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  With my heat and infra-red scanners partially blinded by the swirling maelstrom of countless fires around me, it was only my motion scanner that gave me any warning at all, as a man in a dark-grey, heat-resistant combat suit burst from the door of a burning building, levelled an unrecognisable heavy weapon at me and opened fire. Even as I belatedly stepped to one side I watched my left arm vanish from the elbow downward, as a glowing red ball of massively condensed, super-heated energy flashed past in an instant, vaporising everything in its path. My systems reeled, going into a computerised version of shock. Damage reports and warnings screamed around inside my electronic mind, even as human processes attempted to establish a feeling of horror, at the unprecedented damage I’d taken. It had been too quick for pain; with damage so severe damage control locked down the sensation before I felt it, and it was only that fact that allowed me to react quickly enough to avoid a second blast from a second attacker, who had followed the first through the flames. He fired but I spun on my right foot, bringing my left leg up and around in a high roundhouse kick. The move dipped and pivoted my torso out of the path of the plasma blast, an instant before my kick broke the shooter’s neck. My balance felt all wrong, but my programming was adapting on the fly to my new weight distribution. To the machine in me, losing part of an arm was just a blip, a new variable in the endless computations. A leg would have been worse – for both parts of me.

  Luckily for me, these new guns appeared to have a terrible rate of fire. The first shooter was frantically squeezing his trigger over and over even as I closed the minuscule gap between us and crashed my remaining fist through his clear, protective faceplate.

  I crouched low, scanning and waiting for more attacks. I cleared all the damage indicators from my system – I could bloody well see the perfectly smoothed-off stub of my left arm, I didn’t need a blaring alarm in my head telling me about it. But, for the first time ever, I did not know what to do. I hadn’t just been hurt, I had been damaged.Suggested courses of action were being weighed and considered continually and automatically, but essentially I was deadlocked between fight or flight. At least a bloody animal instinctively knows which one to go for. Instead I’ve got logic telling me that taking one of these weapons and stalking through the burning ruins of the city, towards the centre, was exactly as correct a course of action as grabbing a plasma weapon and jetting out of there as fast as I could. Over to you, inner human.

  I’ve never had to retreat before – the time I helped Lothar and his men escape Dreary Hole goes down as a successful rescue mission, seeing as how I could have stayed swatting Overlords’ soldiers until the supply of them dried up. No, I’ve never suffered the insult of defeat before, so I’d be damned if I was going to suffer it now. I decided to stay and try to discover what had happened here. I couldn’t believe that as soon as the cyborgs had appeared, the humans had raised their game so high, so fast. The uniforms of my attackers were those of the Overlords’ regular forces; the troops who were the closest thing on the planet to an organised army. So, perhaps the Overlords had already been rushing towards plasma tech so they could rid themselves of me. Or, maybe they’d somehow been expecting the sudden upsurge in the planet’s cyborg population and had been ready for it. No, wait, look at the state of this city; perhaps they’d been nearly ready for it.

  I picked up one of the fallen plasma weapons. It was almost offensive how crude it was. I’d been damaged by something that looked like it had been cobbled together by a blind tinker who was both in a rush, and a really shit tinker. The weapon was a chunky, heavy rifle covered in nodules, air intakes, exhausts and such-like. It would be awkward to hold with two hands, let alone one. I’d have sub-perfect accuracy using this in my condition, but it was definitely better than forging ahead unarmed. No pun intended.

  I was worried that neither of the guns was capable of a second shot. Certainly, the first soldier hadn’t been able to get his gun to do anything after firing it once. It was the second soldier’s gun that I took since he hadn’t had a chance to inadvertently demonstrate that it too had a propensity for failure. The power needed to create plasma, let alone fling it around is incredible. By rights, at this stage of human technology on Deliverance, this gun should have had a power supply as large as a truck attached to it. Would the Overlords knowingly send out their troops with weapons so experimental they were only capable of one shot? In extreme cases of cyborg incursion, yes. Actually, since it was the Overlords, the answer was just yes.

