The scooters landed vertically on suddenly unfolded and extended telescopic tail legs in a flutter of drogues, a flurry of dust and a flash of retro-rocket flares. The dust fell slowly in the weak gravity, slowed only a little further by the thin nitrogen atmosphere. The drogues drifted and sagged. Carlos waited until everything had settled, then disengaged from his indented socket and turned around. He was perched as if on a shelf, looking down past the flank of the scooter at grainy grey regolith and the open space between its tripodal landing gear. Gravity was 0.2 g. He jumped down, his slow descent slowed further subjectively by his faster thought. He half expected to stagger on landing, but the frame’s reflexes were already attuned to the gravity. The scooters had landed in a rough circle. Carlos bounded and bounced to the middle of it.
The others did likewise. For a moment they all stood looking at each other and trying not to laugh, or to cry, if such an unlikely feat were possible for their virtual eyes. Carlos again felt tiny, one of six knee-high robots surrounded by space vehicles ten times their height, and his vantage absurd. The horizon, glimpsed between the scooters and the other machines, installations and infrastructure that loomed all around, seemed more distant than it ever had on Earth.
They had landed on the day side of SH-17. The landscape was flat but uneven, broken by crater walls of wildly varying sizes. In the distance, a shallow cone exhaled a pale vapour, whipped by an intangible wind to scattered streamers that smelled of hydrogen and methane. The primary, SH-0, hung low above one horizon, about three-quarters full; the exosun faced it low above the other. Carlos guessed they were close to SH-17’s terminator. The other exomoons were pallid crescents. Carlos couldn’t see the stars without fiddling with his vision’s contrast slider. He let it default to its daylight setting.
<All present and correct?> he said.
<Yes, skip,> said Beauregard.
<Well, here we are,> said Carlos. <Mercenary warriors of Locke Provisos, reporting for duty. Though to whom, or for what the fuck, I don’t—>
As if—and perhaps actually—on cue, the voice that wasn’t a voice in his head spoke. From what he could see of their reactions—a subtle tilt of their oval heads, as if cocking imaginary ears—it spoke to all of them.
<Welcome to Locke Provisos Emergency Base One,> it said. <You will go into action shortly. Please follow the line on the ground to the briefing area.>
Carlos looked down. A bright red line appeared on the ground, helpfully chevroned every metre or so to indicate the direction in which to walk. He guessed it was the equivalent of a hallucination, patched into his vision by the AI running this show.
<Well,> he said, <follow me, chaps.>
Marching was impossible. The fighters bunny-hopped or bounded as the fancy took them. Chun and Zeroual collided. When they’d picked themselves up, the dust slithered off their shiny black surfaces like slow water. Crawler bots that in proportion to the fighters were like spiders the size of horses scuttled everywhere. Some almost floated along in a delicate fingertip dance; others lugged loads that looked too bulky for them to carry, like leaf-cutter ants. These robots had no problem avoiding collisions, or adapting their movements to the gravity. It was the human-minded robots that were clumsy, when they let their human minds override the robotic reflexes of their frames.
They followed the line around descent stages, crates, nanofacturing kit, complex pipework, unloaded cargo, unattended but busy machinery. The base resembled a construction site for a chemical plant, rather than anything military. The line ended in a circle five metres wide.
As they stepped inside it, a virtual image of a round table appeared at the centre. Behind it, bizarrely, stood a slender man of their own height. He was of late middle age, with thin features, a long nose and bright hooded eyes. His wavy white hair went down to the open collar of a white shirt under a loose brown coat.
They all stopped and stared. The sight of an unprotected, diminutive human on the alien surface was too unreal to take in. He, or a process going on around them, must have registered their disquiet. Quite suddenly and seamlessly, the circle was extended into a dome, transparent and with hexagon panels. The whole thing was as virtual as the line itself; the atmosphere inside hadn’t changed at all.
The man exhaled loudly, then took a deep gasp as if he’d been holding his breath for a long time.
“That’s better,” he said, and joined in their laughter.
<Sorry about that,> he said. <It’s easy to overlook such details.>
Carlos suspected it wasn’t, and that the performance had been to put them at their ease. In that, he noticed with a certain wry disdain of himself, it had succeeded.
<You may call me Locke,> the man went on. <Needless to say, I’m an avatar of the company. My appearance is based on the trademark logo, I understand. I trust you are all comfortable with it?>
Carlos nodded, and saw five featureless black eggs nod likewise, light from the exosun and the superhabitable planet reflecting off their glossy curves like distorted eyes. Yes, boss, this isn’t weird at all.
