Great Sky River

by Gregory Benford

Genres: Alien Contact; Hard Science Fiction; Space Exploration; Space Opera

Synopsis

The third novel in the award-winning author's classic Galactic Center series is available once again. "A challenging, pacesetting work of hard science fiction that should not be missed" ( Los Angeles Times). Nearly 100,000 years after first contact with the machines that dominate the universe, a few hundred humans survive. Trapped on Snowglade, a barren world near the center of the galaxy, people like Killeen of Family Bishop and his child Toby are primitive scavengers, homeless and hunted by the ruling "mechs." Then suddenly, a strange cosmic entity-neither organic nor cybernetic nor living matter-reaches out from a black hole to speak with Killeen. But can this fallen descendant of starfarers understand this alien being in time-and seize his only chance to save his family and mankind from final annihilation?

Release date: October 14, 2009

Publisher: Aspect

Print pages: 468

Sample

The Calamity

 

Killeen walked among the vast ruins.


Exhausted, he kept on through a jumble of shattered steel, caved-in ceilings, masonry and stone and smashed furniture.

His breath rasped as he called his father. “Abraham!”

A cold murmuring wind snatched the name away. Smoke seethed from crackling fires and streamed by him, making the air seem
to waver and flow.


From here the Citadel sprawled before him down the broad, knobbed hill. Intricate warrens were now squashed into heaps of
stone and slag. Legs stiff from exhaustion, eyes stinging with smoke and grief, he paused above a shattered plain of marble-white
rubble—the caved-in shards of a dome that once rose a kilometer above the Citadel arboretum. Places where he had run and played,
loved and laughed…


“Abraham!” He had seldom spoken his father’s name and now it seemed strange and foreign. He wheezed, coughed. The acrid bite
of smoke caught in his throat.


The lower ramparts of the Citadel burned fiercely. The
mechs had penetrated there first. Black murk hung over the larger districts—the Broadsward, the Green Market, and the Three
Ladies' Rest. Soot coated the jagged teeth of broken walls.


Beyond, lofty spires had been cut to blunt stubs. Their stumps radiated gorgons of structured steel. The shifting breeze brought
him the crunch of collapsing walls.


But the wind carried no moans or shrieks. The Citadel lay silent. The mechs had taken lives and selves and left nothing but
emptied bodies.


Killeen turned and moved along the hillside. This was his old neighborhood. Tumbled-down blocks and twisted girders could
not wholly conceal the paths and corridors he had known as a boy.


Here a man lay, eyes bulging at the bruised sky.

There a woman was split in two beneath a fallen beam.

Killeen knew them both. Friends, distant relatives of Family Bishop. He touched the cold flesh of each and moved on.

He had fled with the remnants of Family Bishop. They had quickly reached the far ridgeline and only then had he seen that
his father was not among the survivors. Killeen had turned back toward the Citadel, wearing powered leggings for speed. Like
lean pistons, his legs carried him within the slumped defensive walls before anyone in the Family noticed that he was gone.


Abraham had been defending the outer ramparts. When the mechs had breached those, the human perimeter had fallen back in a
mad scramble. The mechs poured in. Killeen was sure he had heard his father’s voice calling over the comm. But then the battle
had submerged them all in a rushing hot tornado of death and panic.


—Killeen!—

He stopped. Cermo-the-Slow was calling over the comm. “Leave me alone,” Killeen answered.

—Come on! No time left!—

“You head on back.”

—No! There’s mechs still around. Some comin' this way.—

“I’ll catch up.”

—Run! No time left.—

Killeen shook his head and did not answer. With a flick of a finger he dropped out of the comm net.

He climbed among tumbled stone. Even in his powered suit it was hard to make his way up the steep angles of ruined walls.
Though the mechs had gouged gaping holes, the massive bulwarks had stood for a while. But beneath the incessant pounding blows
even the heavy foundations had finally yielded.


He walked beneath an arch that had miraculously survived. He knew what lay ahead but could not keep himself from it.

She was in the same position. The heat beam had caught his wife as he carried her. Her left side was seared raw.

“Veronica.”

He bent down and looked into her open gray eyes. They peered out at a world forever vanquished.

He gently tried to brush closed her rebuking eyes. Her gummy, stiff eyelids refused to move, as if she would not give up her
last glimpse of the Citadel she had loved. Her pale lips parted with the half-smile she always made just before she spoke.
But her skin was cold and hard, as if it had now joined the unyielding solidity of the soil itself.


