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  Melon answered. “I have already ascertained from my sub-routine that the Wardens cannot willingly access their own self-destruct. It has to be a command that comes from an external, verified source. Such as from their creators.”

  “But, Kaboom…” said Kam.

  “Upgrading and freeing the human personality coding within the cyborg brain is a bit like taking the safety off a gun,” said Melon. “Sure, you’re now much more dangerous to your enemies, but you’re perfectly capable of shooting yourself too.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said to the humans. “We’ll get the Baboon back again, but we’ll give him some ground rules next time.”

  “In the meantime,” said Melon. “This has not been a wasted trip at all. We have further evidence that the Overlords know something about the Wardens and we have laser weapons for whoever wants them. Oh, and I should imagine that there are some armoured personnel buggies around here somewhere. These soldiers must have got here somehow.”

  Lothar scratched his chin and nodded. “What next?” he said, looking at me.

  “You guys can take Kaboom’s original head, go back to his body at the Kambulance and bury it. Then scour the area for the transportation the grey-skins used to get here. Lothar, search the dead Overlord’s body, let me know if you find anything interesting. Oh, and keep Melon and the female head in sight at all times.”

  “Will do, Zee,” said Lothar.

  “Great. We will meet at the Kambulance in one hour, and then transfer over to the grey-skins’ buggies. Melon, keep networking with our captive head, I want you to make T9 tell us how we can track the remaining cyborgs, and to be alerted if any more are activated.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” said Melon. “What about you?”

  “Well Doc, I got the impression a while ago that you don’t want me to talk to the Grand Overlord, so I’m going to step to one side and make a quick private call.”

  If Melon had a body, I swear he would have shit himself.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “How did you get my personal contact code?” said Chester Boram the Third, Grand Overlord of Boram Bay, Emperor of Deliverance.

  “I can get into just about any computer connected to the ‘net. First time I’ve seen gay dwarf porn, Chester. Try burying your porn folder another twenty levels down, hackers might not find it then.” Hacking credentials established, and sarcasm chip exercised, a good opening to the conversation. Getting his vid-call contact code had indeed been child’s play for me; I’d acquired it in seconds after getting far enough away from Melon’s cyborg auditory receptors to have a little privacy. It was nice knowing he couldn’t follow me unless someone bowled him along after me.

  Not having an external vid-phone unit was no hindrance to me making a vid-call; Chester’s vid-stream was merely fed directly into my ocular array, which passed the visual data onto my processors as though I were seeing it, and those same processors fabricated an outgoing vid-stream of me – with a nice, undamaged face.

  “You were supposed to come here in person,” said the leader of the non-free world. His high, angular cheek bones and bony, furrowed brow accentuated the affronted scowl he showed me. Chester had thick, curly white hair, clumps of which were dyed crimson. The fashion looked ridiculous on a man in his late sixties, but who’d dare tell him that?

  “Am I as daft as you look?” I said. “If I had the brains of a toaster, I’d have popped right in,” I said.

  He tried to soften his harsh features, but anything other than scowling and looking pissed off appeared to be beyond his tight-skinned face. Too much age-reduction cream – which is as much of a fallacy today as it always has been. “I don’t want to hurt you, Zee. I want to work with you, for the good of humanity.”

  “If that’s the case, why did you put a contract out on Doctor Melon yesterday?” I said. “Melon claims to want the same thing. Oh, but perhaps, more to the point, how did you know who Doctor Melon was, that he was on the planet, or even that he existed at all?”

  “I didn’t,” Chester said. “None of my people did. Nobody on Deliverance did...”

  “But Melon said it wasn’t hi – ”

  “This Melon character, whoever the hell he is, lied to you. He’s done a lot of that.”

  “Convince me,” I said.

  “Melon’s trying to use you to his own ends,” Chester said, and that much I couldn’t disagree with. “There is no evil Warden program, you are not a killer cyborg, or rather, you weren’t meant to be, but Melon’s programming job has made you an angry killing machine. It’s only your good, original human programming stopping you from being truly evil, as he intended.

