Z14 (33 page)

“I might rip it off and strangle him with it.” Yep, it definitely looked like a ‘him’.

“That chap’s probably cold, too,” said Melon. “Could you imagine it at full-”

“Enough, Doc!”

The alien had a painfully skinny, pale blue-tinged body, which sprouted long, spindly arms and legs with sharp, knobbly knees and elbows. Its head looked mostly human, although the nose was so long and thin that it looked almost more blade-like than nose-like. Large, circular eyes that were black pools within a milky murk narrowed slightly as he regarded me. He raised a pale blue palm towards me, as though casually ordering me to halt. Then he shook his head, causing his long black hair to fly back and forth.

“Grobular mon sock tu-allar gurk,” he said, in a deep but peevish tone.

“Welcome to Deliverance,” I said, then I broke into a run and charged straight at him.

His eyes widened and an odd, frilly, gill-like thing – that Melon hadn’t mentioned – fanned out around the front and sides of its neck, becoming visibly engorged with blood and turning red. I imagine that effect would have surprised a human somewhat, causing a corresponding drop in his attention, and therefore combat readiness, but I filtered it out as irrelevant to the fight. The alien suddenly looked scared; he looked like he was going through a fight or flight mental coin-toss.

His tiny nostrils flared, as, with a very nasal, almost trumpet-like tone the he said, “Phleet!” The word was long, drawn out and constantly rising in pitch. He took a step backwards. Ah-ha, hesitation. Gotcha. I launched into a dive and tackled the thing about the midriff, making sure to give a certain invitingly exposed target a quick punch, as he fell over backwards with me on top. His flappy, frilly neck ‘sack’, or whatever it was, deflated, becoming invisible against his skin once more.

I scrabbled into a position where I was sitting on his chest. Being careful that my great weight didn’t crush the stick-like creature’s ribs. I gave him a few slaps to the face, still being careful not to do any real damage.

He tried to take on a submissive posture that reminded me of a pack animal showing deference to the leader. Damn right, bluey, I’m the leader of the pack around here.

“Scurl!” he said.

“Rhubarb!” I shouted at him.

“Zoil gronna sock. Sock. Sock!”

Well, this could go on all day. I’d quite happily trade gibberish with him until he died of old age, except that this thing’s servitors were still out there, slicing people’s heads open and sucking out their brains. I grabbed the alien’s throat in one hand and squeezed ever so gently – for me – just hard enough to make it hard for him to breath. I turned my head and shouted, “Melon! Come!”

I held the alien there, on the edge of consciousness until Lothar and Kam – wearing big gas masks, with clear plastic face plates – came running, Kam carrying the doctor’s head. Getting their first proper look at the alien, Kam uttered an expression of amazement, whilst Lothar just shook his head with a kind of detached interest and grim look that implied the neighbourhood was going to hell in a handcart. Lothar had my old bag slung over his back. It contained the head of the Unknown Warden, whose body I’d hijacked, Kaboom’s stored personality and a brand new ‘Kam-special’ laser-weld contraption: He’d melted the face plates of a bunch of gas masks together, to make a bowl, which he’d filled with green brain-food goop…and Oxley’s brain. He’d then sealed the contraption up with some more precision melting and we had our very own Oxley in a jar. It’d be just our luck that the Kon Ramar god would take a fancy to Oxley’s brain and manifest himself inside it.

“Melon, can you speak their language?” I said. “This one seems to like socks.”

“Sock? That means, roughly, ‘I command you, slave’,” said Melon. “But no, I can’t speak their language, only read it. If this one doesn’t speak every major human language though, then I’d be very surprised.”

I stared into the alien’s eyes. “Point to your ship.”

It did so. Keeping one hand around its neck, I moved off of it, wrapped my other hand around both of its skinny naked ankles and lifted it up in front of me, horizontally. It was almost like carrying a long broom-handle, it was so light.

“Keep pointing to your ship,” I said. “If I see something I don’t like, I’ll drop your spine onto my knee. Got it?”

“Phleet!” said the alien, in its flattened trumpet tone again.

“That better be something like, ‘Please don’t kill me’,” I said, glancing at Melon – who Kam was kindly holding up, so as to give him a good view of events. The doctor had that frustrated look on his face which I had already learned to realise was him trying to nod when he couldn’t.

“Something like that,” he said eventually.

We all followed the alien’s outstretched arm, like some captive, biological compass, until we came to a two-foot thick sheet of metal with a tall control column sticking up out of the centre. It was hovering half a foot off the ground and continually swirling away the ever-encroaching gas cloud from underneath it.

“A light-raft!” shouted Melon.

“Wonderful. Can you fly it?” I asked Melon.

“Yes, if this Kon Ramar gets us through the forcefield. It will be attuned to his touch – that means he needs to be alive, Zed.”

I brought the alien’s face close to mine. “Do it,” I said to him. I walked towards the chunk of floating metal that passed as the Kon Ramar’s space shuttle. Melon hadn’t been joking when he’d told me a while ago that the Deliverance colonisation had been left to an old, obsolete fleet of ships. This thing was positively, well, alien.”

“Worgord foz-fold,” said the alien, as I felt a strong static charge in the air ahead. The creature held out a palm and I edged forward a little more. There was a quick white flash around the alien’s hand and the charge dissipated.

“All aboard who are coming aboard,” I said as I jumped up onto the metal platform, still holding the passive alien. The platform didn’t budge a millimetre as I landed. It stayed rock-steady. Very impressive. Kam stepped up, bringing Melon with him. Lothar screwed his face up, shut his eyes, shook his head and stepped aboard too. It was pretty crowded up here now.

