Cermo muscled his way up the slope, puffing to the ledge they were all sitting on. “I get nothing from outlyin’ pickups.”
His broad face furrowed with concern but he said no more. The big man settled onto the ledge and looked out. Pale gray light seeped into distant timestone peaks. It was like a smothered dawn on a world that had curled up onto itself. Above them hung a distant landscape of tawny desert. Dried out river beds cut that land, several hundred klicks away but still visible through a cottony haze. Those river valleys looked ancient and Toby knew they could reach them with maybe a week of hard running, through esty slips and wrack-ranges. Maybe the Mantis would lead them that way. This Lane was twisted and tortured, space-time turning upon itself in knots unimaginable until experienced.
“Let’s vector for it, then,” Killeen said and stood up.
Toby felt a surge of zest as they started out and it lasted until they picked up the Mantis trail. At first he thought he was stronger than Killeen and Cermo and even got impatient with their slow tracking, sweeping the area for signifiers. Killeen halted for a rest every hour, old Bishop Family discipline, but at the very start of a pursuit it irked Toby.
—I could damn sure get ahead faster than this,—he sent to Quath on private comm.
<So could I. That eludes the point.>
Quath ran on internals of huge energy. She could outpace them all.—Maybe you should go on ahead.—
<I know my limits.>
—What are they?— Toby was genuinely interested. The Myriapodia seemed to have abilities beyond human dreams.
<I am not a primate.>
—Um. That all?—
<For the moment, for this purpose, that is enough.>
Beyond that Quath would say no more. Toby puzzled on it for a while but by then he started to tire and Killeen and Cermo were still moving at their same steady pace. They took the same short rests exactly every hour and picked up and went on. Quath herself was upping the pace too. Or so it seemed, though through his sweat-stung eyes the land was opening faster now to Toby and he plunged into it with a fresh energy born of the fatigue itself.
They came upon the first of the Mantis loci in a slope of shimmering timestone.
Cermo sighted the small shiny hexagon. “Mantis is fallin’ apart,” he said, kicking at it.
<No! Perhaps I can read.>
She did. <It contains splinters of the Mantis self.>
Killeen’s weathered face tightened. “Why? What’s it doing?”
<I suspect it is shedding parts and subminds.>
Toby asked, “What’s the sense in that?”
“To lighten up,” Cermo said.
Toby tossed it in his palm. “No mass to this thing.”
“Probably just junked a whole seg. This is a frag,” Cermo said. He had tracked mechs of all descriptions and held them in a lofty, bruised contempt despite the fact that mechs had brought down many of his friends.
“Good sign,” Killeen said flatly and they went on.
The ground began to move under them. The worst of it was in the gut-deep confusion, nausea, and sickening lurches. Toby’s eyes did not tell him true about what his feet and body felt. He remembered Quath saying once about the timestone, The defining feature is the lack of definition—which he had thought to be a joke then.
Not now. Rock parted and pearly vapor churned from the vent. Esty purled off in gossamer sheets, dissolving as they rose. Spray ascended, enclosing him in a halo of himself, somehow caught and momentarily reflected in the event-haze, as if he were both there and also flickering into the surroundings and joining them. The other self peeled away and circled to the tops of the cliffs and became a wreath in the shearing wind, soon frayed into refractive vapor.
“Gets hard here,” was all Killeen said. They went into broken country ahead.
Maybe he should have stayed behind after spotting the Mantis. He was a Bishop grown to fullness now but for this pursuit experience was crucial and he had little. The Mantis and Killeen had fought each other ever since he could remember. Toby wanted to be here but he knew he was a drag on the others, though of course they would not speak of it.
Cermo said it with his eyes, firm and black. There was nothing to be done, the pursuit was on. This terrain was too dangerous for Toby to backtrack by himself; the Mantis was not the only high-level mech here. They had watched from a distance as navvies and grubbers mined and foraged for mech debris.
So he settled in. He went hard and long and said nothing. Around their passage seethed strange vegetations, curled rock, and clotted air, the esty’s energy expressed in frothy plenty. To Toby it seemed some moronic God kept reshaping the land beyond any probable use. The green profusion here seemed demented, undeserved. He realized only dimly that his irritation came out of his fatigue. For that there was nothing to be done and in his father’s face he saw that. He kept falling behind their long, loping stride and so was glad when they stopped suddenly. To stay on his feet as they studied something on the ground he leaned against a rock, out of fear that he was already stumble-around tired.
It was a spool of something translucent yet mica-bright. <More discarded self,> Quath said. <Note also the locomos stripped away and left.>
In a hollow were dusty locomotion parts, a whole tractor assembly, footpads—all junked. Toby looked them over and saw they were modular.
<Left behind.> Quath rattled her flanks. <Defective. Or too much mass to propel.>
Cermo and Killeen inspected the ground. They had done that all along the trail, talking to each other about the track. Toby looked at the round depressions and flattened angular prints and saw the broken twigs where the thing had passed. The twig stems were not dry yet and Cermo fingered them and looked at the radiance streaming from the timestone around there. Crushed wild grass lay squashed but not browned as it would be soon.
“It’s doin’ pretty well for broken country,” Cermo said.
Killeen frowned. “Going to be hard.”
Toby said, “If I could make it out, maybe its systems are so far down—”
“You said you didn’t see it,” Cermo said. “Just felt it.”
“Yeasay.”
Cermo shook his head slowly as he looked down at the matted grass. “If we run up on it, won’t be feelin’ our way.”