He stood. He felt her eyes at his back as he made himself walk on.

He scrambled over slumped piles that had been homes, workshops, elegant arcades. Fires snapped in the central library.

The public gardens had been his favorite spot, a lush wealth of moist green in the dry Citadel. Now they were blasted, smoking.

As he passed the smashed Senate, its alabaster galleries groaned and trembled and slowly clattered down.

He moved on warily, but there was no sign of mechs. “Abraham!”

Around him lay the exploded remains of his boyhood. Here in his father’s workshop he had learned to use the power-assisting
craft. There, beneath a lofty corbelled vault, he had first met a demure, shy Veronica.


“Abraham!”

Nothing. No body. It probably lay beneath collapsed bulwarks.

But he had not covered all the rambling complex that men had built through generations. There was still some chance.

—Killeen!—

It was not Cermo this time. Fanny’s voice cut through to him sharp and sure, overriding his own cutoff of the comm.

—Withdraw! There’s nothing we can do here now.—

“But… the Citadel…”

—It’s gone. Forget it.—

“My father …”

—We must run.—

“Others … There might be …”

—No. We’re sure. Nobody left alive here.—

“But…”

—Now. I’ve got five women covering the Krishna Gate. Come out that way and we’ll head for Rolo’s Pass.—


“Abraham…”

—Hear me? Hustle!—

He turned for one last look. This had been all the world for him when he was a boy. The Citadel had made humanity’s warm clasp
real and reassuring. It had stood resolutely against a hostile universe outside, strong yet artful. Its delicate towers had
glistened like rock candy. Returning to the Citadel from short forays, his heart had always leaped when he saw the proud,
jutting spires. He had wandered the Citadel’s labyrinthian corridors for many hours, admiring the elegant traceries that laced
the high, molded ceilings. The Citadel had always been vast and yet warm, its every carefully sculpted niche infused with
the spirit of the shared human past.


He looked back toward where Veronica’s body lay.

There was no time to bury her. The world belonged now to the living, to fevered flight and slow melancholy.

Killeen made himself take a step away from her, toward the Krishna Gate. Another.

The blasted walls teetered past. He had trouble finding his way.

Fog and smoke swirled before him. “Abraham!” he called again against empty silence.

The Citadel’s high, spidery walkways now lay broken in the dust, sprawled across the inner yards. He crossed the ancient,
familiar ground in a numbed daze. Craters yawned where he had once scampered and laughed.


At the edge of the smoldering ruins he looked back. “Abraham!”

He listened and heard nothing. Then, distantly, came a quick buzzing of mech transmissions. The rasping sound narrowed his
mouth.


He turned and ran. Ran without hope, letting his legs find the way. Stinging dust clouded his eyes—

A jerk.

Intense, blinding light.

“Hey, c’mon. Wake up.”

Killeen coughed. He squinted against the high glare of harsh yellow lamps. “Huh? What—”

“C’mon, gotta get up. Fanny says.”

“I, I don’t—”

Cermo-the-Slow loomed over him. The big smiling face was weary but friendly. “I just pulled the stim-plug on you, is all.
Got no time, wake you up easy.”


“Ah … easy …”

Cermo frowned. “You been dreamin' again?”

“I… the Citadel…”

Cermo nodded. “I was ’fraid that.”

“Veronica… found her.”

“Yeah. Look, you don’t think ’bout that, hear? She was a good woman, won’ful wife. But you got let go her now.”

“I…” Killeen’s tongue was raw from calling his father. Or was it from the alcohol he had gulped last night?

This was morning, early morning. He felt the stiffness in him from the night’s sleep. Peering upward, he could make out the
shadowy bulk of alien machinery. They had bedded down for the night in a Trough, he remembered. Around him, Family Bishop
was waking up.


“C’mon,” Cermo urged. “Sorry I pulled the plug so quick. Snap up now, though. We’re movin' out.”

“How… how come?”

“Ledroff spotted some Snout comin' this way. Figures it’s headed into this Trough for supplies.”

“Oh…” Killeen shook his head. An ache spread from his temples into his clammy forehead. A bead of night sweat dripped from
his nose as he sat up.


“You better stay off the stim-tab awhile,” Cermo said, frowning. “Gives you bad dreams.”

“Yeah.” Killeen nodded and started groping for his boots. They were the first thing you put on and the last you took off.

