Z14 (25 page)

They did so, taking a good hour to heat and partially melt enough of Third Melon’s skeleton that I could pull out my stub of an arm. It was all warm and drippy at its end, although it rapidly cooled and hardened. It now vaguely resembled a melted then re-solidified piece of plastic.

No sooner had we finished, and I was assessing just how useless Third Melon’s own broken body was, Third Melon broke my law and spoke.

“Zed?” he said.

“If this isn’t very, very important,” I said. “I will kill all four of you Melon fuckers.” R1’s bisected head was also now part of the growing collection of transferred Melon personalities. I seriously considered going back to the ship in the Heights with three randomly snatched humans and forcibly encoding their brains just so that I could have some different people to chit-chat to about cyborgy stuff, other than the burgeoning empire of Melons.

“It is indeed important,” said Third Melon.

“Hey,” shouted Oxley from his crash site at the fence. “Have you guys forgotten about me? Guys?” Everyone ignored him.

“What is it?” I said to Third Melon, instead.

“Well, since we’re going to be abandoning this body,” he said. “Could somebody please cut my throat?”

“I beg your pardon,” I said.

“If someone separates all the flesh of my neck from my torso, I have something as clever as it is useful to show you.”

“Hell, I’ll do it,” said Kam eagerly. He had already produced a large, wickedly serrated combat knife from some hidden sheath – a neat trick for a man wearing just a kilt and a Hawaiian shirt underneath those crossed bandoleers of his.

Kam walked up to Third Melon and began to saw and chop at his neck. The crispy burnt skin crackled under the knife and it wasn’t long before Kam stepped away, task complete.

“We have achieved separation,” he said. Then he jumped back a step further because Third Melon’s head made a clicking sound and then fell off, and thumped to the floor.

“I have just discovered how to disconnect body parts at will,” said Third Melon from the ground. His tone resonated with pride.

“Fantastic,” I said, seeing a glimmer of hope for my lost arm and my effectively lost leg. “I take it you can reattach, too?”

“Ah,” said Third Melon. “Not yet, no. I have yet to figure that part out.”

“So, you didn’t think to pop off W12’s undamaged limbs before you ejected the head?”

“Oh. Ah. No. Sorry.”

“You absolute moron,” I said. “Pass your findings onto the other idiot Melons, and then, not another bloody word. Got it?” Beautiful silence was my confirmation that he got it.

“Find out if there’s a way to get dead, headless cyborgs to relinquish their limbs.” I told Third Melon. We still had T9’s corpse on the Kambulance. She had a fully functional left arm, and both her and W12’s bodies had perfect right legs that I could make use of too. In the meantime though, I might as well do what I could to make my left arm a bit more useful. Especially whilst Kam seemed to be in a mood where if it wasn’t welded down, then, well, he’d weld it down.

I had found a big metal-hafted, rubber-gripped sledgehammer in the bunker storeroom and I got Kam to strip the rubber off and then weld and strap the great iron lump to my stump. It took another hour, during which time Lothar went and put Oxley out of his misery; he walked over to where New and Classic Melon had crashed the wheelchair, and, with a great, struggling heave he righted it. He then had to dive out of the way as the two Melons hit the gas a bit too hard and all but ran him down. When Kam had finished with me, I sort-of had a new arm, but with a dirty-great hammerhead for a fist.

“Beep beep!” shouted Oxley, laughing and looking over his shoulder at a furious, fist-waving Lothar. He was still laughing when the Melons steered the wheelchair smack bang into a tree. Yeah, they were definitely getting better at it.

*

I had decided to ignore the communication from Chester Boram. I was backing my Melons, not him. My theory, assessed and rated against a number of possible scenarios, suggested to me that the Overlords had activated a bunch of Wardens, without really knowing what they were doing, or even where the ones they’d activated were on the planet. The fact they’d then had to kill three of them, with heavy losses despite their plasma weapons, told me they’d not been expecting the Wardens to be hostile upon activation. Not a total disaster though, because, since the Wardens weren’t being given orders by the computer aboard the colony fleet flagship, they had been relatively easy pickings; either for the Overlords, or for me and my gang. Boram Bay might experience a few ructions from the last three active ones, but I’d imagine the Overlords’ troops would cope – even if only by burying the Wardens underneath great mounds of their grey-clad corpses. I did hope though that they’d all refrain from wiping the city out in the process.

We were hoping to get to the Bay and figure out how to find and board the submerged flagship. From there, Melon should be able to do a better job of activating and controlling the still-sleeping, thirty-two – projected minimum – Wardens.

We’d get all this done in time to surprise the Kon Ramar when they showed up. The grey-skins and the last three Wardens would be slugging it out with each other, whilst we snuck in and saved the world, and then the universe. Easy. Except, anyone who thought it would actually go down like that needed to re-run their scenario outcome prediction and simulation routines again, with the ‘likely_fuckups’ variable set to ‘lots’.

We formed an odd little convoy as we rolled out of the bunker, hopefully for the last time. Up front was Kam, astride a normal, unmodified bicycle. He’d donned a pair of shades, against the mid-morning sun and if it weren’t for the laser rifle slung over his shoulder and the company he was keeping, he could have just been out for a jolly bike ride, without a care in the world.

