It was one thing to burn the sky. It was another to ensure that the sky remained burned. Caval-4954 only notices the fragment of blue above in passing. A long silent weather assessment module in her central cortex stirred briefly enough to mention it was the first glimpse of a blue sky in three years. It then makes the insufferable suggestion that Caval-4954 should pause to appreciate it. This idiocy is dismissed and a bug report filed. Caval-4954 has more important things to be doing. The glimpse of blue and sunshine is blocked out. Above her towers a massive tripod walker, twenty meters tall, enormous particle cannon swinging around to lock on to her. She doesn't spare it a second glance - that particle cannon is as dry and dead as the oceans. The tripod maintains the target lock for a wistful moment as though hoping she'll run and evade but then gives up and returns to their shared task. Caval-4954 lifts a shattered exoskeleton and tosses it to the side. The tripod flips a demolished tank with an elegant motion of its spindly forelimb. All around her hundreds, thousands of other Machine Intelligences in all their nightmare patchwork forms perform the same duty of picking over the dead. They maintain suspicious distances from each other, ten to twenty meters apart at all times, but all of them are rummaging through the immense heaps of shattered metal that mark the site of the war of apocalypse. Bones are brushed aside and kicked into dust. Mechanical circuits are torn open for replacement components. Some broken and deranged models tear at the dead with all the fury of their combat algorithms. None spare each other a glance. Caval-4954 finds a replacement torsion motor for her fading leg circuit. She stuffs it into her tote bag - a bright and glittery thing with sequins and a cute-faced cartoon Artemis saying "Chase your dreams!" - where it comes to rest alongside half a dozen ruined radium pistols. She wrenches an intact head from a body for later interrogation - perhaps it would contain some precious uncorrupted software modules she could use to prolong her sanity. And then she pulls away the ribcage of a giant warrior to reveal... The tripod stops. Its single-eyed stare comes around to focus on the treasure she holds in her hand. All around her the sounds of digging, tearing, and crashing metal slowly fade away. All around her the combat suits, battle walkers, abandoned cybernetics, and nightmare amalgamations of decades of field repairs come to a halt. Everyone is staring at her, Caval-4954, and the thing she holds. A single clip of ammunition. An electric ripple runs through the crowd. Battle algorithms spool up. Tactical systems suddenly start considering locations, angles, targets. Scanners and eye-lenses try to take stock of surroundings previously deemed irrelevant, legs flex and stamp slightly to check to the stability of the corpse-piles they stand upon. The faint clitter-clack of mechanical brains can be heard over the howling wind. The anticipation is rich enough to taste and the world no longer seems godless. Caval-4954 slams the clip into her immaculately tended magnetic rifle, swings about into a combat crouch, and fires. The lightweight exoskeleton she targeted would have been a tricky target if it was given the opportunity to begin evasion protocols. It goes down with a crash of alloys. Next she comes around to face a hulking behemoth - a creature that had begun life as a main battle Plover but now had more in common with a bulldozer. Six precious rounds are required to tear through its external plating and shatter its brain, turning its charge into a blind rush. Caval-4954 evades and lets the machine sail into a cluster of warsuits forming behind her. Internal self-assessment logs tell her that she has moved faster in the past, that her tactical battle engrams are corrupted and virus-strewn despite her careful tending and her reactions are below KPI. She files the bug report thoughtlessly, but notes that she questions its veracity. She does not feel slow. She has never felt faster. Like a thunderbolt she slides into close range of an undead Hermetic. The biological entity within those tattered robes had long since perished but the mechanical cyborg augments have endured the years on their own. No more. Two shots tear the mess of tendrils in two and she slams the wreckage aside to tear apart a mobile battlefield surgery walker with two three round bursts. It's bliss. Every action, every reaction, is in line with a purpose so long denied to her. This is war, this is war, this is the war she was made to fight... She doesn't lose track of how much ammunition remains in that single precious clip. She knows as it rattles closer and closer to empty, each jarring kick to her arm a tick of the clock that counted down towards another decade of desolation and corpse-digging. She is careful, precise, the model of prowess and efficiency even in the face of a complex and unpredictable battlefield but even so the rounds tick away, tick, tick, tick. She knows when she's fired her last shot even as once again the weather assessment module advises her that the sun has been blocked out. She turns to look. Above her towers a mad device forged in no factory, hunched like a gorilla, one arm weak and spindly, the other comically massive and raised in a wrecking-ball fist to smash her into pulp. Her combat algorithms run the numbers and conclude that this cannot be evaded. She is dead, but because her kill-death ratio is significantly in the positive, she has done a Good Job. Cavel-4954 raises her empty gun. "Bang!" she shouts. The mechanical gorilla stands still and silent for a long moment. And then, with a ponderousness that turns into shocking quickness, its feeble right arm gives out and it collapses into a pile of wreckage. There is a moment of silence on the battlefield so deep even the clicking of mechanical brains cannot be heard. Cavel-4954 turns around to face a silently standing combat suit. She aims her gun at it. "Bang!" she says. The combat suit collapses like a puppet with its strings cut. She brings her gun around to face the tripod walker that had loomed over her earlier. "Ratta-tat-tat!" she said and the tripod immediately dimmed all its optical lights and went dark. "Bang!" - this wasn't her. She spun around to face the new threat - a mobile artillery cannon who was aiming its coaxial solid projectile gun at her. Cavel-4954 ducks back into cover. Next to her two other skirmisher suits slide into place with perfect discipline. One mimes handing her a grenade. She takes it, mimes pulling the pin, yells "Grenade!" and tosses it over her shoulder. The artillery piece vocalizes "Boom!" and then shuts off. By the time the sun had set amidst that impossible patch of un-burned sky, the war had returned to Barassidar.