by Pat Mills
THE ABC WARRIORS
THE MEDUSA WAR
Next moment the screams and the gunfire became deafening.
He turned and gazed in consternation at the mighty war machine, Mek-Quake. He was roaring into the ghetto in humungus-class tank mode. There were the chewed-up remains of humans on his tracks.
"Big Jobs! Big Jobs!" Mek-Quake howled as his guns blazed at the troopers, scattering them in every direction.
He crushed the soldiers under the treads as they attempted to return fire.
THE ABC WARRIORS
#1: THE MEDUSA WAR - Pat Mills & Alan Mitchell
#2: RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINES - Mike Wild
JUDGE DREDD
#1: DREDD VS DEATH
Gordon Rennie
#2: BAD MOON RISING
David Bishop
#3: BLACK ATLANTIC
Simon Jowett & Peter J Evans
#4: ECLIPSE
James Swallow
#5: KINGDOM OF THE BLIND
David Bishop
#6: THE FINAL CUT
Matthew Smith
#7: SWINE FEVER
Andrew Cartmel
#8: WHITEOUT
James Swallow
#9: PSYKOGEDDON
Dave Stone
JUDGE ANDERSON
#1: FEAR THE DARKNESS - Mitchel Scanlon
#2: RED SHADOWS - Mitchel Scanlon
#3: SINS OF THE FATHER - Mitchel Scanlon
MORE 2000 AD ACTION
DURHAM RED
#1: THE UNQUIET GRAVE - Peter J Evans
ROGUE TROOPER
#1: CRUCIBLE - Gordon Rennie
STRONTIUM DOG
#1: BAD TIMING - Rebecca Levene
FIENDS OF THE EASTERN FRONT - David Bishop
#1: OPERATION VAMPYR
#2: THE BLOOD RED ARMY
#3: TWILIGHT OF THE DEAD
To Biljana, my muse.
Pat
For Liatt, Lateef, Nyasha and Shani. Now the adventure begins...
Alan
A 2000 AD Publication
www.abaddonbooks.com
www.2000adonline.com
1098 7 65 4321
Cover illustration by Kev Walker.
Copyright © 2004 Rebellion A/S. All rights reserved.
All 2000 AD characters and logos © and TM Rebellion A/S."ABC Warriors" is a registered trade mark in the United States and other jurisdictions."2000 AD" is a registered trade mark in certain jurisdictions. All rights reserved. Used under licence.
ISBN(.epub): 978-1-84997-073-0
ISBN(.mobi): 978-1-84997-114-0
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
THE ABC WARRIORS
THE MEDUSA WAR
by Pat Mills and Alan Mitchell
The ABC Warriors were created by Pat Mills, Mike McMahon, Kevin O'Neill and Brendan McCarthy
The ABC Warriors - A Brief History -
"War is a dirty job - too dirty for humans."
The ABC Warriors (Atomic, Biological, Chemical) are Sergeant Hammerstein, Joe Pineapples and grizzled war veteran Happy Shrapnel. Once they fought the Volgon war machines on the front lines. When Hammerstein killed one of his human commanding officers, the mysterious Colonel Lash persuaded the robot to recruit more comrades for a mission more deadlier than any of them had faced before.
HAMMERSTEIN
An expendable robot designed to rage war with an unquestioning devotion to duty and believing that the enemy is always evil - Hammerstein is the perfect soldier. Hammerstein employs a number of inbuilt weapons, but the most noticeable is his right hand, which is a huge sledgehammer.
DEADLOCK
Formerly the Grand Wizard of the Knight Martial, Deadlock is highly intelligent and ruthless, he is armed with the life-drinking Ace of Swords. Apart from his robotic abilities Deadlock is a magician of great power.
BLACKBLOOD
Commander of the Straw Dogs during the Volgan War, Blackblood was rumoured to drink the oil of dead ABC Warriors, as well as overseeing the slaughter of thousands of humans. While he is a skilled fighter, it is treachery that is Blackblood's greatest ability.
JOE PINEAPPLES
The coolest of the ABC Warriors, Pineapples is a professional hit-droid, with a preference for status, money, women and his perennial leather jacket. Pineapples is also the best sniper in the galaxy.
MEK-QUAKE
A psychotic killdozer with an unbelievably low intelligence, he has a preference to ripping out the brains of other robots and using their shells for his own wardrobe.
MONGROL
Formerly a robo-paratrooper, Mongrol nearly died in an airborne assault that saw his first body destroyed. Mongrol is incredibly strong, even by robotic standards, and has developed a taste for cigars.
MORRIGUN
Morrigun was a waitress in the Piston Broke bar when she met the ABC Warriors. A robot hostess, a cyber-witch and expert in the martial art of nekra-chi, she is the latest recruit to join the ABC Warriors.
