Great Sky River (2 page)

“You better stay off the stim-tab awhile,” Cermo said, frowning. “Gives you bad dreams.”

“Yeah.” Killeen nodded and started groping for his boots. They were the first thing you put on and the last you took off.

“It’s been years, after all,” Cermo said kindly. “Time we let it be.”

Killeen frowned. “Years… ?”

“Sure.” Cermo studied him a moment, plainly worried. “Been six years since the Calamity.”

“Six…”

“Look, we all like it, gettin' a li’l stimmed now ’n' then. Not if it takes you back into bad times though.”

“I… I guess so.”

He clapped Killeen on the shoulder. “Get on up, now. We’re movin' quick.”

Killeen nodded. Cermo-the-Slow went away to awaken others. His large frame slipped quickly among the shadows of the alien
vats and machines.

Killeen’s hands pulled on his boots but his mind still wandered among memories. His dirty clothes, the worn boots, the calluses
and stains on his hands… all testified to what had happened since the fall of the Citadel, the Calamity.

He stood slowly, feeling his chilled muscles stretch and protest.

The Citadel was gone.

Veronica.

Abraham.

He had left now only Toby, his son. Only a fragment of Family Bishop.

And finally, he had left before him now the endlessly stretching prospect of flight and rest and flight again.

Long Retreat

S
omething was after them.

The Family had just come straggling over a razorbacked ridge, beneath a pale jade sky. Killeen’s shocks wheezed as his steady
lope ate up the downgrade.

The red soil was deeply wrinkled and gullied. Cross-hatching was still sharp in the tractor-tread prints that cut the parched
clay. There had been so little rain the prints could well be a century old.

A black-ribbed factory complex sprawled at the base of the slope. Killeen flew over the polished ebony domes, sending navvys
scuttling away from his shadow, clacking their rude dumb irritation.

Killeen hardly saw them. He was watching spiky telltales strobe-highlighted on his right retina.

There: a quick jitter of green, pretty far back.

It came and went, but always in a new place.

There, again. Far behind.

Not directly following them, either. Not a typical Marauder maneuver. Smart.

He blinked, got the alternative display. The Family
was a ragged spread of blue dabs on his topo map. He was pleased to see they kept a pretty fair lopsided triangle. Cermo-the-Slow
was dragging ass behind, as always.

Killeen saw himself, an amber winking dot at the apex. Point man. Target.

He grimaced. This was his first time ever as point, and here came some damn puzzle. He’d tried to beg off when Cap’n Fanny
ordered him to the front. There were others better experienced—Ledroff, Jocelyn, Cermo. He’d much rather have stayed back.
Fanny kept giving him extra jobs like this, and while he’d do whatever she said without protest, this had made him jittery
from the start.

Fanny knew more than anybody, could see through Marauder tricks. She should be up here. But she kept pushing him.

Now this. He dropped from the air, eyes slitted.

Killeen came down on a pocked polyalum slab, the old kind that mechs had used for some long-forgotten purpose. Packing fluff
blew in the warm wind, making dirty gray drifts against his cushioned crustcarbon boots. Mechmess littered the ground, so
common he did not notice it.

“Got a pointer behind,” Killeen sent to Fanny.

—Snout?— she answered.

“Nossir noway,” Killeen answered quickly to cover his nerves. “Think I’d sing out if was that same old Snout, been tagging
us for days?”

—What is, then?—

“Dunno. Looks big, then small.”

Killeen did not understand how his retinal area scan worked, had only a vague idea about radar pulses. He did know things
weren’t supposed to look large on one pass
and small the next, though. Habit told you more than analysis.

—’Quipment’s bust?—

“I dunno. Flashes okay,” Killeen said reluctantly. Was Fanny joshing him? He didn’t know which he liked less, something that
could come up on them this way, or his gear gone flatline on him.

Fanny sighed. She was a nearly invisible speck to his right rear, wiry and quick. Killeen could hear her clicking her teeth
together, trying to decide, the way she always did.

“Whatsay?” he prodded impatiently. It was up to her. She was Cap’n of the Family and had a long lifetime rich in story and
experience, the kind of gut savvy that meant more in dealing with Marauder mechs than anything else.