“Kam, get Melon a look at that control column, will you?”

“Aye, aye, cap’n,” said Kam. It took a bit of delicate shuffling around between the three of us, and I accidentally winded Lothar with the alien’s head as I tried to get out of Kam’s way.

“Sorry, Lo,” I said.

“Don’t mention it,” said Lothar, on his knees, wheezing.

“Borrack mung-toh!” said the alien. Then it laughed. I didn’t like that laugh. I laid the alien back down on the floor, and sat astride him again.

“So, Melon, you
can
fly this thing, right?” I said.

The doctor was intently studying the console. “Mmmm, yes,” he said. “It’s quite simple. There’s a button to re-enable the forcefield, and another to return to the mother ship, which, according to the readout on this control panel, is directly above us.”

“That does sound simple, Doc,” I said. “Does that mean we don’t need all this extra weight?” I gestured at the alien.

“Technically, no, bu – ”

I deliberately played my son’s last words to the original me in my head, as I tightened my fingers ever harder around the alien’s neck. It was like increasing the pressure on a pencil between your fingers before it suddenly snaps. The alien died instantly. I let go and kicked his corpse off of the light-raft.

“Zed!” cried Melon.

“What?” I said. “You said we should show the Kon Ramar that we could be their equals. I make that: Kon Ramar, many billions. Humanity – as championed by Warden Z14 – one. We’ve got a long way to go before we’re equal.”

“I didn’t mean that kind of equ – ”

“Alright!” said Kam. “Give me some skin, Zed!”

“No way, I’ve only just got this body, I’m not parting with its skin anytime soon.”

Kam grinned.

“Doc,” I said. “Show Kam what buttons to press to re-enable the forcefield, and to get us docked with their mother-ship.”

“Okay, but the very second Kam presses the lift-off button, I suggest everyone sits, or lies down and shuts their eyes. Light-raft travel is not a fun experience.”

“Hit it, Kam,” I said. “Let’s finish this.”

Lothar lost his lunch all over my shoes as the light-raft shot straight up in the air, like a turbo-charged elevator. The ship did something to the atmosphere in the forcefield bubble surrounding us that thickened it somehow; increased the pressure and held us in place whilst cushioning us against the rapid acceleration.

Everyone else had their eyes shut, even Melon, which was odd as there was no way machines like us were going to get motion sickness, vertigo or even agoraphobia. No, I just enjoyed the ride. As we broke out of Deliverance’s atmosphere the forcefield flared white, long, bright and intense. It really ruined the bloody view.

And then we were in space, and I was mildly impressed. There wasn’t time to marvel, though, as we just just hurtled straight at another, much larger light-raft from underneath. Just when it looked like we were going to become a squashed space bug on the other craft, a hole the size of our own light-raft opened up, and we slotted right in. Our ship had basically just become an indistinguishable part of the much larger vessel.

The whole trip had taken three minutes and thirty seven seconds.

I’d like to say we caught the Kon Ramar with their pants down, but, seeing as how the five of them that were standing on the mother-ship – mother-raft? – were as naked as the day they were born, or hatched, or grown in vats, or whatever, that was technically impossible. As it was, they were about as ready for us as we were for them – not at all.

Our light-raft’s forcefield deactivated, now that we were part of the mother-raft. The way we had integrated with the main ship, and the fact that I could see five other control-columns like the one on our light-raft made it logical to conclude that this ship was made up from six light-rafts joined together.

Lothar picked up his sick-slicked laser rifle and aimed it at the nearest alien, who had something that looked like a television remote pointed at us. Kam aimed his own rifle at what looked to be the most important of the naked blue humanoids – the one with the already inflated neck-sack. One of the other four aliens was pointing a remote-like object at us, too. Kam shifted his aim to track that one instead. We had a bit of a stand-off to deal with.

I watched the engorged alien. Over his shoulder, beyond the mother-raft’s clear forcefield I could see a familiar-looking, more ‘traditional’ spaceship. That must be the stranded colony ship. My enhanced vision could pick out a tiny line of dots, like space-based worker ants, coming in and out of an airlock on the side of the ship. It was the trash-can harvester drones. But, had they popped up here to pick the brains of the stranded colonists, or were they delivering? Picking up, or dropping off?

“The alien with the fully deployed neck sack is the leader,” whispered Melon from the floor where his still pole-mounted head lay. “The Kon Ramar use their sacks to show leadership, dominance and to imply forthcoming aggression.

“That one, well, he’s basically their Pope, but is also what they call the Preeminent Lord of Holy Research,” continued Melon.

“Big cheese, huh? We kill him first then,” I whispered back.

“I was hearing that, Zach,” said their leader, in a thin, reedy voice. The words sounded like he was reading them, as though seeing a script for the first time. “My prodigious son re-runs.”

“The Kon Ramar have wonderful hearing,” said Melon. “But a poor grasp of other spoken tongues. I believe he means prodigal, not that it makes much sense anyway.”

“No shit, Doc,” I said. “But I
am
quite prodigious, you have to admit.”

I turned my gaze upon the ‘Pope’. “And who the fuck are you?” I said.

“Zach, Zach of Estramen? How forget-me-not? I am cry,” he said, with a leering grin.

“I know you, do I?” I said. I ran a quick search of my newly recovered, unopened memory files. Looking for the term ‘Pope’ in connection with ‘Kon Ramar’. I didn’t want to know everything about my past, but this way I could access relevant things as I decided I needed to. It took just milliseconds, but the search highlighted a few relevant memory fragments, so I accessed them, incorporating them into my database that serves for general, instant memory-recall.