Great Sky River Read Free Page B

the still air.
    He saw quick darting orange sparks in his right eye. That meant something was poking, trying to find a way into him. But
fast,
faster than he’d ever known.
    A prickly coldsweat redness skittered through him with a grating whine.
    Killeen dropped to the ground. “Fanny! How you?”
    —I… auhhhh… can’t…—
    “This thing—what is it?”
    —I… haven’t seen… years…—
    “What’ll we
do?
    Ledroff tried to cut in on the narrow-cone comm-line. Killeen swore and blanked him out.
    —Don’t… believe… what you… see…—
    “What’s—”
    She coughed. Her line went silent.
    Fanny knew more than anybody in the Family about the rare, deadly mechs. She’d fought them a long time, back before Killeen
     was born. But Killeen could tell from her sluggish voice that this thing had clipped her solid, blown some nerves maybe.
    No help from the fine, wise old woman, then.
    Killeen looked back at the warped, worked shapes of stone on the far hillside. There were contorted planes, surfaces carved
     for purposes incomprehensible to humans. He thought of them not at all, had long ago learned to look past that which no man
     could riddle out. Instead he searched for the freshness of the cleavecuts, the telltale signs of autochisel.
    Which weren’t there.
    “Jocelyn!”
    The scraped stone surfaces thinned. Shimmered. Killeen had the dizzying sensation of seeing through the naked rock into a
     suddenly materializing city of ramparts and solid granite walls. It hummed with red energy, swelled as he watched.
    “Damnall what’s that,” he muttered to himself.
    The city shimmered, crystal and remote. Plain rock melted to glassy finery.
    And then back again to chipped stone.
    Jocelyn called, disbelieving, —The whole hillside?—
    Killeen grunted. “Mirage that size takes a big mech.”
    —Or new kind,— Jocelyn said.
    She came in from his right, bent low and running with compressors. Behind them the Family fled full bore, their pantings and
     gaspings coming to Killeen in proportion to their distance. They were a constant background chorus,as though they all watched him, as though all the Family was both running for safety and yet still here, witness to this latest
     infinitesimal addition to the long losing struggle with the machines. He felt them around him like a silent jury.
    Jocelyn called, —You hit somethin’?—
    Killeen ducked behind an outcropping of ancient, tortured girders. Their thick spans were blighted with scabs of burnt-red
     rust. “Think so.”
    —Solid?—
    “Naysay. Sounded like hitting a mech circuit, is all.”
    —It’s still there, then. Hiding.—
    No chance to try for Fanny yet. He kept a safe distance from her crumpled form, sure she would by now be a well-found target
     point.
    —I can smell it.— Jocelyn’s alto voice, normally so cottonsoft, was stretched thin and high.
    He could, too, now that he’d calmed a fraction. A heavy, oily flavor. His inbuilt detectors gave him the smell, rather than
     encoded parameters; humans remembered scents better than data. But he could not recognize the close, thick flavor. He was
     sure he had never met it before.
    A fevered hollow
whuuung
twisted the air. It came to Killeen as a sound beyond anything ear could capture, a blend of infra-acoustic rumble at his
     feet and electromagnetic screech, ascending to frequencies high and thin in the roiling breeze.
    “It’s throwing us blocks,” he said. “Musta used a combination on Fanny, but it don’ work on us.”
    —She got old ’quipment,— Jocelyn said.
    “It’s prob’ly sweeping keys right now,” Killeen said, breathing hard and wanting something to do, anything.
    —Looking for ours.—
    “Yeasay, yeasay,” Killeen muttered. He tried to remember. There had been some mech who’d done that, years back. It broadcast
     something that got into your
self,
worked right on the way you saw. It could make you believe you were looking at the landscape when in fact the