by Mike Wild
THUNK-THUNK-THUNK. THUNK-THUNK-THUNK.
DUMDUMDUMDUMDUM.
Hairs prickled on Maggie's neck. There was nothing so terrifying as being blind and aware that an enemy was coming, but being able to do nothing about it. Nothing was as nightmarish as knowing that they were there, closing in on her, but not exactly where. Or, then again, maybe there was.
"I've got them. Here, look!" some teckie behind her shouted. Somehow the geek had patched his DA into the plane's rear navcam and was mind-comming the result to the other passengers, whether they wanted it or not. Suddenly, what they were all so desperate to leave behind was right there, in their heads.
The injured woman said it out loud for them all. "Aw, crap."
The rear navcam afforded a panoramic view of the main runway along which they were fleeing. In fast pursuit of them were three Martian tripods. The three tripods moved at a speed that appeared at odds for such huge and ungainly machines. As the plane increased its speed, so did they, coming hell-for-leather in pursuit. Momentum alone would probably have brought them down were it not for the constant whipping and flailing of their metal, snake-like arms that provided support and stability along their way. Those arms were little more than a blur and, as the machines raced forward, they grabbed onto all they could find - vehicles, wreckage, the remains of out-buildings, piles of bodies, alive and dead - to first steady the oncoming tripods and then, flinging the detritus forcefully behind them, to feed their momentum. In turn, the tripod's legs pounded onto the runway surface again and again and again, cracking it as if it was an eggshell and spewed clouds of dust explosively into the air. The impacts reverberated in Maggie's bones and she swallowed hard. They were like hunting dogs, those things, she thought. Big-bastard hunting dogs.
"What's happening?" the aisle-runner said. "Oh Gaia, what are they doing?"
The two flanking tripods had altered their trajectory slightly, closing ranks, in what looked like the beginning of a pincer movement on the plane. At the same time, the central tripod began to thrash forward with even more desperation. Despite the fact that the plane was moving at full throttle, the machines were closing fast.
Get us out of here, Skip, Maggie willed. Come on, Turner, I know you can do it. There was a subtle change in the sound of Viking 613's engines. A slight tip in the image from the navcam accompanied it. YES, Maggie thought.
The plane's front wheels lifted and they became airborne. YESSS!
Throughout the plane there was an instant, palpable sense of relief and the passengers began to cheer.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Captain Turner said. "Welcome to Viking Airways 61-"
The captain didn't get the chance to finish. At that moment, everyone who hadn't blanked their DA recoiled instinctively, as something shot straight at the navcam. There was a loud metallic crunch and the plane lurched. The image dissolved into static.
Everyone heard a loud, almost intolerable metallic scraping. As it continued, the plane's engines made a sound like a violated mule and the cabin began to judder violently.
"It's grabbed us," a man said. "It's slowing us down."
The DA images from the navcam flickered back into lucidity, revealing that the tripod's arms were binding themselves tightly about the aircraft's rear wheels and pulling the plane down and back. The tripod itself had stumbled and fallen on its side, and was tumbling end over end, being dragged along the runway in a shower of sparks and disintegrated metal. Bodies - human and otherwise - tumbled from its maw and bounced away. It was obvious that the machine was near destruction, but it was not letting go.
"Don't worry," the teckie shouted. "The thing's falling apart. It'll never hold."
It doesn't have to, idiot, Maggie thought bleakly. She drained what was left of her Wooze in two deep gulps. The drag that the suicidal tripod generated was all that its companions needed in order to close the gap between themselves and the plane. Their pounding footfalls could clearly be heard on both sides of the fuselage and, a second later, Maggie's window darkened.
As the tripod crashed into view, she tugged the ring-pull on a fresh can of Wooze. Maggie raised it to the window before taking a long, deep slug. "Hi there, how ya doin', biol-head?" With her other hand she held onto the kid again, only this time more gently. She was surprised at how calm she felt.
