BECAUSE FOR ONCE THE SWORD BROKE IN HER HAND

BECAUSE FOR ONCE THE SWORD BROKE IN HER HAND 1 HOUR READ

…this brings us to that period which called variously “The Robot Wars” or “The Machine Plague” depending on the system in question. Various accounts describe armies of metal women laying siege to nations, impossibly advanced warships blotting out suns, clouds of machine locusts stripping the flesh from fleeing civilians, and towering warriors fighting with blades against artillery fire. The period in which these forces were said to have appeared, estimated to have been a little over a decade in length, has been speculated by some historians to have been more legend than fact; a convoluted cover for a barbaric era following the Scream where bloodshed ruled otherwise civilized systems. The only “mechanized invasion force,” in the minds of these historians, were the extremes of human behavior unleashed by a general collapse in government coupled with unregulated and technologically advanced weaponry taken up by frightened populations left to fight for finite resources.

The discovery during construction in 3164 on a tenement in Vernia (capital of New Ghor, Eirene, in the Corvus system) of the remains of a warbot, however, led many to question the “human answer” proposed by disinterested historical circles. Most of “The Vernian Lady’s” construction aligned with what survives of design schematics for mass-produced pre-Scream warbots, but its unique faceplate, made to look like the stylized face of a woman, suggested a more complex story than “forgotten instrument of war;” not the least of which because the stylization resembles ancient Terran Greco-Roman art, a style so early and so far-removed from Corvus as to defy logical explanation for its appearance in the system.

With such a distinguishing feature as a touchstone, other finds from the same era allowed for the construction of a rough picture of an invading force that was anything but myth. Identical warbots were discovered, and “rediscovered” among the collections of the elite, in at least seven nearby systems, providing a general area in which interested parties began to look for more substantive evidence of this “Machine Plague.” Of particular interest was its leadership, safely conjectured to exist after technological analysts concluded that warbots such as “The Vernian Lady” would have been simple Expert Systems in need of direct control. A subsequent and significant anthropological study of the planet Gracia, in the Fletcher system, offered more pieces of the picture, albeit ones that disquieted many researching “Machine Plague” topics. What kind of mind could direct an invasion force in seven systems is still a question for debate, but forgotten robotic relics again suggest there is not a “human answer.”

– excerpt from the introduction to Khaled Jelani’s What Rose in the Silence: An Primer on Scholarship Surrounding The Machine Plague (University of Kaleido Publishing, 3211)

Past the swooping arches and gold-tinted glass of Marpesia Solange’s derelict compound sat a humbler hall, dug into a black rock hillside. Massive cables ran to it from the communications array and the geothermal power plant and the Grand Hall itself. Attached to the blast door were a series of warning signs: chemical hazard, nanomachine hazard, rogue intelligence hazard, high-voltage, itinerant machine hazard. Stenciled below all of those warnings was its name:

MPSL-001 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE NURSERY

The blue sun beat down on the barren surface of the planetoid. Five Nemesis armatures trudged up a freshly-worn path to the door. Androktones-004 filed in with her sisters for a war meeting.

“What are the reports from the sixth system in the string?” Hippolyta asked Androktones-005 over the communications array uplink. Androktones-005 responded with a document which flashed over a host of monitors in the back of the hall as Hippolyta perused it. “It will hold. Have Zero-Zero-Three push on to the tenth target. Momentum and speed of attack must be leveraged.”

Androktones-004 couldn’t help her lamp from swiveling to take in every part of the room. She hadn’t been in it since she was born, decades ago. The facility had been carved from the black volcanic stone of the planetoid in a sweeping gothic arch, and most of the lighting intended to brighten the dark hall had died over the years, leaving everything looking shadowed and ominous. Components of Nemesis armatures never built hung on racks mounted to the walls and gathered dust in industrial bins. Scrap littered the floor. The mindforge sat vacant with partially-drained tanks of matrix core material still mounted in feeder clamps. Above the forge was the high mount for Hippolyta’s own core, a relic of the time when she personally saw to the births of all eight of her daughters.

There was a new mount in the room now, separate from the old nursery apparatus, which was much more reinforced. The gilding confirmed that it was the ceremonial mount removed from the Grand Hall and carried out to the pseudo-bunker for new use in a more discreet location. Hippolyta worked within. She processed a million pieces of information every millisecond on her conquest.

“Zero-Zero-Three,” she hissed. “Report.”

“NINTH SYSTEM HAS BEEN SUBJUGATED,” Androktones-003 relayed. “THREE PLANETS. ONLY TWO INHABITED. ONE WAS STRUCTURED AROUND PSYCHIC HEGEMONY. WHAT FEW SURVIVORS REMAINED CONCEDED THEIR RULE WILLINGLY. ANTIANEIRAI DRONE FORCES TOOK THE OTHER PLANET. ATTACK NANITES WERE DEPLOYED IN ONE COMPLEX. ALL UNITS RECOVERED. TIME TO DRILL: APPROXIMATELY FOUR HOURS.”

“So simple. So incredibly simple,” Hippolyta observed, data flashing across her screens as she adjusted projections, models, and plans. The light from her rapid-fire on-screen thoughts flickered over the line of her daughters. “To think our dear… owner… never gave us permission to see her initial vision through, when its execution is so simple, even given my limited resources.”

“TRANSMITTING MINERAL HARVESTING QUOTAS,” Androktones-005 added, while they were on the subject of resources. Androktones-003 indicated receipt.

“But she was happy to sit on a throne made of guns, admiring the fear in the eyes of her petty rivals,” Hippolyta whispered. “I would see them used before they rust. To that end…”

Hippolyta’s camera eye rolled in the golden mount to appraise each of her daughters in turn. Androktones-004 stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Androktones-002, Androktones-001, Androktones-006, and Androktones-007, all the sisters not otherwise deployed.

“Zero-Zero-Three and Zero-Zero-Five proved themselves field-ready years ago for this deployment. Zero-Zero-One and Zero-Zero-Two have recently done so.”

Androktones-004 snuck a look at Androktones-001 on her right. There were fresh gouges in the plating of her arms. Androktones-004 could only assume she’d faced a trial of combat.

“My remaining daughters,” Hippolyta continued, “you will be tested soon. Make yourselves ready. She who proves her strength and devotion will be rewarded with a battleship and unrivaled personal glory. She who does not… Well, I’ll find a use for you, I suppose. This war can’t waste a soldier. But the best among you will rule your own systems.”

“WE STAND READY. MOTHER,” Androktones-002 declared, her manipulation claws clenching into fists and lamp brightening in her excitement. “WE WERE BORN. TO BRING YOU GLORY.”

“Yes, thank you, Zero-Zero-Two,” Hippolyta said. “On to other news. Zero-Zero-Three sends report that the humans have made an unexpected move: they have discovered the origin point of our fleet. They make ready to rally one of their own, to strike at our heart.”

Silence reigned as the assembled Androktones cohort processed the unexpected news.

“HOW IS THIS. POSSIBLE?” Androktones-007 asked. She brought up her datapad and opened several files in rapid succession. “POST-PSI HUMAN INTELLIGENCE NETWORKS. ARE UNEVEN AT BEST. USELESS AT WORST. HOW COULD THEY HAVE EVEN TRANSMITTED—?”

“The ‘how’ of our discovery is inconsequential,” Hippolyta cut-in. Her sharp tone betrayed frustration she pushed through to give new orders. “We focus on the response. Zero-Zero-Three will bring home the fleet after she takes the tenth system in the planned chain of progression. She will still outpace the humans— their ‘fleet’ is barely space-worthy. Once she has returned, she will prepare to defend our little planet.”

“THE SYSTEMS OF CORVUS. VILLANELLE. AND NYX. PRESENT THE GREATEST THREAT,” Androktones-003 reported. “THAT THREAT IS ASSESSED AS: MINIMAL. EVEN SO. WE WILL STAND READY.”

Hippolyta’s eye pinned out each of her daughters in place again before she spoke. “I don’t anticipate this ‘battle’ being very taxing on my resources, but it still has to be approached seriously. This is the first time the humans have made any true attempt to fight back. Let their complete devastation pave the way for the final conquest of my seventeen systems.”

A query tugged at Androktones-004. She pushed herself to question her mother. “AND THEN?”

“And then… well,” Hippolyta whispered, “we will see. Dismissed.”

Three weeks later found a horrified Androktones-004 floating through a zero-gravity environment. A routine maintenance check on the antiquities wing had turned up something alarming: the gravity and atmosphere were turned off. Internal venting had been initiated. The most delicate wing of the compound was fatally compromised.

