by Mike Wild
Chock!
He did the same again.
The cybo-whale's sensor network warned of the potential breaches of its hull. The metal behemoth was twisting and bucking and thrashing - at least as much as something of its size could twist and buck and thrash - in a desperate attempt to break Joe's grip and throw him off.
Chock!
But Joe was not trying to breach its hull, at least not in the places where he plunged the knife, because the cybo-whale's flesh was too thick for that.
Chock!
No. Joe Pineapples was heading for the cybo-whale's eye; at least he hoped he was. The Sand Sea bubbled and roiled around him. Waves of the viscous soup buffeted him or slapped him in the face. He felt himself rolled upside-down and sideways, plunged to the sea bottom and hurtled towards its surface.
He felt himself dragged along the bottom, his backside bumping inelegantly through the sand. The cybo-whale tried everything it could to dislodge him.
But Joe clung on.
Chock!
Just a little further...
Chock!
Joe's eyes widened as some sharp coral loomed. The way he was positioned, the coral had the potential to cause him some considerable pain - not to mention a soprano voice. He shot it away just in time.
Chock!
Try as the whale might, Joe wasn't going anywhere, not if he could help it.
Chock!
Not that it was easy, maintaining a grip on the bootleg while simultaneously trying to avoid being shot at by its friends - the two cybo-whales that Joe had discovered shared this oversized fish tank.
Not easy at all.
The only relief was that at the moment they were unable to use their heavy weapons against him. They were whales after all, and the way their companion was trying to shift him, they were simply not manoeuvrable enough to bring them to bear in time.
That could change at any time, though, and in the meantime, they had other weapons.
Speaking of which, he thought. Incoming.
Joe twisted, avoiding a homing acid harpoon. It skimmed across his stomach, almost turning his robot six-pack into an eight-pack.
"Frag!" he said. In the quicksand it came out sounding something like "fralub".
He missed the second, which impaled him in the leg. It wasn't the first he had been unable to avoid.
"Biol!" Joe cursed again, but it came out as "bilubb".
Joe snapped the harpoon off and pumped an alkaline sealant into the wound. He sighed as the anti-mektic balm took hold. He had to give Cobb some credit. The senator had done more than just summon the whales here from the Viking City docks - the fragger had turned them into sub aquatic assassins.
Fragging devil-fish, Joe thought. All right, devil mammals, whatever.
He had even given them mammal-like names: Silverhair, Longtusk, Icebones.
The point was, they were armed to the gills with anti-personnel ordnance: cannons, disruptor banks, laser turrets and, of course, the aforementioned harpoon launcher. It was a nice twist, that, Joe thought - fitting whales with harpoons. A kind of Moby Dick revenge.
Joe had only just managed to avoid all of these on the shore when the cybo-whales had attacked, forcing him to race for cover following their unexpected appearance. It was an unfortunate fact of life, however, that the average desert didn't afford much in the way of cover.
Joe had done his best to return their fire on the run, but that was when he had discovered that apart from their weaponry, the three beasts had also been fitted out with some nifty subcutaneous armour. He scanned it. It was Kevlar blubber.
Kevlar blubber, the ABC Warrior had thought to himself with some exasperation. Who the frag thinks these things up? And much more importantly - why? Armoured whale, sir? Certainly. You know, you're not the first person to ask for one of those. Every home should have one, right? Anyway - the point was, considering the size of a cybo-whale, that was one frag of a lot of Kevlar blubber.
An impenetrable amount of Kevlar blubber, as Joe had found out to his cost.
In the end, he just couldn't afford to waste any more bullets, which was when he had decided that the safest course of action would probably be to take a dip. Fast.
Then maybe, just maybe, he figured, he could lose them in the murk.
Unfortunately, though, it hadn't gotten any better when Joe had made it under the surface. What he had hoped was going to turn out to be a leisurely swim across the ocean floor, keeping low to the bed and confusing the whales' radar, turned into a confused and disorienting scrabble through a barrage of gurgling quicksand maelstroms, the sea bed thrown into turmoil by one explosion following another. When he had finally managed to pinpoint his attackers through the resultant mire, Joe had made yet another discovery, namely that the cybo-whales were also capable of disgorging a variety of nasty little homing missiles out of their stupid, fraggin', flapping mouths.
