Z14 (19 page)

Parts of Chester’s tale made sense, and I thought about Q4. He had been non-hostile originally and perhaps he and those others on his network had decided I had to be ‘deactivated and disassembled’, for the good of the people the Wardens were supposed to protect. I was a habitual human killer, after all. And then there was T9, who claimed to want to interface with me…was that an attempt at the personal touch, to reach out and try to help me? Had I attacked her because of Melon’s programming?

The ball, or rather the torn-off head was back in Melon’s court. Time for another chat. I waited until the hour was up, before taking a very quick jetpack hop back over to the Kambulance. Everybody was there. I noticed a mound of freshly turned earth with a wooden cross planted in it. Carved roughly into the cross were the words ‘Resting in Pieces: The Kaboom Baboon’. That might get a tad confusing for Kaboom if ever we got round to bringing him back to – electronic – life again and he found his way here. A macabre pilgrimage to his own burial site. Perhaps I’d do the same one day.

Oh yeah, and: Internal memorandum, medium priority: Extinct the Manoogla lizard species.

Doctor Melon’s head sat on a low rocky shelf near the Kambulance. I hobbled over to Kam, gently but firmly pulled his liberated laser rifle from his hands and turned away from him. I dialled the rifle’s power setting down to medium, put it on the rock-shelf next to Melon, angled towards the back of his head. I switched the rifle into continuous beam mode, pressed the firing stud and then stood back to watch.

“Zed, what are you doing?” said Doctor Melon. “I mean, besides dangerously heating up a small point in the back of my skull with a laser beam.”

I said nothing. The three humans gathered around the scene.

“So, ah, how did your call to the Grand Overlord go?” said the doctor. “Zed, it’s getting rather warm in here…”

“Looks like it’s gone badly for you, Doc,” said Oxley, sharp as a paving slab.

By now, Melon would have urgent warnings going off inside his head, notifying him of impending cranial integrity failure. I limped over to my bag, fished out the data storage unit that had his personality program on it – I knew it wasn’t Kaboom’s identical one because that one was smeared in blood – and threw it onto the ground where Melon could see it, before stamping on it with my useless club of a right foot.

“You absolute bastard,” said Melon. “Okay, I’ll talk! Everything.”

I waited for him to realise he’d actually have to commence with the promised talking before I’d spare him.

“I’m not from the forty-third colony ship!” he screamed. I pressed the firing stud on the laser and the beam winked out of existence.

“Well, that was boring,” said Kam.

Lothar’s crinkly crow’s feet appeared around his eyes at the gag, but Oxley said, “Are you kidding man? Zee’s stone cold. I wanted to see cyborg brains. If we’re not offing the doctor, let’s split the chick-bot’s head open and have a poke around.”

I ignored them. Instead I picked up the laser rifle, circled around in front of Melon and pointed it at his exposed ocular array. He got the point and carried on talking.

“I’m from another colony planet,” he said. “A planet called Iceholme.”

“What was the point of lying to me about that?” I said. “So there’s no stranded colony ship up there?” I gestured with the laser rifle at the heavens.

“Oh it’s there alright, I found it and boarded it when I arrived and it is indeed where I found you. I just wanted to keep my story simple, I wanted to leave out irrelevancies. All that matters – for now – is that this planet is the next test site on the Kon Ramar’s list.”

“You can ram it where?” said Oxley.

“The Kon Ramar,” said Melon. “Blue-tinted lanky humanoids who’ll rip out your brain and talk to it about shoes.”

Oxley’s brow furrowed. “Oh, got ya. Erm? Carry on.”

“They’re on their way here now; the main research team from Earth, but Iceholme is closer to Deliverance than Earth is, which is how come I’ve got the drop on them.”

“You want to be careful about getting the drop on people Doc,” I said. “A man-sized impression in the grass outside my home and some well-fed sea creatures are testament to that.”

“Don’t we have whole centuries until they get here?” said Kam.

“No,” said Melon. “The Deliverance fleet was like a caravan of meandering river barges, which would make their newer ships more like, well, like rocket-powered speed boats, fired from canons and not subject to frictio – ”

“Geez doc,” said Oxley. “Your analogies are so bad they’re, like, really bad. Analogies.”

“Doc, parts of your story tally with Chester Boram’s,” I said. “But he paints you as the villain of the piece.”

“What?” said Melon. “No. That’s, I mean, when I arrived in orbit – yes, I’ll tell you how in a second – I made contact with the planetary authorities, with Chester Boram. I knew nothing about Deliverance, and I didn’t realise that it was ruled by a hereditary madman otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered. I fear I have given The Grand Overlord all the info he needs to try, only try, to convert the Wardens into his own personal army.”

“As opposed to us being your personal army,” I said. “Except Chester says you’re working for these aliens’ enemies.”

Melon just spat laughter at that. “Pure bollocks. The Kon Ramar have no enemies. Nobody can stand against them. Until now, hopefully. Because of what I learned on my home planet, we can stop them. The Kon Ramar are few, and weak on their own. They will rely on their cyborgs to fight for them, which is something they have never done; they’ve never fought a war, not even amongst themselves. Gassing Earth wasn’t a war, it was a tick-box on an experiment checklist. Even the cyborgs are untested against anything more than unsuspecting human populations. So, under the right conditions, Zed, you and a few others could go through them like a Manoogla in a firework factory.”

“Another terrible analogy Doc,” I said. “That’s hardly survivable for the Manoogla.”

“Your survival is irrelevant if humanity is saved”, said Melon. “My analogy is sound.”