She had been Cap’n for all the years that Family Bishop had been on the move. She knew the crafts of flight and pursuit, of
foraging and stealing; of deception and attack. And through terrible years she had held the Family together.

—Comes closer?—

“Looks. Dodging fast.”

Fanny clicked her teeth again. Killeen could see in his mind’s eye her wise old eyes crinkling as she judged their positions.
Her warm presence suffused his sensorium, bringing a sure, steady calm. She had been Cap’n so long and so well, Killeen could
not conceive how the Family had done without her before, when they lived in the Citadel.

—We make the fist, then,— she said with finality.

Killeen was relieved. “Goodsay.”

—Sound the call.—

He blinked. “Won’t you?”

—You’re point. Act like one.—

“But you know more about…” Killeen hesitated. He did not like admitting to his own doubts, not with Ledroff and others probably
listening in. He liked even less the prospect of leading an attack.

“Look, Ledroff has done this before. Jocelyn, too. I’ll drop back and—”

—No.
You.—

“But I don’t—”

—Naysay!— She was abrupt, biting. —Call!—

Killeen wet his lips and steadied himself. He sent over general comm, —Heysay lookleft! Fist!—

Most of the Family were over the ragged ridgeline now. That would provide some shelter from whatever was coming from behind.
He watched as they came spilling down the ruddy, gorge-pocked hillsides. They were a slow tumbling fluid, their individual
tinny acknowledgments coming as thin insect cries.

Killeen did not consider for a moment that the voices he heard were carried on radio waves, for he had lived all his life
in a sensory bath provided by the linking of acoustic and electromagnetic signals. The distinction between them would have
demanded more science than he had ever mastered, ever would master. Instead he heard the gathering peppery voices as scattershot
ringings, carrying long and remote across the hot still silence of dusty late afternoon. Though each Family member glided
in beautiful long arcs, the Family itself seemed to Killeen to hang suspended in the middle distance, so gradual was its progress,
like thick dark down-swarming molasses. Gravid and slow they came, this worn and perhaps only remaining remnant of humanity:
eagering, homing, tribing.

Killeen caught fragments of talk from Ledroff.

—Why’d Cap’n put
him
… Damfino why he’s up there…—

“Cut the chatter!” Killeen called.

—Couldn’t find his ass w’both hands…—

“I said
quiet!”
he whispered fiercely.

Killeen had heard Ledroff’s muttered jibes through the comm before. Until now he had ignored them. No need to provoke a faceoff
with the big, self-assured man. But this time Killeen couldn’t let it pass. Not when it endangered them.

—Seems me he’s jumpin' at spooks,— Ledroff got in, then fell silent.

Killeen wished Cap’n Fanny had come on full comm line and cut off Ledroff. A mere disapproving click of her tongue would have
shut him up.

The Family skimmed low, using savvy earned through hard years. Wheeling left, they seeped down among the knobby, domed buildings
of the manufacturing complex.

Factory mechs wrenched to a stop as the Family skipped light and fast through their workyards. Then the blocky, awkward-looking
machines hunkered down, withdrawing their extensors into marred aluminum shells. Such mechs had no other defense mechanisms,
so the Family gave the slope-nosed, turtlelike forms no notice.

Still, the humans had to be fast. They knew if they stayed here long these slow-thinking drudges would send out a call. Lancers
would come. Or worse.

Killeen pondered for a moment the possibility that the thing trailing them was a lone Lancer, summoned by a minor pillage
the Family had made a few days before. He checked the faint, flickering tracers behind.

No, nothing like a Lancer. Something smaller, certainly. It gave off hardly any image at all. Still…

“Yea!” he called. Tapping his right temple twice with a forefinger, he sent his scan topo map to the entire Family. “We’re
bunching up!”

With muttered irritation they spread out, dissolving their moving beeswarm triangle. They formed the traditional concentric
rings, ragged because the Family numbered a mere 278 now. And some of them were achingly slow—gimpy, or old, or wounded from
past scrapes and fights and blunders.

Fanny saw the problem and called, —Show the wind our heels!—

The old saying worked. They began to run faster now, a keen unspoken fear at their backs.

He sent the latest topo to Fanny. It showed a muddle of bluewhite tracers behind them.

