Tides of Light

by Gregory Benford

  But then he had lost sight of his father in the hammering chaos of multiple assaults. Mech aircraft had bombed the central Citadel and the ramparts fell.

  Killeen had helped carry ammunition to the air-defense guns as strange lights filled the sky. They all had sensed unseen presences above the battle.

  When Killeen’s wife, Veronica, died he had ceased to register very much. He had felt her death in his sensorium, since they were linked. But it had taken a long chaotic time to find her, to be sure.

  He stood on a far hill, looking back meditatively at the mech city. Part of him relished the sight of the mighty mechs brought low. Another remembered the Citadel, and not only because of the city. The sky far beyond began to move with washes of pale luminescence in a way that reminded him of the Calamity. The luminosity was in the air itself, not the fainter play of colors in molecular clouds. The sight chilled him.

  Yet it also recalled his encounters on Snowglade with an entity which had somehow spoken through the magnetic fields of the planet itself. The thing had talked incomprehensibly of Abraham, and of issues Killeen could not follow. Recalling that, he wondered if the magnetic being had been at the Calamity, had lit the sky with its witnessing. Why should such a vast thing care for the doings of a small, inconsequential race? There were no answers.

  Killeen finally shook off the mood and moved on. The quiet of the natural world enfolded him.

  But then a biting sulfuric tinge filled his nose. A hollow bass note caught at the outer edge of his sensorium. A mech trace?

  It carried a strange sugary aftertaste, though, unlike any mech signature he knew. His sensorium translated its electromag-tags into smells because that was the human sense directly linked to memory centers; a brief whiff of an old odor brought long-buried memories welling up, often of use.

  Killeen slipped between the slumped trunks of trees that somehow still showed fresh green growth. The land had collapsed, but root systems seemed resistant even to the implosion of the planet. He flitted quickly among the tangled growth and peered ahead.

  Siiiggg!—something fast cut the air near him. He dropped into a dry streambed and strained to feel his way forward through his sensorium. Hot smells rang through him.

  He angled along a ridgeline and three more times the quick, thin wail sliced the silence. Something was shooting at him, but not well. A fourth bolt caught him slightly and he smelled a cutting microwave pulse. It had the pungency to blow out the inner structures he knew by the name Diode, but whose function he did not fathom. He felt his own Diodes clamp down, sheltering themselves.

  Silence. Cautiously they popped open. His sensorium filled with regained color and perspectives. He carefully edged up to the ridge rim and used a lightpipe to steal a glance over it.

  A lone mech was struggling up the opposite face of the ridge. Deep scars marked its thick shell. Bolts had crisped away the steel. Its angular design was unlike anything Killeen had seen on Snowglade.

  Without thinking he aimed at the mech and caught it full in the forward antenna complex. It stopped for an instant. Killeen could see no damage and he fired again. This time the mech clearly blocked the shot. His electrobolt ricocheted off into a ruby flare that momentarily lit the scene against the encroaching gloom of twilight.

  His Ling Aspect cried:

  This is a totally unnecessary risk! Run while you can.

  “Run long enough,” Killeen grunted.

  He dimly saw that he needed to strike out at something, anything. Suddenly meeting a mech had brought out all his suppressed anger.

  He had seen sophisticated defenses like this before. Nothing in Family Bishop’s weaponry could penetrate it. The chunky mech’s treads caught on an outcropping. It swiveled, bringing projectors on its side around to have a full field of fire at him.

  Killeen ducked, knowing the fringing fields of a broadband microwave burst could catch him even well below the ridgeline. He hunkered down, gritting his teeth hard to tell his subsystems to button up.

  But nothing came. Not even a whisper.

  He risked a glimpse. The mech had flipped over and was burning. Through the curling black pyre he saw a cyborg approaching, its body a complex set of coupled, interlocking hexagonal blocks. Thick brown skin wrinkled and stretched as it made its way up from a broken valley below. A shot had blown open the mech. Its lateral carbosteel housing puckered outward into twisted fingers, a clear sign that the cyborg had somehow triggered an internal energy supply.

