Z14 (14 page)

It was odd; I felt bad for not feeling bad. I could have simulated the feelings of guilt and regret that Kaboom had all but died for me, but, instead, there was a genuine spark from the human side of me that was calling me a shit, for basically just doing the machine version of shrugging.

“Come on, Kaboom Baboon,” said Kam. “Pull through this, you tubby great tit.”

“Oxley,” said Lothar. Then louder, “Oxley. Go get that doctor’s head. He might know something.”

“Yes sir,” said Oxley. He tore his ashen-faced gaze from Kaboom and ran for the bunker door. He nearly stumbled over T9’s head. “I don’t fancy you anymore,” he said, kicking the head and then shouting in pain – it would have been like trying to toe-punt a bowling ball. Only his combat boots saved his toes from being broken.

I felt my damaged facial features, scraping broken teeth out of my mouth with a hooked finger. My nose was such a mess that I just pulled it off and threw it in a bush. So much for last night’s beauty sleep.

“Lothar,” I said. “We’ll need to leave here. Soon.”

“I hear ya, Zee,” said Lothar. “She followed you, but they can pinpoint her on this network of theirs? So there’s a good chance the rest know where she was?”

“They know where she
is
,” I corrected him. “She’s still functional. Neither Kam’s blast, or the Baboon’s dribbly plasma fart damaged her head.”

Lothar looked his age for a moment. “Kaboom,” he said. “We can’t go until he has. Gone that is. We bury him.”

I nodded then limped over to Kam and put my hand on his shoulder. “Thanks Kam. I’m sorry.”

He looked into my eyes for a long moment. “No you’re not,” he said. Then he relaxed and a bit of light came back into his own eyes. “But we know what you are, and we know you’d have done the same for one of us.”

“Only if there had been sound tactical advantage in doing so,” I said.

Kam shook his head, “You twat. You did it before in the Hole, there was no tactical advantage there. You
were
the tactical advantage, and you gave that up to get us all out of there. Don’t try to be the big frosty robot, Zed. We all know you just want a hug.”

Lothar moved to pick up T9’s head and get it shielded from cyborg communications by taking it into the bunker.

“Warden Fourteen submit!” the head shouted as he picked it up. He flinched and then underarm tossed the head through the bunker door and down the stairs.

“Damn things give me the jeebies,” he said as he followed it through the door.

Oxley came out of one of the other doors, carrying Doc Melon – who was already safely locked out of the cyborg network, just as I apparently was, if T9 was to be believed. Frankly, I did believe T9, because so far these cyborgs were proving to be utterly hopeless at anything resembling guile. Maybe they needed Melon tinkering with them before they could
really
learn a thing or two from their cover-personalities. So far, they didn’t seem to be firing on all cylinders. This whole activated-without-a-mission thing had them all running around like headless chicke – cyborgs.

The doctor took in the scene: Partially melted cyborg corpse, two discarded weapons of unknown origin – to him – and a crumpled human. I was interested to see which item would gain his attention first. To his credit, he focused on Kaboom.

“Oh, is that man dead?” he said.

“Get him closer, Ox,” I said. “Kam, take the plasma guns inside. Just throw them in the storeroom, they’re useless to us. Both have now fired twice, and it won’t be happening again, they’re burned out.” Kam took a last look at Kaboom and then did as I’d asked.

Oxley crouched in front of Kaboom, holding Melon’s head with outstretched arms, so the doctor could appraise Kaboom’s injuries. I joined them and felt Kaboom’s ribcage, sternum and spine. Just about everything felt broken and splintered. It was a wonder he was still alive.

“We can save him,” said Doctor Melon.

“We can?” said Oxley, full of hope. He stood up, faced me and, very obligingly, held Melon out at an angle, head turned so he could see both of us.

“We can?” I said, caught between doubt and suspicion. This was Doctor Melon I was talking to, after all.

“The colony ship, the one I hid at the Manoogla Heights,” he said.

