Rage Against the Machines

by Mike Wild

  It slowly beeped out its Omega Alert, not that it could do any good. Deadlock was far too gone for that. It appeared that Deadlock and all his component parts had been crushed beyond recovery and then reformed from the resultant slag into a solid piece of metal. He truly was a statue.

  "Ouch," Blackblood said.

  "You can say that again."

  "Who would do such thing?" Two-Ton Carmen asked. "Two Ton Carmen think it very sick joke."

  "Yeah," Blackblood said. "But then our friend Medusa has a very sick mind."

  "To the altar of evil like lambs to the slaughter we're led..." Joe said.

  "What?" Hammerstein asked.

  "Oh, just something Cobb started at the Red House," the ABC Warrior responded. "It means I've got a bad feeling about this."

  "Ought to have, too," said Medusa.

  "Knew it," said Joe.

  "What the frag?" said Blackblood.

  As the ABC Warriors watched, Deadlock's face - or the representation of Deadlock's face at least - began slowly to glow, its features seeming to liquefy and reform in front of them. This was an illusion because the metal itself remained unchanged but it nevertheless acted as a pretty good entrance ploy.

  The face of Medusa stared at them.

  "You killed our friend," Hammerstein said.

  "Yep. Sorry about that."

  "No, you're not."

  "I actually quite liked him. A little."

  "And this is how you treat people you like?" Maggie said, motioning at the statue.

  "He... outlived his usefulness."

  "You're a bitch, do you know that?"

  Medusa's eyes flared. "I am what I have been made," she hissed.

  "Still that old story, eh?" Hammerstein said. "Poor, hard-done-by Medusa, the mistreated world, abused by her colonists, woken from her sleep."

  "Singer of bad songs," Blackblood joined in. "How does it go again?"

  "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."

  "Yeah, that's the one. Maybe it's time you thought about changing the record, old girl."

  "I was under the impression that the ABC Warriors cared for my world."

  "We do. We just don't care about you any longer."

  "I suspect that you never did. You are the same as the rest of them. The extra-martials. The humans."

  Medusa said the word as if she had accidentally eaten something small and furry and rotten.

  "No, we cared," Hammerstein said. "But that was before you started committing genocide."

  "We can't allow that to continue," Joe said. "Not any more."

  Medusa laughed. "There is nothing that you can do to stop me. I have seen through my warriors' eyes - my tripods - how you are helpless before me. I have seen how insignificant your puny weapons are in this war. I know how close you came to defeat. And I know how that defeat will touch you again."

  "Interesting place, that Sunset Motors," Blackblood chimed in. "Very interesting indeed."

  There was a moment's silence.

  "I don't know what you're talking about," Medusa said, bluffing.

  "Oh, I think you do."

  The others looked at Blackblood questioningly. The ABC Warrior explained all about Sunset Motors and Number 5 and the nano-nano spray. He also told them all about the Invention Exchange and its hidden secrets. Finally, he rattled the rack of guns he carried on his back.

  "That's all there is to it," Blackblood said. "Medusa just made it so we couldn't see the wood for the trees."

  "You're biolin' me," Joe said.

  "Nope."

  "You're serious?" Hammerstein asked.

  "Oh yes."

  "Go team!" Maggie shouted.

  "What Blackblood mean?" Mek-Quake asked Two-Ton Carmen. "Wood for the trees?"

  "You got me, babe," Two-Ton Carmen said.

  "I got you, babe?"

  "Oh, I hope so..."

  Considering that her major secret weapon had just been exposed for the sham it really was, Medusa seemed to take it quite well.

  She simply blew up every cactus in a three-kilometre radius, which came as something of a surprise to the deathkites who were perching on some of them.

  "I smell phit," Mek-Quake said.

  "That you know this information is immaterial," Medusa said, after she had recovered. "My forces will still emerge victorious."

  "Possibly," Hammerstein said. "Possibly not. Either way, quite a number of them are going to be needing a new paint job."

  Hammerstein looked around at his fellow warriors, and at Maggie and Two-Ton Carmen and Juanita Perez.

  All of them stood firm. All of them nodded.

  "Bring 'em on," Hammerstein said.

