The Caryatids

"That plane was much bigger than the flying bomb they sent to kill us," he said. "It had a gun on board, and not a very good gun."

Sonja looked at the two neat holes piercing the robot's prow. The aircraft had an excellent gun; it just had poor programming. It didn't know what to do with their unusual target silhouette.

"I can see others now," he said, pointing, "over there, that is a cloud of them."

Her eyes could not match his. "I think I see some black dots in the sky. Are they flying in circles? They look like birds to me."

"No," he said, "those are not vultures eating the dead. Someone is standing there and fighting those planes. Someone brave, or stupid. Or else they may have armor."

"We have to leave this hilltop right away. We're exposed."

"My rifle here on the ground has a better control of trajectory than an airborne rifle," he said crisply. "I will extend my bipod, taking advantage of my clear line of sight, and pick off a few of those planes. The enemy of these evil planes should be our friend. Also, I admire his gallantry."

"That is gallant. It is also a good way to get killed."

Lucky stared at her and shrugged. "That is true. So: Get out of this robot. Put on your woman's black cloak. Run down this hill, find a hole in the ground, get inside it, hide. When I am done here, I will find you."

That was a speech Sonja had heard from men before. Not in Lucky's own words, but with the same tone and intent. Men who talked that way died.

Sonja put on the black water cloak, she left the robot, she scrambled down the hill, and she looked for a place to survive.

Given that the sky was full of airborne death, there were only a few hiding places near the hill that made any sense. One miserable little gully here, over there a rugged, stony half overhang...The hanging rocks were a better bet for survival, for she might pile up some loose rubble to build a wall.

Sonja picked her way to that wretched excuse for a shelter, and there was a dead man in it.

He had died inside the device that allowed him to run like the wind. It was a humanoid exoskeleton with long, gazelle-like stilts extending from his shins. The skeletal machine hugged his flesh so intimately that it looked grafted onto him. His skull was socketed into its big white helmet like the filling in a pitted olive.

Apparently the rest of his party had fled safely to their rendezvous, while Skeleton Man had suffered some malfunction, shown up too late...Likely it was the weight of all the loot he was carrying, for he had a frame pack that latched and snapped with obscene design precision into his exposed skeleton ribs. The pack was bulging like he'd stolen the family silverware. His loot was heavy and jumbled and awkward...

His treasure stank. It smelled to high heaven, a burned-plastic smell. Like a factory fire.

At first she'd imagined that the stench must be coming from his flesh or his peculiar hardware, but no. He was freshly dead, and he had been a professional...Not a soldier exactly, not her kind of soldier, but some global tech-support cadre. He wore charcoal-black civilian utility gear and no shoes at all-for he seemed to live entirely in the skeleton-and he didn't have one speck of ID on him, not a badge, not a pip, not a shoulder patch.

With that black mustache, with those skin tones, he might have been from the wreckage of India, or the wreckage of Pakistan maybe-but he was Acquis. He was definitely Acquis, for he was exactly the kind of young gung-ho global fool that some Acquis net committee could hustle up in fifteen minutes. Speed and lightness, the Acquis. They were always good at speed and lightness.

The pursuing harpy had shot at him repeatedly, because its small-caliber rounds kept bouncing off his exoskeletal ribs, but its efforts had finally put a dispassionately calculated entry hole through the left side of his torso and he'd died almost instantly.

It was hard to hate the machines, with that neat way that they killed. They had no more moral judgment than bear traps.

His exoskeleton was still functional. The robot suit was trying to do something about its human occupant, putting jolts through his dead flesh as if trying to wake him up. It was searching for his departed soul like a lost Martian probe contacting a distant antenna.

Sonja heard faint repeated gunshots. Then the Badaulet appeared, empty-handed. He looked from her, to the dead Acquis cyborg, and back again. "Many more planes are coming."

"Where's the pack robot? Where's your rifle?"

"I gave the rifle to the robot. That robot is a weapons platform. The rifle knows its targets now. It will kill those planes till it runs out of ammunition. More planes are coming, many more." He flicked his fingers repeatedly. "I think they have hundreds."

"And you're still alive? You are lucky."

Lucky began piling loose cobbles and boulders into a crude barricade. "The planes will see our body heat. We must hide behind rocks."

"Our dead friend here brought treasure with him. He just gave his life for that."