  “There is no alien conspiracy – well, not one pointing back to our mysterious benefactors, anyway. Think about it, Zee, why would aliens take us humans from Earth, using such incredible amounts of resources, and settle us here with these amazing self-starter colonies? Why would they just leave us alone, without ever having interfered with us? You see? We were supposed to prosper and thrive here. It’s my own fault, well, my family’s fault, that Deliverance is far from paradise. Put it down to the trauma of upheaval, and endless uncertainty that the rescued Earth generation went through, that has made us all the way we are here – whatever, I don’t know.

  “Oh, and think about this and watch Melon’s story unravel in your mind,” said Chester, tapping the side of his head with a gnarled forefinger. “If Melon only came to you the very day he landed on the planet; how do I know all this?” He paused, before trying to hit me with a big reveal. “There was a forty-third ship in the original fleet from Earth, it was a – ”

  “I know this,” I interrupted. “It’s a stranded colony ship, above Deliverance. Engine failure.”

  Chester’s face split a in smile as he shook his head slightly in wonder, “It’s still up there? That what Melon told you?” He didn’t wait for an answer, “No, son, the forty-third ship was the fleet’s flagship, but it wasn’t a colony one. It’s buried here on Deliverance, underneath the seabed, a short distance off of Boram Bay. My family have had – admittedly very limited – access to it for several generations, since Oswald Boram no less. It’s why we’ve always been so powerful. It’s where we got laser and, just recently, plasma weapons from, amongst other things. We’ve struggled to understand what limited data we can get out of the ship’s computer, but we’ve had our eureka moments and just recently we’ve gained access to masses of data. I believe this man calling himself Doctor Melon is an agent of a rival alien group to those who rescued us, and that he has come here to turn our true guardians, our Wardens, against us. He wants to wipe us out.”

  It was safe to say at this point that I could not determine which sets of ‘facts’ to allocate the most credence to.

  “How do you know anything at all about Doctor Melon, though?” I said.

  “We got lucky,” said Chester. “The first Warden that Melon re-programmed was such an awful hack job that it came at us raving mad. We had to fight it though, and we damaged its power core. It started to die, slowly. The cyborg equivalent of bleeding out, as its power drained away.”

  A kernel of doubt presented itself to me. Cyborg power cores are essentially tiny batteries, deep in the centre of our heads. Knowledge of their form and function is not something I have access to, but one being damaged without the cyborg being destroyed sounded unlikely. Still, I let Chester continue.

  “Before it died, it, like you, told us about a Doctor Melon, who had saved it from the big-bad Warden program. What it couldn’t tell us was why – if it was truly acting as a friend to humanity – was it in the process of trying to send Boram Bay’s original, alien-tech power stations into some kind of critical meltdown…” As Chester spoke, I recalled the ‘cover story’ on the news about the fate of Jolly Meadows; exploding alien power station was the official line. Artillery and flame-thrower squads had been that grey-skin captain’s version of events.

  Chester paused for a moment. Giving me time to mull his wo
rds over, not that I needed so many extra seconds to process his story. “Why would I believe anything you say? You are, after all, just some over-achieving gang boss.”

  Chester’s faced flashed an angry look, or rather angrier. “I admit it, I am a nasty mother-fucker, and I very much enjoy grinding as much of Deliverance under my heel as I can. But, at least I’m a nasty mother-fucker who isn’t going to wipe out humanity any time soon.”

  “That tells me nothing,” I said.

  “I know. Nothing I tell you will really tell you anything. Come here. Come to Boram Bay and I will take you to the command ship. The computer here knows you, Zee. It knows who you are…it knows who you were.”

  Tempting, I thought. “Why are your men doing their best to kill cyborgs, if they’re meant to be the good guys?”

  “Because so far they’ve been hostile to us. We can only assume they’re all ones that your good doctor has gotten to and tried to re-program. He just doesn’t seem to be great at his job. You’re his greatest success to date, and also his greatest failure. I think he was just about to turn you into an all too real caricature of an evil movie villain when the – it pains me to say it – natural good guy in you rebelled and fucked off away from him.”