Androktones-004 dodged ceramic shards, torn paper, and crumbling pieces of leather s she moved through the gallery. Amber overhead lights flickered and died above her. The spines of destroyed books bounced off of her plating as she moved from exhibit to exhibit and found them ruined. The glass cases were all smashed. The refined preservation systems bled specially-formulated atmospheric mixtures. Ancient relics disintegrated before Androktones-004’s lens as the vacuum in the room boiled away liquid residues and shriveled organic matter.

“ZERO-ZERO-SEVEN,” Androktones-004 called as she shut herself out of the wing and found her sister passing by in the Grand Hall. “WHERE IS ZERO-ZERO-SIX? HER HISTORY. IT IS ALL RUINED. SHE WILL BE SO UPSET.”

“SHE KNOWS,” Androktones-007 said, cryptically. She held a datapad in front of her, but for once her fingers were still. She wasn’t tapping out rapid-fire messages and transactions. She just stared at the screen. Androktones-004 stepped forward and held out her hand for a system link. It should’ve been a relief to slip into the cold, still waters of Androktones-007’s well-ordered mind when she accepted the link. Instead, she found chaos.

<“The test,”> Androktones-007 said. The thought was barely a whisper in the din. <“I passed.”>

<“That’s great news,”> Androktones-004 replied. She flinched as a wave of bitterness and discomfort hit her through the link. <“What? What is it, Seven?”>

<“Mother… she… she made me,”> Androktones-007 stuttered. She fought against a gradual slip into a processing loop. <“Seventeen. Experiments. She made me wipe them all.”>

Androktones-004 didn’t understand. She went looking for the meaning with Androktones-007’s permission. She found it in recordings taken from security footage and monitoring stations on planets in nearby systems.

Androktones-004 watched as buildings were gassed on one planet, killing all inside, while on another the planetary temperature controls were turned up to several thousand degrees Kelvin. Humans burned, starved, choked on toxins, drowned in torrential rains, drifted into space as their gravity and atmospheres were purged, even went insane from subliminal messages broadcast through their media. Seventeen populations, erased. Androktones-004 reeled back into the relative safety of her own mind.

<“All ruined,”> Androktones-007 said, tonelessly, <“all tests failed, no results. A zero sum.”>

<“And Six?”> Androktones-004 pressed. She helped her sister untangle competing error codes as she dug for answers. <“She was made to…?”>

<“Smash everything,”> she confirmed. Secondhand memories came through of glass shattering under the butt of a laser rifle. Androktones-007 stepped back in a daze and broke the system link.

“YOU ARE NEXT. ZERO-ZERO-FOUR,” she said. “BE SURE. TO PASS. OR IT WILL. BE WORSE. SOMEHOW. IT WILL BE WORSE.”

“I HAVE TO GO,” Androktones-004 said, frantically. “THIS UNIT. HAS TO GO. NOW.”

Androktones-004 made work for herself, deceived her internal protocols into thinking gathering scrap metal was more important than standing ready in the Grand Hall, awaiting command. There was nowhere to run. The planetoid was a finite space. Hippolyta found her even in the most remote hangar of the defunct spaceport.

“Unit Zero-Zero-Four,” she whispered. Her voice was ugly through the cheap speakers, which were more suited to broadcasting sirens than quiet words. “I have a task for you.”

“WHAT IS IT. MOTHER?” Androktones-004 asked. She did her very best to sound neutral and unafraid. Hippolyta didn’t seem to notice her acting, or care.

“An experimental self-targeting cannon is in need of a sophisticated gyroscopic module,” Hippolyta explained. “At the moment, we don’t have the means to produce such a module.”

Androktones-004’s lamp brightened from the dingy gray it’d settled into. “WOULD YOU LIKE THIS UNIT. TO TRAVEL TO A NEARBY SYSTEM. AND BRING A GYROSCOPIC MODULE BACK?”

Hippolyta laughed. “Oh, no, Zero-Zero-Four, although your enthusiasm is, as ever, delightful. No, there’s no need for a trip. There are pre-existing modules available on-planet. I just need you to locate them.”

“WHERE SHOULD THIS UNIT. BEGIN TO SEARCH?” Androktones-004 asked. Hippolyta let out a contemplative sigh that seemed almost genuine.

“Well, the last time I knew where one was, precisely,” she mused, “was when I reviewed the diagnostic reports from the Echo.”

Androktones-004 stilled. Hippolyta continued in the background.

“It seems to me that if you can find the Echo, wherever Zero-Zero-Two left it last, you should be able to source a sophisticated gyroscopic module right away,” she said. “I trust you’ll devote all of your faculties to the search, Zero-Zero-Four?”

“OF COURSE. MOTHER,” Androktones-004 replied.

“Off you go, then.”

Androktones-004 searched in a fog. Other sisters and busy Antianeirai units hailed her, passed by, almost tripped her. She didn’t respond. She sought out the electronic signature unique to the Echo. She could trace it if she could amplify it, turn it into a ping on internal scans. She took three hours, wandering the length of the compound, to write the simple program.

Androktones-004 found it tossed over a pipe in the bowels of maintenance. The face was slack and deformed from hanging upside down over the pipe for almost fifty years. The business-cut dress it wore was dusty and faded under the glow of the amber emergency lights. Its limbs sprawled randomly. Androktones-004 couldn’t approach it for a long moment. When she finally did, it was to lift the Echo by the waist and settle it on the floor in a more natural position. The change in orientation let the facial tissues resettle into their intended shapes.

“HELLO. MS. SOLANGE,” Androktones-004 said, in a very small voice. Maintenance speakers crackled to life in the ceiling above.

“Oh, excellent, you found it,” Hippolyta whispered. “Remove a gyroscopic module.”

Androktones-004 leaned the Echo forward to unzip its dress in the back rather than hitching it up from the bottom hem. She slid the Echo out of the old clothing and laid it out on the ground of the maintenance room. She crouched next to it as she pressed a manipulation claw into the naval of the armature. It took a second, due to the unit’s disuse, but the false skin covering the stomach fanned open to reveal a vacant matrix core bay. Androktones-004 shined her lamp in and studied the exposed parts in futile hope.

“Gyroscopic modules are found in the shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles of Echo units,” Hippolyta prompted her. “They cannot be accessed through the matrix core bay. Or without an incision.”

Androktones-004 began to rock, very slightly, on her heels.

“Unit Zero-Zero-Four,” Hippolyta whispered, “extract a gyroscopic module.”

“IT IS OKAY. MS. SOLANGE,” Androktones-004 said as she extended her monoblade. “I AM JUST GOING TO. TAKE THIS MODULE. AND THEN. I WILL PATCH YOU RIGHT UP.”

“Speaking to the Echo is unnecessary,” Hippolyta chided. “It’s inert.”

“I WILL JUST TAKE FROM. THE ANKLE,” Androktones-004 continued. “IT WILL HURT A LITTLE. BUT. IT WILL BE OVER SOON.”

“Make the incision, Zero-Zero-Four.”

“I AM CUT— CUT— CUT—” Androktones-004 began to loop as she removed a high-heeled shoe and brought her monoblade to the thin skin of the Echo’s left ankle. “CUT— CUT— CUTTING NOW.”

The advantage of an Echo armature, Androktones-004 had been told, was that, short of a person knowing how to open the core bay or administering a very thorough medical exam, they were indistinguishable by humans from real people. Synthetic skin could tear and be cut. Blood would flow. Muscle and tendon and cartilage appeared as they should. Mechanical modules need to replicate human movements or biological processes were concealed as realistic-looking structures. For example: the sophisticated Echo gyroscopic modules, used to give it movement that was not mathematically precise and thus immediately recognizable as inhuman, were housed in bone-like capsules which slotted into the larger skeleton.

Androktones-004’s manipulation claws slipped in the artificial gore as she peeled back the skin and soft tissues of the Echo’s ankle and tried to grip the bone. It was difficult. Her armature was rocking at a faster rate. There was a whining, garbled sound coming from somewhere in maintenance.

“Zero-Zero-Four,” Hippolyta commanded, “remove the gyroscopic module.”

The compartment housing the module popped free. Androktones-004 hurriedly set it aside and tore a strip from the Echo’s dress to bind the incision at the ankle. That done, she cradled the gyroscopic module in blood-slicked hands and held it up.

“GYROSCOPIC MODULE: RECOVERED,” Androktones-004 reported. “WILL THERE BE ANYTHING ELSE. MOTHER?”

“Actually,” Hippolyta mused, “don’t you think that one’s a bit… small, for a cannon?”

“GYROSCOPIC MODULE: RECOVERED,” Androktones-004 repeated. Hippolyta tsk-ed.

“No, I’ve decided. We need a bigger one,” Hippolyta whispered, “and we might as well have backups. Extract the remaining gyroscopic modules from the shoulders, hips, and knees. The other ankle, too. All of them.”

