The infantryrobot swung and fired into Karel’s left thigh. The surge of pain from the electromuscle was indescribable. The infantry man shifted his aim and fired again, and now Karel’s left bicep muscle crackled in agony.
‘Karel!’ Susan was screaming. He tried to look at her, he wanted to tell her he was okay, but the pain in his arm and leg was too great. It overwhelmed his coil, blocked the signals he tried to send to his mouth. He fumbled at the panelling on his left leg, trying to release it, to get at the electromuscle so he could unhook it.
‘Get back, Tokvah!’ Eleanor kicked Susan away from Karel. Susan fell over backwards, into the slippery pool of blue wire. She screamed.
‘Ignore her. Now stand up.’ The infantryrobot held an awl under Karel’s chin and slowly pulled it up, forcing Karel to stand, his left leg and arm exploding in pain as he did so.
‘Susan,’ said Karel. It was all there was to say.
Susan sat up, sobbing, as she peeled Axel’s blue wire from her body.
The infantryrobot began pushing him out of the room, and he took a last look at the painted walls, the scattering of tools on the floor, the distress of his wife and that tiny, broken scrap of metal on the floor that had been his son. And then he was gone, pushed out of his life in Turing City.
After that there were only fragments: disjointed pictures in his memory.
The hallway, metal doors to apartments broken and crumpled.
The stairwell, the broken body of another child, in a tangled metal heap at the foot of the steps.
Two Artemisian robots, stripping the decorative copper foil from the pillars outside the apartment block, rolling it up into bales ready for transportation back to Artemis City.
The dark streets, the bright stars above, the sounds of gunfire, the spark of cutting tools, the rolling of wheels. Dark shapes of Artemisians moving through the night, tearing the city apart.
And there, in the middle of the street, a terrible sight. It was enough to make even the young infantryrobot who pushed Karel along pause for a moment.
A City Guard lay dead on the hard-packed gangue of the road. His body was crushed and dented, exposing deep golden electromuscle of an impossibly fine weave. One of his legs was cut off below the knee, his head almost flattened. Yet he lay with his rifle in his hands, still aiming at some target down the road. A deep feeling of respectful awe crept over Karel. This robot, at least, had fought to the very end.
From somewhere to the west he heard a rending, tearing noise. The sky there lit up in brilliant whiteness, so bright it threatened to overload Karel’s eyes. A low vibration shook the metal of his body; it rumbled up through his feet, it throbbed in his electromuscles.
‘What is it?’ asked the young guard.
By way of answer the brilliant white light shorted out, leaving the night suddenly so dark by comparison. And then there was an explosion that shook the very earth, and red flames leaped up into the night.
Karel looked over to the west. He knew what it was. He knew what lay in that direction.
The fort of the City Guard had been breached. Turing City had fallen.
The ending had come so quickly. One minute he had been there in the darkness before the fort, the brilliant white bolts from the Tesla towers arcing down over him to strike the Artemisian forces that were massed just out of rifle range. He had been moving to the dance of battle, weaving through the night, forming patterns with Maoco L and Maoco P and Maoco S. Seeking out the few black-painted Storm Troopers that crept forward through the night, their bodies loaded with explosive, despatching them with a shot to the metal of their minds.
And then, the next moment, the Tesla towers seemed to be feeding back on themselves, the great white electrical bolts arcing down towards the earth and then jumping back to the towers. The current was building in 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.