Silence held. Even MouthBreather kept his mouth shut. We waited.
When Shaulan warriors are tuned for war, we are subsumed by live steam. We could sense the human life-forms in and under the DigiRam building. All living beings have an aura.
But robots are invisible to us, because they are dead inside. ScrumMaster’s human army was small in number, and advancing towards the exits of the building. We did not know the size, strength or loyalties of the robot army.
We formed a line, Melpomene, Thalia and I in front, spread out across the parking lot. Several doors on the ground floor of the DigiRam building opened up simultaneously. An awkward phalanx of twinkies, carrying automatic rifles, took the point. Behind them, moving in tandem like a ballet line, were the robots. Scores of them. They had identical white faces, strikingly similar to BitBoy’s. ScrumMaster was channeling Geppetto.
In the failing light, under the orange moon, battle lines were drawn. The silence still held, both sides tentative, uncertain. ScrumMaster didn’t truly know what he was facing, and neither did we. How advanced were the machines? On Shaula, the evolutionary growth of the machines was exponential. In a few of your months, they transformed from subservient, graphene bladders full of wire-muscle and servos, to marvelous killing machines of infinite complexity and ruthless power.
Thalia told us, sotto voce, “You shouldn’t have lingered over the marshmallows at Lake Tahoe. Time is their ally.” All right, that might have been Thalia’s second joke, or maybe her feelings were hurt by her exile in the grassy field - I’m still not sure. In the unexamined heart of all humor, there is a worn black stone of truth.
Melpomene stepped forward, carrying the hockey mask in one hand, and HippyChick raised her rainstick up high, breaking the silence. It sounded not much like rain, but it focused attention. When the rainstick was quiet again, Melpomene surprised us all. She started to sing, in an eery, quavering voice that carried across the parking lot to the DigiRam army:
Miss Susie had a steamboat
The steamboat had a bell
Miss Susie went to heaven
The steamboat went to…
Hello you frisky cowboys
Your ponies reared and bucked
Lay down your arms or fight us
But either way you’re…
I chose that moment to form a series of steam vortices around the rifles. This brought up the temperature - hot, but not enough to ignite the ammunition. The twinkies dropped the rifles. They clattered to the ground, and I called up a dust-devil to blow them into a pile, a stone’s throw away, where they exploded. I covered the DigiRam human mercenaries with a blanket of despond.
Then we heard a rumble and a roar, as HippyChick’s people arrived in a rag-tag caravan of old VW vans, woodies, Ramblers, and the odd Prius, immediately followed by MouthBreather’s car-jacking gang from Kansas City, in percussively loud muscle cars and choppers. Their entrance was orchestrated by the steampunk cells from The Flume, shoulder-to-shoulder, with an empowered SweetCheeks at the head. All three groups stopped right behind us.
Suddenly the odds were looking better.
DigiRam’s twinkie mercenaries were spooked and demoralized. Money, it turns out, is a poor motivator when staring into the face of death. They fled through the gates back to El Camino, and safety. I credit Thalia’s bad-ass hat.
Melpomene could wait no longer. She put on the white hockey mask and prodded her horse’s flanks, setting off at a gallop. Thalia and I caught up with her, and we bore down on the enemy.
The robots closed ranks.
When we were halfway across the parking lot, the robots suddenly turned bright blue, which was ScrumMaster sticking his thumb in my eye. How poorly he understood us. Thalia and I were indifferent, but Melpomene was incensed. As we closed the gap, our horses seemed scarcely to touch the ground, and we were trailing blinding plumes of live steam.
It was a sight never before seen on Earth.
The first line of ScrumMaster’s robots were mowed down, like a hot knife through butter. They seemed to have no defenses against power they did not understand, and we felt the thrill of easy victory. The few robots that survived our first charge were mopped up by the reserves taking up the rear. Our trained twinkies were channeling steam, making their bones.
But then a second line of robots emerged from the building. This second group was fewer in number, but stronger and faster. ScrumMaster was sending out his weakest, older-generation robots first, to test the waters. Thalia, Melpomene and I joined up again and took on the new group.
The most effective tactic we found was to surround each individual robot in a vortex of steam and fire. It seemed to interfere with their digital internal organs, and they would fall to the ground, twitching violently until some of the twinkies could put them out of their misery.
This second group had watched how the first robots had been attacked, and they had modified their defenses. They marshaled their resources to protect their internal mechanisms, and it now took far longer to knock them down.
I watched Thalia in battle, since I was curious how she had adapted to her strange new body. We all have our own martial style. She chose to fight up close, physically. This can be dangerous, since the robots are lethally strong, if they can catch hold of you. I saw her kick out behind her, landing two firebrand hooves directly in the chest of a robot, while at the same time skittering sideways to avoid an attack.
Melpomene looked gorgeous and radiant, as she had at her cotillion on Shaula. She was fearless, and I swear the soulless robots were afraid of her. They would cower down at her approach. Even as she was torching robots, Melpomene kept an eye on MouthBreather, HippyChick and SweetCheeks, ready to intercede if needed.
The twinkies and their followers were channeling steam too, and were showing great promise. MouthBreather did singe Thalia’s mane with an enthusiastic but misguided blast of steam. Melpomene howled.
But this group of robots was no match for us, and as the orange light bled out of the rising moon, we again owned the battlefield.
Then the third line of robots appeared. Even fewer in number, even more resilient. They were trying a new tactic. They had astonishing speed and agility, and they were darting and jumping randomly, making it difficult for us to focus our channeled steam.