  Killeen decided to lie low. This cyborg was probably part of a team assigned to clear out any remaining pockets of mechs or humans. If he ran it could easily catch him. His only hope lay in the possibility that the cyborg had not registered his own small, ineffectual fire.

  He shut down all his systems again and moved to his right, downslope, seeking more shelter from the rocky ridge. The burning mech was so near that without acoustic amping he could easily hear the crackling and then a loud bang as some vat exploded. Standing still, panting, he thought he could hear the quiet approach of the cyborg: a rustling, clicking cadence as carbosteel limbs articulated.

  The cyborg’s noise grew against the pop and snarl of the flames. It should have reached the mech by now. But the sounds did not stop. Instead the steady rhythm seemed to move to his left, skirting around the mech’s pyre.

  And slowing. It was coming around on him from above.

  Killeen carefully backed farther downslope. The cyborg might not know what was over here; it would be cautious.

  Stealth was his only ally. He might be able to slip back over the ridgeline as the cyborg crossed, keeping low so that his opponent missed him. Then he would have a few moments to run. He strained to hear the whispery sound of the cyborg’s flexing leathery hide.

  There—it was clambering up over the last shelf of rock which crowned the ridge. Softly he backed away. Time contracted for him and he heard each cyborg step, each swivel and adjustment of pads as they sought purchase on the steeply sloped stones.

  The alien was near the top now. Killeen could not tell how far away it was. In the enormous silence, punctuated only by the snapping of the mech’s oily fire, his natural hearing seemed to amplify each small sound into deep significance. Somewhere upslope on the ridge a pebble rattled down. Killeen heard it before he saw it bounce off a boulder and scatter fragments into the soil.

  His eyes followed the pebble’s probable trajectory back into a saddleback where a shelf petered out. It had been a natural wash once and he guessed that a steep streambed led down from there, spreading out onto the other face of the ridge. Which implied that the cyborg had paused at the top, maybe resting but more likely just waiting, cautious, probing throughout the spectrum before it exposed itself on the other side.

  The saddleback was not far away. If he was right, the cyborg was reconning the far slope. But he did not dare power up any of his sensory net to check.

  Killeen set himself and in one quick rush was up and over the nearest jagged shelf. He rolled over the peak and down into a wash of gravel. He came up on his feet, feeling bulky and awkward without any of his inboard systems running. Sluggishly he ran downhill, his joints aching, looking for shelter.

  A glance back. The cyborg’s tail antenna was disappearing beyond the saddleback as it headed down the other side. But the alien wouldn’t take long to figure matters out.

  Killeen ran pell-mell, stumbling on stones and nearly sprawling more than once. There was no place to hide. The planetary convulsions had brushed this slope free of large boulders and the gullies were folded in, shallow. He searched for any minor cranny in the ridgeline, but the few small caves had fallen in. He ran completely past the burning mech before the idea struck him.

  The mech lay blistered and broken now, shattered by internal explosions. Flames began to gutter out. Thick, greasy smoke licked the rocky slope.

  Killeen chose a crimp in the hull just above the heavy tread assembly. He looked back at the ridgeline. Something moved there and he did not take
the time to see what the cyborg was doing. He flung himself into the stove-in section of the burning mech carcass. He was caught immediately in a tangle of parts and smelly goo.

  Still no sign that the cyborg had seen him. Without his sensorium, the usual mech attack modes—microwave, infrared saturation, hyper-fléchettes—would give him no sign unless they struck him square on.

  Cowering in the stinking jumble of the ruined mech, he felt a slow rage building. He had been chased and hurt and mistreated and he was damned if he was going to go out this way. He could wait for the cyborg to go away—assuming it did not return to harvest the mech for parts or scrap. But something made him peer out, wanting the big thing to lumber into view, wanting at least one clear shot at it. Ling barked in incredulous anger. Killeen instantly slapped the Aspect down.

