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  “But?” I said.

  “After a few weeks of ‘preparations’ and human-alien familiarisation, they just pulled out their equipment and converted you all right there on Earth. It was their idea of a joke; befriend the human pioneers of cyborg technology, and then, for shits and giggles, use them as cover-personalities in their own, fully functional cyborg Wardens.”

  “That’d be pretty amusing if it hadn’t happened to me,” I said. “Hell, it still is pretty funny. You sure the Kon Ramar are all bad?”

  “What the? Zed?” said Melon. “They took you – deliberately – from your son, the very moment you were seeing him off to his stasis chamber. And then they let him die.”

  I shrugged. “They took some poor human guy’s son,” I said.

  “Oh, so that really is how you’re going to deal with it then?” said Melon.

  I shook my head and limped away.

  Lothar had loaded my bag onto the Kambulance. I hobbled over to it, my intention being merely to swap my near-empty jetpack canister for my next-to-last full one. But, having done that, I found myself holding that one of my toys; a patchwork lion. I stared at it, willing myself to remember things that effectively I had never known in the first place; damn Melon and his deletions.

  All I could playback in my head was this boy, Peter’s, tear-streaked face turned up at me. Bloody hell Melon, couldn’t you have held back a memory of us playing together or something. A birthday perhaps? Anything but violent upheaval and irreconcilable parting. Damn.

  So, I’d had a son. It shouldn’t change anything. He’d lived and died centuries ago. But I wondered if he’d be proud of his old man, ludicrous idea that it was. “So Petey, do you like how your daddy routinely gets his face melted off while he’s out killing people?”

  Yeah. It changed nothing and here I was with group A asking me to eliminate group B. It was just what I had always been doing, only this time writ large. “Please destroy this organisation”, or “Please kill this man” had become “Please defeat this species”.

  Did the fact that this very species had taken my son and been responsible for his death make things personal? No. I mean it. No, no, no. Did I care about the fate of humanity? Not really. Would I do it for Melon? Never. So, that left what? Ah, fuck it, it left the truth. The thought that I could not stop from tying up all my processors. That I would do it for the tear-streaked little boy, and I didn’t care how mushy that sounded. It had just achieved second highest priority on my great list of things to do. System: Override previous conclusions. New data regarding soft fleshy human infant is grounds for furious bloody vengeance!

  Priority one was still to find the bastard who had wired me up to feel pain and strangle the fucker with a rope made from his most sensitive nerve endings.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Right, time to go,” I said. I’d been standing still for more than an hour. I guess it was my ‘alone time’, dealing with unwanted emotions that were able to steal ever more and more of my processor time. The guys had of course taken the opportunity to break out the cards and the chips. As long as there was no firing, or at least if the firing was not aimed directly at them, it was poker time.

  “Where to, Zee?” said Lothar.

  “Boram Bay, I want to find this fleet flagsh – ”

  “Ah-ha!” shouted Melon.

  “Eureka!” came a muffled voice from the bag containing T9’s head. A muffled, male voice.

  Oxley jumped up onto the bed of the Kambulance, found the bag with the head in it, opened it up and lifted T9 out.

  “Hello,” she said, using Doctor Melon’s voice.

  “I did it!” shouted Doctor Melon’s actual head.

  “You sure did!” said Kam. “And just what was that?”

  I knew. “He’s copied himself into T9 via their private link,” I said. Clever fucker. I destroyed his stored personality so he backs himself up elsewhere. Smart move indeed.

  Lothar grimaced. “You damn things are just plain wrong,” he said. “No offence, Zee, buddy.”

  “None taken,” I said. “Melon, why did you do that? Was there a risk she’d have done it to you, first?”

  “Oh, no,” said the new Melon. “It’s not in her coding. This was a little feature I added to the code when I made the modifications prior to encoding my own personality. I basically just sent a copy of myself across as a virus.”

  “You sure irritate like one, so that’s apt,” I said. “Can you do it to me?”