Fanny sent, —Where’s it?—

Killeen admitted, “Dunno. Looks to be some kinda screen.”

—Deliberate confusion?—

“Don’t think so. But…”

—Situation like this, your topo’s no good for figurin’ size. Go by speed. No ’facturing mech moves quick as a Marauder.—

“This one’s slow, then fast.”

—Must be a Marauder.—

“Think we should stand ’n' wait for it?”

He felt her assessing regard like a cool wedge in his sensorium.

—What
you
think?—

“Well… it might just be reconning us.”

—Could be.—

She was giving nothing away. “So’d be best if we keep on, make like we don’t see it.”

—Long’s we can keep track of it, sure.—

Killeen wondered what Fanny meant by that, but he didn’t want to ask, not with Ledroff listening. He said guardedly, “It keeps
jumpin' round.”

—Might be some new mechtech.—

So?
he thought.
How do we respond?
He kept his voice flat and assured, though, as he said, “I figure we don’t give away that we see it. If it’s just checkin'
its ’quipment, it’ll go away.”

—And come back when we’re sleepin',— she said flatly.

“So? Our watch’ll pick it up. But if we take a shot at it now, when we can’t see it so good, maybe it gets away. Next time
it comes back with better mechtech. So then we don’t pick it up and it skrags us.”

Fanny didn’t answer for a long moment and Killeen wondered if he had made a fool of himself. She had coached him in the crafts
and he always felt inadequate compared with her sure, almost casual grasp of Family lore. She could be a stern Cap’n, a shrewd
tactician, firm and fast. And when they had fought or fled, and again gathered around nightfires to tell their tales, she
could be warm and grandmotherly. Killeen would do anything to avoid disappointing her. But he had to know what to do, and
she was giving him no easy answers.

—Yeasay. That’s best, long as this’s a reg’lar Marauder.—

Killeen felt a burst of pride at her approval. But a note of concern in her voice made him ask, “What if it’s not?”

—Then we run. Hard.—

They were out of the foothills now. The Family sprinted across eroded flatlands.

Fanny asked as she panted, —See it yet?—

“Naysay.”

—Should’ve climbed the ridge by now. Don’t like this.—

“Think maybe a trap?” Killeen cast about for possibilities as he searched his topo display. Again he wished Jo-celyn or even
goddamn Ledroff had this job. If an attack came he wanted to be near his son. He scanned ahead and found Toby in the middle
of the moving Family formation.

Fanny dropped back, scanning the ridgeline.

Killeen searched again for the elusive pursuer. The topo danced in his eye, speeding ribbons of light.

More cloudy tracers.

To the right came a dim speckling of pale blue.

Killeen realized too late that it would have been better to hold the ridgeline. They were exposed and had lost the enemy.
He grunted in frustration and sped forward.

They were partway down the broad valley when he looked right and saw first the overlay winking green and then the far rocky
scarp. It was fresh rock, cleaved by some mining mech, its amber faces gouged and grooved.

But the clear bare cut hadn’t been there moments before. Killeen was sure of that.

“Bear on my arrow!” he shouted to the whole Family. He cut toward a low hill. “Fanny, you’d—”

Killeen heard a sharp crackling.

He saw Fanny fall. She gave a cry of surprise. Then her voice sharpened, riding an outrushing gasp of startled pain.

He turned and fired at the distant carved hills, where stood half-finished blocks of rhomboid stone.

Back came an answering echo of snapping, crisp circuit death.

A hit. Probably not enough to drop the thing dead, but it would buy some seconds.

He shouted, “Max it!”

With Fanny down, he’d have to get the Family away, fast. Killeen blinked, saw the blue dots of the Family swerve toward broken
terrain that provided some shelter. Good. But where was—?

“Toby! Hug down in that stream bed, see?”

A klick away, his son hesitated.

“To your right!”

—and for a moment that seemed balanced forever beside a harrowing abyss, Killeen was sure his son’s gear was blown or overloaded,
making it impossible to hear the warning. Or that the boy was confused by the scramble of electronoise. Or weary from the
run. And so would remain standing while on the dry rutted plain no other simple unmoving target would leap into the fisheye
lens of the unseen Marauder mech. His son’s frozen indecision would recommend itself as a target.