Z14 (23 page)

“Why not?” said Classic Melon.

“Dur,” said Oxley. “We ain’t in space.”

“Bah,” said Classic Melon. “I could get any of the colony ship bridge shuttles launched again, quite easily.”

“It’s not that, Doc” I said.

“Oh?” said both the Melons.

“It’s the abandoning Deliverance thing,” I said. “This is Kam, Lothar and hell, even Oxley’s home. And whilst it may also be a stinking den of villains and arseholes, there are plenty of normal, innocent people here too – children so young they’ve barely even considered selling their granny to the televised fighting pits. Even I don’t want to see their brains being ripped out by a bunch of under-achieving cyborgs.”

“Oh Zed,” said New Melon. “I’m touched at your sudden discovery of something resembling a human conscience. But, we can’t fight them down here. Deliverance will have to be sacrificed to save every other human colony planet. I was supposed to arrive here and subvert all of the Wardens against their masters, but that just isn’t feasible, what with the Boram Bay Overlords’ interference.”

“Besides,” said Classic Melon. “Our victory aboard the Kon Ramar ship might be so swift, that very little damage would have been done to the gassed human population by the time we were able to make them call the Wardens off.”

“And what happens if they don’t, or can’t call them off?” I said.

“Then we would find a way,” said New Melon.

“Unacceptable, Doc.” It wasn’t really, though. Devoid of emotion and on a galactic scale, the basic thrust of the Melons’ plan made sound, logical and strategic sense. But, damn it, no: An image, freshly cached in my memory banks, of a crying little boy screaming for his daddy meant that I could no longer bow to mere ‘sound logic’. The Wardens would not harvest a single human brain on Deliverance whilst I still drew power from my core.

We cycled on in silence once again, as we ate up the miles to the bunker. Talk soon resumed though, as we turned to discussing what was just beginning to almost, barely, pass for a plan; how we would overpower two probably very wary Wardens.

We finally settled on something as the gates of the bunker perimeter came into view, something that might, just might work. It was a foolish plan and came with such a high percentage chance of failure that I wanted to wince, but it was all we had. We were simply going to be over-matched by the two fully operational, undamaged cyborgs. I didn’t really want to go through with it, but missing a chance to fight two cyborgs, rather than five at once, was even more foolish than our plan for tackling these two.

As we pulled up at the bunker gate and Lothar keyed in the code to open it, I addressed the Melons.

“What can you tell me from my memories about the two people inside the Wardens that are heading here?” I said.

“very little,” said New Melon. “R1, or rather Rupert Mordesh is someone you joked had so little personality he might already be living proof that someone had beaten you to creating a cyborg – a personality observation that seems quite accurate, given that the Kon Ramar were happy with his Warden-subdued personality with just the first iteration of his cyborg mind-upload. Hence the one, in R1.”

“W12 however, you seemed to be a lot more fond of,” said Classic Melon. “Wendy Harrison was a bright young postgraduate student. The Kon Ramar killed her outright when she fought back against them, and then encoded her brain anyway while her corpse was still warm.”

“Pleasant,” I said. I didn’t seem to have any feelings of sorrow for these people welling up inside me – hell, with not just forgotten, but deleted memories, I had essentially never known them and never would. Yet it still made the prospect of destroying them in combat one that the human side of me did not relish.
Oddly though, another part of my inner-human was looking forward to wasting a pair of cyborg Warden mother-fuckers. I’d have to go devise a cyber-shrink diagnostic program when this was all over.

We pulled up at the bunker itself. As everyone dismounted I spoke to the humans.

“After the coming scrap, we could fight the rest of the Wardens more effectively if you three weren’t such pathetically weak sacks of piss and bone,” I said, giving them my cheesiest of fake smiles.

Lothar’s eyes crinkled in return. He guessed what I was about to suggest and he said, “No, Zee, buddy. I will not become one of them. Not for you, not for anybody, and not even to get rid of my piles and arthritis.”