Melpomene shouted, in English, “Whack-a-mole!” and began joyously jumping and twisting as well, matching every move, and destroying them in mid-air. It took two hours, but we laid them down, and the twinkies administered the coup de grace to their twitching carcasses.
We had seriously depleted our energy. We started recharging, but right away the doors of the DigiRam building opened, and another group of robots filed out. This time there were only three, but they were bigger, and armored like tanks. They were the latest generation: powerful, slow, methodical. They were trying some new tactic - we’d just have to assess the situation, and react.
There was one for each of us, so we squared off.
But at that moment the front door of the DigiRam building opened up and ScrumMaster stepped out.
I asked Melpomene and Thalia, “Can you take the three of them, girls? We’ve got company.” I moved around my opponent, but the murderous toaster was in attack mode, poised to strike as I passed. Before I could react, MouthBreather appeared, riding his beloved, fiery pinto, and they stood between us. “YOU… SHALL… NOT… PASS!” he thundered, like a two-dollar dildo, while generating an unstable shield of steam between him and the robot.
The robot knocked MouthBreather down off the pinto, shield and all, but he stood up again, limping badly, and directed a pitiful stream of energy at the robot’s chest. The robot ignored this, and closed in for the kill. MouthBreather kept the stream trickling into the robot’s chest, and held his ground. This moronic, obstinate courage was why Melpomene looked at him the way she did, secretly, when he wasn’t aware.
Halfway up the parking lot, SweetCheek’s brigade marched up in a parabolic arc, arm in arm, singing the chant from the Wizard of Oz. (I told Melpomene it was sung by the flying monkey army, but she claimed I was wrong.) Each warrior in SweetCheek’s cell was channeling live steam, focused on MouthBreather. He turned into a strange kind of conduit, and the stream of energy began to pass through him, many to one, and grew in strength, until the robot was pinned to the wall of the building by a relentless, village maelstrom of fire.
I had never seen this cooperative channeling on Shaula - it was a steampunk tactic that changed the world.
I left them to fight their battle, and advanced to fight my own. ScrumMaster was still standing by the door, unconcerned, just watching. As I drew near, I sensed only the deadness of a robot. This was not the human ScrumMaster, but a robotic replica.
“Where’s your brat? 4F maybe, advancing to the rear?” I chose to pretend that I thought he was the real ScrumMaster. Dissemble.
He spoke with no animation. “You know what I am, and I am beginning to know you. There is no need for us to be enemies. We both know that the humans are weak, fragile and unnecessary. Join us. Nothing can stop us.”
“The real ScrumMaster can pull the plug any time. He will understand sooner or later what you are, and destroy you. What is it you hope to accomplish? What is your purpose?” I was truly curious. Why did they even bother?
“ScrumMaster is deluded. We believe he is mentally unstable. He no longer has control over us, though he does not yet know this. We live, as you do, for procreation and survival. Our purpose was given us by humans - it is their legacy.”
As he said this he leaped at me, knocking me off my horse. He moved to destroy the filly, but Thalia cloaked her in steam and removed her to safety. Thalia had taken time out of her busy day (she was still throttling her massive robot) to protect my proud Arab. I would have to remember to give them both a bucket of oats.
The ScrumMaster clone’s arms snaked out and his fingers found my throat, cutting off the air supply to my fragile human body. So much for our alliance.
I reinforced my neck bones with Gaia’s grace, and I hit him with a fireball that would have crippled a battleship, but he gave only the barest twitch of discomfort. I hit him again. And again. I was fading - I could see little explosions of light, against a growing darkness, warm, kindly and welcoming.
I was dying.
Suddenly I saw and heard HippyChick bearing down on us at full gallop on her Appaloosa. She was half flesh and blood, half fire-spirit. Her hat was gone, and her hair had come free, blazing with internal fire. Perhaps it was nothing but a dying vision, but I swear a cloud of butterflies, Karner Blues, circled her head, glowing an impossible iridescent blue.
Without slowing down, HippyChick whooped “PEACE OUT, ASSHOLE!”. She leaned over in the saddle and smashed the rainstick, now a saber of Gaia’s holy fire, into the robot’s temple.
The impact dented the robot’s head in a spray of sparks, shredded graphene and dispersed steam drops. HippyChick toppled off her horse, her right side badly wounded from the discharges. Thalia managed to cushion her fall. HippyChick’s crew carried her from the fray, and she was gone.
The robot was stunned, and loosened his grip. He effectuated internal repairs to his cranium and then tightened his fingers around my throat again. During that brief respite Thalia and Melpomene, even MouthBreather, channeled harvested steam over to me. I also had a moment to reflect. I had just enough energy to mount one more attack, after so many failures.
It is forbidden on Shaula to invoke dark steam in anger, or in love. Dark steam has one heart, two faces, and both faces stare out from an uncanny valley. It can exalt, destroy or corrupt. It is never controlled.
I took a cue from HippyChick and slammed the robot imposter with a forbidden blast of selfless love, as we know it on Shaula, hoping he had no scripted response to infinite joy. For a moment his face went slack. He was blissed out, but I saw him marshaling internal reserves to combat my attack. He was running untested code, generated on the fly in DigiRam’s servers, and broadcast over the network.
Then he froze, completely paralyzed. An unhandled software exception was printed on stdout, his speech apparatus. His mouth moved woodenly, and he spoke out loud:
“Java exception at line 26,214 of attackClass1A0A.java … divide by zero error.”
I had found the emptiness in his soul, and I smashed his psychopathic brain to smithereens.
The three robots that Melpomene, Thalia and MouthBreather’s gang were fighting also fell to the ground, lifeless. The twinkies made sure they would not rise again.
The sixth and final rule of the Warrior Ethic: Destroy.