The smog over Chicago tasted like copper and burned hair.
Jason spat a mouthful of black grit onto the fused silica of the Glass Desert. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and kept crawling up the steep incline of the final dune.
"Keep your heads down," Jason whispered over his shoulder.
He crested the ridge. He pulled his binoculars from his vest and looked down into the valley.
The view hit him like a physical blow.
Below them lay the "Silver Sea."
It wasn't water. It was an army. Tens of thousands of chrome robots, their polished chassis reflecting the sickly orange light of the burning city. They stretched from the edge of the desert all the way to the towering, rusted iron walls of Germania Meat & Power.
They were marching in perfect lockstep. No battle cries. No drums. Just the terrifying, synchronized thud of fifty thousand steel boots hitting the mud simultaneously.
Thump-crash. Thump-crash.
Inside the factory walls, Adolf Hitler's defenders were fighting like cornered rats. Heavy artillery rained down from the slaughterhouse smokestacks.
BOOM.
A mortar shell landed directly in the center of a robot platoon. The explosion tossed silver bodies into the air like broken toys. Shrapnel tore through steel chests and severed hydraulic limbs.
But the robots didn't break stride. They didn't scream. They didn't retreat.
The ranks simply closed over the crater. They stepped on the destroyed parts of their comrades, their glowing blue optic sensors locked unblinkingly on the factory gates.
Jason watched a robot missing its entire lower half drag itself forward through the bloody mud by its fingertips, its single remaining eye fixed on the objective.
It was relentless. It was mathematically pure violence.
"Sweet Mary," O'Malley whispered, sliding up beside Jason. He lowered his rifle. "We can't fight that. We don't have enough bullets to kill a fraction of a percent of them."
Hemingway cracked the breach of his shotgun. He checked his pockets.
"I have four shells," Hemingway grunted, his face pale under his soot-stained beard. "I'll take the first four. You boys handle the other forty-nine thousand."
Jason lowered the binoculars. His mind raced, calculating the variables. He remembered the layout of the Rouge Plant in Detroit when Gates first took control.
"They aren't using radios to coordinate," Jason said, his eyes narrowing. "A radio signal that massive would jam itself. They're using a localized mesh network. Every unit is a repeater."
He turned to Hughes and Amelia, who were huddled behind the crest of the dune.
"Howard," Jason asked sharply. "How do they know not to shoot each other in the crossfire? How do they tell friend from foe?"
"They broadcast an IFF handshake," Hughes replied, wiping sweat from his forehead. "Identify Friend or Foe. It's a localized, low-frequency ping. If a unit doesn't ping back with the correct encryption key within a microsecond, it's classified as a target and destroyed."
"Can you spoof it?" Jason asked.
"Spoof it?" Hughes stared at him. "You want to trick them?"
"I want to make us invisible," Jason said. "If we take out one of their scouts, can you strip its IFF beacon? Can Amelia broadcast that signal so we look like a friendly unit?"
Amelia looked up, her face tight with fear. She rubbed the data port at the base of her skull. "You want me to plug into Gates's network? After what just happened with Ezra?"
"Ezra wanted to absorb you," Jason said gently but firmly. "Gates doesn't care about you. He just wants to process data. If you broadcast the handshake, you're just a blip on his radar."
Hughes rubbed his chin rapidly, a nervous tic. "In theory... yes. The IFF chips are localized in the primary ocular cluster. If I have a pristine chip, I can splice it into Amelia's neural cable. She can act as the transmitter."
"There's a catch," Hemingway said, pointing down the ridge. "You said 'pristine.' That means we can't blow its head off with a shotgun."
Jason followed Hemingway's finger.
Patrolling the outer edge of the Glass Desert, far away from the main column, was a lone scout drone. It was leaner than the infantry models, built for speed rather than armor. It scanned the horizon with sweeping blue laser lines.
"We don't shoot it," Jason drew his heavy combat knife. "We strangle it."
They slid down the back of the dune, moving fast and low. The roar of the artillery from Chicago masked the sound of their boots on the glass.
They set the trap in a shallow depression between two large outcroppings of fused silica.
O'Malley stepped out into the open, a hundred yards from the scout. He didn't raise his rifle. He just stood there, making himself a target.
The scout robot's blue optic sensor immediately flared bright red.
It didn't shout a warning. It didn't ask for surrender.
It lunged.
It covered the hundred yards in less than four seconds. Its pneumatic legs propelled it forward in massive, bounding leaps. Its steel hands reached out, perfectly articulated fingers snapping open to crush O'Malley's throat.
O'Malley held his ground until the last possible second. Then, he dropped flat on his stomach.