  "Oh goody," Medusa said. "I thought that you'd never ask."

  The sandstorm cleared further, exposing the true extent of the desert plain that surrounded them.

  The vast expanse dwarfed the ABC Warriors and their new companions. But it did not dwarf the tripod army. The tripod army was everywhere.

  To the north of them, to the south, to the east, and to the west, the tripods were massed in square battalions as far as even robotic eyes could see. There was not a square yard of desert that permitted an escape route. Not a square yard that was not blocked by an unyielding wall of painful alien death. On the face of Deadlock's statue Medusa laughed softly to herself.

  "We're fragged," Joe said.

  "Uh-huh," agreed Mek-Quake.

  "Thousands of the fragging machines," Maggie observed perhaps a little unhelpfully. "And this is the kind of thing you guys do every day..."

  "I wouldn't say every day exactly," Hammerstein began.

  "And you still find time for the crèche," Maggie finished.

  Hammerstein stared at her. Again.

  As best as she could in her tripod incarnation, Maggie winked.

  "Much as I hate to be pointing out the obvious here," Joe said, pointing out the obvious, "indestructible or not, we are still outnumbered by about a thousand to one. Anyone else rate our chances in this little turkey shoot?"

  "We've seen worse," Blackblood responded.

  "No, we haven't," Joe said. "You're being deliberately argumentative."

  "True," Blackblood agreed.

  "We're just going to have to hope, aren't we," Juanita interjected, "that Mongrol has indeed found GODD."

  The conversation ceased as from the throngs of tripods a figure approached the ABC Warriors and their friends. It was Steelhorn. He carried a flag signifying he wished to talk. Hammerstein, as the newly returned leader of the ABC Warriors, stepped forward. "They really ought to call you Hammer-Nine," Steelhorn said by way of introduction. "As in lives."

  Hammerstein stared at the ex-member of his team. "You chopped my head off, you bootleg."

  "I'll do it again, if you'd like."

  "You could try," Hammerstein said threateningly. He motioned to his weapon. "Kind of an even field again, don't you think? Or should I say 'an even airfield'."

  "I see the famous Hammerstein wit hasn't improved much in two thousand years."

  Hammerstein scowled. "Are we talkin' or fightin'?"

  "Fightin', I suppose."

  "Then let's get on with it."

  "You're the boss," Steelhorn said. "Or at least you used to be."

  Steelhorn returned to his forces, readying them for the battle.

  Blackblood distributed the anti-nano-nano weapons to his fellow warriors, complete with the modifications he had made to the stocks en route. He had reasoned that if the battle was going to be as fierce as he imagined - and by the looks of things it most definitely was - then it would not be practical to expect the ABC Warriors to fire first the nano weapon and then their own. Instead, the stock modification made the anti-nano-nano weapons attachable, transforming them into mounts. They slipped neatly onto the ABC Warriors' own weapons and - via a remote trigger - allowed both weapons to be fired off at once
.

  "You sure these things work?" Joe said doubtfully.

  Blackblood ratcheted some clips into a chamber, slammed the safeties off.

  "Only one way to find out, ya biol eatin' bootleg," he snarled. "Lock and load."

  "Nice to hear some of the old comradely repartee coming out," Joe responded. "But yeah - lock and load."

  Mek-Quake looked at Two-Ton Carmen, who had trundled to his side. "Is charge of the heavy brigade," Mek-Quake said. "Two-Ton Carmen need not fight if Two-Ton Carmen not want. Is not Two-Ton Carmen's fight."

  "You think Two-Ton Carmen want to lose Mek-Quake when she come all this way to stalk - now she found him?"

  "Mek-Quake does not know."

  "Two-Ton Carmen know."

  "Juanita," said Joe. "In case I don't make it."

  Juanita put a finger to his lips. "You'll make it."

  "Maggie..." Hammerstein said.

  "Don't wanna hear it, Sarge," Maggie said. She took a slug of Wooze. "Why don't you just do what you do best."

  Hammerstein stared at her. His chest inflated.

  "Cry havoc," Hammerstein said. "And let slip the cogs of war!"

  He nodded to Steelhorn.

  Steelhorn motioned his troops forward. The desert floor began to vibrate as all four corners of the square began to close in.

