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.
<He is suredead,> Quath said. <The Mantis stripped his self away in the last moments.>
“Why?” Killeen demanded. His voice was strained.
<I do not know.>
“Revenge,” Killeen said.
<It had finished with you.>
“With us? Other way around,” Killeen said bitterly.
<It played out its own end by allowing you to express one of your embedded patterns. One it had not experienced.>
Toby’s voice was a croak. “What… pattern?”
<Your species hunted long ago across far terrain. In groups you large mammals mastered language and the rituals of pursuit. It led to your intelligence—a particular kind of mind.>
“It wanted to see us do that?” Killeen was quiet now, kneeling with his hands uselessly rubbing Cermo’s shoulder.
<I suspect it wanted to be part of it. The only part it could play.>
Toby thought about the stored memories it had shed into the air, its treasure evaporating. But memory was not yourself, he saw. It could not drive forward, act. Memories just sat and waited.
6. Paths of Glory
The timestone tossed and broke and they spent a long time then just clinging to whatever stable places they could find. They did what they could for Cermo but that wasn’t much. Killeen opened Cermo’s spine and swore. “They’re burned.”
“How?” Toby asked.
“Mantis must’ve worked down through all his inboards.”