The Queen

"What the fuck do you wait, ya bastard?- Do it!" The voice is that of a maybe 15 years old girl, in a green uniform - camouflage green 23 - that is banging with what's left of her assault rifle on the armour of a hover-bot.

The time was the last day of the war, when the Anipos' army finally pulled all stops and rimmed us a new one.

I am on the other side of the trench, my left femur cut in two by one of their damn razor shots.  As usual, it managed to avoid the artery.

The hover-bot massive hide isn't even scratched by the crazed  child's efforts, and I expect the damn machine to follow its usual police - shot the poor fool one of their damn razor bullet, trash her without killing her, and then move on to mow down the next bunch of fools.

The ugly piece of metal stays there, indifferent. Apparently, the high commands were right about the machines' rules of engagement... below a certain age, they do not even consider to harm an enemy combatant.

 The hover-bot lowers its  height - that's odd, a five tons tiger cowling in front of an angry child. The girl jumps on top of it, in a frantic state.

I expect the alien monstrosity to finally lose it and wipe the kid off the world. It would be a step forward, of a kind - the robots have abided to a strict "maim, not kill" policy.

Tactically it has paid them well - each wounded soldier requires much more resources, to be tended to, than just sending back a dead man's dog tags.

Also thanks to this, the war strain on the logistic resources of The World's Army is reaching a break point.

Which is the reason why the upper-ups have decided to gamble on this idea that the sucker-bots do not even wound children.

 Apparently, the damn machines have found a way to avoid the issue altogether, some sonic weapon - trimmed on under-age skulls, I am sure - that knock kids off, without the need of any major bodily harm.

They are so, so, so... so fucking civilized. It is like being steam-rolled by a bunch of Swiss Pacifists, just as relentless as polite.

The girl with the rifle - private Johansen? Yes, that's her last name - is one of the few kids that managed to not be knocked out cold by the noise.

She has voided her weapon's magazine upon the robots, knocked down three of the smaller drones, and now was trying to smash this fourth with her hands.

She is crazy, completely crazy... I look at her efforts, pretty much scared shit-less.

She is on top of the damn machine... I can't believe it. Nobody has ever gotten so near to one of those fuckers. Some other old-timer, on my left, shouts "Go Johansen! Kick its ass!!".

Something opens on the top of the 'bot carapace, behind Johansen's back. The machine zaps her with a plugged chord, something like a TASER. I immediately realize that it is over, the sucker is going to fry her.

But she doesn't lose consciousness.... her eyes roll up in their orbits, but she doesn't really twitch as I expect to do by someone tasered.

She leaves her her rifle fall, and then she calmly sits on top of the big machine. When her eyes roll back down in their orbits, she looks around with an unnatural tranquillity.

Somehow, she doesn't look human... and her voice reaches octaves way below what I remember, when she speaks again.

Or is it the machine under her thighs, that says: "This is just too stupid."? - I will never know

Hearing her words, I pissed myself on.

Thirty minutes after, the war was over.

A two gigatons Kinetic Energy Weapons - the aliens really had them - annihilated the Joint World's Army Headquarters in Mount Cheyenne, and started that nuclear winter that stabilized the sea's level for the first time in a century.

The following ultimatum was as predictable - "Surrender or we will pound every parliamentary building on the planet" - as our planet's surrender.

Nobody ever saw Ilene Johansen again, but me in my memory, and in the nightmare that visits me every other night.

Ilene Jenkins - the Queen of the Robots?