Factories secure. Some much-needed servos found.

The supervisors had not sent out a mayday signal. The ’plex was transmitting no raidcry, as near as anyone could pick up.

The older men and women were safely in. Guards posted.

Ledroff listened, nodded. He grinned, showing stubbed brown teeth. His first raid as Cap’n, and it had gone well.

Killeen checked for Toby, found him tinkering with a manager mech. “I gutshot a navvy,” Toby said forlornly, sorry he’d found nothing bigger. Killeen showed him how to make the manager spin on its rotors, whirring madly, its arms ratcheting. Toby laughed, banishing his frown. He was so taken with the mad mech that he forgot to cover his gaping, cheerful mouth. In the Citadel this had been impolite, a symbolic revealing of the coarse inner self. Killeen thought to remind him, but figured there was time enough for manners later. If ever.

Ledroff ordered the navvys uncyberlocked and set back to labor. The Family could learn more of what went on here that way. Killeen watched the slow but powerful mechs as they kept on. They ignored the humans, since their supervisors had had no time to send out a formup call. Their dull cowlings bore designs that only manager mechs could read, and no human had ever deciphered.

One had the same brushed, crosshatched alum carapace he had seen earlier, something new in navvy design. Killeen noted it and thought no more. Mech assembly was a subject of utter indifference to him—he could no more uncoil an axle housing, using fourwrench and screwdriver, than he could reprogram the biochips in his own head—but it was essential to know ordinary navvys from the higher-order mechs.

Usually a cosmetic feature worked its way down from the smarter mechs to the navvys, but this crosshatched aluminum, coming first in the navvys, apparently had some purpose. The navvys who had helped the attack on the Trough had borne no special markings. Still, any change could mean danger.

Once the factories were secure, the Family fell on the stacked wealth. Tightweave was a rarity. It responded to electrical touch-commands, splitting where a current-carrying fingernail sliced.

A dozen of the Family called up Aspects and began using the old skills to cut and plan and fit fresh clothes. Laughter rang down the long ranks of still-spinning machinery. The Family liked labor when they could see clear result. New shirts, vests, and leggings to wear beneath their suits would improve everyone’s spirits.

Killeen roved with Toby, inspecting. “Lookit,” the boy said, pointing to a huge mound of the tufted, dryleaved plants. Navvys were unloading small carts that brought the harvested stems and boughs. “How they make tight-weave from that?”

“Some kinda mechknow.”

Killeen shrugged. He had long since given up trying to figure how mechs worked their routine miracles. But Toby was young and thought he could understand everything in a world which had long since passed human comprehension.

“These leaves got scabs.”

Unbidden, Arthur’s cool, exact voice rippled at the back of Killeen’s mind:

Those have a layer of silicon-boron to protect the plant from the Eater’s ultraviolet. It captures the hard photons and converts them through a phonon process into useful—

“Naysay,” Killeen muttered, and Arthur fell silent. The Aspect’s departure left a faint tremor of pique, an irksome note strumming through Killeen’s sensorium.

“Huh?”

“Just shutting up some Aspect lingo.”

Toby fingered the tough, glassy leaves. “Naysay such.”

“Must be…” Killeen had an idea he didn’t like.

“Figure they’re mechmade?”

Killeen nodded, his lips twisted aside in thought. “Could be. Look awful funny.”

“If they use ’em, maybe they plant ’em?”

“Never heard such.”

“Sure rough, these. Like no plant at all.”

Toby didn’t see the implications. Killeen said casually, “Search round some. See if the navvys’ve got seeds.”

“Yeasay.” Toby was happy to be sent off on his own. He strode away through a rank of navvys which were carrying hexagonal plastibrass containers. The navvys were of the dumbest sort. They did not register Toby as more than a passing obstruction, a detail that temporarily clouded their route and then disappeared without their having to call up outside intelligence to pattern-recognize it. Major problems would be relayed to the manager mechs.

Which meant, Killeen knew, that the whole ’plex would slowly shut down as navvys met difficulties, called to the managers for help, and got none. That would eventually send out a mayday to the central cities.

Raids were always bracketed by that. The true art of them was guessing how long you had until some mid-manager mech showed up. Those could be microwave-fried, too, but it had been a long time since Killeen had seen one answer a mayday. The mechs were getting smarter. Or maybe they were just devoting a fraction more attention to their pest problem.

For years now the Family had lived this way—as nomads raiding isolated navvy factories, holing up where they could, following a wanderers’ path through a landscape of increasing desolation. The ravaged hills offered no shade from the Eater’s glaring hammerstroke. What food they could scavenge and carry was compacted, portable cubes—chaws—that drove the muscles but burned the tongue with their power. Several in the Family still knew how to make chaws from the resources of Troughs, and several times the fate of the entire Family had turned upon those fourbrowns. The Family had run for long damaging times amid ruined canyons, driving forward only by chaws and stale mouthfuls of water that seeped from mechmade rockslides.

Killeen remembered this as he treaded through shadowed corridors, beneath drumming clacking machinery. He was looking for Ledroff, but the ’plex was vast and filled with strumming long warrens of endless energetic ’facture. He explored, idling, curious.

The strange, glassy plants gave forth more fruit than tightweave. From tirelessly spinning belts and presses came fibrous sheets, toughgrained and sturdy. Killeen felt some, tried to tear it without result. There were small stonehard devices, too, with connector jacks and cogs he did not understand. In all he counted a dozen or more intricate things that spilled from the factory, few of any meaning, and only the tightweave of any use to humanity. And warehouses nearby bulged with still more inexplicable ’factured devices, skinwrapped and enameled for shipping.

His interest was purely practical. He no longer marveled at what could come from the incessant engine of mechcraft. Such bounteous wealth spewing forth now seemed to him as inevitable as the rich, organic world had appeared to his ancient ancestors. It was simply an enduring facet of the way things were, fully natural.

His world was divided simply. He lived—as well as he could—among things green and soft and pliant, which had limited use and from which humanity had once sprung. But food came mostly from the vats of Troughs, or the rare damp warrens of the ancient, human-made Casas. Remnants of the once-rich Snowglade ecosphere bloomed in spots, mostly grasslands and desert-tough vines. This realm grew wild only in the outlands, beyond the cities and pathways of the mechs.

On the other side of a hazy division lay most of his planet. The mechs pressed against the shrinking green oases. Most of Snowglade was now open, barren wasteland, used for resources. Dotted around Snowglade were ceramo-sculpted mechwarrens. Killeen had glimpsed one once, when the Family blundered over a mountain range and paid the price of six lost members. It was a glassy, steepled thing that crackled with electromagnetic crosstalk. Its deep, upwelling voice had rung through Killeen’s sensorium, immensely threatening.

Killeen accepted as simple fact that those distant and feared zones were an entirely natural way for intelligence to go forward. The humming, rotating processes around him were unremarkable, obvious. No one in humanity doubted this, for they came from a heritage rung down through centuries, in which mechs had bested the Families in every way. Once Snowglade had been a chilly but greenfilled world. Now the dryness grew, the very air sucked moisture from the throats of men. And mechs seemed to have done it all.