Tides of Light (45 page)

Shibo sent,—Harper!—

Toby knelt beside Besen’s body and lifted her arm. She was face down and when he rolled her over they could see a fine web
of cracks in her faceplate. They were electrostatic fractures. Through them they saw her eyes, still open. She gazed at them
as if about to ask a question, one Killeen knew he could not answer.

Harper came running into the dry wash, panting. She squatted down and immediately let loose a UV shot back the way she had
come.

Shibo sent,—Jocelyn! All in.—

—Hold there,—Jocelyn replied.—Nearly got your rig ready.—

Shibo duck-walked over. Toby said numbly, “She can’t be. She can’t just…”

“Hit her clean,” Killeen said, and instantly regretted his bluntness.

“No. No.” Toby fumbled with her helmet.

“Leave her,” Shibo said.

Toby unlocked the collar ring. He gave it a one-quarter turn and lifted the helmet free. The trailing connectors into Besen’
s neck popped free of their sockets but there was no answering jerk from the body. Her eyes were still open.

Toby touched her face. “Besen, listen. Wake up. Come on. Wake up. Besen—”

“Take it easy. Toby,” Killeen said numbly. People hardly ever came back from a system attack like this.

“She’s just out, that’s all. Just out. We give her a stim, she’ll be okay.” Toby started rubbing Besen’s cheeks.

Shibo said, “Check her indices.”

“Just out, is all.” With fumbling fingers Toby reached around and rotated Besen’s head. He and Killeen had to take off her
backpack to get a clear look at her internal monitors. The digital circle at the top of her spine was uniformly blue. Numbers
slid through each window, cycling meaninglessly.

Shibo glanced at them and then looked back at the hills where the Cybers were. “Looks bad,” she said.

“No. No.” Toby rubbed her face harder, faster. “She’s overloaded, sure. That’s all though.”

“Could give her a stim,” Killeen said, reaching for his pack. He had to make the gesture even though it was the last bulb
he had.

“Chancy, doing it right away,” Shibo said. “Systems need reflex time.”

“I’ll bring her back,” Toby said. “She just needs blood in the head—”

“Here.” Killeen helped Toby screw the stim bulb to Besen’s head.

Toby stared into Besen’s unblinking eyes. “You
got
wake up.”

A microwave bolt whooshed overhead. Shibo said gently, “We have to try her now.”

Toby licked his lips. His mouth wrenched jaggedly. “If her systems overstim…”

Killeen put his hand on his boy’s shoulder but he could think of nothing to say.

Toby’s hands trembled over the bulb. “How… how can I? If…”

“She’s yours. You must decide.”

Toby’s face was white. He looked at Killeen for a long moment. Then he took the stim bulb and asked, “What—what setting?”

Killeen said, “Better try full. She’s pretty far gone.” He thought Besen was almost certainly dead but the next moment would
make that plain enough. He would have to get Toby away fast, though, no matter how much the boy wanted to linger over the
body.

“Okay.” Toby clicked the setting all the way over.

“Son, I—”

Toby triggered the tab. It made a small percussive thump.

Besen jerked. Her lips opened. She coughed. Toby lifted her to a sitting position and they all saw the indices stop rolling
on her neck. She blinked furiously.

They looked at her speechlessly. She coughed again and said, “I… what…”

Toby embraced her and began crying.

Two quick IR pulses raked the air.

“Get her walking,” Shibo said.

Toby and Killeen helped Besen to her feet. She stared at them blankly.

—Shibo! Start falling back!—Jocelyn sent.

Shibo called, “Harper! Cover! Carmen—go!”

Toby massaged Besen’s neck. “Got to go now. Just a step, that’s all. Here, lean on me.”

Shibo said gently, “Toby, Besen—we have to go now.”

“What?” His head snapped up. “No, she—”

“Rest the flanks’re folded in,” Shibo said.

Killeen took Besen’s other shoulder. “Come on, we’ll get cut off.”

“Her pack,” Toby said.

“Leave it.”

“No, wait—” Toby reached into the pack. He fiddled with an unseen catch for a moment and then jerked something free. “I gave
her this,” he said, holding up a chain with a small yellow pendant on it. “Don’t… don’t want damn Cybers get it.”

