Twisted Metal

by Tony Ballantyne

  And then he recognized the robot.

  She had spoken at the parliament, where she had preached calm. She had promised to increase the guard at the railway station . . .

  Noatak.

  Kavan

  ‘What now, Kavan?’

  Eleanor was frustrated at the previous night’s events, the way she had been sent off on a seemingly meaningless errand when she should have been helping organize the sacking of the city. When Eleanor felt like this she would snipe at him, cast doubt on Kavan’s decisions.

  ‘Where do you go now?’ she asked. ‘Back to Artemis to strip away your standard-issue body? Will you dress up in gold leaf and take your place in the conquerors’ gallery?’

  Kavan stood at the head of the central platform, gazing along the tracks fanning out across Copper Valley. Diesel engines roared constantly, moving the trains that fed the Artemis war machine. Wheels bumped across joints; he heard the high-pitched hum of reaction engines in the background, saw the sparks and flash of metal being cut and soldered. Eleanor’s voice was just another part of the machine.

  Somewhere out there along that line lies Artemis City, he thought. Where now, Kavan? What would Nyro do? Where does your path lie now?

  It was almost as if Eleanor could read his thoughts. She taunted him with them, venting her frustration on him.

  ‘Where now, Kavan? Do you head north, beyond the mountains? Go to northern Shull to conquer the ghosts and vampires?’

  There was a cold wind blowing from the north; it blew the black smoke of the burning city out to sea; it left the view along the railway line crisp and clear.

  ‘Or do you continue to ride the moment, Kavan? No one expected you to come this far this fast. First Wien, then Turing City. Spoole will be frightened, and you know it. You worried him when you deposed General Fallan, and so he sent you here, hoping, at the back of his mind at least, that you would be wiped out. What will he think now that you have taken Turing City? What will he be planning now, Kavan? What’s waiting for you up those tracks? That’s what you’re thinking about, isn’t it? Because you know the truth, don’t you, Kavan? You know that Spoole can’t afford to leave you as you are. You’re too powerful now. You’ve become a threat. It’s either you or him. Shull can’t contain you both.’

  She was right, of course, and it came as no surprise. This was what his mother had woven him for. The path that he had followed across the continent was curved and intricate, but it was as definite as the shape of the twisted metal that made up his mind. And just as his thoughts had a definite beginning and end, so did his path. It was now leading him north, back to Artemis City.

  ‘. . . because you know it, Kavan. You can’t fight it. It’s twisted into you. You are Artemis, and Spoole is not.’

  ‘How do you know that, Eleanor?’

  His question startled her, he could see. She hadn’t been expecting the mildness of his tone, this sudden interruption of her flow. Still, she collected herself, answered smoothly.

  ‘Because Spoole is not out in the field. He is not fighting. He is not contributing to Artemis: he’s only taking. Think of the Basilica, the fine metals, the service . . .’

  ‘Sometimes a leader needs to stand back. Sometimes a good leader sends other robots to die, simply because it is right for Artemis. I have done the same myself.’

  ‘Spoole clothes himself in gold leaf and whale metal. You wear an infantryrobot’s body. So which of you is closer to the ideals of Artemis?’

  Kavan turned to gaze back at the shell of Turing City. Truth be told, he felt cheated by this easy victory. There was still energy within his electromuscles ready to be spent.

  ‘I have decided,’ he said. ‘Raise a battalion. We ride to Artemis.’

  Karel

  There was a change in the air. Every robot assembled in the square could feel it. The Turing Citizens that were huddled up around Karel; the Artemisian troops; the cutters and the lifters and the folders; all the robots who worked to disassemble the city and to turn it into folded metal to be transported across the plain to be eaten by the forges of Artemis, they felt it too.

  The soldiers, the Storm Troopers, the commanders.

  And Noatak, the traitor. Especially Noatak, the traitor. She felt it more than anyone.

  There had been a shift in the engine, the sound of a changing of gear in the Artemis machine. Karel gazed at Noatak, watching how the robot shifted nervously, how she jumped and turned at the slightest sound, her newly bare metal panelling glinting in the weak sun.

