Z14 (29 page)

“Oh, hi Zed,” said the newest incarnation of The Kaboom Baboon, who had already stood up and backed away from the rest of the scramble. “I saved you? And I did – ”

“Kaboom,” I yelled as I wildly waved my sledgehammer in front of me to ward off a feinted rush from the Warden who’s arm, leg and head I’d just battered. He was a bald, ancient-looking brown-skinned fellow. “There’s no time for that shit. Find your self-destruct!” The ancient Warden came at me again, catching the head of my hammer in one hand, and trying to jerk me towards him. I’d anticipated that, and instead managed to punch him in the face with my good hand. It was a solid punch, and it caved his face in slightly.

The third Warden, a skinny young white guy with a pathetic, wispy ginger beard was favouring his right-foot after I’d smashed his heel when I’d tripped them both. He seemed to be squaring up to Kaboom, obviously aware their former comrade was now mine. Sort of.

“Self destruct?” said Kaboom. As he said it, he reached up to the side of his head and found the data unit sticking out of his ear. He tugged it out, glanced at it and then, with a look on his face, and a reflexive motion that said, “Ick, what is it? Get it away from me, yuck, yuck, ick,” he hurled it down the sub-corridor I’d leapt from.

 
I briefly wondered what roles these Wardens had played in our research team, centuries ago back on Earth. The whispy-bearded Warden threw a punch at the understandably confused Kaboom, but, luckily for the former human, his combat programming was running on processes inside his electronic brain that were separate from his human ones, so he ‘instinctively’ dodged the punch, whilst launching a solid jab of his own.

“Why would I want to self destruct?” said Kaboom. What the fuck? Now was not the time for Kaboom to veer from the script I’d come to expect. Blow up you tubby idiot!

As the old Warden and I engaged in a furious, blurred exchange of blocked punches, hammer swings, foot stamps and raised knees, I yelled at Kaboom, “Come on now, Kaboom, you’re in a Warden’s body and there’s a big shiny self-destruct button in there. You’re The Kaboom Baboon, how can you resist?”

My adversary caught my hammer head again and this time he wrenched it, hard. The welded join with my arm stump gave way and he snapped the hammer off, reversed it and used the head to crush my left shoulder into the wall behind me, in a crunch of shattering wall tiles. Oh, and my shoulder joint was pretty much flattened, too.

“But, I don’t want to blow up,” said Kaboom. “This is going to take some serious getting used t – Oh, wow look at all this shit in here! I’m on the ‘net…I can, fuck, I can do anything.” Oh, were we back on script?

Kaboom’s opponent got through his distracted defence, then, kicking him in the chest and sending him staggering up the main corridor. “Ouch,” said Kaboom, sounding angry. No, still off the script. Damn.

The ancient Warden had the advantage over me now. Even though I chopped at his arm with the blade of my hand, causing him to drop my sledgehammer to the floor, he focused on the gaping wound in my side. He reached in with both hands, wrapped them around my spine and started wrenching and pulling, trying to shake and snap my metal vertebrae. My reply was to butt him in the face as hard as I could. As he reeled back, I snatched a glance up the corridor. Kaboom saw me looking at him.

“Baboon,” I said. “This is important. We can bring you back again afterwards.” He’d already thrown the data unit clear, bless him.

The black Warden recovered his balance, lifted one of his feet above the height of my knee, and then brought it down in a stamping kick that pulverised my already broken knee joint. I fell to the floor. Oh fuck. I started to wonder if I might be in a spot of trouble.

“I dunno,” said Kaboom. “I should ask Lothar.” The beardy Warden rushed at him and the two duked it out, trading punches.

“Fuck Lothar! Do it, or we’re both dead.” Of course, Kaboom blowing up right next to me was hardly going to be good for my health, but, well, I’d think of something.

“Ten…” said the voice I’d been hoping to hear from Kaboom.

