The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [119]
They followed the jumping machine tracks, for this group had some clear purpose and their tracks were easy to spot.
These new marauders were like giant Gobi jerboas. They bounced their way for kilometers.
Eventually, the javelin-footed things clustered into a gang and scampered together up a steep, flat-topped hill.
Closely guiding the pack robot, the Badaulet circled the hill with great caution.
“Do we climb up there?” she asked him at last.
“They might be waiting there in ambush,” he said. “They ran up there, each on his own two legs, and they did not come back down.”
“It’s getting late. I wouldn’t want to meet these things in the dark.”
“We go up,” he decided.
The top of the hill, barren, chilly, nameless, was scabbed all over with the milling pockmarks, and there were helicopter skids.
“They all flew off,” said Sonja. “It’s some covert insertion team. Not Chinese. These people have robots that jump on two legs.”
As if in sympathy, their own pack robot emitted a loud metallic grunt. Sonja stared at its crude prow, a blunt shelf like an ugly bumper. There was a fresh, new, round hole pierced in the bare metal there.
There was a second mournful bang and a second hole appeared, a palm’s width away from the first.
“Don’t move,” said the Badaulet, standing, “it is trying to shoot us in the head,” and he shouldered his rifle and fired. “I hit it,” he reported, “but I should have sighted-in this target system properly,” and he fired again, again, again, three discreet sniper gunshots not much louder than three clapping hands.
A thing in the twilit sky like a distant child’s kite went tumbling into straw pieces.
“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