The blast was almost ludicrously huge, coming from an object so small. I had been hoping for a small breach in the castle wall, but half the length of it, between tower and gate was demolished in a flash of fire and smoke. Dozens of grey-skins atop the wall were killed instantly, and dozens more were injured, or thrown off the nearby battlements.
I hobble-ran as fast as I could up the hill, yearning to have my jetpack back. Oxley was ahead of me, the Melons steering him around trees as he fired his weapon at whatever he could see through the smoke. From above and behind me Kam was masterfully head-shotting anyone still showing a head, and a glance behind me showed old Lothar puffing his way up the hill behind us. He was gaining ground too, the old coot.
I had already noted that none of the computerised defences were firing, so Kaboom’s dual-purpose, unknowing self-sacrifice had been a resounding – still reverberating, even – success.
Oxley and the Melons had nearly reached what had been the foot of the wall, but was now only a heap of rubble. Perhaps realising they’d not be able to take the wheelchair up the jagged pile of broken stones, either Oxley, or the Melons must have spotted something to use as a ramp, because the wheelchair suddenly took off. It climbed into the air, picking up speed as the Melons increased thrust to maintain flight. Oxley could be heard howling in glee as he spat laser bolts at the brave defenders who remained in the towers and on the undamaged wall segments. He mowed down plenty of them and sent more than a few diving off the wall into the castle courtyard far below. Something had gone awry though. The wheelchair veered to one side, missed the blown apart wall section and crashed with tremendous force into the castle wall, like a bug hitting a windshield. The wreck that had once been Oxley and a wheelchair seemed to be stuck to the wall, just for a second, before the whole thing slid and dropped to the ground. Any chance Oxley may have survived was then reduced from pretty much zero to actual zero as a storm of laser bolts fizzed and crackled into the wreckage. Oh dear.
Lothar fired from the hip as he charged up the hill.
“Oxley!” he screamed. Then with renewed energy, he surged forward and part clambered, part ran up the mound of rubble leading into the castle courtyard. He vanished into the hazy smoke that still swirled around, his laser rifle barking out bolts that illuminated the smoke cloud briefly from within.
I reached the wheelchair wreck. Oxley was definitely dead, even though he had a joyous, almost beatific smile upon his face. Hell, knowing Oxley, he’d probably even had a boner, right up until impact. Sadly, both the Melons were alive still. They blinked at me, not wanting to speak and draw fire. From atop the wall it was very unlikely the defenders would know there were two living cyborg heads down there.
“I’ll be back for you two,” I said, as I began a much slower, awkward climb up the rubble mound and into the castle; my club foot, frozen kneecap and hammer-headed left hand making it an ungainly scramble.
“Oh shit. Oxley!” came the panting voice of Kam, behind me. “You bastards!” And then, just seconds later he too all but sprinted past me, up the mound and into the smoke-filled courtyard. Strange though, a few moments later the smoke started blowing back out towards me and it seemed to have taken on a greenish-yellow tinge. It tasted oddly tangy, too. I realised then that all sounds of firing had ceased. Well, that was Kam and Lothar done for as well then. Damn shame. I let my human side feel a pang for them, and a slightly smaller one for Oxley too, then I pushed on into the now dirty green, ever-thickening smoke. It couldn’t be part of the castle defences, it seemed to be coming from everywhere – it was just forming and thickening in the air.
There was still no weapons fire. No man-made sounds at all. Perhaps nobody could see me in the smoke, although my heat-scanner could pick out plenty of targets. Strange though, they all seemed to be lying down. I finally reached the top of the rubble mound and I was in the castle courtyard. Kam’s body was here, but it still showed a very healthy heat signature. I knelt and felt for a pulse. Strong. What the hell? He was unconscious and unwounded. Just ahead was Lothar, in the same condition. A few nearby grey-skins were similarly affected. Even as I watched, a barracks door opened on one side of the courtyard and a grey-skin stumbled out. He coughed once and fell forward, flat on his face. A horrible, logical assumption was being reached by my processors, as they evaluated any number of
possible explanations. I turned and slid back down the rubble mound on my arse. It was eerily quiet as I returned to the ruined wheelchair.
“What’s going on?” I asked the Melons, although I thought I knew.
“This is how they do it,” said Classic Melon. “This is how they knock out a planet.”
“They’re here?”
“Yes,” said New Melon. “They’re here.”
“I wonder,” said Classic Melon, “I wonder if they’ve been observing things from space for a while.”
“Maybe,” I said. I had been thinking their timing was pretty spot on, myself. But it made sense. After all, I had hoped to enter the city while the Wardens were fighting the grey-skins, and it seemed the Kon Ramar had likewise decided to launch their own assault as soon as any possible threats to them were otherwise engaged.
This was very bad. Melon had said previously that the Kon Ramar, in their arrogance, would be vulnerable aboard whatever ship they had arrived here on – but, we weren’t on their bloody ship, and down here, they had thirty-two sleepi – ”
“Wardens! Activating! Now!” shouted Classic Melon, paraphrasing his own dying words outside my home just a few days ago. Must. Destroy. What? I wondered.
“I have thirty-two new Warden signatures on the Warden network,” said New Melon.
Oh for fuck’s sake. And to think, all I’d had left to do was fight my way through the secret tunnel to the buried ship, kill Chester’s three co-opted Wardens and then kill Chester himself, for good measure. Ha-ha, simple as Boram Potato Pie. But now? This was game over. Unless we could avoid the Kon Ramar’s Wardens and somehow get into space. Maybe we could still board their ship and surprise them with, well, surprise – and ferocity. Do it the way Melon had wanted me to do it originally.
“Where are the Wardens?” I said.
“We’re in luck, they’re scattered all over the planet,” said Classic Melon. “There’s one per original colony city, barring those that have already had their Warden awakened by the Overlords.
