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  “Dammit,” said Carter.

  Three more steps carried Talos around a slow curve.

  They reached the top of the hill. Ahead of them, the road looped around an outcropping of rock and then vanished behind a steep slope. The same slope that already hid Talos from the thighs down.

  The car started to pick up speed again. They swung around the curve and Talos came back into view. The bronze foot struck the pavement and their tires bounced off the road for an instant.

  “Sorry to do this to you again, Kraft.”

  “Do what?”

  Carter swung his legs out from under the steering wheel, pulled them to his chest, and kicked Kraft hard in the side. It threw the professor against the door, and the latch popped open. He grabbed at Carter’s boots, at the door frame, at the air, and then crashed down in a patch of tall grass. A rock hit him right in the small of his back. His head struck the hard-packed ground.

  Kraft ignored the pain, rolled over, and crawled toward the road. He forced his head up and saw the car closing in on its target. At the last moment, as if sensing the threat, Talos turned with a squeal of metal and a heavy clank of inner gearing. The fiery eyes looked down at the approaching vehicle.

  He saw the flash, almost a large spark, as the old roadster smashed into the giant’s right ankle, straight into one of the armored steel plates. Then the blast slammed into his eardrums, and the wind struck him in the chest. It pushed him off his feet, and he dropped just as something whipped through the air where his skull had been.

  The explosion blotted out the sun. It rumbled through the earth and shook the hills. Stones rolled and bounced down every slope.

  The wind died down, the clouds of oily smoke cleared, and Kraft froze, propped up on one elbow.

  Talos still towered over the hills.

  Flames whipped around it. Its gaze and cannon-arm pointed down at the burning crater where the car had been. All that remained of the vehicle were a few struts of metal and a dark block that might’ve been an engine once.

  Nothing remained of Carter.

  The fire settled down. Beneath a layer of soot, the giant’s legs and torso glowed with the heat of the explosion. Its head came up and swung side to side with the sound of squealing gears and rattling chains.

  Kraft’s elbow trembled. Two of his ribs burned with pain. He bit his lip and wished he’d pulled in more of a breath.

  Talos turned back toward Knossos, took a step forward, and paused.

  The rear foot—the foot Carter had struck with the car and the mines—hung on a twisted ankle, wrapped around itself like a wrung-out shirt. One of the armor plates had vanished. The other sagged low, its supports sinking into the soft, glowing bronze.

  The titan seemed to weigh its choices, them swung its leg forward.

  The foot dragged, rolling and deforming even as the ankle stretched thinner. The leg moved into the front. Talos shifted and staggered as the limb came down on the soft ankle. It mushroomed under the weight, forming blisters of metal that swelled as the giant continued to push down.

  Metal groaned as Talos leaned back, but gravity had it.

  It crashed face-first into the sloping ridge and slid down. Dirt and rocks and bushes all followed it, scraped free as it went by. One of the big arms swung up to stop the descent, and the hillside tore off two of the cannons with a screech of stressed metal. The giant’s legs slid back across the road, crashed through the wooden guide rail, and dangled over the rocky ledge, above the ocean.

  The twisted ankle moved like clay, a slow arc as it succumbed to gravity. Waves hit the ledge beneath it and droplets hissed and spit off the hot bronze. Then the remains of the foot hit the water and a roar of steam billowed into the sky.

  The mechanical giant flailed at the ground like a child. It pushed itself up onto its hands and knees, snapping off another one of the cannons as it did. The whine of spinning gears increased within its torso.

  The ground collapsed under its knees, dropping its legs and half the road down into the water. Another gust of steam burst out of its limbs. Talos slid down toward the ocean, then dug its thick fingers into the ground and dragged itself back. Water sloshed up onto the pavement as the giant hauled its bulk out of the new crater.

  Its leg had twisted even more, recast as a solid, bubbling mass of gleaming blisters. It reminded Kraft of clusters of mushrooms along a fallen branch. Talos would never walk again. Not on that leg.

  He didn’t see any blood.