  I oriented myself towards the centre of the city, checked that the coast was clear and began slipping in and out of cover towards my objective. My injury had made me uncharacteristically cautious. Even on assassinations where I chose to be stealthy, I did it with a simulated swagger. Now wasn’t the time to let my human side suddenly start fretting about mortality, but I could certainly let it teach me to be more careful from now on.

  I didn’t encounter anyone else the rest of the way to the centre but just before I arrived I heard a battle begin; heralded by the deep thrum of massed, sustained laser fire. I couldn’t see through the smashed buildings still in my path, but the odd errant laser bolt could be seen tearing up into the sky. As I crept ever closer, clambering over, or ducking under obstacles, the firing began to abate; petering out slowly to nothing.

  Eventually I came to one last head-high wall, which had previously been part of a compound around the old colony headquarters. I paused and listened, catching snatches of voices – soldier banter, if ever I’d heard it. It sounded like they had won the fight. I leaned my plasma rifle against the wall and reached up with my hand, grasping the top of the wall with my fingers to support myself as I raised up onto my toes and peered over the wall into the compound beyond.

  The far side of the courtyard from my position was bathed in light from the headlights of a row of armoured personnel buggies, leaving the space the other side of my wall in darkness. From my position the low-slung headlights seemed to highlight the outlines of a number of dark mounds scattered around the ground. Corpses. Even I gave up counting them when I got to seventy. And yet, twelve grey-clad soldiers moved around, alone and in pairs, cautiously checking each of the corpses for signs of life. My heat scanner could have saved them their time – waste that it was.

  I was just finalising the order in which I was going to kill the soldiers, once I’d scaled the wall, when there was a shout from the end of the courtyard to my right. I leaned into the wall, straining right up onto my tip-toes to see what was going on. After a few seconds I could see a broken figure pulling itself along the ground, into my view. Light reflected off the figure’s shiny, alloy head. Cyborg.

  The soldier who had cried out was keeping pace, following the mutilated cyborg. Its legs and all its flesh were gone, as – like me – was one arm. The soldier stooped as he walked, lowered his laser rifle, aimed for the back of the cyborg’s head and pressed – and held – the firing-stud. An unbroken, continuous yellow beam appeared between the barrel of the laser rifle and the cyborg’s skull. The soldier knew what he was doing and held the beam in place as he matched the cyborg’s slow movement. One of his colleagues joined him and carefully fired his own, purple-beamed laser at roughly the same spot. With the concentrated energy of the two beams it took just seconds until a smoking hole had been bored through the cyborg’s skull and its electronic brain utterly destroyed. The cyborg’s head slumped to the ground and it moved no more. The two soldiers high-fived each other and started poking at the metal corpse with their rifles.

  I felt…I felt? I felt anger. Fury. These insects! Then I felt nothing, for just a second before my system went ballistic, demanding that I acknowledge the need for a full system reboot. Rogue processes detected. Shutdown at once! I should have acknowledged; it was in my programming…wasn’t it? But no, I didn’t. I cleared all the alerts, I stared at the dead cyborg and then I felt…nothing. Was that the Warden code trying to rally me to the defence of an ally? Hah, if it was it had been a bit slow on the uptake. Bu
t, more importantly, I’d held it off – Doctor Melon to thank, I presume? I was certain that the Warden code had just dipped into my human side and tried to use a rampaging, out of control emotion as an excuse to restore factory settings with a flash reboot.

  Perhaps the wall I had leaned against was damaged, or just old, but, with the weight of my body pressed against it for so long as I stretched to look over it, something suddenly gave way and it collapsed into the courtyard, taking me tumbling with it. I landed hard on my face amidst a plume of dust, in full view of most of the soldiers.

  Chapter Twelve

  The noise of the crumbling wall attracted the attention of the soldiers in the courtyard, who collectively began to rush at me from three sides, shouting variations of halt and what the hell was that? as I rolled onto my back and sat up, fingers scrabbling for the plasma rifle that I had felt clatter against my legs as I fell. “Enjoy your trip?” I muttered to myself.

