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  New Melon lay nearby, the bimbo-like features of the T9 Warden head that he occupied were a pulped ruin, after face-first impact with the harvester I’d thrown him at.

  “Any ideas?” I said. “Can I wake Kam and Lothar up?”

  “No,” he said. “You’ll need to clear the chemicals they’re breathing from the air, or just get them somewhere where they won’t breathe these chemicals at all for about twelve hours. They’re going to be out for at least that long, regardless.”

  Yeah, I had known it wasn’t going to be as simple as waving some smelling salts under their noses. Still, Melon’s info made my mind up. As I’d fought the harvester trash-cans I had spared plenty of processor time thinking about what to do next. With the bad shit coming from above, it seemed logical to go down. So, I was going to carry on with the original reason for coming here. We’d breached the castle wall, but now I had to get inside the bunker the Overlords had built around the old colony ship. In there, according to what Melon had told me, I’d find a tunnel leading out and down to the colony flagship. Sure, there were three probably hostile cyborgs down there, but there’d be a trickle and then a flood of definitely hostile ones up here over the next few hours.

  Yes, I knew what I wanted to do. I looked at the bunker door. It was a smaller version of the steel entrance into the castle. I had a little theory that I had something with me that could get me through that door. The harvesters were drawing ever nearer, I’d be fighting them off again in a few seconds, but would be mobbed by them shortly after that, and then Kam and Lothar were going to get sucked-off, and not in a way that would have make Oxley jealous.

  Right. This was no time for subtlety, and neither was it time for politeness. I reached around awkwardly behind me, managing to fumble open the bag on my back just enough to worm my hand in there, and pull out Kaboom’s stored personality once more. Neither Melon saw it coming, as I jammed the data spike into New Melon’s ear. I’m sorry Doc, I thought, but there’s still two of you left after this and I need to get indoors, pronto. Besides, New Melon somehow seemed to be more of an arse than Classic was, I definitely liked Classic better.

  New Melon’s smashed up face slackened, before animating again as the quick shutdown and reboot occurred.

  “Oh, hi Zed,” said the Kaboom Baboon once more, in place of New Melon. “I saved you? And I didn’t die?”

  I smiled. Same old Kaboom. “Hello again. No, you didn’t save me, and yes, you did die. But, honestly, I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done. You’re in a cyborg head now, and it’s kind of urgent, but I need you to self-destruct. Now.”

  “Oh,” said Kaboom. “This is going to take some serious getting used t – Oh, wow look at all this shit in here! I’m on the ‘net…I can, fuck, I can do anything.”

  “Kaboom, listen. Find the self-destruct. I’ll, explain later.” Hey, I was sure I’d get a non-exploding Kaboom back one day, I could tell him what he’d done, then. Well, I was kind of sure…

  “Uh, okay Zed, whatever you say. Hey, what’s that flying dustbin doing to Kam?”

  Fuck. I whirled around, sledgehammer arm extended and all but cut the cheeky harvester bastard in half, such was the ferocity of my movement.

  “Ten…” said that all-too-familiar computerised voice in place of Kaboom’s. The human part of me wanted to sigh in relief.

  “Nine…Uh, I guess I found it,” said Kaboom.

  “You sure did, Baboon. Well done.” And with that, I briefly balanced on my broken foot, swung the foot of my good leg at Kaboom’s head and sent it bounce-rolling to clang against the middle of the bunker door as it came to rest.

  I listened to Kaboom intoning his countdown as I snatched up another dropped laser rifle and began peppering the oncoming harvesters. One got behind me, but a backward hay-maker from my sledgehammer sent it spiralling up and away in ruins. I stood astride Kam, and began walking sideways, using the drag of my broken right leg to pull Kam’s body along with me towards Lothar, batting away harvesters as they formed a bobbing gaggle around me, trying to snatch at Kam’s head with their claws. Kaboom reached “two” just as I reached Lothar with Kam. I believed we were outside of the blast zone, and I was proved correct as Kaboom yelled his name before exploding and, just as I had hoped, shredding a small portion of the bunker security door. Yeah, it definitely hadn’t been built to withstand cyborg shrapnel.