“The brain reading tech?” I said. Then I spat out a tooth that had been stuck in the roof of my mouth.

Melon looked suddenly puzzled, then irritated. “Oh bloody hell,” he said. “Mr Ox, can you please tip my head forward then back a few times?” Oxley did just that. “Thank you. That was a nod, by the way,” said Melon.

“I don’t follow ya, Doc,” said Oxley.

“He wants to download Kaboom’s brain, encode it into a cyborg sub-program and then, I suppose, upload it into our latest captured cyborg head,” I said.

“Doc, I don’t follow Zee.”

“We can put your friend Kaboom into a robot head,” tried Melon.

“Gotcha. Great idea,” said Oxley. “No, wait. Bad idea. Very bad. The Baboon wouldn’t want to live like that.”

“Why don’t we do it anyway?” I said. “Then we can ask him how he feels about not being completely dead. We can always shut him down if he’d rather cease to exist.”

“I dunno, Zee,” said Oxley. “Will he become the cool, sophisticated, likable kind of cyborg? Or will he just be another big metal bollock-face, like you?”

“When I re-programmed Zed,” said Melon. “I had to try to subvert his Warden code with his human sub-personality. I didn’t know what I was doing back then, and, well, the mess that is Zed is the result.”

“Thanks, Doctor,” I said, deliberately using a flat tone of voice.

“However,” continued Melon. “When I came to alter the brain-encoding software – to encode my own, more complex and challenging personality – I was much more versed in the alien programming methods and languages, and was able to encode a brain pattern so complex that it contained a personality strong enough to lock away the Warden and throw away the key. The shoe of domination to now be worn by the underdog’s foot, indeed. Therefore, Kaboom will basically be himself, as much as I am me.”

“And meanwhile cyber-guinea pig Zed, here, just has to carry on figuring out how his human bits are supposed to work,” I said. Factual statement – not resentment. Ha-ha, right.

“Uh, okay. I followed every word of that, Doc,” said Oxley, who genuinely had gone cross-eyed as he glazed over and stared into space. “I’d best ask Lothar.”

The intercom crackled. “Lothar’s here and he says let’s do it,” said Lothar’s voice. He did not sound happy at all, but I knew he’d feel it was his duty to do anything he possibly could to keep one of his men alive.

“Lothar,” I said. “You guys walked here from the Bay, yes?”

“Forced march. Jog-walking. Just over four hours in total. Like I said, it was two hours before you got back from not so Jolly Meadows.”

“Moving Kaboom without killing him will be difficult,” I said.

“Ah, even if – I mean when – he dies,” said Melon, “we’ll still have two hours to use the, ah, the technique on him. Although there will be somewhat less of him to retrieve, the longer we tarry here.”

I fired up my mapping and navigation software and drew a triangle between our location, Boram Bay and the Manoogla Heights coordinates where the space shuttle was hidden. The city was less than half an hour’s jetpack flight to the west. I could fly there, steal a vehicle and drive it back in just under another hour. It would then be about two hours of driving across dirt tracks to reach the Heights. We could do it. Even if Kaboom died right this second we might still be able to save something.

“I’ll get a vehicle,” I said. “Be ready to leave in ninety minutes. Get a bed up here and lay Kaboom out on it. If anyone else shows up here, kill them if they’re human, or get the fuck away if they’re not.”

I checked my jetpack fuel: Plenty – which was good as I only had two tanks left in my bag in the bunker. I hobbled clear of people and trees and blasted off.

Going back to the shuttle hidden in the Heights, with Doctor Melon, might actually turn out to be quite revealing. Perhaps I could get him to restore more of my memories. At the very least, there was still a lot that he needed to tell me – even if he didn’t think so. Or didn’t want to.