“Any nearby?”
“None closer than six hours jetpack flight, no,” said New Melon. Well, it wasn’t all doom and gloom, then.
“Zed,” said Classic Melon. “This gas will be all over the planet. They’ll have been seeding the atmosphere with chemicals that react with atmospheric gasses for hours now, creating the gas as a byproduct. That means any humans not in an airtight area will be unconscious until revived.”
“Tough shit for them,” I said. I actually didn’t mean to sound harsh. It was just a fact. My words summed up that there was nothing I could do about it right now.
“Uh, it’s worse than that, Zed,” said Classic Melon
“How?”
“None of the Wardens are heading this way.”
“How’s that bad?”
“Well, ah, it’s good and bad, I suppose,” said Classic. “First, it means they don’t acknowledge you as a threat right now, that’s the good, but sec – ”
“I’ll show them who’s a threat,” I said. It was a strange time for my human side to throw out such a posturing comment. Most unlike me.
“Secondly, if they’re not coming here to fight, then with the humans knocked out the Wardens will be engaging in their primary function.”
“Brains,” I said.
“No time like the present,” said New Melon. “They’ll squash their rogue Warden soon enough, right now they just want to start harvesting brains for the next god-summoning experiment.”
“Mad, mad, evil stupid bastards,” I said. I quashed a feeling of personal failure. It wasn’t long ago that I’d sworn to myself – and to the only memory I had, or ever would have of the son I’d never known – that I’d not let these alien tossers harvest a single brain on Deliverance.
Oh well, no use crying over spilled brains. It was one task off the checklist, one way or another. That just left the defeat of the Kon Ramar, the Overlords and, of course, the extinction of the exploding Manoogla shits – and as dear to me as that task was, it would really have to take a back seat for the time being.
Three hundredths of a second later I was still weighing up my options, when New Melon, left lying on the floor with no choice but to stare into the green smoky sky, said, “Oh, these are new.”
Something that resembled a corrugated iron trash-can, in both size and shape was descending from the sky a few feet away. There were more above and behind it. Many more. The trash-can had a large, swinging appendage that looked like a vacuum cleaner hose and two long, spindly metal arms sticking out from underneath it. One arm had a pincer-like claw for a hand, and the other had a terribly sharp-looking circular bone-saw.
The trash-can floated over the battlements of the castle wall, hovering directly above a grey-skin soldier who had slumped unconscious over the wall. The trash-can reached out with its claw arm, picked the man up and held him such that, with a quick buzz and grind, the bone-saw neatly removed the top of his head, helmet and all. The vacuum appendage snaked out and with a comedy slurp, suck, pop and a ‘whumpf’, it gobbled up the man’s brain, dropped the limp corpse and hovered towards another victim.
“I say,” said New Melon, sounding awed. “How wonderful. What a device!”
“You ghoul,” I said.
“I say,” said Classic Melon this time, but addressing me. “It looks like you Wardens may have been put out of a job by these things.”
“Yes,” said New Melon. “Terribly efficient. That one’s got five brains already. Oh, it must be full. It’s leaving.”
Sure enough, the trash-can we’d observed was floating up and away, noticeably slower and heavier, now.
“At this rate, they’ll have harvested every brain in this whole area in just a few minutes,” said Classic Melon.
Shit! Lothar. Kam.
I went to each Melon in turn and wrenched the poles that their heads were mounted on free from the wheelchair wreckage. I could just about hold the two poles in my one fist. It looked like I was holding a pair of massively over-sized novelty lolly pops. Ones that grumbled about being swung around, even as they chatted amiably to each other about the brain-harvesting phenomenon they were observing.
With no free hand, and a sledgehammer for a left arm, I was reduced to an ungainly commando-crawl back up the rubble mound and into the castle courtyard again. I slid and rolled down the other side and got to my feet just in time to see one of the harvesters settling above Kam’s unconscious form.
“You fucking dustbin bastard, no!” I shouted. Without thinking – but, naturally with all due processing and calculating – I hurled the two Melons at the harvester droid, probe – whatever it was. Classic Melon missed and sailed by with a wail. New Melon struck the harvester in the middle of its rounded side, with a bang that was indeed just like a metal dustbin being kicked. It wobbled and bobbed around, out of control as I limped over to it and dealt it a fearsome blow with my sledgehammer arm. Hot damn. I’d known this thing would be good for something! The harvester dented, crumpled and fell to the floor with a crash.
Three more of the things were closing in, and one was heading for Lothar, a short distance away. The courtyard was overrun with them. A sub-process was tallying them up – thirty-five, thirty-six – even as I limp-ran at one and batted it out of the sky with another furious sledgehammer blow. Okay, they were easy to destroy, at least. But, fuck, one had picked Lothar up. I crouched, snatched up a discarded laser rifle, steadied myself by planting my sledgehammer on the ground beside me, and fired a flurry of bolts. The harvester went down smoking. It released its grip on Lothar and he fell back a short way onto the ground.
A claw closed around the laser rifle and another around my neck. A bone-saw started cutting into the top of my head. It went through my burnt scalp like tissue paper, but just made an awful screeching noise against my skull and created a bright fountain of sparks. The claw around my neck was ineffectually trying to snip my head off, but the laser rifle fared less well, as it was cut in half. That freed it though, and I used it to club the harvester that had had hold of it to destruction, then I threw myself flat on my face, throwing the harvester that had me by the neck over my head, where it too crashed onto the floor alongside me. I sprang up onto my good foot and in one smooth move just belly flopped onto the harvester. The weight of my alloy body flattened the fucking thing. I rolled onto my side – my backpack preventing me rolling onto my back – as I saw a shadow loom over me. I swung my sledgehammer as I rolled, and connected, smashing yet another one out of the sky.