He'd tried for the mouths, of course, but unlike Blackblood - another owner, to Joe's mind, of a stupid, fraggin', flapping mouth - these guys knew exactly when to keep their gobs shut.
Soon after, Joe had become tired of being blown about the ocean bed, especially as it was making him start to lose his sense of direction.
And that was the last thing he needed down there. He needed, in fact, to reach the shore fast, which presented Joe with a dilemma: to stay away from the whales, and hope for the best, or to get a lot closer.
And obviously the latter had been his decision.
Chock!
He could see the right eye, just around the curve of the cybo-whale's prow. Joe dodged another of the twin harpoon attacks and waited while the other two cybo-whales reached the far end of their manoeuvring circle. It would give him just enough time.
CHUCK!
The knife embedded like an aquatic piton in the cybo-whale's "cheekbone". Joe swung himself around. The huge glass eye - one of the two of the vessel's observation windows through which its Martian pilots were visible - loomed before him. The pilots saw Joe and staggered back in shock.
Joe fired a single shot from his Magnum Macho 3000 and the eye exploded inward, flooding the control cabin with quicksand.
Joe swam in with the breaking glass, giving the pilots no time to react. He killed them both as they flailed desperately against the inrush. All that he had to do was wait while the control cabin's safety systems established a force-field over the broken eye and purged itself of sand.
Purge complete, a monitor told Joe. Silverhair was his.
Time for business.
Joe whacked his personal stereo on autosearch, letting it scan its surroundings and find an appropriate track. What he needed was some good fighting music.
"Marina, Aqua Marina, what are these strange enchan-"
Nope.
"They call him Flipper..."
Gaia. Definitely not.
"Bobbin' along... bobbin' along on the bottom of the beautiful briny sea..."
Okay, he thought. That's more like it. Something he could really chill to. Joe started to dance the Substitutiary Locomotion. And span the wheel so the cybo-whale turned to face its comrades-in-arms.
Both of the other cybo-whales had observed Joe's rather unorthodox takeover of their sister ship and they hovered, side by side, contemplating how to deal with the new threat.
I wouldn't take too long over it, Joe thought, because I'm coming ready or not.
Wasting no time at all, Joe slammed Silverhair into its maximum acceleration, aiming straight for the other two whales. As he did, he fired the first of his missiles.
He wasn't aiming at the whales, though, but down at the seabed between them. This got the cybo-whales' attention. Desperate to avoid both a head on collision and the blast from the missile, the two metallic mammals peeled quickly away from each other.
It was just what Joe wanted. It gave him the room to pass between them.
As his missile detonated on the seabed, Joe manoeuvred straight into the resultant broiling bubble of sand, whic
h obscured him from view.
As the other whales continued in their peeling arcs, he fired two more missiles from both his port and starboard batteries. They hissed through the still broiling sea as obscured as Joe had been.
The two whales had only just completed their evasive manoeuvres when the missiles emerged from the seething mass. Joe could imagine the panic on the Martian crews' faces. Neither had a chance to avoid them.
And the missiles blew off both of their tail fins.
Unable to manoeuvre without this most important part of their equipment, the cybo-whales spiralled down toward the seabed, as seaworthy as lead bricks.
They hit the bottom and imploded.
"Bobbin' along..." Joe sang, as the bodies of the crew bubbled up past his eyes "...just bobbin' along on the bottom of the beautiful briny sea..."
He turned Silverhair towards the shore.
Towards Camp Diaz, which unexpectedly, he found in some degree of chaos. As Joe berthed the cybo-whale on a small beach beside the complex, he was surprised to find the Camp Diaz domestic staff making their way towards him - or rather toward a line of small boats, which were also berthed on the shore.
They ignored Joe completely. All that they were interested in doing was leaving. Camp Diaz was being evacuated.
