Tony Ballantyne - Twisted Metal

The grey robot said nothing. Arban was disturbed, Eleanor could tell. The name obviously struck a bell deep inside him, and not a tinkling little silver bell but a great tolling chime of warning.

‘I have heard of you,’ he said. ‘Back when we took Stark. Were you there?’

‘I was.’

We all were, thought Eleanor.

Arban was picking apart Kavan’s arm, stripping off the grey casing, popping out the joints and peeling away the electromuscles. He dropped them on the ground, one by one.

‘I remember. You led the charge through the Tesla towers. A lot of robots died there…’

‘But we made it through in the end.’

Arban finished stripping the arm. He rubbed his palms together, scraping off the remnants of Kavan’s grease and lubricant, his left hand moving oddly: the effect of the punctured electromuscle.

‘You were offered promotion,’ said Arban. ‘A Storm Trooper’s body, but you preferred to remain as an infantryrobot. Yes, I knew I’d heard of you! You’re not a coward, that’s for certain. I’ve heard you called a hero, but I’m not sure that’s exactly right. Anyone can get others killed. So what are you? You’re not a good soldier or you wouldn’t be skulking in this square. I don’t know what I should do with you.’

‘This is single combat,’ replied Kavan. ‘To the death.’

‘Don’t be stupid! You don’t stand a chance!’ Arban stepped forward and ground the remains of Kavan’s arm into the flagstones with a hard metal foot. Kavan took a step back. And now Eleanor and the grey infantry were moving. Carmel tossed something towards Kavan. Something long, it bent as it tumbled. Kavan snatched it from the air.

Arban jumped, kicked out with one foot, bringing the ultrahard, shovel-like edge around and upwards just at Kavan’s knee joint, breaking the leg there, but Kavan moved in at the same time, stabbing out at the metal in Arban’s thigh, puncturing him again, rupturing the electromuscle there. Arban landed and spun around, slightly clumsy, slightly off balance due to the spasming muscles in his left thigh.

Kavan had two arms again! As Arban moved in to attack, Eleanor nodded to Ulrich, who detached his own leg at the knee and threw it to Kavan, who snapped it into place and then, almost in the same movement, jumped at Arban.

Arban anticipated his attack. He grabbed Kavan’s right arm once more, pulling it off, but again Kavan reached out and with his left hand stabbed at the electromuscles in Arban’s arm. They were spasming all the more. With difficulty, Arban tore apart Kavan’s arm again, but the grey robot simply snatched another arm out of the air, thrown by one of his own robots, and reattached it. Eleanor wondered if Arban yet had any real inkling of his peril. This might be single combat, but Arban wasn‘t only fighting Kavan, he was fighting all of them.

Smoothly, though not as smoothly as before, Arban drew his rifle from his back and shot Ulrich in the head. Twisted wire exploded in a cloud. Ulrich’s arms and legs jerked up and down, thrashing as the curving, expanding wire sent strange signals to the robot’s limbs. Arban fired again, catching Hammett in the chest. Arban’s finger was tightening a third time just as Kavan smashed the rifle from his hand. Arban kicked down, incapacitating both of Kavan’s legs. Kavan stabbed Arban’s left arm once more, and the electromuscle there flashed and died. Kavan took the opportunity to drag himself backwards and out of range, detaching his legs as he went. Arban should have gone for his arms, Eleanor knew, should have stopped Kavan from doing what he was doing now – snapping two more legs into place. Arban jumped, but Kavan was already there, this time scraping at his right arm…

… and they fought. Metal puncturing metal, mechanisms sticking, smoke rising in the air and the rhythmic pounding of metal feet in the distance as the infantry-robots anticipated their leader’s victory.

And with rising incredulity Arban realized he was going to die.

His body, his great, polished, finely tuned body was being gradually eroded by this grey robot that just didn’t stop. Kavan simply didn’t seem to care about the pain. His patchwork grey body fought on, his mind surely exhausted by the exertion, but still he fought.

Until eventually Arban lay on his back, his right arm mushy, his arms and legs dead, looking upwards as Kavan stood above him, the other grey bodies of the broken-down infantry haloed by the sun as they too loomed over him. Then Kavan spoke. For a moment, Arban thought he was speaking to him, but he was mistaken. Kavan seemed to no longer count Arban as a sentient being

‘Come here, Eleanor,’ Kavan had called.

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Arban.

Kavan bent down and used the awl to pry Arban’s head armour clear. Arban felt the awl tapping on his skull. He looked up at Kavan, felt him doing something there.

‘What are you doing?’ he repeated.

Eleanor was looking into his skull. Kavan had opened him up and Eleanor was looking at the twisted metal of his brain.

‘What do you see?’ asked Kavan.

‘Nothing,’ replied Eleanor. ‘He’s just a standard Artemisian robot.’

And then Arban felt an odd sensation down his left side. It was as if his dead arm had come back to life and was waving in the air. He heard the sound of music playing on trumpets, and a rainbow seemed to be forming within his body. He saw Kavan pulling his awl up into the air, the twisted wire of Arban’s own brain around it…

Kavan

There was enough metal and parts from the dead Wiener soldiers to rebuild the damaged bodies of the robots in his section, but it took time to knit electromuscle.

Kavan sat on the rim of the fountain in the centre of the square, waiting for his mind to attune itself to his new body. It was always the same when you added new parts: things didn’t feel right for the first few days, and you had to wait for them to bed in properly and become part of you. Kavan had been swapping body parts with gay abandon not twenty minutes ago. No wonder he now felt tired and shaky.

‘We’ve got six whole robots left; eight if you count you and me,’ said Eleanor, her hands moving in regular patterns as she knitted wire into muscle.

‘Have you got anything out of that pile of bodies we could use?’ Kavan waved a hand towards the dismembered Wiener robots that Arban had been messing around with.

‘Some muscle that can be shortened. But frankly, it’s quicker to knit it ourselves.’

‘That’s not good. We need to move on. We can’t just stay here like that Choarh.’ He gestured to the broken body of Arban, twisted wire spilling over the ground from the shattered skull. Kavan shook his head. ‘Idiot. Just sitting here with that over-engineered matt-black body. If we hadn’t got to him first the Wiener defence would have. That head would have looked good as a mascot for some Death and Glory last-stand squad.’

Kavan flexed his arms and legs. They just didn’t feel right.

‘What are we going to do now?’ asked Eleanor.

‘Send out four of the able-bodied to scout the surrounding buildings. There’ll be some Wiener civilians hiding out in them. Have our robots rip the usable parts from their bodies and bring them back here right away. The more robots we have out cannibalizing, the more parts we can collect.’

‘I thought you’d say that,’ said Eleanor, and she gestured to four waiting robots, who loped off towards the edges of the square.

Kavan moved his new arms and legs in turn, getting the feel of them.

‘It’s pretty up here,’ said Eleanor, unexpectedly.

Kavan followed her gaze and looked out through the wide gate at the bottom of the square, out over Wien bay. The city had been built on a hillside that sloped gently downwards to the sands below, sands that were lapped by the clear green sea. A number of rocky islands studded the bay on which robots had long ago originally built their forges and sunk their mineshafts for ease of defence. And, once they had built those forges, they had then raised towers to proclaim their status. Marble towers. When most other robots on Shull were still only forming metal, the Wieners had used what they had learned in mining coal and developed that into the skill to work rock. Quarryrobots, sawyers and banker masons had dressed stone; carvers and fixer masons had raised the beautiful towers for which the state had become famous.