  I went into a clumsy, crippled blur of movement, swatting harvesters as though it was the function I’d been created for. It would have made a human sick to hear the squelches the nearly full ones made as I battered them. Eventually there were no more around us, but, the sub-process I’d left counting them made me aware of a huge number that were still moving up on the castle from the city itself. I had to get Lothar and Kam inside. I had time now, though. I’d made time. I dragged Kam through the ruined bunker door – thanks Kaboom, you’re a hero – and went back for Lothar. I dragged him inside, too. The bunker entrance was a corridor that split in two after just a few feet. Judging by the orientation of the corridors, the right-hand one led to the colony ship command module, so, the left-hand one led somewhere else. I decided that the highest probability was that the left-hand tunnel would lead to, amongst other places no doubt, the flagship under the bay.

  As quickly as I could, I went back for Classic Melon. When I’d thrown him at the trash-can droid – and missed, with him, at least – he’d only gone a short distance before landing on the ground.

  “You absolute bastard,” he said as I stooped to pick him up. “You, you, killed me. Again.”

  “Doc, you were always going to do the same to me,” I said.

  “I was not,” he said without conviction.

  “Doc, you said yourself; you heavily modified the personality encoding and uploading programs. You’ve made them aggressively invasive, so that they dominate the head they’re uploaded into.”

  “Yes…”

  “You intended all along to stick yourself into me,” I said. Honestly, the namby-pamby human I seemed intent on becoming would have struck a petulant hand-on-hips pose right about now. Sickening.

  “Ah. Well…”

  “For the good of humanity, you claimed at the time.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Same deal here, Doc. Now think yourself lucky that I agree with you about that shit now, and that I don’t just stamp your back-stabbing head into the ground.”

  “No, why do that when I’ll just make a handy hand-grenade for you later on, eh?”

  “That’s the spirit, Doc. Let’s go.”

  “What about Oxley?” said Classic Melon, although really I could just call him Melon again now – the two-thirds of a head that was Fourth Melon, still in my bag just didn’t count really.

  “What about Oxley?” I said. “He’s dead.”

  “True, but his brain might still be of use to the Kon Ramar. These drones might also harvest fresh corpses. Do you really want to leave his brain to these things? Oh, and hurry up, there’s a rather large number of them heading this way.”

  I cursed myself for being a bit slow on the uptake. Oxley hadn’t taken any head injuries – I remembered his smiling, dead face. What were the chances there was a brain encoding machine in the colony flagship under the bay? Kaboom had been dead for a few hours and he had still been retrievable. Although, with his propensity for exploding, it was maybe hard to tell how much of him had been recovered. Gauging that was made even harder by the fact that playing with a self-destruct was exactly the thing either a brain-damaged, or a ‘normal’ Kaboom would do, anyway.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” I said. I picked up Melon, turned towards the bunker and, with a stunningly accurate throw, that was mere par for the course for me – okay, I missed a throw earlier with two thrown Melons, but that was different – I hurled him through the blown up bunker doorway and went and got Oxley. By which I mean I once again clumsily scaled the rubble mound, twisted Oxley’s head off with a squeeze and a wrench of my good arm, and
laboriously returned to the bunker entrance. The last few yards was a limping, hobbling battle against a fresh wave of harvesters. Not as many as I’d feared, though, due to the gruesome fact that many of them were full of brains and had gone, well, wherever the fuck they were taking the brains.

  Once inside the bunker corridor, I smashed up the concrete floor with my hammer and used the rubble to block the rents and tears in the steel door. It might not hold the next wave of harvesters for long, but it was all I could do. Melon told me that he thought the harvesters were unintelligent and would not be able to figure out how to gain entry. He said they would probably just go off in search of un-harvested brains that were lying around outside. After all, there were millions of them to choose from.