“Yes, take it.” Shibo looked at Killeen. “Cover.”

Killeen lay against the wall of the steep dry wash and fired a quick burst into the night. Shibo and Toby fell back with Besen.
Killeen slid back down to Besen’s pack and found her weapon. He expended it noisily, throwing several high-energy pulses at
every flickering target in his sensorium. Return fire chipped and burned the brow of the wash. He ducked under it and fled,
running with a sudden fevered spike of fear. All the way to the riverside he was acutely aware of how big and tempting a target
his back was.

He slid down the narrow sand embankment of the river and crashed into Jocelyn. An IR pulse whispered close by.

“How many more?” she gasped.

Three Bishops were manhandling a big mech part down the slope. Killeen looked around and saw Toby and Shibo getting Besen
into an awkward assembly of mech sheet-metal that floated in the water.

“None,” he said, and started toward the water.

“Three’s the most for that. No room for you.”

“You sure?”

“Get down that way.”

“Look. I want—”

“Shut up and move.”

“I—” Killeen shut up.

“You’re the last, then. Help us with this.”

Jocelyn was crisp and efficient again. She worked well when following a plan. But there was more to being Cap’n than that.

Three large men rolled something forward on its edge. In the infrared it looked to Killeen like a big shell. He grabbed it
and helped splash it into the shallows. The water was cuttingly cold at his ankles. He smelled the tint of Cybers nearby.
Microwaves spat from the embankment above.

Big chunks of rock caught at his feet as he held on to the shell. It bucked and tossed in the frothing current.

“Get in,” Jocelyn said.

Killeen hesitated. Already the team was bringing down another piece of sheetmetal that some crafter had quickly bent into
a crude cup shape. The metal had already lost most of its day heat and was so dim he could barely see it.

“How many to go?” he asked.

“Just us,” Jocelyn said.

“I’ll stay till—”

“Go.” Jocelyn looked at him squarely, her features blotched by the infrared glow of her face. “I’m Cap’n, I stay till the
last.”

“Yeasay.” No point in arguing.

Killeen stepped into the shell as Jocelyn held it steady. He lay down awkwardly. The shallow bowl rode only a hand’s height
above the black water. Jocelyn pushed him off. The river snatched him to itself as though he were a valued bauble. It swept
him along, jostling the shell and throwing bitterly cold spray into his face. He tossed over hidden ridges and banged down
hard.

He stayed as low as he could. His infrared image would be submerged in the cold water. Cybers on the shore could easily miss
him. Or so went the reasoning.

He waited and clung to the smooth inner shell as the rush and roar of the water rose around him. No shots sang through the
air nearby. He wondered how far the torrent would take him. It had not occurred to him until this moment that the Family should
have been told how long to stay
in their makeshift boats. Now they might disembark anywhere and end up spread far down this unknown river.

He lay worrying for a while before he recognized the faint odor of the shell he was riding. It was the used carapace of a
mech. He rode down the raging rapids in the hardened skin of his oldest enemy.

Quath crawled carefully forward. She had nearly exhausted her armaments now. It was time to use care and guile, else the day
was lost.

The Noughts continued to fall. Against Beq’qdahl’s band they would have been squashed long before. But Quath had maneuvered
in the gashed landscape and caught the attacking podia from behind. Like an ephemeral gauzy cloud she had danced upon the
slopes. The extra outfitting the Tukar’ramin had provided worked and purred and salted the very air with deceptions. When
podia fired at her the shots went wide, baking the already tortured soil.

But the game was narrowing. The Noughts were backed to the river now and there was little Quath could do for them.

She heard Beq’qdahl bray excitedly,

Quath tuned to the far mountain, where tiny Nought auras flickered. She had wondered why these distant Noughts did not give
battle.

One of Beq’qdahl’s podders asked,

Hope leaped in Quath. But Beq’qdahl answered,

Of course. Quath had forgotten that Beq’qdahl did not know which Nought was crucial. Still less did she suspect that in the
end, they might all be necessary, how interdependent these seemingly autonomous beings were.

Beq’qdahl cried.

Quath caught a distant podder with a quick burst of ultraviolet. It lurched, disoriented, and rolled down a hillside, snapping
two legs. Good.

