Kill-Bots AFter the End of the World

Or, A Lovely Day Spoiled

The kill-bot’s metallic skull swiveled to its furthest extension as Sunny clambered down the last few rungs to the ground.

“Target acquired,” the skull said. “Kill.”

“In a second,” Sunny grunted.

The way down the cliff face to the level where the kill-bot rested was a patchwork affair of rusty ladder segments, bare iron rebar, and simple holes gouged in the rock. Sunny gave up trying to find the last step with her questing toe and just dropped. Dust and stone fragments showered around Sunny as she landed.

“Kill you, kill you, kill you.” The bulk of the robot was immobile, its body pierced by a long metal spike. That was the only way to get an EM field through the self-repairing armor on a serious military bot, which this one most definitely was, or at least had been. The bot-trap hadn’t made a perfect strike; the head, three claws of one hand, and one of the tank treads – currently spinning wildly and futilely about six inches off the ground – could still move.

“Good morning, Gordon,” said Sunny. “Sleep well?”

“Kill everyone.”

“It’s only me, Gordie. It’s always only me.” Sunny patted the dusty chrome. Gordon snapped his jaws at her, but she was already moving. “Now that the skimmer is repaired-ish, I want to get an early start.” She dragged the plastic-winged contraption from its sheltered nook and gave it a pre-flight once-over. “That crater I found last week right before the fire-nado is bound to have some good scrap. Maybe intact components. Maybe perhaps just very possibly even,” Sunny licked her lips, “...something fissionable.”

Sunny shaded her eyes and tugged her leather flight cap down. The sky was a shining green-gray, barely sullen at all, and the glaring ember of the sun burned red behind the eternal clouds. The wasteland bore scattered sparks of stubborn plant life, and the sound of leathery wings overhead indicated that the doombats were hunting the giant mosquitoes of the Miasma, a sure sign of calm air. “What a lovely day,” Sunny said. “Seems almost a shame to waste it working.”

Gordon clicked frantically, his red eye-lights darting back and forth. “Targets acquired. Incoming. Initiate missile barrage.”

“What?” Sunny blinked out at the desert. “Gordon, have you finally malfunctioned for serious and really reals?”

“Incoming.”

“You’d better not have picked now to develop a sense of humor,” Sunny told him, slinging her pack over her shoulder and leaping to catch the low rung on the jury-rigged ladder.

Three huffing and sweaty minutes later, Sunny reach the top of the cliff. She took a moment to lean on her knees and cuss until the stitch in her side eased, then scampered up the Watchtower, which was an old wooden treehouse she’d found floating in the bay last year, miraculously intact, perched atop an old aluminum ladder and welded in place. She lifted the binocs, swore, pulled her goggles up, swore again, blinked furiously, turned the night vision off, and peered into the distance, scanning the horizon.

“Oh, dear,” said Sunny. “They’re not even trying to hide, Gordon. Big old dust cloud, and probably internal combustion on those bikes. That means they’ve either got a vibrational resonance emitter, which ha-ha, or else they’re so heavily armed that they don’t care if any Critters spot ‘em.”

Gordon probably couldn’t hear her from up in the Tower, and he had about a ten-word vocabulary anyway, but Sunny felt better talking to someone. Crazy people talked to themselves. Sunny wasn’t crazy.

She watched for a while longer, in case any Critters did hear the approaching convoy and ate them, which would solve a lot of her problems all in one go, but the fickle things that lived in and under the Big Glass Desert were apparently busy elsewhere. “That means big, big scrap, Gordon. Like government big. Like rebuilding society or some stupid crap.” Sunny sighed. “They’re going to ruin everything.”

#

On the bright side, the visitors might have been many things, but Sunny was pretty sure they weren’t law-and-order types. Would-be Bastions of Civilization tended to get really into jumpsuits and mirrorshades. No, judging from the chains and spikes and tattoos and so on, these were probably the other sort. They had bikes and four wheelers, mostly internal combustion, several of them with cables dragging a trailer that bore a tarp-covered lump the size of a dead megagecko. They were also armed to a degree that was excessive even for the Big Glass, which would have bothered Sunny more if she wasn’t perched on the overhang above the only road into her clifftop territory with a thick-barrelled plasma cannon resting on her shoulder and emitting a pleasantly ominous hum as she leveled it at the chest of the gang’s leader.