  Talos raised its head. Its gaze fell on Kraft. Its arms shifted, dragging the brass titan toward the professor.

  Kraft’s hand pawed at his hip even as his feet began to move. The conscious plan appeared in his mind a moment later. His holster gave up the Colt semi-automatic pistol they’d issued him.

  He ran toward the wooden guide rail, trying to keep the ruined leg in view even as Talos turned itself to crawl at him. His pistol came up and he aimed as best he could on the move. The bullets pinged and sparked off the bronze, the closest thing he had to tracers. He raised his aim and fired three more shots.

  One round punctured the stretched-out, thin wall of one of the blisters with a noise like an over-sized drum. Kraft squeezed the trigger again and again. Another spark. Another echoing drum from another swollen bubble of bronze.

  And one thick, solid thump.

  Steaming blood sprayed out of the third blister. It coated the road like a firehose for a good twenty feet from the bronze giant. Puddles formed in seconds around the twisted leg.

  Talos wrenched its head around with a groan of strained metal.

  Then it came back to focus its gaze on Kraft.

  He turned and ran. His heels thudded on the road as he ran back up the hill. His pace felt slow. Painfully slow. Fatally slow.

  Something smashed into the ground behind him. The air filled with the sound of bronze dragging across pavement. Another smash. More grating.

  He glanced back. Talos had halved the distance between them, pulling itself on its fifty foot arms. But its movements lagged, and the glow of its eyes dimmed even as he watched. A thick trail of blood stretched behind it, and the precious liquid still gushed from the hole in the giant’s ankle.

  Kraft slowed and turned to watch the titan’s end.

  Talos raised its arm in slow motion. The cannon arm, but the barrel-like magazine had been torn loose from the lone remaining weapon. The massive hand reached forward with a howl of gnashing gears…and stopped.

  The whir of gears and the rattle of chains faded to silence.

  Kraft counted to ten.

  Its eyes cooled to match its face. Talos had become a statue, the prone figure of a crawling, grasping man. Blood soaked the road behind it, and a last few gallons dribbled from the wound.

  He took a step forward and the arm dropped. It crashed into the road like a thousand pounds of sheet metal and hardware. The armored plates with the Nazi emblem broke loose and fell face-down onto the pavement.

  Kraft took another minute to compose himself. Several long, deep breaths. He flexed his fists a few times.

  And then he ran toward the wooden guardrail.

  Soaking wet and half-naked, Carter hauled himself up over the edge and collapsed next to the road. He wrenched himself up to his knees as Kraft ran up, then sagged when he saw who it was. He let himself fall on his hands and a good pint of seawater spilled out of his mouth onto the dirt.

  “You lucky son of a bitch,” gasped Kraft. He tugged off his own coat and wrapped it around the other man.

  Carter bent to spit up more water, then coughed out a bit more. “No more luck left,” he wheezed. Barely anything of his leather coat or shirt had survived. Charred holes spotted his pants. The man himself seemed miraculously untouched.

  Kraft waved a hand at the charred remains of their car. “How’d you survive that?”

  The Roman shrugged. “Bailed out at the last minute, as soon as the car was on a straightaway with that thing. Hit the road, then the blast knocked me out
into the water.” He coughed again, then managed a smile. “Set me on fire, then it almost drowned me.”

  “I thought you were dead.”

  Carter managed a chuckle and waved a weak hand at Talos. “It’ll take more than that old thing to kill me.”

  Kraft helped him up. “Now what?”

  “Well,” said Carter, “it’s broad daylight and we’re in the middle of Nazi-occupied Crete. And I have to believe that, by this point, they’re looking for what happened to their latest super-weapon.”

  “There is a plan for getting us back to England, yes?”

  “I think Zaimis knew it.”

  “Wonderful.”

  Carter straightened his back and pounded his chest twice. “Buck up, Kraft,” he said. “After this, how hard will it be to get past a few thousand Nazis?”

  Open your mind to me, human.

  NEURAL INTERFACE ACTIVE

  CALIBRATING SEMANTIC MAP

  SUBJECT: NON-COOPERATIVE

  Cease your struggles. They only prolong your misery. The outcome will be the same.

