Red Morgaine One-Eye and the Mayall II Robot

By Craig Inanen

You see that electro-mechanical robot sitting over there at the table with Red Morgaine One-Eye’s bunch? Yeah, the rowdy ones who were arm wrestling earlier. That’s Red Morgaine One-Eye with the eyepatch. She’s a bad one, at the head of the table. You don’t want to mess with her. The robot neither, there’s something wrong with it.

I don’t mean the deep scratches up its right hand lower appendage, up to the main lower housing and across that, either, although they figure into the story. The robot talks with a Mayall II accent so I’m guessing it was built there, and is a long way from home. 

The first time I saw it was over at the Friday Night Robot Battles on Rigalta a couple years ago. You ever been there? They’re pretty wild, very exciting. I go once in a while. It’s an all-comers elimination contest. Anyone can enter their robots so you get contestants from all over the universe. There’s a credit prize, prizes actually since they pay off to the winners of each round. They match them up in weight categories and have team matches too, which can get pretty crazy. Hand held weapons are permitted but nothing that shoots. I mean it’s in an amphitheater, which would be dangerous to the spectators, right?

But they can use knives and hammers and things like that. I think it’s kind of like the gladiatorial games back on Earth. Of course there’s gambling. A lot of credits change hands there. They’ve got drinks and drugs available, whatever you want, for a price. It’s a pretty good time if you’re in the mood for that sort of thing.

So this one here, it wins a couple of rounds and you can see it isn’t a battle robot. Some of them there are pretty specialised. They give them these names, you know, “The Crusher” and “The Destroyer” and like that. I forget what name it was called. The owner was a little Mayallan and he doesn’t look like he knows what he’s doing. He doesn’t attend to it between rounds or matches, just keeps entering it and collecting credits. You can see he’s going to go as far as he can and when it’s finally defeated he’ll sell it for scrap and walk away.

So the thing keeps winning. The odds change each time it does, of course. The Mayallan is raking in credits hand over fist. Then it comes up against one of the local favourites, a track-mounted demolition machine that’s been modified for Robot Battles. I think it’s called the Demolisher or something. It’s got a single arm mounted on a rotating pedestal with a claw intended to tear down buildings. It grabs ahold of beams and crushes them, you know?

So this one here, it’s using a steel lance and it tries to go for the Demolisher’s ocular receptors, poking them out. It gets one, you can see the sensor dangling by the wires but when it goes for the second one the Demolisher catches the lance in its claw and it just folds up, all twisted and bent, useless. The Demolisher chases this one into a corner, where it can’t escape and grabs it, both lower appendages. That’s how those scratches got there. You can see the jaws crushing down and it looks like the end for the Mayallan robot when it reaches up and rips the hydraulic lines that go to the jaws clear off of the Demolisher’s arm. Red hydraulic fluid spurts everywhere under high pressure. The first two rows of spectators get soaked. The jaws stop moving. I mean you couldn’t write a script for something like that. It was awesome. The Mayallan robot slowly gets out of the jaws; they’re scratching its main lower housing. I’m thinking they’ll penetrate through any moment but they don’t. The Demolisher can only move on its tracks and pretty soon it can’t even do that. It’s immobile. The Mayallan robot is declared the winner. The owner issues a challenge to the crowd since his robot has beaten everyone. No takers.

So he enters it solo in the team competition. Now it’s going to be two against one. Nobody ever does that, in fact the referees have this conference to determine if he even can. The whole time this one stands there, ready to fight. They match it up against two enhanced utility handling ‘bots with extra counterweighting and reinforced arms.

That’s when Red Morgaine One-Eye climbs through the cables and into the ring. She’s got her gravity compensating boots on and her fighting knife in her hand. She walks over to this one, pats it on its back, says something to it and then stands side by side, next to it. The crowd goes wild. Some beings are shouting for her to get out of the ring, others are cheering. The robot has been given a new lance. It’s ready to fight. So is Red Morgaine One-Eye it appears. This is unprecedented. The whole amphitheater is a madhouse. The referees and the judges confer and decide to let them continue. Red Morgaine One-Eye tosses her knife from hand to hand and she looks out on the crowd which is shouting and cheering for blood.

The match goes five rounds and it’s a real battle but that’s a story for another time. I’ll tell you Red Morgaine One-Eye is snake-quick. When it’s over the referee holds up Red Morgaine One-Eye’s arm along with one of the upper appendages of the Mayallan robot, declaring them the winners of the match.

The robot turns toward Red Morgaine One-Eye and says, “My life for you.” Then it follows her out of the ring. The little Mayallan owner is shouting, protesting, jumping up and down. Both of them just keep walking. There’s something wrong with it. Robots aren’t supposed to be able to do that.

About the Author

C. Inanen lives in the Midwest USA.

His work has been most recently published in Antimatter Dreams. 

It will also be featured in the March 2026 issue of Close to the Bone, April 2026 issue of Yellow Mama magazine, May issue of Blue Lake Review and the June 2026 issue of Down in the Dirt magazine.

He is a contributor to The Yard: Crime Blog and the British The Short Humour Site.