Leela was the last to arrive at Undercity Hall. Lars got in ahead of her; he flashed her a sleep-rumpled smile as he passed.
Leela struggled to return it. An emergency meeting could only be bad news, and her nerves were stretched taut as it was.
As she entered, the knot of mutants at the center of the room widened to let her through, and she saw for the first time what they were all gathered around.
"Bender," she sighed. "I should have known. What now?"
Bender grinned.
"Well, hello to you too, eyeball. I have a proposition for you and El Freako here, which I think might work out to our mutual benefit. As they say."
"He says it's urgent," Raoul interrupted, wringing his hands in agitation. "But he'll only speak to you."
Leela frowned.
"Bender, if you're yanking my chain, I'm not in the mood."
The robot casually lit up a cigar. The mutants nearest to him immediately began to choke and splutter.
"Relax, wouldja?" he drawled. "Like I said, this is a mutually beneficial type deal. You get something, I get something. In this case: I get twelve extra processors, and you get to protect the good people of Crudsville here!" He spread his arms, triumphant. "What more could you want?"
"I don't understand."
"Of course you don't. With your puny humanoid mental capacity, I'm amazed you understand how to brush your own teeth. But never fear, children. Uncle Bender is here to explain it all!" He snorted. "I should do a bit."
The mutant standing in front of him (Leg Mutant) hopped aside, and for the first time Leela got a good look at her friend. He was unrecognizable from the robot she'd met an hour ago. His frame was shining silver again, and the rust on his chin had disappeared.
"You sobered up fast," she observed. "I mean, de-sobered." And then she noticed something else. "What in the world is that?"
For some unknown reason, Bender had swapped out his compartment for a glass-fronted water tank. Thick cables snaked out of the tank and embedded themselves in the back of his head. He seemed untroubled by it.
"I overclocked myself," he announced. "You're looking at the new and improved Bender Rodriguez! I'm running at triple capacity and I've never been better, baby!"
"You overclocked yourself?" Leela repeated, alarmed. "Isn't that incredibly dangerous? You could overheat and -"
"Fry my internal mechanisms, yada yada yada, I know." Bender waved a dismissive arm. "That's why I'm water-cooled." He rapped on the water tank. "I'm way ahead of you, dummy. In fact, I'm so far ahead of you I can anticipate the future."
"You can what?"
"You heard me. I can see the future! Well," - the robot's smugness faded fractionally - "I can see 59 minutes and 13 seconds into the future, to be exact. But don't worry. Once I have access to the processors of Nixon's twelve kill-bots, I'll be elevated to the loftiest realms of thought! I'll know all the deepest secrets of the universe! And no-one will ever again be able to say Bender isn't the greatest!"
He stabbed a finger in the air for emphasis.
Leela stared. As far as crazy schemes went, overclocking himself was well within Bender's ball park. This was someone who had once changed his gender to win a medal, had joined the robot mafia for a lark, and had feigned insanity to avoid jail time. Crazy was what Bender did.
So she tried to weed out the insults and the aspects that didn't make sense to her, and figure out she should be worried about in what he'd just told her.
"Nixon's twelve kill-bots," she said slowly. "Go back to that. What kill-bots?"
"The kill-bots 'ol Dicky boy is sending down here to break your resistance," Bender explained, taking a drag on his cigar. "The ones that'll be here in" - he paused - "43 minutes and 11 seconds. The ones I'll tell you how to defeat, if you agree to hand over their processors. It's a pretty sweet deal, if I say so myself."
Undercity Hall erupted.
Cries of "Robots?", "Killer robots!", and "They're coming to kill us!" broke out on every side. Even the most hard-bitten of the mutants looked panicked. Leela and Lars shared an uneasy look, and on the other side of the hall some mutant lost his head entirely and wailed "We're doomed! We're doomed! We're all dooooomed!".
"We are not doomed!" Leela yelled over him. "Stop that right now." She took a deep breath. "We're not doomed because Bender is going to tell us how to defeat the kill-bots. Aren't you, Bender?"
"Sure I am. In exchange for my twelve processors."
"In exchange for your twelve processors," Leela grudgingly acquiesced. In truth, she had no intention of allowing Bender to overclock himself any further. But that was a bridge she would cross when she came to it. "So how do we stop the bots?" she asked.
"It's simple," Bender declared. "Kill-bots are powerful, sure, but like all robots, they have one fatal weakness. They're sensitive to electromagnetic fields."
Leela paled.
"We can't build an electromagnetic fence around the sewer," she argued. "We don't have the resources."
Bender tapped her condescendingly on the forehead.
"Duh," he said. "That's why you only build one where you know they'll come through." He pretended to buff his non-existent fingernails. "Or, where I know they'll come through. I can tell you exactly where to build it."
