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 picture was edited, leaving out the—

“Mantis,” he said suddenly. “Mantis, Fanny called it. She’d seen it a couple times.”

The Mantis projected illusions better than any mech ever had. It could call up past pictures and push them into your head so quickly you didn’t know what was real. And behind the picture was the Mantis, getting closer, trying to breach you.

—Figure to run?— Jocelyn called. She was a distant speck and already backing off, ready to go.

“Not with a big green spot on my back.”

Killeen laughed crazily, which for this instant was easier than thinking, and he had learned to take these things by the instant. Any other thinking was just worry and that slowed you when you needed to be fast.

His problem was the topo and mapping gear, which he alone carried in the Family. He backpacked his on his lower spine.

Legend had it that the topo man was the first to fry. The story was that hunter mechs—Lancers, Stalkers, Rattlers—saw the gear as a bright green dot and homed in on it. They could bounce their low hooting voices off the stuff, get some kind of directional sense from that. And then hoot louder, sending something that invaded the topo man’s gear and then slithered into his head.

—What do then?—

“Got to shoot.”

He heard Jocelyn’s grudging grunt. She didn’t like that. For that matter, he didn’t either. If this Mantis thing was half as good as Fanny’d said, it could trace your shot and find you before your defenses went up.

But if they didn’t kill the Mantis now, it would track them. Hide behind its mirages at night. It could walk up and pry them apart with its own cutters, before they even laid eyes on it. “Wait. Just ’membered something Fanny said.”

—Better ’member fast.—

Fanny’s way of teaching was to tell stories. She’d said something about the Calamity, about how in the midst of humanity’s worst battle some Bishops had found a way to penetrate the mirages.

He tapped his teeth together carefully, experimentally—one long, one short. That set his vision so the reds came up strong. Blues washed away, leaving a glowing, rumpled land seething into liquid fire. The sky was a blank nothing. Across the far hillside swept crimson tides of temperature as his eyes slid down the spectrum.

—Fanny’s hurt. Think we should try for her?—

“Quiet!”

He shook his head violently, staring straight ahead, keeping his eyes fixed on one place. What had Fanny said… ? Go to fastflick red, watch out of the corners of your eyes.

Something wavered. Among the sculpted sheets of wintry-gray stone stood something gangly, curved, arabesqued with traceries of luminous worms. The image merged with the rock and then swam up out of it, coming visible only if Killeen jerked his head to the side fast.

The illusion corrected quickly but not perfectly, and for fractions of a second he could see the thing of tubular legs, cowled head, a long knobby body prickly with antennae.

—Gettin’ much?—

“Lessee, I—”

Something punched a hole in his eye and went in.

He rolled backward, blinking, trying to feel-follow the ricochet of howling heat that ran in fast jabbing forks through his body.

Molten agony flooded his neural self. It swarmed, spilling and rampaging.

He felt/saw old, remembered faces, pale and wisp-thin. They shot toward him and then away, as though a giant hand were riffling through a deck of cards so that each face loomed sharp and full for only an instant. And with each slipping-by memory there came a flash of chrome-bright hurt.

The Mantis was fishing in his past. Searching, recording.

Killeen yelled with rage.

He fought against a grasping touch.

“I—it got in—” and then he felt the pain-darter clasped by a cool quickness in his right leg. He sensed the roving heat-thing sputtering, dying. It was swallowed by some deeply buried, spider-fine trap, fashioned by minds long lost.

Killeen did not consider what had saved him. He understood his own body no more than he understood the mechs. He simply sprang up again, finding himself at the bottom of a crumbling sandy slope which his spasms had taken him down. In his sensorium strobed the afterimage of the pain-darter.

And his directional finder had followed the telltale pulses to their source.

“Jocelyn! I can get a fix,” he called.

—Damnfast it, then.—

“It’s moving!”

In the glowering ruby twilight the Mantis jerked and clambered toward Fanny’s sprawled body. Killeen heard a low bass sawing sound that raised the hair on the back of his neck.

Like yellowed teeth sawing through bone. If it got close to Fanny—

Killeen sighted on the flickering image of the moving Mantis while his left index finger pressed a spot in his chest. In his left eye a sharp purple circle grew, surrounding the volume where the Mantis image oozed in and out. He tapped his right temple and Jocelyn got the fix.