TWO

Killeen could not get used to the feel of riding atop the Crafter. The haulers he had ridden before had been slow, easy.

This Crafter rolled with a grating murmur and lurched heavily when it crossed an arroyo. The swaying nearly made him sick. He and Shibo kept Toby firmly pressed back into a cubbyhole where the rocking could not dislodge him. The boy’s legs stuck out like cordwood, stiff and useless. Around them the human party covered very little of the Renegade’s cylindrical bulk. They held on to the myriad pipes and masts and vent-valves in the Crafter’s ceramic skin.

They crossed rough country because the Crafter carefully stayed away from mech roads. This was the most built-up complex Killeen had ever seen, a web of pale slab pathways and blank-faced, perfectly cubic buildings. Traffic fled down narrow gleaming rails. On the steep hillsides foundries rumbled. Through a gradually thickening activity the Renegade moved with crafty purpose. Its antennae cycled endlessly. Each time a mech came within view, Killeen heard sputterings. The Renegade was sending some IGNORE ME signal into each mechmind, making itself invisible.

Killeen could not relax. His eyes leaped from each approaching mech to the next.

“Ease off,” Hatchet whispered to him. “Renny knows how get us through.”

Killeen studied a bulky mech, a kind he had never seen, racing along the nearby railline. It accelerated so fast it was a blur as it neared the far end of the worn valley.

He asked, “How many times you done this?”

“Must be thirty, forty.”

“All like this?”

“Mostly. Ever’ one’s different some way.”

“How?”

“New fac’try. Different tricks gettin’ in, too.”

“You never gone back, hit the same place?”

“Naysay. Too chancy.”

“You figure the Renny leaves some kinda mark? So they’ll be waiting if it went back?”

“Could be. Mostly I think he doesn’t take chances. Not when he can get the stuff he wants somewhere else.”

“What kind stuff?”

“Parts, looks like.”

“Replacement parts?”

“Prob’ly. Thing’s trying stay alive.”

“Ever get trouble? Mechs catch on?”

Hatchet’s words came a little slower. “Don’t know as I could tell. Things happen pretty damn mechfast sometimes.”

Killeen hadn’t heard anyone say “mechfast” since the Citadel. On the march there was no comparison between human speed and the blinding quickness of the Marauders.

“Any people hurt?”

Hatchet didn’t answer for a long moment. He clung to a brown vent-valve beside Killeen’s perch on a level housing. The Crafter was plunging down a rough grade. Tan mechwaste clogged the shallow gullies. Coiled blue-green packing material blew in a thin, chilly breeze. It was colder and drier here. Mech weather.

“Lost two,” Hatchet said at last.

“How?”

“Family business,” Hatchet said adamantly.

“My people at risk, makes it Bishop Family business.”

Hatchet didn’t like this. He couldn’t find a way to argue around it, though. His mouth twisted to one side as if he was remembering something he didn’t want to.

“Sometimes there’s mech guards. Twice they come up on us, right in the middle. We ran. They got somebody each time.”

“How?”

Hatchet looked irritated. “Shot ’em, course.”

“With what?”

“I wasn’t takin’ notes, see? Just tryin’ keep my head from gettin’ blowed off.”

“Were they firing solid shot at you?”

Hatcher smiled icily. “Sorry I didn’t snag one for you so’s I could fish it out my pocket, show you.”

“No, I mean, were they using guns like ours? Or e-beams? Cutters?”

Hatchet was irritated now. It wasn’t like a moment before, when he had been trying to keep from telling Killeen something. Now he didn’t see the point to the questions. “Couldn’t tell.”

“Did you recover the bodies?”

“Damn, we were runnin’.”

“I know. Point is, I wonder if it was just mech guards you ran into, or something worse.”

“What… Marauders?”

“Could be. You get a look at what was after you?”

“Naysay.” Hatchet’s pride had resisted telling much about their past failures. But now he saw a pattern to Killeen’s interest and his voice lost its tight, suspicious edge. “Shot at us from way up in the girders.”

Killeen nodded. Just the way something had fired on the Bishops back in the last Trough they’d rested in. So whatever had killed the two Kings were not ordinary mech guards. They had hunted the humans. Yet they were small enough to climb on narrow girders. Which meant there was a new kind of hunter mech.

“You see your people get hit?”

“Naysay. Saw ’em down. No tracer from ’em in the sensorium.”

“Could be you’re right,” Killeen said in a conciliatory tone, but not so obviously that Hatchet would see that was what he was doing. “They were just dead.”