“It’s been years, after all,” Cermo said kindly. “Time we let it be.”

Killeen frowned. “Years… ?”

“Sure.” Cermo studied him a moment, plainly worried. “Been six years since the Calamity.”

“Six…”

“Look, we all like it, gettin' a li’l stimmed now ’n' then. Not if it takes you back into bad times though.”

“I… I guess so.”

He clapped Killeen on the shoulder. “Get on up, now. We’re movin' quick.”

Killeen nodded. Cermo-the-Slow went away to awaken others. His large frame slipped quickly among the shadows of the alien
vats and machines.


Killeen’s hands pulled on his boots but his mind still wandered among memories. His dirty clothes, the worn boots, the calluses
and stains on his hands… all testified to what had happened since the fall of the Citadel, the Calamity.


He stood slowly, feeling his chilled muscles stretch and protest.

The Citadel was gone.

Veronica.

Abraham.

He had left now only Toby, his son. Only a fragment of Family Bishop.

And finally, he had left before him now the endlessly stretching prospect of flight and rest and flight again.

Something was after them.


The Family had just come straggling over a razorbacked ridge, beneath a pale jade sky. Killeen’s shocks wheezed as his steady
lope ate up the downgrade.


The red soil was deeply wrinkled and gullied. Cross-hatching was still sharp in the tractor-tread prints that cut the parched
clay. There had been so little rain the prints could well be a century old.


A black-ribbed factory complex sprawled at the base of the slope. Killeen flew over the polished ebony domes, sending navvys
scuttling away from his shadow, clacking their rude dumb irritation.


Killeen hardly saw them. He was watching spiky telltales strobe-highlighted on his right retina.

There: a quick jitter of green, pretty far back.

It came and went, but always in a new place.

There, again. Far behind.

Not directly following them, either. Not a typical Marauder maneuver. Smart.

He blinked, got the alternative display. The Family
was a ragged spread of blue dabs on his topo map. He was pleased to see they kept a pretty fair lopsided triangle. Cermo-the-Slow
was dragging ass behind, as always.


Killeen saw himself, an amber winking dot at the apex. Point man. Target.

He grimaced. This was his first time ever as point, and here came some damn puzzle. He’d tried to beg off when Cap’n Fanny
ordered him to the front. There were others better experienced—Ledroff, Jocelyn, Cermo. He’d much rather have stayed back.
Fanny kept giving him extra jobs like this, and while he’d do whatever she said without protest, this had made him jittery
from the start.


Fanny knew more than anybody, could see through Marauder tricks. She should be up here. But she kept pushing him.

Now this. He dropped from the air, eyes slitted.

Killeen came down on a pocked polyalum slab, the old kind that mechs had used for some long-forgotten purpose. Packing fluff
blew in the warm wind, making dirty gray drifts against his cushioned crustcarbon boots. Mechmess littered the ground, so
common he did not notice it.


“Got a pointer behind,” Killeen sent to Fanny.

—Snout?— she answered.

“Nossir noway,” Killeen answered quickly to cover his nerves. “Think I’d sing out if was that same old Snout, been tagging
us for days?”


—What is, then?—

“Dunno. Looks big, then small.”

Killeen did not understand how his retinal area scan worked, had only a vague idea about radar pulses. He did know things
weren’t supposed to look large on one pass
and small the next, though. Habit told you more than analysis.


—’Quipment’s bust?—

“I dunno. Flashes okay,” Killeen said reluctantly. Was Fanny joshing him? He didn’t know which he liked less, something that
could come up on them this way, or his gear gone flatline on him.


Fanny sighed. She was a nearly invisible speck to his right rear, wiry and quick. Killeen could hear her clicking her teeth
together, trying to decide, the way she always did.


“Whatsay?” he prodded impatiently. It was up to her. She was Cap’n of the Family and had a long lifetime rich in story and
experience, the kind of gut savvy that meant more in dealing with Marauder mechs than anything else.


She had been Cap’n for all the years that Family Bishop had been on the move. She knew the crafts of flight and pursuit, of
foraging and stealing; of deception and attack. And through terrible years she had held the Family together.


—Comes closer?—

“Looks. Dodging fast.”

Fanny clicked her teeth again. Killeen could see in his mind’s eye her wise old eyes crinkling as she judged their positions.
Her warm presence suffused his sensorium, bringing a sure, steady calm. She had been Cap’n so long and so well, Killeen could
not conceive how the Family had done without her before, when they lived in the Citadel.


