rigid perspectives making a frame for the oblong, misshapen masses that spun silently. But as Killeen stepped toward the nearest mass he caught a sharp scent that tainted his lungs with memories of wood rot and mold. He remembered crawling in a basement of the Citadel, a boy exploring the damp recesses in search of treasure and mystery. Thick smells had assaulted him, moist soil and rancid clothing, crusted old boxes and half-filled jars of moldy sluggish liquids.

The faint, hellish light seemed to brighten. He held his breath.

He was watching something like a large mass of tightly wound conduits. That was his first perception, and as his eyes adjusted further he could see their rubbery elastic sheaths. An oily sheen lubricated their gray, mottled surfaces. They moved. Slid and groped persistently, blindly. A machine. Bent on some purpose he could not imagine, not made of metal, veined and turgid, yes. But it had that strange machinelike, nonliving way of motion. It did not occur to him that this could be anything else. The coiled tubes were waxy in the dim buttery glow. Jelly lubricated their movements. Their slippery heave and slide had the momentum of programmed purpose. Thicker tubes wound among the slim ones. Accordion-pleated extrusions branched off to other joinings. With gravid slowness, oval fissures opened in the large tube nearest to Killeen, breaking the oily glaze. It was swelling. It sighed faintly and a fine blue mist rose from it. He caught the sweet sewer smell he remembered from the drop tower in the Citadel, a heavy lush hint of what would assault the nose if you ever leaned over the long drop and caught the flavored breeze.

His eyes moved beyond, trying to grasp overall movement.

The tubes pulsed. Here and there a spot on a slippery conduit showed pale porosity. As Killeen and Toby watched, a fissure broke open. It worked wider. Killeen saw that the tubes were hollow, flexing coils. The nearest made a wet, sucking noise. It writhed from the snakelike embrace of another and coiled away. Rings rippled in its skin.

Killeen sensed coiling momentum gather through the entire mass before him. Another tube broke free. It had a slick globular head which he saw only for a moment because it buried itself in a new, still-widening fissure nearby.

A furious clenching began in the surrounding mass. Killeen had the impression of a muscular gathering. Currents of moist, sour air brushed him. He heard faint smacks and slides. Then a soft, quickening, wheezing undertone. Like the breathing of a giant.

More fissures puckered in the walls of nearby tubes. They grew, their oval mouths ridged by ropy pink cords. They yawned, red-rimmed and slick, pocked. More wrinkled tubes wrenched free of the mass and waved in the thick air. Their blunt heads swelled. They sought and quickly found fissures that seemed to break and grow in answer to the freed tubes. The heads wormed among the working mass and plunged into the yawning fissures. A long shuddering accompanied each entry. The writhing pink mass shivered unspeakably. Killeen saw almost against his will that each was a coupling, male and female organs that formed of the gelatinous mass and met in a grotesque slithering, each calling up the other from the unshaped ooze that palped and stroked itself in jellied, blunt frenzy.