"But you can't actually build it," Leela pointed out. "You're a robot. Electromagnetic fields affect you too. And I don't know if you've noticed, but that's not our area of expertise either. I do basic ship repairs, Lars feeds heads in jars, and the mutants treat raw sewage. Electromagnetic engineering is way beyond -"
"Your puny capabilities," Bender finished for her. He sounded bored, as if they'd had this conversation already. "Of course it is. That's why you get Amy to do it."
"But Amy's not -"
"She's two streets over, doing math on the walls." Bender took another languid pull on his cigar. He jabbed a thumb in the direction of Lars. "Baldy knows. But you better hurry. You only have 38 minutes now." His grin widened. "Tick tock."
Leela waited until they were out in the street to turn her glare on Lars.
"How long has Amy been down here?" she demanded.
Lars rubbed the back of his neck.
"Since you guys had that fight," he said. "I was going to tell you."
"Really."
Lars flinched from the ice in her tone.
"I was," he insisted. "I wanted to. But she made me swear I wouldn't."
"How convenient."
"What was I supposed to do? She made me promise, Leela."
It was amazing, Leela thought, how Fry could still make puppy eyes, even with an extra two decades of frown lines on his face.
"You should have told me," she said. "I can't keep us all safe if I don't know where everyone is. It's hard enough when I do know."
Lars said nothing, just nodded slightly. He seemed to concede the point.
"I promised her though," he said quietly.
This time it was Leela's turn to lapse into silence. Because what she wanted to say wasn't fair, and she had enough self-awareness left to know it. It wasn't fair of her to demand Lars make her the center of his world anymore. It wasn't fair to insist he break every promise made to anyone but her. She wasn't his wife any more. He didn't owe her that.
"At least tell me Amy isn't in trouble," she managed.
Lars frowned.
"It's like Bender said. She just does math all day. I bring her food and stuff, but she's really into it."
"Into what?"
Lars shrugged.
"I don't know. She says she's trying to crack this equation. Prove it wrong or something."
He limped on ahead of her, leading the way to a boarded-up shack. He had thrown away one crutch when his cast came off, but was still relying on the other to even out his steps.
"She's through here."
Leela followed him inside.
The room was dark, dimly lit by the pale green flicker of a computer screen. There was a sackcloth blanket tossed over the sagging couch, and dirty plates were strewn across the floor, which was piled high with stacks of spongy sewer paper. Leela picked a page off the top of the nearest pile. It was covered in Amy's tiny, precise handwriting. Math, like Bender had said.
The walls were covered in equations too. Or maybe it was one long equation that circled the room. Figures and symbols, numbers, letters, parentheses . . . this was math so dense it looked like an alien language. Whole sections were scribbled out or scrawled over, floor to ceiling.
And in the middle of it all, muttering furiously to herself . . .
Amy.
"Hey," Lars said carefully. "Is this a bad time? Because, uh, it's kind of an emergency, and we need your help."
Amy didn't even glance his way. She held up one finger in a silent gesture, telling him to wait, and the muttering intensified. She chanted a bunch of figures under her breath, cross-referenced against her computer screen, then cross-referenced again against the newest numbers on the wall. Then she added two more long lines of math to it, stepped back, and surveyed her work.
She cursed in Cantonese.
"Amy!" Leela caught her arm. "We don't have time for this. I need your help."
Amy blinked. Slowly, like someone coming down from a high, she refocused and stared around her, taking in Leela and Lars.
"Leela? What are you doing here?"
"I need your help."
Amy shook her head.
"I can't stop," she said. "This is important."
"It's math," Leela said impatiently. "What I need you for is life and death."
Amy tugged her arm free.
"So is this," she said distantly. Her gaze jumped around the room, agitated. It alighted briefly on Lars, then took off again, as if Amy couldn't look at him too long. "Do you know what this is? It's the pure math of the universe. It's . . . the rules. If I crack this I can prove the professor's paradox theory is wrong. If I crack this I can save -"
Lars seized her shoulders and spun her round to face him, cutting her off mid-sentence. It was a blunt but effective way of securing her attention - and it saved her from the slap Leela had been about to administer, so it was probably a good thing.
"Nixon is sending robots to kill us all," he said flatly.
Amy's mouth fell open.
In Amy's defense, she pulled herself together fast. By the time they made it back to Undercity Hall she understood the situation and was firing out questions of her own. Where were the kill-bots coming through? How many were coming? Why was Nixon sending them now? And how had Bender known?
Leela answered as best she could. Bender's precognitive abilities were the hardest thing to explain.
"He can see an hour ahead of us," she said. "In time."
She winced. It sounded crazy.
But Amy simply nodded, as if this made perfect sense. Maybe it did, to her. She had been the professor's lab assistant after all. Crazy occurred in that job on a daily basis.