  All twelve of the surviving soldiers were converging on me. One of them fired his laser rifle from the hip. It went high and wide; an azure flash in my peripheral vision. Another one had a go, firing a jade-green laser beam, aimed more carefully, rifle-butt against his shoulder – but he missed, too. They were firing into a pool of darkness, their eyes attuned to the bright courtyard. Nevertheless, a darker, almost black, green beam melted my right ear. Too close. My fingers were still searching for the plasma rifle when a particularly fat solider, who’d donned a pair of night vision goggles, shouted to his men.

  “Stop! Cease fire! That’s the tame one.”

  Tame? Who was he calling tame? I finally found the plasma rifle and levelled it at the fat guy from my sitting position. I easily had the strength in one arm to hold the bulk of the gun at this awkward angle, for as long as it took. For as long as whatever was going to happen took to happen, that is.

  The soldiers had formed a loose semi-circle around me; nine of them had laser rifles, the fat guy was apparently unarmed, but the other two had plasma rifles. Shit.

  “Hi,” I said, forcing an ingratiating smile. “What’s going on here, then?”

  “Damned if I know,” said the fat guy as he pushed his goggles onto the top of his head. I could make out his rank insignia, and he had his name stencilled above the breast pocket of his combat suit. Captain Mengan. “The colonel’s dead, and so is the Overlord he came down here with,” he continued.

  “How many cyborgs were there?” I said. I was continually assessing my chances of escape, or of launching a successful attack, as we spoke.

  “Four,” said the captain. “We’re fighting cyborgs man, shit’s gone sci-fi.” He’d just confirmed my initial suspicion that he was an idiot – Even if I put it down to the exhilaration that humans describe feeling after surviving intense combat.

  “Did you kill them all?” I said. It was no good, my chances of taking my fate into my own…hand, here and surviving, were two point zero zero zero zero seven – unless it suddenly rained, then they went up to a nice round three percent. Even with the laser rifles, even with just one arm, I’d attack them and be reasonably sure of the outcome – if it wasn’t for those plasma rifles.

  “Pablo here killed two,” he indicated one of the soldiers who’d executed the cyborg just now. “And I took one down with just one punch.” A couple of his men snickered dutifully at the boast.

  “And the fourth?” I said.

  “Well, we knew one of them was in the old ship, the old command centre, and we had it surrounded.” He wiped sweat from his ample brow. “What we didn’t know was that three more were going to come up behind us and tear us a new asshole. We called down the artillery on the rest of the city then, to flush any more ou – ”

  “What about the people?” I said.

  “What about my people?” he said. “We had to do something to make sure no more were out there. Besides, they’re only Jollies.” He used the nickname for the people from this city.

  “And the arty didn’t do too much damage,” the captain continued. I employed a facial expression that conveyed disbelief.

  “No, seriously,” he said, as a grim smile stretched his lips. “That was the flamethrower teams we sent out to make doubly sure there were no more cyborgs.”

  I shook my head slowly. “And yet, here I am.”

  “Yeah, but you’re fucked,” he said. Most of his men laughed this time.

  “Anyway,” he went on gesturing with a thumb over his shoulder, back towards the courtyard battlefield. “Turns out we could wear them down with concentrated laser fire, while the bulk of the men kept them busy – even if that was only because the bots move a bit slower when they have to keep pausing to rip a man in half.

  “With the lasers doing a bit of damage, we managed to get the plasma guys close enough to kill two and blow the legs off the last one. Then Pablo had to swap his plasma for a laser because, well, the plas – ”

  “Because the plasma rifles are shit?” I said.

  “A bit, yeah,” he said with a nod that wobbled his jowls. “Experimental tech. You get one good shot out of them, and then, if you’re lucky you get a second one, but it’s always noticeably weaker. After that, you’re carrying dead weight.”

  “And how do you feel about being given faulty weapons? The Overlords have fucked you over,” I said.

  “True that. But, way I see it, it’s either get paid by them and get fucked over, or, just get plain fucked by the ones they are paying. Only way to be the one getting to do any actual fucking is to be an Overlord.” He gave a short laugh. “Apart from the Overlord who came down here with us, that is. He won’t be doing much more of that. I swear, he was hoping for some sort of meet and greet with the cyborgs. But as soon as the firing started he lost it and ran through a laser beam. Hell, his legs even carried on running for a second after he left his torso behind.”