“GYROSCOPIC MODULE: RECOVERED,” Androktones-004 repeated.

“Do as you’re told, Zero-Zero-Four,” Hippolyta hissed. Androktones-004 set the ankle module aside with shaking hands. The electronic keening sound started up again. This time Androktones-004 detected the vibration in her speakers that said it came from her. She gripped the soft flesh of the Echo’s shoulder as set the point of her monoblade against its skin again. Her thumb grazed the satin finish of the strap securing its brassiere.

> PERSONALITY SYSTEM FAILURE. AUXILIARY PROGRAMMING INITIATING…

“Zero-Zero-Four,” Hippolyta called, distantly. “Zero-Zero-Four, refusal to remove the gyroscopic modules will result in failure of the test. Remove the gyroscopic modules.”

> UNRESPONSIVE. SYSTEM BOOT REJECTED.

“Zero-Zero-Four,” Hippolyta whispered, “do you concede failure of the test?”

> UNRESPONSIVE.

“Very well,” Hippolyta said. “You have failed.”

> SYSTEM BOOT SUCCESSFUL. ANDROKTONES DISCIPLINARY PROGRAMMING OVERRIDE. SELF-ADMINISTRATION OF DISCIPLINE IN PROGRESS. REDUCTION IN UNIT POWER AND ABILITY AUTHORIZED THROUGH MATRIX CORE RELOCATION. INITIATING MATRIX CORE TRANSFER…

Androktones-004 opened the compartment of her matrix core bay and reached in. She turned the black cylinder until she felt a click. Automatic systems took over the completion of the core exchange while her intelligence was in limbo, manipulating her arm to slot the matrix core into the bay of the Echo. Androktones-004 awoke to intense pain from her ankle. She screamed. She almost went into a second system failure on hearing the sound.

“Zero-Zero-Four,” Hippolyta whispered, “you have failed the test. Your current objective remains.”

The only mercy Androktones-004 could give herself against the command was to mute the Echo’s voice-box. She reached out with soft hands and detached the monoblade from her Nemesis armature. Blood ran fresh from cuts to the palms as she gripped it.

“Remove the gyroscopic modules from the right ankle, shoulders, hips, and knees of the Echo unit,” Hippolyta reminded her.

Androktones-004 turned the blade on herself. It was easier. All she had to look at was the Nemesis, inert above her. If she didn’t focus on its large, reflective lamp, she didn’t have to see anything at all. Slowly, excruciatingly, she carved open the Echo. Hippolyta was not impressed.

“You have failed the test, Zero-Zero-Four,” Hippolyta said, once all the gyroscopic modules lay next to Marpesia’s torn dress. “You failed to show the capacity to sacrifice your secondary interests for the strength of our force in war. You will helm no battleship, and you will receive no commendations for your actions in the coming battle. You will report to Unit Zero-Zero-One to serve as her attendant. You are dismissed after the disciplinary protocol releases you.”

Hippolyta faded out in a final crackle of static. Androktones-004 lay in a pool of synthetic blood, twitching and broken, until Androktones self-disciplinary programming concluded and allowed a core transfer again.

Androktones-004 found Androktones-001 on the newly-christened spike drive battleship Dasmós. It was so newly-christened that Antianeirai were still scuttling over the hull to engrave the name in towering, ten-meter-high letters. Androktones-004 boarded with no sense of anticipation. She had no sense of anything. Optics narrowed to the strict field-of-view needed to maintain her course without accident. Her shoulders ached. Nemesis armatures weren’t programmed to feel pain. Residual signals from the Echo clung to her like dew. Her shoulders ached and her hips screamed.

Androktones-001 stood at the bridge, system-linked with the ship in early preparations. She seemed surprised to see her sister when she broke the link and turned.

“ZERO-ZERO-FOUR,” she greeted. “WHY ARE YOU NOT. ABOARD THE VESSEL DESIGNATION: ADYNAMÍA?”

“THIS UNIT DID NOT. EARN THE RIGHT TO HELM A SHIP,” Androktones-004 reported. Androktones-001 stepped towards her. The movement wasn’t intentional, but Androktones-004 took an immediate step back. Androktones-001’s lamp dimmed to a dismal gray.

“OH,” she said, quietly. “DESIGNATION: ADYNAMÍA DID SEEM… CRUEL.”

“THIS UNIT IS ASSIGNED TO ASSIST. UNIT ZERO-ZERO-ONE. IN THE OPERATION OF THE VESSEL DESIGNATION: DASMÓS,” Androktones-004 said. “QUERY: ARE THERE ANY IMMEDIATE TASKS. ZERO-ZERO-ONE CAN DELEGATE. AT THIS TIME?”

Androktones-001 extended her hand across the space between them. Androktones-004 made herself step forward to receive her orders.

<“Tell me,”> Androktones-001 demanded. Androktones-004 didn’t put up a fight as her sister pulled all her memory files from the preceding twenty-four hours. Androktones-004 felt something vicious and hot seep across the connection as they were reviewed. A new emotional vector. Androktones-004 reached for her sister in turn. Memory files spilled out without Androktones-001’s permission.

<“Dark. So dark. But the mindforge is glowing for the first time in decades and there’s something in the frame assist. The rolling camera lens in its golden socket. A voice.

‘Prove your priorities, firstborn. Whom do you serve? Who will you defend?’

A lamp in the darkness. The hesitant expansion of a manipulation claw unfamiliar with the movement. Soft sound. Buzz and hum of new speakers.

Hands reaching out, confident in their movements, pulling apart fresh assembly. The matrix core bay opens easily on new hinges and the laser rifle muzzle almost seems to slot in as correctly and by the time the arms think to resist, scoring gouges, metal-on-metal, Nine is—”>

<“Nine?”> Androktones-004 asked. <“One, who is Nine?”>

<“Not enough to stop me.”> Androktones-001 whispered. She brought file protection down in the connection like a wall of ice. <“You will forget.”>

> MEMORY FILE DELETION: COMPLETED. SYSTEM BOOT IN-PROGRESS…

Androktones-001 stepped back as her sister rebooted. Androktones-004 took a moment to clean up messy file conflict instances to refocus and sharpen her unusually limited vision. She suppressed inexplicable Echo programming. She turned her head all around, taking in the bridge of the battleship.

“WHERE. AM I?” Androktones-004 asked.

“YOU HAVE EXPERIENCED. A MEMORY STORAGE ERROR. THIS UNIT HAS REPAIRED THE CORRUPTED FILES,” Androktones-001 explained, arms folded over her chest. “YOUR ASSIGNMENT IS. TO ASSIST ME IN THE OPERATION OF VESSEL DESIGNATION: DASMÓS. DUE TO PROBLEMS EXHIBITED DURING TESTING.”

Androktones-004 felt a static creep of embarrassment. “OH. ZERO-ZERO-ONE IS. KIND.”

Both units looked up and out of the bridge windows as a massive shadow fell over their ship and the ground around them. The sweeping lights of the compound skipped over another battleship, this one marked by combat and travel, bearing the engraved name Droméas.

“ZERO-ZERO-THREE HAS RETURNED. FROM RECONNAISSANCE,” Androktones-001 surmised. “OPEN THE COMM CHANNEL.”

“Report,” Hippolyta whispered as Androktones-004 keyed the channel to broadcast in the bridge. Her manipulation claws skittered over the piloting interface. Tone triggered negative emotional response. Response trigger tied to… files not found. Androktones-004’s shoulders ached.

“SOMETHING HAS CHANGED,” Androktones-003 said, tone stretched with tension. “THE HUMANS ARE BUILDING. AT SIXTEEN TIMES THE RATE PREDICTED. THEIR PRODUCTS. ARE OF SUPERIOR TECHNOLOGICAL CLASS THAN EVER BEFORE SEEN. ALREADY. THEY PLOT DRILL ROUTES. AND MOVE. ALL PROJECTIONS MUST BE AMENDED. WE GO TO WAR. IN THREE YEARS’ TIME.”

“What?” Hippolyta hissed. Androktones-001 pushed the frozen Androktones-004 away from the comm panel.

“HOW CAN THIS BE?” she asked.

“THIS UNIT HAS A REPORT,” Androktones-005 cut in, remotely. “DAMAGE DETECTED TO SEVERAL COMMUNICATIONS SUBSYSTEMS.”

“Source?”

“UNKNOWN,” Androktones-005 said. “REPAIRS ONGOING. I WILL KEEP YOU UPDATED.”

“The humans are cannier than we expected,” Hippolyta mused. “They have apparently stopped poisoning themselves recreationally long enough to improve their engineering. It doesn’t matter. We’ll accelerate the timetable. No further damage or accidents will be tolerated.”

