“We’re ’bout played out,” he said reflectively.
“Can’t stop here,” Shibo said. “Cybers know this place.”
Killeen nodded. “Might come back.”
He wondered if Cybers found it any more difficult to move and seek at night. Probably not, since he remembered their natural optical senses worked best in the infrared. Which meant that the gathering gloom gave Family Bishop no advantage here.
He walked to the middle of the gathering crowd and sat, his legs gratefully ceasing their aches. The quakes had shaken most of the odd, triangular leaves to the floor of the forest, providing a deliciously soft loam for rest. Approaching Bishops’ bootsteps made no noise whatever, and the ebbing twilight suffused the scene in a soothing, serene light.
His feet screamed for release, but he did not dare take off his boots for fear that he would not be able to get them back on when his feet swelled. He was tempted to expand his sensorium and get a quick head count, but the hanging body had made him wary of even the slightest electromagnetic tracer.
And in any case, he knew the rough dimensions of their loss. Family Bishop had been the outer flanking element in the assault, a relatively less dangerous position affording a clear escape route. They had gone in after the forward units sprang from their concealment in the Cyber tunnels. The battle had played out on the plain beneath the magnetic generator buildings. Those units had appeared directly among the Cybers.
Killeen had witnessed the fate of those brave Families. The assault ratio must have been at least one Family per Cyber. The first rush had brought down two Cybers and things had looked good. Then men and women began to fall on the plain as though blown over by a sudden soundless wind. Killeen had not been able to pick up any signatures of microwave or optical or even kinetic-kill weapons. People fell in midstride, as though picked up and slammed into the ground by an invisible giant.
The rush came to a sudden halt. Families regrouped behind the fallen, smoking Cybers. Even there some weapon picked them off one at a time. They tried a rush toward the magnetic generators that loomed above like mud-colored, rectangular hills—and fell by the dozens, their strangled cries twisting through the comm.
The Bishops answered the blaring attack signal of His Supremacy. More Families poured over the distant hills. They spread out and moved in jerky dashes between the covering shelter of arroyos and clumps of trees and boulders. The battlefield was a gray scabland left by some recent magma-spewing vent which had obliterated the life there. Whether this was by accident or design Killeen could not tell. The Cybers had already bored tunnels in the barely cooled lake of lava. Cracks in the crusty scab gave some shelter as the Tribe descended and brought withering fire to bear on the four remaining Cybers.
Had they been mechs, the directed bursts would have sheared away legs and burned out antennae. Here, nothing happened. The Cybers paused, as though reassessing the situation, and then went on picking off the darting human targets, as if nothing more bothersome than a summer’s rain fell upon them.
Killeen had been running at the middle of the Family. He saw the first Family members fall and ordered everyone down. They had poured a torrent of fire on the nearest Cyber, and succeeded in blowing away several appendages. But even the natural, warty skin repelled all shots.
This Killeen could not believe until be tried three successive bolts straight into the exposed midsection of the thing. Only after all three failed, fading away to mere luminous blue traceries in the air, did he notice the slight shimmer that hung over the Cyber, and hear the crackle of ionizing air in his sensorium.
That was when he called retreat. His Supremacy had immediately broken into Killeen’s comm line and cursed him, demanding another full assault. Killeen had hesitated for a long moment, while Bishops died all around him. The chaos of the rest of the battlefield had stormed against his sensorium, blinding him with its agonized calls and screamed pleas.
He had to resist the press of centuries of Family tradition, the absolute rule that said an Elder of the Tribe must be obeyed, especially in the split-second tumult of battle. Killeen had paused, agonizing, and that was the moment when he saw Loren, a boy Toby’s age, blown apart. The boy simply went to pieces. Something had struck him in the chest and made a bloody flower of him. Even though Loren was down in the apparent shelter of a lava crack, the burnished rock failed to stop whatever the Cybers used.
He called retreat then. Similar orders seemed to echo faintly in his comm, coming from other Cap’ns, but he could not be sure. He had provided some covering fire for the main body of Bishops, but harshly commanded that no one try to recover any fallen bodies. They had lost eleven getting off the plain, and still more working their way through the arroyos and over the ridgeline. He had barely stopped the retreat from turning into a rout. And all the while, he had ignored the mad, rattling curses of His Supremacy.
The only blessing in all this was that the children, pregnant women, and older Family members were all with the supply train. That was an improvement over their clashes with mechs on Snowglade. The abilities of the Cybers more than made up for that, though.
Killeen let himself wonder for a moment about the next time he saw His Supremacy. Would the man order him hoisted up on a spit, like the suffering remnants of people he had seen at the Tribal camp? There was a fair chance of it. Nonetheless, Family Bishop had to make for the designated rendezvous point. Without the Tribe the Family would fare badly in the open countryside; they simply knew too little about this world to survive for long.
For a moment Killeen weighed his own personal fate against the needs of the Family. He had seen quite enough of His Supremacy’s tactics already. They were ruinous used against Cybers, and probably not highly effective against mechs, either. His Supremacy’s victories had come with mech allies, after all. And after Killeen’s insubordination on the battlefield, His Supremacy would certainly put the Bishops in the thick of things in the future, where he could keep better control of them—whether or not Killeen still lived to lead them.
He sighed, and Shibo lying beside him cast a wise, pensive look. She knew what he was stewing about, yet said nothing. He took out a chaw and bit into its dense, sugary grains. Cermo came in with the rear guard. Killeen scowled at him, his usual signal that he was not in the mood to talk. He needed to think.
On balance, he had to lead them to the rendezvous. It was to be at a mountaintop, apparently a site having to do with one of the locals’ revered religious symbols. There they could meet the supply train. Then, if they decided to leave the crazed leadership of His Supremacy, they could slip away with full packs and bellies. That was worth risking his personal fate; in the end, no true Cap’n could decide otherwise.
His Arthur Aspect observed:
One should expect religious fervor, even rabid fundamentalism, in the face of such calamity as these people have endured. Be mindful that their ardor reflects an underlying fear they can barely contain. They have been rooted from their homes—
“So were we,” Killeen muttered.
Yes, but we have dwelled for years in the comfort of Argo.
“We didn’t turn crazy, not even in the worse times on Snowglade.”
What about Hatchet? Wasn’t he unbalanced?
Killeen remembered the closed, tight look to Hatchet’s face. “Naysay—just plain mean. Thought he could strike a deal with mechs, when all the time they were usin’ him, planning a zoo for us all.”
I won’t belabor such distinctions. But do notice that the Tribe also experienced apparent victories over the mechs when the intercity conflicts gave them an advantage. The crushing advent of the Cybers followed, however. Plus the disemboweling of their planet. Their strong reaction, their need for a perfect leader who embodies their hopes, who tells them that he speaks for God—such an effect is quite within the bounds of human responses.