  “So Doctor Melon’s been loose on the planet for at least five years?” I said. Chester nodded in silence. “And he’s been re-programming cyborgs the whole time, yet only I was activated initially?”

  “Hey,” said Chester, “I’m into the speculation realms myself, here, but I guess he saw you weren’t really up to much, you weren’t aware of your true self; you wouldn’t be out to get him. And, on the other hand he didn’t want to release any of his other fuckups until he had enough of them to cause some damage.”

  “But he didn’t count on plasma weapons?”

  “He didn’t. Man, I rushed those bad boys into production the very day we realised Deliverance’s mysterious new unstoppable assassin was actually one of the god-damned cyborgs we’d been reading about in the fragments of data we had from the command ship. I was originally itching to use one of them on you, until we realised what Melon seemed to be up to.”

  I waggled my stump, not that he could see. “You nearly got me, anyway” I said.

  Chester smiled. “That’s another thing. Come here and we can fix you up with a nice new arm.”

  Definitely tempting. Maybe that was the point. Probably was.

  Chester paused again, he was looking at me earnestly, as though trying to gauge whether to tell me something. “Zee,” he said. “We did activate a few Wardens of our own – those few that we could gain access to. And we sent them out to find others, or to try to…to…help the ones Doctor Melon had fucked around with.”

  Q4 and T9, then? Must have been.

  “Zee,” said Chester, his voice almost pleading, which wasn’t something I could imagine he had ever had to do. “I’ll say it again: Come to me. Together you and I can mobilise the rest of the true Wardens, to fight Melon’s co-opted ones, and then…well, then we start talking about finding a way to Earth, to find out what really happened there. Hell, I might even refrain from trying to conquer it in the name of Boram and Deliverance.” He smiled again, but I’d yet to see anything in his eyes other than anger.

  “Melon told me a story about Earth,” I said.

  “Yeah, we got that one out of our poor, dying cyborg too,” said Chester. “Utter bullshit. Thing is, you’re gonna spin a yarn about space aliens, you try to make it a bit far-fetched, a bit fantastic, and I swear that has people more ready to believe it. Goddamn brain network. Wow. What the fuck, eh?”

  “I’ll be in touch,” I said and I cut the call. I began replaying the conversation, video and all, in my head. I studied Chester for visual clues and analysed every word he had said to see how it matched up to the fragments of things Melon had told me.

  Parts of Chester’s tale made sense, and I thought about Q4. He had been non-hostile originally and perhaps he and those others on his network had decided I had to be ‘deactivated and disassembled’, for the good of the people the Wardens were supposed to protect. I was a habitual human killer, after all. And then there was T9, who claimed to want to interface with me…was that an attempt at the personal touch, to reach out and try to help me? Had I attacked her because of Melon’s programming?

  The ball, or rather the torn-off head was back in Melon’s court. Time for another chat. I waited until the hour was up, before taking a very quick jetpack hop back over to the Kambulance. Everybody was there. I noticed a mound of freshly turned earth with a wooden cross planted in it. Carved roughly into the cross were the words ‘Resting in Pieces: The Kaboom Baboon’. That might get a tad confusing for Kaboom if ever we got round to bringing him back to – electronic – life again and he found his way here. A macabre pilgrimage to his own burial site. Perhaps I’d do the same one day.

  Oh yeah, and: Internal memorandum, medium priority: Extinct the Manoogla lizard species.

  Doctor Melon’s head sat on a low rocky shelf near the Kambulance. I hobbled over to Kam, gently but firmly pulled his liberated laser rifle from his hands and turned away from him. I dialled the rifle’s power setting down to medium, put it on the rock-shelf next to Melon, angled towards the back of his head. I switched the rifle into continuous beam mode, pressed the firing stud and then stood back to watch.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Zed, what are you doing?” said Doctor Melon. “I mean, besides dangerously heating up a small point in the back of my skull with a laser beam.”