The old Warden lashed out at my prone form with a savage kick. I deflected it over me with my good arm, and his foot smashed through some wall tiles, getting stuck in the solid rock beyond that the tunnel corridor must have originally been dug into.

“Nine…” said Kaboom’s other voice. “I found it!”

Kaboom’s adversary spun a round-house kick that hit him in the shoulder, crashing him against a wall, but leaving him upright.

“Eight…”

“Well done, Kaboom,” I said. “I’ll get you back, I promise.”

“Seven…”

As Kaboom dropped to his knees, letting his opponent’s fist sail over his head, I thumped my own fist down on my opponent’s free foot – once, twice, three times, in a blur of motion, like some pneumatic pounding machine.

“Six…”

The old Warden fell awkwardly on top of me, his free foot broken, his other still trapped in the wall, bending his leg at what, for a human would be a stressful angle, threatening to buckle the joint.

“Five…”

Kaboom had been kneed in the head by his attacker, and had fallen on his face. He struggled to rise, but his foe leapt astride his back.

“Four…”

I couldn’t stand up, nor wriggle free of the old Warden, who, almost mimicking Kaboom’s struggle, was unintentionally sitting on me. He tried to wrench his foot free of the wall, as I head-butted him in the groin. Oof, right in his nozzle.

“Three…”

The bearded Warden had grabbed Kaboom by the hair and started slamming his face into the floor, over and over. He was probably trying to deactivate the self-destruct – by deactivating Kaboom. A sound plan and one I would approve of were the situations reversed.

“Two…” Kaboom’s alternate voice was muffled as he forcibly ate floor tiles.

I wasn’t going to get away. A sinking realisation on my human side, even as every process I had been automatically running, desperately trying to plan an escape, chimed in with agreement.

“One…” Kaboom’s voice was weak. He was fading. I could imagine the warnings blaring in his mind that cranial integrity was compromised.

I had one chance left. I grabbed a fistful of my opponent’s lovely, retro tweed jacket and pulled him down on top of me.

“Kaboo – ” yelled Kaboom, before being cut off by the explosion inside his head.

The noise was tremendous. My system automatically all but shut-off my audio input to prevent damage to my sensitive hearing equipment, but I could do nothing about the exposed parts of my body, underneath the fully exposed, old man Warden. I felt immense, searing pain as a shard of hot cyborg alloy went through my own still exposed spine, just above my pelvis, severing my spinal column. Kaboom and the other Warden were both comprehensively destroyed, and shrapnel even went through my now dead, inhuman shield and pierced what remained of my own body in dozens of places.

I clumsily shoved the corpse off of me and then I lay still for a moment, on my back, staring at the ceiling. I had hoped to be nowhere near the explosion in the tunnel, when it went off, as I feared a collapse. However, it appeared we were surrounded by many metres of thick rock, and Kaboom’s latest explosive demise had merely served to excavate a small cavern around the detonation point.

I barely took all that in though. I was more occupied by my internal damage alerts. I had never seen so much bad news scrolling through my system before. Most of it was banging on about superficial dents and scratches, but “Warning: Legs Severed” sounded just a tad serious. Ah-ha, using understatement to comedic effect: Five years of human humour studies, still not paying off. I emulated a sigh, before using my arm – of which I now entirely had only one – to push my oddly light, broken torso over onto its front.

“Melon?” I called. “Melon?”

“Zed?” shouted the doctor. I suppressed a very real giggle – boy did I need a doctor, right now. Hah.

“In the flesh, Doc,” I said. “Well, I think I have a patch or two of flesh left under my armpit, anyway.” I began pulling myself along the corridor, throwing my forearm out, just in front of my head, and using it to pull and drag myself forward a bit, and then repeating. It was as awkward and ungainly as it sounded, but, being a powerful machine, I could still go at a fair old clip. It’s not like I was going to get tired. I moved over to where I’d thrown Melon. On the way I went past my bag. A quick glance inside told me that Fourth Melon had taken a load of shrapnel in the blast. He was dead. Oh well, never mind, I’m sure that at the rate I accumulated Melons there’d be a half-dozen more along soon. They were annoying little know-it-alls, but at least they didn’t tend to explode. Exploding Baboons and scheming Melons; what a strange world I now lived in.

