“You’re holding up. Feet fine.”
“Just need some sleep,” Toby said.
“You and Quath were up finding it while we were sleeping. No reason you shouldn’t be a little behind.”
“I’ll do the sweep searching tomorrow.”
“Don’t take on too much. Have some more of those beans.”
“Not all that hungry.”
He was asleep before his father had turned off the burner and he heard nothing as the darkness waxed on. He thought of the Mantis or maybe he just dreamed that he did.
The next day he remembered the sleeping fondly before many hours of loping were done. It was bad by then. He had started fresh but it faded and he sweated more than he ever had. Quath spoke to him with some concern but Toby talked little. He carried as big a pack as the others but they also had the burner and some extra food so he was behind in that as well.
Cermo did not smile or waste energy on talk, and Toby remembered again the intensity of the man on the plains of his boyhood. That had been when humanity began to take on the mechs here on even terms and the fighting had been bitter.
Cermo pointed to each sign of the Mantis and interpreted it with assurance. Cermo was pointing to a fresh print when the confusion squall hit home.
Purple bees. It felt as if they were biting him as they swarmed inboard. Toby got down fast but the fan beam caught him and he could not see any more. He rolled downhill and fetched up against a rock. That jabbed him in the side and he rolled around it and farther downhill. That was the surest way to get away from the swarm of emag turmoil. Above him hummed a tangle of magnetic fields and orange plasma discharges. Forking energies. His inboards covering up made sharp clangs in his sensorium.
He slammed into a gnarled tree and could then see again. He lay there looking up at the others. They shared the stupefaction. Two heartbeats, three. The squall passed without any follow-on bolts.
The Mantis used these to soften targets. Not attacking made no sense. He walked back up the hill and Quath greeted him with, <It is leaving them as traps for us.>
“Good, cause otherwise we’d be dead.”
A malicious grin split Cermo’s face. “Means it’s desperate.”
“Wounded,” Killeen said and picked up his pack where he had dropped it at the first sign of trouble.
They moved faster then and it got worse for Toby. The confusion squall had robbed him of his zest and the dry air sucked sweat from him.
The Mantis was an advanced mech and thus a timeless enemy. The earliest intelligent life in the galaxy, who had produced the early mechs, knew the dangers inherent in the conflict between the two forms.
The mechs had slowly decided that the Naturals were no longer semi-di-vine forefathers. They had become competitors, using the same raw resources of energy and mass. Such conflicts were inevitable. In the long run, no life form owed another indefinite homage.
Against this certainty, the earliest organic races wanted a trump card. The First Command.
Deep in the inner design codes of those early machines, they embedded a First Command which could not, even in principle, be detected. Activated, those brought great pleasure… then, a kind of interior death by ecstasy.
If another trigger code was activated from outside—the Second Command—the mech felt the impulse to convey its sublime joy to others. Then pleasure became a plague.
Humanity had done this to the mechs in the esty, once they saw that the conflict between humans and machines would be without end. Except for the Trigger Codes.
Naturals and mechanicals had collided in the Esty, a labyrinth of lanes built of folded space-time. No one knew who had made it. It had been found orbiting the giant black hole at the center of the galaxy, and so had become a stage.
Toby could not truly conceive of the expanse of time and therefore of injury and anguish, of remorse and rage and sullen gray sadness, which had washed over the ruby stars themselves. It had cloaked the galaxy in a wracking conflict which could never be fully over, he knew. From this primordial pain there lumbered forward into his own time a heritage of melancholy unceasing conflict which had shaped all his life and had made the Family Bishop culture he so revered and would die to defend.
In Killeen and Cermo and all the Bishops there smoldered a fire that would never go out until the Mantis died of the Trigger Commands. All Naturals, even half-mechanical forms like Quath, shared that hatred. The Mantis was the last of its kind and the Bishops had sought it for years now. Toby had been lucky to find it, after reports in the area seemed to lead nowhere.
“It’s sick, that’s certain,” Killeen called as they moved.
“We’re getting closer,” Cermo answered.
<It is trying to cure itself,> Quath said.
“How you know?” Cermo asked, head swiveling in surprise.
<The illness might be arrested if portions of the Mantis, its subminds, can be shed. Once infected, they are ejected.>
“That spool?” Troy asked. “And the hexagon?”
“It hoped we’d miss them,” Killeen said, his mouth twisted with surprise. “Dropped that other gear to make us think it was just shedding mass. Yeasay, Quath.”
<The pleasure plague can operate in its higher minds, but on unconscious portions. It then spreads to subminds and becomes overt. The bliss disguises the damage for a time, despite its higher minds.>
Cermo asked, “Why not shed all the subminds?”
Killeen answered, “It’d have no defenses against us.”
<It is being hunted within and without.>
Toby croaked, “Hope it’s getting tired,” but what had intended to be a lighthearted remark came out desperate.
His father dropped back and studied his face. “Just last out a few more hours,” was all he said.
“I’ll take fore point,” Toby said suddenly.
Killeen looked at Cermo, who nodded. “Keep a sharp,” Killeen said. He went back to sweeping the right, tracking.
The navvy hit them as they came down a narrow draw. It was a fine place for an ambush and if the Mantis had done the job itself several of them would have died or at least gotten scrambled pretty badly. The navvy was a lesser mech which apparently the Mantis had assembled in flight. It looked like that.
Toby saw it just before it fired at them. Its big disks were extruded and the emag burst fried Toby’s left side. His servos froze and his legs locked, chunk and chunk and then no feeling. He went down hard.
The beam swept across Cermo too but he had been faster and blew a hole in the navvy. That saved them from a real frying.
Killeen was in the clear and took his time. He got the navvy square so that the emag reservoirs in it spilled out in one long shriek. Then it was dead.
They rested while Toby got his servos back up and running. Nobody said much but his father helped him with the crisped sockets and remarked casually, “Those nawys aren’t as slow as people think.”
Toby knew what that meant and in recollection knew that the navvy had been pretty slow. He had been loping through his own personal fog and had missed the profile when it popped up on his sensorium. Ignoring signs while on point was stupid.
“Sorry,” was all he could say.
Toby kicked the navvy in exasperation and then bent over the cowling. He popped some seals and rummaged, and brought out two smooth ceramic things shaped like lopsided eggs.
“Mag traps,” Cermo said.
“Fine.” Killeen handled one carefully. It had the usual mech slots and looked all right to Toby. “Can we use them?”
“Lemme try,” Killeen said.
“Sorry,” Toby said again.
Killeen slapped one of the eggs into a hip servo. It clicked on. “Good find.” That was Killeen’s way of answering. “Let’s eat.”