—I could damn sure get ahead faster than this—he sent to Quath on private comm.
<So could I. That eludes the point.>
Quath ran on internals of huge energy. She could outpace them all.—Maybe you should go on ahead—<I know my limits.>
—What are they?—Toby was genuinely interested. Myriapodia abilities dwarfed anything human.
<I am not a primate.>
—Um. That all?—
<For the moment, for this purpose, that is enough.>
Beyond that Quath would say no more. Toby puzzled on it for a while but by then he started to tire and Killeen and Cermo were still moving at their same steady pace. They took the same short rests exactly every hour and picked up and went on. Quath herself was upping the pace too. Or so it seemed, though through his sweat-stung eyes the land was opening faster now to Toby and he plunged into it with a fresh energy bom of the fatigue itself.
They came upon the first of the Mantis loci in a slope of shimmering timestone.
Cermo sighted the small shiny hexagon. “Mantis is failin’ apart,” he said, kicking at it.
<No! Perhaps I can read.>
She did. <It contains splinters of the Mantis self.>
Killeen’s weathered face tightened. “Why? What’s it doing?”
<I suspect it is shedding unwanted portions. Subminds it does not need.>
Toby asked, “What’s the sense in that?”
“To lighten up,” Cermo said.
Toby tossed it in his palm. “No mass to this thing.”
“Probably just junked a whole seg and this is a frag.” Cermo said. He had tracked mechs of all descriptions and held them in a lofty contempt despite the fact that mechs had brought down many of his friends.
“Good sign,” Killeen said flatly and they went on.
The ground began to move under them. The worst of it was in the gut-deep confusion, nausea, and sickening lurches. Toby’s eyes did not tell him true about what his feet and body felt. He remembered Quath saying once about the timestone, The defining feature is the lack of definition.—which he had thought to be a joke then.
Not now. Rock parted and pearly vapor churned from the vent. Sheets of esty purled off in gossamer sheets, dissolving as they rose. Spray rose, enclosing him in a halo of himself, somehow caught and momentarily reflected in the event-haze, as if he were both there and also flickering into the surroundings and joining them. The other self peeled away and circled to the tops of the cliffs and became a wreath in the shearing wind, soon frayed into refractive vapor.
“Gets hard here,” was all Killeen said. They went into broken country ahead.
Then he knew he should have stayed behind once he and Quath had sighted the Mantis. He was a Bishop full grown now but for this pursuit experience was crucial and he had little. The Mantis and Killeen had fought each other ever since he could remember. Toby wanted to be here but he knew he was a drag on the others, though of course they would not speak of it.
Cermo said it with his eyes, firm and black. There was nothing to be done, the pursuit was on. This terrain was too dangerous for Toby to backtrack by himself; the Mantis was not the only high level mech here. They had watched from a distance as navvys and grubbers mined and foraged for mech debris.
So he settled in. He went hard and long and said nothing. Around their passage seethed strange vegetations, curled rock and clotted air, the esty’s energy expressed in frothy plenty. To Toby it seemed some moronic God kept reshaping the land beyond any probable use. The green profusion here seemed demented, underserved. He realized only dimly that his irritation came out of his fatigue. For that there was nothing to be done and in his father’s face he saw that. He kept falling behind their long, loping stride and so was glad when they stopped suddenly. To stay on his feet as they studied something on the ground he leaned against a rock, out of fear that he was already stumble-around tired.
It was a spool of something translucent yet mica-bright. <More discarded self,> Quath said. <Note also the locomos stripped away and left.>
In a hollow were dusty locomotion parts, a whole tractor assembly, footpads—all junked. Toby looked them over and saw they were modular.
<Left behind.> Quath rattled her flanks. <Defective. Or too much mass to propel.>
Cermo and Killeen inspected the ground. They had done that all along the trail, talking to each other about the tract. Toby looked at the round depressions and flattened angular prints and saw the broken twigs where the thing had passed. The twig stems were not dry yet and Cermo fingered them around there. Crushed wild grass lay squashed but not browned as it would be soon.
“It’s doin’ pretty well for broken country,” Cermo said.
Killeen frowned. “Going to be hard.”
Toby said, “If I could make it out, maybe its systems are so far down—”
“You said you didn’t see it,” Cermo said. “Just felt it.”
“Yeasay.”
Cermo shook his head slowly as he looked down at the matted grass. “If we run up on it, won’t be feelin’ our way.”
Of course he was right. The Mantis was invisible to human sensoria. It could deflect attention from itself, disperse telltales, turn a thousand tech-tricks. Toby scuffed at a stone and said nothing.
<I believed its abilities are diminished,> Quath said.
“Enough so it can’t ambush us?” Killeen eyed Quath’s shifting bulk skeptically.
<Perhaps. It sheds mass, then the locomos that propelled that mass, trying to move quickly.>
“Or wants us to think so,” Killeen shot back. He smiled to take the sting out of it. Toby wondered if Quath would understand the quick flash of yellow teeth in the rugged, walnut face.
3. Confusion Squall
Toby got dazed as the pace quickened with each passing hour. His wandering, miasmic mind was his true enemy now. He kept loping, inevitably behind the others, trying to go through the fog that deadened him.
They tracked the Mantis by its footpad scrapes across rocky ground. Cermo and Killeen took turns sweeping to both sides in case it was backtracking or leaving a false trail. They kept looking back to be sure Toby was still in sight. The humiliation of it was that they had done that years ago when Toby had been a boy and now he was not.
Men and women kept growing throughout their lives, so adults could outpace their children until the fragilities of old age finally caught them. There had been a time, Toby knew, when a boy reached manhood and was as strong as anyone. The competition with the mechs, who could always augment themselves further, had ended that. Humans had changed their own biology and chemistry to compete and in that way had become strangers to even their own past.
The timestone ebbed. Gauzy glows seeped up through the rough landscape. Days and nights were not evenly spaced here because the illumination came from light trapped in the space-time curvature itself. Refraction and time lags gave the radiance a hollow quality as though it had been strained through some filter and leached of its sharpness. They stopped and made camp and Toby fell asleep leaning against a boulder. He discovered this when he hit the ground and the others laughed, though of course not Quath. He made himself lay out his pad and once on it fell asleep again, and only woke when his father pulled off his boots to check his feet for blisters.
“You’re doing yeasay,” Killeen said softly in the dim dark. Toby’s nose caught the heady scent of cold but cooked vegetables and he found a plate of them next to his head. He ate them without speaking and his father brought a spicy tea hot from the fire. It was not a flame of course but a carbo-burner, so no mech could track them from the smoke or light.