ONE
They had been terraforming Mars for over two thousand years, but they still couldn't get rid of the dust. It was formed of cold, dry, ice-glittering, red grains that made your teeth sing, your gums numb. They entered every crease of your clothes and every crevice of your body. No one ever told the young settlers from Terra about it before they came. Or about the vast sand oceans, the dust swamps or the plains of rusted powder that drifted, and the rubble that undulated and surged, sweeping in blood red crests towards the petrified horizon.
This was the real Mars. Not the Mars in the glossy brochures. Not the humans' capital, Viking City, with its vulgar pyramids that they tried to make look like Ancient Egypt, but ended up looking like Las Vegas. It was certainly not Marineris City, with its overhead crane transport system, container-bin housing and scaffold walkways that made it seem like a vast construction site. This was Mars as Medusa meant it to be: with vicious five hundred kilometre an hour winds tearing the peaks off mountains, month-long dust storms that engulfed her in joyful darkness and endless expanses of cratered loneliness.
They said that if you listened to the wind long enough, you would hear the "Song of Medusa," the spirit of Mars, and this was no idle fantasy. But Medusa had been dead for a hundred million years. And as she slept her long, cold sleep, she luxuriated in the fragrant and exotic dreams of when she was alive.
Then the humans came. Creatures with just two arms, two eyes, two legs, and only two sexes. Creatures that seemed unwholesome and alien to Medusa.
They began awakening her painfully from her slumbers. Melting her icecaps, drilling deep into her crust, releasing her biosap, and seeding her skies. But they had not Mars-formed her; they had terror-formed her; making her in the image of her sister world, Gaia. Raping her. Turning her into something she was not.
As these strange binary beings multiplied on her surface, Medusa tried to find a way to communicate with them, to tell them how she felt, and why they should leave. So she reached into their minds and found a song there that she understood better than she understood these extra-martials. It was an old Bible song from Earth, popular with the colonists, and it was this song she sang to them on the wind:
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.
It was about death. And this was what Medusa yearned for. To cross the bridge and die once again. To sleep, as she had slept for so many years. But the colonists took no notice of the song in their heads and never heard it in their hearts. They just continued with their rude awakening of the Red Planet. Mars was there to be tamed. Conquered. Not pampered and indulged.
At last, in despair, Medusa revived her own trinary life forms - three-limbed and three-eyed creatures - to do battle with them. If the humans would not leave, then they must cross the bridge with her.
The hooded and masked old man rested his chin on his hands, and his hands on his ornate staff of power. From his vantage point on the mountain top, he stared out over the dust storm howling below him, ignoring Medusa's Song even as it swirled up to him on the wind.
One red, veined eye peered out above his dust mask and he squinted it into a furrow, scanning the empty skies impatiently, waiting for them to arrive.
The other eye was concealed and this was probably just as well. For it had slipped right down his face. It was now by his mouth, where it was in danger of becoming lost in the tangled hair of his moustache.
Not for nothing was Seraph Rosesand known as Hoodwink.
The two sides of the human face normally don't quite correspond, but in Hoodwink's case they had given up any kind of correspondence.
His left eye had slid down his face over the seventy years of his life. At the same time his right eye had pushed upwards. His mouth attempted to unite the two sides of his face, bridging them at a forty-five degree angle. His teeth did the same, but not as successfully. His rotting teeth and gums were exposed instead.
But Seraph had no concerns about his appearance; in fact he was rather proud of it, because it showed that he was a Chosen One; chosen by a toad-like alien entity from a planet in the Sirius star system, or so the alien claimed. Seraph couldn't be sure, because the alien regularly lied about everything as a matter of principle; it was the only principle it actually seemed to have. The agreement he signed with the being, when he was a young man, was that the alien would take up residence in the right sphere of his brain and, in return, would act as his partner and guide him through life.
The alien was able to do this by using Seraph as a "window" from its world in the fourth dimension, through which it could look into Hoodwink's own world. He would pass on to his host the secret knowledge of past, present and future held in the fourth dimension.
If the eyes really are the windows to the soul, then judging by Seraph's disturbed red optics, he was in a lot of trouble. In an earlier age, his Faustian arrangement would have been called demonic possession but his contract with the alien parasite had enabled him to make a killing on the futures market of the Invention Exchange. His company, Conflict Management, was now the leading supplier of war robots to the federal government and he himself was President Cobb's special adviser. Thanks to his alien mentor, the unpronounceable Snnktts, Seraph had outwitted and tricked every rival in the president's cabinet, ensuring Cobb became totally reliant on him alone.
De facto, Hoodwink was the secret ruler of Mars.
The few people who knew that Seraph had manipulated the government used to say, "some people can fool some of the people some of the time. A few people can fool most of the people most of the time. But only Hoodwink can fool all of the people all of the time."