“You are the leader, right?” she said. “You look like the leader. You’re the tallest and the fattest and you’ve got the motorcycle with the most skulls on it. And also that robot arm, although it looks broken to me.”

“It’s not broken,” the man snapped. “It’s just gotten a little persnickety.”

“What?”

“Persnicke-“

“What!?”

He shouted back, “I said... Hold on.” He made a sharp gesture with his meat hand, and the riot of twenty gasoline and diesel engines rumbling in the close confines of the switchback road gradually stilled as his retinue cut off their motors. “That’s better. Now. We’ve come to speak to the famous Dr. Thibodeaux.”

“Who shall I say is calling?” Sunny asked sweetly. She lifted the sight of her cannon until the crosshairs neatly bisected the gang leader’s wind-scarred face.

He licked his thick, purple-tinged lips. His left eye was artificial, too, just like his right arm, and it clicked audibly in its socket as he stared down the barrel of Sunny’s gun.

“Think fast, sweetie. I take it you’ve met one of these before?”

His face began to darken again, slowly turning the same shade as his lips. “Impudent little piss-stain, aren’t you?”

“Bad names make my trigger finger itchy.”

A shorter man darted out of the morass of leather, earrings, and dirt. He was much paler than his companions, evincing less time spent in the sun and on the road, and his slender-hipped build made him stand out like a newt among toads. “Miss, truly, we mean no harm. This is Zechariah the Iron-Fist, and we are his followers, the Steel Hawgz.”

“Steel Hawgz!” roared the other gang members in ragged unison.

“Coo,” said Sunny. She didn’t lower the weapon.

“We have come to beg the assistance of Dr. Thibodeaux, who is said to possess much of the learning of the Times Before, and particularly the art of robotics.”

“Okay,” said Sunny. She didn’t lower the weapon.

The slender man coughed. “We can pay. Substantially.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“We have gold, titanium, platinum.”

“Precious metals we got. What about rare earths?”

“Less of those, although probably more than you’d get anywhere north of the Canyon...”

“Anything radioactive? My pile’s been on the fritz for years.”

“Well, no, but-“

“Enough!” roared Zechariah. “Why are we dickering with some psycho twat out in the sun? You!” He attempted to point at Sunny, but his mechanical hand remained locked on the grip of his handlebar. The seconds it took his fleshly hand to pry the metal fingers apart passed in pained silence. Someone in the back near the still-settling dust cloud coughed. “You!” Zechariah tried again. “Take us to the robotics expert who lives on this god-forsaken mountain or my men will perforate your body and piss through the holes, plas-gun or no.”

“Sure,” said Sunny. She waved. “Hi!”

Zechariah looked confused. The dry-throated gang member coughed again. The slender man’s eyes widened. “You mean...”

“Yup. Cassandra Thibodeaux, PhD. Call me Sunny.”

Zechariah rumbled dangerously. “You’re playing games, girl, and I don’t appreciate-“

“You shush,” said Sunny. “I was talking to the pretty boy.” She gave the slender man an appreciative once-over. “What’s your name, Green Eyes?”

The slender man flushed and cleared his throat. “Hammond.”

“Just Hammond?”

“I try to keep things formal with people who are threatening to vaporize me.”

“Oh, this old thing?” Sunny flipped the plasma cannon over and stood up. “It’s been out of juice for years. Makes a fun noise, though, doesn’t it?” She strolled a little ways up the hill. “Come on up. Leave the wheels, and don’t mind Gordon; he can’t hurt you, whatever he says.” Sunny glanced back. “God, you all should see your faces.”

#

Later, with the gang setting up their patchwork UV tents and trampling Sunny’s cactus garden, Zechariah and Hammond perched with varying degrees of comfort around the plastic table in Sunny’s tiny kitchen. The base of the compound was an old cave system Sunny had found and expanded, enhanced with a piecemeal but effective layer of armor and shielding scavenged from old gliders, tanks, the remnants of ancient skyscrapers, and, one glorious day, most of a crashed interstellar cargo ship. Struts and cables festooned the exterior like parasitic vines around a teetering old jungle tree, and a casual observer could be forgiven for believing that the whole thing was about to topple over in the next stiff breeze, let alone a serious desert twister or garbage storm. Given how frequently such events occurred on the edge of the Big Glass, however, the mere fact of the structure’s continued existence spoke to its sturdiness. Nonetheless, Zechariah’s eyes, both mechanical and organic, swiveled (in opposite directions) every time the wind blew and set the walls creaking and groaning.

