He wandered in the hush of the ruined streets. No mechs labored to put this right. Nothing moved. At some intersections towers of ornately worked alloys rose. Killeen remembered the art of the Mantis and could not tell if these spindly things had some function or were intended to ornament the city.
He felt uneasy in the mechworks and did not try to find food among the ruins. At sundown he still had not crossed the sprawling mechplex. That night he hid in a parts shed and slept. He awoke several times, pursued by fevered dreams. His time inside the alien returned and he strangled in jellied air, vainly swimming upward, his lungs scalded. Each awakening left his arms and legs clenched tight as though he had been fighting in his sleep. And then he would doze off and again the dream would come.
Before dawn something moved nearby. He carefully peered out. A large animal was creeping closer. The largest creature he had ever seen was an old orange chicken back at the Citadel. This thing could easily eat the chicken in one gulp. Something about its large teeth told Killeen that this idea might be pleasing to the animal.
Plainly it had scented him. After all his years of hunting mechs and being hunted by them, he had no idea how to deal with the animal. It came nearer. Its ears flattened. Killeen held his rifle at the ready. Silently he stepped from the door of the shed and stood watching. The animal froze. They remained that way for a long time. A strange sense of communion stole over Killeen. Its yellow eyes were clear and deep.
Pale dawn seeped around them. The animal finally licked its lips with bored unconcern and walked away. It stopped at the corner of a storage bin nearby and looked back at him once and then went on.
As Killeen set out walking again he realized his rifle was set for an electromag pulse. It would have had no effect whatever on the animal.
Without thinking about much of anything, he felt conflicts within him flare and simmer and die. Beneath this world’s calm,
the natural clasp of life pealed forth its own silent message.
TWO
The day was sharp and clear. He found berries and edible leaves and kept going. Faint sounds from a second destroyed mech city made him skirt around it until he could find another route.
From a distance the buckled ramparts reminded him of his last sight of the Citadel, at the Calamity. Innumerable times he had replayed that day in his dreams. The very air had seemed to roil and stretch, he remembered. Rippling radiances had washed the clouds even before the mech attack on Citadel Bishop began, giving them some warning. Not enough, though, for the mechs had thrown immense resources into their assault. His father had been at the center of the Citadel’s defense. Despite the desperation that crept over them all as the first reports came in, all bad, Abraham had kept a calm, unhurried manner. Killeen had been nearby when the mechs breached a Citadel wall. Abraham had direeled an effective flanking attack on the intrusion. Killeen had not even comprehended the mech purpose until his father’s deft sally cut off the head of the mech advance and chopped the remnants to pieces.
But then he had lost sight of his father in the hammering chaos of multiple assaults. Mech aircraft had bombed the central Citadel and the ramparts fell.
Killeen had helped carry ammunition to the air-defense guns as strange lights filled the sky. They all had sensed unseen presences above the battle.
When Killeen’s wife, Veronica, died he had ceased to register very much. He had felt her death in his sensorium, since they were linked. But it had taken a long chaotic time to find her, to be sure.
He stood on a far hill, looking back meditatively at the mech city. Part of him relished the sight of the mighty mechs brought low. Another remembered the Citadel, and not only because of the city. The sky far beyond began to move with washes of pale luminescence in a way that reminded him of the Calamity. The luminosity was in the air itself, not the fainter play of colors in molecular clouds. The sight chilled him.
Yet it also recalled his encounters on Snowglade with an entity which had somehow spoken through the magnetic fields of the planet itself. The thing had talked incomprehensibly of Abraham, and of issues Killeen could not follow. Recalling that, he wondered if the magnetic being had been at the Calamity, had lit the sky with its witnessing. Why should such a vast thing care for the doings of a small, inconsequential race? There were no answers.
Killeen finally shook off the mood and moved on. The quiet of the natural world enfolded him.
But then a biting sulfuric tinge filled his nose. A hollow bass note caught at the outer edge of his sensorium. A mech trace?
It carried a strange sugary aftertaste, though, unlike any mech signature he knew. His sensorium translated its electromag-tags into smells because that was the human sense directly linked to memory centers; a brief whiff of an old odor brought long-buried memories welling up, often of use.