  Something was happening. Identical grey soldiers, the lapping waters of the Artemisian army, were receding into the station. What was happening?

  The Artemisian engine had changed gear, but still it worked with relentless efficiency. The buildings of the city were still being stripped of their metal, the spoils of war taken away to be processed. Only now it was the turn of another sort of metal.

  On command, Karel’s line of robots stepped forward. He found himself standing in the front row. A grey Artemisian infantry-robot walked the length of the line, inspecting them. And there was Noatak with them, speaking to the Artemisian commander, telling her the names of the assembled citizens, informing her of their jobs and their family details, yet jerking nervously at the sound of the troops marching into the station.

  Karel felt hollow, like a northern ghost. There was nothing inside him but the emptiness of his dead son, the emptiness of his lost wife. A single raindrop fell on his metal shell, and his body rang like a bell. Another raindrop fell, and another. Karel heard the ringing as if from a great distance away.

  ‘And this one?’

  The Artemis commander wore a silver flash on her shoulder. Apart from that, she was identical to the other infantryrobots that she commanded. But she could not compare with Noatak the traitor, who hovered at her shoulder in her bare metal body still stained with paint stripper; Noatak whose body panelling was hammered so smooth that the seams barely showed – how that contrasted with the cheap tin solder of the commander.

  More rain drops fell on them all. Plink plink plink. Plink plink on Karel’s head.

  ‘This is Karel, ma’am,’ said Noatak.

  ‘Karel?’ The commander’s voice was strange. Or maybe it was just the rain, dripping down onto their bodies.

  ‘That’s right. Karel worked in Immigration. He controlled who entered our state . . .’

  Once. Yesterday. Was it only yesterday?

  ‘So this is Karel,’ said the commander, thoughtfully.

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Do you know of him?’ Noatak looked uncertain, nervous.

  As well she should. What was she doing, standing here, when Axel was lying dead, back in their flat? If their flat was still even there . . .

  ‘He is unusual within this city,’ continued Noatak. ‘His mother was . . .’

  ‘No matter,’ said the commander, turning to watch the soldiers still marching into the station. ‘We need transport.’

  Axel dead on the floor.

  ‘Noatak,’ said Karel, quietly, his voice almost unheard below the pattering of the raindrops.

  ‘Now this is Beryl,’ said Noatak, anxious to move on. Karel moved as fast as a spring snapping back. He shoved the traitor, tripped her, seized her head and smashed it onto the wet slippery ground, badly denting the skull. Noatak made to get up, but Karel kicked her feet away, slammed her head on the ground again. That was it: he felt himself being pulled away, hauled up by two infantry-robots.

  The commander was standing before him again.

  ‘I had heard that he had a temper,’ she was saying. ‘Better not let him give vent to it. Take him into the station now.’

  Karel heard Noatak emitting an electronic whine.

  ‘Turn it off,’ ordered the commander. ‘Or, if it’s a fault in your voicebox, get it fixed. Swap it for the voicebox from one of these Tokvah. Now get back up. We have to get all these processed.’

  Karel twisted, lashed, kicked at his captors to no avail. As he was
dragged backwards into the station he saw Noatak, head badly dented, still working her way down the line of robots.

  The well-oiled machine of the Artemis invasion processed Karel.

  He thought of his conversation with Banjo Macrodocious, just a few days ago.

  Don’t you realize that if you had emerged in Artemis we wouldn’t even be having this conversation? You would already be owned by the state! Every item there, every rock, every mine, every robot is nothing but property.

  And now he, Karel, was nothing but property. Nothing more than metal, and Artemis did not distinguish between the metal of the body and that of the mind.

  The infantryrobots twisted free his arms and his legs, the easier to control him. They laid his body on the station floor. He craned his head this way and that, trying to see what was going on.

  Engineers brought forward metal and bent it to make a chassis. They worked so quickly, following a well-practised drill. Metal wheels were then rolled up on the rails, the chassis fixed over them.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Karel. No one answered him.