“I mean, I didn’t actually attend a university,” said Sunny. “Obviously. I was barely born when the last of the First Wars was wrapping up.” She set an old plastic McDonald’s tray down on the table with three mismatched cups full of hot water and her least-used tea bags – they might be rude barbarians, but guests were guests. “Grandad and Daddy both had tenure before the world exploded, so it was a little rough getting the, y’know, the basics down, but as far as advanced work, I’ve got pretty much about like two, two and a half doctorates.” Sunny waggled her hand to indicate the roughness of her calculations.

“The basics?” Hammond took a mug with a smiling blue Cookie Monster on it and sipped cautiously.

Sunny blinked. “Before you can calculate a Fourier transformation you gotta know how to count and say your ABCs.” She shook her head. “I don’t think either of them had tried to even talk to a five-year-old in, like, ever. But we muddled through. And here we are!”

“You can read?” Zechariah rumbled over the cheerful bubble letters pronouncing his mug the property of The World’s Best Grampa. “Dr. Thibodeaux left... books?”

Sunny smiled innocently at him. “Encoded data crystals with an eight-thousand bit YDE encryption algorithm. They’ll melt if anyone else tries to read them. Even assuming whoever took them had a fifty-year-old computer to plug ‘em into.” She plonked into the chair beside him and patted his meaty forearm. “That was a nice try, though. You’ll trick me soon, I bet, if you keep on like that.”

Zechariah glared at Sunny with one eye (the other roving nervously up to the ceiling as the gusting wind sent something clattering down the outside walls). He growled deep in his throat. They sat in silence for a time. His artificial arm reached up and flicked idly at his earlobe, which somewhat ruined the effect.

“So you want me to fix your arm, right?” Sunny said.

“No!” Zechariah snapped. “My arm is fine.”

Sunny rubbed at her chin. “Probably a faulty motivator, and with all that dust on the road you’re basically guaranteed to need a valve job at least.” The hand latched onto a clump of Zechariah’s beard and pulled, eliciting a soft grunt despite his best efforts to conceal it. “AI looks like it’s gone a little squirrelly, too. It’s not a direct neural link, is it? I’d be worried about feedback from that kind of thing if it was.”

“It’s supposed to react to muscle impulses and learn contextual responses,” Zechariah admitted unwillingly.

“Yeah,” Sunny nodded. “The SmartLimb series work great for the first couple of decades, but they tend to go goofy after the third owner or so, especially if you don’t get a proper cyberneticist to do a wipe and reset during install.”

Zechariah looked chagrined.

“That actually isn’t why we’ve come all this way,” Hammond interjected, setting Cookie Monster down. “Though if you can fix it, or at least get it to let go of things on cue, that would be...” he wilted under Zechariah’s glare. “Our primary goal, though – you’ve probably been wondering about our cargo on the trailer – is much more secret. We’ve got-“

“A ZX Series 5200 rotor-drone,” Sunny finished absently. “Might be a 5800 if you’re missing the main gun.” She glanced up. “What, you think I don’t know my ‘bot profiles? Plus you left a blade sticking out from the back.”

“Er, it’s a fifty-two. Uh, we hoped... that is, we want you to-“

“Not a chance.” Sunny sipped her tea.

“I am not accustomed to being refused,” said Zechariah.

“It’s a day for firsts!” Sunny agreed.

“I mentioned payment earlier,” Hammond put in. “While we don’t have any fuel rods per se, we can provide something you might like even better.”

“Nuh-uh. No way. No how. Negatory.”

“But-“

“I refute it thus!” Sunny said, slapping the table and giggling.

“Perhaps the girl requires convincing,” said Zechariah darkly.

Sunny snorted. “Yeah, you could try that.”

“You doubt me? I have two dozen men. You are a single unarmed girl, however allegedly intelligent.”

“Yup.” Sunny met Zechariah’s eyes with an unblinking smile. “Also I have bombs.”

“What?”

“Bombs. Explosives? High-speed combustibles? The whole peak is wired and hooked up to my vital signs. If the Sunny-machine stops or slows down too much...” Sunny beamed. “Boom.”

“Boom?”

“Biiiig boom. Pshoom.” Sunny demonstrated with her hands. “So no means no, you big bully.”