  “No, when I was re-coding you five years ago it was something I set up a defence against. Once I had your personality streamlined, perfected and in control of the Warden program I didn’t want them somehow doing what I’ve just gone and done to T9, and undoing all my good work.”

  “I see,” I said. “Well, well done you, I suppose. But you were supposed to have been cracking the Wardens’ network, getting us a secret window onto their movements and activated numbers.”

  “Child’s play,” said the original Melon.

  “I did that while we were chatting earlier,” said the new Melon.

  “And you decided this was not worth reporting?” I said. “I presume, at least, that you can still monitor the network, despite having invaded T9’s head?”

  “Indeed I can,” said the new Melon.

  “He’s very clever,” said the old Melon. “Takes after me.”

  “My brilliant colleague, the original Doctor Melon, had of course already removed my host-head’s presence from the cyborg network. I am now, however, additionally able to detect their presence, via the network, and pinpoint their locations to within three centimetres,” said the new Melon.

  “I’m sure that’s as wonderful, as it is babbling bollocks,” I said, picking up my laser rifle. “Then I guess we won’t be needing the old Melon anymore.”

  “Wait,” shouted both the Melons.

  “I’m just kidding, Doc, or Docs, rather,” I said. “I’m not so angry at you anymore. I get why you’ve done the things you’ve done to me, even if I don’t fucking like them. We’re in this together, I suppose. Just, please, try not to let this multiple Melons thing get confusing.”

  “Oh,” said the old Melon.

  “We,” said the new Melon.

  “Won’t” they both said.

  “For fuck’s sake,” I said, clamping down hard on a smile that was creeping onto my ravaged face.

  “Oh, I get it!” shouted Oxley, having his own little Eureka moment. “The chick-bot is doing an impression of old Melon-features, yeah?”

  “Yes, Ox, that’s exactly what’s happening,” said Kam. “Well done.”

  “Right,” I said. “From now on, old Melon is just plain Melon, or Classic Melon. New Melon is New Melon, or Melon Two. Is that simple enough?”

  A general murmur of assent or indifference was all I needed, and it was all I got.

  “So how many cyborgs are active, not counting us three,” I said, addressing either Melon.

  “Five,” said New Melon. “That’s also taking into account the three we know the Overlords killed at Jolly Meadows.”

  “So no more activations so far?” I said.

  “No,” said New Melon. “There may be up to thirty-two unactivated cyborgs yet to come, assuming one per Deliverance colony ship.”

  “And where are the five active ones?”

  “Scattered all over Deliverance, mostly.” said New Melon. “They’re all between fifteen and twenty-four hours away as the cyborg crow flies. But they’re all moving at what I presume to be jetpack speeds.”

  “Can you ascertain anything at all of their purpose?” I said.

  “No,” said both Melons.

  “But, I can tell you where they seem to be heading,” said New Melon. “If they don’t deviate from their current headings, that is.”

  “Do tell,” I said, disguising my annoyance at having to prompt for the information.

  “Three are bound for a coordinated arrival in Boram Bay in twenty-three hours and twelv
e minutes,” said New Melon.

  “Sounds like it’s going to get a bit hot for old Chester soon enough,” said Lothar.

  “We can but hope,” I said.

  “The remaining two are actually heading for the bunker we left behind,” said New Melon.

  “They’ll be there in approximately fifteen hours and twenty-nine minutes,” said Classic Melon.

  “Heading for the last known position of the late Miss Rampaging Kill-bot,” I said.

  “Can we fight two cyborgs?” said Kam.

  “We took all the plasma and laser weapons from the grey-skins we fought earlier,” said Lothar. “What do you say, Zee, buddy?”

  “No, we can’t.” I said. “Just chuck the plasmas. Any one of them could have been fired once, if not twice. I’ll not see another one of you get smashed because your gun blows a raspberry at an onrushing death machine. They won’t even serve for intimidation, because if the bluff fails, it’s too late to back it up with anything else, because you’ll be dead.”