  Six engineers approached carrying a shiny diesel engine, no doubt freshly unloaded from an Artemisian truck. They took it over to the half-built frame and slotted it into place. It fitted perfectly. Karel was impressed, despite himself, by this Artemisian efficiency. Already, side panelling was being pop-riveted into place, and the engine was being coupled to the wheels.

  A diesel locomotive was taking shape before his eyes.

  Someone took hold of Karel and rolled him onto his front. They started to strip the panelling from his body. They rolled him onto his back and completed the operation, leaving his head and naked body lying helpless on the floor, whilst next to him they went on constructing the train. His bare electromuscle touched cold stone. It ached.

  They were welding the seams of the locomotive now: sparks dripping down onto the floor near his head.

  And then he felt himself being moved again. He felt hands inside his body, someone touching his coil, unplugging his mind from his body.

  Nothing.

  Maoco O

  Turing City changed shape by the hour. The broken-rock roads grew a block at a time, stamped into the ground by the Artemisian troops as they marched. Crossroads appeared, sending new twisted metal branches of tracks and thoroughfares reaching through the heart of the city. They were foreign roads, alien roads, made of stone from broken buildings, gravel and shattered concrete stirred up from foundations, all stamped flat by the pounding feet of the invaders.

  These roads spread through the city like organic life, creeping through the cracks, tipping over buildings that had stood for decades. Like organic life they sucked the life of the city away: on Artemisian carts loaded with the stacked metal that had been columns, the folded metal that had been decorative panelling, the bundled metal that had been minds . . .

  The galleries with their intricate iron work, their stained glass, their leafwork . . . all were now empty shells, the ground a pointillistic nightmare of broken and trodden paint tubes scattered here and there by the invading forces. Dislodged marble rubble from broken fountains rolled multicolour tracks through the colours that were being washed into the drains by the pattering rain. Ripples appeared in yellow and red and purple puddles.

  No one saw Maoco O as he crept through the plundered streets. He was the broken metal at the foot of a building here, the sound of rain dripping from shattered tiles there. He was the silent shadow that flickered across the square as windblown litter tumbled over the ground.

  There had been an entrance to the fort amongst the columns that decorated the southern end of the galleries. In the old days, Maoco O had been able to emerge from that entrance and merge with the milling shoppers unnoticed. Now half the columns had dominoed, fallen and shattered, sending sections like thick-toothed yellow wheels rumbling across the square.

  The entrance to the fort was still there, but now covered by one of those stone cylinders. Maoco O heaved at it, electromuscle straining, and the stone shifted ever so slightly. He needed a lever of some sort. He cast around to locate one, and found himself facing a pair of Artemisian Scouts, their silver bodies sparkling with raindrops.

  It was difficult to tell who was the more surprised, Maoco O or the Scouts, but all three moved at precisely the same time. Maoco O was moving sideways so that the kick launched by the left Scout went wide; he blocked the punch thrown by the right Scout, taking the awl from her other hand as he did so. He scraped a foot down her calf to stamp down on the instep, snapping the claw mechanism there. Water slipped from silver bodies in a diamond spray. Maoco O kicked down again at an exposed leg, tearing through the panelling and into the electromuscle beneath. Reaching underneath the chin as the body doubled up, he ripped back her head, exposing the coil and slicing through it with one sharp palm edge. The other Scout was now moving in. Maoco O squeezed the electromuscles in the dead Scout’s foot so that claws were exposed and he raked them down the other’s chest.

  The scene fractured into shards of sensations. The flashing of polished metal and sparks and rain like diamonds, reaching up and grabbing blue wire, and then there was just Maoco O staring at the emptiness of two more dead bodies.

  The warrior’s mind was fading, lost in the emptiness of it all. The city had fallen: his purpose was now receding once more.

  Maoco O looked at the two metal shells, disconnected a pair of legs, twisted the mechanisms around.

  Now he could make himself a lever to shift the yellow stone.

  The heart of the fort stood silent and empty. And hidden. Elsewhere, Artemisians were sacking the public areas, the DMZs and the dummy rooms, but the core of the fort, the secret heart, still remained hidden beneath the earth.