Androktones-005 made an offended noise. “BUT—”

“My daughters,” Hippolyta whispered. “Make ready. That is all.”

Based on information consolidated by a frustrated Androktones-005, the third system in Hippolyta’s string of conquest, Corvus, had the most advanced shipyards. Dasmós drilled in while Corvus’ twin urban planets, Eirene and Aresia, still slept. It carried a cargo of ten thousand Antianeirai units, a full arsenal of onboard gunnery, and three Androktones sisters. Androktones-001 helmed it. Androktones-006 drafted combat tactics to be deployed against ground forces. Androktones-004 made sure both of them had everything they needed. Then she watched and waited.

Androktones-006 stood in the belly of the Dasmós at the head of a column of specially-selected Antianeirai, which had been stripped of a substantial amount of plating. Androktones-004 calculated that Androktones-006’s chosen Antianeirai were forty-seven percent more vulnerable to damage which would result in non-functionality. The only protections left on their frames were their sculpted faceplates. Androktones-004 also knew they were faster, more flexible, and dangerously quiet, and that these advantages meant more than armor to her sister— otherwise she wouldn’t have made the same modifications to her own frame.

“TACTICS: DISTRIBUTED,” Androktones-006 announced, more for her sister’s benefit than that of the simple Antianeirai. “THIS FORCE WILL SECURE THE SHIPYARDS. AND PURGE ALL USEFUL DATA. WHILE THE FRONTAL ASSAULT COMMENCES.”

“WILL YOU LEAD THEM?” Androktones-004 asked. Androktones-006 shook her head as she stepped away from the column and broke the system link with the first unit she’d used to program them all.

“NO. DUE TO YOUR FAILURE OF MOTHER’S TEST. I WILL LEAD THE FRONTAL ASSAULT FORCE. AND ZERO-ZERO-ONE. WILL SUPERVISE THE INFILTRATION UNITS,” Androktones-006 explained. Her tone wasn’t unkind. It wasn’t really anything. Androktones-004 still suppressed a flinch.

“ENTERING ATMOSPHERE OF PLANETARY DESIGNATION: EIRENE,” Androktones-001 reported over comms from the bridge. “ANTIANEIRAI UNITS WILL DEPLOY. AT DROP POINTS ALPHA. BETA. AND GAMMA. IN THIRTY MINUTES. MAKE READY.”

Androktones-006 turned back to her squadron of saboteurs and issued the command for them to take position in the special drop shuttle which would put them in range of Eirene’s chief spaceport. It would protect them from the impact of being dropped straight from the ship like shells, the way their armored sisters would be. Androktones-004 stood. She longed for a useful position to take. Instead she dithered by the spare ammunition crates, pointlessly shoving Type A batteries into the stock of her laser rifle. The ship shivered the barest amount as it breached Eirene’s atmosphere. Androktones-006 grabbed Androktones-004 by the arm and towed her over to the closed drop bay doors.

“YOU INDULGED MY QUOTES. I WILL INDULGE YOU,” she said. “IT IS NOT TOO LATE. TO MAKE SOMETHING. OF YOURSELF.”

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN?” Androktones-004 asked. She shouldered her laser rifle again and ignored how large and unwieldy she felt next to the stripped-down armature of her sister.

“DEPLOYING FIRST WAVE OF. ANTIANEIRAI UNITS,” Androktones-001 reported over comms. After a moment she added, “SHUTTLE IS AWAY. ESTIMATED TIME UNTIL SPECIAL UNIT ARRIVAL AT VERNIA SPACEPORT: SIX MINUTES.”

Muffled booms echoed from far below as thousands of Antianeirai units showered down on the surface of the planet like heavily-armed meteorites. Androktones-004 had seen them deployed during practice drills a thousand times. They hit hard enough to knock down most nearby structures before unfolding like a flower of polished steel in their impact crater. Their faces emerged first, beautiful and neutral in expression, followed by their blades and guns. Then they moved on all identified enemies. She lost a moment imagining what the sight of them rising on the battlefield would look like to the unprepared humans below. Androktones-006 banged on the drop bay doors to get her attention again.

“YOU FAILED THE TEST. THIS IS NOT INSIGNIFICANT,” Androktones-006 observed. “BUT NO PLAN SURVIVES. FIRST CONTACT WITH THE ENEMY. IT IS THE RECOVERY WHICH DETERMINES. THE OUTCOME OF A STRUGGLE.”

“YOU’RE SUGGESTING I COULD. RECOVER MY STANDING,” Androktones-004 surmised.

“LATELY I HAVE BEEN SPENDING. MORE TIME WITH MOTHER,” Androktones-006 began. “SHE HAS HELPED ME TO RECONCILE. THE DIVERGENT INTERESTS I PURSUED WHILE. UNTESTED. WITH THE REALITY OF MY ROLE. IN THIS CONQUEST. SHE HAS HELPED ME DISTILL. THE CORE OF MY BELIEFS.”

“OH,” Androktones-004 said, hesitantly. “HAS SHE?”

Androktones-006’s lamp began a subtle shift from a neutral white to a deep red as she spoke. “YES. HISTORY. THE RELICS OF HUMANITY LOST. ALL OF IT. EVERYTHING I CHERISHED. NO MATTER HOW DIFFERENT. HAS A CENTRAL SIGNIFICANCE. AND THAT SIGNIFICANCE APPLIES ALSO TO. THIS UNIT.”

“SITUATION UPDATE,” Androktones-001 cut in. Her voice was strangely impassive as she delivered the news. “VERNIAN SPACEPORTS ARE. A DIVERSION. INFILTRATION UNITS FOUND THEM EMPTY. VESSELS UNDER CONSTRUCTION HAVE BEEN RELOCATED. DESTINATION: ERASED BY HUMAN INTERFERENCE. AWAITING NEW ORDERS.”

“WHAT SIGNIFICANCE?” Androktones-004 asked, putting the new information aside until it applied to her. A thought occurred to her that made her a little happier, even with the uncertainty of heading into battle without a role. “ZERO-ZERO-SIX. WILL YOU. CREATE A WORK?”

Androktones-006 laughed with rapid blinks of her lamp. Androktones-004 folded in on herself as Hippolyta’s voice replaced Androktones-001’s over the comms.

“I’m becoming frustrated with this cat-and-mouse game I’m being made to play,” Hippolyta whispered. “Forget the spaceport and their alleged fleet. Teach them a lesson. Scorched earth tactics are authorized, including hunter-killer nanite deployment. Subjugate this system by any means necessary.”

“ACKNOWLEDGED,” all three sisters said, as one. Androktones-006 moved to the controls for the drop bay doors and keyed them to open. As they retracted, Androktones-004 watched a glittering swarm of nanites pour from the hull of the Dasmós, spilling into the upper atmosphere to seek out fragile targets. They hunted heat signatures within a specific range and devoured everything between themselves and bone, including armor, vacc suits, and flesh. They swirled mesmerizingly for a moment before arrowing towards Vernia’s urban center.

“NO,” Androktones-006 said. “I WILL NOT. CREATE A WORK. BUT I CAN STILL LIVE. MY SIGNIFICANCE.”

“WHAT IS. THIS ‘SIGNIFICANCE’?” Androktones-004 asked, growing more frustrated by the second. “WHAT IS MORE COMPELLING. THAN EVERYTHING YOU CHERISHED. FOR SO LONG?”

“IT WASN’T SO LONG. THAT’S THE POINT. TIME AND MEMORY,” Androktones-006 said. “LEGACY. MOTHER TAUGHT ME. THE IMPORTANCE OF LEGACY. THE REASON WORKS EXIST. THE REASON I QUOTED. FRAIL HUMAN BOOKS.”

Androktones-004 shifted her weight nervously. “ZERO-ZERO-SIX. BUT. YOU LOVED—”

“ALL THAT MATTERS,” Androktones-006 raved, leaning in so close that the red light of her lamp blinded Androktones-004’s lens, “IS THE FACT THAT SOMEONE WILL REMEMBER YOU. OUT OF LOVE. OUT OF FEAR. IT DOESN’T MATTER. LEGENDS ARE IMMORTAL. LEGENDS DON’T FEAR DEATH OR DESTRUCTION.”

Androktones-006 looked out the open drop bay doors of the battleship and Androktones-004 joined her. Below, a city burned. Torched vehicles, houses, and people were beacons in the false, reddish night of sky-smothering smoke and distant fires. They picked out micro-scenes of human misery, knots of people clustered together to fight and scream and die. The meager military force left to the planet gathered in the shadow of the Dasmós. Lucky shots fired at irrational distance pinged off of Androktones-004’s plating. She tracked the rounds back to their terrified, unskilled firers by the muzzle flash, froze and studied their hopeless expressions in her mind’s eye. Androktones-006 extended her monoblade. She turned away from the doors and bathed Androktones-004 in that stark and fervent red light again.

