Z14 (8 page)

“Another cousin?” said Lothar.

“Sounds like it,” I said. “Change of plan. You guys take the head. Keep moving around randomly until you meet up with Kaboom and then get to the bunker, quickly. I’ll be there as soon as I can. I have to check this news report out.”

Lothar considered briefly. He knew me leaving them with the head left them as not just targets, but vulnerable targets. “Okay, Zee, you crazy machine bastard. We’ll see you there. Happy hunting.” It was a calculated risk. Lothar would only have Q4’s head in the open for a short time, but I needed to be at Jolly Meadows as soon as possible, if I was going to be able to find out what had happened there before the area got cleaned up.

I pulled Q4 out of my bag again – he didn’t have anything to say this time. I tossed him to Oxley and threw Doctor Melon’s storage device to Lothar. “Look after this for me too, Lothar,” I said. “Destroy it if that’s what happens to me.” I shouldered my bag, took a few steps away from the flammable humans and ignited my jetpack.

Oxley gave Q4 a strange look as I took to the air. “Hey, do you think he’d bite my dick off if I stuck it in his mou – “ Thankfully I rapidly left audible range as I blazed off in the direction of Jolly Meadows.

Jolly Meadows had always been a misleading name – far from being, say, a sprawling city amidst lush and fertile fields, it’s actually a jumbled heap of a city, in a narrow, rocky valley. It’s the most densely populated city in Deliverance’s Northern hemisphere. Or rather, it used to be.

The city appeared on the horizon as a smoky orange glow against the midnight sky. ‘Extreme measures’, the news report had said. Extreme understatement. As I neared the city I flew high enough to get a good overview of it, but without getting close enough to worry about being seen. But seen by whom? With so much smoke, and so many fires still burning, even I could only estimate the amount of damage done here, but I’d say a good seventy-five percent of the city was now rubble, ash and slag. Most of the rest would yet go the same way. Judging by where the fires still burned brightest, it would seem that the trouble had initially begun at the city’s historic centre, where the colony ship’s bridge would have become the early headquarters. I landed on the outskirts of the dying city, switched all my scanning systems on and began a steady, measured jog towards the centre.

After the fight with Q4, I reasoned that since I was likely to be facing other, better-prepared cyborgs in combat, now might be time to break the habit of a – known –
 
lifetime and arm myself. Doing my assassination work unarmed had been a fun little challenge I’d set myself – a way to keep me on my toes rather than just being boring and mechanically gunning everyone down all the time. I’ve never had to fight fair before, but now that an unknown number of hostile cyborgs who wanted to do me mischief had potentially reversed the scales, I should do what I could to make things unfair again.

There are plenty of things already on Deliverance that can kill me, mind you. Some of the more wealthy humans and their underlings have various laser weapons, with which they could actually permanently harm, or even destroy me – if only they could hold the things on me long enough in the same area to heat up and melt part of my skeleton. The rare times I came up against laser-wielding foes though, I’d known it in advance – it pays to swot up on a target – and generally taken them out first, or avoided them. When I did get hit by them they melted the flesh off me in an instant. But hey, it looks like I’m done wearing skin these days anyway – fuck knows when I’ll get time for some regeneration in the near future.

The humans could also do away with me by crushing me with immense pressure; by sawing at my skull for long enough with diamond-tipped tools; by throwing me into molten lava, or by detonating nuclear weapons in my personal space.
Or
they could wise up a bit and develop theoretically viable plasma-based energy weapons…which, unfortunately, is what I suddenly went on to discover they had now done.

With my heat and infra-red scanners partially blinded by the swirling maelstrom of countless fires around me, it was only my motion scanner that gave me any warning at all, as a man in a dark-grey, heat-resistant combat suit burst from the door of a burning building, levelled an unrecognisable heavy weapon at me and opened fire. Even as I belatedly stepped to one side I watched my left arm vanish from the elbow downward, as a glowing red ball of massively condensed, super-heated energy flashed past in an instant, vaporising everything in its path. My systems reeled, going into a computerised version of shock. Damage reports and warnings screamed around inside my electronic mind, even as human processes attempted to establish a feeling of horror, at the unprecedented damage I’d taken. It had been too quick for pain; with damage so severe damage control locked down the sensation before I felt it, and it was only that fact that allowed me to react quickly enough to avoid a second blast from a second attacker, who had followed the first through the flames. He fired but I spun on my right foot, bringing my left leg up and around in a high roundhouse kick. The move dipped and pivoted my torso out of the path of the plasma blast, an instant before my kick broke the shooter’s neck. My balance felt all wrong, but my programming was adapting on the fly to my new weight distribution. To the machine in me, losing part of an arm was just a blip, a new variable in the endless computations. A leg would have been worse – for both parts of me.

Luckily for me, these new guns appeared to have a terrible rate of fire. The first shooter was frantically squeezing his trigger over and over even as I closed the minuscule gap between us and crashed my remaining fist through his clear, protective faceplate.

I crouched low, scanning and waiting for more attacks. I cleared all the damage indicators from my system – I could bloody well
see
the perfectly smoothed-off stub of my left arm, I didn’t need a blaring alarm in my head telling me about it. But, for the first time ever, I did not know what to do. I hadn’t just been hurt, I had been
damaged
.
Suggested courses of action were being weighed and considered continually and automatically, but essentially I was deadlocked between fight or flight. At least a bloody animal instinctively knows which one to go for. Instead I’ve got logic telling me that taking one of these weapons and stalking through the burning ruins of the city, towards the centre, was exactly as correct a course of action as grabbing a plasma weapon and jetting out of there as fast as I could. Over to you, inner human.

