She wasn't surprised at all to see the Improbability Drive sitting exactly where she left it. A six-foot tall metal cylinder, bristling with copper heatsink fins, and completely unharmed. A thought entered her head, and rattled around in the wasteland of her mind:

The Hawton Engine. The Chance Generator. The Heisenberg Device. All the names that, according to his diaries, Hawton himself gave to his invention. He changed his mind as often as he changed his socks. At least, until some marketing experts decided that they had to sell this war.

"I -" she began. The first words she'd said since the explosion, and her voice sounded almost exactly like someone who had breathed nuclear smoke until her lungs were filled with radioactive black mucus.

She recovered quickly. "I see you're still operational," she whispered. "Although you don't have much to work with any more, do you?"

She looked around herself. "Lots of miscellaneous carbon," she muttered. "But that won't work, will it? Otherwise you'd have started to change things already." She wriggled her steel-plated toes in the ash. "You only work on things that are alive, don't you? Or things that are improbable by nature. Like dice, or cards. Things of chance. Things that people think of that way. Is that true?"

She threw the stones to the ground. Earlier she had decided which sides were heads, and which sides were tails.

They landed in a straight line. Heads. Heads. Tails. Tails. Heads. Sixteen, plus eight, plus zero, plus zero, plus one. Twenty-five. Y.

She gathered them up and cast them again. Again, they landed in a straight line. Tails. Tails. Tails. Heads. Tails. Heads. Five. E.

One more time, she picked up the stones and dropped them to the ground. Heads. Tails. Tails. Heads. Heads. Nineteen. S.

Yes.

"All my soldiers are dead," she whispered. "There's no need for me to be here anymore, but I can't die." The pebbles clicked together in her hand. "I think you might have something to do with that. I know that I'm your mortal enemy, but to keep me alive and suffering like this... it's not..."

What could she say? To a machine that she'd been fighting for years? A machine with no ethical code. She had nothing to threaten it with. She had no bargaining position. If she told it that to torture her with unwanted life would be to lower itself further than those who wanted to destroy it... would it care?

For the first time since she opened her eyes, she felt fear in her spine. Fear that this might be forever, now, this might be it. To wander in the ash until her mind was lost, and then to wander trying to find it, until the sun went dark.

"Just... please stop. Please."

She picked up her stones. "Please," she whispered one more time, and cast them, again and again for a long time, sinking deeper and deeper into despair with every letter.

The Drive said:

I am just a machine. I convert energy to chance. That is the whole of my function. Once generated Chance will do as it will. I am not your God.

She threw three sets of all-tails in a row, then sat down on the ash.