"It's a limited scope," she mused. "I bet he can only see his immediate surroundings too. Otherwise it would be information overload – I mean, way beyond the load his processors can handle right now. His head would explode. We're just lucky he was going to be here in an hour."
"Less than an hour, now. Amy, tell me you can build this thing."
"I can build it. If you can get me what I need."
"Ms Wong?" Raoul approached behind them, anxiously wringing his hands. "I – I can help you with that. The robot told us what you'd need. My people are gutting the hospital and the sewage works as we speak. He says the components we can find there will be close enough, if you can put them together."
Amy nodded.
"I can do it. I could do that in my sleep. Tell me where to go and prepare to be amazed, Mr Mayor!"
She spun on the spot, shaking out jazz hands at the bewildered Raoul. Her smile was bright and forced, and there was a muscle twitching under her left eye. A sure sign of stress, or sleep deprivation. But Leela couldn't afford to dwell on that. Amy was their only hope, and she was willing to help. This wasn't the time to doubt her abilities.
So she let Amy dive into a pile of copper wiring, and turned her own attention to the mutants.
"Raoul!" she called. "Everyone who can't fight needs to be gathered together here in Undercity Hall. Barricade the doors and windows and stockpile supplies. This is our safehouse. I want everyone else at the mouth of the tunnel, armed and in groups. Twelve groups should do it. Twelve groups of four. That's four for each bot. Alright." She raised her voice and turned to address the group at large. "Listen up, everybody! Those suckers are big, and hard to get a hold of. If Amy's electromagnetic field works, the robots will lose control of themselves. They'll be weakened. Not for long - but long enough that we can get the jump on them and remove their processors."
"What's a processor?" a nearby mutant asked worriedly.
"The robot's brain," Leela answered. "It's a green square about as big as my hand." She held up her hand, palm out, as evidence. One of the lessons she'd learned early on in mutant warfare was that every one of her soldiers had a different sized hand. Or no hands at all. It was easiest to use herself as the universal example. "There's a port on the robot's underside – depress it and the processor just pops out."
"That doesn't sound so hard."
"It's not. Taking out the processor is easy, once you know where to look. The hard part is accessing the kill-bot's underside without it shocking or strangling you. If Amy's gizmo works, the bots won't be actively trying to hurt us – but they'll still be lethal. We'll have to immobilize them before we even try and access their processors."
"How?"
"Nets and rope," Leela answered, indicating the piles Bender had already gathered. "Four mutants to each bot, pin it down, and remove the processor." She took a deep breath. "Once the electromagnetic wave does its work, we'll have a limited time frame to do ours. The killbots will overload, shut down, and then reboot. We have to overpower them before that happens. Between the time the wave hits and the time they shut down for recovery."
"How much time is that?"
"Five minutes," Leela admitted. "Ten, if we're lucky. It's a very narrow window."
There was silence as the mutants absorbed this information.
Lars broke it.
"Five minutes though," he mused. "You can do a lot in five minutes. I know I can." He waggled his eyebrows, raising some laughs among the crowd. He turned to them, grinning. "And you heard Leela. We could get ten minutes. We could get lucky!" He winked. "Boy, the things I could do in ten minutes. Am I right, fellas?"
There was a riot of sniggering.
Lars turned back to her.
"Ten minutes. Four on one. I like those odds." He raised his crutch in the air. "Let's crush these kill-bots!"
"Crush 'em!" the crowd echoed.
"Crush 'em!"
"Take 'em out!"
"Catch 'em all!"
"For the sewer!"
"For mutants!"
"For Leela!"
"Mutant pride! Mutant pride!"
"This is our home!"
"For freedom!"
The chant grew and swelled until Leela could no longer determine individual words - just a mess of shouting, raw anger and defiance coalescing into sound. In the crush of it all Lars reached for her, the fingers of his free hand curling around her own.
"Let's do this," he murmured in her ear.
The baby spun somersaults and Leela instinctively touched her stomach, trying to settle it.
"Let's do this," she agreed.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Leela shifted slightly, fighting a growing urge to pee. In this position, hunkered down in the shadows, the baby was practically squatting on her bladder. It didn't help that the only sound for a clear mile was the steady drip drip of water off the pipes.
With the mutant population either barricaded inside Undercity Hall or frozen in position with nets in hand, it was unnaturally quiet. No wind, down here. No rumble of traffic or whine of insects. The sewer was a sealed environment. Silence reigned.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
To her right, Lars grimaced, kneading his calf muscle. To her left, her father chomped vertically on one cheek. Up ahead, Amy - the fourth member of their group - stood poised with her hands on the lever, squinting into the gloom of the tunnel.
Waiting for the signal.
Slap.
Slap.
Slap slap.
Slap slap slap.
The sound came faintly, growing louder as it drew nearer. The smack of bare feet on a wet surface. Fly Mutant skidded into sight, every eye blinking madly. He was waving his arms, his tongue flickering back and forth.