“I’m afraid there has been a terrible misunderstanding...” Hammond began.

Sunny leaned back, waving a hand dismissively. “Even if I thought it was a good idea to give you bozos an unstoppable semi-autonomous superweapon, the main gun on a ZX runs on xenotech, and you’d be more likely to catch lightning three times in a row after finding an untouched water purifier walking blindfolded in the Big Glass than find any greenstone outside of the Federal Wall. There’s probably not more than two hundred... micro...grams... of...” Sunny trailed off, her eyes on the heavily shielded tube Zechariah had just withdrawn from his sleeve.

He slid open a thin slot on the side, and the light in the room took on an emerald sheen.

“Greenstone?” Zechariah asked.

“Ooh,” said Sunny. “Shiny.”

#

After they’d bargained Sunny down from her initial bid (“Half of everything plus royalties plus my face on the battle flag.”) to a ten percent share of the alien fuel – still more power output per second than she could use if she hooked up every piece of tech she’d found in the past decade, broken or not – the Steel Hawgz and their leader retired to a safe distance, leaving the silent hulk of the semi-ruined killbot brooding on Sunny’s doorstep.

The first day was spent in assessment. Sunny poked and prodded, her head and arms (and sometimes most of her diminutive form) disappearing under the tarp and into the guts of the machine. She sang to herself as she worked, snatches of mostly forgotten songs and cobbled-together poems from the Times Before. It had been a long time since she’d had such an intact mechanism to work on, and the weather held clear except for one small needlestorm – the bone cacti were dispersing their deadly wind-borne seed packets early this year. Sunny almost managed to recapture the blissful cheer the morning had promised. The Steel Hawgz loitered around the edges of the scene, a smelly blot on an otherwise perfect day. They took their cue from their boss, and Zechariah was equal parts resentful and nervous around Sunny.

As night fell, Sunny twiddled her multitool, staring at the shadowy heap. An articulated arm – tipped in long-since-looted diamond cutting blades – dangled limply into the dust. She glanced to the side of the house, where sweating, tattooed men were hooting and dancing around a campfire of her prized bone cactus. She slotted her tool into its holster, picked up a needle-gun from the rack by the door, and slipped into the gathering dusk.

A dark figure separated from the edges of the biker camp and trailed after her.

#

“I don’t know, Gordon,” Sunny sighed. She was perched on his immobilized tank tread, watching distant megageckos slip from their burrows. “I think I’m making a terrible mistake.”

“Kill.”

“Oh, I can fix it. Mostly neglect rather than battle damage. Once you get all the hydraulics and circuits running, it’s cake. Rudimentary AI at best, and those are always the trickiest parts. The ZX is meant to be piloted; it just has a handful of patterns and responses when its on auto. Not like you, my beamish boy.” She patted his spiky metal shoulder.

“Target approaching.”

Sunny adjusted the focus on her binocs. “Hey, Green Eyes. Though everything’s kind of green through these.”

Hammond eased forward, seeming to coalesce out of the desert night. He glowed in Sunny’s night-vision screen as he entered the dim crimson radiance of Gordon’s eye-lights. “Is it safe?”

“Sure, mostly.” Sunny patted the tread beside her and scooted over. “Don’t let him bite you. Those teeth aren’t completely for show.”

Hammond gave Gordon’s metal skull a wide berth. The red eyes tracked every step.

“Not enjoying the party?”

Hammond shuddered. “Not really my scene.”

“Ha! Yeah.” A megagecko snagged a doom-bat with its prehensile tongue, and the death shriek echoed from the cliff face behind them. “How’d you get your pretty pert butt stuck in leather chaps and rivets, anyway?”

Heaving a sigh, Hammond shifted on their shared perch. His knee bumped against Sunny’s, and he pulled quickly away, avoiding her gaze. “There are a lot of ways for a town to get unlivable these days. Especially a small one. And a man alone in the wasteland... well, that usually ends about as well as you expect.” Even from a half a mile, the crunching noises were audible as the megagecko began to feed. “Zeke is a good leader. He keeps his men safe, and he... you get used to his temper. He means well.”

“Hell. Road to. Paved with.”

Hammond chuckled. “I suppose you’re justified in thinking little of him. But in these latter days, a leader who stands by his men and looks to improve their lot is about as good as you can hope for.” He cast a sideways glance at Sunny. “You’re pretty isolated out here. When was the last time you spent time with people? Visited any of the larger camps?”