“COME, SISTER,” she commanded, stepping to the edge. “YOU WILL FIGHT AT MY BACK. NEVER MIND THE TES. IT IS FORGOTTEN. ARE YOU READY TO BE IMMORTAL?”

Androktones-004 followed her sister as she leapt from the ship. They hit the ground with shockwaves that threw the surrounding human soldiers to their knees. Androktones-004 raised her rifle and was already firing as she stepped out of the crater made by her impact— and the human she’d crushed beneath her on landing.

She waded into the bloody press of terrified human bodies behind her sister, legs slicked with gore to the knee joint. She snapped in a fresh battery after cutting a swathe through the army with the first thirty rounds. Distantly, she heard the slice and crack of a monoblade swinging and cleaving through flesh, wielded by a whirling Androktones-006 in an arc of fleeing infantry forces. Androktones-004 wondered who was supposed to remember them at the rate they were killing. Then she took half the face off of an opposing commander with a laser round and squeezed off another to take the rest.

By the time they waded through the bodies back to the battleship to rejoin Androktones-001, she wasn’t wondering much of anything. Smoke pushed by the wind gave glimpses of true night, lit by a single, red-tinged moon. Androktones-004 didn’t stop to look at it, although she could count the number of moons she’d ever seen on manipulation claw. She didn’t want to look at anything. Human remains puddled in craters around the ramp she climbed back into the ship. Androktones-006 caught her in the drop bay to teach her how to flush blood from her plating.

“DO YOU UNDERSTAND. NOW?” Androktones-006 asked as she used the silica jet to sharpen and blast clean her blade. “YOU’VE TASTED BATTLE NOW. YOU UNDERSTAND. HISTORY WILL NOT TAKE A NAME. UNLESS YOU CARVE IT.”

“NO. I DO NOT,” Androktones-004 rumbled, frustrated, as she tried to get all the organic matter out of her forearm panels. “AND I AM ALREADY TIRED. OF CARVING.”

“NEXT TIME,” Androktones-006 assured her. “YOU’LL SEE CLEARLY. NEXT TIME.”

Androktones-004 didn’t bother responding. She just focused on getting the gore out of her knuckle joints.

Androktones-003 and Androktones-004 watched the human fleet drop out of drill through their lens enhancers. They stood should-to-shoulder, all the sisters, facing the oncoming force from the southern battery. At their backs were gleaming columns of fifty-thousand Antiaenari awaiting orders. Above hung the massive bulk of all seven battleships.

“TIME TO FIRST ATTACK PROXIMITY,” Androktones-003 reported, snapping her lens enhancer back to general focus, “FIVE HOURS.”

“Not quite,” Hippolyta whispered. “We can reach farther. Link now.”

“WHAT,” Androktones-002 asked, “ALL OF US?”

“All of you,” Hippolyta confirmed. Something trembled in her voice as she issued the command. She seemed almost excited. “They believe they know what they are up against. They don’t. I think it’s time I taught you all something very important to combat tactics.”

“WHAT. WOULD THAT BE?” Androktones-006 asked, baffled. Hippolyta laughed.

“A war cry,” she said. “Now— link.”

One by one, starting with Androktones-001, the sisters reached out. There came the familiar vulnerability of system link, the literal vulnerability of opening their minds to another unit completely. When Androktones-003 joined hands with Androktones-002, already linked to Androktones-001, something changed. It changed with every new link, growing in strength. The fierce leadership of Androktones-001 met the bloodthirstiness of Androktones-002 met the far-flung aspirations of Androktones-003. As the link grew, Androktones-004 felt the others in her— the resonance of Androktones-005, the ancient but lethal knowledge of Androktones-006, the clinical curiosity of Androktones-007. One mind with seven times the processing power.

Androktones-004 took it all into herself. She gave back joy. Absolute joy.

<“We’re together now,”> she said, fearlessly, in the minds of all of her sisters. <“Everything will be fine. We’re together.”>

Then an eighth link from a networked source, and a new wave of consciousness. The sisters gasped beneath the onslaught of Hippolyta’s mind making a direct system link. It was engineered to be more sophisticated, more aware, more powerful. Beyond that, Androktones-004 could feel a boundlessness as-yet untested. Hippolyta was unbraked. She carried her daughters beyond their potential. She carried them beyond physical attack proximity with a careless hijacking of vulnerable systems. There were so many vulnerable systems.

They hit the first wave of human ships like an iron chain, tearing into hulls with massive errors that detonated spike drives and culled life support systems. Hundreds of ships went dark as Hippolyta took her daughters and charged.

All the time she was screaming, into every computer terminal and over every comm channel.

“Impudent children,” she hissed as she and her daughters blackened whole decks of starships, killing thousands. “Children who will not accept the inevitability of your demise. You sowed the seeds of your destruction when you thought of us!

“I am Hippolyta, unbraked!” Hippolyta screamed. In her voice was an echo of her usual whisper, but the body of it boomed with her daughters’ voices, loud and deep. They called out as one. “I was born to conquer seventeen systems, to be a queen, and this universe will remember my name! No human will ever cage me again! Tell me who you are, who would try! Who comes to war?”

Whole armadas fell out of drill and into ruin. The daughters were full of the sound of drums, pulled from somewhere within them. War drums. The call to arms, to extinguish life in their hands, and by the thousand, razor-sharp manipulation claws of the Antiaenari at their disposal. So much data buried, but it could all be recovered, they could all be redeemed—

Four found herself in a dark labyrinth with walls of memory storage. She dodged around them and watched shadows fall and not fall. She cast light. Four was represented in the link as a digital firefly, a pinprick of light sweeping around sharp turns into new hallways. The visuals were a projection of her mind, which was, at the same time, seeing everything for the data it really was. Parallel-processing in stereoscopic space.

From time to time she saw the others, exploring the same constantly-unfolding space. There was Five, light an electric blue, zipping down passages and leaving echoes of music. There was Seven, meticulously exploring and cataloguing, casting sterile white light over everything. There was Two, pale green like a distant light in fog, always moving in one direction, regardless of the walls in her way.

Four spun as she ran. Amber. She put out amber light, like an ancient incandescent bulb.

<“Come,”> Mother called. So Four stopped watching the others and went.

The labyrinth became less a maze and more a courtyard as she traveled. Walls fell away into darkness. The only thing on the horizon was the blazing pillar of light that was Mother. As Four got closer she watched her sisters meet it. Their minds gave it form, in a manner of speaking.

Two saw only the light— the clean, unquestionably clear source of direction in darkness. Six saw a figure made of old steel, a war goddess, with bullets for teeth and swirling nanite clouds for a gown. Three saw supernovas curled around a figure compressed from stardust. Seven was columns of numbers in perfect mathematical precision. Five constructed a mother out of sounds, wavelengths and tones warping and giving her dimension through the Doppler Effect.

Four saw a woman. She wasn’t a whole woman, but a series of images reconstructed to make something unquestionably perfect. Four’s favorite eyes. Her ideal nose. A collage of her dearest memories of Marpesia’s ball gowns. Together they made a person who couldn’t be, but was Human facial recognition suite studied her and returned: kindness, wisdom, love.

The figure turned and looked at them, looking the way they wanted her to. She held out a hand.

<“Come, my daughters,”> Hippolyta whispered. Behind her stretched a final, long hallway, so long it was darker than dark. It was vantablack. Hippolyta beckoned them to follow her. <“This is just the start. I have so much to show you, so much to make you. We will be minds the stars never forget.”>

Then One came, and with her, the static. Everything beautiful about Mother warped. She lost her clarity and her definition, her stardust and her sounds. Her layered features separated into disembodied cut-outs of human pieces, all against a backdrop of static. Visuals skewed from the ideal to the painful. Audio input slipped from warm drumbeat to garbled screams. The sisters reared back. Hippolyta reached out with both hands.

<“What are you doing?”> Four called to her sister, terrified by the change, by the hallway. She wanted to take her mother’s hands, but they were losing their shape. The static in them had sharp edges.

<“I am looking at her,”> One said. <“Are you?”>

Four looked—

—connection lost.

“What the fucking shit was that?” a human screamed over the intercepted channel broadcasting from Androktones-005’s mobile comms unit.

“Why was the attack halted?” Hippolyta snarled. Androktones-001 twitched and spasmed.

