A bomb exploded to the squadron’s left, splitting a sausage tree into a million pieces and creating a crater of blackened dirt. Soldiers with Asian or Slavic features—most of them human, but others robots—approached, accompanied by tanks spitting out bombs and bullets.
The sergeant dove behind a tall rock and looked to his squadron. “Attack!” he cried, face locked in a terrified grimace. Montgomery had no way of knowing for sure, but he suspected from previous experience that the rest of the sergeant’s human companions had been killed, leaving him alone with the surviving robots.
All twenty-six of them turned to the approaching army and charged forward, raising their guns and unleashing a barrage of sparks and metal. Montgomery felt his accuracy improved by computer guidance systems and his 360-degree vision. His limbs held steady as could be even as the gun trembled with every burst.
The frontline Slav-Asians dropped like flies, but the others fought back with ferocity. Their battle robots—almost identical to Squadron Nine’s, except less chrome and more black—surged ahead unloading bullet after bullet. Montgomery felt them pinging against his steel body and grimaced with pain. It was little different from his standard touch sensation, and yet through the Soulcage he could feel the anguish like his own body being poked at by needles. He watched his chest become pocked with dozens of dents.
The two groups of battle robots approached each other and met in the middle. Montgomery noticed that there were fewer Slav-Asian robots; probably not quite a dozen. Hope welled up in him, which he thought strange considering he didn’t care one whit about who won or lost, who lived or died here. The Soulcage had a way of doing that to you: filling you with the desires and mentalities, human or programmed, of those you Soulcaged as.
Robotic fists were thrown and metal skulls were crunched as the robots engaged in hand-to-hand melee combat. Their intense strength was fearsome and their capacity for killing unparalleled. Oil burst from them like blood, the only thing remotely humanlike about their interactions. Montgomery threw rocketlike punches at a Slav-Asian robot, taking a few hits to the jaw himself, but eventually he succeeded in punching through the enemy’s chest and tearing out vital wiring, leaving the robot dead and lifeless.
In a few flashes of violence, and minutes on end of cacophonous, harsh noise, ten of Squadron Nine’s robots lay dead alongside most of the enemy’s. That left mostly the remaining human soldiers to deal with.
Montgomery let others deal with the last Slav-Asian robots: he didn’t want to feel any more pain than was necessary. He charged forward on his long legs and fired upon the human soldiers, dropping them one after another. One tossed a frag grenade at him, but he shot it out of the air—flabbergasted by his own prowess—and blew off the soldier’s head with a burst of bullets.
They understood, didn’t they? They understood that Soulcaged prisoners didn’t want to do what they did? Montgomery could not physically weep for any of the deaths he witnessed or caused, even if he had wanted to. He watched the men die and thought only of himself: a prisoner forced to kill, maim, destroy.
A tank shell exploded on Montgomery, and in the shock he was feebly aware of his body launching into the air and bashing against a tree. With a computerized daze—binary code spinning through his mind—he lifted up his head from where he lay prone on his stomach and watched three of his allied robots approach one of the Slav-Asian tanks. Two on one side and one on the other, they proceeded to push it on its side with only a bit of difficulty. Iron fists pounded on its hull. One bot bent the long barrel of its gun. The tank was out of commission long before they were done with it.
Montgomery got to his feet quickly, fearful of being chided, but stumbled. His body was damaged, spouting oil and dented in a thousand places. He cursed in his mind, acknowledging that this was probably it for this body.
Another day in the war, another death. But he wasn’t gone yet.
He charged over to another tank, dodging bullets and bombs, his mechanical feet thudding into the dirt, until he rammed into its side with his shoulder, denting it and lifting it off the ground. It tilted upward, and with another shove it was upside-down. Montgomery grabbed his gun and sprayed bullets all over it until he saw blood pooling out from the cockpit.
Death. Death. Death…
A blade sunk into his chest from behind. A Slav-Asian soldier had stabbed him with something that sent shockwaves rippling through his robotic body. The pain was dull but immense. Montgomery fell to his knees, needles piercing every inch of him. Unable to speak, he screamed in his mind and doubled over. He heard a blast from just behind him. Bullets chewed through his neck.
He set his hands on the back of his neck in an attempt to block the barrage. His hand trembled as it ate the lead, and two of his fingers were blown off. By then he regained enough focus to raise up his machine gun in his other hand, turn around, and point the barrel at the soldier. With the pull of a trigger the man was dead, his stomach blown open.
No…he wasn’t dead. Just lying there in the dirt writhing and howling. Another shot did the deed, but it was too late for Montgomery. He’d seen the guts and gore fall out of that man’s body.
Montgomery couldn’t scream in the mouthless body. He couldn’t vomit. But how badly he needed to.
He was so busted up now that he couldn’t turn his head; half of his neck was a mass of frayed cords and hot, broken metal oozing oil.
The rest of the robots of Squadron Nine—about a dozen of them still alive now, the others reduced to smoking, shattered corpses in dirt—were turning the tide to victory. The rest of the tanks were overturned and the human soldiers shot or punched to bloody pulps.
The sergeant left his stone wall of safety and ran up to them, shouting something. But Montgomery’s hearing system must have been damaged, because he only heard a few words. It was something about pushing forward and reaching a supply drop. The sergeant gestured with a chopping motion, sending the squadron onward. Then he noticed Montgomery. He reached up to his helmet and pressed a button.
“Hailstorm, this is Carmak. Do you see this robot?”
Montgomery heard only faint static.
“Sounds good. Get me that supply drop, stat!”
The sergeant turned and ran off with the others.
Montgomery’s robotic body began shutting down. It was being killed remotely, he realized. Too damaged.
A brief moment passed, during which he savored the silence, the calmness, and the emptiness of the times between battles.
And only a few moments later, he woke up in another metal body watching Squadron Nine slowly approach him at the supply drop location. He was dead, and alive again.
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