Jack Yeovil - Route 666

Turning over a durium arm with her boot, she continued her report.

"We've got brand-new prostheses scattered like seashells. I'm no expert, but I think some of the smaller contrivaptions are doodad hearts and kidneys and the like."

She picked up a glass eye. Its pupil dilated and she dropped it like a slug.

"And we have abandoned ve-hickles, some with trace blood in their treads. Plus what looks to me like explosive charges wired around the base of a national monument."

The cruiser was in sight now, growling up an ill-maintained access road. Few tourists ventured this way nowadays. Out in the Des, you were more likely to pick up a permanent disability than a novelty hologram. Besides, once you've seen one acre of sand…

"Looks like a bird of prey," Burnside said, pointing out a circling black bird, "a hawk or something."

"Probably a vulture," Tyree said. "A disappointed vulture. There's no meat around here, just metal."

Burnside tore himself away from the grandeur and started poking around amongst the robo-junk. Some remains were almost complete, like empty suits of armour.

Dried smears of oily substance were all over the show, coating the abandoned doodads but also streaking the sand and rock. It had a faintly nauseating odour. Tyree had no idea what the stuff might be, but didn't care for it.

Quincannon ambled over from the cruiser, Yorke trotting behind like a faithful terrier. They looked like a father-and-son team; the young trooper trying to copy the older, bulkier sergeant's Cav swagger. Yorke was OK for a kid.

"Have you pulled wires on the infernal devices?" the sergeant asked.

"We thought you'd like to take a scan, Quince."

Quincannon raised a disapproving eyebrow at the arrangement of detonators and charges.

"It's just demolition equipment," he said. "You couldn't even call it a bomb."

Tyree agreed, but it was never a good idea to perform surgery on Blastite without a second opinion. "Burnside, disable and collect the fireworks." Burnside saluted and snapped to, scurrying around the base of the column to unfasten the packages.

"We'll put 'em under Captain Brittle's desk for the Fourth of July," Quincannon said.

The Sergeant squinted at a decal on one of the abandoned cykes. It showed Pinocchio making obscene use of his liar's nose. "Knock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots," Quincannon said. Tyree agreed. Yorke needed the full explanation. "A cyborg fraternity. Renegades from GenTech BioDiv's New Flesh programme. They aren't really even a gangcult. There's a semi-official Hands Off note posted on them. BioDiv wants to observe them in the wild, see how they survive the environment."

"Not too snazz, I guess," Tyree said.

"Good call, Leona. Scans like a back-to-the-old-drawing-board situation to me."

Canyon de Cheliy was an android graveyard. Maybe the 'bots always crawled here to die. In the future, poachers would recover a fabulous fortune in circuit boards and brain-chips from the shifting sands. All they had to do was cripple a toaster and follow the tracks.

"What happened?" Yorke asked. "They all go bughouse and tear out their robo-bits?"

Tyree imagined a religious frenzy falling upon the 'bots. Her Daddy had been a small-time preachie, specialising in Biblical excoriations like "if thine glass eye offend thee…" But theory didn't fit the picture.

"No, they're still here," said the Quince. "Scan those stains. I've seen sludge like that before. When the Virus Vigilantes launched a bioweapon against the Road Runners back in '92, that was the kind of stuff left behind. It's human compost. They tagged the effect the Meltdown Measles."

Yorke did a little dance, scraping black goo off his boot-soles. Tyree couldn't believe that human flesh and bone deconstituted to such an extent, but Quincannon knew best.

"The air tests clean," Burnside put in, a satchel of Blastite and fuse equipment under his arm. "I ran the check first thing. No out-of-the-way bugs."

"This doesn't feel viral to me," Quincannon said. "Scan the way the works are scattered around …"

There were robo-bits strewn in a wide circle, as if they had been wrenched apart and thrown to all points of the compass.

"This feels violent to me. This feels late 20th century."

"Very late," Burnside said.

"Should we call it in to Fort Valens?" Yorke asked.

Quincannon nodded. "Trail runs out here. The way I picture it, the perps ran into natural justice. The 'bots zotzed the pilgrims then something bigger came along and totalled them. Case closed, and we should get back to our route."

There was a distant whup-whup-whup. Tyree saw a sleek shape in the sky, some sort of mutant helicopter. The thing did a circle of the rock column and she tagged it as Private Sector. There was a discreet Japanese GenTech logo.

"Visitors," Burnside commented.

"Best behaviour, boys," Quincannon said, heavily depressing the irony pedal. "We don't want a diplomatic incident."

There was bad blood between the Quince and the Japcorps, Tyree knew. There was a dead girl in the story.

The spidercopter made a neat landing and withdrew its blades. It was a gleaming white and had no obvious windows.

"You expect them to troop out behind a robot and say 'we come in peace'," Yorke said.

"They don't need that," Quincannon said. "They're the new owners."

An aperture appeared and steps unfolded. Two figures stepped down precisely. They did look like aliens. Their Self-Contained Environment suits were sexless and slimline, with filter-mask helmets that resembled samurai armour. They bowed formally and advanced.

"This equipment is the property of GenTech," a computer-generated voice advised the patrol. "Thank you for protecting it. Your welcome assistance is now surplus to requirements."

It was impossible to judge whether the voice came from either of the SCE figures or the spidercopter.

"With all respect," Quincannon said, not bowing, "serious crimes have been committed. We're not rightly sure whether this junk is evidence or the perpetrators."

The figures froze and inclined heads towards each other. A tiny buzz indicated a conversation.

"The air's clean," Burnside said, helpfully. He held up his test print-out.

The SCEs took a moment. One raised an arm and punched buttons on a wrist-band. Tyree guessed the equipment was several generations in advance of the wheezy old contrivaptions Burnside had to lug around. There was a ping which, she assumed, confirmed Burnside's tests. As one, the figures touched buttons at their necks and hoods were sucked into their collars, rolling back like foreskins. Anonymous faces emerged, a Caucasian man and a Japanese woman.

"You will please help Dr McFall-Ngai and Engineer Huff gather the GenTech property," the helicopter said. Tyree didn't quite like its tone.

"It's just junk," Yorke said, kicking a stray leg. The Japanese – Dr Shimako McFall-Ngai, her breastplate read – cringed. In that moment, Tyree found some sort of fellowship with her; it was irrational to think a prosthesis felt pain, suggesting a welcome streak of human idiocy.

"If you will kindly have care," Dr McFall-Ngai said. "Delicate recording instruments are concealed."

"You're looking for the black boxes?" Quincannon asked.

"Indeed," the woman confirmed.

Tyree didn't understand.

"The company has been letting its experiments loose," Quincannon explained. "The 'bots must have imagined they were renegade, but they've been monitored all along."

The GenTech officials methodically went through the detritus, retrieving specific doodads.

"Why didn't they use the off switch when it scanned like they were killing people?"

"There is no off switch," the helicopter said.

"Don't be so sure of that," said Quincannon, raising his voice unnecessarily. "Something sure found a way to pull the plug on the 'bots."