Liberty Prime sat on a boulder and waited. He had taken a fondness to the boulder. Very few objects were sturdy enough to support his weight, high enough for him not to knock his head on or heavy enough to resist being picked up and thrown at Baby-Eating Communists by him. It had been three days now since they had holed up near Rockland Car Tunnel, trying their best to be reasonably inconspicuous, or at least succeed in killing everything that discovered them. Dawn was about to break when Doanette appeared again, this time in heavily customised full Outcast power armour, carrying a tri-beam laser in one hand and something completely unidentifiable but roughly gun-shaped in the other. Her helmet was off as usual and she was chewing on something that sort of looked like a luminous blue squid.
"Ding!" she declared, raising her arms theatrically.
"Doanette, what the hell have you been doing this time?" demanded Sarah Lyons.
"Well, you see, there was this alien space-ship... oh, you mean the Outcast armour? Well, there was this talking tree..."
"Ah, so you've arrived!" said Paladin Tristan, rubbing his hands together, "Good, good, we can finally begin the assault. Only three days late, by the way, that's a personal record. Well done!"
"Uh? Is that the time? I lose track. I was busy." she shrugged, "C'mon, what are we waiting for?"
------
A Vertibird wheeled past Liberty Prime's peripheral vision. He lazily grabbed it out of the air, swung his arm around and threw it at another Vertibird, causing them both to explode, creating a fireball that another Vertibird flew straight into, setting itself on fire and plummeting towards the ground in a plume of smoke, hitting an Enclave officer and killing him instantly. Prime hadn't been in such a large scale battle since he was reactivated. It was like Anchorage all over again. He was in his element. This was where he belonged – in the front line, raining destruction upon his enemies with extreme prejudice, a relentless one-robot harbinger of Armageddon for all Communists, a god of war and justice in his court. Finally, he had enough room to manoeuvre and almost everything he shot at was something he was supposed to be shooting at.
"THE LAST DOMINO FALLS HERE!" he proclaimed, "ANCHORAGE WILL BE LIBERATED."
"I don't want to set the world on fiiiire, I just want to staaart a flame in your heaaaaart." sang Doanette as she ran alongside him, firing the alien blaster with remarkable precision, reducing three more Baby-Eating Communists to piles of ashes. Liberty Prime did not understand about the human psyche. He had been taught that the way to raise morale was to offer everyone he met some Psycho, yell things like 'COMMUNISM IS A TEMPORARY SETBACK ON THE ROAD TO FREEDOM' during battle and shoot anyone he saw running in the wrong direction, not to hum songs by the Ink Spots and occasionally yell 'DING!'. Then again, Scribe Rothschild had once told him that Doanette was not a good example of a psychologically normal human being.
Suddenly, he stopped. In the distance, he saw that there was a wall blocking his progress. He stomped up to it and gave it a few experimental thumps. It held solid. Lobbing a brace of Mini Nukes behind him to distract the enemy for a while, he analysed the wall for a weakness. Eventually he found a point in the wall where the power field was slightly disrupted due to an energy flux. He thumped it until it gave way, at which point the force field went off and he could tear a large enough hole in the wall to get through.
"We're in!" yelled Doanette, "Okay, this time you take the left side, I'll take the..."
She yelped. Liberty Prime stood in front of her quite deliberately, almost treading on her, and stopped. She tried to move around but he blocked her path with a hand. She gave him a look that implied that she was one second away from finding out whether there was some kind of glitch that would take her up to level 31 if she killed him or if it was just a stupid rumour, like the floating dog in Paradise Falls.
"Doanette." he said, "I am going to have to go alone from here. You have this now." he handed her something he had been hiding in his chest cavity. Something that was not Psycho or spare ammo.
"What do I do with this?" she demanded, folding her arms and staring it as if not quite sure whether it was edible or not.
"It is a neural chip. It plugs into your existing cybernetic interface."
"I don't have anything that goes into my brain! Only idiots do that!" she protested.
"It will work off the same channels as the signals from your motor control sectors to your physical implants. I designed it for combat use. No, not now." he said, "It will take time. It must be implanted exactly right. We are in a combat situation."
"I can SO perform cybernetic surgery in the middle of a..." she began to protest, but Liberty Prime shoved it into her hand, accidentally knocked her over, turned around and bellowed:
"WARNING: RED CHINESE ORBITAL STRIKE IMMINENT! ALL PERSONNEL SHOULD REACH MINIMUM SAFE DISTANCE - IMMEDIATELY! REPEAT, RED CHINESE ORBITAL STRIKE INBOUND! ALL U.S. ARMY PERSONNEL MUST VACATE THE AREA IMMEDIATELY! PROTECTION PROTOCOLS ENGAGED!"
"What the... did you just say 'orbital strike'?"
Doanette turned around and ran for it.
Liberty Prime strode forward. He looked at the sky. It was very large. Possibly endless. Maybe he would fit in it as easily as the humans fit into the Citadel. He wondered why his logic circuits were forming such complex thoughts today. Maybe it was because his vital systems were about to go offline.
Something fell out of the sky.
"I... DIE... SO THAT... DEMOCRACY... MAY... LIVE!" he declared.
