TWO

Shadows stretched long and threatening, pointing away from the hoteye of the Eater. Its harsh radiance cast fingers across the stream-cut plain, fingers reaching toward the onstruggling human tide.

Each windgouged rock, though itself dull and worn, cast a lively colored shadow. The Eater’s outer ring was smoldering red, while the inner bullseye glared a hard blue. As disksetting came and the Eater sank to the horizon, it drew from the least rocky upjut a tail of chromatic ribbons. Shifting shadows warped the land, stretching perspectives. The seeing was hard.

So it was a while before Killeen was sure. He blinked his eyes, jumping his vision through the spectrum, and barely picked up the wavering fern-green pip.

“Heysay,” he called. “Ledroff! Give a hard lookleft.”

The Family was spread through a canyon shattered by some ancient conflict. No one was closer than a klick. They slowed, glad to pause after the hours of steady, fearful flight.

“For what?” Ledroff called.

“See a Trough?”

“No.”

Killeen panted slowly, smoothly, not wanting the sour sound of his fatigue to carry to the others. Ledroff’s response was slow and minimal. Killeen knew that if Fanny had been speaking, Ledroff would have been sharp and quick. By Family tradition, they would choose a new Cap’n as soon as they found safe camp. Until then, Killeen was point and called their maneuvers. Ledroff understood, but that didn’t stop his grumbling.

They had paused to conduct a quick service for Fanny, concealing the body in a hastily made cairn. Then they had run long and hard. They could not go much farther. Killeen had to find shelter.

“Jocelyn? See anything?”

“I… maybe.”

“Where?”

“A little thing… could be a mistake…” Strain laced her thin voice.

“Can you cross-scan with me?”

“I… here…”

A quick picture flared in Killeen’s right eye. Jocelyn’s overlay showed a sputtering blip.

“Let’s find it,” he said.

“Naysay,” Ledroff said sternly. “Better we sack in the open.”

“And shut ourselves down?” Jocelyn asked, disbelieving.

“Safer. Mech will naysay it’s us.”

“We’re too tired,” Killeen said. He knew Ledroff would have been right, if the Family wasn’t played out. Mechs usually couldn’t find a human in a powered-down suit. They scented circuits, not skin.

“Trough? Found Trough?” Toby sounded fuzzy from daze-marching.

“Could be,” Killeen said. “Let’s look.”

Ledroff shouted, “Noway!”

But a chorus of assent drowned him out. Ledroff started arguing. Which was what you’d expect when a Family marched without electing a new Cap’n. They all needed to rest and think.

Killeen ignored Ledroff and loped in long low strides over the nearest hill. It took teeth-gritting effort to achieve the flowing smoothness but he knew the following Family would take note. Without thinking about the matter clearly he understood that, worn to a brittle thinness, the Family needed some display of strength to give confidence, to regain their vector.

Ledroff came up behind. Killeen’s eyes automatically integrated Jocelyn’s display and picked up the sputtering slight promise-note again. He surged over rumpled, scarred hills and realized he had overshot only when the signal faded.

“It’s buried,” he said.

“Where?” Ledroff asked with a cutting, impatient edge.

“Under that old factory.”

Tucked into a dimpled seam were sloping sheds of wrought rockmetal. Navvys clucked and rolled and labored around them, carrying out the endless production that had given mechs their steady dominion over humanity. Such sheds were erected wherever the land offered a rich seam of weather-collected minerals. This was a neglected station, far from the lands where mechs chose to build their majestic woven ceramic warrens. Yet the endless succession of such minor stations had flooded this world with mechlife and soon, Killeen reflected, might end the long battle between the mechs and all else.

“Nosee! No is,” Sunyat called from far away. She was always the most cautious of the Family. “Maybe trap.”

Killeen made a show of ignoring her, same as he had done to Ledroff. Most times that was the best way, rather than talk. “Trough’s buried. Navvys’ve built on top of it.”

“Troughs’re that old?” Jocelyn asked.

“Old as mechs. Old as men,” Killeen said. He landed beside a navvy and followed the half-blind thing as it rolled into the factory. Sure enough, the navvys were refining some ceramo-base extract from the rocks, oblivious to the large rusted door that formed one whole wall of their little world.

Within moments the Family had converged on the factory. They sapped each navvy, powering them down enough to pry out some portable power cells, but not so far that the navvy would register a malf. At this they moved with accustomed grace. This small place had no supervisor mechs to confront, no dangers. Navvys were easy pickings. The fact that the Family was like rats stealing crumbs from a back larder did not concern or bother them.

Ledroff went into the Trough first, Killeen behind. It was a vast old barn, ripe with scents Killeen savored in the air. The Family conducted its entry automatically, each darting forward while the others covered, exchanging not a word. Killeen and Jocelyn crept carefully along rows of leaky vats, boots squishing in the slop.

Nothing. No navvys came to greet them, mistaking them for mechs. That meant this Trough was tended poorly, expected few visitors. Its navvys were loaned to the factory outside.

“Out of business,” Ledroff grunted, sitting down on an iron-ribbed casement. He started shucking off his suit.

“Food’s good,” Jocelyn said. She had already stuck a fist into an urn of thick syrupy stuff. She licked it with relish. Long brown hair spilled over her helmet ring, escaping. Her bony face relaxed into tired contentment.

Killeen listened as other Family prowled the long hallways, sending back the same report: nobody home. He went back to the entrance and helped swing the big moly-carb hatch closed. That was it, for him. They were in safe haven and now he let himself lie down, feeling the quiet moist welcome of the Trough envelop him.

Around him the Family unsuited. He watched them lazily. Jocelyn shucked her knobby knee cowlings with a heavy sigh. Mud had spattered her shin sheaths; she had to pop their pinnings free with the heel of her hand. Her slab-muscled thighs moved gracefully in the dappled light, but inspired no answering in Killeen.

The Family removed their webbed weaves and tri-socketed aluminum sheaths, revealing skins of porcelain, chocolate, sallow. Their flesh had red, flaky areas where insulation bunched and rubbed. Many carried ruddy seams of forgotten operations. Others showed the blue-veined traceries of old implants. These were add-ons from the days when the Family still knew how to work such things. Glossy slick spots spoke of injuries soothed. But nothing could shore up the sagging flesh, the pouch-bellies of inflamed organs. The Family carried a wearying burden of slowly accumulating biotroubles, unfixable without the technology that they had lost with the Citadel.

Jocelyn had found a bubbling caldron of sweetyeast. Killeen ate some of the foamy yellow head with the single-minded ferocity that the years of wandering had taught each of them. It had been four weeks now since they’d last found a Trough. They all had been running on hardpack rations and bitter water hand-scooped from tiny, rare streams.

Troughs were all that kept them alive now. The dank, dark places had been made for the Marauder-class mechs, and of course for the higher mechs for which humans had no names because men never survived a meeting with one. Marauders—like Lancers, Snouts, Trompers, Baba Yaggas—needed bioproducts. Roving, they sometimes stopped in at the randomly sited Troughs to refeed their interior, organic parts.