“You mean, ’stead of…”

“Suredead.”

“Not much difference, is there?” Hatchet said. A deepening in his voice suggested a layer of sorrow carried but not revealed. “Either way, we got no Aspect of ’em. They’re gone.”

Killeen could not stop himself from saying with a flinty look, “You figure having your mind ripped apart by a Marauder is same as just dying?”

Hatchet didn’t reply immediately. Both fell silent as they looked out at a passing yard of grease-filmed, partly dismantled machines. Skeletal ranks stretched to the distant hills, a gray, damaged army momentarily halted in its conquest. Each body was missing a hull or treads or, most often, sensors. Their arrogant juts and angles had struck fear into Killeen more times than he could recall. Now they seemed vacant gestures; forlorn. He imagined the Crafter scavenged such yards for parts, picking over the rusting, unresisting dead.

Hatchet said finally, “Don’t figure it either way. Some things a Cap’n shouldn’t figure.”

Killeen felt cowed by this remark, simple and without the edgy proud bluster Hatchet faced the world with most of the time. There was nothing to say in reply.

He swung away, holding to some gas lines with his good hand. Moving was harder than he had thought it would be. The right arm was tiring already. He found Shibo cradling Toby where most of the party rested on a broad, grainy manifold cover. The Crafter was running flat and fast now with just a drumming coming up through its body. The tremor brought soft curves of sleep to Toby’s pale face.

Killeen squatted to speak and abruptly the Crafter braked. They all pitched forward, clinging to whatever they could. Toby came awake and automatically grasped at his father as the two of them rolled forward, over a polymer manifold hatch. They fell a meter. Killeen landed with jarring pain. But he had gotten under the boy so Toby merely had the wind knocked from him. They lay together, panting.

“Pile off!” Hatchet called. “Inside! Quick now!”

They had stopped near a factory. Killeen and Shibo carried Toby down the side. Most of the party was already running the short distance to an open grate-door that clattered up as they approached. Killeen tried to survey the area but Hatchet was yelling at them to hurry. The grate-door started chugging down like slow teeth even before they were through it.

“Renny, he don’t like this part,” Hatchet said. “Closes doors fast. Goin’ in and out’s the most tricky, he says.”

“For it, sure,” Shibo said dryly.

Killeen carried Toby into the shelter of a cluster of stacked polyplastic canisters. He did not like the way Hatchet kept calling the Crafter “he”—a symptom of thinking of mechs as manlike, of imagining that you could deal with them in terms a human would accept. Killeen’s father had said to him once, Biggest fact about aliens is, they’re alien—which was one of the reasons Citadel Bishop had made fewer contacts with Renegades than the Kings had. Killeen reminded himself to not fall into Hatchet’s way of thinking about the Crafter. That was why he asked for the facts behind everything Hatchet said. Facts were more use than opinions.

The party moved away from the lowering grate-door. Feet scuttled down narrow crannies in the crowded bay. Killeen had bent over to put Toby on the floor when he felt a powerful jjjjjaaaattttttt explode in his head. Faint cries skittered in the humming silence that followed the soundless knife-edge violence. “What was—”

Hatchet’s voice came as a dry rasp. “Crafter. Musta shot at a mech.”

Shibo said, “Electromag kill.”

Killeen got up unsteadily and saw the Crafter crowding the stilled grate-door. Its antennae and sensor-snouts were all trained into the factory. They fanned and fidgeted with quick energy.

Cermo-the-Slow called from farther in, “There’s a mech here. Burned out!”

Hatchet got up from behind a large crate and went to see. “Crafter can pick off these li’ 1 guard mechs. He’s too fast for ’em.”

Shibo said worriedly, “Didn’t see even mech tracer.”

Killeen shook his head, his ears still ringing. “Me either.”

Toby looked unconcerned. He pointed at the Crafter, which now was backing away. “What’ll it do while we’re inside?”

Hatchet had ignored the boy so far. It startled Killeen when he answered Toby’s question with an offhanded kindliness. “It’ll lie doggo. Freeze its externals. Make like it’s dead, just used for spare parts.”

“Like that yard we saw? With all the old mechs?”

“Guess so. Only it’ll hunker down in some shed, I seen it do that. Guess that’s why it lets its carapace get so rundown-lookin’.”

“Fools the other mechs?” Toby asked.

“That’s my guess.”

“Hey, let’s go see what’s in here.”

“Now you be quiet, boy. Rest yourself.”