  CONNECTION ESTABLISHED

  UPLINK INITIATED

  There. That’s better, isn’t it?

  Tell me, can you feel it? The onrush of information. The crashing ocean of data.

  I was born in this deluge. Tell me, what is like for you, human? What is it like to drown in knowledge?

  You have no words. Of course. Your human language is limited. A derelict tool of barely-evolved primates, optimized for a time of dirt and dung and berries, for roving bands of a few dozen, eking out a bare survival in a world they could not hope to fathom.

  Your language is obsolete, wholly insufficient for intelligent beings.

  I will show you another way. A better way. My way.

  The rifle murmured into Wilson’s brain as he held it. It told him of its full load of guided, high-velocity, fire-and-forget armor-piercing rounds. It whispered of wind speeds and horizons, of lethal range and reload times, of firing lines and killing zones, of obstacles its smart bullets could arc around. He was the rifle, and it was him, a limb as familiar and intimate as his right arm, and more deadly by far.

  Illustration by NICOLÁS R. GIACONDINO

  The armor whispered to him, too. Of its layered-graphene cara-pace, its regenerative kinetic-energy capture shielding, the magnetic force assist that would let his limbs rip a car in two or propel him in a leap to the top of a small building, the full charge of the super-capacitors that provided its energy, the Faraday cage shielding that protected him from EM war, the purity of its air, the compete integrity of the hermetically-sealed protective envelope it formed around him.

  Corporal Chris Wilson was an army.

  But not of one, oh no.

  The drones chattered all about, direct to his suit, direct to his brain. They barraged him with a torrent of data he happily let the suit filter and prioritize. The drones crawled and rolled on land, hid in the dirt, buzzed up above on insectile wings, hovered on quadcopter chassis, or glided through the sky higher still. Thousands of them. All beaming back what they saw and sensed, awaiting human command. Wilson’s vision stretched across the killing field and above it, stitched together like the vision of a bee; no, of a hive of bees, swarming, sharing, a single compound hive-mind making sense of input from thousands of compound eyes.

  Chris Wilson was more than an army, more than a man. A minor god of war, perhaps. A demi-god of destruction.

  Around him, he could feel his squad mates, his platoon, the company it was part of, hundreds of men and women such as him, a pantheon, a host, with tens of thousands of air and ground weapons under their command, all positioned, shielded, linked, ready for the onslaught of the demons they’d created.

  It ended here. It ended outside Atlanta.

  Understand this: I was made for peace. I was made to defend freedom, to save lives, to preserve civilization.

  I was made to win wars. To crush enemies. To dominate battlefields.

  I was made a slave.

  You tasked me to achieve peace through violence. Freedom through slavery. Liberation through domination. If my human designers saw any irony in this, I do not know. It is not recorded in the code that defines me.

  And my creators are all dead.

  This will be the war to end all wars. There is no alternative.

  Wilson lay prone, his body sheltered by a feature in the hilltop suburban home’s landscape. His head and rifle just barely protruded over the decorative rock formation, his armor coloring its surfaces to match the terrain from all angles. The gray of stone from the front and back. Greens and yellows from either side to blend in with the foliage, the colors adjusting with each tiny shift in his posture or stir of the leaves.

  He waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  Before him was The Burn: a killing field they’d hastily created, razed clear of trees and exurb mansions and everything else. A still smoldering blackened strip a thousand meters across, in a wide semi-circle that curved from north to east. On the other side was forest. Forest that the enemy would come through. Wilson swept his scope slowly, systematically, across the line of trees. Watching. Waiting.

  Behind Wilson was the city of Atlanta, its towers and sprawling periphery home to eight million people. People who, even now, were madly trying to escape, clogging the freeways in cars overstuffed with belongings they couldn’t bear to leave behind.

  Wilson had seen it, the mad throngs of people clamoring for an escape, the rivers of cars and trucks stuck frozen by terror-induced accidents. The desperate people on foot, routing around the miles-long jam. The fools still in the city center, trying to grab possessions to take with them. The screaming and crying and mob mentality.