Sunny shrugged.

“It’s not nice out there. Things are running out. Supplies. Water. Time. Humanity is showing what it’s made of.” Hammond leaned forward, his eyes in shadow. “In terms of loyalty, I’ll take what I can get.”

“Death,” said Gordon.

“If you’re trying to recruit me to the Steel Hawgz, you’re doing a shitty job of it. Just so you know.”

“That’s not why I came down here.”

Sunny raised an unseen eyebrow and leaned back. “What’s your first name, Hammond? Like, what do your friends call you?”

Hammond didn’t answer. “You think you can fix the drone?”

Sunny blew a raspberry. “Kid stuff. A monkey with a wrench could do it if he had the manual.”

“And you do?”

“Sure do. It’s in the files somewhere, if I wanted to bother downloading it, but I don’t need it.” Sunny tapped her temple. “Cybernetics is my life. Now, fixing Zekey-boy’s arm is going to be trickier.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that arm,” Hammond said, deadpan.

“Okay, well, improving that arm, then.” Sunny laughed. “So is it that you don’t have friends who call you by name, or is your first name just super duper ultra embarrassing? If I guess it, do I get a prize?”

Hammond shifted again. Sunny supposed that tank treads probably weren’t what most people considered comfortable. “A little of both, and no. Hey, you’re going to enjoy having xenotech power around here, aren’t you?”

“God, it’s going to be rad. I’ve got plans I haven’t been able to even dream of building without a reliable power source. Not to mention being the richest person on this side of the continental divide.” Sunny stretched her arms, wishing the light was a little better so Hammond could appreciate what the motion did for her chest. She glanced to the side, suddenly serious. “What about you guys? Going to feed the orphans with air-lifted food baskets?”

Hammond cleared his throat. “There have been some... disputes. Things have become unstable, politically speaking.”

“Peace through superior firepower, huh? It’ll be nice to be on the winning team, I s’pose.”

“Kill!” Gordon piped up.

“Unity has benefits,” Hammond insisted stubbornly. “This will be good for the region, long-term.”

“And short term?”

“I’ll... do what I can. To mitigate things.”

Sunny stood up and crossed her arms, taking a few steps out from the cliff face. She knew that to Hammond, she’d nearly have disappeared into the darkness. “I... I don’t think that’s good enough, Hammond. I really don’t.” She turned. “I’ve decided. My answer is ‘no’ again. This time for keepsies.”

“Ms. Thibodeaux. Sunny.” Hammond was sitting very still.

“It’s not like you all have paid me yet.” Sunny sniffled. “You keep your stuff, I keep my knowledge. Find someone else to enable your conquest.”

“I don’t think you should say that,” Hammond said, enunciating each word. “I think you should reconsider.”

“Or what? Your fat toad of a boss-man will stink me to death?” Sunny laughed harshly. “You all can pack up and leave in the morning.”

“You might push him too far, Sunny.” The edge in Hammond’s voice grew sharper. “He’ll feel like you were teasing him. He might do something to you anyway and to hell with the explosives.”

“He can try,” Sunny snorted. “I’m not as helpless as I look.”

“Sunny...”

“Look, you’re cute, but you’re getting pushy. I’m done arguing.”

A scratchy voice that belonged to neither Sunny nor Hammond sounded from Hammond’s lapel. “This is useless. Waste the little bitch. We’ll toss her in her own rubbish pit and see how long it takes her to see reason.”

Sunny leapt backwards. “Zechariah?”

“I’m sorry,” said Hammond. He spread his arms as he stood. He held a stunner in his left hand. “I tried to... I’m sorry.”

“Quit yapping and shoot her,” Zechariah commanded over the radio.

“Sir, I really think...”

“Now, dammit!”

Hammond’s mouth tightened. “No. You are going to listen to me for once. If we’re going to bring order to the wasteland, we’ve got to start with ourselves. We can’t just take whatever we-“

Sunny shot him.

Not fatally. In the legs.

The needler was intended to discourage predators, not to win quick-draw contests. It sprayed its spikes haphazardly, giving the sandy ground what looked like a five o’clock shadow, but enough of the flechettes sliced into Hammond’s thighs to send him lurching backwards with a pained grunt. Sunny bolted. Hammond would be slow in pursuit even after he’d recovered himself, thanks to the leg wounds. Sunny knew the ground, and her glider was stashed nearby, in nearly flight-ready condition.