  The ABC Warriors mobilised; their friends mobilised.

  Battle had begun.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Strike first! Strike hard!

  The ABC Warrior's motto never rang more true than when they engaged the tripod army that day. The ABC Warriors and their friends laid into the tripods without hesitation, wielding their anti-nano-nano technology and backing it up with an arsenal of weaponry the likes of which had never been deployed on a single field of battle.

  Sin guns, scrambled egg grenades, torc tubes, crybaby mortars, balls bazookas. Monkey bombs, gut-burner cannons, widow-maker missiles and koroda bombs, atom-meks.

  All were unleashed.

  Maggie Sidewinder lay in with her heat-rays. "Hey, these are cool!"

  Two-Ton Carmen with her chain cannons. "This desert needs a good cleaning-up!"

  Juanita Perez with twin machine guns. "For RedPeace!"

  And together, they began to make a difference. Not that the battle was limited to ranged weaponry; far from it.

  Hammerstein ploughed into the tripods, his hammer hand flying, battering and pummelling the war-machines until they were nothing more than scrap metal on the desert floor.

  Blackblood darted swiftly from war-machine to machine, injecting them with insidious corrosives and then ripping them apart with a gleeful hiss.

  Mek-Quake rumbled forward on his tracks, his Maniaxe descending on the helpless tripods time after time as if it were the sword of Damocles reborn.

  Joe Pineapples leapt from tripod to tripod as he had at Sojourner airport, plunging into the maws of the machines and dispensing swift and calculated death.

  Between them, they left many tripod bodies on the sand. As glorious and as decimating as the battle was, though, one thing soon became apparent. As effective as the destabilising weapons were, the fact remained that seemingly every tripod on the planet Mars was engaged on the field of battle this very evening. They were still hopelessly outnumbered. They were ludicrously outnumbered.

  They were still going to lose and there was nothing else that could be done. The tripods kept advancing and the ABC Warriors kept fighting. They were beginning to feel their heads disappearing beneath the tide, however.

  "If Mongrol did find GODD," Joe shouted to Blackblood, "now would be a pretty good time for its holiness to pay us a visit."

  "For once, Pineapples, I agree," Blackblood responded. "What we need is a fraggin' good heavenly smite!"

  "Smite?" Mek-Quake asked. "He not know word."

  "Hardly the time, you... oh, what the frag. It means to strike, to kill, to overcome in battle. It's used a lot by gods instead of 'bop'."

  "Gods?" Mek-Quake said. "So smite is heavy phit?"

  "Oh yeah," Blackblood confirmed. "Whatever it was you just said..."

  It occurred to the ABC Warriors that they still did not know the true nature of GODD, even then. Only Mongrol was privy to that nugget of information and Mongrol, of course, was still MIA. If GODD's powers were going to manifest themselves then they could come from anywhere, as anything, at anytime.

  There was a sound in the distance, of something like a cavalry horn. Was this it? The ABC Warriors looked to the horizon.

  Across the desert charged a number of other tripods - a number of unfinished-looking other tripods, as if they had come straight from a production plant. And waving from the maw of each was an even smaller tripod who held what looked suspiciously like a copy of the anti-nano-nano gun. The small tripod that seemed to be the leader of this merry little band spotted Blackblood and waved.

  Blackblood rubbed his eyes. Oh frag, no. But he realised that the truth was, oh frag, yes.

  "Number 5 is arrived!" Number 5 announced to the ABC Warrior. The other war-machines galloped up next to him. "Number 5 use Sunset Motors to reproduce weapons and bring friends to help in battle against she who always shot at us," he declared. "Allow Number 5 to introduce Number 4! Number 3! Number 6...!"

  "I am not a number, I am a free target droid!"

  "As are we all, brother," Number 5 declared. "Number 8, Number 11, Number..."

  "I get the picture, Shorty," Blackblood growled. Joe was looking at him from the sidelines and laughed to himself. Blackblood leaned over to Number 5 and whispered urgently: "Go away... "

  "Friend of yours, tough guy?" Joe asked.

  "Frag off," Blackblood hissed.

  Another phalanx of tripods pounded their way.

  "Seems to me that we need all the help we can get right now," Joe went on.

