intensity, the flow making the very ground vibrate.
Maoco L was suddenly there at his side. ‘They’ve laid a grid on the ground,’ she was saying. ‘They’ve crisscrossed the land with iron and they’re reflecting the current back to us. We have to disable it!’
But it was too late. There was a shriek and the current shorted out, the light died.
A horrible low grinding noise, the creaking and shifting of stone that had lain undisturbed for years. The fort itself was collapsing. Artemis was attacking.
Maoco O was calm. He felt a quiet sense of pleasure. This was what he had been built for.
Grey robots and black robots and silver robots came rushing towards him. He fought with his rifle, with shuriken and knife and awl and hands and feet.
The outer wall of the fort had fallen. Artemisian troops rushed for the breach and Maoco O went to slow them, but there were too many robots around him now. He fought on, kicking and slicing and chopping, all the time trying to move towards the fort.
The Artemisians had almost made the wall now, but they were… they were falling! Cut down by a hail of bullets and thrown stars. Maoco O was confused. There weren’t that many robots left in the fort, surely? And then he understood.
Emerging from the breach in the wall were tall golden robots. Their hands and arms were long and flexible, their legs smooth and unarmoured. Yet they carried guns and rifles and they wielded them with deadly accuracy.
The Mothers of the Fort, the robots that had woven the minds of the City Guard, now fought their last stand.
Karel
Another Turing City robot and its guard joined them, and then another, and Karel found himself part of a growing procession of the defeated, winding through the city towards the wreck of the railway station. The yellow light of the false dawn bloomed above it.
Karel felt so vulnerable, his thin, brightly coloured panelling was scratched and dented. It seemed pathetic when compared to the utilitarian grey of the infantry that surrounded him and the other prisoners.
Their city was being stripped apart. In the half-light, grey infantryrobots could be seen, tearing foil and leaf from the facades of buildings. Blue engineers with heavy-duty cutters followed them, cutting away iron pillars and supports, piling up sheets of steel on the ground, ready for processing. The decorated windows of buildings were smashed with hammers, so that Karel found himself crunching through diamond and ruby and amber and jade fragments of broken glass. Walking down a wide boulevard, he and the other Turing Citizens saw the tin beading being pulled from the windows of a meeting house so that, one by one, the curved plate-glass panes toppled forward into the road, their shattered glass skittering along behind him.
The Artemisians worked so quickly. That’s what really amazed Karel. Bare hours had passed, and, as they approached the centre of the city, already some of the buildings were stripped down to skeletons.
They had machines there. Digging machines, long cylinders with spiral noses.
‘We need a mind,’ called out one of the blue-painted engineers. ‘He’ll do.’
The engineer was pointing directly at Karel.
‘No, he’s not to be touched,’ said Keogh, Karel’s guard.
‘Take this one,’ offered another guard.
A Turing Citizen was pushed forward.
‘No!’ he cried in terror, but the engineers seized him, popped open his skull and pulled out his mind, carefully detaching the coil. The mind was placed into one of the digging machines.
‘Keep going down,’ they said to the ear, built into the rear of the machine. ‘We need to get at the foundations of the building.’
‘I don’t know if these Turing City minds have enough power to run these machines,’ said one of the engineers. But then the screw at the front of the machine began to turn.
‘Looks like they can,’ said another engineer. ‘Okay, we need four more robots.’
Four more Turing Citizens were pulled from the crowd, and then the procession moved on. They heard the pleading shouts of the chosen abruptly cut off as their minds were detached.
They reached the railway station just as dawn was breaking. The reflected light from Zuse threatened to outshine the pale yellow sunlight that picked out the stripped carcases of the city buildings, the long shadows of which extended across the marble square in front of the station. Only a few hours earlier Karel had been standing there with Susan.
Susan. What had happened to her?
The square was full of Artemisians, so many of them now. New soldiers were pouring into the city on trains, Karel could see them freshly disembarked and already marching in lines into the stricken city. Along with them came engineers and surveyors and reclamation robots. Now the city had fallen Artemisian workers were pouring into Turing City to claim the spoils.
And there went the prizes of conquest. A steady stream of metal was being marched and rolled and trundled and carried back into the station. Girders and steel plate, bundles of foil and reels of wire, all being fed onto the waiting trains to be whisked away, back to the factories of Artemis.
Karel had a thought that disgusted him: the process was like organic life. It was as if the city was eating itself: the railway station was a mouth that was now sucking the rest of the body into itself, sucking up all that metal to leave nothing of Turing City but the empty spaces in the long-depleted mines.
Karel’s procession was now all the way through the square. He was made to join a growing crowd of other male prisoners. He looked around and wondered what had happened to the women. Most importantly, where was Susan?
And then he remembered the little body of Axel, lying broken on the ground.
Everything was gone.
The marble flagstones of the parade ground were becoming abraded at the edges, stained and eroded by the acid rain. The thought gave Spoole pleasure: it was a sign that Artemis was a healthy, growing place. Even now, the three tall brick chimneys of the infantry factory belched smoke into the pale dawn, and a thin, cold breeze braided little curls of it across the clear morning sky. A team of robots scaling the chimneys, already two hundred feet up, were heading to repaint the white collars that encircled the tops.
Two newly manufactured battalions of infantryrobots formed squares on the parade ground. The doors of the factory had been flung wide open, and a company of Scouts were marching out, silver skins flashing in the pale light.
Gearheart leaned close to him. ‘Just think what I could do to one of their bodies,’ she murmured. ‘Just imagine the mind I could twist from their wire.’
‘Not another word.’
Gearheart annoyed him. Not her words so much, rather the fact that she tried to goad him. Everything about her seemed gauged to irritate him. She was wearing so little panelling today that the beautifully knitted electromuscles in her arms and legs were clearly visible, and Spoole realized how the soldiers, both male and female, would be looking at her.
‘My appearance is symbolic,’ she had claimed, ‘it’s an indication of your power, Spoole. A robot doesn’t need protecting in this state that you have built.’
‘You were woven to be attracted to me,’ Spoole had replied, just before they had come out here that morning. ‘It’s like you feel you have to annoy me, just to prove that you have some control over your life. Don’t think that I don’t know that you‘re playing games with me, Gearheart.’
Gearheart had just altered her pose, showing off even more of her body.
‘Playing games? I’m not the only one, Spoole. Look at Kavan. Where will he turn his attention next, now that he has taken Turing City?’
‘I will deal with Kavan just as I will deal with you if you ever cross the line with me.’
‘Oh, Spoole,’ she had said, reaching to touch his leg, so that he felt the wire stirring within him, ‘don’t be like that.’