<Very well,> said Locke. <I cannot give you orders, but I can explain the situation.>
The avatar took from a fold of his coat a plume-shaped light-pen and moved it above the table, gradually sketching in and simultaneously summoning an increasingly detailed map and diagram, explaining as he went. Just beyond the terminator was a large crater. On the nearest side of the crater wall was what had been the Astro America landing site; on the other, the Gneiss Conglomerates supply dump. Eight renegade robots in the one, six in the other, plus the auxiliary robots and other machinery they’d suborned, all of them connected via an improvised but hardened local network. The task was to capture or destroy the eight robots at the Astro site; those at the other site would meanwhile be taken care of by another law company, Arcane Disputes, which held the Gneiss account. Locke recounted in outline the company’s previous attempts to take the Astro site, with a certain pinched sarcasm.
When the avatar had finished talking and light-sketching, Carlos and Beauregard worked out a plan of attack that almost wrote itself. The tactics seemed self-evident, but as the squad came to a consensus Carlos found himself perplexed.
“We’ve been through all this—revival, simulation, training—just to stomp on half a dozen little robots?”
As soon as he said it, he had to choke back a laugh at himself.
Locke swept them all with a look. <An even match, I should say.>
Half a dozen little robots shared sidelong glances.
“Point,” Carlos conceded.
“We’ll need better odds than even,” said Beauregard. “Defenders” advantage, and all that.”
<You will indeed have much better odds,> said Locke, <as you’ll soon see.>
<I get why it has to be us and not robots that does the actual fighting,> said Carlos. <We’ve had all that explained. What I still don’t get is why we don’t just bomb them from orbit.>
The Locke avatar affected a horrified expression.
<Think of the property damage!>
They couldn’t have seemed impressed.
<It’s not just a matter of equipment, you know,> Locke explained. <Every square centimetre of this surface has been surveyed. Every cubic millimetre of this moon has been claimed by one company or another, and changes hands from millisecond to millisecond as the markets move. And then there is knowledge. Every molecule is of potential significance in understanding the system’s history, and thus its future as a stable habitation for human life for billions of years to come. All of it is property of the DisCorporates—and thus, at ever so many removes, of shareholders in the solar system and their future heirs in this system.>
<Mixed their labour with it, have they?> Beauregard asked, sarcastically.
<In the relevant sense, yes,> said Locke, sounding impatient. He made a gesture of brushing something aside. <There is no time for that discussion now. The point I wish to make clear is that there are good reasons for not bombing from orbit, and for keeping destruction to a minimum.>
<You’ve picked a bloody expensive way of protecting property,> Beauregard said.
<How so?> Locke seemed genuinely puzzled.
Beauregard waved an arm, an expansive gesture that would have carried more weight if he hadn’t been so small.
<Like Carlos said—the sim, the training, these bodies, the scooters, the tug…>
Locke laughed. <These are cheap. A barely detectable increment in running costs. The DisCorps spin more sims than you can possibly imagine, just for planning. They build machines from metallic and carbonaceous asteroid rubble. The complex materials and subtle knowledge they can derive from this moon and the other bodies in the system are worth far more to them in the long run, and they live in the long run because in the long run they are not dead.>
Unlike you lot, he didn’t need to say.
<Think of yourselves,> Locke added in a kindly tone, <as bacteriophages, responding to a scratch. The scratch may be very small in itself, a pinprick perhaps, but it carries an infection that could be fatal. So your efforts are tiny, but necessary, and of vast significance.>
He looked around, as if daring anyone to ask another question. No one did.
<Now, to work. Follow me.>
The virtual dome disappeared. The avatar strode confidently off, walking as if nothing were less remarkable on SH-17 than an eighteenth-century philosopher strolling in normal gravity and breathing actual air, and quite as if the fighters were now so inured to their bizarre situation that the sight wouldn’t freak them out. The fighters followed, through mazes of yet more machines and components apparently scattered at random but more likely in an order that made sense to algorithms beyond human computational capacity. At the end of a canyon between stacked crates Locke stopped, and flung out his arm with a bow.
“Behold the fighting machines.”
