The colonel greeted him with genial familiarity, and hastened to introduce him to the others. The colonel’s companions were young, with neat hairstyles under regimental caps, high cheekbones, and cold, green-gray eyes.
“Excuse me, gentlemen, but I must pass. Good evening, sir,” he said curtly, ignoring the two strangers and addressing only his old friend, the colonel. The men did not step aside, however, but to the contrary formed a tight, jostling ring around him, chattering familiarly.
“Ah, Vronsky! When are you coming to the regiment? We can’t let you off without a supper. You’re one of the old set,” said one of the men. But even as he smiled politely, still glancing up toward Anna’s box and trying to shoulder past, Vronsky saw that all three, even his old friend the colonel, wore not the bronze uniform of his regiment, but the crisp blue of the Toy Soldiers. Vronsky turned away from them, silently appealing to the colonel to let him by… and noticed with a start, as he looked directly into the colonel’s round, handsome eyes, that this was not his old friend at all.
The face was almost the same face-the same set of the jaw, the same roll of flesh below the chin, the same bristly black mustache-but a cunning simulacrum of his friend’s appearance, not the real thing.
Vronsky recoiled. “I can’t stop, awfully sorry, another time,” he said, and tried again to break free, to get to the carpeted stairs that led to Anna’s box.
“No, no,” replied the colonel-who-was-not-the-colonel genially. “We insist.” One of the other soldiers grinned, as if preparing to invite Vronsky for a drink or a game of Flickerfly. “Say, the adjustment protocol is moving toward completion. How strange it is that your Class III remains uncollected.”
“Oh yes!” said the third soldier. “Why, we could rectify that situation right away!”
Lupo hissed and showed his teeth. Vronsky murmured a demurral while his left hand, hidden by his cloak, moved discreetly toward his belt. Although not, apparently, as discreetly as he had hoped.
“Oh, that won’t do, your Excellency,” said the “colonel” with a smile. “That won’t do at all.”
The colonel’s face blurred, wavered, and was replaced in a terrible instant by a silver-black mass of churning gears. Vronsky yelped in startlement as the same hideous transformation unfolded on the other men: the skin of their faces retracted, revealing not flesh but gears-gears rolling in gears, tiny pistons pumping up and down, winding tracks-all in the approximate shape of a human face, but made from the stuff of robots.
“Good God,” Vronsky had time to say, before a tongue of flame shot forth from the mouth-space on the colonel’s face, or rather where the face had been a moment ago. Vronsky ducked in the last moment and caught the blast with the top of his head. He cried out in pain, smelling his own singed flesh and burnt hair, and drew his smoker to open fire; Lupo launched himself forward on his strong hind legs and landed on the chest of one of the counterfeit soldiers, groznium teeth sinking into groznium Adam’s apple. The robot cried out and went down in what appeared to be some genuine form of pain, while Lupo wrestled and thrashed at his neck.
Abstractedly, Vronsky heard the panicked screams of the other theatergoers; he ducked and rolled away from a second fire-blast, crouching behind a red-upholstered seat and returning fire. The non-colonel winced as he absorbed a fusillade that would have killed a real human several times over.
Vronsky cursed, and then heard, from the other side of the box, a strangely commonplace refrain coming from the third soldier. “Here boy,” the soldier said, crouching down and patting at his lap. “Here, Lupo.”
Vronsky, rolling away from a third belch of fire from his antagonist, nearly laughed at the implausibility of such a plan-until he saw that Lupo had indeed released his toothsome clasp on the one robot’s neck and was trotting, spellbound, toward the other. “What in the…”
A fresh gout of fire spilled over the seat, and Vronsky narrowly avoided it, got off a quick smoker blast at the face-hole of the pretended colonel, and was then distracted again-this time by the sound of weapons firing above.
Anna’s box.
“No!” he cried.
He looked up, to where two more of the Toy Soldiers in their handsome blue uniforms stood, with smokers drawn and aimed at Anna’s heart. And fat, foolish Kartasov, who mere minutes ago had presented no more significant a threat than societal disapprobation, had revealed his own churning, silver-black death-robot face-from whose mouth-space was billowing a swirling, malevolent column of blue-black smoke.
This cloud snaked forward, Vronsky saw with some relief, not toward Anna but toward Android Karenina; his relief lasted only until Anna boldly jumped forward, interposing herself between the strange cloud and her beloved-companion.
I should not have let her come to the opera. How could I have let her come?
Cursing, Vronsky leapt from behind the barricade of the seat row and leveled his most deadly blast yet at the robot colonel, crossing the trajectories of his two smokers in a deadly effluxion that he knew would drain the weapons, creating a fire pattern so powerful he could technically face court martial for employing it indoors; the least of my worries, he thought drily, watching with satisfaction as the robot’s torso melted into a sodden mass.
He was dashing for the door of the box when he heard a pitiful yip from behind him-Damn it, he thought. Lupo. It appeared that the blue uniformed man-machine, just by staring in the dog’s eyes and calling him, had drawn Lupo nearly all the way to his lap-where, Vronsky noticed with horror, the Toy Soldier held a long, nasty-looking groznium scimitar, of exactly a sort he had seen used to junker animal-form Class Ills in the most direct and irrevocable way. He jerked on the triggers of his smokers, knowing it was no use: his maneuver had exhausted the weapons and they were dead metal in his hands. “Stay!” he shouted to Lupo. “Stay, boy!” But Lupo, caught by the mysterious power glowing out of the soldier’s eyes-that-were-not-eyes, continued the forward trot toward his own doom.
Vronsky, in one swift and terrible movement, snapped his hot-whip to life and flicked it at his own Class Ill’s aural sensors. In an instant, the wolf was blinded, the cruel spell was broken, and Vronsky scooped him up under his arm-except that now they faced the Toy Soldier, unarmed. Their faceless opponent drew back the gleaming groznium scimitar and was about to swing…
Suddenly Anna Karenina and her companion robot, their hands joined in one powerful fist, smashed down on him from the balcony above. The robot collapsed, and Vronsky, still clutching poor, blinded Lupo beneath his arm, ran to the woman and machine-woman.
“Are you hurt?”
“Not so badly as they,” Anna replied smartly, clutching at her leg as she smoothed her skirts and struggled to her feet. Vronsky glanced up at the theater box, and saw the two Toy Soldiers slumped over the sides of the railing, broken like dolls, and the Kartasov robot with its head unit entirely torn off.
“How-” he began, but Anna interrupted: “Alexei, we must go.” She was gesturing at the prone Toy Soldier, whose machine-face, stilled at the moment of injury, had begun to whir and glow back to life.
The mechanical soldier leaped to his feet, hissed angrily, raised his gleaming sword-and was set upon again: this time by a massive beast, resembling a madman’s hallucination of a jungle lizard, standing upright, with a cluster of yellow-grey eyeballs and the long, razored snout of a bird of prey. The inhuman monster’s beak gored the groznium belly of the Toy Soldier, while his ragged claws laced into the arms and legs of the machine-man. As soon as the robot stopped moving, the beast bounded away, leaping over the heads of Anna, Vronsky, and their Class Ills, and down the aisles.