Deep Eyes

5. Stalking

“Why doesn’t it fly?” Killeen asked during one of their short breaks.

Toby had been wondering, too. The Mantis could jet across lanes. Men didn’t have flying gear. They couldn’t generate the thrust to deal with gravitational stresses, not and be able to walk, too. “Maybe it can’t any more?”

Cermo swallowed some water and spat it out again, an old ritual to get the dust taste out of his mouth. Then he cocked an eye at the distant emerald roof, the folded terraces of land far overhead. “Could be it threw away its propulsions first thing. We just didn’t run across them.”

Quath murmured,

The men looked at each other and shrugged. Toby wondered what Quath could mean but she ambled away then, combing the area. He did not get a chance to think further because Cermo was looking up at the foggy Esty again and frowning and then pointing. “Matterfall,” he said quietly.

Masses of green and brown ripped away from the landscape above. Silently they shot up in a geyser. Lumps tumbled and smacked into each other. “Coming fast,” Killeen said nervously.

There was nothing to do. Sometimes the esty fissured. Along its surface gravity would abruptly vanish as stretched lines of space-time snapped back, like rubber bands releasing energy. Matter would find itself suddenly released, free.

“No pretty li’l arch this time,” Cermo said.

Sometimes the trajectory of a matterfall made an arc and the mass slammed back down nearby. Once the freed debris got high enough, though, it could just as soon spray all the way across the vast space between Lane walls. This time it had more than enough energy. It seemed to speed up and still there was no sound.

“Coming close.” Toby stood with legs tight and ready to run. But which way?

The clotted stream of mass shot toward them. It swelled and Toby saw trees and rocks clearly. The leading edge was a little to his left, he saw, and then very quickly the whole sheared mass came down toward them.

Close, but not right smack on. It slammed into the esty unslope. The shock wave bowled them over. Thunder followed it. They doubled up against a spattering rain of pebbles and silt. One hit Toby in the shoulder and hurt but broke nothing.

It was over in a few minutes. They brushed themselves off and looked up at the damage. Some hills had fresh cover and boulders were still tumbling down and crashing into ravines.

“Be bad footing over that way for a while,” Cermo said.

“Wonder if the Mantis will go that way on purpose,” Killeen said.

Cermo frowned. “I spect so.”

That was what happened. Their tracking told them so within an hour.

Trouble came immediately. The Mantis trail led into the shifty new ground. They labored upgrav toward majestic, brooding slopes. The rock here was bare, thickly folded esty. The matterfall had liberated fresh energies. Events curled out of it, sliver-thin instants from the past which splintered off and then evaporated. Going uphill was like climbing a full, heaving wave that crested and was always about to break its sharp peak into roaring foam. Bowls formed in the slant timestone. In them were lakes not of water but of some chipped gravel that flowed. It was easy to mistake for a water lake because the granules of shattered esty were a pale turquoise, as if blue with chill. Toby dipped his hand in and jerked it back scalded. He danced around, flapping his hand and feeling stupid and angry with himself.

He was not paying attention so was surprised when the ground trembled and opened. Toby fell into a cleft with edges sharp as tom tin. He scrambled and got out just as quick.

Neither Cermo or Killeen noticed any of this because they had just heard the Mantis ahead. Quath had vectored on it.

Toby ran to catch up to them. Abruptly the Mantis disappeared from his sensorium. It left not even the Mantis blankness.

“Get it on visual!” his father called so he knew that the others had lost their sensoria traces, too.

Toby plunged upslope. He had to use all his power to manage it and he could not see the others. Thick cover festooned the ground here and shook and rattled as timestone gave way downslope. He heard crashing and explosions below. If a piece of the esty slipped into instability it carried off everything. The shaking got worse and he fell.

—Cermo!—he sent on hushed comm. Nothing came back—.^.—he sent to Quath, but again nothing.

Still, he could smell the Mantis somehow. It was not a sensorium cue but a flavor cool and metallic on the dry air.

He understood this last desperate move. The Mantis had led them into unstable territory to throw them off. He wanted to cling to the trembling ground but the smell was strong. Fronds rattled above him as he picked his way upslope and into a divide. He knew it was up ahead but did not know how he knew.

