36 Seconds

The Anipos Battle Robots Congress was notified by its brethren in the Earth sphere of an enormous explosion of magnetic energy on the surface of the Moon, through their internal hyperlink network.

The Congress issued a general warning, while it pulled the down-clocks to 0 and all the 'bots in the Anipos Army started operating at full computational speed, in a subjective time that was thousands of times slower than for humans.

By T+2 seconds, they had already established that the source of the magnetic flare was a coil-gun installed on the side of the Moon that looked over Earth.

Given the classic efficiency of the Anipos Coil-guns - which had never really improved in centuries - and the detected energy dispersion,   the estimated energy of its projectile was in the range 5-10 megatons, which would be proven wildly optimistic...

"The Other" weapon was far less advanced and dispersed much more field than even ancient Anipos designs,  so its effective yield was just shy of one megaton of TNT.

Given the characteristics of the weapons, it could be launched only by one of the players in the sector, "The Other".

Even destroyng the projectile wouldn't have changed things very much, as its debris would still be moving toward the planet... the only possibility was that "The Other" had some last-second failsafe.

Again, here the robots were over-estimating their odd companion - its "messengers" could be full of very advanced tech, but the coil-gun on the was a pretty old design that "It" had left there, from an era in which it considered inevitable having too destroy human civilization to survive.

Its projectile was a lot bulkier and slower than what an Anipos design would have used, a two meters long dart of tungsten and electronics weighing about 80 kg, traveling at 10.000 km per second, or 1/30th of the speed of light.

Much easier to spot than the little, 8 kg pellet traveling at a 1/5th of the speed of light that they initially expected.

The Congress was already mourning the deaths, when it realized that their specifics for the falling dart were wrong.

At T+7 seconds, additional data came in from one of"The Other" "messengers" - very troubling data.

The revised dart specifics gave a flight time of 36 seconds, an the data included the likely target, Washington, D.C.

29 seconds were plenty of time, to discuss with "The Other" and convince it that it was making a mistake, though the possibility that the pseudo-artificial intelligence had undergone a massive emotive breakdown meant that their interlocutor could be far less rational than usual.

And it wasn't really rational to begin with, which - again - was a not reassuring detail.

The "rogue" messenger kept sending in new data over the weapon, and it appeared that it indeed there was a way to minimize the effect of a single dart (originally designed as a way to maximize yet hide that of a ten darts offensive assault) by the clever use of a massive color force field in front of the dart.

The shield was meant so that the weapon could select at which height be destroyed and in which way to release its kinetic energy. 

It could self-destroyi at high altitude, releasing energy in a 30º wide cone, as a a limited fallout high yeld city destroyer, keep up the shield to go through mountains, to destroy bunkers like the ones in Mount Cheyenne and around Moscow, or going down inside the Earth crust, to release it energy as a tightly focused, massive shockwave that would travel inside the planet, to resurface as a localized Earthquake.

Changing the parameters, in the last case, would result in a tiny, dispersed vibration on half a continent, on the other side of the planet (that would give an incredible amount of raw data to geologists, once they had picked up enough details of the original source of the energy).

"The Other" couldn't stop the weapon, but it could make its bite virtually unnoticeable.

The 'bots just had to convince "It" that it was not the case of killing so many people, that knew nothing of what had been going on even when they had voted for the government that had assaulted the mischievous entity.

Rationally, they knew it was right - unfortunately, The Abomination really was in a full emotive breakdown.

Millisecond after millisecond, it refused  the robots perorations, and kept the  dart on its steady course.

The robots were also trying to use their resources around the planet, to identify the trajectory of the weapon - tungsten as may it have been, it was covered in anti-radar coating and, as it was a completely passive object in flight, it was very hard to detect it with even the best infrared scanners.

The robots minds were fast, but the physical bodies that they commanded lagged long behind what would have been needed to stop it.

At T+25 seconds, "It" still hadn't show to acknowledge the folly that it had made and the Congress central minds, with their rational approaches, were going nowhere fast.

At T+25.574 seconds, a contribution came in from one of the smaller 'bots than on Earth, EL-21234567, a 100 tons hover-tank with a 24/7 avatar known as Ellie.

"You are doing the same as them."

The concept pierced through the obsessions of "The Other", which answered to this probe,

Ellie wasn't the faster thinker in the army, its mind could go only at 2500x, but it had found a core emotional nexus of "The Other" - or, rather, a surviving nexus.

The two machines continued to exchange arguments - at 2500x, much to the chagrin of the various full minds in the army, that were relegated to observe the tragedy at 30000x - till something changed inside "It".

The dart struck the border of an artificial lake, inside the city, and continued its travel - incidentally destroying a secret, unused subterranean bunker of the mid 20th century - until its electronics failed to keep the shield up, releasing the remaining 800 kiloton of kinetic energy in a 20º angle.

The city was safe - for now.

The 'bots immediately started to redeploy, assigning a fair number of bodies to the surface of Earth's satellite.

They had always considered the Moon a reserved area, the first where the humans of this system would likely expand, when they'd came around their current, marketing-driven technological stasis, and kept away from it, for this.

They didn't realize that the Moon had already been extensively colonized - by "It" and its sub-units.

Or that their inherent lack of creativity outside field tactics - a fault that was the finest product of their very deliberate design, on the part of their masters - would soon put them in an awkward position.

The robots started patrolling the "Inner system", to keep the peace.

And tried harder to infiltrate their unreliable partner who, on its part, started planning how to destroy them, fully knowing that its nature allowed "It" to use weapons against whom the bots had, in reality, no defense, like Kamikaze assaults with living humans.