The six little robots crowded out of the gap, and beheld. They looked up, and up. In front of them, like a row of heroic statues by a modernist sculptor working in cast iron, stood six humanoid shapes in full space armour, crusted with sensors and effectors, bristling with weapons. They were each three metres tall. Alongside them stood the scooters, now refuelled and refurbished—not for carrying the fighting machines, Carlos realised, but to operate as semi-autonomous drones in close overhead support.
<Now that,> said Beauregard, <is more like it.>
<How do we get on board them?> Karzan asked.
Carlos had already read the schematic of the thing, and could see the operator socket clearly marked on its nape. He snorted.
“Jump.”
Jump they did, like monkeys leaping on to human backs. As he soared, Carlos had plenty of time to predict where he’d land. He grabbed hold of a handy protuberance on a weapons rack between the shoulders, and heaved himself up the back of the neck and into the slot in the base of the giant robot’s head. There was no visible articulation anywhere on this thing—the surfaces were rugged, matt, the colour of rust, made from layers of subtle and supple metamaterials. The head was not quite hollow. He pushed his way in and slid himself into place. The space inside was shaped to hold him in a hunched, seated position, as if in a cramped cockpit packed with sponge.
As he’d found with the scooter, there was a moment when it felt like being a pilot or operator of a vehicle, while the connections were still being made, and—as in his first training on the crude simulator—a moment of claustrophobia. Then came the next moment, when everything clicked into place, and he was no longer squeezed into the machine’s head. He was the machine, and its head was his. The little, foetal frame was no longer his body.
He moved the head, and was amused and somewhat disquieted to find that his visual field could move independently. It was wider than that provided by his natural (and his simulated) eyes, and could sweep through 360 degrees in all directions. This would have been a handy feature in the small frame, too. Carlos could only guess why it wasn’t included—perhaps there just wasn’t room to include these optics along with all the other astonishing hardware and software of the kit, or perhaps the designers wanted that body to feel not too far removed from the human.
He looked around, seeing the frames beside him come to life, and seeing a lot farther than he had before. The horizon was close now. The avatar still stood on the ground, looking tiny, looking up. Carlos swung a mechanical arm in an experimental wave, then stretched the arm out in front of him and raised a foot-long thumb. Locke waved back, and disappeared. Carlos sent after him a far from fond farewell, a thought he hoped hadn’t been transcribed into a message, and continued to look around.
It was absurd how much difference his increased size made. The feeling was almost familiar, perhaps from a trace of uncorrupted muscle memory since the time when his virtual body image had straddled the Thames. Now he was a monster again, in body and not just in whatever warped corner of his mind that past experience lurked. It felt good.
Carlos flexed his arms, rotated his forearms and admired then checked over the heavy machine guns and laser cannon mounted between elbow and wrist. He reached over his shoulder to the RPG rack on his back and clocked the missiles one by one, each tiny mind a fierce red eye in the dark. In symmetrical sweeps around the rack were the tubes of the rocket pack. Somewhere in his own mind, the status and position of each squad member was as evident as that of his limbs.
<OK,> said Carlos. <Here’s the plan, one more time.>
He conjured a shared workspace and sketched as he spoke.
<We stay below the enemy’s horizon as long as possible, split, then converge between the crater and the Astro base as the Arcane squad drops on the crater. Beauregard and I launch our scooters remotely and bring them down firing just before we charge in. Timing is critical, likewise radio silence as long as possible.>
He added a few details. <Everyone clear?>
Everyone was.
<Situation update,> said the company voice in his head, now the voice of the Locke avatar.
A view from the stationary satellite, detail snatched and patched from high-flying overhead cam drones too small and fast for the renegades to spot, let alone shoot at. The two rebel bases, with the crater wall between them, their fortifications clearly visible. Overlay of a spider-web line-of-sight laser comms net, some of it presumed or deduced. Some of the robots’ comms were definitely aimed outward, and their direction shifted rapidly from point to point, but so far their content had been impossible to crack. The present position and deployment of their expected allies in this battle—the Arcane Disputes squad, riding a tug in low orbit, currently well below the horizon and coming up fast, scheduled to arrive at the same time as the Locke Provisos team on the ground.