A brilliant white flash went by him and the second smacked into him. The pain snapped down his spine. He hit and rolled. Only then did he register the quick rapping bursts that had come before he was hit and recognized his father’s emag rifle. Cermo’s booming reports came right after.

His systems convulsed. His legs had curled up with the pain and he could not brace himself against the time-stone as it cracked beneath him. Sharp shards peeled off and shattered and cut his face.

His world clouded up with the pain. Cermo’s punching booms and his father’s rap-rap-rap came cotton-soft in the hollow air. The two men were shooting steadily now. Toby still could not see their target though the metallic smell was stronger.

Quath sent her characteristic whoom whoom echoing through his sensorium. She was using her weapon that scrambled up interlinks and could dissolve a mechmind if it went in just right. They shouted now in his comm but seemed far away. They had not gotten visual of the Mantis either and their calls got fainter as they moved away.

He got up painfully. No broken bones. A wad of cloth from his pouch stopped the bleeding in his scalp and cheek. More hollow firing. Then he saw it. The blankness rippled in his sensorium.

A shot caromed off him. It hurt but did not get into his inboards. Something else did before he could react.

—the two lines of running figures met on a dry plain. Here men laughed wildly as they grinned through filmed helmets, slapping each other in salute. The two Families had not met for years and now to come upon each other, Rooks and Bishops colliding. Only taste and touch mattered, the press of warm and pungent flesh, rank and salty. Hugging and patting. Sobs as old friends saw each others’ lined, worn faces. A babble river of talk, hoarse cries, guffaws—

It came in so fast he got only a stinging sensation. A nose-wrinkling itch, a furious sneeze. So fast he was all reaction, no thought. Then he saw the matrix of rods moving in the clattering fronds nearby. No more than a hundred meters.

Slow, underwater slow. He shot at it and missed. Mantis fields deflected nearly anything except a direct pulse. A shot had to be shaped just the right way to defeat its layered minds of defense.

He ran down a gully that snapped and cracked beneath him. The esty energies played in blue-white arcs where his boots struck. He knew he was not seeing quite right from the pain.

More booming reports and a crashing and it was all going steadily away from him in the fog-thick clotted air.

Cermo screamed. His shriek sliced the comm.

The Mantis reek came stronger.

Toby scrambled out of the gully. Timestone frayed upward here like spores blowing. It fractured, split. Big zigzag lines ran back into sour-smelling bushes.

He ran toward the thrashing sounds. Uphill. Tripped and got up and went on.

—in the celebration came a hard spang and then streaming talk turned to shouts. Screams. Bodies falling, others trying to catch them. Shocked, bleached faces. The stinging notes were emag shots and the Mantis was a speck on a far rise aiming into the reunited humans, being very careful to focus on a single fleeing form at a time. It brought down more and drew the essence out of the primates as their little lights flickered and began to go out. Pain, remembrance, joy, gray defeat, soft dreams—all siphoned into it. All was saved—

He staggered with the hard-blown intensity of the burst. Where was it?

The bushes were high here and scraggly trees hung above them. On his comm he got a pip from his father and Cermo beyond. On the topo display Cermo was on the hillside and highlighted. Killeen was moving away from Cermo and headed farther uphill.

Toby angled up a ravine. He had to cut his way through some of the wiry bush and came upon his father suddenly.

Killeen was white-faced. “Got Cermo pretty bad.”

“You tracking it?”

“Hit it pretty solid and it’s trailing smell.”

The stink was metallic and oily now. Toby knew the true data his systems compiled were not smells at all but the scent blended with the memories it had projected into him and together they reverberated in him.

There were plenty of other signs. Scattered loci had spattered the bushes with burnt orange and crimson. Mantis castoffs. A seared cowling lay cocked against a tree. “Careful of it,” Killeen said. They went by cautiously but the piece was dead.

“Dad, back there it sent memories to me.”

“Tryin’ to confuse you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You look to be woozy.”

“I’m OK.”

“Been hit?”

Toby nodded and gasped for air.

“Maybe you should stay back with Cermo.”

“I can keep up.”

“Not what I meant.”

“He’s not good.”

“I’ll head back for him in a little while.”

Toby saw Quath on topo a fair distance off. She was blocking the Mantis’s retreat. “It’s close by. Smell that?”

Killeen said, “We got the bastard now.”

“It wasn’t trying to get me solid.