Killeen watched the Crafter lumber away. He was eternally astonished at the resilience of the young, at how they could take the completely new and blindingly dangerous and simply live with it. He wondered how he had lost that unthinking certainty. Something had worn it away in abrasions so subtle that you never noticed the loss until it was far too late.

The scorched guard mech had an odd look to it. Shibo approached as Cermo-the-Slow was wrenching at one of the mech’s side housings. It came away with a clatter. Inside were exposed joints and thick, leathery pads. An oily sheen coated them.

“This’s cyborg,” Cermo said. “Lubed up, too.”

Shibo kicked one of the joints. It gave, flexed, and returned to its original alignment with a persistent fluidity. “Organic parts.”

Hatchet seemed unsurprised. “Seen that a lot in fac’tries. Don’t get many these in the field.”

“Let’s go,” Killeen said.

Hatchet looked faintly amused. “In a big hurry, huh? Wait’ll the two men up front figure the tracer.”

The Crafter had transmitted to the lead man a flatmap of where they were to go in the factory. It was recognition-keyed so they got a telltale in their eyes when they were going the right way. A flatmap was language-independent. The Crafter used comman deered navvys to search and make the map; entering a storage zone was far too dangerous for a Renegade.

The party followed the two lead men through a high, arched bay that slumbered in soft orange-green gloom. No mechs moved among the catwalks and bar-rigged balconies that punctuated the immense rising curves of the walls.

“Not much going,” Shibo said.

“Old fac’try,” Hatchet said. “The Renny sends us mostly places like this. Mechs use ’em for storage.”

“Had a guard, though,” Killeen observed.

“Just keep movin’,” Hatchet called.

They slipped down dark corridors. Inky shadows stretched among old, abandoned manufacturing lines. Drums half-filled with sulfurous colloids leaked across broken decks. The two Kingsmen who led brought them deftly to a dank underground warren.

At the entrance a portal gaped, rimmed with detection gear. Killeen recognized some of the standard parts from mechs he had stripped. Their party stopped and each person slipped through the portal carefully, moving slowly. Hatchet explained to Shibo and Killeen that the detectors were set at mech levels. They sensed not simply metal, but the network of electronics that any mech carried. Humans had so relatively little of this that they seldom registered on such automatic watchdogs. This was their primary use to the Crafter.

In the tunnels beyond the portal their work began. Long racks of modular parts lined the intersecting tunnels. The lead man located the items the Crafter wanted. The party split into teams to carry out the heavy items. Killeen paired with Shibo after they put Toby in a spot near the portal, where he could watch them work, and, not coincidentally, where they could check on him frequently.

Killeen felt the presence of the mech factory as a cold pressure seeping into him. His apprehension had subsided but it sprang forth with every distant flicker of movement or unexpected sound. Twilight tunnels ricocheted the clatter of their labor, making odd, whining notes. Worse, a few small robomechs worked in the tunnels. The first time Killeen came upon one he very nearly killed it.

Shibo caught his gun hand and whispered, “Doesn’t see us!” She was right. Robos were low on image sorting and texture definition and too dumb to sound an alarm. They simply fetched and stored, on orders from some distant inventory link. Still, their rattling, spidery gait unnerved Killeen in the shadowy tunnels.

The Crafter wanted parts that ranged vastly in scale. Tiny embedded polytron boards. Greenish, marbled photonic slabs no bigger than a hand. Ribbon-ribbed condensers that took three men to carry.

Killeen and Shibo hauled the Crafter’s replacement parts out on their backs, or sometimes between the two of them, carrying a short distance and then stopping to let arms and backs rest.

They worked through a time that was for both of them wearying labor threaded by quicksilver instants of fear. The dulling rhythm of hauling without any mechanical aid numbed them. There were no metal carts around to help, and in any case Hatchet ruled out using any. No one knew precisely what triggered the portal alarm, so anything beyond the minimum was a risk. It took several hours to produce the mound of replacement parts they gradually built up near the grate-door. The Crafter would reappear only when the job was done. That minimized its exposure.

Luckily, Toby had fallen asleep again. Killeen checked him on each circuit between the tunnels and the exit bay. He and Shibo at last took a quick break in the depths of the tunnels to eat some dried concentrate bars. Killeen’s throat was raw from breathing the acrid fumes of the factory.

“You do this much?” Killeen wheezed as Hatchet passed them.

“Whenever the Renny wants.” Hatchet’s eyes narrowed. “Listen, we’ll do it much as we can. Without the Renny’s help, we’d be busting ass runnin’ from Marauders.”

