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  “Okay, but the very second Kam presses the lift-off button, I suggest everyone sits, or lies down and shuts their eyes. Light-raft travel is not a fun experience.”

  “Hit it, Kam,” I said. “Let’s finish this.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Lothar lost his lunch all over my shoes as the light-raft shot straight up in the air, like a turbo-charged elevator. The ship did something to the atmosphere in the forcefield bubble surrounding us that thickened it somehow; increased the pressure and held us in place whilst cushioning us against the rapid acceleration.

  Everyone else had their eyes shut, even Melon, which was odd as there was no way machines like us were going to get motion sickness, vertigo or even agoraphobia. No, I just enjoyed the ride. As we broke out of Deliverance’s atmosphere the forcefield flared white, long, bright and intense. It really ruined the bloody view.

  And then we were in space, and I was mildly impressed. There wasn’t time to marvel, though, as we just just hurtled straight at another, much larger light-raft from underneath. Just when it looked like we were going to become a squashed space bug on the other craft, a hole the size of our own light-raft opened up, and we slotted right in. Our ship had basically just become an indistinguishable part of the much larger vessel.

  The whole trip had taken three minutes and thirty seven seconds.

  I’d like to say we caught the Kon Ramar with their pants down, but, seeing as how the five of them that were standing on the mother-ship – mother-raft? – were as naked as the day they were born, or hatched, or grown in vats, or whatever, that was technically impossible. As it was, they were about as ready for us as we were for them – not at all.

  Our light-raft’s forcefield deactivated, now that we were part of the mother-raft. The way we had integrated with the main ship, and the fact that I could see five other control-columns like the one on our light-raft made it logical to conclude that this ship was made up from six light-rafts joined together.

  Lothar picked up his sick-slicked laser rifle and aimed it at the nearest alien, who had something that looked like a television remote pointed at us. Kam aimed his own rifle at what looked to be the most important of the naked blue humanoids – the one with the already inflated neck-sack. One of the other four aliens was pointing a remote-like object at us, too. Kam shifted his aim to track that one instead. We had a bit of a stand-off to deal with.

  I watched the engorged alien. Over his shoulder, beyond the mother-raft’s clear forcefield I could see a familiar-looking, more ‘traditional’ spaceship. That must be the stranded colony ship. My enhanced vision could pick out a tiny line of dots, like space-based worker ants, coming in and out of an airlock on the side of the ship. It was the trash-can harvester drones. But, had they popped up here to pick the brains of the stranded colonists, or were they delivering? Picking up, or dropping off?

  “The alien with the fully deployed neck sack is the leader,” whispered Melon from the floor where his still pole-mounted head lay. “The Kon Ramar use their sacks to show leadership, dominance and to imply forthcoming aggression.

  “That one, well, he’s basically their Pope, but is also what they call the Preeminent Lord of Holy Research,” continued Melon.

  “Big cheese, huh? We kill him first then,” I whispered back.

  “I was hearing that, Zach,” said their leader, in a thin, reedy voice. The words sounded like he was reading them, as though seeing a script for the first time. “My prodigious son re-runs.”

  “The Kon Ramar have wonderful hearing,” said Melon. “But a poor grasp of other spoken tongues. I believe he means prodigal, not that it makes much sense anyway.”

  “No shit, Doc,” I said. “But I am quite prodigious, you have to admit.”

  I turned my gaze upon the ‘Pope’. “And who the fuck are you?” I said.

  “Zach, Zach of Estramen? How forget-me-not? I am cry,” he said, with a leering grin.

  “I know you, do I?” I said. I ran a quick search of my newly recovered, unopened memory files. Looking for the term ‘Pope’ in connection with ‘Kon Ramar’. I didn’t want to know everything about my past, but this way I could access relevant things as I decided I needed to. It took just milliseconds, but the search highlighted a few relevant memory fragments, so I accessed them, incorporating them into my database that serves for general, instant memory-recall.