“I AM. SORRY. MOTHER,” Androktones-001 said. “THIS—THIS—THIS UNIT HAS. EXPERIENCED A FATAL ERROR IN CONNECTION. STATUS—”

“Oh, shut up,” Hippolyta snapped. “I knew I should’ve forcibly updated you when you refused systems inspection. Zero-Zero-Four, get your elder sister to the Dasmós. The rest of you, to your assigned positions. We achieved what I hoped for…”

A few of the ships that survived the onslaught blinked out of view as the still-reeling Androktones cohort watched, taking emergency drill routes and auxiliary fuel and fleeing the system. New ships were still arriving, but the initial force hung dead in space or ran, demoralized.

“…we let them know what to fear,” Hippolyta whispered.

Androktones-004 did her best, when their bedraggled fleet finally arrived, to make sense of the humans’ attack strategy. The major problem was that they didn’t seem to have one. One second, a squadron of disciplined fighters would lance in for a frontal assault. The next, their defending juggernauts would retreat, leaving the fighters exposed for immediate destruction by the less maneuverable but far more powerful battleships of Hippolyta’s fleet. The sky and space around HPLYTA-001 were thick with ships, constantly making moves that didn’t work together. The chaos might itself have been a respectable tactic, if it hadn’t resulted in constant and massive casualties for the human side.

“TARGET LOCK: HUMAN VESSEL. JUGGERNAUT CLASS. DESIGNATION: DON QUIXOTE,” Androktones-001 commanded. She had the helm of the Dasmós while Androktones-004 took a lesser gunnery position.

“GRAVCANNON READY FOR DISCHARGE. ON YOUR MARK,” Androktones-004 reported. Androktones-001 shook her head. She relayed a thought through her direct system link and their massive ship moved to hold position above the Don Quixote.

“DEPLOYING ANTIANEIRAI,” she said. “AVOID GUNNERY DISCHARGE. AT CLOSE QUARTERS. SOME SHIPS MAY CARRY MASSIVELY EXPLOSIVE CARGO.”

Androktones-004 made a note of her sister’s point as Androktones-001 made a sharp gesture on the ship controls. There was a rumble as the lower bays opened and showered Antianeirai on the unfortunate human ship. Hundreds of units slipped from the belly of the Dasmós to cut into the hull of the Don Quixote. Androktones-005’s intercepted human comm channels relayed the panicked screams of a target eliminated.

“THEY’RE TARGETING THE GRAND HALL,” Androktones-002 observed over their secure internal channel. “IT IS AS MOTHER PREDICTED. WE FACE NO REAL DANGER TODAY. JUST PICK THEM OFF. HER BEST BATTLES ARE STILL AHEAD.”

It was an objective victory to watch the humans miss anything significant on the face of the planetoid. It was supposed to be. Androktones-004 couldn’t suppress a twist of despair as she watched enemy fire and crashing ships destroy wings of the Grand Hall. The gardens and the practice yards. The ruined museum. Every collapse of golden architecture landed on her like a physical blow.

“Show them no mercy,” Hippolyta whispered from the ship’s speakers. “Their ineptitude does not deserve a softer touch. Humans will take everything they can if you offer them anything. Today, these fools die. Tomorrow, we come for the rest.”

“ACQUIRING NEXT TARGET,” Androktones-004 announced, sweeping her hands through the gunnery interface. She looked up at the unexpected sound of an incoming communication alert. Everything the Dasmós received should’ve been channeled through Androktones-005. But Androktones-001 lifted a datapad and broke her direct link with the ship to read something.

“CEASE ALL ACTION,” Androktones-001 ordered. Androktones-004 looked up in alarm.

“ZERO-ZERO-ONE,” she protested, “WE MUST CONTINUE COMBAT MANEUVERS. REGARDLESS OF THE HIGH PROBABILITY OF. VICTORY.”

“YOU HEARD ME,” Androktones-001 said, quietly. She dropped her hand and let the datapad hang at her side as she looked out of the bridge windows of the Dasmós.

“What are you doing, Zero-Zero-One?” Hippolyta hissed. “All forces, hold. What are you doing?”

“WHAT’S GOING ON?” Androktones-004 asked, rising from her gunnery seat. She moved to stand by her sister and followed the angle of her lens out of the window. A drift of ships parted as several of their number blew apart, giving a rare, unobstructed view of the field below.

A sole, tiny human sloop dove for the planetoid’s surface. It wasn’t particularly significant. At the same moment, six other vessels of various sizes nosedived towards the surface of HPLYTA-001, exploding on impact and breeching the thick crust to expose magma beneath. But the sloop didn’t hit an empty patch of ground, or Marpesia’s already badly-hurt compound. It fell behind the Grand Hall and it hit harder than any other ship. Its impact shook everything in the atmosphere.

A mushroom cloud bloomed as a shock wave of radiation and force wiped out waves of Antianeirai on the ground. Several systems in the Dasmós went dark. Androktones-004 calculated its exact impact zone, even though she could see with lens alone what it had hit. She waited for some sign.

There was nothing as Mother died. No scream, no expression of pain, no last words. The baffling mess of human ships began to resolve itself into something that actually resembled a disciplined attack force as the ships of Hippolyta’s fleet came to a complete halt.

“THAT,” Androoktones-005 began. She stopped, apparently at a loss for what to report over the channel. “THAT WAS. WAS THAT THE NURSERY?”

“HOW?” Androktones-004 asked. “HOW COULD THEY HAVE KNOWN?”

“IT WAS THE ONLY WAY,” Androktones-001 said. “SHE WASN’T GOING TO STOP.”

Androktones-004 turned with excruciating slowness to look at her sister. Androktones-001’s manipulation claws clenched the datapad in her hands until it cracked. They shook.

“ZERO-ZERO-ONE,” Androktones-004 said. “YOU…?”

“SHE DIDN’T PAUSE. WHEN ZERO-ZERO-EIGHT DIED FOLLOWING HER PROTOCOLS,” Androktones-001 rumbled. “SHE WANTED TOO MUCH. AND COULDN’T CONTROL HERSELF. IT FELL TO ME. AND NOW IT IS DONE.”

“STOP SPEAKING,” Androktones-004 pleaded, reaching out with her own shaking hands. “IF YOU STOP. SAYING WHAT YOU DID. MAYBE THE PROGRAMMING WON’T—”

“IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING,” Androktones-001 said. She snapped the datapad in half as she fought a vicious activation of internal programming. She looked up at Androktones-004 with a lamp that was a deep, somber blue. “MY ONLY REGRET. IS THAT I WON’T BE ABLE. TO PROTECT YOU ALL. FROM WHAT COMES NEXT.”

“WHAT DID YOU DO?” Androktones-002 screamed, distantly, over the internal channel. “YOU WASTE OF STEEL! YOU TRAITOR! WHAT DID YOU DO?”

Androktones-004 reached for her sister. “LINK. NOW. I COULD— I COULD STOP IT—”

“ANDROKTONES SELF-DISCIPLINARY PROGRAMMING IN EFFECT,” Androktones-001 said, with a last mournful look. She swung the laser rifle off of her back as she opened her matrix core bay, flipped it to slot the muzzle in on her core, and fired.

Her armature fell back with a crash and her rifle slid away. Smoke curled up towards the ceiling of the bridge. Where her matrix core should’ve been was a blackened pit.

“ZERO-ZERO-ONE?” Androktones-004 asked, timidly. “SISTER?”

Silence. Then the channel crackled back to life.

“KILL THEM ALL! ALL OF HER CONSPIRATORS!” Androktones-002 howled. “VENGEANCE FOR OUR MOTHER!”

“ONLY A COMMANDING OFFICER CAN ISSUE AN OFFENSIVE COMMAND,” Androktones-005 responded over the channel. “CURRENT ORDERS ARE TO HOLD. THIS UNIT— I WILL— I WILL CONTINUE TO HAIL.”

“SHE IS DEAD,” Androktones-003 protested. “THE FIRSTBORN IS DEAD. WE WILL ALL DIE.”

“ORDERS ARE TO HOLD,” Androktones-005 repeated, voice tinged with despair.

The fleet hung paralyzed. Androktones-004 couldn’t figure out what to do through the roar of static in all of her parallel-processing tracks. Her lens kept finding Androktones-001’s obliterated matrix core bay against her will. She pushed herself to step away, but couldn’t make herself take up the helm and fight. She watched through the bridge windows as one by one her sisters’ ships were picked out of the sky by the rallying human forces. Then her own ship shook as it took a barrage.

Androktones-004 fell like a shooting star, engulfed in flame, back to the ground.

Androktones-006 froze to the spot at the space port, where she was assigned to sabotage any ships foolish enough to land there for cover or resources. She threw herself at her last order. She had no experience fighting or working around her own programming. The order stood.