"I see my reputation precedes me," Joe said, strolling up the beach with his Magnum Macho 3000 in his hand.
Inside, there was hardly any organised resistance from the Dead Eyes, either. Something was definitely going on. Joe tried asking the Dead Eyes what it was, but they were Dead Eyes, weren't they? So Joe killed them instead.
The only problematic obstacles that he came across were those that he had least expected.
The obstacles were Diaz's twin dinosaur pets, Sodom and Gomorrah.
Joe found them blocking a connecting corridor through to the main part of the complex. Joe presumed they were not meant to be roaming free. Unless, that was, they were normally permitted to carry Camp Diaz staffmembers between their teeth.
They dropped their snacks and roared at Joe, slavering and hot-breathed.
Thankfully, Joe had come prepared for any occasion. From his armour he removed two specially concocted and potent Molotov cocktails, lit them and hurled them into their gaping mouths. He was glad that the beer bottles he had used had been Stellar. He found them reassuringly explosive.
Wiping dinosaur bits from his armour, Joe proceeded on into the deserted Camp Diaz. He couldn't find Diaz or Juanita anywhere. He ran an X-ray and infrared scan, searching the multi-domed complex for heat signatures corresponding to that of his beloved. He found one that was very faint. It was in a dome that was permanently sealed.
There was another entrance in a corridor far below but Joe had no time for that. He blew the seal apart and stepped into what looked like a dimly lit laboratory of some kind. Cautiously.
"Hi, honey, I'm home," he said. The comment was much more light-hearted than Joe himself felt. The truth was, he had been dreading discovering what Diaz might have done to Juanita in his absence, and he cursed himself for having had to be away for so long.
If the bastard had so much as... Joe stopped. Oh Gaia. The bastard had.
Juanita hung suspended in one of two human-sized glass cylinders that occupied the centre of the dome, her eyes staring at him madly.
In the other cylinder hung Sheen Zano, her beautiful model's face... no longer beautiful.
Juanita was in some kind of biol solution. Sheen Zano Diaz had suspended in acid. It was with great sadness that Joe realised he had come too late to save her. Joe fired a shot at the glass of the two cylinders and he removed Sheen's master program chip. He caught the body of Juanita as she fell; his beloved lay gasping in his arms.
"Oh Joe," she sighed sadly. "Diaz killed Sheen. Just because she helped me, he killed her..."
"I know and I'm sorry," Joe said. He stared at the woman he loved and thought: What has he done to you?
As if she could read his mind, Juanita said, "He's mad, Joe. Diaz is mad."
"Not for much longer," Joe said with determination. He wiped some goo from Juanita's eyes. "Not after this."
"It's not that, Joe," Juanita explained, gripping his arm as tightly as she could. "It's the biol!"
"Biol?"
Juanita told Joe about what she and Sheen Zano had been forced to witness happen to the last inhabitants of the tanks - Diaz's poor ex wives. How Diaz had demonstrated that he'd been conducting experiments with biol to change and mutate them. How he'd been seeking to isolate and control one particular element in the biol: the element that had troubled objectors to the universal food-stuff since it had gone on-pipeline so long ago. It was the element that many feared could - if triggered - turn humans into trimorphs or something worse.
She told Joe that Diaz had succeeded. He had found the trigger. Something within biol that contained traces of Mars' original primordial soup - a rogue genetic code, a rewriter - that could be used to alter the molecular bonding of anyone who had (and was there anyone on Mars who hadn't) at any time ingested the foodstuff.
Alter or completely eradicate. In other words, there was a reason why Diaz's ex wives were no longer in the tanks. Diaz had enjoyed his demonstration to the full.
He possessed the ultimate assassination tool.
"And Joe," Juanita said urgently. "He can activate the trigger through Digital Angels."
Joe absorbed the information grimly, but he had heard enough. It was time to take Juanita away from Camp Diaz for good.
He destroyed the laboratory and scooped her up in his arms.
"But Joe, the biol," Juanita said.
"Is only a worry while Diaz lives," Joe responded. He did not need to elaborate.
