Legs pumping, I reach down with my right hand and pull a lipstick-sized plasma torch from the tool kit stowed in my hip. As my right knee rises with each stride, I bathe the strut with a precise burst of heat. The torch stutters on and off like Morse code. After sixty paces the strut is repaired and the fresh weld cooling.
The dotted line in the sky is homing in on my position. It curves deceptively overhead, on a collision course with my current trajectory.
The instant I drop to the ground, my body is rocked by an explosion from a hundred meters in front of my position—consistent with my exact trajectory prior to the full stop.
Mathilda has just saved my life.
Satellite imagery shows that the plain before me will soon shatter into a maze of ravines. Thousands and thousands of these canyons—carved into the rock by long-melted glaciers—curve away into pockets of poorly mapped darkness. Beyond the ravines, the antenna looms like a tombstone.
Archos’s hiding place is in sight.
Overhead, I count three more dotted lines efficiently tracing their way toward my current position.
The female child commands me, and I choose to obey.
With Mathilda’s guidance, Nine Oh Two was able to negotiate the maze of ravines and avoid drone-fired missiles until he reached Archos’s bunker. Once there, the Arbiter disabled the antenna, temporarily disrupting the robot armies. Nine Oh Two survived by forming the first example of what became known as the dyad, a human- machine fighting team. This event ensured that Mathilda and Nine Oh Two would enter the history books as legends of war—the progenitors of a new and deadly form of combat.
5. MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE
It is not enough to live together in peace, with one race on its knees.
The final moments of the New War were not experienced by any human being. Ironically, Archos faced one of its own creations in the end. What happened between Nine Oh Two and Archos is now part of the public record. No matter what people make of it, the repercussions of these moments—reported here by Nine Oh Two and corroborated by ancillary data—will have a profound effect on both our species for generations to come.
The pit is three meters in diameter, slightly concave. It has been filled with gravel and chunks of rock and is plugged with a layer of frozen soil. A corrugated metal tube is sunk into the shallow crater like a blind, frozen worm. It is a communications main line and it leads directly to Archos.
I ripped the main antenna to pieces when I arrived here last night, running blind at fifty kph. Local defenses immediately deactivated. It seems Archos did not trust those closest to it with autonomy. Afterward, I stood in the snow to wait and see if any humans survived.
Mathilda went to sleep. She said it was after her bedtime.
Brightboy squad arrived this morning. My decapitation attack reduced the high-level planning and coordination of the enemy army and allowed the humans to escape.
The human engineer replaced my cranial sensors. I learned to say thank you. Emotion recognition indicated that Carl Lewandowski was very, very happy to see me alive.
The battlefield is quiet and still now, a blank plain scoured of all life, dotted with rising columns of black smoke. Besides the tube into the ground, there is nothing to indicate that this hole is of any importance. It has the quiet, unassuming feel of a particularly vicious trap.
I close my eyes and reach out with my sensors. Seismic detects nothing, but my magnetometer detects activity. Electrical impulses flow through the cable like a blazing light show. A torrent of information cascades in and out of the hole. Archos is still trying to communicate, even without an antenna.
“Cut it,” I say to the humans. “Quickly.”
Carl, the engineer, looks to his commander, who nods. Then, he grabs a tool from his belt and drops awkwardly to his knees. A purple supernova bursts into existence, and the plasma torch melts into the surface of the tube, liquefying the cables inside.
The light show disappears, but there is no outward indication that anything has happened.
“I’ve never seen any material like this,” breathes Carl. “The wires are packed so
Cormac nudges Carl. “Just get the ends away from each other,” he says. “We don’t want it to self-repair halfway through this.”
As the humans struggle to wrench the end of the fat tube out of the tundra and away from its severed mate, I consider the physics problem before me. Archos waits at the bottom of this shaft, under tons of rubble. It would require a massive drill to penetrate. But mostly it would require time. Time in which Archos could find a new way to contact its weapons.
“What’s down there?” asks Carl.
“Big Rob,” answers Cherrah, leaning on a crutch crafted from a tree limb to keep weight off her injured leg.
“Yeah, but what’s that even mean?”
“It’s a thinking machine. A brain silo,” says Cormac. “Been hiding the whole war, buried in the middle of nowhere.”
“Smart. Permafrost must keep its processors cool. Alaska is a natural heat sink. Lot of advantages to being here,” says Carl.
“Who cares?” asks Leo. “How we gonna blow it up?”
The humans stare at the cavity for a long moment, considering. Finally, Cormac speaks. “We can’t. We have to be sure. Go down there and watch it die. Otherwise, we risk caving in the hole and leaving it down there alive.”
“So now we have to go underground?” asks Cherrah. “Great.”
An observation thread detects something of interest.
“This environment is hostile to humans,” I say. “Check your parameters.”
The engineer pulls out a tool, looks at it, and then scrambles away from the depression. “Radiation,” he says. “Elevated and growing toward the center of the hole. We can’t be here.”
The human leader looks at me and backs away. His face seems very tired. Leaving the humans standing around the perimeter of the concavity, I walk to the center and squat down to inspect the bloated tube. The skin of the tube is thick and pliable, clearly built to protect the cables all the way down to the bottom.
Then I feel Cormac’s warm palm on my frost-covered shoulder casing. “Can you fit?” he asks quietly. “If we yank out the cables?”
I nod my head to indicate that, yes, if the wires were removed, I could squeeze my body into the required
