Great Sky River (6 page)

Ledroff kicked him in the butt. Killeen yelped. He sprawled. A damp moldering smell rushed up into his nostrils, sharp and
biting.

Ledroff grabbed his collar and jerked him to his feet. Killeen staggered forward, pushed by the rough, callused hands of other
men. His legs were wooden stumps. The hollow cavern swerved eerily. Women hooted, rebuking him. A hand cuffed his cheek. A
muttered curse found strident echoes. The Family formed a grumbling circle in the dappled gray light. Ledroff marched Killeen
to the center of it and booted him again in the ass.

“Watchdrop,” Ledroff said simply, a plain indictment.

“Drunk, he was!” a woman accused.

Jake-the-Shaper, whose word carried far in the Family, said disgustedly, “Coulda got us raided.”

Ledroff nodded. “Whatsay punishment?”

The family didn’t hesitate to answer.

“Three fullpouch!”

“Naysay, four!”

“My thermpack!”

“Mine too!”

“Let ’im carry my medkit.”

“And
canisters.”

“All
the canisters.”

“Yeasay. He slept, let him stagger now.”

Killeen kept his head bowed. He tried to remember what had happened. The alky, right. He’d had some. Done some dancing. Started
sobbing, he remembered that. Drank some more…

The Family bickered and joked and hooted. Idle rage, frustration—Ledroff orchestrated them to vent their feelings. Anger diffused
into mere irritation. They finally settled on a penalty load for Killeen to carry: one fullpouch and the medkit, relieving
two of the older women of a good third of their burden.

“Take you it?” Ledroff demanded ritually.

Killeen coughed hoarsely. “Uh, yea. Doubly yea.”

Killeen then recited the sorrow-giving, letting the words trip out through swollen lips without having to think about them.
Silence followed the ancient sayings.

Ledroff laughed, breaking the remaining tension around the circle. His lips twisted in an unreadable expression, Ledroff made
a joke about the stains on Killeen’s overalls. The Family chuckled. Killeen didn’t even look down to see. He knew he had fallen
asleep on something sticky. He welcomed the laughter. To be the butt of a joke was nothing compared with the humiliation of
not handling the alky, of falling asleep on watch.

He didn’t look up to find his son’s eyes as Ledroff cuffed him aside. He felt a smarting in his eyes, perhaps from tears,
but the roaring ache in his head made it impossible to cry. He would’ve liked to slink away, humiliated, but his mouth and
throat were parched from the harsh malty alky. He walked unsteadily down an alleyway shadowed by a row of vats, away from
the Family, until he found a spring of processed water. Someone had popped a feeder line, creating a frothing geyser. He slurped
it up, stripped, washed himself in the bitterly cold spray. As he stood in the warming air, letting the breeze of a yawning
duct dry him, Toby came from the inky recesses of a forging machine.

“Dad…what…?”

Killeen looked into the upraised, trustful face. “I… the laying-low. Guess I let it get me.”

“Looked like alky,” Toby said sardonically.

“The alky was a way out.”

“Thought it was… Ledroff, maybe.”

Toby was trying to comfort him, Killeen saw, and thought that being direct was the best way. Or maybe Toby simply wasn’t old
enough to know how to talk and say nothing at the same time.

Killeen nodded slowly, so his head didn’t ache so much. It was all coming back. “Ledroff…”

“After the laying-low songs,” Toby said matter-of-factly, “he talked some.”

“I remember…” A blur.

“Decided we’d head for a Casa.”

“Great. He got any idea where one is?”

Toby shook his head. “Hesay lots, but not that.”

“ ’Cause he dunno.”

“Family liked how he talked, though.”

“He make sense?”

Guardedly: “Some.”

“What’d I say?”

“Nothin’ that went over real well.”

“Oh.” Killeen couldn’t recall any of this. “I get much support?”

“Some. Paid off lots better for Ledroff.”

Killeen shook his thick hair free of droplets, wrung it in both hands. “Huh? How come?”

“They made him Cap’n.”

Killeen stopped, dumbstruck.
“Cap’n?”

“Yeafold, the voting was. Ever’body but you.”

“Where was I?”

Toby shrugged, a silent way to say that Killeen had been insensible by then.

