The Spartan automaton pulled the spear back with economical grace, turned its head, and the red eyes blazed at Jess from a distance of only an arm’s length away. This was no sphinx, no lion; it was in the form of a man, muscled and lean. Upright.

It slammed its left forearm toward him, and Jess ducked. He didn’t quite move fast enough, and the blow that grazed the top of his head made the world go soft and strange. Not pain, exactly, but he knew it was there somewhere, floating like a cloud that hadn’t quite rained yet.

“Jess!” Morgan’s scream pierced the fog like the Lighthouse’s focused beam, and he scrambled out of the way as the Spartan thrust down again. The spear tore through the leg of his uniform trousers and grazed his flesh; he felt skin part, but again, no pain. The spear’s tip was too sharp to hurt, like a Medica’s scalpel. He was seconds from dying and he knew it. All he could do was scramble and try to estimate where an engineer, a good engineer like Thomas, would have placed the safety switch for this particular design. He didn’t know. It looked like a man, taller and broader and faster than a man. The face under the Spartan helmet was unmoving, as uncaring as any beast. It won’t bite, at least, he thought. The mouth was half-hidden under the helmet . . .

The helmet? No, too high up. He’d never reach it. If he tried any approach from the front, he’d be killed before he could even try a switch, if one even existed in a spot he could find.

He was going to die. Maybe he’d known that from the first moment he’d seen the Spartan automaton on the High Garda grounds. He remembered feeling a shiver of premonition about it.

His brain was racing like a river in full flood, uncontrollable in its search for some way to survive. It directed his body without conscious thought, rolling, diving, scrambling on all fours like a crab, and when the Spartan lifted one sandaled foot to crush him, he remembered something.

Something from a favorite book he’d read a dozen times as a child. Talos, the bronze titan who fought Jason and his men aboard the Argo. A metal man who could not be hurt, could not be defeated.

Talos had been stopped by the removal of a plug at his heel, which had drained away the vital fluid that moved him. So the story went.

The engineers who’d designed the Spartan had read the same stories, dreamed the same dreams.

Jess hit the ground behind the Spartan and reached out blindly for the backs of the statue’s legs with both hands, sliding fingers down the unnaturally warm bronze. It twisted around, shifting position to spear him like a fish. He saw the head tilting down toward him. The spear lifting.

His hand found a slight depression in the metal of the automaton’s heel on the left side, and he pressed in with his thumb and rolled aside, gasping for breath, hoping he’d not just killed himself.