All twelve of the surviving soldiers were converging on me. One of them fired his laser rifle from the hip. It went high and wide; an azure flash in my peripheral vision. Another one had a go, firing a jade-green laser beam, aimed more carefully, rifle-butt against his shoulder – but he missed, too. They were firing into a pool of darkness, their eyes attuned to the bright courtyard. Nevertheless, a darker, almost black, green beam melted my right ear. Too close. My fingers were still searching for the plasma rifle when a particularly fat solider, who’d donned a pair of night vision goggles, shouted to his men.
“Stop! Cease fire! That’s the tame one.”
Tame? Who was he calling tame? I finally found the plasma rifle and levelled it at the fat guy from my sitting position. I easily had the strength in one arm to hold the bulk of the gun at this awkward angle, for as long as it took. For as long as whatever was going to happen took to happen, that is.
The soldiers had formed a loose semi-circle around me; nine of them had laser rifles, the fat guy was apparently unarmed, but the other two had plasma rifles. Shit.
“Hi,” I said, forcing an ingratiating smile. “What’s going on here, then?”
“Damned if I know,” said the fat guy as he pushed his goggles onto the top of his head. I could make out his rank insignia, and he had his name stencilled above the breast pocket of his combat suit. Captain Mengan. “The colonel’s dead, and so is the Overlord he came down here with,” he continued.
“How many cyborgs were there?” I said. I was continually assessing my chances of escape, or of launching a successful attack, as we spoke.
“Four,” said the captain. “We’re fighting cyborgs man, shit’s gone sci-fi.” He’d just confirmed my initial suspicion that he was an idiot – Even if I put it down to the exhilaration that humans describe feeling after surviving intense combat.
“Did you kill them all?” I said. It was no good, my chances of taking my fate into my own…hand, here and surviving, were two point zero zero zero zero seven – unless it suddenly rained, then they went up to a nice round three percent. Even with the laser rifles, even with just one arm, I’d attack them and be reasonably sure of the outcome – if it wasn’t for those plasma rifles.
“Pablo here killed two,” he indicated one of the soldiers who’d executed the cyborg just now. “And I took one down with just one punch.” A couple of his men snickered dutifully at the boast.
“And the fourth?” I said.
“Well, we knew one of them was in the old ship, the old command centre, and we had it surrounded.” He wiped sweat from his ample brow. “What we didn’t know was that three more were going to come up behind us and tear us a new asshole. We called down the artillery on the rest of the city then, to flush any more ou – ”
“What about the people?” I said.
“What about
my
people?” he said. “We had to do something to make sure no more were out there. Besides, they’re only Jollies.” He used the nickname for the people from this city.
“And the arty didn’t do too much damage,” the captain continued. I employed a facial expression that conveyed disbelief.
“No, seriously,” he said, as a grim smile stretched his lips. “That was the flamethrower teams we sent out to make doubly sure there were no more cyborgs.”
I shook my head slowly. “And yet, here I am.”
“Yeah, but you’re fucked,” he said. Most of his men laughed this time.
“Anyway,” he went on gesturing with a thumb over his shoulder, back towards the courtyard battlefield. “Turns out we could wear them down with concentrated laser fire, while the bulk of the men kept them busy – even if that was only because the bots move a bit slower when they have to keep pausing to rip a man in half.
“With the lasers doing a bit of damage, we managed to get the plasma guys close enough to kill two and blow the legs off the last one. Then Pablo had to swap his plasma for a laser because, well, the plas – ”
“Because the plasma rifles are shit?” I said.
“A bit, yeah,” he said with a nod that wobbled his jowls. “Experimental tech. You get one good shot out of them, and then, if you’re lucky you get a second one, but it’s always noticeably weaker. After that, you’re carrying dead weight.”
“And how do you feel about being given faulty weapons? The Overlords have fucked you over,” I said.