These were all familiar from the avatar’s briefing. What was new and startling was the level and nature of activity within the rampart of the Astro base and around the dome at the Gneiss site. Both places seethed with movement like nests of disturbed ants. No distinction could be made between the dozen renegade robots and the uncorrupted ones and the dumb machinery and the auxiliaries and the peripherals: they all moved as one, in floods and flows. Encrypted radio chatter and laser flicker glowed in the relevant spectra of the chart. Carlos had to slow it down a thousandfold to get any sense of the pulse of traffic. What he saw reminded him of nothing so much as of a high-school graphic of neural activity. Intricate networks formed and vanished, connections were made and broken, in every instant. Zooming out and returning to real time, he saw the physical counterpart, the deliberate frenzy of perfectly coordinated activity. Weapon emplacements, comms relays, reinforcements of the already impressive fortifications appeared to spring up in seconds, and then yet more.
<They’re acting as a single brain that’s at the same time a single body,> said Locke. <A swarm intelligence. This is new. This is dangerous.>
<It’s beautiful to watch,> said Karzan. <Like seeing thought.>
<It is indeed,> said Locke. <It’s also an indication that they are on the verge of breakout, and that you must act at once.>
<Tactics as agreed?> Carlos asked.
<No change of plan,> said Locke.
<Copy that,> said Carlos. He didn’t need to ask if everyone was ready: he could see in his mind’s display that everyone was.
<Go!> he said.
The six fighting machines bounded across the plain. No longer clumsy, they moved with precision in long low leaps, jumping and landing on both feet. The plain was more uneven than it looked, dotted with craters, crazy-paved with rilles and cracks. The fighting machines’ reflexes and the occasional rocket-pack boost kept them coming down on reliable surfaces. Soon they had passed the terminator. The exosun sank behind. SH-17 rose higher ahead. The team’s sight adjusted imperceptibly to its pale light.
After a few kilometres they split up. Carlos, Chun and Rizzi struck off on a diagonal path to the left; Beauregard, Zeroual and Karzan to the right. Keeping below the rebels’ horizon and maintaining radio silence until the actual attack was almost underway was part of the original plan, but might now be obsolete: the robot nests might well have succeeded in hacking into a satellite or even the space station, and be getting a view from above already. But at least it kept the squad out of direct line-of-sight laser targeting, for now.
Their pincer movement took both halves of the squad to opposite ends of a line between the crater wall and the Astro rebel fortification. Carlos could see the disposition on the display, but as agreed he stopped and double-checked that everyone was in position.
<Ready to go, skip,> Beauregard responded.
<Arcane Disputes is go for drop,> reported Locke. <Over the horizon in ten seconds.>
Carlos spared a thought for his squad’s counterparts in the other company’s team, at that moment preparing to hurtle out of the sky. He had no idea what frames they were using or what their tactical approach would be, but could guess they would be tense. He knew nothing more than that there were six of them, but he presumed they were revived—and reviled—Axle veterans like himself.
<My scooter and yours, sarge,> he said. <The rest of you, ready to launch if needed.>
<Copy, skip.>
<On my mark, launch and go.>
Eight point nine seconds until the Arcane tug rose. Carlos reached mentally behind himself, catching the scooter’s metal breath, the adrenaline-like surge of fuel, the ignition spark. Eight point eight seconds.
<Now!>
Far behind him, the two scooters lifted from Locke Provisos Emergency Base One on a suborbital trajectory that would take them down in the middle of the Astro site. At the same moment, Carlos and Beauregard led their trios in bounding forward, their jumps boosted by bursts from their rocket packs. The regolith rampart appeared on the horizon to Carlos’s right, the crater wall to his left. He struck a bearing to the right, aiming to arrive closer to the rampart than the crater.
His radar caught an incoming blip, arcing down on course to hit him on his next bounce.
<Boost!>
Everyone soared to a hundred metres up. The missile passed beneath them and exploded behind them. At the top of their jump laser fire licked their faces. No damage. Carlos aimed a far more powerful beam the other way. As he hit the ground he saw a flash behind the rampart, and cheered inwardly.
Then the laser lashed forth again. Damn.
Away to his left, above the crater wall, the tug climbed in the sky. Six fiery dots spilt from it, dropping much faster than his own squad’s entry had been. He guessed the fighters would be in battle-ready frames, and therefore heavier than the small frames in which the Locke crew had ridden down. Instant intuitive calculation showed him that the Arcane scooters would have enough fuel to fire retros and land, but not enough to take off again without refuelling. Unexpected tactics indeed. Two more dots fell from the tug, making another fast descent. Backup supplies, no doubt.
Forward, bounce, boost, get a shot off, land, repeat.
