Strata

before the robot reversed in, with all the painstaking care of a fornicating porcupine. It stopped humming. Patently, the repairman had gone dormant.
    Kin considered for some time. The tunnels seemed endless. She could wander around in them for days. Then she’d die. But there was an alternative … She went back down the tunnel until she found the soldering robot. Wrenching off one of its arms was difficult, but shemanaged. She used it to hit the thing until it stopped humming. As an encore she tossed the arm at the exposed circuitry, which sparked satisfyingly.
    Then she waited.
    When a small, hemispherical robot-repair robot rolled up a few minutes later she overturned it. It hummed at her reproachfully.
    The next one was a pear-shaped, multi-lensed blob travelling along a rail near the ceiling of the tunnel. Kin tried to bring it down with pieces of robot, but it swung away hastily.
    At least she had made her presence felt.
Someone
must repair the robots that repaired the robot-repairing robots. All it took was time.
    Hours passed before a tank-like machine arrived. It was dented and lacked panelling, and bore the stumps of various delicate manipulatory appendages. If this was the ultimate repairer, Kin supposed, then sheer time could have caused its battered state.
    On the other hand, the fact that Marco was sitting on its hull with a robotic arm trailing wires in each hand could have had something to do with it.
    ‘Perhaps there just aren’t any facilities for dealing with humans who get into the machinery,’ said Kin.
    Marco grunted, but didn’t look up from his work. He was doing something neolithic with alength of robot innards, using the small repair hemisphere as a hammer.
    ‘There must be,’ he said. ‘This world must be studded with hidden air ducts, ventilators, power shafts. Humans poke into everywhere. Anyway, we were brought here, remember? Subsequently to ignore us is impolite.’
    He stood up. ‘Coming?’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Anywhere with delicate circuitry. This’, he waved a robot limb, ‘is insulated. For short-circuiting.’
    ‘And the other thing?’ asked Kin, her heart sinking.
    It was a connected series of arm sections, terminating in a crude but lethal blade. Marco hefted it experimentally.
    ‘Huh? It’s a weapon, obviously.’
    ‘You were maybe expecting to meet some antipersonnel robots?’ Kin said icily.
    Marco had the decency not to meet her gaze.
    ‘I was thinking of Silver,’ he said wretchedly. ‘Well? Do you imagine she’s found anything to eat yet? And have you got any better ideas?’
    He set off along a tributary tunnel, and called back, ‘Anyway, it can’t have escaped your notice that these tunnels are lit. Robots don’t need light.’
    Kin shrugged. Perhaps soldering robots needed light. A little light destruction to attract attention was one thing, however – intelligentaction in the circumstances. But Marco looked ready to smash the whole disc.
    In the distance she saw him hacking at cables. This wasn’t action to attract attention – this was Marco vs The Universe.
    What was happening up on the surface? A plague of flies? A rain of frogs? All the seas running dry? The extinction of the dodo?
    Now she was running. Marco was a terrible figure wreathed in smoke, hacking at a solid cliff of planet-sized circuit. There was a jerkiness about his movements that told Kin all she needed to know. Marco had gone mad. Or at least gone kung.
    She stopped when his blade swept a few inches from her throat.
    ‘They want to play games, eh?’ he croaked. ‘Put us on the spot, watch our reactions, eh?
I’ll
show them.’
    One free hand swept his club into a circuit board, which exploded.
    ‘I’ll show
them
.’
    Kin swayed back, her eyes on the tip of the blade. Then a movement to the right of Marco’s private smoke cloud made her look away. Marco saw her expression, and hesitated for a fraction of a second too long.
    Silver leapt. Marco disappeared as the huge paddle-like arms swept round in a bone-grinding hug, then appeared again with three arms flailing at the shand’s head. Silver screamed, and one footcame up with claws out to disembowel the enemy. Marco’s bowels had already gone with the rest of him for Silver’s eyes. While the shand staggered across the floor clawing at the demon atop her, Kin saw Marco’s fourth arm swing up with his pike.
    It twirled gracefully, the blade drifting through the hot air like the scythe of death. Then it buried