Toby snorted. “Slow as sundown.”
Loren said more judiciously, “They seemed disorganized. Couldn’t form up right.”
“Don’t think they were fighters,” Besen said.
“They sure fought enough,” Toby said. “I ’member you dodgin’ plenty bolts.”
Killeen leaned forward quizzically. “Besen, why you think they weren’t fighters?”
She paused, aware that the Cap’n had been letting them pour forth their own ideas, and now suddenly feeling self-conscious. “Well…they had grapplers, screwjacks, poly-arms. Work ’quipment.”
“They tried fryin’ us,” Toby pointed out.
Besen held her ground. “Those microwave disks were prob’ly comm gear, not weapons.”
“How ’bout that thing almost caught us at the main-mind?” Toby pursued.
Besen paused reflectively. “I’m not sure.”
Killeen watched her carefully. Whatever had been lurking near the mainmind had disintegrated when the cluster charges went off. The Family had found only meaningless fragments. There had been chunks of fleshy stuff, but mechs on Snowglade had used compounds which mimicked the self-repairing chemistry of life.
Besen went on, “Don’t think we’ll savvy out the answer till we meet the mechs who made the station.”
“C’mon, you’re just inventin’ boogeymen.” Toby chuckled.
“I know navvy-class mechs when I see ’em,” Besen said. “That’s all we saw in the station. The higher-class mech was at the mainmind.”
“You dunno that,” Toby said. “We never got a good look.”
“Stands to reason.” Besen gave Toby an affectionate, bemused look. “Station was already damaged. Prob’ly some mech faction took it from another. We caught ’em before they could build up defenses again, I figure.”
Killeen watched Toby wrestle with the idea. The boy was bright but he let his enthusiasm cloud his thinking—or replace it.
Toby began, “Even if it was a manager mech or some-thin’, we were faster.”
“We got lucky, is all,” Besen said.
“Luck?” Toby looked insulted. “We were quick!”
“If Cap’n hadn’t made us drop everything and run, we’d be mechmeat.”
Killeen was glad to see Besen not meekly following whatever Toby said. There was in the Family a regrettable tendency of adolescent females to accept their boyfriends’ views of the world. The generations of sedentary life in the Citadels had somehow instilled that. The Long Retreat after the Citadel Bishop fell had seemed to erase this, but a scant few years aboard Argo now threatened to bring such customs back. He wanted his midshipwomen to give no ground to the usual swaggering male self-assurance, to develop their burgeoning ability to lead. In a battlefield crisis, such timidity could prove fatal.
Killeen shared the Family’s traditional view that females usually made the best Cap’ns. Conventional wisdom held that once women were through their adolescent-romantic phase, and had reared children, their abilities could again come to the fore, especially diplomacy and compromise. They could ripen as mates and executive officers into Cap’ns. But the Family had no time now for such extended, subtle, and probably wasteful methods. He had to encourage independent thinking in everyone, and to hell with the ageold mating dance.
“I think the same,” Killeen said.
Besen brightened. Toby looked surprised, though he quickly covered it by slurping at his cold potato soup. “But Waugh and Leveerbrok might disagree.”
Besen’s face darkened. Killeen instantly regretted being so blunt. He couldn’t get the hang of handling young crew. “But you’re right. I think they made mistakes.”
Loren nodded soberly. “Didn’t stop, didn’t fix up their suits when they took hits.”
“True,” Shibo said emphatically. Killeen caught her veiled glance, which told him that she was coming to his rescue even though she saw what a clumsy lunk he was. “Got laser punctures into circuitry. Didn’t slap-patch. Voltage found ’em.”
Killeen was still unclear about the difference between Volts, the powerful spirits that inhabited mechs, and Amps, the mysterious sense of quick flow that somehow aided the Volts to seek and move within the world of the machines. Volts embodied intent, and Amps were the runners who carried out those intentions, against the Ohms. He expected he never would fathom such lore. He had heard the scientific explanation but couldn’t keep it straight.
Instead, like all the Family, he treated the scientific underpinning of his world as a set of colorful spirits and personalities, elementary animations and wills which orchestrated events he could not see. Learning to use them meant boring study of the proper rituals—connecting leads, punching in numbers and commands, arranging wires and knobs and minute chips—which induced proper behavior in the entities who inhabited the interior of the Argo’s myriad complexity.
He sensed living motivations inside dead matter, but imagined that this came from humanity, animating the ancient human tech with fresh force. Mechtech, though, was inherently dead and beyond human understanding. It came from more recent and higher evolution of the galaxy, he knew, but he despised it for what it did to humanity—and for its indifference to the pain and anguish and inexpressible poignancy of what every human felt instinctively and mechs in their remorseless certainties so clearly could not.
“Yeasay,” Killeen added. “The Volts hid in the shafts. Like mines; the mechs didn’t have projectors themselves. Carelessness killed Waugh and Leveerbrok.”
This pronouncement brought silence and stony, downcast glances to the table. Killeen bit his lip, wishing he could have made the point more smoothly. Better to get it over soon, though, before the experience faded. “So it went,” he said cheerfully. “But you three—you were fast and sure and damnfine.”
He raised a glass of alky-laced cider and they all followed suit. There was a traditional toast at every post-Witnessing dinner, and this seemed a good way to break the mood. They murmured assent and Killeen said, “Clean the table, too.” They all cast puzzled glances at him.
“Didn’t Family Knight have such a custom?” he asked Shibo.
“Eating all food?”
“After a Witnessing, yeasay. It shows confidence in the future, gathering energy for coming battles and victories.”
Shibo shook her head. “Family Bishop big eaters anyway.”
“Porkers,” Toby put in timidly, “compared with Knights.”
“Guess it got started in the bad years at Citadel Bishop,” Killeen said. “I was small, barely ’member ’em. Ending the meal was the best—crunchy, salty.”