  “Can’t we just give them a bit of cosmetic surgery with our lasers?” said Oxley.

  “Not with just four of us against two of them, no,” I said. “We’d barely have enough shooting time to warm them up slightly, then they’d be on us.” T9 on her own had taken me down in one-on-one combat, despite me striking first, again. The cyborgs had been slow on the uptake, but they would definitely know by now that I couldn’t be talked to, and there was no way at all that I could stand against two of them in hand-to-stump combat.

  I had an idea, though.

  “Doc,” I said.

  “Hmm?” they both replied.

  “Can’t you two just invade their minds, the way you took over T9?”

  “No,” said Classic Melon. “The cyborg point-to-point network ‘chat’ ability has a range of just a few feet, and, If T9 had had a body she would have instantly gone into combat mode the moment we attempted to plant the virus. It took hours and hours to hack into T9 in the first place back at the bunker when she was decapitated and force her to accept a point-to-point networking request. These other two cyborgs won’t become, let’s call it, “malleable” until they’re incapacitated.”

  “I see,” I said. “Can we cook up some electronic warfare surprises? Could we maybe trick them into thinking T9 is still one of them?”

  “Negative,” said Classic Melon. “They will know, or at least suspect she’s gone. They can’t detect her on the cyborg network – even though we still have her kind of attached to it, stealthily – and she will have been relaying everything that happened to her at the bunker to the other Wardens, right up until Lothar took her inside, cutting off her comms.”

  “However,” said New Melon thoughtfully. “We may be able to confuse them a little if we have the former T9 bombard them with private communication requests.”

  “But that means getting New Melon’s head close to at least one of them,” said Classic.

  “So there’s a chance of throwing them off balance and gaining some kind of advantage?” I said.

  “I’d say that chance is slim at best,” said Classic Melon.

  “How do I make this thing nod?” said New Melon.

  “Okay,” I said. “But slim chances against two are better than the probabilities against taking on five together if we allow them to all link up. See if you can formulate some kind of plan.” I addressed the group as a whole, “We have fifteen hours for some rest and relaxation, and to get to the bunker to see if we can arrange a nice booby-trapped red-carpet for our incoming special guests. I’m going to regenerate first, which will take about eight hours. The rest of you make yourselves comfortable. Lothar, I take it you packed rations?”

  “Fifteen kinds of Boram Potatoes,” said Lothar. “Get ‘em while they’re cold.”

  Once again I had a lot of flesh damage so I chugged a couple of cans of lumpy spuds to top up my artificial stem-cell matrix ‘goop’, while the humans shunned sustenance and instead magicked their poker cards back into their hands and got on with their game.

  “We’re jealous of you,” said Classic Melon, eyeing me with his one good eye.

  “Yes,” said New Melon. “You can heal, we can’t.”

  Indeed, that would be a bit tricky when their digestive systems had been forcibly disconnected.

  “Well neither of you was very pretty to start with,” I said. Which in the case of the T9 head was a lie. Committee-designed she may have been, but T9 had been smoking, even before Kaboom’s misfiring plasma had set her hair – and part of her head – alight.

  “You can share your cell matrix fluids with us, you know…” said Classic Melon.

  “I can?” I said. Oh cyber-god, no: My nozzle.

  “Yes,” said New Melon. “Although all the cyborgs have the D.N.A. of their original humans, it’s been modified; improved to be compatible with the D.N.A. of all other cyborgs from the same origin species. You just need to secrete the fluid onto us using your excess discharge hose.”

  “Maybe I don’t have any excess to spare,” I said. Oh, look: Churlishness – chalk up a new human trait for Zed. Or is it Zach now? No, I’m Zed. Zach’s dead, baby.

  “You have just consumed enough protein to restore a dozen cyborg’s outer layers,” said Classic Melon.

  “Don’t be greedy now, Zed my dear boy,” said New Melon.

  I summoned up a sigh. “Tell me how,” I said. They told me. I shuddered and dropped my trousers.