“Its body’s shot,” Killeen whispered.

It was. A heavy odor of something like suffering layered the air as they came into a stand of gnarled trees and thick undergrowth. They trotted as quietly as they could although speed mattered more now.

The Mantis was leaning against some trees. Branches stuck through its open spaces. Coming up on it slowly, Toby thought the thing looked as though the trees had grown in the Mantis body itself and it was now a work both organic and mech.

He could see the back of it, jet black and soft gray and huge, lattices united with complex angularities. He followed his father along flanks that sighed and settled as though something was going out of the Mantis. Something was—fleeting wisps of data hummed and buzzed in their passage.

It was as big as a house and Toby saw now the way energies had held it together and would no more. More slabs of data emitted from it like blood running out and Killeen raised his emag and fired. The Mantis had antennae and disks in their own enclosed bays and one of these focused on them. That was its only reaction. There was no need to do it mechanical damage, to use explosives or bolts. The intricate information web that made up the Mantis was frying into nothing. Programs from the Trigger Codes fed with a crackling intensity that Toby could hear eating like flames through the whole gray sensorium of the Mantis. Three parabolic antennae swiveled to look at them. His father fired again and the whole thing shook like a house about to come down.

Toby backed away. “Plenty done now,” he said.

“No.”

The Mantis fell. Parts popped free and rolled and the intricate crystalline layers smashed. Some beautiful arc struts popped from their collars and the complexities they had supported spilled. The ground rumbled but the two men did not back away from the unspooling masses.

“It’s done,” Toby said.

“No.”

Toby did not like it but his father was right. Quath came up behind them and said nothing. They all heard the thin cries of the subminds as pleasure-pains slipped into them. The Trigger Codes at work.

The Mantis had been trying to stop the spread of the disorders all this time, and its despair and agony came intensely to the men, released by constellations of subminds which had finally given up. The thing was letting itself go in a final burst of bliss. Patterns danced and flared in its sensorium, spilling out filigreed and rich and meaning nothing to humans.

Toby stepped back and his own aching pain made him suddenly weak. “It’ll be gone soon, Dad.”

“No. Prang it once yourself.”

“Let it go.”

Cermo limped up suddenly behind them, one ear tom loose and blood down his face. His left arm dangled uselessly and showed white bone but Cermo’s face was whiter. Toby remembered instantly when Killeen had lost arm function to a mech long ago, and the way Cermo had paid it no attention out of respect, except when Killeen truly needed help.

Cermo’s sensorium rang with medical alarms. Cermo paid them no attention and Cermo did not look at Toby or Killeen or Quath either. He hobbled up and took Toby’s weapon in a hand caked in brown blood. Cermo staggered with the weight of it and nobody said anything.

There was no sounds except the Mantis still stirring. From it whirred smears of information and into Toby came one clear voice.

Here is all I can give.

“Kill it,” Killeen said. Cermo blinked, dazed. His right arm halflifted Toby’s sharp-darter. He seemed stunned by the sudden intensity of the voice.

I am more than the sum of all memories.

Cermo lifted the sharp-darter and pointed the snubbed snout at the center of the still seething Layers. The mainmind was in there somewhere. He weaved, unsteady. The moment hung in the air.

I saved so many Bishops.

I have the greatest collection of you.

And you are the most splendid of all the lesser forms.

Cermo jerked into life. He fired three times. Even singlehanded, at this range each shot found its way into a submind and sparked a hard yellow flare in the Mantis sensorium. Each time Cermo swore angrily and the Mantis rocked with the impact.

The third one made the parabolic antennae whirl around very fast and faster and then stop. Toby knew he would remember the silly look of that.

Every sliding rod and servo in the Mantis halted and the dignity went out of it in a way he could not voice. One moment it was huge and suffering and then it was just a big pile of shattered parts. No whole.

Cermo fell then. He came down completely slack, arms loose and knees buckling. Toby saw that the Mantis had done some last thing and the aura of that burst hit him, too. It gave him a prickly jolt all over. His sensorium fused, tilted, flashed with working veins of amber. He staggered but the pulse did no damage.

By the time he reached Cermo the heavy-lidded eyes had closed.

“Damn!” Killeen said.

Quath said.

“Why?” Killeen demanded. His voice was strained.