—We make the fist, then,— she said with finality.

Killeen was relieved. “Goodsay.”

—Sound the call.—

He blinked. “Won’t you?”

—You’re point. Act like one.—

“But you know more about…” Killeen hesitated. He did not like admitting to his own doubts, not with Ledroff and others probably
listening in. He liked even less the prospect of leading an attack.


“Look, Ledroff has done this before. Jocelyn, too. I’ll drop back and—”

—No. You.—

“But I don’t—”

—Naysay!— She was abrupt, biting. —Call!—

Killeen wet his lips and steadied himself. He sent over general comm, —Heysay lookleft! Fist!—

Most of the Family were over the ragged ridgeline now. That would provide some shelter from whatever was coming from behind.
He watched as they came spilling down the ruddy, gorge-pocked hillsides. They were a slow tumbling fluid, their individual
tinny acknowledgments coming as thin insect cries.


Killeen did not consider for a moment that the voices he heard were carried on radio waves, for he had lived all his life
in a sensory bath provided by the linking of acoustic and electromagnetic signals. The distinction between them would have
demanded more science than he had ever mastered, ever would master. Instead he heard the gathering peppery voices as scattershot
ringings, carrying long and remote across the hot still silence of dusty late afternoon. Though each Family member glided
in beautiful long arcs, the Family itself seemed to Killeen to hang suspended in the middle distance, so gradual was its progress,
like thick dark down-swarming molasses. Gravid and slow they came, this worn and perhaps only remaining remnant of humanity:
eagering, homing, tribing.


Killeen caught fragments of talk from Ledroff.

—Why’d Cap’n put him… Damfino why he’s up there…—


“Cut the chatter!” Killeen called.

—Couldn’t find his ass w’both hands…—

“I said quiet!” he whispered fiercely.


Killeen had heard Ledroff’s muttered jibes through the comm before. Until now he had ignored them. No need to provoke a faceoff
with the big, self-assured man. But this time Killeen couldn’t let it pass. Not when it endangered them.


—Seems me he’s jumpin' at spooks,— Ledroff got in, then fell silent.

Killeen wished Cap’n Fanny had come on full comm line and cut off Ledroff. A mere disapproving click of her tongue would have
shut him up.


The Family skimmed low, using savvy earned through hard years. Wheeling left, they seeped down among the knobby, domed buildings
of the manufacturing complex.


Factory mechs wrenched to a stop as the Family skipped light and fast through their workyards. Then the blocky, awkward-looking
machines hunkered down, withdrawing their extensors into marred aluminum shells. Such mechs had no other defense mechanisms,
so the Family gave the slope-nosed, turtlelike forms no notice.


Still, the humans had to be fast. They knew if they stayed here long these slow-thinking drudges would send out a call. Lancers
would come. Or worse.


Killeen pondered for a moment the possibility that the thing trailing them was a lone Lancer, summoned by a minor pillage
the Family had made a few days before. He checked the faint, flickering tracers behind.


No, nothing like a Lancer. Something smaller, certainly. It gave off hardly any image at all. Still…

“Yea!” he called. Tapping his right temple twice with a forefinger, he sent his scan topo map to the entire Family. “We’re
bunching up!”


With muttered irritation they spread out, dissolving their moving beeswarm triangle. They formed the traditional concentric
rings, ragged because the Family numbered a mere 278 now. And some of them were achingly slow—gimpy, or old, or wounded from
past scrapes and fights and blunders.


Fanny saw the problem and called, —Show the wind our heels!—

The old saying worked. They began to run faster now, a keen unspoken fear at their backs.

He sent the latest topo to Fanny. It showed a muddle of bluewhite tracers behind them.

Fanny sent, —Where’s it?—

Killeen admitted, “Dunno. Looks to be some kinda screen.”

—Deliberate confusion?—

“Don’t think so. But…”

—Situation like this, your topo’s no good for figurin’ size. Go by speed. No ’facturing mech moves quick as a Marauder.—

“This one’s slow, then fast.”

—Must be a Marauder.—

“Think we should stand ’n' wait for it?”

He felt her assessing regard like a cool wedge in his sensorium.

—What you think?—


“Well… it might just be reconning us.”

—Could be.—

She was giving nothing away. “So’d be best if we keep on, make like we don’t see it.”

