lust rising within him like hot oil pumping up inside his body. He began to slip and skid down the hillside, his metal feet tearing out long dark gouges in the mud. The mud and something else… Organic life! Growing from the mud! And now his hatred boiled. What sort of creatures could live here, to let their environment be polluted so?
He ran on downwards, the killing lust rising higher, plunging on towards a line of what he thought at first were abstract sculptures. And the realization dawned: trees! Organic trees planted in a line! These rust-ridden robots actually cultivated them! He kicked at one with his foot as he passed, shaving a white weeping wound across its surface.
And now he was past the trees and upon the outer edge of the little kingdom. A row of ramshackle stone mounds stretched to the left and right. There was an opening directly ahead of him: the entrance to a hovel. He had lost sight of his section in the swirling confusion, and he ran forward without thinking, plunging into the hovel without further thought.
He found himself in a small, dome-shaped room, its two occupants cowering against the far wall. Thin, pathetic things, they looked up at Olam, holding out their hands in supplication. Poorly made hands of impure metal, blotched and stained. Bodies shaking and quivering from badly tuned electromuscle.
‘Please…’ said one of them, whether man or woman, Olam couldn’t tell. His rage surged up through the electromuscle. They didn’t even deserve a bullet, it told him. His awl was already in his right hand, striking down through the skull of the pleading robot: it tore through the thin metal without any difficulty, tangling in the sick green-blue wire that lay beneath. The other robot began a pitiful wailing; it clung to Olam’s legs. He kneed it, felt the metal of its chin crack, then with a savage joy he brought down the awl once more, splitting open the second skull.
They were both dead. That’s when the frenzy overtook him. He began to tear apart their pathetic bodies, scattering them around the room. He tore electromuscle, he snapped metal bones riddled with impurities. Blue- green twisted wire unravelled on the floor, and he looked at it with disgust. There was a little fire in the corner of the room, barely fit to be described as a forge. He pushed twisted metal towards the flames with his foot, watched it begin to glow and then collapse in on itself.
And then rage passed, and in the lull that followed his attention was caught by a sheet of metal hanging on the wall above the forge. A sheet of steel, the quality of this metal easily superior to anything else in the hovel, and yet it had been hung there on the wall rather than used to improve the build of a body.
Olam moved closer to the sheet, puzzled. There was a symbol engraved on its face: a large circle, a smaller circle on the top of its circumference. What did it mean?
He heard more noise, the sound of gunfire, and that brought him back to his senses. Outside, the attack continued.
He tore the sheet from the wall, crumpled it and dropped it on the fire. The lust was rising again.
Karel
Karel had no ears to hear what was happening around him; his eyes could only see the railway lines in front. Even so, he knew that the attack had begun. He could tell by the purposeful movement of those robots around him. He saw the grey troops piled on the trains pulling out of the valley ahead of him.
He was impressed, despite himself. They worked quickly, the Artemisians. Fast and efficient.
Karel waited in a shallow valley, twilight falling with the swirling snowflakes. He counted eight sets of lines squeezed between the valley walls, all for the benefit of the constantly moving traffic of Artemis as it prosecuted another war.
Karel had drawn his train up amongst all the others that morning, and had spent the long day waiting, watching the snow piling up around the tracks. He had watched the other trains leaving the temporary marshalling yard, their wagons stacked with rails and sleepers, hoppers filled with ballast, and he had pondered the fact that Artemis was moving north again and another state was about to fall.
All day long, Karel had revved his engines, felt the rumble of the diesel shaking his frame. He had been told to keep his engine running, to be ready to move at a moment’s notice. But that moment had not come, and as the day progressed the shallow valley had slowly emptied. He began to hope – and to fear – he had been forgotten about.
He watched the wind chase a flurry of snowflakes down the tracks towards him, and then realized that there was movement to his right. The long line of ballast hoppers that had been parked there since lunchtime was moving forward, red-rimmed wheels spinning slowly.
Again, Karel wondered if he had been forgotten.
He watched the hoppers departing to the north, leaving him alone in the valley.
Artemis was on the move.
Eleanor stood at the edge of the North Kingdom, looking down over a view that she almost recognized from the stories she had heard as a child. Not that there had been that many tales, growing up in Artemis, but robots talked, and sometimes the infantry that returned to the forges to rebuild themselves would tell what they had seen and heard on their travels over the continent.
But even those stories had not prepared her for this. She had never seen a land so desolate. She felt something almost like pity for the robots that lived here.
‘I never realized,’ she began.
‘The poverty?’ said Kavan. ‘I suppose it provides an answer…’
‘An answer? To what?’
But Kavan didn’t reply, and Eleanor felt a stab of annoyance at his recent attitude. There had been a time when Kavan had shared his confidence with Eleanor. As he rose in importance he seemed to regard her more and more as a threat.
Irritated, she turned her attention back to the scene before her.
The attack was going well. The rising storm gusted clouds of snow, obscuring parts of the scene before her, but then the wind would shift to reveal a line of black Storm Troopers marching forward, pushing hovels over with their heavy hands and feet. Another gust and she saw a line of grey infantryrobots firing patiently at the few pathetic robots that emerged from the rubble. And, throughout it all, the silver shapes of Scouts slipping back and forth, flashing and spinning and kicking.
‘There doesn’t seem to be much resistance,’ she offered.
‘There won’t be straight away,’ said Kavan. ‘They’ll still be reeling from the shock of the bombs. They will have fallen back and regrouped. They’ll launch their counter-attack when they are ready.’
As if on cue, the wind blew a differently patterned sound towards them.
‘Not our rifles,’ observed Eleanor, thoughtfully.
She stared across the expanse of the bowl to where a handful of Scouts lay unmoving in a bank of snow. It took her a moment, and then she spotted them. Black iron robots advancing steadily. Big bodies, heavy panelling. Mining robots. A squad of infantry saw them, fell back, hesitated, then raised their rifles and let off a volley before falling back again.
‘Fools,’ said Eleanor. ‘Their rifles won’t pierce that metal.’
‘They’re panicking,’ said Kavan. ‘Eleanor, get yourself down there.’
‘I’m gone.’
She unslung her rifle and ran off down the hillside, heading straight for the infantry troop. It was only when she was gone that she realized that Kavan had done it again. He had sent her away from the command position.
It was too late to worry about that now. The mining robots were already upon the infantry. Slow-moving, they sought to catch hold of the Artemisians and crush them. The grey soldiers dodged them easily, but discipline had broken down. There was no order to their movements, they were panicking, firing their rifles at random.
A flash of silver nearby, and Eleanor saw three Scouts emerging from a nearby doorway. They were carrying something.
‘Drop it!’ called Eleanor. ‘Come with me!’
The leader extended her eyes, spread her claws at having been spoken to in this fashion. Then she realized who had addressed her.