  Turns out this fucker had been the one who came to my research team on Earth, acting as a friend of humanity, and, eventually of me, personally. He’d then stuck the knife in, after months of working together and co-operating. He personally had dragged my son away from me – hey, maybe that’s just what friends do? Alien ones, anyway.

  “You!” I said.

  “Deevak Eel-Shay. Your are at my service.”

  “That’s what you think,” I said as I lashed out a foot that connected with Melon’s head and sent it flying at the Kon Ramar Pope. Understandably, that was the signal for all hell to break loose.

  Kam ducked, rolled and fired at one of the ‘armed’ aliens, who thumb-stabbed a button on his remote-like device. The device made a noise like a human with a mouthful of water saying “wibble” and, with no visible beam, or projectile, a patch of floor near where Kam had been glowed white hot, almost liquefying. Kam’s solid, orange laser beam cut that Kon Ramar in half, from nipple to nuts. The portion without legs slid to the floor, but, oddly the bit with legs stayed standing. Didn’t matter, that one was dead.

  An inhuman scream came from Lothar as the second, definitely-armed Kon Ramar, hit him in the leg with a shot from his wibble-gun. Most of Lothar’s left leg vanished and he crashed to the floor, writhing and clutching at the gooey stump of his thigh.

  Deevak was the only alien wearing something. He had a thin metallic belt around his skinny waist, that seemed to have a number of gadgets clipped to it. As Melon’s head came – actually – screaming at him, he pressed a button on the belt, and, in a blur, seemed to slide aside. He pressed another button, and four more Kon Ramar who looked just like him appeared all around him. I wasn’t fooled for a second, as the holograms had no heat-signatures. The actual Deevak was running for one of the light-raft control columns.

  Kam shot the other armed Kon Ramar in the face, just as an unarmed one – real, not hologram; those were static – rushed at him and launched himself into an ungainly flying kick, which nevertheless connected with the side of Kam’s head. Kam went down as consciousness left him. The alien put a foot on his neck and would have ground the life out of him if I hadn’t shrugged my jetpack off my back, grabbed it with my left hand and thrown it at the alien. As it flew clear of me, I sent a command to ignite it, and it sped up, striking the Kon Ramar in the head, totally obliterating it.

  The other unarmed alien had unwisely rushed me from behind. I did the T9-manoeuvre; dropped my shoulders, took half a step back and drove my elbow into the middle of the attacker’s body. He went flying away from me, struck the raft’s forcefield and just hung there, suspended against it. My Kon Ramar biology wasn’t up to much – all I knew was that they were blue, proudly exhibitionist and had frilly balloons in their necks – but he looked dead to me.

  Deevak’s neck sack had shrunk to nothing. I took that for a good sign as to how he felt the battle was going. He’d reached a control column now, though. He started jabbing at buttons with a finger.

  “Estramen,” he said. “Once bitten, twice angry. Estimations of human irritation will be reprised. Our Holy magnificence shall re-run once more!” With that, the portion of mother-raft he was standing on sank out of view as it became a separate light-raft and, faster even than I could track it shot off towards deep space, before vanishing into a glowing orange-purple energy ball that appeared just in front of it.

  “Bugger,” I said. What the fuck did he mean that their Holy magnificence would re-run? Return, I guess. I hadn’t realised it had ever arrived in the first place. My gaze went to the still-moving ant-line of harvesters over at the colony sh
ip, just a short way away. The aliens had sure been in a hurry to get their brain-harvesting operation going. All potential scenarios my processes were evaluating were starting to point to something very odd indeed.

  Kam was out cold and Lothar had passed out from the pain of the destruction of his leg, but neither of them had swallowed their tongues, or anything like that, so I left them to it for the time being. I walked to one of the control columns and looked at the display. Meaningless alien squiggles greeted me. Fuck it. I jogged over to where Melon lay and picked him up. I took him over to the control column and thrust his face at it.

  “You said you can read this bollocks,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  Melon concentrated on the console for a few minutes.

  “Oh my,” he said.

