Love, Death and Robots. Volumes 2 & 3

“Fuck you,” Nielsen snarled, squeezing the trigger on his M320. The 40mm grenade thundered against its snout with a shriek of tortured metal. Macy primed and threw two hand grenades in quick succession, both of them erupting beneath the monster’s heaving gut.

The MAARS-bot continued its unrelenting stream of tungsten and lead. Subjected to such withering firepower, the barghest’s outer skin was blasted to pieces until it was nothing more than a huffing, wheezing skeleton. It rounded on the robot, flipping it onto its side and viciously pounding it with heavy strikes of its massive paws.

“MAARS-bot, no!” Macy yelled. “Save yourself, robot friend!” The robot chirped weakly in response, before exploding in a shower of sharp metal pieces.

The barghest rounded on Macy. The infantryman hastily backstepped, firing controlled pairs into its mouth as it advanced on him. He tripped over a fallen computer screen and went down. The barghest howled, rearing up on its hind legs to deliver a crushing strike.

Nielsen’s one remaining 83mm round caught it right in the ribs. The projectile detonated with the thunder of a mortar round, blasting the cyborg monster apart from the inside out. The top half of its body blasted toward the ceiling, its torso spewing rancid blood everywhere. Its upper half crashed onto the floor a moment later, its eyes rolling across the ground to stare accusingly at its killer.

The sergeant limped over to Macy and helped him to his feet. Macy looked at the bisected corpse, then glared at Nielsen.

“This is bullshit.”

SWARM Bruce Sterling

“I will miss your conversation during the rest of the voyage,” the alien said.

Captain-Doctor Simon Afriel folded his jeweled hands over his gold-embroidered waistcoat. “I regret it also, ensign,” he said in the alien’s own hissing language. “Our talks together have been very useful to me. I would have paid to learn so much, but you gave it freely.”

“But that was only information,” the alien said. He shrouded his bead-bright eyes behind thick nictitating membranes. “We Investors deal in energy, and precious metals. To prize and pursue mere knowledge is an immature racial trait.” The alien lifted the long, ribbed frill behind his pinhole-sized ears.

“No doubt you are right,” Afriel said, despising him. “We humans are as children to other races, however; so a certain immaturity seems natural to us.” Afriel pulled off his sunglasses to rub the bridge of his nose. The starship cabin was drenched in searing blue light, heavily ultraviolet. It was the light the Investors preferred, and they were not about to change it for one human passenger.

“You have not done badly,” the alien said magnanimously. “You are the kind of race we like to do business with: young, eager, plastic, ready for a wide variety of goods and experiences. We would have contacted you much earlier, but your technology was still too feeble to afford us a profit.”

“Things are different now,” Afriel said. “We’ll make you rich.”

“Indeed,” the Investor said. The frill behind his scaly head flickered rapidly, a sign of amusement. “Within two hundred years you will be wealthy enough to buy from us the secret of our starflight. Or perhaps your Mechanist faction will discover the secret through research.”

Afriel was annoyed. As a member of the Reshaped faction, he did not appreciate the reference to the rival Mechanists. “Don’t put too much stock in mere technical expertise,” he said. “Consider the aptitude for languages we Shapers have. It makes our faction a much better trading partner. To a Mechanist, all Investors look alike.”

The alien hesitated. Afriel smiled. He had appealed to the alien’s personal ambition with his last statement, and the hint had been taken. That was where the Mechanists always erred. They tried to treat all Investors consistently, using the same programmed routines each time. They lacked imagination.

Something would have to be done about the Mechanists, Afriel thought. Something more permanent than the small but deadly confrontations between isolated ships in the Asteroid Belt and the ice-rich Rings of Saturn. Both factions maneuvered constantly, looking for a decisive stroke, bribing away each other’s best talent, practicing ambush, assassination, and industrial espionage.