39

Three ahtra lay dead at Juric's feet. He knelt next to one of the bodies, examining the wounds.

"Bot-fire,sir."

Eli turned to look at the bot at his side: an innocent bot—if such a concept could be applied. This bot hadn't been out of their sight for days.

Nonplussed by the sudden attention, the AI peeled off a slug of fire at a scavenger creeping back to resume its meal on the ahtra.

Vecchi and Pig stood guard, eyeing the bodies and the hexadron, perhaps thinking how close these three ahtra had been to safety, only to be cut down. Or maybe just see-ing dead enemies.

Looking at the mangled bodies, Eli thought how vul-nerable the ahtra were, to put themselves in harm's way every four years, their cyclical war of procreation. Maret had said even the ahtra world ships sent shuttles home bearing the latest candidates for ronid, receiving the shut-tles at a well-hidden portal to DownWorld. So this home world was the ahtra Achilles' heal. They needed Up World and its season.

Once Congress Worlds knew this, the tide of war might well change.

Which will force Nefer to launch her ships sooner rather than later…

Nazim appeared from behind a small copse of trees. "Found it, sir."

The second bot trudged forward, at her side. Its hous-ing was. punctuated on all sides by a full array of arma-ment. Vines and moss hung around it, dragging behind it like the tattered wraps of a mummy. To Eli it looked weary beyond caring. And guilty as hell.

"No one else around, sir," she reported, crushing any hopes they might have had for human survivors accompa-nying the bot. But from the expression on her face, it was clear that Nazim considered the bot a wild stroke of good fortune.

The second bot trundled toward their own bot as though happy to see it. The AIs rustled with movement.

Eli saw the new bot extend a narrow cylinder, inserting it into a port in the other bot. They were exchanging information.

No.

Eli strode forward, aiming a hard kick at the bridge be-tween them, hoping to break the contact. It held with im-pervious strength.

A fresh nozzle emerged from the new bot, pointing at Eli.

Swiftly, Nazim aimed the domino at the machine. "Or-der, Captain? I can melt this bucket of bolts."

But already the bot's threatening tube had retracted, then the bridge between, the two machines.

"Never mind," Eli muttered. "Too late."

Juric and the others looked at him in confusion.

"This bot has got it figured out," Eli said. "About the enemy. Who it is."

Pig stepped back from the bots as though he thought it might be him they decided on.

"Only problem is," Eli said, "the bot's got it wrong." He looked with a kind of sadness at the new bot.

"And now he's told our bot."

The soldiers shuffled uncomfortably, waiting for their superior to make sense of things. All but Juric. He was watching Eli all this time. "No act of war," he said, "if our machines go nuts."

Juric got it, of course. Nailed it.

Eli spoke low and steady. "These bots are under my command. I'm responsible for what they do. And what they will do." On automatic, the AIs were. To be sure. There was that little detail, but it wouldn't absolve hu-mans from the blame for a clear act of war. Eli turned away from the group and walked a short distance to clear his head.

If ahtra saw that CW bots had attacked their people— had attacked them during ronid—oh, the fury Miss Nefer could whip up. A clear act of aggression. How many had the bot already killed?

Nazim, Pig, and Vecchi eyed him nervously. Something was up. And they suspected that they weren't going to like it.

A narrow shadow fell across him. Juric stood there.

The sergeant sat down, bracing his gun on his knee, light winking armed, muzzle pointing down-valley.

He spat out a wad of fiber, residue of the yellow polyps. As a com-ment, it was eloquent enough. "Dead pocks never were a problem, far as I ever knew."

"They're a problem now, Sergeant."

Juric's regen side was toward Eli, making him about as easy to read as a bot. "The peace," Juric said, making it sound like a wad of polyp fiber.

A jagged wall of dust arose from down-valley. It looked like a curtain of orange rain, a spasm of dust, in an atmo-sphere scoured of dust every few hours. But Eli had seen the like before. It was an enormous cloud of insects, all hatched at once to improve their mating success.

"How many enlisteds have you seen die, Sergeant?"

The scent of rain rode the air, making each breath heavy. "Enough," Juric answered.

Eli thought of the battles the man had known. It was a full list, holding a lot of blood.

"Is it? Enough?" Eli still gazed out at the plume of in-sects.

"Not a matter of what I think."

