Shibo sent,—Jocelyn! All in.—

—Hold there,—Jocelyn replied.—Nearly got your rig ready.—

Shibo duck-walked over. Toby said numbly, “She can’t be. She can’t just…”

“Hit her clean,” Killeen said, and instantly regretted his bluntness.

“No. No.” Toby fumbled with her helmet.

“Leave her,” Shibo said.

Toby unlocked the collar ring. He gave it a one-quarter turn and lifted the helmet free. The trailing connectors into Besen’ s neck popped free of their sockets but there was no answering jerk from the body. Her eyes were still open.

Toby touched her face. “Besen, listen. Wake up. Come on. Wake up. Besen—”

“Take it easy. Toby,” Killeen said numbly. People hardly ever came back from a system attack like this.

“She’s just out, that’s all. Just out. We give her a stim, she’ll be okay.” Toby started rubbing Besen’s cheeks.

Shibo said, “Check her indices.”

“Just out, is all.” With fumbling fingers Toby reached around and rotated Besen’s head. He and Killeen had to take off her backpack to get a clear look at her internal monitors. The digital circle at the top of her spine was uniformly blue. Numbers slid through each window, cycling meaninglessly.

Shibo glanced at them and then looked back at the hills where the Cybers were. “Looks bad,” she said.

“No. No.” Toby rubbed her face harder, faster. “She’s overloaded, sure. That’s all though.”

“Could give her a stim,” Killeen said, reaching for his pack. He had to make the gesture even though it was the last bulb he had.

“Chancy, doing it right away,” Shibo said. “Systems need reflex time.”

“I’ll bring her back,” Toby said. “She just needs blood in the head—”

“Here.” Killeen helped Toby screw the stim bulb to Besen’s head.

Toby stared into Besen’s unblinking eyes. “You got wake up.”

A microwave bolt whooshed overhead. Shibo said gently, “We have to try her now.”

Toby licked his lips. His mouth wrenched jaggedly. “If her systems overstim…”

Killeen put his hand on his boy’s shoulder but he could think of nothing to say.

Toby’s hands trembled over the bulb. “How… how can I? If…”

“She’s yours. You must decide.”

Toby’s face was white. He looked at Killeen for a long moment. Then he took the stim bulb and asked, “What—what setting?”

Killeen said, “Better try full. She’s pretty far gone.” He thought Besen was almost certainly dead but the next moment would make that plain enough. He would have to get Toby away fast, though, no matter how much the boy wanted to linger over the body.

“Okay.” Toby clicked the setting all the way over.

“Son, I—”

Toby triggered the tab. It made a small percussive thump.

Besen jerked. Her lips opened. She coughed. Toby lifted her to a sitting position and they all saw the indices stop rolling on her neck. She blinked furiously.

They looked at her speechlessly. She coughed again and said, “I… what…”

Toby embraced her and began crying.

Two quick IR pulses raked the air.

“Get her walking,” Shibo said.

Toby and Killeen helped Besen to her feet. She stared at them blankly.

—Shibo! Start falling back!—Jocelyn sent.

Shibo called, “Harper! Cover! Carmen—go!”

Toby massaged Besen’s neck. “Got to go now. Just a step, that’s all. Here, lean on me.”

Shibo said gently, “Toby, Besen—we have to go now.”

“What?” His head snapped up. “No, she—”

“Rest the flanks’re folded in,” Shibo said.

Killeen took Besen’s other shoulder. “Come on, we’ll get cut off.”

“Her pack,” Toby said.

“Leave it.”

“No, wait—” Toby reached into the pack. He fiddled with an unseen catch for a moment and then jerked something free. “I gave her this,” he said, holding up a chain with a small yellow pendant on it. “Don’t… don’t want damn Cybers get it.”

“Yes, take it.” Shibo looked at Killeen. “Cover.”

Killeen lay against the wall of the steep dry wash and fired a quick burst into the night. Shibo and Toby fell back with Besen. Killeen slid back down to Besen’s pack and found her weapon. He expended it noisily, throwing several high-energy pulses at every flickering target in his sensorium. Return fire chipped and burned the brow of the wash. He ducked under it and fled, running with a sudden fevered spike of fear. All the way to the riverside he was acutely aware of how big and tempting a target his back was.

He slid down the narrow sand embankment of the river and crashed into Jocelyn. An IR pulse whispered close by.

“How many more?” she gasped.

Three Bishops were manhandling a big mech part down the slope. Killeen looked around and saw Toby and Shibo getting Besen into an awkward assembly of mech sheet-metal that floated in the water.

“None,” he said, and started toward the water.

“Three’s the most for that. No room for you.”

“You sure?”

“Get down that way.”

“Look. I want—”

“Shut up and move.”

“I—” Killeen shut up.

“You’re the last, then. Help us with this.”

Jocelyn was crisp and efficient again. She worked well when following a plan. But there was more to being Cap’n than that.

Three large men rolled something forward on its edge. In the infrared it looked to Killeen like a big shell. He grabbed it and helped splash it into the shallows. The water was cuttingly cold at his ankles. He smelled the tint of Cybers nearby. Microwaves spat from the embankment above.

Big chunks of rock caught at his feet as he held on to the shell. It bucked and tossed in the frothing current.

“Get in,” Jocelyn said.

Killeen hesitated. Already the team was bringing down another piece of sheetmetal that some crafter had quickly bent into a crude cup shape. The metal had already lost most of its day heat and was so dim he could barely see it.

“How many to go?” he asked.

“Just us,” Jocelyn said.

“I’ll stay till—”

“Go.” Jocelyn looked at him squarely, her features blotched by the infrared glow of her face. “I’m Cap’n, I stay till the last.”

“Yeasay.” No point in arguing.

Killeen stepped into the shell as Jocelyn held it steady. He lay down awkwardly. The shallow bowl rode only a hand’s height above the black water. Jocelyn pushed him off. The river snatched him to itself as though he were a valued bauble. It swept him along, jostling the shell and throwing bitterly cold spray into his face. He tossed over hidden ridges and banged down hard.

He stayed as low as he could. His infrared image would be submerged in the cold water. Cybers on the shore could easily miss him. Or so went the reasoning.

He waited and clung to the smooth inner shell as the rush and roar of the water rose around him. No shots sang through the air nearby. He wondered how far the torrent would take him. It had not occurred to him until this moment that the Family should have been told how long to stay in their makeshift boats. Now they might disembark anywhere and end up spread far down this unknown river.

He lay worrying for a while before he recognized the faint odor of the shell he was riding. It was the used carapace of a mech. He rode down the raging rapids in the hardened skin of his oldest enemy.

SIXTEEN

Quath crawled carefully forward. She had nearly exhausted her armaments now. It was time to use care and guile, else the day was lost.

The Noughts continued to fall. Against Beq’qdahl’s band they would have been squashed long before. But Quath had maneuvered in the gashed landscape and caught the attacking podia from behind. Like an ephemeral gauzy cloud she had danced upon the slopes. The extra outfitting the Tukar’ramin had provided worked and purred and salted the very air with deceptions. When podia fired at her the shots went wide, baking the already tortured soil.