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their passage through the water.
    Four awls were raised. Four awls were brought down on Nicolas’s body. Nicolas flinched as the blades struck home; he felt the pain as they cut into the circuitry beneath, felt . . .
    He felt nothing. The blades had bounced clear. The Raman looked puzzled. They struck once more. Again Nicolas flinched and again the blades were deflected, leaving not even a scratch on his body.
    Heated by the explosion of the petrol bomb and then explosively cooled by water, Nicolas’s body had been at the sweet point. He had hardened like the blade of a katana.
    Now he was indestructible.
    Again and again the Raman struck. Eventually they tired, their electromuscles drained of energy. The five robots stared at each other.
    ‘Why can’t we kill you?’ one of them asked Nicolas.
    Nicolas raised one weak arm and reached out for an awl and took it from the unresisting hand of the Raman woman who had asked the question. He reversed the awl, weighed it in his hand. Then he reached forward and drove it up into the skull of the woman opposite him. She gave off an electronic scream that made the other soldiers back away.
    Nicolas stabbed again. There was a nick at the end of the awl, a barb. This time, when he withdrew the point, twisted wire trailed from it. The woman screamed louder.
    Nicolas stabbed again and again. He pulled at the twisted wire and unwound the woman’s mind. She died.
    The other Raman soldiers had frozen in silent, helpless contemplation of this horror. They watched as the body of their companion slumped lifelessly to the wet ground: they watched as Nicolas, his arm tangled in the twisted wire of her mind, began to cut himself free of their dead companion. Then, finally, as Nicolas stepped weakly towards them, they turned and ran, fleeing up the long passageways to the surface.
    Nicolas stripped the body of the woman. He pulled out her overlong electromuscles and cut them shorter to fit into his own limbs. Awkwardly, one-handedly, he took apart her hands and replaced the muscles in his own with hers. He studied the circuitry of her ears and found it inferior to his own burned-out sense, but at least her ears still worked. He took them and he could hear again. Raman State occupied the mountains and the coast. They built their eyes to see long distances. Nicolas was impressed by their design, and he incorporated it into his own body.
    It took him several hours, but finally Nicolas rose again. The Raman had destroyed his entire squad. Now he would have his revenge.
    Nicolas rose from the depths, clad in his dull grey shell and carrying a Raman awl. One by one he caught up with the fleeing soldiers and stabbed the awl up into their chin before winding out the twisted wire of their minds, their hands scrabbling all the while at his indestructible body.
    It took him days, weeks, wandering in the dark, water-formed passageways, but there at last came a time when he rose from the ground among the moonlit peaks of the Raman mountains.
    Behind him, sealed in the earth, were the bodies of his troop.
    Behind him, dead in the darkness, were the disassembled minds of his enemies.
    Now Nicolas had returned to life, to Artemis, to his destiny.
    Nicolas was a new man. A robot in an indestructible body. A robot destined for great things. All would fear him. All would envy him.
    And there, in the night, in the starlit, moonlit peaks of the Raman mountains, Nicolas came upon a still pool of water and looked into it and beheld himself. And his fate descended upon him, and Nicolas saw himself for what he was.
    A coward.
    For now all robots would desire his body. All would try to take it from him. He would never be able to rest, never be able to drop his guard for fear that someone would strip his mind from its indestructible shell, just as he had taken the parts from the Raman woman, deep beneath the ground.
    Nicolas did not want his wonderful body. He did not feel strong enough to be the one to own it.
    And so he