  Time for the next phase of the make-it-the-hell-up-as-you-go-along plan. I stuffed Oxley’s head into my bag, alongside the near-forgotten Fourth Melon and the incredibly useful Kaboom data unit. I left the lazy, sleeping humans hidden under an old tarpaulin I’d found lying around and set off down the left-hand corridor of the bunker tunnel. I clutched the pole that Melon’s head was still attached to – he was coming with me, I wanted him giving me updates on the two sets of Wardens. He told me that the three at the end of the tunnel were still moving back and forth, still doing something repetitious. What the hell could be so important that they wouldn’t come out here and fight either me, or the brain harvesters, or both?

  Time to find out, and put a stop to it.

  Unless it was something useful, and then I’d just have to steal, or hijack it or something.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The corridor became a man-made tunnel with large white tiles on the floor, walls and ceilings. Every tenth tile in the ceiling had a glowing white orb attached to it, providing illumination. Melon had told me that the Wardens were five hundred feet out to sea, in the bay and fifty-two feet below the seabed. From the entrance to the tunnel, that was one thousand and forty-two feet in total. The tunnel descended at a gentle, almost unnoticeable angle – a five point seven zero three percent gradient, the anal computer part of me couldn’t resist pointing out.

  I advanced down the corridor in as casual a manner as I could manage when dragging my broken leg along. I was waiting for Melon to warn me if the Wardens up ahead of us started moving this way, instead of the limited wandering they were doing, wherever it is that they were. Aside from them, frankly I wasn’t scared of anything else that may lie in wait. If I got melted by a plasma rifle, then so be it, but I was beginning to suspect the plasma tech had come too late for the Overlords – that maybe they’d used them all up already. It could even have been a safety concern. Using plasma in a tunnel, under the sea could mean impromptu bath-time.

  At one point, an automatic door in the corridor slid open and a squad of gas mask-wearing grey-skins piled out, bungling an attempt to ambush me. I made short work of them in the tight confines of the corridor, as I beat them to death with my sledgehammer, and, a couple of times, with Doctor Melon’s head. Melon even apologised politely to the last grey-skin as I swung the doc’s head into his face with lethal force.

  Finally, I came to a crossroads where the corridor split off in two other directions to the left and right – narrower corridors that both disappeared into darkness, one going up, the other heading down deeper. According to the doctor, the Wardens were within shouting distance, down the main corridor, straight ahead. So, I shouted.

  “Hey! There’s a crippled cyborg down here who thinks he can kick your Warden arses!”

  “That got their attention,” said Melon. “They’re coming this way. And they’re running.”

  I ducked down the right-hand offshoot, shrugging my bag off my back and throwing Melon a bit further down the corridor, into the darkness ahead of me – my night vision told me there was sod all down there, though. I quickly opened the bag and pulled out Kaboom’s data unit. I was about to stab it into Fourth Melon’s disfigured head when I realised the patter of cyborg feet was too close. Instead, I flattened myself against the far wall of the corridor, so that the enemy Wardens wouldn’t see me until they had turned almost fully into this offshoot. I predicted that with three directions to choose from, and three Wardens, they’d assign one Warden per corridor, so as to quickly scan every angle for threats.

  Sure enough the three Wardens, in a line abreast, came into view. The one closest to me, a friendly looking young man with neat brown hair and pasty white skin, was just starting to turn my way when I hopped forward, leaping off of my good foot and barrelling into him. We all went down like dominoes, but, as we fell, I managed to jam the spike of the data unit into the ear of the Warden I’d collided with. The other two Wardens were back up on their feet in an eye-blink – damn was I jealous of their mobility. I had made no move to stand up, instead I simply swept their feet from under them with the weight of my sledgehammer. The head of the hammer badly damaged the right foot of the furthest Warden. As they landed on their backs I flailed at one of them – the uninjured one – with the hammer, doing some damage to his arm, his leg, his head – not a lot, but enough to fuck him up a bit and make him readjust his combat calculations, with new variables. I managed to scramble to my feet at roughly the same time as my adversaries.