I’ve never had to retreat before – the time I helped Lothar and his men escape Dreary Hole goes down as a successful rescue mission, seeing as how I could have stayed swatting Overlords’ soldiers until the supply of them dried up. No, I’ve never suffered the insult of defeat before, so I’d be damned if I was going to suffer it now. I decided to stay and try to discover what had happened here. I couldn’t believe that as soon as the cyborgs had appeared, the humans had raised their game so high, so fast. The uniforms of my attackers were those of the Overlords’ regular forces; the troops who were the closest thing on the planet to an organised army. So, perhaps the Overlords had already been rushing towards plasma tech so they could rid themselves of me. Or, maybe they’d somehow been expecting the sudden upsurge in the planet’s cyborg population and had been ready for it. No, wait, look at the state of this city; perhaps they’d been
nearly
ready for it.

I picked up one of the fallen plasma weapons. It was almost offensive how crude it was. I’d been damaged by something that looked like it had been cobbled together by a blind tinker who was both in a rush, and a really shit tinker. The weapon was a chunky, heavy rifle covered in nodules, air intakes, exhausts and such-like. It would be awkward to hold with two hands, let alone one. I’d have sub-perfect accuracy using this in my condition, but it was definitely better than forging ahead unarmed. No pun intended.

I was worried that neither of the guns was capable of a second shot. Certainly, the first soldier hadn’t been able to get his gun to do anything after firing it once. It was the second soldier’s gun that I took since he hadn’t had a chance to inadvertently demonstrate that it too had a propensity for failure. The power needed to create plasma, let alone fling it around is incredible. By rights, at this stage of human technology on Deliverance, this gun should have had a power supply as large as a truck attached to it. Would the Overlords knowingly send out their troops with weapons so experimental they were only capable of one shot? In extreme cases of cyborg incursion, yes. Actually, since it was the Overlords, the answer was just yes.

I oriented myself towards the centre of the city, checked that the coast was clear and began slipping in and out of cover towards my objective. My injury had made me uncharacteristically cautious. Even on assassinations where I chose to be stealthy, I did it with a simulated swagger. Now wasn’t the time to let my human side suddenly start fretting about mortality, but I could certainly let it teach me to be more careful from now on.

I didn’t encounter anyone else the rest of the way to the centre but just before I arrived I heard a battle begin; heralded by the deep thrum of massed, sustained laser fire. I couldn’t see through the smashed buildings still in my path, but the odd errant laser bolt could be seen tearing up into the sky. As I crept ever closer, clambering over, or ducking under obstacles, the firing began to abate; petering out slowly to nothing.

Eventually I came to one last head-high wall, which had previously been part of a compound around the old colony headquarters. I paused and listened, catching snatches of voices – soldier banter, if ever I’d heard it. It sounded like they had won the fight. I leaned my plasma rifle against the wall and reached up with my hand, grasping the top of the wall with my fingers to support myself as I raised up onto my toes and peered over the wall into the compound beyond.

The far side of the courtyard from my position was bathed in light from the headlights of a row of armoured personnel buggies, leaving the space the other side of my wall in darkness. From my position the low-slung headlights seemed to highlight the outlines of a number of dark mounds scattered around the ground. Corpses. Even I gave up counting them when I got to seventy. And yet, twelve grey-clad soldiers moved around, alone and in pairs, cautiously checking each of the corpses for signs of life. My heat scanner could have saved them their time – waste that it was.

I was just finalising the order in which I was going to kill the soldiers, once I’d scaled the wall, when there was a shout from the end of the courtyard to my right. I leaned into the wall, straining right up onto my tip-toes to see what was going on. After a few seconds I could see a broken figure pulling itself along the ground, into my view. Light reflected off the figure’s shiny, alloy head. Cyborg.

The soldier who had cried out was keeping pace, following the mutilated cyborg. Its legs and all its flesh were gone, as – like me – was one arm. The soldier stooped as he walked, lowered his laser rifle, aimed for the back of the cyborg’s head and pressed – and held – the firing-stud. An unbroken, continuous yellow beam appeared between the barrel of the laser rifle and the cyborg’s skull. The soldier knew what he was doing and held the beam in place as he matched the cyborg’s slow movement. One of his colleagues joined him and carefully fired his own, purple-beamed laser at roughly the same spot. With the concentrated energy of the two beams it took just seconds until a smoking hole had been bored through the cyborg’s skull and its electronic brain utterly destroyed. The cyborg’s head slumped to the ground and it moved no more. The two soldiers high-fived each other and started poking at the metal corpse with their rifles.

I felt…I
felt
? I felt anger. Fury. These
insects
! Then I felt nothing, for just a second before my system went ballistic, demanding that I acknowledge the need for a full system reboot. Rogue processes detected. Shutdown at once! I should have acknowledged; it was in my programming…wasn’t it? But no, I didn’t. I cleared all the alerts, I stared at the dead cyborg and then I felt…nothing. Was that the Warden code trying to rally me to the defence of an ally? Hah, if it was it had been a bit slow on the uptake. But, more importantly, I’d held it off – Doctor Melon to thank, I presume? I was certain that the Warden code had just dipped into my human side and tried to use a rampaging, out of control emotion as an excuse to restore factory settings with a flash reboot.

Perhaps the wall I had leaned against was damaged, or just old, but, with the weight of my body pressed against it for so long as I stretched to look over it, something suddenly gave way and it collapsed into the courtyard, taking me tumbling with it. I landed hard on my face amidst a plume of dust, in full view of most of the soldiers.

The noise of the crumbling wall attracted the attention of the soldiers in the courtyard, who collectively began to rush at me from three sides, shouting variations of
halt
and
what the hell was that?
as I rolled onto my back and sat up, fingers scrabbling for the plasma rifle that I had felt clatter against my legs as I fell. “Enjoy your trip?” I muttered to myself.