“We got better than Ledroff. Why, Jocelyn’s—”

“He talks good.” Toby didn’t have to say
better than you, drunk,
but he didn’t need to. Killeen knew the Family thought he was good but unreliable, and not really old enough to be Cap’n
anyway. Even if Fanny had been training him, same as Ledroff and Jocelyn.

Until now Killeen had been glad to have them think that way, too. It kept them from always coming to him with disputes to
settle, intrigues, the rest of it. Every Family had that, and on the run everybody whined more and sought shelter in the casting
of words around their problems.

“Well, maybe Ledroff will have some ideas after all,” Killeen said lamely.

“Uh-huh.”

“I got look after you, anyway.”

“Uh-huh.”

Something distracted him from his son’s guarded, puzzled expression—a small warning somewhere in the
back of his mind. He brushed it aside. Time to scheme later. Right now he wanted to gain back some of his son’s respect.

“You don’t really believe that,” Toby said solemnly, accusingly.

“Well, let’s give him a chance.” Killeen climbed back into his overalls, scratching where the water hadn’t taken all the scum
from his skin.

“You figure he’s any good?” Toby persisted.

“Well…” There was an obligation not to badmouth the Cap’n. Boys didn’t understand that.

“Dad, you could’ve talked sense into them.”

“Look, son, I don’t want to mess in that. Got enough just lookin’ after you.” Killeen sat and began drawing on his hydraulic
boots.

“You
could’ve.”

“Yea… well…” Killeen had no words. Ledroff had made him look stupid before he’d started drinking, he remembered that now.
The man had been playing for support. Calculating that Killeen would drown his grief in alky. So Ledroff had held up the Witnessing
until Killeen was thick into the sauce.

“Well, I know I… I had a problem….”

“Sure did.”

“Guess I let it get away from me.”

Toby swallowed with difficulty. “Y’shouldn’t
do
that”

“Yeasay… it’s just…”

“Fanny. I know.”

“Fanny.” Last night the full weight of it had come in on him. He would never see that weathered, crusty face again. Never
hear the gravel-voiced jokes. Never.

Killeen rummaged for a way to deflect the talk. “Come on, let’s go outside.” He pulled on his helmet, secured it.

Suspiciously: “What for?”

He reflected wryly that Toby could see around him pretty easily, and only twelve years old at that. Even better evidence that
he wasn’t cut out to be Cap’n. Everybody would guess his moves before he knew them himself. “Have a look at the land, now
we’re not so tired.”

“If Ledroff
lets
us,” Toby said sarcastically.

“Don’t be so—”

A faint tinny sound, high up.

“Huh?” Toby asked.

“Naysay!”

Toby didn’t hear the sound. The boy opened his mouth to say something more, eyes serious and adamant. Killeen clapped a hand
over the mouth and sent a whispery red Mayday to the Family. Something coming. But not on the floor.

Through the long hollow bay Killeen heard the Family furtively snatch weapons from clips, shuffle across the tile deck, fade
into hiding places. Quick, unhesitating, almost instinctual.

Killeen pushed Toby into a hollow beneath a steaming sulfurous vat. The boy protested, wanting to see what would happen. Killeen
kept a firm hand on the boy’s chest as he listened, figured.

Anything downlooking in the IR would see the vats ripe in red. Hard to pick out humans, then. Adequate shelter for the moment,
but the Family would be pinned down. Once the ones up above were spread widely, each human who emerged would be a ripe moving
blob, target-simple.

Killeen activated his boots. He stepped clear and leaped for the rim of the nearest vat. He landed unsteadily
on the narrow steel ledge, felt his balance going. If he was lucky his IR image blended with the vat vapor. He wobbled, trying
to see above, inhaling a rank biting lungful.

A tinny clank to his left.

He hesitated, starting to get scared. His arms wind-milled to keep steady.

Another clank.

He leaped. Off at an angle this time, vector chosen more by his toppling than by his plan.

He soared into the high arching vault. A sudden coldness invaded his chest and he felt a thousand hostile eyes probe him.
He did not know the smooth curve he followed was a parabola but sensed immediately that he would hang too long at the apex,
too warm and radiant against the cold ceiling. So as he passed a broad girder he lunged and grasped it. He hauled himself
onto a rough shelf deep in rust flakes.

