He felt the ship gently lift from its mount. Thrumming strength beat through the air.

The wall opposite them wobbled. It gave a panoramic view of the site. Legions of black mechs ringed them.

The Mantis stood at the base of the ruined, scooped-out hill. Its myriad knobbed joints made it seem like a half-finished construction beside the broad blue stream.

Shibo took them up. The Argo leaned over, preparing for full boost. A rumbling came through the deck. He watched her intent face and saw there no trace of fear or doubt.

Behind him Toby called out, “Heysay yeasay. Go!”

Calls answered him down through the bright tapestries of the sensorium. All this legacy now rode on a single turning moment that came rushing toward them. Yet he found no panic or unsteadiness among them. They were an instrument honed by harsh years and ongoing tragedy and nothing could deflect them now.

—Boots on?— he asked them. They answered the code word with raucous and joyful affirmations.

The Mantis sent from below:

I wish you good voyage. You shall hear from me and my tributaries again.

“Yeasay!” Killeen answered.

“Go!” Toby called.

Shibo threw the Argo into full thrust. A hammering roar burst upon them. The Argo arced up and away. Sudden weight pressed them into their couches.

The ship rammed up into the hard sky.

And then it failed. Engines fell silent. The craft flew on, whistling and weightless.

They began falling. The view-wall cleared as their exhaust blew away. Far below, the mechs were a black ring.

Killeen felt a sudden vacancy of a kind none of them had ever known. The fall seemed infinitesimally slow. Every sense in him cried in shrill panic.

The Argo plunged aft-down toward bare rock. The plain rushed at them.

Killeen bit his lip to stifle a cry. He knew he could not let his fear leak into the sensorium but it threatened to overwhelm him. He saw Shibo pause in her feverquick movements, judging, pacing, listening to the ship’s own small ancient minds.

The Argo veered. No lifting pressure slowed them but they did drift in their fall. Toward the hard blue stream that snaked like a cutting wire through the weathered stone.

—Now.—

Shibo’s call came at the same instant that a brutal hand slammed them hard.

Killeen saw the stream below, its surface a reflecting glare. The Ship’s exhaust played upon it, driving waves. The Argo turned toward the shore.

The Mantis saw them coming and had only an instant to move. It lifted a turret weapon—

And was blown to fragments as spurting exhaust showered down on fragile structure.

Struts and rods and polished chromed complexes—all jerked and dissolved and scattered like useless random junk on the burnished rock.

The Argo hovered for a long moment. Its hot gases played with loving, lingering detail on the scattered, melting parts.

—Let’s see you recover from that!— Killeen thought, and his bottled-up rage burst the words crimson through the sensorium.

—Feel what it is to die. Even if you come back, if you’re saved somewhere else and can be regenerated, feel it now.—

Hails and gleeful cries answered him all through the Argo.

—Feel it! For Fanny. For what you did to her. For every one you surekilled and forced to live again as your grotesque artworks. Feel it!—

A punch drove Killeen down into his couch.

The Argo lifted at tremendous acceleration. It shot up from the plain and into an empty sky, leaving a towering yellow exhaust trail. Streamers of hot gas pointed back like an arrow toward the still-exact circle of black mechs. Severed so surgically from their master, none had fired at the lifting ship.

Killeen let the heavy weight press him without resistance. He had prayed that the Mantis could not read his emotions any better than he could read its. The Mantis’s cozy use of Arthur’s Aspect had made it seem almost human. Killeen would never know how close to the truth that was. Could a vastly intelligent mind, reduced to their level, mimic humanity?

It made no difference. The Mantis had violated the dignity of living things and by human standards that was enough to know. Nothing else mattered.

Little problems. That had been their code for the micromechs who infested the Argo. Who now ran mad through the ship, attacking it, cutting and searing.

And as they moved from their hiding places the Families cut them down.

The humans poured from their couches.

Boots on. Their running equipment gave them the power and agility to move through the Argo, even though the ship was under hard boost.

The micromechs were engineered to work in steady gravity. So Shibo rammed the Argo to high thrust, then backed off, then ran it high again.

The surges tumbled the micromechs from their holds on cables, pipes, circuitry. Bishops and Rooks swung through suddenly full-lit corridors, nerves quickened for the hunt. They shot and stabbed at the small creatures. Sudden surges slammed them against bulkheads but they kept on, relentless. The hunt sang in them. Micromechs scurried and fled and tried to hide. Boots stamped them into oblivion. Hands ripped them in half.

Where they did flee the humans had allies. The manmech pursued them, wise in the ways of these small microbots. It ground them under steel treads. Toby followed it down the lurching, careening corridors of the Argo. He shot micromechs but took more pleasure in pounding them with the butt of his e-beam gun, feeling the crunch of collapsing metal, of shattered microcircuits.

They hooted and called and yelled, this fevered mob, as they spilled like an avenging flood through the big ship. Old blood-songs sprang to their lips. Glee and rage echoed savage and pitiless through the metal warrens.

By the time the Argo had achieved a staging orbit the micromechs were smashed and riddled.

“Got ’em all,” Toby said. His eyes were big and bright. “W’out Mantis tellin’ them what’s up, they’re not so smart.”

Shibo nodded, distracted by her work at the board. They began boosting at steady acceleration on a course the Mantis had plotted. She was going to follow the course, find out where it led. She understood by feel only a minute fraction of the ship systems, but now she could rely on them. With the Mantis control gone, they were free.

Killeen asked, “Any casualties?”

Toby sobered immediately. “Jocelyn got hit in the leg.”

“How’s she?”

“They’re workin’ on her.”

He grimaced. Every loss was irreplaceable, final. Now that they were his responsibility, they cut even more deeply. He saw that he was always going to have doubts afterward, questions, second thoughts, regrets. Always.

“We got ’em all, though,” Toby said confidently.

“Maybe.”

“Naysay, we did. Honest.”

“If the Mantis had some fixed so they’d hide when things went wrong, we’d miss ’em,” he said mildly. He didn’t want to take the steam out of Toby so fast—the boy needed a victory—but he might as well start now in showing how you had to look at every side of mechs if you wanted to guard against them. That was the way the world was. The boy had to learn.

“Well… maybe,” Toby allowed. Then he brightened. “Want we look some more?”

“No, get some food. Any mechs hiding, maybe they’ll come out in a li’l while. Keep somebody watching all the time.”

“Yeasay. The manmech’ll be good for that.”

“It work out okay?”

“Sure. Wish it’d cut out that barking, though.”

“You don’t like it?”

“Well, that’s not so bad. Sounds funny with the woman voice, though. Was there really an animal made that noise once?”

Killeen smiled. “So I hear. Worked for us.”

“Did all the animals?”

“Some. What my Aspects tell me is, we got more and more of them working for us. Or we ate them, which is another way of working for us I guess.”