  For a second, Blackblood actually looked flustered. He ignored Joe and leaned in even closer to Number 5. Much as he hated to admit it, Joe was right - they needed all the help they could get. "Go for it, Shorty," he said. "Good luck."

  Then he simply pretended that it hadn't happened at all.

  "YO, THREE-EYES!" Number 5 shouted, and waited while the other target droids joined in. "OVER HERE!" As one, they galloped off again, their metallic voices echoing as they went: "Call that a shot? Where did YOU buy ya eyes, Stevie? Whoa, baby, you're gonna have to get yourself a BIIIGGG dartboard for that one..."

  The battle continued throughout the day. The tripods did not tire. The ABC Warriors and their friends did not allow themselves to acknowledge their exhaustion.

  They reloaded again and again; Maggie slugged Wooze between her kills; Two-Ton Carmen dusted her fellow warriors down.

  More Martian metal littered the desert floor, piling up inch by painful inch. Still the tripods came.

  Hammerstein stared at their unceasing ranks in a brief moment of respite. Then he piled in again. "Mongrol, if you're anywhere out there," he said, "give us a sign."

  Eventually, the skies above the battlefield began to darken: dusk was coming to the desert. The last thing anyone expected was a sunrise. It began in the west as a kind of scintillating glow above the mountains that drew everyone's eyes. Gradually, the glow became a painful, blinding flood of light that cascaded over the tops of the mountain ridges like white-hot soup.

  And finally, the sky itself exploded. Everyone on the battlefield shielded their eyes and realised that this was no sunrise. This was nothing natural at all, because this moved more rapidly over the mountains, moving inexorably towards them like an accelerated dawn.

  "Ohhhhhhhhh frag..." Maggie said.

  "It's GODD," Hammerstein said.

  "Looks like our prayers are answered," Joe observed.

  "That remains to be seen."

  "Mek-Quake need daily upgrade because Mek-Quake is seeing things."

  The intense white light scythed onto the desert floor, slicing into it like a hot knife through biol, cutting a gouge deep into the sand and the rock
below, creating a channel that ran across the desert from the mountains to where they stood. It headed straight for them and struck the battlefield.

  "DOOOWWWWNNNN!" Hammerstein commanded them all.

  THHHHWWWWWOOOOOOOOMMMMMMM!

  All of the ABC Warriors who could, hit the deck and those who couldn't turned rapidly away from the light, activating their armour enhancers and emergency shields and deflector packs, but all the while thinking that all the defences they had would probably make the end only slightly less painful. But they didn't really think they would. They waited for the awesome visitation.

  THHHHWWWWWOOOOOOOOMMMMMMM!

  At the very last moment before it engulfed the ABC Warriors and their friends, the heavenly light altered trajectory sharply, making a ninety-degree turn and cutting straight into the heart of a chunk of the tripod army. Medusa's war-machines had no chance. Rank after rank of tripods exploded in the intense white heat, detonating one after the other with full and final bursts of flame, the sound of their destruction muted by the sheer overpowering volume of the beam itself. The sounds of the tripods' demise were as insignificant and ephemeral as fur balls combusting on a log fire.

  THHHHWWWWWOOOOOOOOMMMMMMM!

  The beam altered trajectory again, another ninety-degree turn that took it through another chunk of Martian machines and further explosions lit up the desert.

  The tripods that remained to the south and the west began to utter their mournful wail.

  Uuuuulllaaahh!

  This time, however, it was not a cry of victory; it was a cry of despair.

  THHHHWWWWWOOOOOOOOMMMMMMM!

  At last only a scattering of tripods remained, treading the desert sands in confusion, and as quickly as it had come, the beam went away. Hammerstein tracked the source of the beam and was not in the least surprised when it turned out to be an orbiting space station. He sent a tight-beam comm.

  "Hammerstein to Mongrol. That was quite a show. All of us down here thank you."

  "Oh, I'm afraid Mongrol couldn't make it," said the voice of a woman. "He... went for a walk."

  "Nancy Cobb," Blackblood snarled.

  "What's going on?" Hammerstein asked.

  "Nothing much," Nancy Cobb replied.

  "Shouldn't I speak to them, Nancy?"