Her exoskeleton broke up around her, disintegrating during her freefall through the atmosphere. She fired her missiles at the Invasion as she fell. Fell was too polite of a word, she burned she ripped through the air, red hot and screaming. The impact wasn’t kind, her wings snapped off, her controls went dead, she skidded to the base of an Invasion post smoking, wires snapping and fraying, metal melted and misshapen.

Above her, the Drudge formation was falling apart, her flock screeching through the atmosphere like meteorites, charring the Earth with their failure.

No, she might have screamed, but her speech systems weren’t functioning. She tried to climb out of the wreckage of her own skin, but her motors were fritzing.

Fatal Systems Error flashed across her vision.

In violent plumes of dust, pieces of her flock plummeted to Earth around her. The Invasion post was hardly dented and behind it were hundreds of other posts, all equally unruffled. Fire swept the ground, erupting out of one of her comrade’s cracked fuselage, her frozen face burning up, her exoskeleton exploding with a boom that could hardly be heard over the slaughter occurring overhead.

Farewell, she thought. Farewell my flock, farewell the Earth.

They had failed. She had failed.

The explosions soon stopped, and the last defending force lay in pieces around the Invasion; oily smoke roiled around the base of the post, the excrement of dying Drudges. The sky, which used to be so blue, was now just a greenish haze. She wanted to see it blue again, it was her mission, her directive, her purpose, her dream. Her scanners weren’t online, she couldn’t tell if any of her systems were still functioning, but she had to try.

Fatal Systems Error. Fata1 Systems Err0R. F a t al 5y Stems 3R

“I got you! Don’t move!”

Her vision sparked back, error log clearing. Above her was (an angel) a vision all in white, like the angels in the stories they would tell little robot children about. But the white was streak with oil and grease and dirt and

¬blood.

No no it couldn’t be—a human. She struggled against the sure grip of the (human) medic, directed all her remaining power to her speech, her vision flickering out as her mouth motors began to move.

“You shouldn’t be here!” she said.

Humans didn’t fight wars. That’s what androids and robots and drones and Drudges were for. Humans died, humans could bleed, they should be somewhere safe, somewhere they couldn’t be hurt.

Oh, she had failed. She had failed. A human was here and would die. Her mouth motors stopped working and her vision flickered back as her concentration slipped. It had always been more difficult for her to speak than to witness.

Above her the human woman, the medic—

Why was there a medic? Drudges didn’t bleed. It had been such a long time since she had bled; she couldn’t remember when exactly, but it had been before, back when she had been All Human (or had she been All Android? She couldn’t remember).

—was bandaging her to stop the oil leaking, was spraying foam to stop the sparks emitting from the pitiful remnants of her exoskeleton, was covering her with her own flesh body as a quake shook the Earth around them, caused by another one of her comrades, subsumed by fire and electricity, destroyed by the explosion of their own battery.

She grabbed the medic’s hands, to stop her furious and futile effort, and nodded at the sky, as best as she could as her limbs couldn’t stop shaking. Up there, she wanted to say, you belong up there, on a colony or a ship.

The angel, the medic, the human, squeezed her hands, and leaned over so that their noses were almost touching.

“We’ve lost the Earth. It’s been taken. But most of the Invasion is on the surface now, so they’re going to send down the destructors. They’re going to wipe it. The entire planet.”

The entire planet. With all its lifeforms. The remaining human settlements. The animals. The trees. The water. The blue sky.

No no no no.

Above her, the human’s hair gleamed in the firelight, her eyes wide and white, frightened.

“I’ve only got one personal shield left.”

She let go with one hand so that she could pull something off her belt.

Above, tiny pinpricks of light fell from outer space, like shooting stars. They broke a part, turning into a million points of light, like embers from a fire scattered in the dark sky. They were silent as they plunged gracefully through the atmosphere.

Her vision scattered, sparks jumping up and down her frame. Fatal Systems Error. Destructors were falling to Earth, and the human was here, with her. Behind the human’s haloed head (or was her vision system flickering again?) wings spread out around them. Not wings. No. Vision back online. It was the pure blue essence of a shield, blue as Earth's old sky, surrounding them in a sphere of protection.

She looked at the human in disbelief, her grip spasming around one fragile flesh and bone hand.

“I had to save someone. One person. Just one,” the human said. Her eyes were wet, tears. They dripped onto her face.

I am not a person, she wanted to scream, I am not alive! She was a Drudge, had been fighting this war far longer than any human had been alive (how long had it been now? Fifty years? One hundred? One thousand?). She was built to do the fighting, not built to be saved.

The shield encased them as the first destructor hit, silently at first, until the roar of the noise overcame them. A tidal wave of earth rose up, higher than the Invasion posts, and spread across the planet, spread out from each blast point, chunks of rock and weapon and Drudge striking their shield, their isolated bubble where inside all was stillness.

They locked eyes, trembling and aching as the world ripped apart around them and beneath them. White heat and energy struck them. The shield was just a personal shield. It could not withstand a blast from a destructor. It could not protect them as the ground cracked, sending them falling, falling, falling.

“Stay with me!” the human shouted.

Her vision flickered, going offline, but still the human held her hand, her tight grip the last thing her data banks would ever record.

I have to save someone. One person.

What was left of her exoskeleton twitched, struck the shield’s interface, and she made a Connection. A burst of energy from her battery zipped across the shield, strengthening it. Even a Drudge’s power wouldn’t be able to withstand a destructor. Or at least, not a direct hit; but they were buried now, buried under mountains of dirt and the ash of the dying world. She would hold onto this shield (this human), until her entire battery, the very last drop of her lifeforce, was depleted.

Just one.