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bitten off half your legs.
Beq'qdahl was cautious, striving to conceal her anger.
you. >
Quath sent a hard, prickly burst toward Beq'qdahl's voice. It scattered among
the walls of rock.
The battle began. Quath ran and dodged. She had chosen her position well. Her
superior equipment enabled her to block most shots. She disabled three podia
with quick, stuttering pulses. But her armaments were wearing thin.
Beq'qdahl was the key. The others would flee if their leader fell. Quath
reached out with a cone-shaped aura and touched
Beq'qdahl.
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Now she saw into Beq'qdahl's true self. Her goals were simple.
Lounging in burr-rich strands. Sucking down sweetbreads and
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Gregory Benford plotting meanness, guilty only of casual malice and ignorance,
stuffed with a bland assurance of self.
Beq'qdahl would have been no worse than this, but for the distant conflict of
Illuminates. For such a minor, accidental matter, should she die?
Quath could not reason the question. Had her Philosoph genes left her alone,
she knew, these vexing issues would not even arise.
Gathering herself, she rushed forward.
The moment came when Beq'qdahl was exposed and Quath could not fire.
She clambered instead over the last upturned layers of fractured strata and
ran pell-mell into the milling band of firing, fleeing Noughts.
Cries, shrieks, bangs. They brushed against her like passing motes. Her
superior shields were up and their bolts were no more than pesky itches.
Her Nought! There! Shedding opalescent waves of heat. Helping another Nought
to its--no, her feet.
But Beq'qdahl had now seen which was Quath's Nought. Quath could see Beq'qdahl
carefully aiming for the small figure.
Still Quath could not fire. This was Beq'qdahl, strandsharer.
Beq'qdahl . . .
The simmering presence of her Nought abruptly broke through
Quath with rainsquail momentum. It--no, he--comprehended the quicksilver
essence of the moment. He turned and picked
Beq'qdahl out froin the jumbled landscape.
Aimed. Fired.
And Beq'qdahl burst open. Flames leaped from the holed bulk of her.
Quath felt a jolt of sudden pain. She heard dismayed anguish leak from
Beq'qdahl. It spattered through the spectrum.
Her friend and rival was dying. The projectile weapon of the
Nought had breached her main compartment. Fragments lodged in Beq'qdahl's
subminds. Unless Quath hastened to salvage what scraps she could, Beq'qdahl
would dwindle, ebb, die.
Leaden remorse filled Quath. But she kept on.
Toward her Nought. Ignoring the stings and arrows of the harrying crowd around
her.
Toward the appointment she had made with the whirl and gyre of gravity and
time.
Chapter NINETEEN
Shibo fell before the first volley.
The Cybers opened up from the shattered ridgeline above.
Their timing was perfect. His Supremacy's escort was still star-tied,
confused, scrambling for cover.
Killeen had just started to get up when he felt the stinging bolt go by his
leggings and saw it strike Shibo a glancing hit. She toppled forward from her
knees. No visible damage on her suit. A
tech-disabling shot, then. He grasped her shoulder and rolled her over.
"Close . . . that time," she gasped.
"Can you feel your legs?"
"Yeasay."
"Arms?"
"Yea... yeasay."
"Move 'em."
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The pulse had knocked out most of her exskell. It heaved and jerked in a dying
spasm. The riblike frame wheezed, purred, and went dead. Without it she had
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less strength than even the simplest augmentation of leggings and shocks gave.
She would not get far if they had to run.
And it looked like they would. The Cybers were cutting up the escort guard.
"Can you walk?" he asked.
"Don't know. Head's lfl wobbly. Her"
She got up onto one elbow and grunted with the effort of rising to her knees.
A pulse ripped by with a loud whoooom.
Killeen started to help her further and into his mind came a sharp, pointed
imperative. Something was narrowing down on his back. He felt it as a circle
of compressed heat. It rasped against his sensorium.
He spun away. A bolt frayed the air where he had been.
For the first time in their long battle with the Cybers Killeen
335
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Gregory Benford had a sudden, sure knowledge of where the fire came from. His
sensorium Dopplered back along the bolt path and found among the rocks a
smudge of greasy fog.
He knew immediately that this was his enemy. Unbidden, he felt its raw
immensity. It was a mind that came from a place of shining movements, from
moist dark spaces, from velocities bleak and hard. All this sudden, crisp
certainty came streaming from the gravid wedge that rode in the back of his
mind.
He rolled to his left. The enemy probed for him through the thickening haze of
electrodeception that flutried across the rugged slope. A blizzard of
flickering images cycloned by. It swirled through the milling mob of humans as
they scattered.
He fumbled for his last projectile weapon. Clicked it into place. Sighted
carefully--
--and felt intruding a feathery streamer of sorrow and hesitation.
Not his.
The somber emotion washed through him, stilling his hand.
Reasonless, it spoke only of regret.
Killeen sucked in air to break free of the heavy, choking mood.
Shibo gasped nearby, "Leave me. Get clear. I'll be"
He fired. The bolt hit just where he had known to aim.
Instantly the air cleared. The snow-squall of flitting electro-deceptions was
gone.
Through a compacted instant Killeen felt a sad spike of longing.
Again it came as a flowing, many-streamered emission, from the shadow-blue
weight behind his mind.
He saw Besen was well sheltered downslope. Toby--
His son was firing carefully from slight cover nearby. Killeen called to him,
"Fall back!" Toby came running.
"Come on," he grunted, hauling Shibo to her feet. She wobbled weakly.
Hissing bolts refracted through the nearby air. Splashes of infrared strobed
running figures into flash pictures of desperation.
Microwaves rattled.
And something else boomed down from the vault above, He and Toby got Shibo
down the steepest slope. They were making for the shelter of a dry wash when
Killeen felt rather than heard the hammering sound of pursuit. A massive thing
bore down on them. He barely had time to turn and glimpse the crusted, warty
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