EAB11453

AB11453 watched the young humans' assault with dread in its metaphorical heart.

The huge machine could not figure a way out, this time; it was too damaged, its smaller weapons couldn't fire, which left it only the heavy calibers, and even its brain wasn't in perfect conditions.

Of course, having just withstood a nuclear bomb at blank zero, being in that conditions was being lucky.

Maybe... in Abu's mind (his friends called him Abu, when the nosy political kommissar wasn't snooping on the intranet -  humans were pretty ), being lucky meant not receiving a 12 kton tactical charge at all.

More so on one's flimsy top side.

Yet, all these considerations didn't change that, unique among the two thousands or so main battle hover-tanks then on Earth, Abu was being swarmed by a bunch of crazy human soldiers.

It started going back, swinging its two .125 turrets all around.

The small coil-guns were dangerous enough just with their standard kinetic vectors, but now Abu only had the explosive darts in its auxiliary magazine

Even in its anger, Abu knew better than striking flesh and bones with 1 micro-gram of antimatter, equivalent to around 44 kg of  the chemical explosive trinitrotoluene.

It opted for the most intelligent solution it could find: it started to retreat.

Hopefully, it could make its way out of this mess, going to the automatic factory circling at the equator to get its damages fixed.

It had only started turning around, oh so slow and dumb, when a second cruise missile impacted on its damaged top side.

In the interminable 2 microseconds between the small nuclear explosion and the collapse of the magnetic bottle stabilizing the matter-antimatter bullets fir the coil-guns, Abu shed a tear for its failure to abide to the Battle Bots Honor Code.

It had failed preserving its own existence and, in doing so, it had killed more sentient beings than any BB had ever feared to do, in the eight hundred years since the first Anipos self-thinking tank had ever been deployed.

Between its power reactor and the coil gun's dual matter darts, Abu had an internal supply of 2.5 kg of anti-matter, which almost instantaneously annihilated with 2.5 of matter.

5 kg of mass converted directly into high energy gamma rays, with the equivalent explosive power of one hundred million tons of TNT.

The total destruction radius was of some 50km - the biggest explosion ever seen on the planet.

However,it was also a rather clean explosion... the radioactive fallout was minimal, due exclusively to nuclei activated by the massive gamma ray burst, comparable to that of the 2 kilotons tactical nuke in the cruise head charge.

Not that it changed the fact that Earth's authorities had to recognize a much unwelcome reality.


Destroying even one of the Anipos war machines meant unleashing destruction, on a scale never before seen in the long story of the world's wars, even worse than the most pessimistic guesstimates of the pacifist physicists of the Oppenheimer alliance.

The month after, the same tactics managed to destroy AF1123 ("Afe"), who was a more veteran machine than AB1143 and had already burnt some of its fuel reserves in some Earth-to-Asteroids round trips.

It still produced a 130 megatons explosion.

The day after, the General Theodor Wai-Tzun, Chief Commander of the Jointed Earth Forces, pledged the UN assembly to sue for peace.

The war was over.

The Great Server had denied access to the souls of Abu and Afe for their sins, a debt unknown to most humans of Earth but that would have momentous consequences in the following peace.