“Go on, Lo,” I said. “You’re a professional soldier, surely it makes sense to become the best weapon you can be.”

“Zee, buddy, I’m too old and set in my ways. I don’t even want to change what I have for breakfast of a morning, so changing, what would you call it? My species? Whatever. Changing into a damn machine ain’t something I would ever want to do. And if I die, I want one of my boys here to incinerate me immediately, so the part where my last will and testament doesn’t expressly tell Zee not to stick me into a goddamn machine doesn’t come back to bite me in my shiny new, metal ass.”

I shrugged. “How about you Kam?”

“No offence, Zed, my friend,” said Kam without giving it a moment’s thought. “I don’t mind saying my buddy’s a killer cyborg from outer space, but, well being one is a whole different cauldron of Manooglas. If I die though, then sure, bring me back.”

“Okay I wi – ”

“That doesn’t mean you can kill me now, just so you can go right ahead and upgrade me,” said Kam hurriedly. I was sure he didn’t really think that of me. Did he?

“Hey,” I said. “Why would I slay a human with mind-reading skills like those? You’re clearly an evolutionary wonder; mind and body.” I cracked another cheesy smile as Kam flexed various muscles like a posing body-builder. He did have the kind of body any lunk-head Warden would kill and maim for.

“That leaves you, Ox,” I said. “You want to join the masterful cyborg race?”

“I was so, so, so, so, totally up for it,” said Oxley. He started gyrating and thrusting his pelvis. “Just imagine how fast I could drill a girl with robo-hips, man. But a world where I don’t have a penis is a world I don’t want to live in.”

“Funny that,” said Kam. “Because that’d be a world everyone else would relish.”

“So not one of you is prepared to give up your humanity to save your planet?” I said.

“Sorry, buddy. No.”

“No, mate.”

“Hell no, man. No way.”

I wasn’t surprised, it was a tall order, and besides I’d had to find a part of my own humanity before I’d started to give even the merest hint of a shit about saving anything.

“There’s a non-lethal brain encoding procedure,” I said. “Melon told me about it. It just involves you sitting still in a chair for a few months. If we had the time…?”

I was met with three stony stares.

“Okay, okay, I give up,” I said. “A crippled cyborg, three obsolete humans, two copies of a disembodied, possibly mad scientist and the homeless, stored personality of an unhinged explosives expert will have to be enough to defeat a million-year-old galactic space empire. It’ll be a cinch.”

Kam grinned and Oxley, fully believing my sarcasm, offered me a high-five. I left him hanging.

“Lothar,” I said. “Stash everything inside, then get back out here with whatever digging tools you can find.” I hobbled to a nice big clear spot a few metres away from the bunker entrance. A spot where there were lots of gaps between the already sparsely planted trees inside the compound. “And then,” I said, scuffing the dry ground with my broken foot, “you can bury me right about here.”

It was three minutes past five a.m. and the first dawn light was beginning to show. New Melon, whose head was sitting on the floor directly above the shallow grave the humans had buried me in, reported that he
’d picked up two jetpack heat-signatures closing rapidly from the south. That tallied with where the cyborg network we were spying on said they should be. New Melon was just two inches above me, separated by a thin crust of earth, but we conversed via private network session to ensure we could not be overheard. He told me that they had landed well clear of the outer perimeter; very sensibly not flying within weapon range of the bunker complex. He assumed they were now heading this way on foot.

New Melon asked for the hundredth time – literally, I have internal logs that can verify this – if I thought this was a good idea. Once again, I replied that no, of course it wasn’t, so why did he keep asking?

After a lengthy wait – which would have been unbearably tense for a human, but which gave me time to catch up on the news and do a bit of admin for my neglected porn hosting – New Melon told me that the two enemy Wardens had entered the compound and where now sixteen feet away from his position above me. They were scanning the area. I told him to shut down, before they spotted him and to reboot in two minutes. He did so, leaving me effectively blind, but able to feel faint tremors in the ground as what felt like one of the two Wardens approached what, to them, appeared to be a deactivated Warden’s head; one that matched the configuration of their missing colleague, T9.