—Long’s we can keep track of it, sure.—

Killeen wondered what Fanny meant by that, but he didn’t want to ask, not with Ledroff listening. He said guardedly, “It keeps
jumpin' round.”


—Might be some new mechtech.—

So? he thought. How do we respond? He kept his voice flat and assured, though, as he said, “I figure we don’t give away that we see it. If it’s just checkin'
its ’quipment, it’ll go away.”


—And come back when we’re sleepin',— she said flatly.

“So? Our watch’ll pick it up. But if we take a shot at it now, when we can’t see it so good, maybe it gets away. Next time
it comes back with better mechtech. So then we don’t pick it up and it skrags us.”


Fanny didn’t answer for a long moment and Killeen wondered if he had made a fool of himself. She had coached him in the crafts
and he always felt inadequate compared with her sure, almost casual grasp of Family lore. She could be a stern Cap’n, a shrewd
tactician, firm and fast. And when they had fought or fled, and again gathered around nightfires to tell their tales, she
could be warm and grandmotherly. Killeen would do anything to avoid disappointing her. But he had to know what to do, and
she was giving him no easy answers.


—Yeasay. That’s best, long as this’s a reg’lar Marauder.—

Killeen felt a burst of pride at her approval. But a note of concern in her voice made him ask, “What if it’s not?”

—Then we run. Hard.—

They were out of the foothills now. The Family sprinted across eroded flatlands.

Fanny asked as she panted, —See it yet?—

“Naysay.”

—Should’ve climbed the ridge by now. Don’t like this.—

“Think maybe a trap?” Killeen cast about for possibilities as he searched his topo display. Again he wished Jo-celyn or even
goddamn Ledroff had this job. If an attack came he wanted to be near his son. He scanned ahead and found Toby in the middle
of the moving Family formation.


Fanny dropped back, scanning the ridgeline.

Killeen searched again for the elusive pursuer. The topo danced in his eye, speeding ribbons of light.

More cloudy tracers.

To the right came a dim speckling of pale blue.

Killeen realized too late that it would have been better to hold the ridgeline. They were exposed and had lost the enemy.
He grunted in frustration and sped forward.


They were partway down the broad valley when he looked right and saw first the overlay winking green and then the far rocky
scarp. It was fresh rock, cleaved by some mining mech, its amber faces gouged and grooved.


But the clear bare cut hadn’t been there moments before. Killeen was sure of that.

“Bear on my arrow!” he shouted to the whole Family. He cut toward a low hill. “Fanny, you’d—”

Killeen heard a sharp crackling.

He saw Fanny fall. She gave a cry of surprise. Then her voice sharpened, riding an outrushing gasp of startled pain.

He turned and fired at the distant carved hills, where stood half-finished blocks of rhomboid stone.

Back came an answering echo of snapping, crisp circuit death.

A hit. Probably not enough to drop the thing dead, but it would buy some seconds.

He shouted, “Max it!”

With Fanny down, he’d have to get the Family away, fast. Killeen blinked, saw the blue dots of the Family swerve toward broken
terrain that provided some shelter. Good. But where was—?


“Toby! Hug down in that stream bed, see?”

A klick away, his son hesitated.

“To your right!”

—and for a moment that seemed balanced forever beside a harrowing abyss, Killeen was sure his son’s gear was blown or overloaded,
making it impossible to hear the warning. Or that the boy was confused by the scramble of electronoise. Or weary from the
run. And so would remain standing while on the dry rutted plain no other simple unmoving target would leap into the fisheye
lens of the unseen Marauder mech. His son’s frozen indecision would recommend itself as a target.


Hanging there on the instant, Killeen remembered a time when he had been on a scavenging expedition with his father, a mere
short foray for needed chip-parts, so easy his mother consented to her son’s going along. And there a Marauder had chanced
upon them as they looted an isolated ramshackle field station where navvymechs labored in mute dumb servitude. Killeen had
been on a small side trip to snag servos from a dusty storage shed, and in the attack the Marauder (a Rattler, old but fully
armed) had seen him and run him down. Three men and
a woman had blown the Rattler to spare parts, catching it two steps away from Killeen’s frantically fleeing form. He had been
scared so badly he shat his suit. But what he remembered now was not the embarrassment as the shitsmell got out, and not the
taunts of his friends. Instead, he recalled in a spirit-sucking instant his own father’s look: eyes burned into the sockets,
deadwhite. Eyes that had drilled into him with their desperation. And Killeen knew his own face now locked into the rictus
of foresighted horror as his own son stood, unmoving, for one solid thudding heartbeat of immutable lost time—


“Toby!”