I reached the original, the classic and now the
only
Melon, who was utterly unscathed; his head lying there on its side, watching me approach in slack-jawed amazement.

“Wow, Zed. You’re…um, ah, alive,” he said, taking in the state of me in a mix of shock and pity. “That’s, that’s…good. That is.” His face said he’d rather be dead than be in my state. Hah, he was one to talk – or he would have been if he’d vocalised that thought. I almost felt like obliging the unspoken thought.

“Let’s get going, then,” I said. “I don’t suppose you can move around using your lips, can you?”

“Hah. No,” he said. “By the way, something flew past me not long after you started all that ruckus with the Wardens. It landed just over there.” He gestured further along the corridor with rolls of his eyes. I dragged myself along until I came across good old Kaboom’s memory unit. I clutched it in my hand and dragged myself back over to Melon. I wedged the unit into Melon’s mouth, then I grabbed the pole his head was still welded onto and threw it back down the sub-corridor, back to the junction that was full of the remains of three and a half cyborgs. Fuck, I’d miss those legs of mine a lot. We’d been through a lot together and they’d always been there to support me. That one was definitely going into the humour database.

I made my torturous way down the main corridor again, heading in the direction the Wardens had come from. Every few yards I had to stop and grab Melon, with his mouth-full of data unit and throw him a bit further ahead of me.

This was madness, but pressing on was still all that was left to me. Sure, the Kon Ramar’s nearest Warden was still more than five hours away, but they could have literally anything else out there that had come with them from, well, wherever the hell they’d come from. Melon had said previously that they would only send their currently Earth-based religious, scientific group that also formed their political leadership. Yet more madness if that were true – scouting a potentially hostile situation with your most important assets? And these crazy idiots had built the likes of
me
?

It wasn’t long before we reached our final destination: The room where the three Wardens had – ever since we tracked their arrival in Boram Bay less than four hours ago – been pacing back and forth. Now I knew why, and I didn’t know whether to turn on the waterworks, or to howl with laughter.

Grand Overlord Chester Boram had built his own living brain network.

The corridor had opened out into a huge, cavernous white-tiled and brightly lit room. On one side was an enormous aquarium full of green goop and – quick tally-up – fifty-seven human brains. In the middle of the room, just sitting on the floor, joined together by webs and tendrils of a fleshy rope-like substance were another thousand-odd brains. They all seemed to be connected to a cluster of five brains, which in turn were joined by those same strands of matter to one more brain. One that was snuggly nestled inside the open skull of a head – still attached to its body – that was unmistakably that of Grand Overlord Chester Boram himself.

And he was alive.

And he looked at me.

And he said, “Zee fourteen, we meet at last.”

“Astonishing,” said Doctor Melon. I’d thrown him into the room ahead of me, and he had a good view of Chester’s little experiment.

Now, I’m no expert on gigantic, inter-connected, living brain networks, but this looked like a fairly rushed, slap-dash, ad-hoc setup to me. I’m sure when the Kon Ramar did this they didn’t just leave a bunch of wired-up brains lying around on the floor, where any clumsy old, half-destroyed cyborg might ‘accidentally’ splatter one of them…

Chester’s stern old features, that I’d last seen in a video conversation, lit up in the kind of smile that would make many a grown human feel nervous. “You’re probably wondering just what I’m up to, Zee,” said Chester. If he was concerned about the fact that his last few body – brain? – guards had just been destroyed, he certainly wasn’t showing it. But, there would have been no way he would have been expecting to send three fit and healthy Wardens after me only to see the battered ruin of his – fairly recently declared – enemy come pulling itself across the floor towards him.