*

I was gone for ninety-three minutes and twelve seconds. Stealing a vehicle had been as trivial as it had been uneventful, and I pulled up to the bunker perimeter gates in a big, all-terrain flat-bed truggy – both the word and the vehicle were an ugly mash-up of a truck and a buggy. Driving with one arm hadn’t been a problem, as the truggy didn’t have a gearstick, but with my right foot now little more than a frozen, dead weight, it made speed control challenging.

I leaned out of the window and pressed the intercom. “Let me in. How’s the patient?”

The reply, from Lothar, was almost instant, “He’s the same. Come on in. We were just about to leave without you.”

How could they have hoped to move Kaboom on foot? I wondered, as the gate swung open and I jammed my brick of a foot down on the accelerator, lurching the truggy forward. I saw what Lothar meant as I pulled up at the bunker. They’d got all the old, practically antique push-bikes out of the store room, brought them outside and cannibalised some of them to make a kind of chariot-cum-rickshaw. They’d dragged a bed up, cut the legs off and attached two bicycle wheels to one end. The other end was joined, via a framework constructed from a pair of bicycle frames, to another pair of otherwise unmodified bicycles – unmodified, but held together by a welded-on cross bar, which I presumed was so that one couldn’t get ahead of the other, causing the chariot contraption to just turn in circles. The mattresses from two more beds lay next to the as-of-yet unmoved Kaboom.

I had to allow a smile – smashed face and all – not just because I wanted to, but to show them I was pleased that they’d been so industrious in my absence, just in case I hadn’t come back, or hadn’t sourced a vehicle.

“Well, there’ll be no need for that heap of shit you’ve built,” I said. “Let’s get trugging.”

I then noticed Doc Melon and T9’s heads, sitting on the floor, face-to-face, just a foot apart. They were engaged in what looked like the world’s most pointless staring competition. Why wasn’t she in the box Lothar had brought Q4 in?

Lothar caught my gaze. “Doc says he’s interrogating the prisoner.”

I didn’t like that. I did not trust Melon at all. Just what the hell he might have been doing with the former Miss Rampaging Kill-bot was anyone’s guess.

“Doc,” I called, modulating my voice with a clear note of warning. “Don’t you be doing anything I wouldn’t like over there.”

“Oh, don’t worry about a thing, you,” said the Doc. “You’ll be pleased to know I’ve linked minds with T9 here and have her internal defences on the run. I’ve hidden her presence on the cyborg network. They can’t see her, they can’t hear her. We, ah, we can’t see or hear them either, but I’m working on that. We may be able to track them soon.”

“That’s well done then, I suppose. Carry on.” Grudging praise indeed.

“Lothar told me about the electro pulse she used. I think, yes, yes, I’ve got that figured out. I, ah, I’d best disable it, for now,” the doctor said.

“Doc, don’t be messing with things you don’t understa – ” I said. Too late. A noise like a light switch being flicked came from T9 and for a micro-second I was deaf, dumb and blind. I ‘came to’ realising I’d just survived an E.M.P. attack. My cyborg tech was protected, it seemed, which would make sense if Wardens were going to run around chucking out electrical pulses.

“Oh my,” said Doc Melon. “That didn’t go quite as planned, but I
have
disabled that feature, in a roundabout way – I’ve burnt out her pulse generator, you see. Sorry.”

“That’s not all you’ve burnt out you pillock,” I said. Only the very newest vehicles on Deliverance have any hint of computer technology inside them, but, this truggy was absolutely state of the art. Or it had been until the E.M.P. had fried its electronics, making it about as useful a lump of metal as my right foot.

“Ah. Whoops?” said Melon.

“Idiot,” I said. “Lothar, it looks like we fall back on your backup plan. We’ve simply got to get moving or Kaboom’s fucked.” There wasn’t time for me to fly off and get another vehicle. We just had to get moving. If I let the rest of them go ahead with the bike-chariot rig while I went buggy-jacking again, I might not find them very easily. No, the best chance now was plan-B; cold, hard, computerised analysis of the facts said so.