“You’ve really got to work on that bedside manner, Doctor,” said Kam.

“Zed,” said the doctor. “Every colony planet the aliens set up was an experiment as much as it was a backup, planet-wide, laboratory for the brain-construct project. My planet was colonised using a fleet of stasis-capable colony ships and, when we arrived at our new home, we were greeted, warmly, by the Kon Ramar. Co-habitation with the aliens was the experiment here, as well as to study how humans coped with the combination of stasis and colonisation.”

“Mind fuck,” said Kam.

“Blue-skinned alien fuck, more like,” said Oxley. “Come on Melon, you guys got jiggy with the aliens, yeah?”

“Stasis?” I said, “So the people kidnapped from Earth and taken to this Iceholme were the same generation?”

“Indeed,” said Melon. “Although they only ever woke up twenty of the forty million people they transplanted. They spun us a line about saving us from a comet collision, how they were so sorry they could only save so few, and that they were only capable of sustaining those twenty million of us that they had revived. Years later and they were apologising again that a power failure had cut life support to those still in stasis. They even showed us footage of Earth being destroyed by a comet. Which some of us now know was fake.

“But, over time – generations, that is – little cracks showed, and human curiosity was piqued. The Kon Ramar’s arrogance is one of their weaknesses. They had no idea that some humans had found a way to learn from their technology, to learn their written language – they taught some of us to speak a basic version – to read their history, and, to discover their future plans. The culmination of us learning what we did, was that we realised Deliverance was next and then Iceholme, if they failed at Deliverance.

“We had a chance, we realised, to get to Deliverance first and have the Kon Ramar’s pre-planted cyborg servitors prepare a welcoming party that they’d never forget.”

“Why can’t you use your own cyborgs, on Iceholme?” I said.

“There aren’t any. None that we can find information about, anyway. I think the aliens’ arrogance literally leaves them with zero fear of any trouble from the Iceholme humans. They don’t think like we do. They’re not paranoid. They’ve seeded some planets with Wardens because the actual expected results of their experiments there are that trouble will occur. It’s the same on planets where they’ve allowed for conditions in which human technological progress is expected to increase. The Wardens will step in and end any threat before it begins, if it emerges before the Kon Ramar are ready to turn up, gas that planet and start stitching brains together.”

“But isn’t uncertainty the reason for experimentation in the first place?” I said.

“To humans, yes. To arrogant, unhinged, powerful space-zealots who’ve had hundreds of thousands of years of things going their way, no. They’re alien, Zed.”

Melon’s tale certainly came with more back-story than Chester Boram’s did, but I recalled the Grand Overlord saying that if you’re going to spin a yarn, spin it big. “So, you shared everything you knew with Chester Boram when you got here, but the two of you couldn’t unite to face the threat of these Kon Ramar?” I said.

“I didn’t realise that Boram knew about the Deliverance fleet flagship, let alone that he had access to it,” said Melon. “He told me not to worry; not to worry because he’d made a deal with the Kon Ramar. They’d repatriate him and his chosen few to a paradise planet and he’d deal with any trouble stirred up ahead of their arrival.”

“Hence the plasma weapons?” said Lothar, astutely.

“Indeed,” said Melon. “He didn’t tell them that – back then – one cyborg was already active on the planet, so they don’t know that he knows about their slumbering, hidden anti-insurrection force. Boram subsequently told
me
that he was going to use the cyborgs not only to defeat the Kon Ramar, but to create a human empire.”

“A Boram Bay Overlords Galactic Empire?” said Kam. “Fuck that, I’m with you Melon, even you can’t be worse than that.”

“Exactly,” said Melon. “We don’t want that. We just want the Kon Ramar to leave us alone. Maybe in time we can truly become friends with them.”

“Fuck that,” said Lothar, Kam, Oxley and myself almost in unison.

“One step at a time then, eh?” said Melon with a grin.

I re-targeted the laser rifle on the middle of Melon’s forehead and activated its beam once more.

“What, what the fuck are you doing?” Melon cried.

“Nice story, Doc,” I said. “Nighty night now.”

“No! I’m telling the truth. I swear,” said Melon as his melting forehead flesh dribbled into his ocular array and over his one good eye.

I said nothing.

“Zee?” said Lothar.

“Zed, please,” said Melon.

“I just have to be sure, Doc,” I said. I wasn’t going to go through with it. I’m not that bad. I just felt this was the only way to squeeze the last drop of blood from this reticent stone. “You’ve got about ten seconds left, I’d say.”

“You bastard,” said Melon. “I can’t fight the Kon Ramar with the likes of you!”

“I’m all you’ve got, and besides, yes, you can. Better still, I can fight them without you.”

“Wait!”

I allowed an eyebrow to raise.

“You had a son!”

Amidst blaring alarms in my mind, once more demanding that I reboot due to an apparent emotional overload, I calmly clicked the firing stud, shutting off the burning beam. I then dropped the laser rifle to the floor, called up an image of that tatty old stuffed toy I had in my bag, and then, even as I felt my knees buckle, everything inside me switched off.

My internal clock said that three minutes had passed since Melon dropped his little bombshell. My reboot sequence takes less than a second, so I was a little concerned about having had a blackout. It’s not like I can get shit-faced on a pub crawl and wake up the next day with gaps in my memory – sounds fun though. I had shards of rock embedded in all of my knuckles and in my forehead. Also, most of my hair was singed and there was a large patch of melted flesh clinging to my neck. Must’ve been quite a ‘night out’.

“I’m proud of you,” came Melon’s voice.