At his request, Juanita guided Joe through the rest of the complex to Diaz's personal chambers - if he was to be found anywhere, it would be there. Eventually they came to a room that was decorated in an entirely different way to the rest of the complex. There was a framed and lit-up collection of antique road signs and ephemera, an impressive display of erotic art originals by artists such as Leerer, Letch and Hans all over the place. There were dirty magazines, life-sized dolls. There was also a rather incongruous looking, bucking, Soya-bean cow, of the kind you found in bars to challenge drunks.
This was obviously Diaz's inner sanctum, the place that in amongst these sprawling domes he called home.
Joe reckoned Diaz had spent a lot of money here - money that no doubt been earned by the hard labour of everyone but Diaz himself. That, or taken from their corpses. He had to admit, the place was palatial.
It was also Diaz's and so he had no choice at all.
With a good deal of pleasure, he fragged the whole damn place.
FUD-A-FUD-A-FUD-A!
BLAM-BLAM-BLAM!
At last, when the bullets had finished hammering around the room, when the walls had crumbled, the furniture had collapsed and everything hung in shards and tatters, Joe stared around. Diaz's collection of erotic art treasures were gone, destroyed for good. The bucking Soya-bean cow was bucked. And out of all the antique road signs and ephemera only Diaz's beloved Belisha beacon remained intact, blinking like a silent orange alarm in the middle of the room.
How could I have missed that? Joe asked himself, knowing full well that actually he hadn't, he'd just saved it for last.
BLAM!
"Now that," Joe said with satisfaction, "is what I call a house-clearance!"
Diaz's little empire was no more. All that remained was the man himself.
"I'm through here, Mister Pineapples," he heard Senator Diaz say wearily.
Joe turned. With the curtains hanging in ribbons, Joe saw a double doorway that lead outside. Steadying Juanita in his arm, Joe stepped through the shattered French windows.
But suddenly, he stopped. The spacious balcony on which Diaz was sitting directly overlooked the Sand Sea through which Joe had slogged his way earlier, and offered a rather dramatic panoramic view of the empty desert beyond.
The sun was setting over the desert, casting it in red and orange hues.
At any other time the view would have been beautiful - something that after he had killed Diaz, Joe would have loved to share with Juanita, had she been in any state to appreciate it. If it hadn't been for the tripods...
Joe knew finally why the staff had left: Diaz was staring out at the tripods, sipping at a cocktail through an ingestion tube, and looking vaguely as if he had realised he had made some massive error of judgement. Joe knew nothing of the events at Tripolis Cathedral, but one thing was clear to him. These tripods had no real strategic reason to leave the main force and attack Camp Diaz, unless they had come for Diaz himself.
"Just look at them, Mister Pineapples," Diaz said. "Are they not awesome?"
Joe stared out. The tripods were lined silently on the far shore; twelve of them at the very edge of the lapping Sand Sea, their hulls dipped slightly, their heat-ray ports, like eyes, shadowy and baleful, carefully watching Camp Diaz. Carefully watching Diaz himself; watching and waiting.
Intimidating, for sure, Joe thought, but awesome. No - he'd had more than enough of the bootlegs to think them awesome. More like pains in the arse.
Unexpectedly, Diaz chuckled to himself. It was a sick sound, the sound of a man, Joe suddenly thought, who was nearing the end of his time.
"Awesome," Diaz said again. "And utterly fragged."
Joe stared at him.
"They're stuck, Mister Pineapples, don't you see?" the senator explained. "They want me, but there is nothing they can do about it." He laughed, or rather he rattled. "Don't you think that is glorious?"
"What are you talking about, Diaz?"
"Why do you think the bridge was blown, you fool," Diaz hissed. "I knew they would come for me but I also knew there was no way the lumbering beasts could cross my Sand Sea! I thought I'd just make it difficult for them, but then - lucky bonus - I find I'm also just out of range of their heat-rays here. That's what's glorious."
"The heat-rays could still reach you," Joe observed.
"If they could, don't you think they'd have fired by now?" Diaz argued. "As I said, they're fragged. Just as fragged as your beloved Juanita has so recently been."