All from a Marauder-class mech.

All the latest designs.

All burnished with use, but still showing silvershine where they’d been protected from the grit outside.

“Good stuff,” Killeen said casually.

“Yeafold, eh-say?”

“Ummmm…” But parts of what?

“Can I use it, then?”

Killeen hefted a crosshead block. It was big enough to fit on a Stalker. “Uh, what?”

Exasperated, Toby said, “This” holding out the circuit-choker.

“Oh. What for?”

“Kill navvys!”

Killeen looked around, studying the pools of shadow. If a Stalker was in here, had heard the Family come through the hatch, and decided to bide its time…

“Well?”

Speculations. And a fidgety feeling. That was all.

Killeen looked at his son and saw there the open testament of all that he could hope to pass on, the slender thread of his posterity. Yet Toby would not be fully what a human could be in this harsh world if he had his childhood stolen from him. He needed a sense of security, of certainties. And if Toby became fearful now, he would sleep poorly. Tomorrow he would be less swift.

“Come on, we’ll go back, hit the food vats. Have some more chow.”

“Awwww…”

“Then we’ll go outside, maybe, nick some navvys.”

Toby brightened. He was the last child in the Family. Mechs and accident and racking disease had stolen all the others. “Jazz!”

Killeen got the boy to play a kind of hide and seek, with Toby leading the way back. This let Killeen rear guard without seeming to do so, ears pricked. He sensed nothing strange. The caverns rang hollow, empty, waiting.

When they reached the vats Toby was winded. Killeen found him a glob of sticky foam stuff that smelled of leather and spice. Then he went to Ledroff and described the mech parts.

“So? I checked the whole place,” Ledroff said. “Had Jake-the-Shaper do it, too.”

“Those parts weren’t old. Latest stuff.”

“So a mech left ’em.”

“And might be back.”

“Might not, too.” Ledroff squinted at Killeen. His luxuriant black beard grew up to his eyes and hid his expression, but the cutting edge of Ledroff’s voice was clear enough.

“You wanted we sack down in the valley, ’member?” Killeen said evenly.

“So?”

“Maybe you were right.”

Ledroff shrugged elaborately. “Different now.”

Something had changed since arriving here, something to give Ledroff assurance. Killeen shook his head. “It’s damnsight odd. Why’re parts left in a pile? Usually navvys take ’em.”

Ledroff grinned, showing broad yellow teeth. He looked around at the few Family members within earshot and raised his voice. “What’s got you so jumpy?”

“That Mantis today.”

“Whatsay of it?” Ledroff demanded loudly.

“Fanny said once that a Mantis, it works with others.”

“What others?” Ledroff’s bushy eyebrows lowered, encasing his eyes in shadow.

“There were a bunch of navvys in that valley.”

“Near where the Mantis was?” Ledroff’s lips lingered on the words, turning them over for inspection.

“Yea. Ten of ’em at least—”

“Those can’t hunt us,” Ledroff said scornfully. “You’re getting addled.”

Killeen smiled grimly. “You ever see a Marauder-class mech travel with navvys?”

“I’d vex on mechs, not navvys.” Ledroff laughed loudly. The rhyming’s slight taunt confirmed Killeen’s suspicion. Ledroff was playing to the audience. But why?

“A mech who has navvys can have other mechs. Stalkers. Or Lancers.”

“You can be night guard, then,” Ledroff said mildly. “Put your vexings to good work.”

He unstuck a gobbet of organic paste from his belt and offered it to Killeen. The Family nearby nodded, as if some point had been made, and went back to digesting their motley meals. Killeen only dimly sensed what Ledroff wanted with such talk, but decided to let it go. Fanny’s death had fair well unhinged them all.

Killeen took the food and ate, an age-old sign of comradeship. Ledroff smiled and walked off. Toby came from seeking more sweet and thumped down beside his father, gesturing at Ledroff. “What wanted?”

“Talk of the laying-low,” Killeen said. No reason to bother the boy with his own misgivings.

“When’ll it be?”

“A while.”

“Time for some more of the sticky?”

“Sure.”

Toby hesitated for a moment. “It’s okay, the sticky. But when’re we finding a Casa again?”

“We’ll start looking tomorrow.”

Toby seemed content with that stock answer, and went scampering off. Killeen found some rank but nourishing stuff that tasted like metal filings mixed in cardboard. His thumbnail chemsensor assured him it wasn’t poisoned; Marauders did a lot of that.

He picked at the gummy stuff, thinking. He couldn’t remember how many months it had been since the Family had stayed in a Casa. A year, maybe—only he had no clear idea how much a year was. He knew only that it was more months than he could number on both hands. To know exactly would mean calling up one of his Aspects, and he did not like to do that.

Unbidden, taking advantage of Killeen’s distraction, his Arthur Aspect spoke. The small, precise voice seemed to come from a spot just behind his right ear. In fact, the chip that carried Arthur and many more Aspects rode high in Killeen’s neck.

Our last stay in a Casa was 1.27 years ago. Snowglade years, of course.

“Uh-huh.”

The Aspect was irritated at not having been called up for so long. This showed in the clipped, prissy exactness of its voice.

The Family does not use the week or month any longer; otherwise I would speak in those terms. Such short time scales are artifacts of a settled people, adjusted to priorities of agriculture. In my day—

“Don’t get on that,” Killeen snapped.

I was merely pointing out that even a year ceases to have meaning now, since the mechs have obliterated the seasons.

“Don’t wanna hear talk ’bout the old days.” He forced the Aspect back into the recesses of his mind. It squawked as he compressed it.

Killeen listened to his Aspects less and less now. He’d had the Arthur Aspect only since the Calamity, and had consulted it seldom. Aspects had lived in eras when the Families dwelled in Citadels or the larger, ancient Arcologies. They knew damn little about being perpetually on the run. Even if they had, Killeen disliked their talk of how great things had been. Killeen always smothered Arthur’s techtalk. No matter how they phrased it, Aspects always came over as rebuking the Family for having fallen this low.

Killeen didn’t want to hear that, or anything about the Mantis attack. Their long flight from it had let him keep his grief bottled up. But he could feel the press of it, and knew it had to vent.

Ledroff was moving among the crouching figures of the Family, arranging the nightwatch. Soon the Witnessing would begin. They’d discuss Fanny’s death, and sing, and then choose the next Cap’n.

Killeen got up, his legs stiff from hard running, back tight and aching. But he would have to dance his respect to Fanny, sing the hoarse cries of farewell.

“One good thing for that,” he muttered to himself. He had not been thinking of it, but now his nose caught the thick, swarming savor of alcohol vapor from a nearby vat.

Troughs produced it as a side effect of their endless chemcycling. An old story held that mechs got high on alky, too, though there was no evidence of it. Come to think of it, there was no proof that mechs got high at all, Killeen thought.

He didn’t like alky as much as the sensos you got in a Casa, nobody did. But alky would get him through the laying-low. He needed it. Yes. Yes. He followed his nose.