The machine was keeping pace with the plane. Maggie realised that it was as tall as the Galasphere itself. Through a tangle of arms and legs there was the main body, which looked like an egg that was devoid of features, apart from its maw and a pair of heat ports that shone like feral eyes. Being that close, Maggie noted that the maw was lined, not just with blood, but strips of flesh and gristle, as if it had crammed its victims in. The thing reminded her not so much of a machine, but of some living predator, a giant, chitinous jellyfish.
There could be no doubt that it was some kind of construct. No doubt, because it said so, right there, in big letters:
Manufactured by Sunset Motor Company.
Sunset Motors, Maggie thought incredulously. You have got to be kidding. She thought back through her long line of boyfriends and the number of embarrassing Sunset models in which they had paraded her about. Sunset Motors. I wouldn't be seen dead in one of-
She stopped and looked at the tripod's maw. God and Gaia, I have had enough of this fragging planet. The machine turned to look at her. It actually looked at her with those feral eyes, which began to glow. Oh frag, Maggie thought. SHI-
TWO
"Let's burn a large one." These had been Mek-Quake's last words as the demolition robot, in his humanoid form, had thrown himself from the ABC Warrior's jet. He dropped with the others and their hip torcs flared as they descended towards the army of tripods that rampaged across the tarmac of Sojourner Airport. For once, there had been no argument from his fellow warriors, no dissent in the ranks, no alternative strategy, proposed by the group's more reasoning mechanical minds, to increase the peace. It was, as they were all aware, the final showdown - a test of metal and mettle, between themselves and the age-old forces of the planet Mars itself. It was, in short, time to kick ass, to do the biz, to kill or be killed. It was do or die day.
It was a sentiment with which they all concurred.
Blackblood said, "If Medusa wants total war, she's got it." Deadlock stated, "It's time to finally take sides." Joe Pineapples added, "It's not over for any of us."
They were good words, Hammerstein reflected, as he fired his altitude jets, manoeuvring to take in the view below. Brave and worthy words, ones that, on any other day and on any other planet, would have made his chest swell with pride as the leader of the ABC Warriors. At that moment, though, his chest remained oddly deflated, for Hammerstein was concerned for his friends. He believed that today could very well be the day when it was over - for all of them.
After two thousand years, the ABC Warriors had returned to the Red Planet. The "Song of Medusa", the planetary entity, who was as much the soul of Mars as Gaia was of Earth, had drawn them back there. Her song, a plaintive cry for help to the humans who had colonised her world, had drifted far beyond her atmosphere and leaked out into the depths of space, reaching, eventually, the ears of the ABC Warriors, who were on Lo-Braseel. She sang:
Across the bridge, there's no more sorrow,
Across the bridge, there's no more pain,
The sun will shine across the river,
And we will never be unhappy again.
The song's message, in Medusa's mind, had been a simple one. Awoken from a hundred million year sleep by the continual and brutal terraforming of Mars, all Medusa wanted was to be left in peace. To be allowed to return to her long, deep slumber.
It was not to be. Either the humans had misunderstood her plea, or they had chosen to ignore it completely.
Humankind had continued to brutalise her world and remake it in their own image. They changed it, violated it. They violated her.
Perhaps it was the colonists who were the villains, for doing this, or perhaps it
was the lady Medusa herself, for refusing to accept that which always inevitably came: change.
In the end, it hadn't mattered. Medusa had been driven to the edge of sanity, some would say beyond, by the intrusion.
She had declared an all-out war.
The ABC Warriors, the almost legendary guardians of Mars, had been left with no choice but to intervene. Over the millennia, Hammerstein and his companions had fought in so many battles that he had lost count of their number. From the Volgons and the Straw Dogs, the Mekaniks and the Dentrassi, to the Bel, the Bok and the Kandul, they had trodden the bloodied boards in countless theatres of war. On each occasion, they had emerged victorious. They had lost good friends along the way, of course, as all combatants do: among them Ro-Jaws, Happy Shrapnel, Steelhorn, and most recently Morrigun, but as a unit, they had lived to fight another day.
But this battle, as Hammerstein knew, was going to be very different.