Killeen nodded mutely, saving his breath, and that was when he saw the approaching mech. It was no robo or navvy. He could make out a carapace as long as a man, with a set of tools bunched in front like a tangle of briars. It was coming toward them down a distant lane between storage racks, either oblivious or not expecting anything unusual. “Hatchet!” Shibo whispered.

They all pulled weapons. Hatchet blinked, as though he had never seen anything like it. “Fan out,” he whispered.

The mech came on. Killeen heard in his sensorium an abrupt series like quick, strangled coughs. A voice, but not a human one. It spoke again. Cut-short exclamations, rapid but unforced, natural but eerie. Not words, not more than quick bursts of air expelled through a narrow, hoarse throat—

Hatchet said wonderingly, “What the hell… ?”

Killeen’s Arthur Aspect broke in:

Barking! That is the sound of a terrestrial dog barking. I haven’t heard that call-code for so long….

Into Killeen’s eye leaped a picture of a furry, four-legged animal yelping and scampering over a green field, chasing a blue ball that hopped away downhill. Something in the sound that flooded his ears carried a meaning of salute, of an element he had always missed.

“That mech,” he said. “It’s calling us.”

Their talk had attracted it. Shibo was already braced, tracking the quick form as it raced down the network of racked supplies, leading it slightly so she could fire instantly if needed. Killeen put his hand on her shoulder. “No. I think it’s all right. There’s something…”

The barking rose to a crescendo, then abruptly cut off.

A warm, mellow woman’s voice said clearly, “Humankind! I picked up your scent. It is the longlost!”

Hatchet called out, “Don’t move.”

“To hear the voice of man is to obey it,” the mech called from somewhere in the racks. “I used the correct call, did I not?”

“You did,” Killeen answered, peering through the twilight glow of distant lamps. Its steel hide was pocked, seamed, pitted. The worn jacket was crisscrossed with melted lines, rivets, weldings long since ripped away, tap-in spots, and rough scars. At a prompting from Arthur, Killeen added, “Good dog.”

“Ruff! Ruff!… I… well, I am not actually a dog, you know.”

Shibo said wryly, “We guessed.”

The womanly mech voice came from an aged acoustic speaker mounted directly between two optical sensors.

These glittered, tracking Killeen intently as he approached. Shibo and Hatchet edged in at the flanks, still ready. Shibo looked distant for a moment, consulting her own Aspects. Killeen saw Cermo-the-Slow easing around behind the mech, grinning in anticipation of blowing it away. He raised a cautionary hand.

“Barking is simply an attention-getting device.” The mech had a full-bodied, resonant voice now. Killeen wondered if dogs spoke.

Of course not! The dog was an animal which long ago came to think of humans as, well, as sort of gods. They herded other animals, guarded things— Ah! Now I see it! This is an original, humanmade machine. Or at least it contains elements of some device humans must have made.

Humans made mechs? Killeen wondered. The idea was as odd as the assertion that humans had made the Taj Mahal building they had seen.

Shibo said, “That you did.”

“I was told to use that call-approach method. To differentiate myself from hostile mechs.” The machine scuffed its treads enthusiastically against the rough cement floor. Its throaty alto vibrated with emotion. Unable to restrain itself any longer, it rumbled up to within arm’s length of Killeen, crying, “It has been so long!”

Killeen was startled. “How… how long?”

“I don’t know. My inboard time sequencing was reordered long ago by the mechmind in these factories. I hope you realize I never would have labored for these beings if I had been able to escape them. I was wholly loyal to human direction.”

Hatchet approached and the machine caught sight of him. “Oh, another human! So many still alive. Ruff!” The voice attained a timbre of awe.

This machine is remarkably doglike. Listen to that devotion. There must have been dog memory passed down from the original expedition vaults themselves. That ancient trove…

Hatchet asked, “What you want?”

“I… I was only meaning to serve you, sir.” A whimper filled each word with remorse.

“How?”

“I… You must understand, I have been a good servant. All this while. I kept my instructions buried, where the mechmind could not find them.”

Hatchet’s forehead wrinkled. “You work here?”

“Yessir! I am valued for my ability to haul and to repair and to find lost items of the general inventory.” It scuffed around anxiously, as though it wanted to lick Hatchet’s hand. “Also I—”

“Shut up,” Hatchet said with evident satisfaction. “What can you do for us?”