“True that. But, way I see it, it’s either get paid by them and get fucked over, or, just get plain fucked by the ones they
are
paying. Only way to be the one getting to do any actual fucking is to be an Overlord.” He gave a short laugh. “Apart from the Overlord who came down here with us, that is. He won’t be doing much more of that. I swear, he was hoping for some sort of meet and greet with the cyborgs. But as soon as the firing started he lost it and ran through a laser beam. Hell, his legs even carried on running for a second after he left his torso behind.”
“Pleasant,” I said. “You never got round to telling me about the fourth cyborg.”
“Well, just before you turned up and we finished playing with chrome-dome back there, the old ship’s door opened up and a cyborg just flew straight out, climbed into the sky and bugged out.”
“Direction?”
“No idea. Up?” he said, and then grinned at his own gag. “Anyway, enough chit-chat, the boss wanted to see you if you showed up.”
“The boss?”
“Chester Boram the Third, Grand Overlord of Boram Bay, Emperor of Deliverance,” said the Captain, reeling off Chester Boram’s utterly unofficial, but equally unopposed, title in a monotone.
“Oh,” I said. Very interesting indeed. “Why?”
“No idea. Now, up you get, you’re coming with us.”
I had never had to do what a human demanded before. “No,” I said, deciding now would be no different. “I’d have to be seriously malfunctioning to go with you. At least here I know what the odds are. Tell his Royal Overlordness that I’ll give him a call sometime.”
“How about we just take you, or shoot you?” said the captain. Many of his men had relaxed after the initial moment where they surrounded me, but now they tensed up again and became more alert.
“It seems obvious Boram wants me alive and I doubt I’d be any good to him much more damaged than I already am…” I said, waving my stump at him.
The captain sighed. “Give it up, you’re beaten.”
“You’re right. I’d better self-destruct then,” I said. I changed my voice to mimic a tinny, badly synthesised and annoyingly nasal female human, “Warning, code nine self-destruct sequence initiated. All friendly units please retire to a safe distance of twelve miles. Ten…Nine…”
“Obvious bluff,” said the captain.
“…Skip a few. Three. Tw – ”
“Alright. Shit. Just go you crazy fucker!”
“Countdown paused,” I said, before switching back to my usual voice. “Good idea. Nice meeting you.” I got to my feet, keeping my rifle trained on the captain. Even if they did fire, I could register the tiny movement of any one of their fingers and squeeze my own trigger in the same tenth of a second. Dodgy weapon or not, the Captain would have known he might not live to report my apparently unwanted death.
“I’m going to engage my jetpack now,” I said, “Don’t be startled.”
“Get on with it,” said the Captain.
I took off, using minimal thrust, and half hovered, half flew back to where I’d first been ambushed by the plasma troopers. I landed, managed to awkwardly clutch my plasma rifle and the other discarded one to my chest, with my one good arm, and then I took off again.
I started the journey back to Lothar’s bunker, leaving a city senselessly but brightly burning in the night behind me. Mission accomplished, after a fashion. I’d found out what had happened, but not a hint of why – but knowing the Overlords were involved raised the stakes somewhat. I’d be sure to put that call through to the 'Emperor’ pretty soon.
And then there were the plasma rifles; clearly rushed into production. Maybe I’d get time to take one apart and see how it worked, or maybe I was just carrying dead weight. Hah, in a world now full of cyborgs that weren’t hampered by pseudo-morals and inefficient inner-wrangling, and human soldiers who could seemingly now hold their own against ‘us’; in that world, maybe it was me that was the dead weight.
Oh for the love of lubricant, no. Of all the useless human emotions, please, no – don’t let me feel self-fucking-pity! I did a clumsy, over-burdened loop-the-loop and a few barrel rolls in the cool night air, just to remind myself that I was still alive. I was alive! “I am alive!”
After messaging Lothar and giving him an E.T.A. to the bunker, I spent the rest of the return flight from Jolly Meadows stubbornly ignoring every single query that crossed my processors. Since Melon fell out of the sky, everything I had done had been based on, or had resulted in, incomplete data. I was hardly acting like a logical machine; I was rushing around like a confused human – and a pretty over-excitable and flappable one at that. So, I would not process a single question more until I had some answers. Instead, I considered what potential methods I had for gaining pertinent data. I had four untapped leads, so it was time to logically analyse them, pick one and follow it up.
