Then I notice Carl is crying.
“I lost my shit. I’m losing my shit. Oh man. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.”
“Carl. Talk to me, bud. What’s our situation?”
“Fucked. It’s fucked. Beta squad went through a plugger swarm, but it wasn’t pluggers—it’s something else and they started getting up, man. Oh god.”
Carl scans the snow behind us frantically.
“Here they come. Here they fucking come!”
He starts firing sporadically into the mist. Shapes appear. Human sized, walking. We begin to take incoming fire. Muzzles flash in the twilight.
Helpless with a shredded cannon, Houdini makes due by turning its turret and shining a spotlight into the gloom.
“Rob doesn’t carry guns, Carl,” says Leo.
“Who’s shooting at us?” shouts Cherrah.
Carl is still sobbing.
“Does it really matter?” I ask. “Light ’em up!”
All our machine guns fire up. The filthy snow around Houdini melts from the superheated barrels of our guns. But more and more of the dark shapes come shambling out of the mist, jerking from bullet impacts but still walking, still firing on our position.
When they get closer, I see what Archos is capable of.
The first parasite I see is riding Lark Iron Cloud, his body riddled with bullet holes and missing half his face. I can make out the glint of narrow wires buried in the meat of his arms and legs. Then a shell blasts his belly open and the thing spins like a top. It looks like he’s wearing a metal backpack—scorpion shaped.
It’s like the bug that got Tiberius, but infinitely worse.
A machine has burrowed into Lark’s corpse and forced it back up. Lark’s body is being used as a shield. The decomposing human flesh absorbs energy from incoming bullets and crumbles away, protecting the robot embedded inside.
Big Rob has learned to use our weapons and our armor and our meat against us. In death, our comrades have become weapons for the machines. Our strength turned to weakness. I pray to god that Lark was dead before that thing hit him. But he probably wasn’t.
Old Rob can be a real motherfucker.
But looking at my squad’s faces between muzzle flashes, I see no terror. Nothing but clenched teeth and focus. Destroy. Kill. Survive. Rob has pushed too far, underestimated us. We’ve all of us made friends with the horror. We’re old chums. And as I watch Lark’s body shamble toward me, I feel nothing. I only see an enemy target.
Enemy targets.
Weapons fire tears through the air, filleting bark from the trees and smacking into Houdini’s armor like a lead rain. Several human squads have been reanimated, maybe more. Meanwhile, a flood of stumpers pours in from the front. Cherrah focuses her juice in economical spurts on our twelve o’clock. Nine Oh Two and his friends do their best to stop the parasites coming at our flanks, darting silently between trees.
But the parasites won’t stay down. The bodies absorb our bullets and they bleed and bones shatter and meat falls but those monsters inside them keep picking them back up and bringing them back. We’ll be out of ammo soon at this rate.
Thwap. A bullet sneaks under the tank. Cherrah takes it in the upper thigh. She screams out in pain. Carl crawls back to patch it up. I nod to Leo and leave him to cover our flank while I grab Cherrah’s flamethrower to keep the stumpers at bay.
I put a finger to my ear to activate my radio. “Mathilda. We need reinforcements. Is anybody out there?”
“You’re close,” says Mathilda. “But it gets worse from here.”
Worse than this? I speak to her between bursts of gunfire.
“We can’t make it, Mathilda. Our tank is down. We’re stuck. If we move, we’ll get… infected.”
“Not all of you are stuck.”
What does she mean? I look around, taking in the twisted, determined faces of my squad mates bathed in the red glow of Houdini’s intention light. Carl works on Cherrah, wrapping her leg. Looking out into the clearing, I see the smooth faces of the Arbiter and Warden and Hoplite. These machines are the only thing standing between us and certain death.
And they aren’t stuck here.
Cherrah is grunting, hurt bad. I hear more anchor blasts and know that these are parasites forming a perimeter around us. Soon, we’ll be another squad of rotting weapons fighting for Archos.
“Where is everybody?” asks Cherrah, jaw clenched. Carl has gone back to firing on the parasites with Leo. On my side, the stumpers are gaining momentum.
I shake my head at Cherrah and she understands. With my free hand I take her stiff fingers in mine and hold them tight. I’m about to sign a death warrant for all of us and I want her to know I’m sorry but it can’t be helped.
We made a promise.
“Nine Oh Two,” I call to the night. “Fuck it. We’ve got this covered. Take Freeborn squad and get your ass to Archos. And when you get there… fuck him up for me.”
When I finally have the courage to look back down to where Cherrah lies hurt and bleeding, I’m surprised: She’s grinning at me, tears in her eyes.
The march of Gray Horse Army was over.
4. DYAD
With humans, you never know.
While the human army was being torn apart from within, a group of three humanoid robots pushed onward into even greater danger. Here, Nine Oh Two describes how Freeborn squad forged an unlikely alliance in the face of insurmountable odds.
I say nothing. The request from Cormac Wallace registers as a low probability event. What humans might call a surprise.
Pock-pock-pock.
Crouched beneath their spider tank, the humans fire at the parasites that jerk the limbs of their dead comrades into attack positions. Without the freeborn to protect them, the survival probability for Brightboy squad drops precipitously. I access my emotion recognition to determine if this is a joke or a threat or some other human affectation.
With humans, you never know.
Emotion recognition scans Cormac’s dirty face and comes back with multiple matches: resolution, stubbornness, courage.
“Freeborn squad, assemble on me,” I transmit in Robspeak.
I walk away into the twilight—away from the damaged spider tank and the damaged humans. My Warden and Hoplite follow. When we reach the tree line, we increase speed. The sounds and vibrations of battle recede. After two minutes, the trees thin out and end completely and we reach an open frozen plain.
Then we run.
We accelerate quickly to Warden’s top speed and spread out. Plumes of vapor rise from the ice plain behind us. The weak sunlight flickers between my legs as they pump back and forth, almost too fast to see. Our shadows stretch out across the broken white ground.
In the gloomy semidarkness, I switch to infrared. The ice glows green under my illuminated stare.
My legs rise and fall easily, methodically; arms pumping as counterweights, palms flat. Cutting the air. I keep my head perfectly still, forehead down, binocular vision trained on the terrain ahead.
When danger comes, it will be sudden and vicious.
“Spread to fifty meters. Maintain,” I say over local radio. Without slowing, Warden and Hoplite spread to my wings. We cut across the plain in three parallel lines.