  “Oh your what?”

  “Press that button would you?”

  “Why?”

  “It will bring up an information screen about the progress of the harvesting mission.”

  “Okay, Doc,” I said. I pressed the button.

  “Wow,” said the doctor.

  “What? Damn it,” I said, before trying to quash the human impatience.

  “They’ve been up here for a few weeks. They, oh dear me, they converted everyone aboard the colony ship over there into a brain construct.”

  “Bastards,” I said. It felt like I had to say that, but yeah, that was definitely pretty shitty, and I had wanted to stop that sort of thing. Hell, it was still happening down on Deliverance, even though less than three hours had passed since they’d started slicing and sucking, so most of the Deliverance population would hopefully still be intact.

  “There are three commands here,” said Melon. “The button on the left corresponds to a command that translates basically as ‘Purge’. The middle and right ones are ‘Download’ and ‘Hail’, respectively.”

  “That’s great, but what are those commands relating to?”

  “Whatever’s happening on the colony ship,” said Melon.

  “Ever heard the saying, ‘Curiosity killed the cyborg’?” I said as I pressed the ‘Hail’ button.

  “Oh my good lord!” said Melon a moment later, as I watched more alien squiggles replace those already on the screen.

  “What?”

  “They’ve done it!”

  “Done what?”

  “They’ve summoned their god!”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The Kon Ramar had, according to Melon, wanted to bring the essence of their god into our physical realm, primarily, apparently, so that they could download Him into a computer and then re-program the bits of the religion they slavishly obeyed, but didn’t like. Whilst that was a bit bonkers, the fact that phase one of their plan had, apparently, succeeded was bonkers squared. Bonkers to the power of bonkers.

  “How can that, over there, be an actual god?” I said.

  “How do we know it isn’t?” said Melon.

  “Not to start an infinite loop, but how do we know it is?” I said.

  “Because it spoke to me, through the console.”

  “What did it say?”

  Melon read from the screen. “It said, ‘I am He the Kon Ramar call Father. I am: All,’ which is a bit strange, seeing as how it seemed to know it was addressing a non-Kon Ramar through the console.”

  “That is a little spooky,” I said. The logical side of me had nothing much useful to add, other than suggesting a high probability rating that the appearance of an alien ‘god’ on the scene was not in our favour.

  “I want to talk to it,” I said.

  “You’re in luck then,” said Melon. “According to this computer, they’ve jacked another computer into the brain network. The aliens had probably been expecting it to just talk to them with one, dominant human personality, like all their ‘successes’ have to date.”

  I chuckled inwardly, remembering that experimental network Melon had told me about that wanted to talk to them about shoes. Maybe that had been the god of shoes, and they’d not realised.

  Melon had me press a few buttons and, suddenly, a deep, I won’t dare say ‘godly’ voice, emanated from speakers built into the mother-raft control columns, so that the voice appeared to come from all around us.

  “Speak, mortals-in-metal,” it said. “Tell me how you wish to serve me.”

  “Now, that takes the spooky biscuit, Doc,” I said. “It’s speaking English.”

  Melon laughed at me. Not with me, but at me. I made a mental note of that. “Oh, my dear, Zed,” he said. “That’s just the computer translating the speech output, you silly robot.”

  I pouted at him like some affronted teenager, scolded by a parent.

  “Okay, press that button, and we’ll be transmitting voice,” said Melon.

  “Hi there, brains,” I said, leaning towards the control column, as I didn’t know exactly where the microphone was. “Who is this, again?”

  “I am He the Kon Ramar call Father. I am: All,” said the voice.

  “Well, hi there, He,” I said. “I am he the Kon Ramar are going to learn to call a pain in the skinny blue butt. I am: Standing next to a self destruct butto– Whoops I slipped.” I pressed the button that Melon had said earlier was marked ‘Purge’ and turned away, not even watching the colony ship as it exploded outside, beyond the forcefield behind me.

  “Zed!” cried Melon, utterly aghast. “You just killed a god!”

