1194, Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire

The robot’s last step took it within striking range and with a whiplash movement it swung its sword at Bob’s head. Bob quickly raised his own, parrying the blow with the sharp, vibrating clatter and ring of metal on metal.

Bob’s riposte was a lightning-fast lunge towards the robot’s ‘armpit’ – hydraulic fluid pipes momentarily exposed between plates of pitted metal armour. The lunge nipped at one of the pipes, causing a clear yellow liquid to spray out under pressure.

The robot swung its arm down, snapping Bob’s sword like balsa wood. It reached out and grabbed Bob by his neck, lifting his feet off the ground and hurling him like a child’s toy against the fallen oak. He bounced off the stout trunk. The tree shuddered under the heavy impact.

‘You must run!’ barked Bob as he struggled to get to his knees.

Liam shook his head. ‘I can help!’

‘RUN!’

The robot reached down and grasped hold of Bob’s right ear in an attempt to lift him up off the ground. But with a loud ripping sound it was torn from his head, spattering them both with a thick gout of blood. The robot tossed the ear aside and reached down again, this time picking Bob up by his neck, raising him above its head.

Liam could see a fine spray of the yellow liquid puffing out from the rubber pipe that Bob had managed to nick with his blade. It was pumping out in arterial pulses …

Like blood … just like robot blood.

The robot carried Bob, still aloft, like some sort of trophy, towards the trunk and then slammed him down across it. Liam thought he heard something snap as Bob grunted and rolled off the side, falling heavily to the ground.

Jay-zus. It’s going to kill him!

The robot thrust the sword still held in its other hand through Bob’s left upper arm, skewering him to the trunk, like a butterfly pinned in a collector’s cabinet.

‘Bob!’ Liam shrieked. Bob struggled to wrench the sword out of the wood, but its blade was buried at least a foot deep into the old dead oak.

With Bob pinned down, the robot now slowly turned round to focus on Liam. Blue eyes softly glowing, evaluating its next target.

‘Please!’ Liam’s voice quaked. ‘I’m not in your war!’

It advanced on him.

‘Hey there! H-hey! James Locke said to go an’ get me, right? Not … n-not kill me?’

Liam fell as he took a backwards step, landing amid a cluster of nettles. The robot stood over him and then slowly squatted down, placing one glove-covered hand around Liam’s throat.

‘P-please! I can help Mr Locke! … I can h-help … h-him!’

Behind the robot, Liam thought he heard something crack and rip. Or maybe that was the sound of the tendons in his own throat. He felt the robot’s fingers begin to compress his windpipe, firm and steady like someone winding a vice closed, feeling tender muscle and trachea, cartilage and his Adam’s apple pressing in on each other. His eyes saw white sparks, his ears roared with pulsing blood struggling to find a passage up to his brain through a dangerously compressed carotid artery.

Then suddenly hot foul-smelling liquid was splashing into his face.

The hand round his neck twitched painfully as if attempting to snap it, but then released its grip as if someone had suddenly decided to spin the vice’s handle the other way. The hand dropped down on to his chest like the lifeless appendage of a paralysed man.

His vision cleared again and he saw the robot’s left arm dangling by its side. From beneath its armpit the rubber pipe flapped like a serpent, gushing yellow liquid in hot spurts. The combat robot flopped to its knees, blue-light eyes looking down uncomprehendingly at its powerless arm.

Behind it he saw Bob standing triumphantly with the broken, jagged remnant of his sword in one hand. His other hand, his left arm, was a dangling tattered stump that ended with the fragments of an elbow and dangling loops of frayed tendons and muscles.

Bob thrust the sharp edge of his broken sword into a small gap between the robot’s armour-plated shoulders and twisted. The robot lurched and more of the hot clear yellow liquid spurted out under high pressure.

The robot’s half metal, half plastic-human face seemed to express something. Surprise. Shock. Then finally, with a whirr of hidden motors working against hydraulic pressure that no longer existed, it collapsed on to its side.

‘We were fortunate. It appears the combat unit’s rear motion sensor panel was damaged in an earlier fight,’ said Bob matter-of-factly as he began to examine the ragged remains of his left arm. The arterial spurts of his own opened veins already beginning to cease as the blood clogged into a thick sealing glue.

‘Bob!’ Liam managed to gulp. ‘Your … your arm!’ He looked round Bob’s wide frame to see the rest of it was still pinned to the tree.

‘I will live,’ he said gruffly. He looked down at the robot. ‘It is still active. Although motion on its combat chassis has been disabled.’

Liam could see the blue-light eyes burning angrily still and its head turning frantically left and right with the loud whirr of a small overworked motor, as if that alone was going to move its heavy lifeless chassis across the forest floor.

‘What – what did you do to it?’ Liam struggled to talk. His throat was killing him.

‘I severed a major hydraulic pipe. The liquid provides the pressure system that enables the servo-motors to activate limb movements.’ He examined the disabled robot. ‘A design flaw of mechanical units,’ he said dismissively. ‘They cannot heal themselves. They are old technology.’

‘Right.’

Bob started looking at the ground until he spotted what he was after. He stooped down and picked up a rock the size of a human head.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Liam.

‘This unit is still active. It needs to be destroyed.’

As Bob raised the rock over his head Liam found himself looking away. Even though it was just a machine on the ground, the plastic skin from the nose down made at least half its head look too human for him to want to watch it being smashed in.

He heard several heavy thuds followed by a clanking and the clattering whirr of some part of it still working frantically. Another final thud and the noise stopped.

‘Is it … dead?’

‘It is dead,’ Bob replied.

Liam turned to see a flattened hump of crumpled metal and shredded flesh-coloured plastic.

‘Before this unit found us, you indicated we need to return to the camp.’

Liam looked at Bob. ‘We can’t go back … you’re in no condition to fight. Not like that.’

‘My combat proficiency has merely been reduced by fifty per cent. I am still an effective combat platform.’

Liam looked at him. Perhaps he was right. Even with one arm he pitied any poor man who decided to stand in Bob’s way. But, looking at the pitiful dangling shreds of his left arm, he didn’t feel he had the heart to ask – no, to order – Bob to fight his way back into the camp.

Then his gaze rested on the robot’s discarded dark cape, then the tattered rags and woollen hose that still clad the dead robot’s body.

‘All right … All right, I’ve got an idea. I guess we should bury the robot?’

‘Correct. The metal will corrode in due course.’

‘Well, let’s undress it first.’ He looked at Bob and cocked an eyebrow. ‘Guess who you’re going to pretend to be …’