Next, weaving and lurching all over the narrow dirt track that led away from the bunker came the jetpack-powered, cyborg-steered wheelchair, with a snoring Oxley strapped down tight. The wheelchair was followed up by Lothar and I, back aboard the Kambulance, towing two dead cyborgs, two ‘live’ heads, and all of our worldly possessions, not forgetting the memory module in my own bag that contained poor old Kaboom’s encoded brain. I’d considered replacing at least one – hell even all four – of the Melon’s with Kaboom’s personality, but, Classic Melon said he had not yet thought of a way of preventing an instant repeat of Kaboom’s explosive first and last experience of cyborg life. Melon may, of course, have been lying about that to save himself, or rather save one of his selves. Would Melon move out of one of his four heads if I asked him to. He’d already said once before that he would fight the invading personality if I had tried to put Kaboom into his head. Well, we’d just see how that went when the time came to do try it.

Even with my newly busted knee-joint, I could still cycle, albeit with one leg. I had to push the pedal down with my left foot, before using the toes of my boot to hook it back up to the top, replant my foot on the top of it and push down again. Fucking awkward, but I could still do it faster, and with more power than old wheezy-fart-pants Lothar next to me.

The four Melon heads had formed their own silent network now. I was a little worried about that. One Melon had proved to be a bit of a lying, scheming fuck – although I had come to accept his motivations, if not his actions – so I had to wonder what sort of scheme four of them might try to concoct. I wanted those heads though, even if I didn’t want all of them to be part of what Classic Melon was now referring to as the Melon Hive. Blithering idiots, the lot of them.

“Are the three remaining Wardens still en route to Boram Bay?” I said.

“Affirmative,” said Classic Melon. “They have converged en route and will all arrive there in an hour.”

“No more activations?”

“Negative.”

“Yes or no will do, Doc,” I said.

“Roger that,” said Classic Melon. Oxley must’ve heard someone talking about rogering, because he stirred in his sleep.

It was going to take us a minimum of two hours to get to Boram Bay, go all the way through it and reach the Bay’s bay. I very much hoped that the grey-skins and the last three Wardens took longer than that to wipe each other out, as having to fight whatever remained of the winning side would be a dangerous delay.

There hadn’t been time for any healing this time, so with crispy flakes of my terribly burned flesh crumbling off of me as I pushed and pulled clumsily at the pedal, I increased my speed, forcing Lothar to redouble his efforts. He stood up out of his saddle and pumped away furiously at the pedals, whilst trumping away just as furiously in his pants. I swear, I had never realised what a gassy individual he was before now.

Onward then, to the flagship, to fight whoever or whatever got in my way. To save Deliverance from, well, just whatever the fuck was going to happen to it, and perhaps to see if there was a dusty old box lying around with ‘Zach Estramen’s long-dead memories’ scrawled on it in marker-pen. Fuck all good it would do me knowing anything about myself from centuries ago and light-years away, but I was indulging in a certain amount of very human curiosity.

One hour, three minutes and twelve seconds of steady cycling later, we were still approximately an hour away from the outskirts of Boram Bay. The terrain had been a little more difficult than I’d hoped, before we’d eventually got onto one of Deliverance’s very few tarmac roads. It led to the now destroyed colony city of Jolly Meadows, and, apart for the last few miles into Boram Bay, it was nothing more than a wide dirt track. We came down on it from out of some wooded hills, and joined it just where the tarmac began. We were back in sort-of civilisation. Classic Melon gave me an update on the progress of the three incoming Wardens.

“Their positions indicate they are just over five hundred feet out to sea, in the bay alongside Boram Bay,” he said. “It would appear they are also fifty-two feet below the seabed.”

“So they’re aboard the flagship, then?” I said.

“A logical assumption,” said Classic Melon.

Shit. That was probably bad. Hopefully it was going to be bad for Chester Boram before it proved to be bad for me, though.

Ten minutes later, whilst I was scanning the news channels and the ‘net, for news of fighting in Boram Bay – and listening out for the distant crump of explosions – I got yet another email message from the Grand Overlord:

I gave you a chance. Come and talk to me, I said. I could provide you with answers, to help you, improve you and then you could in turn help me sort this sorry planet out and, eventually, take to the stars and achieve amazing things out there. Re-discover Earth, even. But no, it’s too late now. I don’t need you anymore, and, by all accounts you’re a shadow of the former sleek, efficient killer you once were. No, my dear, I’ve got three brand new friends now. Obedient, loyal and willing. And they aren’t damaged goods like you are.

You’re obsolete. I won’t waste time and resources looking for you. This planet won’t be my concern much longer, so you can hobble about in its ruins for all I care. But, if you come here now, you will be defeated and junked like the rundown heap of shitty scrap that you are.

Wow, what an impatient fuck-wit the Grand Dick Head is then. But, oh dear; unless he was full of shit, he had the last three Wardens under control. There’d be no battle in Boram Bay now – until we got there and started one.

I had been expecting the Grand Overlord to have every road into Boram Bay check-pointed and guarded, but that didn’t seem to be the case. At least not for the road we entered the city by, and the Boram Bay to Jolly Meadows dusty highway was as big as roads got on Deliverance. No sign of soldiers anywhere. Very little sign of life at all, really, although it was still only fairly early morning. The odd civilian buggy trundled around, and a few people here and there dotted the dirty streets, going about their business. Our little bike-based convoy drew some very strange looks, but when you see a charred, living corpse like me riding a bicycle down the main road of your city on Deliverance, you quickly choose to pretend you haven’t seen it.

Chester must’ve known that stopping me getting into the city was futile. I had killed enough of his acquaintances via subterfuge over the years that he knew a roadblock wouldn’t stop me. No, he’d concentrate his defences around his headquarters – which encompassed the old colony command centre; the bridge of the converted colony ship. Besides, I had no idea just how many of his troops the cyborgs had killed, before he had seemingly gotten three of them under control, hopefully his forces were depleted and stretched thin.