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  I set off at a speed that would be comfortable for the humans to match. I could pedal faster than the highest gear on the bike could keep up with, so I had to pace myself. Besides, if I went too fast, the bumpy ride might hasten Kaboom’s demise. We still had about three hours of punishing travel ahead of us. We could only really afford for Kaboom to expire when we were an hour or so away from our target, if we didn’t want too much of him to be gone for this brain-encoding technology to do whatever the hell it was going to do to his brain. Speaking of brains, it was time to pick Melon’s a bit more.

  “Doctor?” I said. Melon and T9 had been arranged in their individual carry-baskets so that they were facing each other. Melon was in the basket on Lothar’s bike, and I could see eye-to-eye with him from where I pedalled. “Have you learned anything from T9?”

  “Not really, no,” said Melon. “I’m very, very close to co-opting their network so that we can pinpoint other cyborgs – or any other computers, that happen to be on it. But I cannot figure out how to intercept the network communications between the cyborgs, without revealing T9’s presence.”

  “I see, but what does T9 know? What was her mission?”

  “Much the same as my own host head, except that she knows she wasn’t activated by her creators. She has no mission other than to activate others, and seek out and repair or destroy ‘damaged’ Wardens.”

  “So could it be the Overlords who are activating the cyborgs?” I said. A cyborg would have been able to control the flash or…something, that crossed Melon’s features – but with his copied personality so very much in control of his new, metal head, he was unable to hide it. It looked like he’d been surprised the question had been asked, but not surprised by the idea.

  “The Overlords? What could they possibly know of the technology of the, ah, the creators?” he said, rather hurriedly.

  “Well, Doc,” I said. “They’re the ones who created the plasma weapons Kam brought T9 down with, and they used them to kill three other cyborgs at another city.”

  Melon blinked his one eye rapidly, taking in what I had said, none of which I’d told him yet – and evidently T9 hadn’t either. “I’m quite sure I wouldn’t know anything about that.” He smiled slowly and joked, “Why not take it up with Grand Overlord Boram himself?”

  “Oh I will. Some of his men wanted to give me an honour-guard to go and see him, just yesterday. He wants to talk to me, apparently.”

  Melon really did look worried this time. “Oh, well, I…I wouldn’t talk to him if I were you, he’s just a glorified gang boss. No doubt he just wants to capture you, and use you to his own ends.”

  “Like you do?” I said.

  A heavy silence hung. Lothar had been listening to all this, as he puffed and panted away, trying to keep up with the pace I was setting, although with both the bikes being bolted and welded to the rest of the Kambulance it didn’t really matter, I was essentially the one pulling the whole thing along. His slower-pedalled bike was actually having a brake-like effect, but it was no real hindrance to me.

  “Melon,” I said. “Tell me about the creators, now. Tell me what the Wardens are for, and tell me why the terrible thing they were supposed to do doesn’t seem to be happening.”

  “I can’t. I still don’t trust you.”

  “I don’t trust you either.”

  “But you must,” said Melon. He sounded like he was pleading. “If I had wanted to do you harm, then I would have rigged the data transfer in the space shuttle to completely wipe you and replace you with my personality. But, no. I came to see you, to get your permission for us to share minds.”

  He had a very good point there. My human resentment of him must’ve clouded my processors over that bit of logic. “Well, Doctor, you should trust me in return. Can’t you see I’m not all bad?”

  “Any amount of bad is too bad,” said Melon. “It’s like I said before, the Warden program could use an overly strong emotion to regain control, your system would report errors, critical failures, and demand that you shut down. Then the Warden woul – ”

  “That’s already happened,” I said. I told Melon about how I’d felt overwhelming rage at the humans who’d stalked and killed a crippled cyborg at Jolly Meadows.

  Melon looked almost awed. “You were that angry – at humans specifically – right at that moment, and you didn’t reboot? You didn’t wade in and start rending limbs?” He whistled. “Maybe I had done enough to you five years ago after al – ”

  “Or maybe, Doc, I’m just a better person, and a better cyborg than you think I am.”

  Melon laughed. “Oh, goodness, no,” he said. “Not at all, you’re just programming and the simulation of a human brain pattern, you’re not exactly complicated.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not. “Come on then, tell me.”

  “Okay,” he said. There was a pause. Neither of us spoke. We were both expecting something to happen, something to interrupt the conversation…

  Lothar farted, but that was it for drama. “Excuse me,” he said, disguising his shame with puff-cheeked exertion. “It’s the pedalling, it forces them right out, even if I try to hold them in.”

  “You will remember that I told you the people who came to Earth in twenty twenty-three were like us?” Melon said. “Not exactly like us, but very close indeed. Compatible brains. It was all about the compatible brains. They’re generally taller than the tallest humans, thinner of limb, and they have blueish tinges to their pale skins, but otherwise they look human.”

  “I remember,” I said. “You also said they were mad.”

  “Mad aliens?” said Lothar. “I’ve heard it all now.”

  “You haven’t heard the half of it,” said Melon. “Yes, they are total fruit-loops, the whole lot of them. They’ve been around, at their current stage of evolution for almost a million years and they’ve been slowly spreading through the galaxy – basically using it as a big sandbox – during more than seven-hundred thousand of those years.

  “They’ve conquered most of the challenges that any sentient race could face. You name it, they’ve probably done it. You cyborgs are proof that they’ve found a way to sidestep death. But, they themselves are not allowed to download their brains into cyborg bodies. Their religion forbids it.”

  “That’s not evidence of insanity,” I said. “A bit of religious dedication.”

  “No,” said the doctor. I could see how badly he wanted to nod. “But invading a planet and constructing a physically connected network of harvested, living human brains to act as a host for the god you intend to summon into it, is.”

  “What the fuck?” I said. “You have to be kidding.”

  “I’m not. Everything the aliens do is driven by their religion. It pervades all aspects of their society, including science and research. They have got themselves caught up in what I can only believe is a species-wide psychosis. They believe, after a centuries-long research project, that their god wants to assume a physical form in the universe, but is unable to do it himself because his evil brother is blocking his efforts. Some ‘eternal struggle of good versus evil’ twaddle of theirs.

  “They believe that if they can construct a living neural network large enough for their god to pour even a small part of his, I don’t know, spirit, being, personality, whatever, into, then he will do so. Oh, and once they’ve got him in the physical realm, they’ll download him into a computer and re-program him, so that they can change the bits of the religion they don’t like – like not being able to sidestep death themselves and live on as cyborgs. If their own god is in a computer, then, hell, why can’t they be, eh?”

  “Holy fuck, that’s insane,” I said.

  “Told you,” said Melon. “Conquering Earth was a triviality, but they knew they might fail with their ultimate goal, so they took some elements of humanity to other planets, and left them alone to breed and prosper so that they’d have backup test sites to do it all again.”

  “There are more pl
anets like Deliverance?” said Lothar. I thought he’d been keeping up as badly as he had been with his pedalling, but he’d been taking it all in quietly.

  “There are more planets, but none like Deliverance. There are none the same as any other,” said Melon. “The aliens saw each colony planet they founded as great opportunities to study the humans under different conditions. To see if they thrived, or, as they have on many planets, withered.”

  “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.”

  Chapter Twenty

  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.