His Sirian partner, Snnktts, seemed to know everything that had ever happened on Mars, everything that was happening now on Mars, and everything that was going to happen on Mars. Consequently, he had warned him that they were returning to Mars.
So Hoodwink had a "welcoming committee" waiting for them.
As the dust storm continued, he chuckled as he thought of their impending fate. Many people still remembered the first time they had been on Mars and brought peace to the planet two thousand years before. Snnktts certainly did and had told Hoodwink all about it.
Today, they were remembered as legends, like the Knights of the Round Table, and Snnktts had pointed out that if they came back, there was a risk that they would attract misguided followers and bring dissent, confusion and negativity to Mars. In other words, they would interfere with their plans. And so Seraph had arranged his welcoming committee.
As far as he was concerned, the only place for legends was in the history files. Seraph's warbots were the real power on Mars. Nothing could withstand his state of the art storm troopers; certainly not seven antique metal misfits that were two millennia old. There could be no doubt they would be victorious. In fact, it was a little embarrassing calling them out to dispose of such pathetic robot has-beens.
The cloak wrapped around Hoodwink's leathery, cracked body kept the creeping cold from his bones as he took out a bag from his pocket. He pulled open the drawstrings and his exposed red eye squinted inside.
It was full of writhing, juicy white trimites, triple-eyed Martian maggots. He reached in and grasped a handful of them, then pulled up his dust veil and stuffed them into his mouth. A few of the larvae dropped onto his beard where they nested comfortably. He'd tongue them out later so they wouldn't go to waste.
Meanwhile, he munched on the others to pass the time, pondering idly why they should have chosen to come back. What about Mars had possessed them? Could that be it? Could there be some rival alien that had possessed their brains and summoned them to the Red Planet?
The deep hum of the spaceship swept away his musings. Its huge, battered, hulking shape was briefly visible in the clear upper atmosphere above his mountain perch. It then descended into the red maelstrom and disappeared from sight.
They were here at last.
The ship plummeted through the swirling mayhem, its shape barely visible in the all-consuming darkness. Finally its sensors warned it was approaching the ground.
It hung in the air momentarily before landing in a noisy cloud of billowing sand.
A section of the ship slid upwards and a ramp came down. Heavy footfalls could be heard approaching the exit. Two enormous caterpillar-tracked, metallic feet hummed down the ramp into the soft, yielding sand.
Four further sets of robotic feet followed.
One was wearing fashionable steel boots. A second seemed far too small to support the hulking creature above it. A third was concealed by flapping robes but had a Khaos sign - arrows spreading out from a central source - on the pointed big toe. The fourth was delicately chromed and manicured and the fifth had just one green, scaly metal foot and what appeared to be the tip of a road drill.
A pair of heavy tank tracks followed.
The ABC Warriors had arrived back on Mars.
Hidden in their foxholes, Hoodwink's storm troopers waited for their robot commander, MD, to give the order to open fire. They dared not anticipate it, even though they had the Warriors in their infra-red sights.
From his command post, MD remained silent, motionless and featureless - little more than a shapeless and unimpressive metal box on stubby, hydraulic legs.
Some observers of MD in action had speculated that the initials on his chest stood for "Managing Director" or possibly "Manic-Depressive". Either would have been appropriate for the hulking and morose war machine, because it had an authoritarian manner and would not tolerate any debate of its orders. MD also seemed to suffer from violent and unpredictable mood swings during which it had committed a number of atrocities.
In fact, his initials had two completely different meanings. One was a carefully guarded secret that Hoodwink and MD kept very much to themselves. The other was a little more obvious and entirely appropriate: "Mass Destruction".
Mass Destruction picked up a silent thought command from Hoodwink's nano-chip, a device that all humans on Mars had inserted in their bodies.
Acting on Hoodwink's thought command, Mass Destruction's body began to open up and change shape, like a Rubik's cube. Two wicked gun barrels clicked up onto his shoulders. Telescopic gunsight eyes slid along them. A mouth slit appeared bel
ow them and gaped open as a heavy machine gun extended through it. A section of his chest opened sideways and a cannon projected outwards on a hydraulic, shockproof chassis. His arms snapped into two large laser rifles with grabber claws at the ends. Further grabbers snaked out from his sides. Anti-personnel and jet-propelled spikes emerged from other parts of his anatomy. Within thirty seconds, MD had transformed himself into a mobile armoury, with an impressive series of guns and cannons and spikes of differing sizes and shapes. He looked like a robot porcupine. The initials on his chest lit up.
It was time to make sense of them.
TWO
The deathkite had been coasting the upper vectors of the Martian desert sky all morning before it spied its quarry. Harsh winds combed its triangular wings into a taut cruciform cloak. Its three diamond-shaped eyes peered with solemn purpose. Even the thick blanketing swirl of the sandstorm would not prevent it from its purpose. The need to feed its young was the only imperative.