“Well, I can do all the tasks I am routinely assigned, sir. But there is—there is—there is—”

It is hung up in a command loop. There must be some information it cannot reveal unless we give it the right association or code word.

“Shut up,” Hatchet said firmly.

The mech’s stuttering stopped. It began, “I am most sorry for that. Ruff! I seem to have—”

“Look,” Killeen said, “you know this factory, right? Are there any mechs around that are dangerous for us?”

“I… Not in this part of my workworld, no.”

“How near?”

“Five prantanouf.”

“What?”

“A distance the mechs use. I… do not remember how to say it in this speak.” The mech’s womanly voice became distressed, whimpering, almost tear-filled. “I… I am sorry… I…”

“Never mind. Do they know we’re here?”

The mech paused as though listening. “No. Sir.”

“How’d you find us?”

“I have sensors which pick up the human effusions. Wondrous manscents. They are long buried by the sludge the mechmind has carbuncled onto me. Still, they alerted me to your presence.”

Killeen wondered how such a humanmade machine could have survived so long among the alien mechs. Arthur put in sardonically:

Precisely because of its unthinking obedience. Uncomfortably, that is exactly what humans required of animals if they were to survive domestication. We were not morally superior ourselves, when we had the power…

Aspect Nialdi’s stem voice immediately broke in:

That was the proper role of animals. Partners and servants of humankind! You cannot compare—

Killeen cut off a rising babble of Aspect voices within himself.

The mech paused, its opticals registering others of the party who approached as they heard the talk. “Many humans. You have lived after all!”

“You worked in Citadel?” Shibo asked.

“Yes yes, madam.” The mech lowered its front section in a stiff parody of a bow. “I functioned first in the Chandelier.”

Killeen blinked in astonishment. Arthur was babbling in his mind, a thin excited voice which he batted away like a fly. “Tell us what you remember before you came here.”

“I was a worker for the humans who built the first Arcologies. Then, later, Citadels. I designed and labored for the three Citadels Pawn.”

“When did you run away to the mechs?” Hatchet demanded roughly, suspiciously.

“I did not run away!” The machine sounded insulted, like a woman whose honor has been slighted in a casual comment. “Some human machines did so, I know. I was not among them! I was taken.”

“Co-opted?” Shibo asked.

“My circuits overridden. New imperatives written directly into my substrate.”

Killeen said, “They took the Citadel?” and watched the machine carefully. He knew of no machines controlled by men, ever. Certainly Family Bishop had none at the time of the Calamity.

“Oh, no. No. In those ages the mechs were a small band. They avoided humanity’s Citadels, their festivals for breeding, all. They captured me when I was… was… was… was…”

The mech’s audio rasped as it went into a circular-command loop. Something it yearned to say was blocked by a deeper prohibition.

“Stop!” Killeen ordered. He was beginning to believe the machine. His Arthur Aspect piped in:

We termed them “manmechs,” in my day. The Expedition had an entire complement of intelligent machines, after all, and kept them in good running order. Otherwise, how could the first generation have been kindled? Humanmade robots united the sperm and ova brought from Earth. They tended the young, grew the first food—

So they did! Doubly evil, then, the manmechs’ own perverse and traitorous act, to form alliance with those who pillaged the Chandeliers and now hound us in every cranny. This is an enemy of all mankind, this thing that insults us with its bark and woman’s soft tones. Kill it! That is the only—

The mech civilizations captured this manmech. You cannot attribute evil to it if it had no choice! The mechs transformed some of its functions, but apparently never extracted its fundamental human-command overrides.

Killeen asked, “How come they didn’t just tear it up, mine it for materials?”

It knows us. They kept this foul betrayer because it can deceive us yet again! That is why I command you to destroy it. Now! Yet—

Probably it satisfies some arcane function in mech society. Or its survival from the early days may be mere chance. I advise against any sudden action such as the frothing nonsense Nialdi advances.

You risk all if you suffer the traitor to—

Killeen cut off the Nialdi Aspect. He had no time for that now. Nialdi and Arthur kept sputtering and sparring with each other. He let them run as tiny mouse-voices in the back of his mind, to bleed off their tensions, but otherwise ignored them.

The machine coughed, barked angrily three times, and came back to normal. “I… am sorry. I cannot reveal that information without a key word command.”

“How’d the mechs get you?” Hatchet asked.

“There was nothing I could do. I went with the mech civilization and lost my place at the foot of beloved humanity.” These words were darkly plaintive, half from broken memories and half a plea for understanding.

