Z14 (16 page)

“And did they succeed with their giant brain scheme?” I said. I was actually somewhat, fearful, about the answer.

“They tried many times. They put the human population – the five billion-odd who survived the chemicals the aliens used to subdue the planet – on ice and constructed, at first, a small network of one million brains. The brains were physically joined together with great, artificial synapses that had been cloned and grown from harvested stem cells, and there were fleshy tubes, almost like plant roots attached to parts of the brain network. These feeding roots were connected to nutrient vats – oh and just guess what, or rather who, they pulped to make those nutrients.

“It was a dismal failure. The brains just died. So they tried again, upping their game this time, undeterred by failure. Ten million brains. Failure. One hundred million, and then a billion. And that’s when they cracked it.”

“They summoned their fucking god?” Lothar shouted in disbelief.

“No, no,” said Melon. “But they had a stable, living, thinking organism. I can’t describe to you just how advanced these people are; they hooked the brain up to computers and they spoke to it. To see if it was their god. It wasn’t, it was a woman from an English city called Bristol, she had somehow dominated the group mind, and she spoke to the aliens.”

“Wow. Insane, but, wow,” said Lothar. “What did she say?”

“Not a lot,” said Melon. “She mostly talked about shoes.”

“Shoes?” I said.

“Shoes. And her dog, Alfie. It was his birthday, you see.”

I laughed along with Lothar. “Good story Doc.”

“It’s the truth,” said Melon.

“Doc, get the fuck outta here with this shit,” said Lothar.

“I swear, cross my heart, hope to die. Again. I’ve seen footage of the experiments. I’ve read their racial history. Their very recent racial history.”

“Why does that sound so ominous Doc?” I said.

“Because – and this is why I was so desperate to reach you, to re-program you, and eventually others – they failed on Earth. They used up their entire stock of billions of humans, but, in doing so they worked out the optimal size of the brain network.”

“And would that be, say, roughly the size of the population of Deliverance?” I said.

“I’m nodding gravely right now,” said Melon. “You just can’t see.”

“You’re right doc, this is nuts,” I said.

“It is. Utterly, completely mental. Laughable, even. But it’s happened, and it’s going to happen here, and again, and again elsewhere until they succeed, or they wipe out humanity in the process.”

“Well,” I said, monitoring my thermal scanner. “They’ve got one less brain to use on this planet now.” The Kaboom Baboon had just died.

“Damn. C’mon! Step on it people!” shouted Lothar. We pedalled like mad, but right now, reviving one little human seemed utterly irrelevant. Although, if I couldn’t find a way to care about the fate of a human I’d known and had some kind of fondness for, then how and why would I give a fuck about millions of faceless humans who were just numbers. Hell, part of me even thought a giant, oozing mass of human brains holding some dark alien god would be kind of a cool thing to see in one’s life.

“How do you fight crazy aliens who can knock out a planet without setting foot on it?” I said.

“With their own weapons,” said Melon. “With you.”

The humans dug deep into their energy reserves and picked up their pace remarkably; driven by the desire to save their dead comrade. Melon babbled away, trying to be reassuring, saying that he may have been too conservative in his estimates of how long the brain could be dead before the alien technology could no longer read it.

We had cut our travel time in half, but would it be enough? The humans were nearly spent; their heads hung forward as they panted, hunched over their handlebars, dead legs endlessly pushing at the pedals.

We entered the Manoogla Heights. That meant hills – big ones. The humans would have suffered, tackling them on their bikes, even with fresh legs, so I ordered the dismount. We’d be just as quick on foot. The ship actually wasn’t hidden very deeply into the Heights, relative to where we’d entered the area. Besides, with the way the terrain turned rocky – where the shards of the oddly missing mountains were – the Kambulance might not have made it through the smaller gaps between boulders and jagged, jutting rocks. Another consideration was those bloody lizards. Whilst I could heat-scan for them, they liked to hide under and behind rocks and explode as you went past. We needed to travel together, on foot, and have eyes and guns covering every angle.