  I said nothing. The three humans gathered around the scene.

  “So, ah, how did your call to the Grand Overlord go?” said the doctor. “Zed, it’s getting rather warm in here…”

  “Looks like it’s gone badly for you, Doc,” said Oxley, sharp as a paving slab.

  By now, Melon would have urgent warnings going off inside his head, notifying him of impending cranial integrity failure. I limped over to my bag, fished out the data storage unit that had his personality program on it – I knew it wasn’t Kaboom’s identical one because that one was smeared in blood – and threw it onto the ground where Melon could see it, before stamping on it with my useless club of a right foot.

  “You absolute bastard,” said Melon. “Okay, I’ll talk! Everything.”

  I waited for him to realise he’d actually have to commence with the promised talking before I’d spare him.

  “I’m not from the forty-third colony ship!” he screamed. I pressed the firing stud on the laser and the beam winked out of existence.

  “Well, that was boring,” said Kam.

  Lothar’s crinkly crow’s feet appeared around his eyes at the gag, but Oxley said, “Are you kidding man? Zee’s stone cold. I wanted to see cyborg brains. If we’re not offing the doctor, let’s split the chick-bot’s head open and have a poke around.”

  I ignored them. Instead I picked up the laser rifle, circled around in front of Melon and pointed it at his exposed ocular array. He got the point and carried on talking.

  “I’m from another colony planet,” he said. “A planet called Iceholme.”

  “What was the point of lying to me about that?” I said. “So there’s no stranded colony ship up there?” I gestured with the laser rifle at the heavens.

  “Oh it’s there alright, I found it and boarded it when I arrived and it is indeed where I found you. I just wanted to keep my story simple, I wanted to leave out irrelevancies. All that matters – for now – is that this planet is the next test site on the Kon Ramar’s list.”

  “You can ram it where?” said Oxley.

  “The Kon Ramar,” said Melon. “Blue-tinted lanky humanoids who’ll rip out your brain and talk to it about shoes.”

  Oxley’s brow furrowed. “Oh, got ya. Erm? Carry on.”

  “They’re on their way here now; the main research team from Earth, but Iceholme is closer to Deliverance than Earth is, which is how come I’ve got the drop on them.”

  “You want
to be careful about getting the drop on people Doc,” I said. “A man-sized impression in the grass outside my home and some well-fed sea creatures are testament to that.”

  “Don’t we have whole centuries until they get here?” said Kam.

  “No,” said Melon. “The Deliverance fleet was like a caravan of meandering river barges, which would make their newer ships more like, well, like rocket-powered speed boats, fired from canons and not subject to frictio – ”

  “Geez doc,” said Oxley. “Your analogies are so bad they’re, like, really bad. Analogies.”

  “Doc, parts of your story tally with Chester Boram’s,” I said. “But he paints you as the villain of the piece.”

  “What?” said Melon. “No. That’s, I mean, when I arrived in orbit – yes, I’ll tell you how in a second – I made contact with the planetary authorities, with Chester Boram. I knew nothing about Deliverance, and I didn’t realise that it was ruled by a hereditary madman otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered. I fear I have given The Grand Overlord all the info he needs to try, only try, to convert the Wardens into his own personal army.”

  “As opposed to us being your personal army,” I said. “Except Chester says you’re working for these aliens’ enemies.”

  Melon just spat laughter at that. “Pure bollocks. The Kon Ramar have no enemies. Nobody can stand against them. Until now, hopefully. Because of what I learned on my home planet, we can stop them. The Kon Ramar are few, and weak on their own. They will rely on their cyborgs to fight for them, which is something they have never done; they’ve never fought a war, not even amongst themselves. Gassing Earth wasn’t a war, it was a tick-box on an experiment checklist. Even the cyborgs are untested against anything more than unsuspecting human populations. So, under the right conditions, Zed, you and a few others could go through them like a Manoogla in a firework factory.”

  “Another terrible analogy Doc,” I said. “That’s hardly survivable for the Manoogla.”