  I don’t have a penis. I can’t say I’ve ever needed or wanted one, and they seem to cause trouble – as well as causing more humans, which is something I generally frown on. What I do have is a flap of skin in my groin area which can be moved to one side to reveal a small, orange hose-like nozzle. Many of my functions are unknown to me, and the Purpose Of The Nozzle is one of my greatest inner mysteries. I think the gaps in my self knowledge can probably be blamed on Melon hacking my code apart and deleting shit willy-nilly. Or nil willy in my case.

  With my trousers and pants around my ankles I shuffle-limped over to Classic Melon, batted him to the floor with my stump, did the same to New Melon and began ejaculating spare stem-cell fluid all over their heads.

  As the thick, milky-white fluid began to coat them both, running down their battered faces, Oxley, of all people, wandered over, diverted from his mission to raid the Kambulance for beers for the lads. He stared at the scene with his mouth hanging open and a strange look in his eyes that I did not like one bit, no sir. If he started touching himself I’d make him pay. Cash. Nobody should get a show like this for free.

  “Ox, what’s the hold-up?” called Kam from the poker game.

  “Zee’s got his little orange pecker out and he’s jerking off over the Docs,” said Oxley. “He’s giving them both a dirty great spunk-bath.”

  There was only the briefest of pauses, before Kam said, “Well, are you joining them or getting the bloody beers?”

  The Kon Ramar and Doctor Harold Melon had robbed me of my childhood memories, so for all I knew this was the first time I’d ever felt like a pubescent teenager being caught having a crafty wank by his mum. I terminated those human thoughts and went to ‘sleep’, wondering why I could feel warmth in my cheeks.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  We spent ten hours resting, leaving us with another five to get back to the bunker and prepare an ambush for the two inbound Wardens, looking for T9. Both Doctor Melon’s heads and I healed up nicely – not my arm and foot though, of course; oh how I missed being whole – and I think even the poker fanatics got a few hours sleep.

  It was half an hour before midnight, on a cloudless, moonlit night, when we secured the now much lighter load aboard the Kambulance – Kaboom had been quite a hefty chap, even if he had been like a feather compared to the cyborg corpse he had shared his deathbed with. We were still going to cart T9’s corpse around with us in case I could figure out a way to steal her arm and foot, and use them to replace my damaged bits. Neither Melon was aware of any kind of cyborg sk
eleton repair procedure, but logic dictated that I, as a machine, could be repaired.

  Lothar and I climbed aboard the Kambulance bicycles – each choosing a Melon to travel in our handlebar baskets, and Kam and Oxley took up the free-roaming bikes. We set off with the light from Deliverance’s small, suspiciously Earth-like moon – anyone doubting the terraforming theory was an idiot, I reckoned – more than adequately lighting our way. Coming down from the lower portions of the Heights, where we had originally abandoned the bicycles, made for very easy going, with more free-wheeling than pedalling. We’d definitely get back to the bunker long before T9’s pals showed up there.

  I played back and reviewed the conversation I’d had with the doctor about how I’d been part of a team of scientists, studying the theory of cybernetics. Right before the Kon Ramar had showed up on Earth.

  “Melon?” I said, as we all but flew down a steep slope.

  “Yes?” they both replied.

  “You say the Kon Ramar thought it would be amusing to turn all of the human cybernetics scientists into cyborgs…”

  “Yes,” they both replied.

  “So, would it be logical to presume that all of the Deliverance cyborgs came from that same research team?”

  “Yes,” they both replied.

  “So, the rest of the cyborgs are my former colleagues? Old friends, even?” I said.

  “Yes,” they both replied.

  That was bad enough, but I was thinking that if I had had a son, then, well, scientists aren’t always the most socially minded examples of human-kind, so I may not have looked too far afield when choosing a mate. Was my son’s mother stomping around Deliverance at this very moment, unaware that she was anything other than a weapon pretending to be human? Had I already ‘met’ her? Was the skinless cyborg I watched get executed by the grey-skins a former lover?