Great Sky River Read Free Page A

foothills now. The Family sprinted across eroded flatlands.
    Fanny asked as she panted, —See it yet?—
    “Naysay.”
    —Should’ve climbed the ridge by now. Don’t like this.—
    “Think maybe a trap?” Killeen cast about for possibilities as he searched his topo display. Again he wished Jo-celyn or even
     goddamn Ledroff had this job. If an attack came he wanted to be near his son. He scanned ahead and found Toby in the middle
     of the moving Family formation.
    Fanny dropped back, scanning the ridgeline.
    Killeen searched again for the elusive pursuer. The topo danced in his eye, speeding ribbons of light.
    More cloudy tracers.
    To the right came a dim speckling of pale blue.
    Killeen realized too late that it would have been better to hold the ridgeline. They were exposed and had lost the enemy.
     He grunted in frustration and sped forward.
    They were partway down the broad valley when he looked right and saw first the overlay winking green and then the far rocky
     scarp. It was fresh rock, cleaved by some mining mech, its amber faces gouged and grooved.
    But the clear bare cut hadn’t been there moments before. Killeen was sure of that.
    “Bear on my arrow!” he shouted to the whole Family. He cut toward a low hill. “Fanny, you’d—”
    Killeen heard a sharp crackling.
    He saw Fanny fall. She gave a cry of surprise. Then her voice sharpened, riding an outrushing gasp of startled pain.
    He turned and fired at the distant carved hills, where stood half-finished blocks of rhomboid stone.
    Back came an answering echo of snapping, crisp circuit death.
    A hit. Probably not enough to drop the thing dead, but it would buy some seconds.
    He shouted, “Max it!”
    With Fanny down, he’d have to get the Family away, fast. Killeen blinked, saw the blue dots of the Family swerve toward broken
     terrain that provided some shelter. Good. But where was—?
    “Toby! Hug down in that stream bed, see?”
    A klick away, his son hesitated.
    “To your right!”
    —and for a moment that seemed balanced forever beside a harrowing abyss, Killeen was sure his son’s gear was blown or overloaded,
     making it impossible to hear the warning. Or that the boy was confused by the scramble of electronoise. Or weary from the
     run. And so would remain standing while on the dry rutted plain no other simple unmoving target would leap into the fisheye
     lens of the unseen Marauder mech. His son’s frozen indecision would recommend itself as a target.
    Hanging there on the instant, Killeen remembered a time when he had been on a scavenging expedition with his father, a mere
     short foray for needed chip-parts, so easy his mother consented to her son’s going along. And there a Marauder had chanced
     upon them as they looted an isolated ramshackle field station where navvymechs labored in mute dumb servitude. Killeen had
     been on a small side trip to snag servos from a dusty storage shed, and in the attack the Marauder (a Rattler, old but fully
     armed) had seen him and run him down. Three men anda woman had blown the Rattler to spare parts, catching it two steps away from Killeen’s frantically fleeing form. He had been
     scared so badly he shat his suit. But what he remembered now was not the embarrassment as the shitsmell got out, and not the
     taunts of his friends. Instead, he recalled in a spirit-sucking instant his own father’s look: eyes burned into the sockets,
     deadwhite. Eyes that had drilled into him with their desperation. And Killeen knew his own face now locked into the rictus
     of foresighted horror as his own son stood, unmoving, for one solid thudding heartbeat of immutable lost time—
    “Toby!”
    —Uh, yeasay.—
    The distant figure scrambled down an embankment, into the fossil snaketwist of an ancient waterway.
    Killeen could not breathe. He realized he had gone rigid himself, a perfect target.
    “Hunch ’n’ go, boy,” he called as he swerved and dodged away.
    And felt something go by—
tssssip!
—in