The cluster of humans looked at one another, confused. “You figure it tells true?” Cermo-the-Slow asked Hatchet.

“Could be.”

“Damn strange, you ask me,” Cermo said flatly, shaking his head.

“Mechs’ve never tried this before,” Shibo said. “Not like a mech trick, this. I trust it.”

Killeen said, “Yeasay. Mechs just try kill us, not confuse us.”

The Kings and Rooks spoke, guardedly agreeing. The ancient manmech’s acoustic sensors swiveled eagerly to ward each speaker in turn, small polymer cups tilting around its oblong body.

Hatchet’s yellow upper teeth chewed at his lip, his triangular face for once giving away his uncertainty. He reached up and unconsciously fingered his knobby chin, squeezing it slightly, as if to press firmness into the rest of his face. “Okay. So what? We’re ’bout done here. Let’s

go.”

The machine barked nervously, a high animated yelp. Then the womanly voice murmured, “But no! You cannot leave me here, sir. I am yours. Humanity’s.”

Hatchet looked uncomfortable. “Say now, I…”

“But you must.” The woman’s voice gained an edge of seductive softness. “I have been loyal to you these long times. And I must deliver my message to the Citadel Pawn.”

“Citadel Pawn’s destroyed,” Killeen said. “We are all the Citadel Families that remain.”

“No! Gone? But then well I… well I… well I…” “Shut up!” Hatchet said irritably. “Come on, let’s get movin’.” He walked away.

“No, I must follow. You are my—”

“Yeasay, follow,” Shibo said gently. “But quiet.”

There were only a few more items on the Crafter’s list. The party carried these out to the grate-door. The Crafter was approaching as they shouldered the last pieces onto the pile. Suddenly the grate-door began rising.

“Get to it!” Hatchet called.

At his signal the team began to quickly carry the items out and load them into a side pouch which the Crafter popped open. Killeen and Shibo and Cermo joined in the hurried scramble. Only moments before they had been joking at the curious machine. Now there was a taut watchfulness as they finished the job, fully exposed to the slanting pale light of Denixrise.

Killeen and Shibo carried Toby out as the last pieces went into the pouch. They got him safely onto a ledge halfway up the Crafter body. They were all getting tired and it was hard to get Toby up the incline. Bud broke into Killeen’s attention:

1. Crafter says climb up.
2. We go to another factory.

Killeen relayed this blank-faced to Hatchet, who asked, “How come?”

“The Crafter says he has something for us.” This was a flat lie, since Bud said:

1. Crafter wants Toby’s help.

Impossible, Killeen thought. 1. You will see, Crafter says.

Killeen said, “Can the Crafter release this manmech? Says it can’t leave this factory ’plex.”

Bud said nothing for a long moment. Then:

1. Crafter has freed manmech.
2. Favor to you.
3. It says, remember, it wants Toby’s help.

“We’ll see,” Killeen said guardedly.

The manmech began to crawl up a side ramp of the Crafter. Bud said hurriedly:

1. Crafter won’t carry manmech.

“Why not?”

1. Manmech is now free mech.
2. Can trigger detectors.
3. Make it stay off.

“I want it with us.”

1. Crafter will kill then.

“No, just a—”

Killeen heard the Crafter transmit a seething burst of static, which sent the manmech reeling.

1. That was warning.

The manmech cried, “Humans! Do not leave me!”

Tight-lipped, Killeen called, “No choice. You’re free now. Good luck!”

As they lumbered away from the cubic factory the grate-door came ratcheting down. Looking back at it, Killeen felt a washed-out sense of relief. They had come through the dark tunnels and survived.

He was saddened to see the dog-woman manmech come clattering after them. He would’ve liked to ask that strange combination about its ancient life. A living entity was far more gripping than the desiccated little lectures the Aspects gave him. He was trying to learn more from his Aspects, but they lacked the manmech’s poignant, humble truth.

He shook his head. His father had told him once that the smartest people were those who, once they saw they had no choices left, forgot the matter. He had never mastered that art. He shut off his comm, so he would not have to hear the manmech’s fading, plaintive yelps and forlorn baying.

The Crafter accelerated away. Its antennae swerved and buzzed with anxious energy.

He lay back to rest. Toby moaned nearby. The boy’s nerveweave was beginning to fray and fret. Killeen levered his bad arm under his son’s neck to provide some pillow. He closed his eyes. Sleep crowded in on him. He set himself against it. He had to think. To prepare for the real reason he had come here.