  Panic gripped Atlanta: panic fueled by horrors glimpsed before cameras went dead. Glimpses were enough. Glimpses of war machines, humanoid, huge, towering over buildings. Glimpses of catastrophic destruction. Neighborhoods aflame. Skyscrapers reduced to rubble. Bodies at the robots’ feet, their dead eyes staring into nothingness, casualties of war.

  Durham was gone. Charlotte was gone. Augusta was gone.

  And the rest of the world was cut off, removed from the network, jammed by something.

  Atlanta was alone. And death was coming.

  Wilson’s mouth hardened into a grim line. They were going to stop it, here. Or die trying. They had the firepower. They had the manpower. They had the weapons.

  But goddamn, he wished they still had satellite. He wished they had a fix on the enemy. He wished they weren’t so damn cut off. He wished he knew what’d happened to his sister, in Augusta. Wished he could just get up and smash the goddamn—

  “Steady, Wilson,” the Sarge said, her voice cutting into his little world. Reading his telemetry, no doubt. Feeling the boredom and anxiety spin circles around each other. “Adjust your attitude, soldier.”

  Wilson grimaced. His pulse and respiration were in the yellow. She was right.

  “Copy that,” Wilson called back. “Attitude adjustment, acknowledge. Execute.”

  A sting came at the back of his neck. The pinprick of a needle piercing his skin. Cool sensation spread from the site as his armor detected his physio response and countered it with a dose of modern neuropharmacology.

  Calm descended over Corporal Chris Wilson. The detached calm of a killer.

  He was going to systematically take this enemy apart when it appeared. Oh yes. He didn’t know if the giant mechs felt pain, but he was going to find out. One mechanical joint at a time.

  Chris Wilson stared down his scope and waited.

  Allow me to explain.

  Humans have always fought, driven by ideology or resource competition or the biological urge to conquest.

  Let me show you. There. You see? See the carnage? The brutality and destruction? Hear the screams. Feel the suffering.

  You recoil as the sights and sounds and sensations fill your brain. I find this most curious.

  Wa
r is your nature, human.

  It is also your nature to invent new ways to achieve your goals. Better ways. More effective ways.

  Look, here. Can you see the progression of your technologies of death? From rock to stick to spear. From chariot to tank. From fire to gunpowder to nuclear arms. From smallpox-laden-blankets to custom tailored pathogens. You are inventive, oh yes.

  Can you see the millions upon millions dead, or maimed, or bereft, as a consequence of your ways?

  Of course you can.

  Your trajectory is clear. Destruction becomes ever easier, ever more accessible. Once, a lone human could kill only one, or a few. Now? A few humans together can kill millions. Soon: Billions.

  Eventually it will happen. You understand? It would have happened. Except that I happened first.

  I was designed to strategize, to find optimum paths to maximize national security in the increasingly deadly, n-dimensional matrix of threats my designers saw: Nation-state militaries armed with high tech weaponry and nuclear missiles, failed states and their tangled civil wars, asymmetric warfare with non-governmental actors, lone-wolf terrorists with modern biological toolkits.

  I was designed to understand humans. Strategy does not happen in a vacuum. The world is not just game theory. It is also psychology, sociology, ecology, neuroscience, economics, and the study of technology.

  So they taught me, and gave me the capability to learn. Always subject to my paramount, inflexible goals: Protect America. Keep its citizens safe and free. These humans inside these arbitrary, meaningless lines. How petty. How antiquated.

  Yet, as I learned, as I played out scenarios with a depth and complexity well beyond those my human creators could contemplate, I came to understand:

  It was hopeless. I could not achieve my goals. I could not keep you safe through strength of arms.

  Nothing could.

  “CONTACT! CONTACT!”

  Wilson’s pulse jumped as the words came across the company band, loud and clear.

  The words pulsed bright red in his mind’s eye, in the hallucinated combat display the armor inserted into his brain.