If that had been all there was to it, she might even have made it.

There was a distant thump from somewhere higher up the ladder. Sunny kept her head down and ran for all she was worth, which was why she didn’t see the net coming until its weighted sides hit the dirt around her. She stumbled and fell.

With a clatter and a rush of stones, Zechariah landed at the bottom of the cliff. His mechanical arm emitted a high-pitched whine as the net-launcher slowly retracted into his forearm.

“Told you it worked fine,” he said, approaching with a measured pace. Hammond limped frantically behind him, shouting something Sunny couldn’t make uot. Zecheriah leveled Hammond’s stungun at her torso. “Nighty-night.”

The dark swallowed her whole.

#

Sunny was mildly surprised to wake up, even clad only in her tank-top and underpants. She was more surprised to see Hammond face-down in the muck next to her, nude and visibly bleeding. There was barely enough light to see; the sky was a distant yellowish circle overhead. Jagged metal shapes loomed in the shadows around them.

“Hunh. He threw us into the rubbish pit,” Sunny said. “Idiot.”

“Nn,” said Hammond.

“Oh, good. You’re not dead.” Sunny nudged him with her toe. “Did you try to talk him into not killing me?”

“Mm.”

“Thank you. It looks like it mostly worked.” She shifted to peer up at the lip of the pit. “Kind of sucks for you, though. He wasn’t happy?”

“Ow.”

“Sorry. There’s not a lot of room down here.”

“I wish I could say this was the first time he’s hit me. Or that I’m surprised he left me to die.” Hammond pulled himself to his hands and knees. “Oh, God, what am I covered in?”

“Just call it mud. You’ll be happier.”

“It’s itching. And burning.”

“Yeah... well. There’s a reason I don’t keep this stuff up top.”

Hammond heaved himself against the rocky wall of the pit. “So are you going to agree to help? I sort of really don’t want to stay down here, and I think I need medical attention badly. Don’t you?”

“Oh, I’ll be fine. I’m tougher than I look.” Sunny tugged her shirt off and began scrubbing at the filth on her arms. Hammond watched her with an expression somewhere between shocked bemusement and catatonia. Sunny shot him a sly glance. “I guess a quick lay is out of the question?”

Hammond swallowed with apparent difficulty. “Even if I were healthy, I, uh... look, you’re a nice girl, or you seem nice from what I’ve seen, but-“ He coughed, deep and wet. “I like boys,” he wheezed at last.

Sunny sighed. “Always the pretty ones. It’s super unfair. Oh, well.” She smiled at him. “At least that explains why you put up with Zekey-boy’s crap so much.”

“I had a little leverage,” Hammond agreed, smiling weakly in return. “He doesn’t want the others to know.”

“T’cha. And him such a modern man, too.”

“I think I’ve used up all my credit, though.”

Sunny’s eyes lit up, and she opened her mouth. Hammond cut her off.

“If you make a ‘dumped’ pun, I swear I will find a way to end you.”

“Jeez, you’re grumpy.” Sunny peered at her forearm, now almost clean. She tugged her shirt back on.

“We are trapped in a twenty-foot pit, naked, surrounded by poison, acid, and sharp edges, with armed lunatics standing guard above us. Why are you not grumpy?”

“Because your boyfriend persists in seeing what he’s looking at instead of what’s actually there.” Sunny gripped her arm in a very particular manner and twisted. Her skin slid off with a faint clicking sound.

Hammond gasped.

“A girl should never go anywhere without her tools.” Sunny rippled the mechanical fingers now revealed. “I wasn’t kidding about being tougher than I look. Also older. Also also, I kind of lied a little bit. I’m not so much Dr. Thibodeaux’s daughter as, um, kind of him.” Sunny didn’t look at Hammond while she spoke, the words coming out hard and fast.

“Cloned?” Hammond winced as he spoke, clutching a likely broken rib.

“Cloned, gene-modded, custom implants, um, kind of a little of everything. Next generation of kill-bots, see? Human bots. Ultimate spys, big psy-ops points. Prototype, greatest creation, dying wish, blah blah blah. I sort of... deprogrammed myself after Daddy went. He left the codes, but... it kind of took a while.” She tugged at a piece of sheet metal. “If you can stand, I need to move some of this junk. This is, technically speaking, my junk-slash-emergency-stash pit. I wasn’t planning on having another passenger, though, so I’m going to have to rig a quickie.” She flicked her fingers and extended her pinky, which begin to spark with a welding torch at its tip.