  He listened intently but could pick up nothing this close to the smoldering fires. He would have to expose himself to see what was going on.

  Now that he looked closely at the mech body, he recognized housings and struts and assemblies like those he had yanked out of destroyed mechs back on Snowglade. The outer skin had looked odd, but apparently the same principles of basic design ruled among all mechs at Galactic Center.

  Carefully he inched out. Most mechs had visual detectors that registered rapid movement, and the cyborg seemed at least as sophisticated. He saw movement on the ridgeline. Coils of acrid smoke stung his eyes, blurring his vision. He began to wonder if it had been such a brilliant idea after all to hide here. All the cyborg had to do was amble up and overturn the mech body and—

  Without any warning the cyborg appeared in his field of view, a watery image refracting through the pall of sour smoke. It articulated deftly over the broken ground, antennae swiveling. But it was not coming toward him. Instead it surged with startling speed across the broad wash of the streambed. A parabolic dish turned and Killeen felt a faint buzzing in his neck. Even with his sensorium deadened, the chips he carried along his spine had picked up the cyborg’s burst.

  Such a powerful pulse could not have been simply a comm signal. The cyborg was firing at something. Something that worried it considerably, for it now scrambled forward, its double-jointed limbs clashing with haste, its pads sometimes slipping on the loosened topsoil.

  Killeen bit his lip to try to restrain himself, but it was hopeless. Long years of training, the recent humbling capture—these combined to make him seize his narrow-bore rifle, the one inherited from his father and his grandfather before that, and jack a precious shell into it. He leaned against an aluminum strut and aimed with luxuriously deliberate care at the forward comm housing of the cyborg. He squeezed off the round. It struck the base of a big spherical web antenna, shattering it. The cyborg lurched visibly.

  Killeen knew that ordinarily he would never have gotten such an easy, unopposed shot. The cyborg must have been in serious trouble before it lumbered into view. Which meant that something was coming after it. More mechs. This cyborg had been unlucky enough to meet overwhelming strength when it was alone.

  Killeen made himself tuck the rifle back into his side sling. He had vented his rage, and already he felt a tug of regret. He had felt odd moments of connection with the cyborg which had carried him down from orbit and finally set him free. He owed that single cyborg some gratitude, perhaps. But the outrage perpetrated upon him had needed vengeance, by a law as old as humanity, and now that need had been met.

  He settled back into his cranny, hoping nothing had seen where his one shot had come from. The cyborg scrambled on, downslope. It was nearly out of sight before a ringing shot burst beside it, spewing brown soil into the air. Killeen blinked. Mechs seldom used ballistic weapons. They preferred cleaner, lighter, more precise electromagnetic means.

  Then a second shell struck the cyborg in its middle. That apparently cut a prime mental function, for the long chunky body convulsed, jerking in spasms of almost sexual frenzy.

  The cyborg turned on its pursuers. There was a desperate, abandoned look to the maneuver. Killeen sensed stubborn, fatalistic defiance in the cyborg’s movements. Its arms came up in a clenched gesture, like six fists shaking in rage at once.

  It fired everything it had at something out of view. But its cause was hopeless. It lurched to the side and took another massive blow. Smoke poured from it. Small rattling bursts struck its natural, organic body, leaving shallow red craters in the rough hide.

  Without pleasure Killeen watched the thing die. The cyborgs were, for all their uncaring brutality and deep strangeness, based on natural beings, organically derived from the world. He had felt some strange respect for the one which had spared him, cast him onto this maimed planet. He was not happy to see one brought down by mechs, even though he himself had been among the killers.

  The faint calling came to him as he thought this, and at first he did not register it. Only when the small human figures came running into view, waving their puny weapons in triumph, did he understand.

  THREE

  The tent was worn and frayed and stained. Killeen wondered if this was for camouflage, since it blended well into the jumbled terrain.

  All during the walk here his escort had said nothing beyond curt orders. He had not been surprised that their thickly accented speech was in his language; it had never occurred to him that humans spoke more than one way.