Lead One: Damian Faran. I discounted that one. All my prior experience of seeing humans lie and squirm when I confronted them told me that he was just a messenger. Humans who wanted somebody killed but were afraid I would reverse engineer the contract, in that special way of mine, would often use some poor, innocent dupe as the apparent contract setter. I could always tell, and could always back-track from the dupe to the real contact, but it took time. I wanted more immediate answers than a trail of patsies like Faran would provide.
Lead Two: Grand Overlord Chester Boram. This one most definitely required following up, to discover what the Overlords knew about the cyborgs, and, to find out more about the plasma weapons and their origin. However, I would put off hob-nobbing with a gangster until I had exhausted the last two leads.
Lead Three: Q4’s head. I was putting this one off, too. Mostly because I had no idea how to communicate with Q4 if he wouldn’t physically speak to me. Creating some sort of private network with him was probably viable, but I had no idea how to identify and use those capabilities within me – I’d not even known about the existence of the cyborg network I had seemingly briefly been part of, until Q4 showed up and him and his mates conducted a quick trial concerning my rogue status on it. Besides, even if I could network with Q4 and 'talk' to him that way, I would be concerned that he could co-opt and dominate my programming over the link we established. So, for now, that ruled this lead out.
Lead Four: Doctor Harold Melon and his
we’ll not get it there and we’ll die trying
parcel delivery service. I, or rather Lothar, still had his portable storage device – complete with ear-stabbing data transfer spikes. There was no way on Deliverance that I was going to stick that data unit into my own head, since it had come from a man who no doubt wanted to wipe my brain after he bodged his first attempt at 'saving' me from the Warden program. Oh, no, I had a better use for Melon’s gift in mind.
I touched down outside the bunker’s perimeter fence, by the only access gate, at three minutes past midnight. Located in the middle of some woodlands to the east of Boram Bay’s city limits, the only visible part of the bunker was a hut-sized, thick concrete building, the roof of which sloped down the back side and into the ground. There were three strong steel doors side by side at the front of the building and some subtly-hidden-yet-meant-to-be-noticed heavy machine gun turrets – and video cameras – covering each door. Knock on the door, and, if the occupiers didn’t like you, you’d soon know about it. The woodlands provided great natural air cover and camouflage, not that airborne threats were common on Deliverance, and, a number of the trees were cunningly hollowed out, hiding yet more gun turrets behind neat little sliding wooden doors that matched the tree bark perfectly. Tiny video cameras were dotted all round the square mile outside the entrance, providing good overall coverage of the approaches to the bunker.
There was an intercom attached to the gate, too. I was about to press the buzzer when the intercom speaker crackled.
“Two seconds past your estimated arrival time, Zee,” came Lothar’s voice, slightly crackly. “You’re getting old, or sloppy,” he said, chiding me like a teacher would a favoured, yet under-achieving student.
“The Overlords will bow to Oxley,” I said into the intercom, preempting the need for Lothar to request the pass-phrase.
A pair of lit, red warning lights attached to the gate – indicating the defence turrets would track and fire on intruders inside the perimeter – winked out, going dark. The gate opened, swinging inward. I wanted to get inside quickly, not wanting to dawdle out here where anybody could be watching, so I broke into a run as I started through the gate. The plasma guns I still clutched to my chest clattered and rattled together as I sprinted to the bunker entrance, where I found the door opening to let me in. I stepped inside and it clanged shut so fast it hit me in the arse. More turrets and cameras in here, mirroring the setup on the other side of the doors. Even if we let you in, we reserved the right to change our mind a few seconds later and let rip. One more heavy steel door obstructed my path, but it opened at a press of a button from Lothar way down in the bunker’s control room, revealing a long, dark concrete staircase that vanished into the gloom. Well, it vanished to those without night-vision, anyway.