Oh, but it was. Now it was. The master sergeant must concur. Two officers or two noncoms, or one of each, was what it took to decommission a bot in the field, if put on automatic. If AIs were put on automatic, it meant desper-ate straits. So it would take more-than-ordinary measures to stand them down. So it was very much a matter of what Sergeant Juric thought. What he thought of Eli, most of all.

Eli went on, "How many you figure will die if the ahtra avenge their dead here?"

It was a clear and ugly choice: pull the plug on the AIs, and maybe not make it back to the ship. Or leave the two killing machines free to sweep the area of pocks.

Juric hadn't blinked for a very long time. That side didn't blink very much. Eventually the master sergeant said, "Guess us five don't matter, live or dead."

Eli wouldn't have put it like that. They mattered. But soldiers got paid to die, every one of them knew that. Now maybe they'd earn their pay.

Clouds scudded overhead, as though fleeing from some-thing up-valley. Their shadows swept over Eli and his troops, bringing a few seconds of relief from the dual blaze of the suns. Rains would form up again, within a couple hours.

Eli set out the choice, saying it simply. "Figure a short trek will kill us without the AIs?"

"Done a good job so far."

"Yes. Cut us down to five. Three Transport, two In-fantry." He would have had it otherwise, but it was as Maret had said. "The worst of us in the whole unit. That's who's left. The meanest, most self-serving, paranoid bas-tards of both divisions."

Juric turned a quick look on Eli, what might have been a smile of relish at the edge of his mouth. "Maybe so. Maybe we are." He looked in the direction of Nazim, Pig, and Vecchi. "Good enough to get two miles, or die try-ing."

As they gazed down-valley, a band of rippers could be seen galloping after something, all in silence at this dis-tance.

Juric stood up, the act taking a little longer than it had in the other direction.

Eli knew Juric had no reason to love him; much the op-posite. But the man was looking at him long and steady, maybe trying to take the measure of this captain as Eli was of the sergeant.

Then Juric nodded, his voice low and calm. "You ready to put those dogs down?"

Eli hoped he didn't show his relief. He covered by get-ting to his feet and brushing the dust from his uniform. "I'm ready, Sergeant."

They passed the enlisteds, who watched them, brows wrinkled.

As they approached the two AIs, one of the bots backed up a step. It wouldn't do to ascribe human motives to them, of course.

Juric stepped close to the bot, placing his hand on the command panel. "Too stupid to know an enemy when it sees one." He grinned at the unit. "Me."

The panel was reading the sergeant's DNA.

The thought came to Eli as he reached out to the bot's panel: Were you with Sascha? Did you see her die? Was she dead? The thought still nagged at him, that she might be out there somewhere…

From deep inside the bot issued a high, stinging tone of the processors deactivating. Having read Eli's genetic sig-nature, it stood down.

The other bot—the one they thought of as "theirs"— also went meekly into sleep mode, emitting its own long whine, and then what sounded like a shudder, it seemed to Eli, of relief.

Then they left the bots behind, resuming their journey, with Eli on point, four good soldiers coming behind.

Along the perimeter of the woody den, Sascha dug an-other hole and buried the soft, bloody moss. In the torren-tial rains, the moss would soon have been clean again to use against her body, but moss was plentiful, and she feared the smell of blood would draw predators—those witless enough to enter the den of the king predators. There had been a few, to the delight of the Singers.

Madame Singer had left at first light, as was her habit. The others sat in the pitiless rain, watching the tumble play of the three youngsters, whose main targets of mock battle were each other and Brat.

Watchful sat her place, chewing on a haunch of meat while observing Sascha dig-ging her hole, blinking now and again to wash the rain from her eyes. Watchful hadn't left the nest for days, act-ing irritable, staring at Sascha as though brooding over some awful lapse.

Sascha patted mud over the hole and pulled the vines back into place. The odor of rich mud mixed with the smell of Singer dung and the overripe fruit that had be-come her diet staple. She inhaled the soupy air, almost nourishment in itself, it was so heavy. She stood, wiping her muddy hands on her shirt. She imagined her mother's disapproving look. A lady did not wipe her hands on her clothes. And she was now, in truth, a lady, a woman grown. Not a feral child.

She longed to be clean again. The clothes she had worn for weeks were rotting from her frame. The buttons of her shirt were long gone. It was a simple matter to have done with the tattered things. As she freed herself from her shirt and long pants, they tore like seaweed. She stood naked in the forest shower, wearing only her boots and lantern, let-ting the rain pelt her skin while Watchful put down the bone she was gnawing on and stared as though she had never seen a naked human before.