  They had led him through rambling encampments of tattered tents and lean-tos of scrap and brush, past more people than he had ever seen assembled. Even the Citadel had held fewer Bishops than this. Flapping pennants with unfamiliar symbols suggested that this was a full Tribe. No such grand meeting had occurred on Snowglade within living memory.

  A woman in gray coveralls pulled back a tent flap and someone poked Killeen in the buttocks. He walked in, taking long quick strides to avoid another poke, and to maintain some shred of dignity.

  The tent seemed larger from inside, with a high peak lit by a phosphorescent ivory ball. Oil lamps glowed along the tent’s four oblique diagonals, casting blades of yellow down onto the heads of dozens of people. They were gathered at an orderly, respectful distance from the man at the very center of the tent.

  A black desk of polybind ceramic dominated the room. Killeen wondered if these people had carried that heavy mass around with them. It looked mechmade, smoothly curved and sculpted so that its sharp arc focused the eye on the small man behind it, lounging in a light metal chair.

  The figure did not seem impressive enough to merit the fixed, hushed attention of everyone else in the tent. He was short, stocky, with hair as black as the ebony desk. A long gash of sullen red ran from above his right temple down across the swarthy skin to the hinge of his jaw. Something had nearly struck his eye, for the mark burrowed into his heavy eyebrows.

  About a dozen men and women flanked the desk like guards. No one said anything. They were all watching the man eat a large piece of green fruit. Juice ran down his chin and dripped onto a white cloth set on his chest. The man’s uniform was made of a cool-blue, light, comfortable-looking fabric unlike any Killeen had seen before. He smacked his lips. He was giving all his attention to his eating and everyone else seemed to be, too.

  The long silence continued. Killeen wondered if this show was for his benefit and dismissed the thought when he saw the rapt look on the faces around him. This was some sort of privileged, special audience, unlike any meeting of a Cap’n and his Family that Killeen knew. The man eating wore no signifying patch. The people nearby had makeshift uniforms of rough cloth, with insignia vaguely similar to the house emblems of Snowglade. Their faces, though seemingly dazed, bore a certain intense look of authority. Some wore small medals of tarnished, ropelike silver. Could these be the Cap’ns of the legions he had seen outside?

  Finally the small man sucked on his snaggly teeth, smacked his lips, and tossed the remnant core of the fruit over his shoulder.

  As someone moved to pick it up the man leaned back and stretched, yawning, still not looking at anyone in particular. Then he se
emed to notice Killeen and regarded him with unreadable blank eyes. “Well?” the man said.

  “I, my name is—”

  “Knees!” the man shouted.

  Killeen blinked. “What? I—”

  Someone hit Killeen hard yet neatly across the backs of his knees, knocking his support away so he dropped forward and hit the floor, barely managing to stay on his knees.

  “Signify!” a voice whispered near him.

  “I come from Family Bishop. I honor these lands of, of…” Killeen had begun the old greeting in hopes that some idea would come to him, but now he needed to insert the name of this Family.

  “Treys!” the whisper said.

  “…Treys, seeking help in a time of dire need, against the depredations and torments inflicted by our mutual—”

  “Bindings!” the man behind the desk shouted.

  Instantly hands grabbed Killeen’s arms and swiftly tied them behind him. He let them without protest, because of something he glimpsed in the man’s eyes as the orders were given. The empty eyes had suddenly jerked with animated fire, a spasm of wrenching pleasure.

  The man stood up. Honorific pendants swayed from a broad scarlet belt that neatly bisected his blue suit. “He is disarmed?”

  A whisper answered, “Aye, Your Supremacy.”

  “He understands his position in our cause?”

  The whisperer near Killeen hesitated, then said, “He is a Cap’n, Your Supremacy, so we did not feel qualified to instruct him.”

  Evidently this transparent attempt to shift responsibility worked, for the swarthy man nodded calmly and spread his hands toward Killeen, as if addressing a problem. “I must attend to this myself, then.” Abruptly he frowned at Killeen. “Your Family?”