Killeen slipped between the slumped trunks of trees that somehow still showed fresh green growth. The land had collapsed, but root systems seemed resistant even to the implosion of the planet. He flitted quickly among the tangled growth and peered ahead.
Siiiggg!—something fast cut the air near him. He dropped into a dry streambed and strained to feel his way forward through his sensorium. Hot smells rang through him.
He angled along a ridgeline and three more times the quick, thin wail sliced the silence. Something was shooting at him, but not well. A fourth bolt caught him slightly and he smelled a cutting microwave pulse. It had the pungency to blow out the inner structures he knew by the name Diode, but whose function he did not fathom. He felt his own Diodes clamp down, sheltering themselves.
Silence. Cautiously they popped open. His sensorium filled with regained color and perspectives. He carefully edged up to the ridge rim and used a lightpipe to steal a glance over it.
A lone mech was struggling up the opposite face of the ridge. Deep scars marked its thick shell. Bolts had crisped away the steel. Its angular design was unlike anything Killeen had seen on Snowglade.
Without thinking he aimed at the mech and caught it full in the forward antenna complex. It stopped for an instant. Killeen could see no damage and he fired again. This time the mech clearly blocked the shot. His electrobolt ricocheted off into a ruby flare that momentarily lit the scene against the encroaching gloom of twilight.
His Ling Aspect cried:
This is a totally unnecessary risk! Run while you can.
“Run long enough,” Killeen grunted.
He dimly saw that he needed to strike out at something, anything. Suddenly meeting a mech had brought out all his suppressed anger.
He had seen sophisticated defenses like this before. Nothing in Family Bishop’s weaponry could penetrate it. The chunky mech’s treads caught on an outcropping. It swiveled, bringing projectors on its side around to have a full field of fire at him.
Killeen ducked, knowing the fringing fields of a broadband microwave burst could catch him even well below the ridgeline. He hunkered down, gritting his teeth hard to tell his subsystems to button up.
But nothing came. Not even a whisper.
He risked a glimpse. The mech had flipped over and was burning. Through the curling black pyre he saw a cyborg approaching, its body a complex set of coupled, interlocking hexagonal blocks. Thick brown skin wrinkled and stretched as it made its way up from a broken valley below. A shot had blown open the mech. Its lateral carbosteel housing puckered outward into twisted fingers, a clear sign that the cyborg had somehow triggered an internal energy supply.
Killeen decided to lie low. This cyborg was probably part of a team assigned to clear out any remaining pockets of mechs or humans. If he ran it could easily catch him. His only hope lay in the possibility that the cyborg had not registered his own small, ineffectual fire.
He shut down all his systems again and moved to his right, downslope, seeking more shelter from the rocky ridge. The burning mech was so near that without acoustic amping he could easily hear the crackling and then a loud bang as some vat exploded. Standing still, panting, he thought he could hear the quiet approach of the cyborg: a rustling, clicking cadence as carbosteel limbs articulated.
The cyborg’s noise grew against the pop and snarl of the flames. It should have reached the mech by now. But the sounds did not stop. Instead the steady rhythm seemed to move to his left, skirting around the mech’s pyre.
And slowing. It was coming around on him from above.
Killeen carefully backed farther downslope. The cyborg might not know what was over here; it would be cautious.
Stealth was his only ally. He might be able to slip back over the ridgeline as the cyborg crossed, keeping low so that his opponent missed him. Then he would have a few moments to run. He strained to hear the whispery sound of the cyborg’s flexing leathery hide.
There—it was clambering up over the last shelf of rock which crowned the ridge. Softly he backed away. Time contracted for him and he heard each cyborg step, each swivel and adjustment of pads as they sought purchase on the steeply sloped stones.
The alien was near the top now. Killeen could not tell how far away it was. In the enormous silence, punctuated only by the snapping of the mech’s oily fire, his natural hearing seemed to amplify each small sound into deep significance. Somewhere upslope on the ridge a pebble rattled down. Killeen heard it before he saw it bounce off a boulder and scatter fragments into the soil.