Around Sascha the rain clattered, needling the leaves and puddles of the bower and the deeper woods.

The sound was almost the crackle of fire, a conflagration feast-ing on the Gray Spiny Forest.

With her eyes closed, the sound became the roar of a two-man log in the great fireplace of the family hall.

In an-other life she would have known her body's change in a different way. With silk, and white velvet, and the creamy pearls of her maternal grandmother's necklace. With ta-bles of savory dishes, with meaty main courses, buttery side dishes, with food as decoration: carved, julienned, fanned, layered, and molded. Iced smallcakes heavy with candied fruits. Mutton and fragrant cheeses and shellfish stews with great loaves of herb bread. The young men, stiff in Officer Candidate uniforms too heavy to sit in, would be nudged on by their fathers to make nice to Sascha Jaizelle Olander. Her hair would glitter with spikes of light from a jeweled hair net, and at her bosom the sym-bolic long pin, resting in her gown's fabric, capped with a diamond. In the old days, one drew out the pin at one's breast and drove it into the eye of a conqueror taking spoils. So her grandmother had told her with relish, know-ing that Sascha thought the young bucks in their uniforms both silly and threatening.

The nest occupants were on edge, humming shrilly. Everyone had been upset since the death of Triplet's baby. They let Sascha bury it, but regarded her with something that felt like blame.

Now, one of the youngsters was at Sascha's elbow. In the clatter of rain, Sascha hadn't heard it approach. He snatched a fruit that she had by her side, scampering off, shredding the pod in a trail of yellow pulp. Casting the seed stone aside, he collected his two siblings, and the three of them bounded viciously toward her.

She rose, clutching her lamp. Flipping it on, she sprayed them with light, causing one of them to veer away. The other two slowed, but advanced.

They had grown during her stay here. Now they needn't stretch their necks far to look her in the eye. She shouldn't have stared at the lead youngster, it inspired him to move. He leapt forward, but collided with his sibling who had the same aggressive thought. As they extricated themselves from their tangle, Sascha backed up toward the nest wall to protect her back.

Now Brat was among them, droning in excitement, shoving them with his long arms, but playfully. One of the young ones bit him. This wasn't play anymore. Brat screamed, and Triplet's head rose from the nest.

Her hum filled the enclosure, a short burst of melody. The three sib-lings now advanced on Sascha, heedless of Triplet's song. Brat worried the hind legs of one of them, and a small skir-mish broke out, sending hums through the nest and caus-ing the vines to tremble with the noise.

Sascha's ever-present light was losing its power over the youngsters. Now it was only a direct pulse of light that made any difference. She swerved her lamp from one to the other of the two foremost creatures. They moved apart to make it harder for her, circling to each side.

Behind the woody wall in back of her, she could hear the droning bass thrums of Demon, always a counterpoint to the events in the nest.

The cubs charged. Simultaneously, Watchful erupted from her placid seat. Sascha had never seen her move so fast. She vaulted, her hum pitched so high it sliced pain-fully into Sascha's ears. The floor of the nest trembled with her landing, and she crashed forward, ripping up vines and hurtling them at the youngsters, smashing a paw into Triplet's face as the mother advanced to protect her young.

The three young ones fled to the farther side of the en-closure as Watchful stomped and screamed.

Triplet relin-quished the center of the nest to Watchful, who raised her head and sent a long, soaring note into the sky. Every Singer now stood frozen, staring at the old denizen. A stream of drool fell from the side of her mouth as she stood there, panting at her exertions.

The uproar was over. Now Watchful turned her great blue eyes to stare down on Sascha. Sascha waited, stick-still. Something in the eyes of her protector had fled.

Watchful advanced toward her. It was a slow, jerky ad-vance, punctuated by hard stomps of her great feet. Sascha knew to back up. And then Watchful moved to one side, forcing Sascha to retreat along the perimeter of the nest. The creature was still panting, her warm breath hitting Sascha in the face, smelling of baking bread. They were headed in the direction of the back door.

Watchful stomped closer, sending Sascha into the open-ing in the viney wall. The Singer stomped again, leaving no doubt that Sascha's welcome had run out.

Sascha stood on the border between den and forest. Her mouth parted, to say something to Watchful.

But what could she say? I'm sorry for the blood. I never meant for it to come.

Now it had. And just as she had always feared: disas-trously.

Sascha turned from the Singer and walked through the hole in the nest wall.

Demon was waiting.