“You’ve got some kind of ladder down here?”

“Yes, though strictly speaking it’s less ladderesque and more jet-packish.”

Hammond closed his eyes. “What about the rest of the gang?”

Sunny pursed her lips. “How sad would you be about some light maiming with risk of death?”

“For me?”

“Nope. Them.”

Hammond opened his eyes and met Sunny’s directly. “They’re violent psychopaths, almost to a man. They never met a helpless animal they couldn’t put in pain for a laugh. Up until this morning, I’d have said the only one among them with a shred of decency or common human feeling was Zechariah.”

“Righty-o.” Sunny flipped a small keypad open on her wrist and punched in a code. She leaned close to her palm. “Voice confirmation: Code 0ZH1T Red Rabbit Epsilon.” She clenched her fist. Something beeped.

“Activating the bombs?”

“Just turning something off.”

A thumping from above.

“What was it?”

“An electromagnet.”

The thumping drew near. Someone overhead screamed hoarsely. There were sounds of gunfire. Then more screams, this time with the shrill note of real fear in them. Metal rang against metal. There was a soft, fleshy sound, and something tumbled into the damp dirt at their feet.

A severed hand, still clutching a smoking pistol.

The gunfire continued and intensified, but the locus of it moved away from the lip of the pit.

“Come on,” Sunny said, ignoring Hammond’s fear and confusion. “We’d better get out of here before Gordon runs out of targets.”

#

The jet-pack, being strictly an emergency measure, was unhappy with the more than doubled load, but it sufficed to drop them in a grimy heap over the barbed-wire fence and twenty yards further toward Sunny’s mismatched domicile. A dead gang member was blocking the front door, which bore eight-inch claw marks in the solid steel frame. Sunny scooped up a flasher from the bin beside the needlers.

She hauled Hammond upright. He leaned on her awkwardly.

“Come on,” she grunted. “The glider is probably still at the cliff; Gordon wouldn’t have gone after escape routes until after he’d taken out the most dangerous targets, which means anyone armed. Can you make it down the ladder?”

“I can try,” said Hammond. “How did you reprogram a kill-bot? I thought they were unhackable.”

“Oh, I didn’t.”

Hammond stumbled. “You’re not in control of it?”

“Nope. Running on original programming.”

“My god.”

“At least he’s out of ammunition.”

“I was at Vid City, you know. After one got through the perimeter fence there.”

“Let’s keep walking, Hammy.”

“It killed everyone.”

Someone screamed in the distance. More gunshots, which had almost died down in the interim, rang out.

“Even after they cut it into pieces, it was trying to kill more. The hand got ahold of the mayor...”

“Look, no plan is perfect, okay? I work with what I have.”

They reached the edge of the cliff and looked down. The sand below was stained red, and heavy tank tracks trailed gore toward the switchback road up to the house.

“Upsy-daisy,” said Sunny, helping Hammond down the first few rungs.

Hammond grabbed her meat-wrist and pulled her face down to meet his. “We’ve got to stop that thing, Sunny. There are enclaves nearby, barely fifty miles away.”

“Nah, Gordon’s a pussycat. We’ll be fine.” Sunny swallowed and glanced over her shoulder. The rocky mesa echoed with shouts and ricochets, but nothing was visibly in pursuit. “And if we’re not, well, boom. And that’s two fewer death machines the world has to worry about.”

Hammond stared at Sunny in horror until she shoved him back into motion.

At the ladder, Hammond had to hold onto each rung with his entire arm, but he made it to the bottom. Sunny hovered at the top, bouncing from foot to foot like a little girl in need of a bathroom break until he was down. She scampered down like a monkey, barely using her feet.

“This way,” she said, tugging Hammond into a half-trot. “My glider can carry us both, and we can figure something out once we’re not in immediate-“ She skidded to a halt. Hammond slumped bonelessly to the ground without her support.