Looking out for Manooglas on the fly, whilst carrying Kaboom’s body would be perilous. If I had both my arms and feet I could just sling him over a shoulder, and we could all press on, but I was a bit of a cripple these days. Of course, Doctor Melon then piped up with a rather gruesome solution to the Kaboom problem.

“Since he’s dead, we don’t technically need the, ah, the body any more,” he said. Even Oxley got that one and he gave a grim nod, matched by Lothar.

“You lot won’t want to watch this,” I said. Those who had backs they could turn did so. I limped over to the body. I’d never pulled a human’s head off with just one arm before. I elected to get his rather fat neck in the crook of my elbow, which took an awful amount of faffing around. Once in position I squeezed, wrenched and twisted simultaneously. There was no blood flow to speak of – he’d been dead for nearly two hours by now – but in the still and quiet of the afternoon air, everyone heard the popping of cartilage, the crack of bone and the wet tearing of flesh as I wrestled their friend’s head from his shoulders.

“I’d just like everyone to know,” said Oxley. “That I already had a boner before I heard that.” Kam elbowed him in the ribs.

I put the head, along with a grumbling Melon, into my bag and had Kam arrange it on my back so that I could still both use my jetpack, and sling my automatic rifle over a shoulder. Then I scanned as far into the rocks ahead as I could. I couldn’t pick up a single lizard, or anything else. It didn’t mean they weren’t there, but, maybe, hopefully, I’d thinned out the area’s bastard exploding bastard lizard population during my last visit here, round about this time yesterday.

“Lothar, the ship’s almost due north of here,” I said. “I’ll fly on ahead with Kaboom and the doc, and make a start on bringing him back. We’ll get him on a storage unit, and you guys get to me with T9 as fast as you can. Be safe though, go steady, the Manooglas are tricky little wankers. Mobile land-mines, essentially.”

I decided to fly up and heat-scan the area ahead, so I could give the guys a bit more of an idea about potential Manoogla locations ahead. I took off, jetpack roaring. I didn’t get very high at all before, nought point zero two seconds before I registered a human heat signature ahead and below, a black laser bolt sizzled up and past me from the direction of the ship. I killed my thrust and plummeted to the earth, stabilising my fall with little bursts of flame from the jetpack just before I landed. An emergency controlled descent. I was right back next to Lothar and the other two, who’d already taken up defensive positions. I dropped my bag, unslung my weapon, held it steady with my one arm and stood brazenly in the open, scanning several possible rocky passages that the shooter and his probable allies might emerge from. When I remembered to factor plasma weapons into the combat simulations that were whizzing through my processors, I took up a more sensible firing position behind a rock. Must learn caution. I’m far from the top dog in these parts now, damn it. Damn it!

After five minutes, nobody came. We hastily distributed the three heads we were now lugging around between us like some demented lost tribe of head-hunters, shouldered our bags and then advanced into the rocky heights. We covered each other and moved in pairs, turn by turn. Something moved ahead. Manoogla, or humanoid, it didn’t matter. I poured bullets into it before anyone else had even seen it. It was a grey-skin – now how the hell had the Overlords found the shuttle?

To my left, Lothar fired at something, which exploded. Manoogla. A white laser bolt came from behind the explosion, clipping Lothar’s cowboy hat and setting it on fire. He cursed and swatted the flame out with his bare hand. Man, he must really love that hat. Kam tossed a small grenade over a rock. The white laser shooter must’ve ducked behind it after firing, because with the dull crump of the grenade came a very welcome scream.

We carried on advancing. Time was of the essence, but how could Kaboom’s cold, dead brain still be of any use to us? I took the lead through a narrow pass between two long and tall, blade-like rocks. As I neared the other end a soldier with a plasma rifle stepped out with a grin on his face. I thrust my gun into his stomach and out through his back. I squeezed the trigger, and waved the gun and the dying man around as I gunned down six or seven others who’d been queueing to follow him through the small pass. Firing and explosions came from behind me – sounded like rear-guard Oxley was dealing with some sort of Manoogla swarm. We were edging ever closer, but what the fuck were these bastards doing here? I did wonder why they were now overtly hostile to me, but no doubt the ruin of my face – thanks T9 – and the pace of the combat, might have been the reason they weren’t offering to take me to their leader.