The simple fact of the matter was that the ABC Warriors had never faced an enemy quite like Medusa, or to be more precise, an enemy like the chosen army of Medusa: the tripods. Far from being mere machines, these homicidal constructs, and their genetically rekindled Martian pilots, had been plucked from the very subconscious of the colonists themselves, and inside those minds lay the horrors of a book written by a certain Mr HG Wells. Tempered by, and imbued with, the strength of an angry and half-deranged planet, they were the foot soldiers of an elemental power that was both ancient and omnipotent - and as such, they were no mere cannon fodder. There was a chance, albeit a small one, that the ABC Warriors would once again emerge victorious, but Hammerstein had to face the very real possibility that maybe this battle was already lost. In any case, he knew that it was one they had to be prepared to lose.
Hammerstein was aware that the other ABC Warriors knew this, too. He saw it in the set of their faces and in the grim determination in their eyes.
The irony was that, even if they were to win, they would still lose, because a victory would bring about the culmination of a two thousand year-old program imperative. And with it their automatic self-destruction.
Either way, it was the end for the ABC Warriors.
It said a lot that not at any point did the ABC Warriors falter in their descent. They intended to give the fight their all. Even though they were still a thousand feet up, the Warriors unleashed their weaponry on the enemy that lay below. Their neural nets micro-calculated blast radii and explosive yield, fallout and detonation plumage, so as not to endanger the humans caught amidst the melee. They let loose with monkey bombs and gut-burner cannon shells, koroda gas and atom-meks, widow-maker scythe missiles and SEGs. They gave the tripods everything that they had got and more. For the tripods on the ground there was no avoiding this storm from the heavens, and they were inundated with pellets and bombs, rays and projectiles, beams, bullets and bazookas. It was an atomic, bacterial and chemical strike of devastating pre-emptiveness, but in case that didn't work, the kitchen sink was thrown in as well, literally, by Mek-Quake.
The explosion of colour, the swift and deadly rainbow rain unleashed by the robots, was designed to gauge every potential weakness of their challenging foe, to find any chink in their armour and exploit it. The rain analogy was not lost on the ABC Warriors and through the budda-budda-budda, thwoom-thwoom and brat-a-tatta-tat that their guns rapidly discharged, Hammerstein caught snatches of songs from Joe, Blackblood and Mongrol, which carried to him on the roaring wind.
"Paindrops keep falling on my head..."
"It's rainin' meks, Hallelujah..."
"Listen to the rhythm of the falling pain..."
Mek-Quake, typically, failed to grasp the analogy, drawing some very strange looks from his companions when, for reasons best known to himself, he contributed a cover of How Much Is that Doggy In The Window? complete with bow-wows.
The song was made all the more surreal by the fact that he was discharging seventy-millimetre shells at the time.
Deadlock remained silent, though not through any lack of musical talent. In fact, he prided himself on doing a rather splendid version of Bat Out Of Hell, complete with motorbike and chainsaw, but this was something he would never let the others know. Instead, at this moment, the ex-Grand Wizard of the Knights Martial had other things on his mind. Deadlock ran a broad-spectrum sweep of the enemy, scrutinising the effects of his teammates' aerial bombardment, and he analysed and computed the damage on their behalf. What he saw was not reassuring.
"Much as I appreciate the water music," he said, "it appears that our friends are a little tone deaf. They appear, in fact, to be unmoved by the entire fragging performance."
Prompted by Deadlock's words, the ABC Warriors ceased their fire, allowing the fog of war from the intense onslaught to clear. When it did, they were amazed to see that, despite the bombardment, the tripods' ranks were barely diminished and that most remained remarkably unscathed. What was more, those rounds of their aerial bombardment that were still detonating were doing so with less than dramatic results. In fact, they were almost totally ineffectual.
"I'll be boiled in biol," Mongrol said.
"If this is as bad as it looks," Hammerstein responded, "Medusa might just see to it that you get your wish."
"Mek-Quake not understand," the killdozer contributed. "Leggy things should be itty-bitty pieces."
"They should," Blackblood said.
"Deadlock?" Hammerstein queried.