  “I’m just warming up, Doc. Just warming up.”

  “Melon,” I said. “Zed to Melon, come in Melon.”

  “You, you, killed a– ”

  “Oh snap out of it, Doc,” I said. “I destroyed a network of human brains that had apparently been possessed by an other-worldly phenomenon.”

  “But, it, knew we weren’t Kon Ramar. It knew we were the personalities of mortal beings inside metallic, electronic entities.”

  “All the more reason to kill it, with fire,” I said. “Sounds far too clever for its own good. Besides, Chester Boram was raving about mind-reading and telekinesis before he had his little accident – so who knows what powerful shit that thing might have been able to do?”

  “But, you killed a go– ”

  “Doc, do you want me to spend as long as it takes me to figure out how to send one of these light-rafts, with you on it, straight into the centre of Deliverance’s sun?”

  “No,” said Melon. “I don’t think so.”

  “Then shut up. I’ve probably just banished it from our realm, or something nerdy like that. Right now, we’ve still got to end the brain harvesting going on on Deliverance. There are still thirty-two Wardens down there and dead-god knows how many harvester drones.”

  I walked over to check on Kam and Lothar, a bit more thoroughly than the cursory look I’d given them earlier. Lothar’s vapourised leg had left behind a cauterised thigh-stump. I’d noticed the distinct lack of blood from his injury when it happened. That was a good thing, I supposed, but I feared for his chances of survival. The quality of medical care on Deliverance wasn’t that fabulous, even before the brain-drain began. Getting him treated right in the chaos that would follow the awakening of the Deliverance survivors would be tricky, at best. As for Kam, I was pretty sure he would be okay. I probably could have woken him up, but I didn’t want him asking questions – mostly because I had no real idea what was going on, anyway.”

  I walked back over to the control column Melon and I had been using. “What I can’t begin to rationalise,” I said. “Is why this Kon Ramar Pope abandoned his newly-channelled god to save himself? Wouldn’t it have been a good idea for him to self-destruct this light-raft, or something?”

  “Suicide is against their religion,” said Melon. “And, besides, any explosion might have consumed their god. These creatures are so bound by their religion, that they forgo eternal life via the computerisation of their brains. Do you really think they’d be able to kill their own god, or even risk harming it? No, Deevak Eel-Shay will be back, with reinforcements. This is a holy war fo
r them now.”

  “Hah,” I said. “By the sounds of it even taking a shit is a major religious experience for these jokers, so that’s not saying much.”

  “Well, they do have certain ceremonies…” said Melon.

  “Okay Doc, enough shit-chat. I presume we can control the Wardens from up here?”

  “You presume correctly, this is where the aliens activated them from. Now, press the buttons I tell you to, and no others,” said Melon, and he began guiding me through endless menus and command prompts on the Kon Ramar computer system.

  Eventually, Melon said, “It’s no good. I can’t find any way to shut them down, or alter their mission. The commands are all obfuscated.”

  “What about blowing them up?” I said.

  “With what? This ship is unarmed.”

  “Let me re-phrase,” I said. “What about making them blow themselves up?”

  “Oh, you mean like The Ka – ”

  “ – boom Baboon. Yes.”

  “It’s worth a try,” said the Doc. “Try this…” and he gave me another flurry of orders.

  “We can do it,” said the doc after a few minutes. “I can’t isolate individual Wardens, but I can send out a blanket self-destruct order. We can stop them!”

  “Let’s do it then,” I said. “Which button?”

  “You do realise, that you and I will be affected by this command, don’t you?” said Melon. “We’re still Wardens, both of us, we just happen to have dominated the Warden programme, within us. We will still respond to such a high-level command.”

  It was a possibility I’d considered. If we both died here, then who would carry the fight to the Kon Ramar? We’d save the people of Deliverance, but for how long?

  “I hope this is the part where you tell me that ever since Kaboom first exploded on us, you’ve had a sub-process figuring out how to deactivate the self-destruct sequence?” I said.