As planned, Chun and Rizzi veered left, nearing the crater wall and dividing the target for the enemy. More laser fire strobed across them, still not strong enough to hurt, but getting dangerous—Carlos experienced the damage as a smell of burning rubber. He drew an RPG from his shoulder rack, gave it its target in a coded tremor of fingertip pressure, and threw. The rocket torched off and streaked away, on an all but horizontal course. It exploded well before it got to the rampart, milliseconds from contact. Wasted.
But his and Beauregard’s scooters were now dropping from the sky. Carlos patched a quarter of his view—half an eye, as it were—to the descending vehicle. From there he saw the regolith-circled base, and the swarming scurry that boiled within. Laser beams stabbed upward, and were deflected. Crude projectiles hurtled up, to bounce off the scooter’s sides.
The scooter spat precision ordnance as it came down, its retros blowing dust all around. A few metres farther up, Beauregard’s vehicle did the same. Not quite as confident or accurate as he was, Carlos gauged, a harsh judgement rendered fair by the metrics of the frame’s cold eye. Beauregard was smart, and had brought with him military training from his first life, but he didn’t have Carlos’s experience of drone warfare deep in his muscle memory… or whatever analogy of that still reverberated in Carlos’s copied mind.
Both leaders used their descending scooters to aim for the larger robots, insofar as they could be distinguished in the melee. Beauregard sought above all to target the comms hub. But its shielding had always been robust, and the hub was now well defended by suicidal swarms of auxiliaries leaping up like insane electric grasshoppers to take incoming fire for the team. Carlos concentrated his scooter’s fire on a rugged, tracked machine with a powerful laser, an attention that was returned in kind. Damn thing was built like a small tank, and preternaturally agile with it.
While Carlos and Beauregard kept the robots busy, Chun and Rizzi on the one side and Zeroual and Karzan on the other maintained a barrage of laser shots at the comms relays along the top of the crater wall. At this range, and with these targets, lasers could do damage. But for every relay they knocked out, another popped up. As often, it ducked back down again below the ridge before it could be hit—but not before it had had time to flash a fresh communique between the bases.
Beyond the wall, above the crater, the Arcane Disputes team were dropping almost vertically, their firepower flickering in a cone of laser beams and a flare of flashes from below. The neat hexagon of sparks was falling too slowly to be accounted for by their retro-rockets’ downward thrust. Carlos spared his new allies a zoomed glance and saw that something opaque was stretched out between them, as if all the scooters were holding on to a shared tarpaulin to break their fall. He mentally shook his head and returned his full attention to the task on hand. Ahead the rampart loomed. Whenever his feet came down they crunched into broken crawlers and other small bots, which littered the surface on the approach to the rampart like crab carapaces on a beach.
An explosive charge sailed above the rampart and toppled to a lazy fall. Carlos sprang away from its predicted point of impact—and straight into its blast, as it exploded unexpectedly three metres above the surface.
Bowled over, thrown flat on his back, Carlos saw sky and stars. With a surge of surprised confidence he realised that though his entire front surface was frazzled and various of his components were jarred to breaking point, he wasn’t so much as winded. Of course not—he had no wind to be knocked out of him. He rose to a crouch and threw himself at the wall. At the last centisecond he straightened to jump. He grabbed the top and hauled himself up, then swung legs and torso upwards to roll flat over the lip. As he slowly fell on the other side he fired his machine guns. The recoil shoved him against the inner side of the rampart. He remained on his side, gimballed his vision to horizontal and lay in the lee of the wall. He kept firing from that position, rotating both arms from the elbows, letting the reflexes call the shots.
The other five fighters came over the rampart in different ways: Beauregard boldly leapt to the top and stood spraying suppressive fire for two seconds before jumping even higher, to rise on a backpack boost and descend right on top of the comms hub. Karzan blasted a notch out of the rampart rim with an RPG and hurled herself through it in a shallow powered dive before the debris had hit the ground. Chun and Rizzi used the rampart as their own defence, and each reached one hand over it to generate intersecting fans of laser shots before scrambling over in an undignified hurry. Zeroual simply bounced up to the barrier and vaulted over. He then lunged and rolled to take cover behind a mangled and pocked descent-stage. Blind luck—Carlos could imagine Zeroual’s eyes squeezed tight shut, impossible though that was.
