conduits, armor and all the intricacies that went into a Galbth II. He saw them steaming, stumbling, falling--respirators clogged--smothering. Their motions weakened, their limbs failed, the warriors died.
Two hundred years ago the planet had been a peaceful colony. Then with the collapse of the empire had come two hundred years of reversals, and they who had once been the overseers of harmless workers now found themselves struggling for the barest survival. Only the workers, the natives, had adapted.
He went through the bulkhead into the immenseness of the cavern where the machines stood waiting in the shadowless light.
Down the iron catwalks the silver warriors ran. Down to the mechanics, down to the surgeons with their surgeon fingers dead white beneath the operating lamps. All waiting. Waiting to fit the mechanism for a thousand eyes to the optic nerves, the amplifiers to the audio.

Jord felt the familiar horror.
When you were fitted with the conduits for optics and audios, you lost all contact with reality. You became a consciousness in nothing. His great fear at this time was of falling. He seemed to fall for eons until the mechanics with steel hands slid him into his machine and, bit by bit, his body returned.
Fingers, hands, wrists, arms, feet, legs, shoulders, back, neck, jaw, cheeks, nose, eyes--His cranial optics slid from their sockets within the blue steel skin of his head, and he looked down to the floor of the cavern, seventy feet below.
"Check motion!"
He moved in the ritual ballet. Seventy feet and 140 tons of steel and glass, copper and nickel, silver and plastic, and a man buried deep inside.
The ultimate machine. The ultimate extension of a man.
A ton of fist opened and closed, moved with effortless grace and fell to his side with enough power to crush a block of granite. His atomic muscles turned silently when he walked. His legs of flesh commanding legs of steel. He could walk two hundred miles an hour or run five times that fast. He could thread a needle with his fingers, or rip through a mountain.
"Check respirators."
"Check."
The technicians scurried from the cavern floor. The all-clear sounded and the roof slid open and a ramp grew up from the floor.
His voice echoed through the cavern, mingling with the voices of the other warriors. Joyous, thankful voices--the horror had passed and they were alive again.
On the surface it was winter. The methane-frosted ground beneath the machines was like iron. Iron against steel feet rang in the heavy air. Wispy tendrils of steam rose from the great bodies. The respirators sucked and transformed ammonia and methane. The great feet left imprints in earth and stone.Jord exulted in the freedom of the surface, in the long vistas of unwalled 

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