The crimson-cloaked ABC Warrior gazed down and assessed the new dynamics of the situation. "If I were to hazard a guess," he said in his tombstone tones, "it would be that we are dealing with sophisticated barrier technology as standard equipment on each of the tripods. Powerful stuff. Multi-resonance canopies, quantum phasic shields, possibly even Einstein-Rosen deflection."
"You mean Martians brought umbrellas?" Mek-Quake noted more simply.
"That's right, Mek-Quake," Hammerstein said. "They're the ones who are singin' in the rain."
"So, what now?"
"No choice," Hammerstein said determinedly. He locked and loaded. "We have to get down and dirty, find a hole in those things and get in there."
"A bit of undercover penetration?" Blackblood said happily. "Now you're talkin'."
Hammerstein surveyed the besieged airfield. Most of it was already devastated, but there were a few small pockets of human survivors: a group of federal troops were cornered near a smouldering hanger; more buzzed angrily, but uselessly, in a swarm of mini-copters called Little Deathknells; nearby, a panicked mob of battered civilians trying without much success to clamber over a locked set of security gates.
Further away, towards the edge of the airfield, tripods were pursuing a lone plane while it attempted an emergency take-off.
"Concentrate attacks near the areas of the floppies' activity," Hammerstein ordered. "Draw the tripods to you. Blackblood, Mek-Quake - the feds. Deadlock - see what you can do to help the knells. Joe and Mongrol - take the civilians. I'm going after that plane."
"Er, Ham," Blackblood said. He had noticed something the others had not: the tripods had triangulated their position and launched a counter-offensive. Heat-rays lanced at the ABC Warriors from all directions.
"INCOMING!" Hammerstein shouted. "Hip-torcs, now! Go, go, GO."
The ABC Warriors blasted away from each other as their torcs fired at maximum power, radiating the meks outward as if they were performing an aerial display. Those Mek-nificent Men In Their Flying Machines, Hammerstein thought. The tripod heat-rays lanced through the exact centre of where the meks had been and continued skyward relentlessly, except for one, which caught the tip of Blackblood's road-drill leg. Blackblood was more than a little fragged-off by how effectively it turned the metal of his pride and joy golden, then molten, and promptly reduced it by an inch in height.
"YOW!" the ABC Warrior shouted. "Watch out for those babies. They sting."
"Guess you're gonna be walking in circles, Blackblood," Mongrol said.
"Least I'll be wal
kin', ya lumbering ox. Biol! I am gonna knee-cap those bootleg sons of bitch-"
There was an explosion above them. The ABC Warriors looked up to see that one of the tripod heat-rays had impacted with their auto-piloted jet. Smoke poured from its tail and it had begun a slow and spiralling descent. It looked as if there was no way it was going to pull up.
"Oh frag," Deadlock cursed.
"This bad," Mek-Quake commented. "This mean we can't go home."
"We haven't got a home, dimwit," Joe interjected.
"Yeah, right," Mek-Quake agreed. "But it also mean we have-"
"No more replacement bodies," Deadlock finished. "If we're destroyed here then it's the Great Journey for all of us."
"Lovely," Joe said. "This day just keeps getting better and-"
The exchange was lost to Hammerstein as he accelerated after the escaping plane at full thrust. The tripods, which were in pursuit, performed a classic pincer attack on the aircraft. As he watched, one of them grabbed its tail and pulled it back, while its companions jockeyed into position on both sides. They kept pace with the plane for a second. The tripods stared hungrily in through its windows then maliciously fired at the wings, slicing them neatly away with single blasts of their heat-rays. It appeared to Hammerstein as if they were playing a game of cat-and-mouse, only they intended it to be a deadly game.
Before the plane had even rolled to a stop, the tripods turned their heat-rays onto the main fuselage and, in more prolonged blasts, drew them left to right along its entire length. The top of the fuselage was simply sliced away and popped off as the heat that was generated lifted the metal momentarily. The tripods casually peeled away the roof as if they were opening a can of Marsardines. They loomed over the exposed interior, their metal arms twitching readily, and without hesitation they began to pluck out screaming passengers from their seats. Despite the safety advice, this was not a time for clunk-click, every trip. Those who had secured themselves in seatbelts were simply torn in half by the tripods.