He rolled, lost his grip, almost fell off the other side. The dust of ages prickled his nose. The slumbering dark seemed shot
through with flashes of yellow and ivory. Killeen got to his hands and knees and blinked to let his eyes adjust.

He was staring into the face of a mech. It was a three-eyed navvy, with skin of burnished organiform and blunt brass seize-and-draw
hands. It wasn’t a fighter but it lunged at him, face coming up fast in Killeen’s still-speckled vision.

He jerked a ramrod launcher from his belt and held it forward and the navvy—knowing nothing of fighting, and obviously commandeered
by some higher form, enlisted for this—slammed into it. The sharp point sensed the mech coming and darted sideways to the
softest spot.
Killeen held it firmly and felt the point go in, just beneath a thin ceramic slitvent. The point found a circuit, worked its
magic, and the mech abruptly froze.

But this was just a simple navvy. Killeen rolled left to see around it. Across the chasm were further webbed girders, solid
black lines scratched in gray gloom. Something skittered along one. No, three. Opalescent forms moving in quick little rushes,
surefooted.

And beyond, in gathering muskgloom, were two more. They had traction clasps which clamped them to the girders and permitted
easy movement. Long bodies, a feathery quality to their gliding gait. And between the wedgelines of girders, smaller forms
prowled among the knobby iron struts.

Killeen’s tongue touched his farthest back tooth a certain way and he sent
Stay still. They’re up top,
on a low-frequency channel he would never understand but had used throughout his life:

His only advantage was the navvy body. He pulled a pulse pistol from the belt and awkwardly leaned around the lifeless hulk.
The nearest target was coming his way, perhaps curious but more likely following a search pattern.

Below, the vats fumed covering vapors. Killeen flashed a quick look in the IR and saw a mottled haze, pinpricked by bright
sources which might be human. As soon as this bunch of mechs scanned the floor, they would select targets, he knew.

He shot the first one clean. Its fore-eyes flared blue and then it died. The next target started to turn his way. He kicked
hard at the navvy body. It rocked unsteadily. That would make it look active. Immediately something smacked into it, delivering
crackling blue webs.

All right. That would tell them that this mech was dead and the real target had to be elsewhere. Good enough. He kicked it
again and it teetered. A second bolt hit it and blew a tread off the far side. The navvy wrenched sideways and fell, exposing
Killeen.

He was ready and fired quickly at anything he could see. Already an illusion of misty orange leaped into his right eye. He
knew they would blind him if they could find the right key into his nervous system.

Two more dim profiles shot at the mech as it fell. He traced them by their sudden spurts of emission in the radio. He thought
he had hit them. Then the mech struck the deck below with a splintering crash. It roared in his ears, which had enhanced themselves
without his thinking of it. The crash brought cries of surprise in his inner ear, from the Family.

A bright green volley glared at his right. A crisp sputtering answered, bringing the descending
hurrriiii
of a wounded mech.

A hoarse shout of
Got ’im!
and more firing.

Killeen felt the odd
whoooom
of passing bolts. If one struck it could wriggle into his circuits, seize his nerves or worse. He fired back at the source.
The mechs were of a class he could not tell, but they moved quickly in the gloom and were not mere scavengers. They did not
aim to kill, but to probe and subvert.

There! Up!

Crossin’to you, Jake.

Trackin’x Watch—

A white glare.

Jake!

The sudden brightness blinded Killeen for a moment. He kept his head down while his systems adjusted
and when he looked up again there were fewer mech-signatures in the IR.

In his inner ear hoarse voices shouted.

Ledroff gave cool commands.

Someone was counting dead mechs but Killeen paid no attention. He was looking for movement among the vats.

Down a shrouded lane below came something slick. It had a narrow, ferret head and oblong body. Killeen recognized it: a Crafter.

The Crafter slipped among repair modules and threaded its way quickly through a spare-parts bin. Spindly legs jerked and found
purchase.

A Crafter was not a fighter or forager. They were smart, though, able to organize navvy teams. Surely this one would not usually
care about a band of scavengers which had blundered into its resting station.

But it had organized the navvys up here as a diversion while it crept below. That meant that the Crafter either felt itself
threatened or else had an injunction specifically to act against humans, even if that was not its main job.