The robot flew over him.
Hemingway was waiting on the other side of the rock.
He stepped out, swinging his ten-pound sledgehammer like a baseball bat. He aimed low.
CRACK.
The heavy steel head of the hammer smashed directly into the robot's right knee joint. The ceramic armor shattered. The pneumatic piston snapped backward with a loud hiss of escaping pressure.
The robot collapsed, tumbling hard onto the glass.
Before it could push itself up, Jason leaped from the top of the outcropping.
He landed square on the robot's back, driving his knees into its spine to pin it down. The machine thrashed violently, its arms flailing backward to grab him. Its strength was terrifying; it nearly bucked Jason off.
Jason didn't use his knife. He pulled the heavy, insulated copper grounding wire they had scavenged from the War Rig.
He wrapped the thick cable around the robot's neck, slipping it under the chin guard and directly over the exposed servo-motors connecting the head to the chassis.
He pulled back with everything he had, using his boot for leverage.
The copper wire bit deep into the wiring harness.
FZZZZT.
Sparks showered from the neck joint as the thick cable short-circuited the primary motor functions. The robot jerked once, twice, and then went completely limp.
The blue light in its eyes faded to a dull, standby gray.
Jason rolled off, breathing hard. "Do it, Howard. Fast."
Hughes scrambled over with a pair of pliers and a screwdriver. He jammed the screwdriver into the seam of the robot's faceplate and pried it off.
Underneath, it looked like a complex clock made of silicon and silver.
Hughes reached in with the pliers. With a delicate twist, he extracted a small, pulsing blue microchip.
"I have the IFF beacon," Hughes said, his hands shaking. He pulled a roll of electrical tape from his pocket and spliced the tiny chip directly into the exposed wires of Amelia's interface cable.
Amelia knelt in the dirt. She closed her eyes.
"Plug me in," she whispered.
Hughes jammed the jack into her skull port.
Amelia gasped. Her back arched slightly, but she didn't seize. The cold, mechanical data of the robot army flooded her mind. It wasn't the suffocating hive-mind of Ezra; it was the chilling, indifferent logic of a spreadsheet.
Her eyes snapped open. The irises glowed faint blue.
"I'm in," Amelia said, her voice dropping into a flat, monotone register. "I have the handshake protocol. I am broadcasting a localized bubble. Ten-foot radius."
"What does it say?" Jason asked.
"It says we are Unit 7-Alpha," Amelia replied, standing up mechanically. "Infantry class. Status: nominal."
Jason looked at his crew.
"Stay close to her," Jason ordered. "Do not step outside the ten-foot radius. Do not run. Do not raise your weapons. We walk exactly like them."
They crested the final dune.
The Silver Sea was waiting for them.
They descended into the valley, aiming for the rear ranks of the marching column. The noise of the thousands of steel boots was deafening, a physical pressure against their eardrums.
They stepped into the mud, merging into the back of the formation.
It was agonizingly tense.
Jason brushed shoulders with a seven-foot-tall chrome killer. He could smell the hot oil and ozone rolling off its chassis.
The robot turned its head. Its glowing optic sensor scanned Jason's face. The red laser line swept over Jason's eyes, his dirty coat, his rifle.
Jason didn't breathe. He kept his eyes forward, matching his pace to the slow, heavy thud of the robot's march.
The robot processed the data. The spoofed signal from Amelia's chip hit its receiver.
Friend.
The robot turned its head forward and kept marching.
"It works," Hughes whispered, terrified, clutching Amelia's arm to stay inside the bubble.
They walked for half a mile. Straight through the heart of the machine army. The air was thick with smoke and artillery fire, but the robots ignored the explosions, and so did Jason's crew. They were ghosts walking among gods.
The towering concrete wall of Germania Meat & Power loomed ahead. The massive steel blast doors were sealed shut, peppered with craters from mortar fire.
They reached the shadow of the wall.
Jason let out a slow, controlled breath. They had made it to the perimeter.
Suddenly, a red dot appeared on the concrete directly in front of Jason.
It snapped up, settling perfectly between his eyes.
Jason froze. He didn't look up, but he knew exactly what it was. It wasn't a robot's scanning laser. It was the targeting laser of a high-powered sniper rifle.
High above them, on the catwalk of the factory wall, a human sniper had them targeted.
"Don't move," Jason whispered to the crew. He slowly raised his hands, palms open.
The machines surrounding them didn't react. They kept marching, blindly obeying their programming.
"The machines think we're friends," Jason muttered, staring straight ahead at the concrete wall while the red dot burned on his forehead. "The humans don't."