As she drew closer to her own Nought she caught a tremor of the scorching outrage it—no,
he
—felt. Not toward the attacking podia, but toward the distant main body of Noughts.

These nearby Noughts were webbed together by the gossamer strands Quath could now feel ever more strongly. Their curious tension
between self and other gave forth a binding energy. There was true sinew in them. She felt the translucent threads gradually
cloaking her own minds. Their touch was cool and oddly comforting.

And their smoldering rage arced among them. A marrow-dark anger at their own kind, fueled by betrayal. Quath realized with
a start that the bitter scents were akin to the core-hot ire she felt toward Beq’qdahl and the other traitors.

Quath’s mood rose alkaline in her dry throats. She slipped down a yawning gap freshly torn in the hills. Her Nought was ahead,
his mood urgent. Those close to him fought on, wrapped in a haze of burning fatigue. Despair laced bile-yellow through them.

Quath saw Beq’qdahl clambering forward in short rushes, using the shelter of the shattered rock and broken mech factories.
Gloom descended. Orange flames crept up the cowling of a dead hexpodder nearby.

Quath switched to her full normal vision. The soil simmered in crisp pinks. The far mountains cooled faster, fading blue redoubts
sinking into the night. A purple-black streamer marked the great fault line.

She articulated softly forward. A multipodder appeared briefly and she quickly numbed its microwave dishes with a stinging
shot.

As she turned, she saw a Nought retreating. Before she could even judge which of the podia might catch the little fleeing
form, a sharp bark split the night.

Too late. Another Nought wounded or lost.

And the web among all the little creatures wrenched and tore violently. This was what they felt in the face of death—if anything,
even stronger than Quath’s stunned recoiling from the flat facts of the universe. A deeper sadness, laced with somber mortality.
It was worse, she saw, to be small and fragile and still face the great night. Yet these things did.

Too late. Too late.

Killeen had tried to sleep in the makeshift boat, but the shallow mech carapace spun and slewed and rocked endlessly. Once
he had dozed off, but only because the current had swept him into a slow vortex inlet. He did not know how long he had circled
there.

At the merest hint of dawn he paddled the bobbing carapace ashore. He waded onto a rocky beach, cold and sore and dizzy with
fatigue.

Carefully expanding his sensorium, he caught the hazy
fog-dots of Cybers. They were far behind him. Spread out, combing the riverbank. But coming fast.

He got back into the carapace boat. The current was weaker here. It took him in a jouncing path over boulders that swelled
up from the muddy waters like enormous speckled white fish.

He went through two rough rapids before he heard the dull bass roar up ahead. It sounded like no battle he had ever heard
before. When he asked his Arthur Aspect, the small mind said:

I had forgotten that Snowglade had dried out so in your lifetime. I remember that sound from pleasant days of sport on the
rivers that once blessed the valley of the great Citadel. It is a waterfall—probably a high one, judging from the amplitude.

Arthur drew him a quick sketch. Killeen had always visualized water as a glorious, rare, placid entity. That it could rage
and kill seemed a violation of some implicit promise. He quickly stroked against the suddenly gathering current. The shore
was near but he swept by like a leaf in a gale.

The water numbed his hands. He leaned far out of the awkward boat and stroked with furious energy. The shore inched closer.
A roaring was all around him now. Spray hovered just ahead. He looked in that direction but the river seemed to vanish. It
was hopeless. The carapace was speeding faster toward the brink.

Killeen rolled out of the carapace. The water stung as he sank. His head went under just as he sucked in a breath. His boots
struck something solid. He stroked against the current to keep upright. Already he wanted to breathe.

The water was a brown wall. Where was shore? Currents had turned him around so much he could not tell. He stepped
heavily and found that the riverbottom was steep. He headed upward. Knowing little about water, he saw that his only hope
was that the mass of his equipment would keep him from being swept away.

He slipped. For an agonizing moment he tumbled. He got his boot on a rock but it rolled out from under. The water was bitterly
cold. He pulled himself forward with his arms and then got enough purchase to stand up. The burning in his lungs was worse.
He surged forward, hoping he was going the right way. His boot slipped but he fanned his arms against the current and kept
upright. Three more steps—and his head broke water. He struggled up the slope and fell on gravel.