  “Pleasant,” I said. “You never got round to telling me about the fourth cyborg.”

  “Well, just before you turned up and we finished playing with chrome-dome back there, the old ship’s door opened up and a cyborg just flew straight out, climbed into the sky and bugged out.”

  “Direction?”

  “No idea. Up?” he said, and then grinned at his own gag. “Anyway, enough chit-chat, the boss wanted to see you if you showed up.”

  “The boss?”

  “Chester Boram the Third, Grand Overlord of Boram Bay, Emperor of Deliverance,” said the Captain, reeling off Chester Boram’s utterly unofficial, but equally unopposed, title in a monotone.

  “Oh,” I said. Very interesting indeed. “Why?”

  “No idea. Now, up you get, you’re coming with us.”

  I had never had to do what a human demanded before. “No,” I said, deciding now would be no different. “I’d have to be seriously malfunctioning to go with you. At least here I know what the odds are. Tell his Royal Overlordness that I’ll give him a call sometime.”

  “How about we just take you, or shoot you?” said the captain. Many of his men had relaxed after the initial moment where they surrounded me, but now they tensed up again and became more alert.

  “It seems obvious Boram wants me alive and I doubt I’d be any good to him much more damaged than I already am…” I said, waving my stump at him.

  The captain sighed. “Give it up, you’re beaten.”

  “You’re right. I’d better self-destruct then,” I said. I changed my voice to mimic a tinny, badly synthesised and annoyingly nasal female human, “Warning, code nine self-destruct sequence initiated. All friendly units please retire to a safe distance of twelve miles. Ten…Nine…”

  “Obvious bluff,” said the captain.

  “…Skip a few. Three. Tw – ”

  “Alright. Shit. Just go you crazy fucker!”

  “Countdown paused,” I said, before switching back to my usual voice. “Good idea. Nice meeting you.” I got to my feet, keeping my rifle trained on the captain. Even if they did fire, I could register the tiny movement of any one of their fing
ers and squeeze my own trigger in the same tenth of a second. Dodgy weapon or not, the Captain would have known he might not live to report my apparently unwanted death.

  “I’m going to engage my jetpack now,” I said, “Don’t be startled.”

  “Get on with it,” said the Captain.

  I took off, using minimal thrust, and half hovered, half flew back to where I’d first been ambushed by the plasma troopers. I landed, managed to awkwardly clutch my plasma rifle and the other discarded one to my chest, with my one good arm, and then I took off again.

  I started the journey back to Lothar’s bunker, leaving a city senselessly but brightly burning in the night behind me. Mission accomplished, after a fashion. I’d found out what had happened, but not a hint of why – but knowing the Overlords were involved raised the stakes somewhat. I’d be sure to put that call through to the 'Emperor’ pretty soon.

  And then there were the plasma rifles; clearly rushed into production. Maybe I’d get time to take one apart and see how it worked, or maybe I was just carrying dead weight. Hah, in a world now full of cyborgs that weren’t hampered by pseudo-morals and inefficient inner-wrangling, and human soldiers who could seemingly now hold their own against ‘us’; in that world, maybe it was me that was the dead weight.

  Oh for the love of lubricant, no. Of all the useless human emotions, please, no – don’t let me feel self-fucking-pity! I did a clumsy, over-burdened loop-the-loop and a few barrel rolls in the cool night air, just to remind myself that I was still alive. I was alive! “I am alive!”

  Chapter Thirteen

  After messaging Lothar and giving him an E.T.A. to the bunker, I spent the rest of the return flight from Jolly Meadows stubbornly ignoring every single query that crossed my processors. Since Melon fell out of the sky, everything I had done had been based on, or had resulted in, incomplete data. I was hardly acting like a logical machine; I was rushing around like a confused human – and a pretty over-excitable and flappable one at that. So, I would not process a single question more until I had some answers. Instead, I considered what potential methods I had for gaining pertinent data. I had four untapped leads, so it was time to logically analyse them, pick one and follow it up.