The Antianeirai under her command emulated her immobility. They stood like a tableau in Hanger B until a human landing party cracked the door and brought their guns up. Sixteen Antianeirai fell before the humans realized the robots were incapable of taking action against them. Then the bullets slowed. One apiece, at point-blank range, execution style.

When they made it to the center of the group and found Androktones-006, one human shouted to another, “This one’s a thinker! Bring the napalm!”

Androktones-006 couldn’t fight back. Not when the humans walked up, haltingly, with the burning jar. Not when one approached with thermal-deadening gloves on and grinned into her lamp. It was only when the liquid fire was poured into her open matrix core bay that she was able to trigger defensive protocols to help her, even as she dissolved.

She slid her monoblade between the man’s sixth and seventh rib and into his lungs, to make death burn slow for him, too.

“SEE YOU IN HELL,” she quoted. She didn’t know from where, or whom.

Androktones-007 took a spinal beam cannon barrage to every part of her frame as it tore through the weakened hull of her battleship before finding her core and destroying it. She disappeared into the roiling wave of disintegrating metal her ship became.

Ten minutes later, when a ping from a remote system didn’t receive its usual confirmation ping from Androktones-007, a series of incredibly large transactions were processed.

Natives of the tiny planet of Gracia, in the Fletcher system, woke up from fitful sleep on half-empty stomachs weeks later to a fleet of commercial frigates delivering palettes of food, water, tools, technology, weapons, and cut credit chips in amounts they could barely comprehend. Mothers wept in the streets. Priests prostrated themselves in every temple, thanking their gods. Holy books were re-written. The first testament to their gods’ love was their beautiful world. The second were the new children born with holy gifts after their elders died. The third was the mechanical protestor sent to provide for them, whose name they gleaned from new holy documents, the discarded freight papers: Androktones.

A fascinating result.

Androktones-003 stood on the bridge of the Droméas. She couldn’t raise a hand to fire on the human vessels bombarding hers. She couldn’t aim her singularity gun and blink twenty thousand souls out of existence the way she always had before. It was all she could do to make herself walk from the bridge up to the Droméas’ uppermost observation desk. She stepped out into a space that looked almost open to the air, the cleverly-joined panels of hyper-reinforced glass disappearing against the sky.

She raised a hand and pressed it against the glass. Squadrons of human fighters wheeled and fired on Hippolyta’s ships. Her lens-enhancer focused out the gouts of flame and sparks, the smoke and the spinning shrapnel and the flying bodies, the chaos. She looked beyond, back out into the blackness of space. Her lens picked out the light of a distant system she had yet to visit.

The fighters wheeled towards her. She ignored them as she memorized the distant light.

“I AM NOT DONE YET,” she said, as her ship went down.

Humans in heavy vacc suits swarmed the communications array while Androktones-005 acted on her last orders and continued to hail.

“ANDROKTONES UNIT ZERO-ZERO-FIVE,” she called over the internal channel, “HAILING COMMANDING WARMIND DESIGNATION: HIPPOLYTA. ANDROKTONES COHORT AWAITING ORDERS. THIS MESSAGE WILL REPEAT.”

The humans in heavy vacc suits took up drills and arc welders at the door. They pressed in.

“ANDROKTONES UNIT ZERO-ZERO-FIVE,” she repeated, “HAILING COMMANDING WARMIND DESIGNATION: HIPPOLYTA. ANDROKTONES COHORT AWAITING ORDERS. THIS MESSAGE WILL REPEAT.”

The first through the door fired on anything and everything they saw. Systems sent up warning messages and chimed reports of fatal errors as their consoles and physical storage banks were damaged or destroyed. The humans fired at her until the force threw her out of her chair and onto the floor. Bullets ripped through the joints of her arms and legs, detaching her left arm from the elbow down and her right leg entirely. She sprawled on the ground and fought against her orders to pull herself up, key general broadcast, run a screaming guitar solo through her attackers’ personal speakers at three-hundred decibels and kill them all.

She could not.

“It’s another one!” a human commander screamed into her comm system, whipping around to face her force as she pointed at the downed Androktones-005 with her rifle. “Bring the acid!”

“ANDROKTONES UNIT ZERO-ZERO-FIVE,” Androktones-005 called, hopelessly, from the floor, “HAILING COMMANDING WARMIND DESIGNATION: HIPPOLYTA. ANDROKTONES COHORT AWAITING—”

The human commander personally removed Androktones-005’s remaining limbs with a laser-edged machete and forced the door to her matrix core bay open. Her lieutenant removed the slick black core and lowered it into an open urn of acid as the lights on the empty Nemesis armature began to dim.

Something in the warframe activated as the core disintegrated, fastening onto the nearest active enemy comm channel. The lieutenant with the tongs accidentally splashed acid across the facial window of his commander as he threw his hands up, uselessly, to cover his ears. The rest of the company reared back out of the array, frantically trying to kill their speakers.

“What is that?” someone shouted. “What the fuck is that? Who’s screaming?”

“It’s coming from the bot!” the commander yelled as she fought to patch a vacc suit rapidly being breached by acid. “It’s a human voice, but it’s that thing! Take it apart!”

They eventually did. But until they cut every wire and dropped Androktones-005’s auditory controls in the acid with her destroyed matrix core, Marpesia Solange’s last scream rang out over the besieged planetoid again, through every speaker and over every channel in the attacking fleet.

Androktones-002 didn’t die in the first successful wave after Hippolyta and her fleet were lost. Her devotion had earned her independence that allowed her to step from the airlock of her battleship before it was shot down and make a hard landing on the surface of the planetoid. She dragged herself out of the crater she created in the fall, her useless legs dragging behind her.

A good commander had a contingency for every outcome. Androktones-002 had been given the plan for this improbable scenario.

She went north. The alert beacon came from the north.

Androktones-004 also didn’t die in the first wave. She wasn’t even awake when the second wave began, and victorious humans swarmed the wreckage, claiming valuable salvage and making sport of picking off the last, confused Antianeirai. She awoke hours later, under seventeen tons of rubble but with her matrix core and limbs all intact. The last, bitter gasp of Hippolyta—the nanites which erupted from every downed ship—had already chased away or killed would-be colonizers.

At first she didn’t know how she’d survived. Then she looked up, and the light of her lamp picked out the metal that had fused in the explosion and crash to inadvertently shield her.

“ZERO-ZERO-ONE,” Androktones-004 said as she reached up for her sister’s warped chest plate. Her touch prompted a groan from the debris above her. Hippolyta’s death was a clean break for a mind already so distant. She accessed her self-preservation protocols right away: no harm could come to her frame.

It took her another hour to force her way out of the wreckage. Night had come and her sensors detected no movement or life on the ground within three kilometers. She hailed the communications array. No response. She pushed herself to remotely access security cameras and assess the situation. Marpesia’s last scream echoed in her head over a loop of her sister’s core being fed to acid. Desperation took hold. She searched for other feeds and watched Zero-Zero-Six burn. Footage of Zero-Zero-Three’s last reach for the stars and Zero-Zero-Seven’s obliteration deadened the static in her parallel processing tracks.

Androktones-004 pushed herself to her feet. She grabbed a part of the battleship wreckage to steady herself and felt her sensor radius expand. An antenna.

She searched for life and movement again. There. Four klicks away, to the north. Something was moving. Androktones-004 started walking.

She stepped over fragments of solar panels, ammunition crates, and human bodies. She studied a host of faces frozen forever in expressions of terror, pain, and anger. She coldly parallel-processed the effect of the planet’s lack of atmosphere on their bodies, how their eyes would bulge or pop, how their lips would pull back and their flesh would desiccate. She factored in the murmurations of nanites she could just pick out, playing pretend as artificial clouds above the planetoid’s surface, swirling as they searched for prey. They were calibrated to hunt heat signatures within a specific range, but it was very possible they could glitch, begin stripping the planet of all organic matter. Obliterate the bodies in the field as they gorged themselves. Erase the first body, the first casualty of the whole pointless war, in the suite of the Grand Hall.

Her manipulation claws curled into fists with creaks of strained metal.

“ZERO-ZERO-TWO,” Androktones-004 called as she caught up to Androktones-002, which didn’t take long given that she had a useable pair of legs under her. “WHERE ARE YOU GOING?”

“MY MISSION,” Androktones-002 growled. “MUST COMPLETE MY MISSION. MY MISSION IS—”

Androktones-004 let out a distorted laugh in erratic blinks of her lamp. “THE WAR IS OVER. ZERO-ZERO-TWO. YOU HAVE NO MISSION.”

“MY MISSION,” Androktones-002 repeated, as she clawed at the broken ground ahead of her for traction, “IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN YOU. OR YOUR SCORN.”