—Uh, yeasay.—

The distant figure scrambled down an embankment, into the fossil snaketwist of an ancient waterway.

Killeen could not breathe. He realized he had gone rigid himself, a perfect target.

“Hunch ’n’ go, boy,” he called as he swerved and dodged away.

And felt something go by—tssssip!—in the still air.


He saw quick darting orange sparks in his right eye. That meant something was poking, trying to find a way into him. But fast, faster than he’d ever known.


A prickly coldsweat redness skittered through him with a grating whine.

Killeen dropped to the ground. “Fanny! How you?”

—I… auhhhh… can’t…—

“This thing—what is it?”

—I… haven’t seen… years…—

“What’ll we do?

Ledroff tried to cut in on the narrow-cone comm-line. Killeen swore and blanked him out.

—Don’t… believe… what you… see…—

“What’s—”

She coughed. Her line went silent.

Fanny knew more than anybody in the Family about the rare, deadly mechs. She’d fought them a long time, back before Killeen
was born. But Killeen could tell from her sluggish voice that this thing had clipped her solid, blown some nerves maybe.


No help from the fine, wise old woman, then.

Killeen looked back at the warped, worked shapes of stone on the far hillside. There were contorted planes, surfaces carved
for purposes incomprehensible to humans. He thought of them not at all, had long ago learned to look past that which no man
could riddle out. Instead he searched for the freshness of the cleavecuts, the telltale signs of autochisel.


Which weren’t there.

“Jocelyn!”

The scraped stone surfaces thinned. Shimmered. Killeen had the dizzying sensation of seeing through the naked rock into a
suddenly materializing city of ramparts and solid granite walls. It hummed with red energy, swelled as he watched.


“Damnall what’s that,” he muttered to himself.

The city shimmered, crystal and remote. Plain rock melted to glassy finery.

And then back again to chipped stone.

Jocelyn called, disbelieving, —The whole hillside?—

Killeen grunted. “Mirage that size takes a big mech.”

—Or new kind,— Jocelyn said.

She came in from his right, bent low and running with compressors. Behind them the Family fled full bore, their pantings and
gaspings coming to Killeen in proportion to their distance. They were a constant background chorus,
as though they all watched him, as though all the Family was both running for safety and yet still here, witness to this latest
infinitesimal addition to the long losing struggle with the machines. He felt them around him like a silent jury.


Jocelyn called, —You hit somethin’?—

Killeen ducked behind an outcropping of ancient, tortured girders. Their thick spans were blighted with scabs of burnt-red
rust. “Think so.”


—Solid?—

“Naysay. Sounded like hitting a mech circuit, is all.”

—It’s still there, then. Hiding.—

No chance to try for Fanny yet. He kept a safe distance from her crumpled form, sure she would by now be a well-found target
point.


—I can smell it.— Jocelyn’s alto voice, normally so cottonsoft, was stretched thin and high.

He could, too, now that he’d calmed a fraction. A heavy, oily flavor. His inbuilt detectors gave him the smell, rather than
encoded parameters; humans remembered scents better than data. But he could not recognize the close, thick flavor. He was
sure he had never met it before.


A fevered hollow whuuung twisted the air. It came to Killeen as a sound beyond anything ear could capture, a blend of infra-acoustic rumble at his
feet and electromagnetic screech, ascending to frequencies high and thin in the roiling breeze.


“It’s throwing us blocks,” he said. “Musta used a combination on Fanny, but it don’ work on us.”

—She got old ’quipment,— Jocelyn said.

“It’s prob’ly sweeping keys right now,” Killeen said, breathing hard and wanting something to do, anything.

—Looking for ours.—

“Yeasay, yeasay,” Killeen muttered. He tried to remember. There had been some mech who’d done that, years back. It broadcast
something that got into your self, worked right on the way you saw. It could make you believe you were looking at the landscape when in fact the picture was
edited, leaving out the—


“Mantis,” he said suddenly. “Mantis, Fanny called it. She’d seen it a couple times.”

The Mantis projected illusions better than any mech ever had. It could call up past pictures and push them into your head
so quickly you didn’t know what was real. And behind the picture was the Mantis