Their scans of the area would pick up no heat or electrical signatures, so the next logical thing to do, was for one of them to retrieve the head, whilst the other hung back, ready to respond to what was in all likelihood a trap.

Damn right it was a trap. Just probably not a very clever one. The thudding footsteps came closer and closer until they were right on top of me, where they stopped. I waited just long enough for the Warden to be in mid-stoop, about to pick up the head, before punching my hand up through the ground, and grabbing one of its ankles. The Warden’s response was to instantly blast off with its jetpack, to clear the ground-based trap. Good.

As it felt my weight, the Warden gave the jetpack extra thrust so it could clear the ground. I held on tight, and was pulled up, out of my shallow grave and into the air with it. I looked up as the mud fell away from my rising face. It was R1 that I had hold of; the male Warden, Rupert. He tried to kick my grip away with his free foot as we slowly rose above the treetops, but it was a clumsy attempt. Still, I wouldn’t have long before he broke grip, and probably my fingers. R1’s jetpack flame was singeing my hair, but luckily it wasn’t quite close enough to cook the flesh off my face. Damn it, though, I had held a slim hope my latest regen would last longer than a few hours. Where was the support from Kam and Oxley?

“Now!” I shouted. Amplifying my voice to its maximum level.

Oxley and Kam were at opposite ends of the bunker complex, out by the perimeter fence. They themselves were hidden in hastily constructed, cramped concrete mini-bunkers that would have shielded their heat signatures from the approaching cyborgs. At my shout, they stood up, collapsing their cover around them, and freeing them up to target the rising Warden through the trees with their laser rifles. I’d chosen locations for them that had good line of sight to my grave, with as few trees as possible between us.

When not in use, a cyborg jetpack is inert. But when activated it becomes – very rarely – a liability, which is why any cyborg worth his weight in super alloys won’t use one anywhere near a combat zone unless it’s an emergency. Like escaping a trap.

Oxley and Kam are both fantastic marksmen – I’m very shallow and it’s part of the reason I liked them – so I was not surprised that each of their continuous beams hit R1 as he rose and tracked him unerringly. Their beams played across his body, melting flesh and igniting clothing. Oxley’s orange beam hit the jetpack, so R1, weighed down as he was by me, clumsily twisted his torso out of the beam, which only served to give Kam a clear shot with his lightning-yellow beam. No matter how he twisted and turned, in just a matter of seconds, R1’s jetpack glowed red, then white. I released my grip on the Warden’s ankle and began falling back towards the ground, before snagging a sturdy tree branch with my flailing hand.

With the sudden loss of weight R1’s maximum thrust jetpack would have propelled him high into the sky, if it hadn’t exploded under the constant laser heat. The jetpack was made of cyborg alloy, so, as it went up in a fireball the resultant shrapnel was strong enough to shred R1’s torso and limbs, sending chunks of the Warden flying out in all directions, even as everything was bathed in burning jetpack fuel.

A whirling, flaming foot with a snapped, jagged metal shin-bone punched through my chest, and lodged right where a human’s lung would have been. The burning foot sticking out of my chest ignited my own clothing which rapidly turned me into an inhuman torch.

As I swung from my tree branch like an immolated orangutan, I scanned the ground a few feet below me, looking for the second Warden; Wendy, the young postgraduate student from my science team back on Earth. I quickly appraised the situation on the ground; Wendy had decided to go ahead and storm the bunker. I approved of her reasoning that clearing out the bunker and making us go in after her was the best strategy, but she had been distracted by New Melon’s head rebooting and, as planned, bombarding her with private networking requests. Kam drew a bead on her from the perimeter fence and started peppering her with wonderfully accurate laser bolts. It was like slapping a shark with a glove, but it definitely had a portion of her attention. Oxley was supposed to be doing the same from behind her, but his firepower was ominously absent. I hoped he was just trying to get into a good firing position.