That was the way he got through this place. Pushing it back. Making it not-him. Not-me.
The little breakfast group grinned nervously as they talked. One fellow who had not run at the first sight of the squashed man had a superior smirk, holding forth about how he had seen bodies like that plenty of times before in a way that made Toby pretty sure that he had not.
The woman said with assurance that if you didn’t smell a skimmer you were safe. How she could know this Toby did not bring up. She went rattling on about never smelling the one that would get you because by the time your sensorium caught a whiff you were slam-dead anyway. It was the kind of guff he had heard a thousand times but he listened because sometimes people gave away information you could use, unintentionally of course.
Later he caught a quick, cutting fragrance and saw a hillside above him simply vanish. It happened fast and he registered no noise. The hill vaporized, clouding the air with cottony filigree.
He thought it was very pretty and a piece of it passing caught him in the leg. A clean slice. The piece did not even stop.
The woman that morning had grinned and given him a “quick-lick,” which turned out to be a vial of brown, smart-smelling stuff. He could not drink it, even though he suspected it was intended to be quick liquor. He did not much like what liquor did to people but it worked well on the cut. He watched more hillsides boil off to take his mind off the sting.
Twice before the next waning he got hit. Just nicks, but they hurt and his inboard systems had to adjust to keep his sensorium tuned.
The quick-lick helped. He had learned not to worry much about the technology here so he just used it. That fitted in fine with his new policy of not thinking. He used the quick-lick that way until by accident he spilled some and found that it ate away the sleeve of his shirt.
FOUR
Carrion
Carefully Toby looked out over the plain where heat made the air dance. He had learned a lot and had paid with only a small wound in his side and some cuts. A bargain, considering.
He knew now that when hit in the butt or the fleshy thick of the thigh or the long taper of the calf, people could speak nobly and clearly. They could even reach outside themselves and show real concern for nearby wounded, or even for the worried faces of those gathered over them.
But if hit solidly, they withdrew. A solid shot to the belly, a snapped bone, lost control over arms or neck and head—all common glancing wounds from mech disablers—and the wounded clutched themselves, eyes boring into spaces others could not see.
The mech flying predators were the worst. For a while Toby could not understand what the flitting small forms were doing in the distance.
He saw first a thin triangular wedge of black and white that skimmed near the ground. It settled on a fallen man’s leg and waddled up to his face. Two tilted triangles working from a shared axis. Black light-gathering panels hinged with white scanners, corded by wiry linkages.
Toby guessed that it was just curious but then it tilted its head down and pressed against the man’s forehead and he knew what it was doing. For a few hours before the man went to rot his self could be extracted by using a fast-flash.
The wiry bird jockeyed over the dead face. Panels skated over his brow, seeking, reading. The man’s body jerked once when the flash-reading hit a motor-active center. Then it lay still and the flood of what the man had been passed into the thing that sat on his face.
Toby shot it with a curling lick of infrared. The bolt fried the unprotected solars. The black triangle winked to brown. Still the scavenger took two teetering steps and flopped over on its side.
Toby approached warily. He kicked it off the man and stepped on the white scanner panel. The thing was a glinting intricacy, a marvel of compressed purpose, now smeared and crumpled. It snapped satisfyingly as he dug his heel into its spine.
Whatever it had sucked out of this man and others was gone now. Gone for humans and mechs alike. But at least this man, still cooling in the mud, would not be resurrected as a grotesque toy.
Within an hour he saw a rectangular silhouette planing high up. It swung down the sky on a slow glide. He followed it. There had been a series of deep whooms reverberating from a distant ridge. He had been skirting around it, keeping in the twisted trees, but his hatred of the scavengers burned and would not let him go.
This one was bigger, with a scrawny neck of cables that gyroed a seeking-panel head. It swooped safely above, not committing itself. Toby got near and another whoom came. The shifting sheets above wheeled and then fell like a whistling projectile.
This time it was a woman and she was not dead. Both her legs lay loose, control cut. She saw the thing land off balance. It looked around with darting crystal eyes and waddled toward her.
It was on her before Toby could get set. He watched from the trees and wanted to shoot it but could not be sure that using the necessary power he would not hurt the woman or even kill her.
It teetered over her head. She must have also had something wrong with her neck because she did not turn to look at it. Instead he could feel her sensorium shift to bunch against the thing but that did no good. Her eyes rolled—panic or fear or derangement, Toby could not tell. She found some way then to move and twisted, rolling over, away from the shuffling sheets.
She could have been trying to save her face somehow. Toby would never know because as she did it, flopping awkwardly face down, arms sprawling uselessly, the mech fired a pulse.
It was like nothing he had ever seen on full-scope sensorium before, a jagged jab of red. It overloaded his sensors so that they clicked shut. A sizzling, frying-fat throb—and the woman went limp.
The mech lifted itself onto her chest and turned an inspecting head this way and that, as if checking its work. Job all done.
He had to wait for his sensorium to recover before he could use his weapons again. Seconds ticked by on his lower-left eyeball clock.
It began to lift off with a soft whish of acceleration and Toby hit it then, sorry that he was so slow. This time he caught the power panel, gray from the drain. The mech flapped and clattered to the ground.
He walked carefully to the woman’s body. She looked peaceful, which he knew was an illusion but took comfort from anyway. Blood ran out of both of her ears and matted her wavy brown hair. After a while to dry it looked pretty much like ordinary reddish, crusted mud.
FIVE
Cards and Dodgers
The worst was the woman with the baby. He saw it all because he had gone to a makeshift field station to resupply some of his inbody fluids. His wounds had used up the reservoir.
The field station was set up by a Family named Yankee. There were plenty of wounded people there, Families named Cardinal and Dodger and people speaking in such a broken-jawed way Toby could not make out a tenth of what they said. But a thin woman found him by using some kind of sensorium seeker.
“Bishop?”
“Yeasay. You from—?”
“There’s another Bishop over here. Asking after kin.”
Toby followed her into a section sheltered by a tent roof. The flaps rattled in the wind. Therm beds were crowded together here and all filled. He passed a woman lying under a quilt who was grunting and shoving hard.
Next to her lay a man rolled over on his side with the covers drawn up around his head. “Here,” the thin woman said and left him.
