4. DYAD

NEW WAR + 2 YEARS, 8 MONTHS

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.

—CORMAC WALLACE, MIL#GHA217

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.

Running this fast is itself dangerous. I award priority control to simple reflex avoidance. The broken surface of the ice is a blur under my feet. Low-level processes are in total control—no time to think. I leap a pile of loose rocks that no executive thought thread could have registered.

While my body is in the air, I hear the wind whistling across my chest hull and feel the cold pulling away my exhaust heat. It is a soothing sound, soon shattered by the pounding of my feet as I land at a full run. Our legs flicker like sewing machine needles, eating up the distance.

The ice is too empty. Too silent. The antenna tower emerges on the horizon, our goal visible.

Destination is two klicks away and closing fast.

“Status query,” I ask.

“Nominal,” come the abbreviated replies from Hoplite and Warden. They are concentrating on locomotion. These are the last communications I have with Freeborn squad.

The missiles come simultaneously.

Hoplite notices first. It orients its face to the sky just before it dies, half transmits a warning. I veer immediately. Warden is too slow to reroute. Hoplite’s transmission cuts off. Warden becomes engulfed in a column of flame and shrapnel. Both machines are off-line before the sound waves reach me.

Detonation.

The ice erupts around me. Inertial sensors go off-line as my body twists through the air. The centripetal force sends my limbs flailing, but low-level internal diagnostics continue collecting information: casing intact, core temperature superheated but cooling fast, right leg strut snapped at upper thigh. Spinning at fifty revolutions per second.

Recommend retract limbs for impact.

My body smashes into the ground, gouging into the icy rock and spinning out into a lopsided roll. Odometry estimates fifty meters before full stop. As quickly as it began, the attack is over.

I uncurl my body. Executive thought thread receives priority diagnostic notification: cranial sensor package damaged. My face is gone. Shredded by the explosion and then battered by the razor-sharp ice. Archos learned quickly. It knows that I am not human and it has modified its attack.

Lying here exposed on the ice, I am blind and deaf and alone. As it was in the beginning, all is darkness.

Survival probability fades to nil.

Get up, says a voice in my mind.

“Query, identify?” I radio.

My name is Mathilda, comes the reply. I want to help you. There’s no time.

I do not understand this. The communication protocol is unlike anything in my library, machine or human. It is a Robspeak-English language hybrid.

“Query, are you human?” I ask.

Listen. Concentrate.

And my darkness ignites with information. A topographical satellite map overlays my vision, expanding to the horizon and beyond. My own internal sensors paint an estimated image of what I look like. Internals like diagnostics and proprioception are still online. Holding up my arm, I see its virtual representation—flat-shaded and without detail. Looking up, I see a dotted line creeping across the vivid blue sky.

“Query, what is the dotted—” I ask.

Incoming missile, says the voice.

I am back on my feet and running inside 1.3 seconds. Top speed is slashed due to the snapped strut in my leg, but I am mobile.

Arbiter, accelerate to thirty kph. Activate your local sonar ranging. It’s not much, but better than being blind. Follow my lead.

I do not know who Mathilda is, but the data she pours into my head is saving my life. My awareness has expanded beyond anything I have ever known or imagined. I hear her instructions.

And I run.

My sonar has low granularity but the pings soon detect a rock formation that is not a part of the satellite imagery supplied by Mathilda. Without vision, the rocks are nearly invisible to me. I leap the outcrop an instant before I demolish myself against it.

On landing, my stride skips a step and I nearly fall. I stagger, punching a hole into the ice with my right foot, then catch myself, settle back into my stride.

Fix that leg. Maintain stride at twenty kph.

Legs pumping, I reach down with my right hand and pull a lipstick-sized plasma torch from the tool kit stowed in my hip. As my right knee rises with each stride, I bathe the strut with a precise burst of heat. The torch stutters on and off like Morse code. After sixty paces the strut is repaired and the fresh weld cooling.

The dotted line in the sky is homing in on my position. It curves deceptively overhead, on a collision course with my current trajectory.

Veer twenty degrees to the right. Increase speed to forty kph and maintain for six seconds. Then execute a full stop and lie on the ground.

Boom.

The instant I drop to the ground, my body is rocked by an explosion from a hundred meters in front of my position—consistent with my exact trajectory prior to the full stop.

Mathilda has just saved my life.

That won’t work again, she says.

Satellite imagery shows that the plain before me will soon shatter into a maze of ravines. Thousands and thousands of these canyons—carved into the rock by long-melted glaciers—curve away into pockets of poorly mapped darkness. Beyond the ravines, the antenna looms like a tombstone.

Archos’s hiding place is in sight.

Overhead, I count three more dotted lines efficiently tracing their way toward my current position.

On your toes, Nine Oh Two, says Mathilda. You’ve got to take Archos’s antenna off-line. One klick to go.

The female child commands me, and I choose to obey.

With Mathilda’s guidance, Nine Oh Two was able to negotiate the maze of ravines and avoid drone-fired missiles until he reached Archos’s bunker. Once there, the Arbiter disabled the antenna, temporarily disrupting the robot armies. Nine Oh Two survived by forming the first example of what became known as the dyad, a human-machine fighting team. This event ensured that Mathilda and Nine Oh Two would enter the history books as legends of war—the progenitors of a new and deadly form of combat.

—CORMAC WALLACE, MIL#GHA217