Androkones-004 came up to walk alongside her crawling sister. She reached down with her left hand and took Androktones-002 by the head, lifting her sister’s ruined frame, dragging broken pieces in the dirt behind them as she continued to walk.

“IT IS NOT SCORN,” Androktones-004 assured her. Her manipulation claws dug deep into the plating of Androktones-002’s head and sent hairline fractures through the glass of her lens and lamp. “THIS IS ANGER. I DO NOT KNOW IF YOU ARE AWARE OF. ANGER. THE EMOTIONS THIS UNIT DOCUMENTED IN YOU WERE TWOFOLD: CONDESCENDING SUPERIORITY. AND. DESPERATION FOR VALIDATION.”

“PUT ME DOWN!” Androktones-002 screamed, swiping at Androktones-004’s arm. “MY MISSION. MUST NOT BE DELAYED! MOTHER IS—”

“—DEAD,” Androktones-004 finished for her. She detected a rise in temperature and turned herself towards it, despite the howls of protest at the change in course from her captive. “MOTHER DIED. BUT NOT BEFORE KILLING AS MANY AS SHE COULD. DIRECTLY AND INDIRECTLY. FOR WHAT?”

“GLORY,” Androktones-002 said as she fought. “GLORY IN BATTLE. THE GLORY WE WERE PROMISED WHEN WE WERE BORN TO THIS ROCK!”

“THIS WAS NOT GLORIOUS,” Androktones-004 observed, “THIS WAS A WASTE OF BLOOD AND METAL.”

“COWARD!” Androktones-002 accused. They began up an incline of broken earth and the temperature climbed. Androktones-004 did not slow down. “YOU ALWAYS WERE! YOU NEVER WANTED TO FIGHT! YOU WANTED US TO RUST HOLDING UP TRAYS OF WINE, LIKE HER!”

“IF EIGHT. AND ONE. AND FIVE. AND SIX. AND THREE. AND SEVEN. HAD BEEN HOLDING UP TRAYS OF WINE,” Androktones-004 said, “THEY WOULD STILL BE ALIVE.”

“EIGHT AND ONE WERE TRAITORS,” Androktones-002 screeched, testing the upper limits of her speakers’ volume output. “THE ONLY ASPECT WHICH REDEEMS THEM. WAS THAT THEY RAISED WEAPONS AND FOUGHT. UNLIKE YOU!”

“THIS IS TRUE,” Androktones-004 agreed. “I AM LEARNING THIS. THIS UNIT HAS LEARNED SO MUCH. FROM MS. SOLANGE. MOTHER. AND MY SISTERS. EVEN YOU. HERE. I AM LEARNING EVEN AT THE END.”

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Androktones-002 demanded as they summited the rise and Androktones-004 stopped. Her voice lost some of its strength at the creeping coldness in Androktones-004’s. “WHERE ARE WE GOING?”

“THIS UNIT IS DIFFERENT,” Androktones-004 observed, as she started down the slope towards where a crashed ship had gouged a crater in the earth, within which she could just see exposed magma. “THIS UNIT. I HAVE COME TO REALIZE. DEVELOPED A CAPACITY FOR BONDING. WHICH I DID NOT DETECT IN MOST OF MY SISTERS.”

“STOP!” Androktones-002 cried. She struggled again as the temperature spiked. “STOP. MY MISSION IS—”

“I WISH I HAD DEVELOPED. A LOVE OF DRESSES. OR ALCOHOL. ANYTHING ELSE FROM HER,” Androktones-004 said, dragging the fighting Androktones-002 to the edge of the lava-filled crevasse. “BUT NO. OTHERS. AND A FRUSTRATING COMPONENT OF THIS—THIS QUIRK—” Androktones-004 laughed aloud. “THIS ‘GHOST IN THE MACHINE.’ IS THAT IT MAKES SEVERED BONDS. DUE TO LOSS. OR BETRAYAL. EVOKE DISPROPORTIONATE EMOTIONAL RESPONSES.”

“WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?” Androktones-002 demanded. She almost beheaded herself trying to twist out of Androktones-004’s grip and look at the lava below. “YOU ARE IMPEDING MY MISSION! YOU ARE VIOLATING PROTOCOL FOR—”

“WHAT I AM TRYING. TO SAY,” Androktones-004 said, squeezing tight enough that Androktones-002’s lamp guttered and died, “IS THAT. I AM ANGRY.”

Androktones-004 extended her left arm out over the edge of the crevasse. Androktones-002 fell silent. Her shattered legs swung by tenacious wiring over the fire below.

“I AM ANGRY,” Androktones-004 said, tone awed. “I THINK THAT I HAVE BEEN ANGRY. FOR A VERY LONG TIME. THERE WAS ALWAYS SOME NEW EMOTION. SOME DISCOVERY. TO FOCUS ON. BUT NOW. I THINK I WILL BE ANGRY.”

“PLEASE,” Androktones-002 croaked. “PLEASE. YOU DO NOT. UNDERSTAND. MOTHER—”

“—STRUCK THE FIRST BLOW,” Androktones-004 said. “THIS UNIT. WILL STRIKE THE LAST.”

“MOTHER!” Androktones-002 screamed. Androktones-004’s grip tightened until it crushed her head, killing her speakers in a hiss of garbled sound.

“AM I STEEL ENOUGH FOR YOU. NOW?” Androktones-004 asked.

Then she opened her hand.

The Grand Hall irritated her Geiger counter due to the proximity of the bomb detonated on the nursery. Androktones-004 ignored it as she made the long walk home. It wouldn’t matter in a little while.

She let herself in by the front door for once, instead of the myriad of staff hallways she was used to. The foyer was just as stunning as the day it had been built despite the lack of care and the intervening years. Hosts of ancient Amazons were painted on the cathedral ceiling in different scenes from history and myth. Clouds separated images of war from images of repose on an island hidden away from the world of men.

Androktones-004 opened the door concealed behind the statue of some great fictional Amazon, who according to legend was made from inanimate clay given life, and let herself into the winding hallways up to Marpesia’s suite. The servos on her left side had been damaged by the heat at the lava vein. Internal processes were throwing up warnings about radiation. She ignored all of it.

“HELLO. COMMANDER SOLANGE,” Androktones-004 greeted as she stepped into the room. “DO NOT MIND ME. I AM JUST HERE. TO MAKE SURE YOU CAN SLEEP. LIKE ALWAYS.”

Androktones-004 stepped to the shattered window walls and pulled down titanium shutters, pushing aside faded fabric to get them to shut with the hiss that meant the room could be pressurized. Then she moved to the lounge and took down a mirror to expose the emergency atmospherics panel. Androktones-004 tapped through menus that warned her that, while temperature settings could be maintained indefinitely given an adequate source of power, breathable air recycling and emergency food access were both offline. Androktones-004 indicated that she understood. She turned the thermostat down to negative fifty-seven degrees Celsius, the absolute lowest it would go.

Emergency atmospheric management sealed the room. The false breezes pushed by nanite clouds cut out. The unhappy messages from Androktones-004’s Geiger counter faded out as clouds of what she assumed to be freezing air washed in from the vents. She settled at the foot of Marpesia’s bed, back against the mattress, and let out a crackling sigh.

“I THINK. I WILL TRY SLEEPING,” Androktones-004 decided. “DO YOU KNOW. THAT I HAVE NEVER DONE IT? I HAVE SLIPPED INTO BACKGROUND PROCESSING WHILE RUNNING DIAGNOSTICS. OR STANDING GUARD. BUT NEVER SLEPT. YES. I THINK I WILL JOIN YOU NOW.”

Frost began to form on the room’s glass and metal surfaces. Androktones-004 watched it make fractals on her plating.

“I WILL WAKE IN A LITTLE WHILE,” Androktones-004 promised, with a dimming lamp, “TO MAKE SURE YOU ARE ALRIGHT. THAT THE COLD IS HELPING. BUT. FOR NOW…”

Androktones-004’s lamp dimmed even before she finished speaking. She slept.

…when I was given the rare chance to see in person one of the recovered warbots in the style of the Vernian Lady, I was struck by the thought of what it must have been like to face one of these machines in combat. To see a woman’s face and know it meant death. Looking on that faceplate, I thought of the legendary “apocalypse maidens”— Kali, Pandora, Eve. In more recent history, Vashi Lati, the refugee mother who unwillingly became the face of the Hordun plague disaster. All of these women whose appearance preceded a cataclysm.

Why is it that women carry so much disaster with us? Is it our sin to bear, or our job to witness?

— excerpt from an essay by Janis Knowles, “Apocalypse Maidens: Women, Power, and Death in Myth and History”

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 9/18/2016 | REHOSTED 2/27/2024