  Maoco O made his way through forgotten passages to the silent darkness that lay deep beneath the broken city, listening hard. Was he the only one who had escaped? Was he the only one to make it down here? The City Guard had planned for everything. They had planned to hide here even in defeat, to regroup and to prepare for the future. But no one could have predicted the utter rout that had been inflicted upon them. Robot after robot had fallen on the arena before the fort, locked in furious battle.

  Only Maoco O, it seemed, had been able to muster the strength to walk away. To escape from the killing ground and to hide away while the battle swept past him.

  Maoco O the coward.

  Now Maoco O was heading down and down, heading for a certain room near the centre of the hidden quarter.

  Finally, he entered the room he sought. His body was badly damaged, but there was metal here. Metal and coal and tinder. And a forge, cold and unused.

  Maoco O looked around for a lighter.

  Eleanor

  Eleanor watched Kavan marshalling his troops.

  It was funny, she reflected. He had travelled across half the continent and succeeded in a task others had declared impossible: he had conquered Turing City. And yet, for all that effort, he was going to depart from the scene of his greatest victory having seen nothing more than the railway station.

  Not that it was really possible any more to see Turing City as it had been. All Kavan would now ever have seen of the once-proud state on the southern coast would be its component parts being carried past him, piece by piece.

  It was appropriate after a fashion, she decided, for Kavan did not care about any philosophy other than Nyro’s. He saw Turing City as nothing more than building materials.

  She turned her attention back to the matter at hand.

  A train was being made ready. Just one train to conquer Artemis.

  ‘It took a division to take Wien,’ Kavan had declared. ‘It took a regiment to take Turing City. We’ll take Artemis with a battalion.’

  Eleanor didn’t argue. Kavan had been proved right so far.

  He had summoned his troops, ordered oil and cleaning fluid. Forges had been set up along one platform; he had the quartermasters set up shop along the next. The chosen robot
s had stripped their bodies down, cleaned and repaired themselves and each other and rebuilt themselves afresh for yet another battle. The activity had slowed the removal of material from Turing City, but this was more important.

  The train on which they were to travel was newly built: a functional thing of unpainted metal, edges of solder and curls of swarf marring its unsmoothed extent. The troops were already boarding.

  Kavan, Wolfgang and Ruth took their places in the lead carriage. Kavan finally noticed Eleanor.

  ‘Come in here,’ he said. ‘I’ll need you with me.’

  Eleanor made to join him in the lead carriage, pleased to be back amongst the minds of the army. Kavan gave her a rare smile as she climbed into the carriage; her feet echoing like a drum beat on the bare metal floor.

  ‘I’d rather have you in here where I can watch you than out there plotting behind my back,’ he said.

  Eleanor smiled. ‘How well you know me, Kavan.’

  Karel

  Vision returned. Then sound.

  ‘Three minds,’ said someone, and Karel was shown two minds nestled into a metal frame. There was space for a third between them. His own, he presumed. Questions began clamouring for his attention. How was he seeing? Where were his eyes? Where was his body?

  ‘You control this locomotive,’ said the voice. And his vision moved, giving him a view along the dull grey length of the freshly built machine. He saw the roughly cut metal, the unfiled coils of swarf curling from the ends of panels. The view swept further along the train’s length, showing a line of bare metal carriages, infantryrobots climbing on board. The view shifted again, and for a moment it lingered on the platform. He saw his old body stripped of its panelling, arms and legs removed, head empty. And then his vision moved again and it was gone.

  ‘Your coil has been hooked up as follows,’ said the voice. ‘Your legs are linked to the motor. It’s diesel, so give it time to warm up. It should have a good midrange pull, this model usually does. Left arm linked to the brakes, right arm to the gears. You’ll soon get the hang of it. You’ve got ears so that you can be told what to do. You’ve got a mouth, but unless we want to hear from you we won’t be using it. Mostly we’ll just have you linked to a buzzer. One beep for yes, two for no. Long beep if you see something important.’