“This is Zed Fourteen,” I shouted. “We don’t want a fight.”

A huge boulder in front of me glowed red for a micro-second. That was all it took for my super-fast computer mind to realise a plasma blast had been fired at me through the fucking rock. I threw myself on the floor and the bolt went through where I’d been standing, melting its way through more rock behind me. As I struggled to my feet, three more soldiers appeared where I’d just gunned down their friends. They had projectile weapons, so I could have just laughed at their pathetic wasp stings, but, what I did laugh at was the Manoogla that clambered onto a rock above them before diving into their midst and detonating. I swear the little shit had a lizardy grin on its face.

We surged – and limped – ahead. Oxley was walking backwards, back to back with Kam, so that Kam could guide him without Oxley having to keep looking over his shoulder. Staccato bursts of gunfire from Oxley’s weapon told me he was holding someone, or something off behind us. He’d shout if he couldn’t deal with the situation. Another Manoogla appeared above us this time, but Lothar coolly shot it through the head with one bullet. It exploded but was too far away to hurt us, although a few razor-sharp stone chips were blasted free, clattering into the rock around us.

The way forward became a tight maze of natural, rocky corridors, branching off in many directions. I superimposed a red path directly to the shuttle on my vision – augmented reality. Getting lost in this section would be bad news. I led the way, and soon came to a natural tee-junction. I could hear the breathing of a human who thought he was lying in wait for me. Even with my limp I was around the corner before he knew what was happening. I swung my gun with the momentum of my turn and pierced his skull with the weapon’s barrel. I wrenched it free and trampled the corpse. Ahead was a single file of six humans, funnelled into a passage so narrow their shoulders were cramped up against the walls. The lead man couldn’t bring his plasma rifle to bear as I lowered my head and turned myself into a human missile, igniting my jetpack – after checking Lothar hadn’t rounded the corner yet. I flew straight at the human soldier ahead. His jaw dropped and he desperately tried to scrabble backwards, but his mate was right behind him and another behind him, and and so on; ones who had not seen what was happening. In barely a second I crashed into the lead human. My bowed head plunged through his sternum and ribcage and I crushed his heart and his lungs with the top of my head. The transferred force of the impact probably killed the next man too, he certainly crumpled to the floor. I extricated my bloody head and as that corpse also fell, I raised my gun and poured the rest of its magazine into the tightly packed troops ahead of me. When my bullets ran out I threw the gun like a cumbersome javelin into the chest of the last man. Then I limped awkwardly over the squelchy carpet of dead humans.

A large open area was ahead, but, just as I stepped out into it, a Manoogla came out of some kind of burrow in the stony ground and exploded. The force of the explosion swept my legs from under me and I crashed to the floor. At the other end of the clearing, three laser armed grey-skins started plinking away at me. They all had the default red selection for their laser bolts, so I was unable to make a good note of the one who scored a hit on my right eye, melting the eyeball in a flash, but doing nothing to the ocular array underneath. But, even as I scrabbled to my feet, I was in danger of taking real damage, as the soldiers had gone into continuous fire mode. I was starting to heat up dangerously where two of the lasers converged on my chest.

“What are you doing?” wailed an object that flew through the air, striking one of the grey-skins in the face. He went down in a heap and the thrown object – Doctor Melon’s head – latched onto one of his calf muscles, chomping on it and growling like a dog. Lothar stepped into view, out of the gore-filled passage behind me and into the clearing. He calmly drew his sidearm as he moved. One of the two remaining grey-skins hurriedly swept his laser beam across the ground between Lothar and me. Lothar hopped over it as it swept past him, firing two shots as he jumped. Both soldiers fell as misty clouds of blood exploded around their heads. I managed to push myself to my feet. Crisis averted, no damage done. Skeleton: Not compromised. Flesh: Yeah, mostly gone again. Why do I bother growing it back, honestly?