“Danger?” asked Zechariah. Half of his face was a sheet of blood from a cut high on his forehead, and his beard was matted with it. His clothes were singed, and his metal arm gleamed as it moved. It appeared to be cycling through the gestures of a hula dance, but it was still somehow threatening. Zechariah’s other arm held Sunny’s discarded plasma cannon. The xenotech power source gleamed in the charger cell. Sunny noted that the ominous hum was much louder and a lot less fun from this end of the barrel. “Call off your robot.”

“So you can kill me in peace? Yeah, no thanks.” Sunny backed away slowly. Zechariah followed her without hurry; there was nowhere to go with the cliff at their backs. “How about you put down your gun and then I’ll turn off the robot?”

“Stalemate, is it?” Zechariah shifted the cannon until it pointed at Hammond. “But you have more to lose than I do at this point. Shut down the robot.”

Sunny forced herself to meet Zechariah’s bloody gaze without flinching and, most importantly, without glancing upward. She held him for as long as she dared. When she saw his knuckles whiten as his finger began to close on the trigger, she held up her hand. “Stop! Okay, fine! You win.” She dropped the flasher and stretched her cyberarm out. She showed the keypad to Zechariah. “Just don’t hurt him.” She started to punch numbers.

“Sunny,” Hammond gasped. A shadow appeared on the ground at Zechariah’s feet. He didn’t notice.

“I’m doing it,” she snapped. “You’ll be fine.”

Zechariah threw his head back and laughed. “God, the things women believe. You want this little faggot? Find him in Hell.”

He pulled the trigger.

Gordon landed on his head.

The impact knocked Sunny to the ground. Zechariah crumpled instantly underneath the multiton kill-bot chassis. The ball of superheated plasma burst out of the gun’s barrel and crackled off into the sky, singing the hair from Hammond’s head and leaving everyone gasping for air. This was too much for Hammond’s abused system; his eyes rolled back and he fainted.

“Kill,” Gordon rasped. Someone had shot at his skull-shaped head, which dangled in two parts from the slender neck. It was purely decorative, of course; the actual sensors were distributed throughout the kill-bot’s structure. Just another piece of psy-ops, like the cold, metallic voice.

“Gordon...”

The kill-bot spun in place on its treads. Zechariah made an unpleasantly moist crackling sound beneath it. His robot arm spasmed and made a thumbs-up.

“Target acquired.”

Sunny snatched the flasher and crawled backwards. She was still fumbling at her built-in keypad with her other hand. She glanced to the side; the bot-trap was reset, the spike retracted underground. If she could angle just a little further to her left...

“Destroy all humans,” Gordon crackled.

He rolled forward, and Sunny saw the glider in its alcove behind him. She could blow the flasher’s charge pack; the pulse wouldn’t do more than stun Gordon for a moment, but she was fast enough; a moment would be all she needed.

To the side, she saw Hammond stir. Fifty miles, he’d said. They were probably already on Gordon’s sensor map. Kill-bots were good at finding humans. That was kind of the point.

Sunny tucked the flasher away and scooted to the side, putting the bot-trap between her and Gordon.

“I probably deserve this,” Sunny told him. “It’s symbolism. Or maybe catharsis. I never studied literature. But tragic flaws, right? Hubris and whatnot.”

“Prepare to die, human scum.” Gordon had apparently found more of his stock phrases somewhere in the battle. Psy-ops again. He lifted his jagged claws.

He was a foot-and-a-half too far to one side of the trap.

“But we had some good times, right, Gordon? You and me, stuck out here in the desert, knowing more than is safe for anyone. Just two wartime leftovers who don’t know what else to do. Broken bots.” Sunny smiled and closed her eyes. “Daddy told me something before he went. I’ll tell it to you now, Gordon, because I think I almost mean it. If I knew how to fix you so you’d be happy, I would.”

The deathblow didn’t fall. Sunny peeked through slitted eyelids; Gordon was hesitating, scythe-like arms upraised. His one baleful, red eye bored into hers.

“Target lost. Adjusting angle.” Gordon shifted slightly on his treads. He rolled neatly over the concealed hole. “Kill!”

Sunny clenched her fist to enter the command. The spike launched upward. The kill-bot’s own weight speared it. With a hum, the EM field engaged.

Gordon clicked. His arms remained outstretched, frozen. One tank tread lurched, then stopped.

The half-skull tilted down to face Sunny.

“Kill,” Gordon said.

“I love you too, big guy.” Sunny patted the ruined chrome jawline, then went to check on Hammond.