  “Oh, hi Zed,” said the newest incarnation of The Kaboom Baboon, who had already stood up and backed away from the rest of the scramble. “I saved you? And I did – ”

  “Kaboom,” I yelled as I wildly waved my sledgehammer in front of me to ward off a feinted rush from the Warden who’s arm, leg and head I’d just battered. He was a bald, ancient-looking brown-skinned fellow. “There’s no time for that shit. Find your self-destruct!” The ancient Warden came at me again, catching the head of my hammer in one hand, and trying to jerk me towards him. I’d anticipated that, and instead managed to punch him in the face with my good hand. It was a solid punch, and it caved his face in slightly.

  The third Warden, a skinny young white guy with a pathetic, wispy ginger beard was favouring his right-foot after I’d smashed his heel when I’d tripped them both. He seemed to be squaring up to Kaboom, obviously aware their former comrade was now mine. Sort of.

  “Self destruct?” said Kaboom. As he said it, he reached up to the side of his head and found the data unit sticking out of his ear. He tugged it out, glanced at it and then, with a look on his face, and a reflexive motion that said, “Ick, what is it? Get it away from me, yuck, yuck, ick,” he hurled it down the sub-corridor I’d leapt from.

  I briefly wondered what roles these Wardens had played in our research team, centuries ago back on Earth. The whispy-bearded Warden threw a punch at the understandably confused Kaboom, but, luckily for the former human, his combat programming was running on processes inside his electronic brain that were separate from his human ones, so he ‘instinctively’ dodged the punch, whilst launching a solid jab of his own.

  “Why would I want to self destruct?” said Kaboom. What the fuck? Now was not the time for Kaboom to veer from the script I’d come to expect. Blow up you tubby idiot!

  As the old Warden and I engaged in a furious, blurred exchange of blocked punches, hammer swings, foot stamps and raised knees, I yelled at Kaboom, “Come on now, Kaboom, you’re in a Warden’s body and there’s a big shiny self-destruct button in there. You’re The Kaboom Baboon, how can you resist?”

  My adversary caught my hammer head again and this time he wrenched it, hard. The welded join with my arm stump gave way and he snapped the hammer off, reversed it and used the head to crush my left shoulder into the wall behind me, in a crunch of shattering wall tiles. Oh, and my shoulder joint was pretty much flattened, too.

  “But, I don’t want to blow up,” said Kaboom. “This is going to take some serious getting used t – Oh, wow look at all this shit in here! I’m on the ‘net…I can, fuck, I can do anything.” Oh, were we back on script?

  Kaboom’s opponent got through his distracted defence, then, kicking him in the chest and sending him staggering up the main
corridor. “Ouch,” said Kaboom, sounding angry. No, still off the script. Damn.

  The ancient Warden had the advantage over me now. Even though I chopped at his arm with the blade of my hand, causing him to drop my sledgehammer to the floor, he focused on the gaping wound in my side. He reached in with both hands, wrapped them around my spine and started wrenching and pulling, trying to shake and snap my metal vertebrae. My reply was to butt him in the face as hard as I could. As he reeled back, I snatched a glance up the corridor. Kaboom saw me looking at him.

  “Baboon,” I said. “This is important. We can bring you back again afterwards.” He’d already thrown the data unit clear, bless him.

  The black Warden recovered his balance, lifted one of his feet above the height of my knee, and then brought it down in a stamping kick that pulverised my already broken knee joint. I fell to the floor. Oh fuck. I started to wonder if I might be in a spot of trouble.

  “I dunno,” said Kaboom. “I should ask Lothar.” The beardy Warden rushed at him and the two duked it out, trading punches.

  “Fuck Lothar! Do it, or we’re both dead.” Of course, Kaboom blowing up right next to me was hardly going to be good for my health, but, well, I’d think of something.

  “Ten…” said the voice I’d been hoping to hear from Kaboom.

  The old Warden lashed out at my prone form with a savage kick. I deflected it over me with my good arm, and his foot smashed through some wall tiles, getting stuck in the solid rock beyond that the tunnel corridor must have originally been dug into.

  “Nine…” said Kaboom’s other voice. “I found it!”

  Kaboom’s adversary spun a round-house kick that hit him in the shoulder, crashing him against a wall, but leaving him upright.

  “Eight…”

  “Well done, Kaboom,” I said. “I’ll get you back, I promise.”