"They're here!"
Amy threw her body against the lever, forcing it down. There was a whine and the machinery she'd wired into the mouth of the tunnel began to vibrate, increasing in intensity until the whole tunnel was humming. Ten feet away, the ground beneath Leela's feet started to shake. She grabbed a hold of Lars to keep him upright.
The whirring of machinery became deafening.
"Amy!" she screamed. "Amy!"
There was a clicking, huge insect pincers in the dark, and she made out glowing red lights, like huge eyes drawing closer. The kill-bots.
"This had better work, Amy!"
The machine let out a turbo rocket whine and Leela clamped her hands over her ears, cringing away from the noise. Her father was yelling, and so was Lars.
Amy was whooping, exultant . . .
"Here it comes!"
Somewhere nearby, she could hear Bender singing.
"Bender cracked corn and I don't care, Fry cracked corn and I don't care . . . damn you, Amy!"
The kill-bots moved into the light and for the first time Leela saw them clearly. They were huge, hovering in mid-air like malevolent spiders. Their tentacled arms coiled and uncoiled in smooth, liquid movements. Deep inside the black glass of their domed heads, red lights blinked on and off.
Watching. Hunting.
It was now or never.
"Now!" Amy screamed.
BANG.
There was a flash of light, nuclear bright. In the center of it, the kill-bots hung suspended, electricity crackling along their metal bodies. They jerked and spun, alight, and then -
The whining went dead, and Amy's machines sputtered and sparked. As suddenly as it had started, the mayhem stopped.
"Now!" Leela cried.
The kill-bots continued to thrash wildly, lights going haywire in their heads.
Screaming war cries, the mutants attacked.
Leela's world became a blur of motion. Amy appeared at her side and seized a corner of the net. "One, two, three!" she shouted and they threw the net up and over the nearest kill-bot, drawing it tight over the spasming octopus legs. They wrestled it down and tugged the processor from its head – the body went limp immediately.
"One down, honey!" Morris cheered, but Leela didn't have time to celebrate. Her fellow mutants were still waging war on the other eleven bots.
Three more were subdued as she watched, but a fourth had zapped Fly Mutant with something nasty – he was convulsing on the ground, by the prone form of another fallen mutant. Raoul was groaning nearby, his third arm twisted at an unnatural angle. Another mutant went flying as they ran to help, caught in the flailing limbs of the kill-bot. Morris pulled Vyolet out of harm's way just in time. Together they put down another bot, and another . . .
Scratched and bruised, Leela turned back to the fray – in time to see a kill-bot detach itself from the throng and whirl away in the direction of Undercity Hall.
"Lars!" she cried.
She took off in pursuit and felt him follow her.
The bot smashed into the boarded-up windows of the Hall. Leela heard the remaining glass shatter, but the barricade on the other side held. Inside the Hall, people screamed. A child started to cry, hysterical.
The kill-bot slammed into the wall. Hairline cracks appeared in the plaster, and dust showered through the gaps in the broken glass. Terrified screaming broke out again inside.
"Hey! Hey! Over here!"
Leela picked up a brick and hurled it with all her strength. It hit the kill bot hard enough to leave a dent.
The bot lurched at her. It zapped the wall behind her head and left scorch marks in the slime. Then it rolled away, twitching drunkenly.
Leela grasped a plank and swung it, blernsball bat style, at the body of the bot. She was hoping to knock out its processor with blunt force, but only succeeded in spinning it off-course. It collided head-on with Lars, coming up behind her. Leela ducked as his crutch sailed past her head and struck the wall.
"Lars!"
He was struggling, caught in a tangle of extensomatic limbs. One wrapped around his neck and even from this distance Leela could see him choke, slowly turning blue.
She sprinted towards him, throwing anything she could reach at the bot as she went.
"Don't!" he gasped, but it was too late. She was too close.
A tentacle coiled around her ankle and whipped her off her feet. The world tipped upside-down and she shot left and right, then left again -
She kicked out at the body of the beast as she passed, heard Lars fall hard and suck in a breath -
"Leela!"
The kill-bot convulsed, enraged -
And then it flung her away.
Leela hit the ground in an instant. Pain exploded behind her eye, a supernova happening inside her skull.
Fry was shouting her name again.
"Leela! Leela!"
No, not Fry. Lars. The bot had let him go.
There was that, at least.
"Leela!" he shouted again, and this time other voices joined him, all of them calling out for her in panic.
She felt a hand on her forehead, callused but gentle.
Lars, stroking back her hair.
"Leela," he said in her ear. "It's okay, it's okay . . . you're okay . . . " Then he pulled back and Leela heard him call out to someone else. The sound felt distant, as if she was spiraling down a tunnel. "She's bleeding! Someone help!"
Leela groaned, and the world went dark.