Beauregard prised panels off the comms hub and shoved in arm extensions while kicking away auxiliaries and peripherals snapping at his feet. He remained alert to the wider situation, as Carlos found a moment after giving Zeroual belated covering fire.
<Auxies and riffs at twelve o’clock, skip!> Beauregard warned.
Carlos swung his gaze upward. A column of auxiliaries and peripherals was trotting daintily along the top of the rampart to a point just above him. As he looked up they poured down the wall like a nightmare of spiders. Some of them dropped straight to his shoulder and side. Scrabbling legs and flickering manipulators and glinting sensor lenses filled his vision. One of the things stabbed down at his thigh. He felt and smelt the burn of dripping acid. Nasty, but hardly dangerous. What the fuck was it trying to do? As soon as he formed the question in his mind an answer came: it was attempting a malware insertion. All it would need was an almost monomolecular probe making a microsecond’s contact with his circuitry, and he’d be as good as poisoned.
He swiped hard at the auxie with his right gun barrel. It dodged the swing by leaping back and then forward, too fast for even his enhanced vision to track. Meanwhile another pounced on his arm and started stinging. Carlos rolled. His weight crushed the auxie on his arm and the one on his thigh. He jumped to his feet, brushed off the rest and stamped on as many as he could. Not many—the things could move fast.
Carlos updated everyone on the malware danger and looked around for bigger prey.
Twenty metres away, a robot rolled out from behind a stack of supply crates. Even with its solar panels folded away, it looked absurdly delicate. Two of its manipulators held a long plastic tube above its back, swinging it this way and that. Carlos zoomed on the end of the tube as it swung past him and glimpsed a mining charge at the bottom of it. He had no idea how the robot intended to project the missile from this improvised bazooka. Most likely a small fuel tank or gas cylinder. The possibilities paraded smartly through his mind—name, spec and serial number—like a scrolling page of a planetary exploration equipment catalogue.
He threw himself prone and shot at the robot’s undercarriage, taking out the wheels on one side. As the robot lurched and toppled, Carlos shot off both the raised manipulators. The others flailed to grab the tube, missed, and in the process unbalanced the machine even further. It fell on its side. Its remaining wheels spun and its legs scrabbled. The tube lay on the ground beside it. Carlos elbowed forward, trying to line up a shot for the coup de grâce. A flexible manipulator lashed like a whip from the fallen robot. Its thin tip coiled on the tube, and tugged.
Carlos had heard and read many times of how things like what happened next seemed to happen in slow motion. With his optimised mind and body he now experienced that quite literally.
He saw and felt the hydrogen explosion that farted out of the far end of the tube, and saw the cylindrical mining charge shoot out and skid across the grainy regolith, just missing his elbow. His view tracked it automatically, whipping around in a hundredth of a second to see the charge hit the base of the rampart. There was a delay of another tenth of a second that felt a hundred times longer. Then the blast picked him up and hurled him high.
He fell slowly, to hit the dust shoulder first. His right leg fell close by. For a moment, he thought he was in shock. But there was no pain, and he realised that pain wasn’t on its way. Not now, not soon, not later. The next thought that hit him was that he’d be dead in seconds. In a human body such an injury would mean unconsciousness and death from massive blood loss. There was a moment of pure fear—of instant black oblivion for this instance of himself, and of the hell that would be the next conscious experience of the saved version back in the station. The dread was followed by overwhelming relief. He had no blood to lose and wasn’t about to die. His thigh leaked lubricating fluids, the connections gave off sparks, and that was it. He was damaged, partly disabled, but he wasn’t hurt and he wasn’t in shock and he wasn’t out of action. Self-sealing and self-mending mechanisms were already oozing to work in the stump.
But if he waited here a moment longer he would be a target for another shot, or a lethal auxie stab. Nevertheless, it took a conscious effort to make the unnatural act of getting up with what, at some irrational level, felt like a grievous wound.
Carlos rose from the ground like a gyroscopic toy bobbing back to vertical and balanced easily on the remaining leg. One hop took him to the crippled robot. Carlos read the serial number on its back—SBA-0481907244—and called up the specs for the model. He brought both fists down on the carapace, ripped it open, reached in and hauled out the central processor. That faceted flake of black crystal looked like a flint spearhead made by one of the smaller hominid species. Torn attachments sprouted from it like strands of moss.
“Got you, you little blinker!” he exulted.
To his amazement, the thing replied. The signal was faint and fleeting, but detectable.
<You have not. Goodbye.>