by Pat Mills
There was one problem with MD's rapid transformation from Nikita back into Mass Destruction. This was the unstable nature of his molecules which hadn't settled fully. Nanobots were still scurrying about at the microscopic level putting everything back together, tightening him up, converting sub-components, and running quality control checks. It was rather like a wine needing time to chill, a ham to hang, or a soup to simmer. Mass Destruction had no time to chill, hang or simmer.
Consequently when he came under the Warriors' concentrated fire, their bullets, shells and lasers began to find their mark. He began to go into meltdown, reverting to a shapeless mass of metal, pock-marked with a thousand bullets.
Budabudabudabudabuda!
Thoom! Thoom! Thoom!
Takakakakakakakaka!
Fwoom! Fwoom! Fwoom!
And into the hellish cacophony of death came a new voice - the cry of Mass Destruction calling out for his creator. "Seraph! Help me! Help me, boss, please! They're killing meeeee! Help me! Help meeeeeee!"
He cried out for his mentor, but all he got was his tormentor. Hammerstein straddled him and snarled, "I'm going to pound you into baking foil!" Then he beat him to death with his hammer. It was the least he could do to MD after that unfortunate business with NKVD.
The seventh ABC Warrior sat in the managing director's office, in Mr Brian Botwright's old chair, suitably reinforced. He was poring over large-scale maps that were spread out over the huge, highly polished desk. If Mr Brian had any idea what Steelhorn was intending to do with the Botwrights' once-sedate vehicles, he would have turned in his Sunset Saga.
Viking would be Steelhorn's first objective, then Marineris, and then the rest of Mars. He studied detailed maps of the suburbs of Viking City, locating Biohazard Troops barracks and other key targets. He drew arrows on the maps. One swept through to the Trans-Martian Highway. Another headed in the direction of the Red House. A third encircled the city.
Opposite him, above the heavy, dark wood, traditional mantelpiece, was the proud company motto: "Bot right with Botwrights." It was emblazoned on a shield, which showed the family coat of arms that seemed to consist of a bottom and a Sunset Boulevard. A black marble and brass clock ticked solemnly and slowly away beneath it, a proud family heirloom from the Botwright's home back in Preston, Earth. The brass plaque on its base had an inscription that read, "Presented to Mr Thomas Botwright on the sad occasion of his retirement."
Of course, Steelhorn could have done all his military planning entirely in his head on internal screens, he had no need for any of this documentation. The process would have taken about three seconds - five seconds if his brain was working on other programs at the same time.
However, Medusa was drawing on the memories in the humans' collective subconscious as her guide. And this was the way military planners on Earth conducted themselves so her general must do the same.
Her theories were based primarily on old Earth movies like A Bridge Too Far, Sink the Bismarck and Stalingrad. Steelhorn had had to work very hard to persuade her not to make him wear a long, black leather coat and speak in a German accent. Her favourite film was The Longest Day.
She liked that sense of impending doom as the invaders made their plans to obliterate the enemy. Although if she had one small criticism of it, she didn't think they spent long enough on the actual obliteration. And if she was going to remake it, she'd call it The Last Day.
Medusa believed in fighting fire with fire, and Steelhorn had lit one for her in the grate. In deference to her feelings he used blocks of human food, from a biol picnic pack, rather than redwoods from her rainforests. Steelhorn thought Red.
So did Medusa. Her face appeared in the flames, snakes writhing in her hair, dancing in tune with the blazing tongues of fire. Burning the biol somehow put her in a more vile mood than usual. She blazed hungrily in the fire, eager to begin the planet-wide inferno. And this attempt to blame the Red Death on her, which she was naturally aware of, had not sweetened her temper any.
Mr Thomas's retirement clock chimed the hour.
Eleven o'clock.
There was just one hour left for President Cobb to agree to her demands. After that, there could be no more excuses, no delays, no prevarications. She'd heard them all before and her patience was at an end.
Yet, even at this eleventh hour, the extra-martials could still be spared if their president called her Arch-Marzah, who waited in his cathedral in Tripolis, and told them he was prepared to negotiate.
Seraph Rosesand was too busy to help Mass Destruction. He was busy watching Joe Pineapples die. He was the second ABC Warrior to end his life on the Red Planet. Seraph looked forward to the others following.
Joe could feel his consciousness slipping away. He saw himself looking downwards at his decaying body and realised he was saying goodbye to it. Whatever this consciousness was, he saw now it was somehow separate to the intellect that his human manufacturers had initially given him. It had merely taken advantage of the robot shell to find a home for itself. And wherever it came from, it was going back there now. A tunnel of light appeared in front of Joe and he began to float happily towards it.
During this, machine code numbers continued to stream through his head. And then, in the midst of them, the image of a lion roaring surprisingly appeared. It was a rather caricatured lion, that looked a little like a Pac Man, but a lion nonetheless. The image interwove with numbers; it roared at him, telling him to go back. It was not his time to go on yet. He had to fight the fear, for Juanita. It was the robotic equivalent of a near-death experience.
He turned away from the tunnel.
Joe knew how Slimes worked. It was one interconnecting organism. So if it was destroyed at source, it would be destroyed everywhere. But at source, the virus was at its strongest. Joe felt strong enough to face it now. An intelligence that feeds on fear can only be overcome by the conquest of fear.
Joe had to live for Juanita, so that somehow, someday, they could be together again. And the thought of how she must be suffering at the hands of Diaz, and her courage in dealing with such appalling adversity gave him the courage to face his deepest and darkest of fears. When Joe thought of Diaz and what he had done to Juanita, he knew there must be a reckoning with him. It gave him a further reason to live.
Molten metal limbs cooled and reformed. The decaying process stopped and reversed itself. Joe's face set in his usual hard lines.
And he advanced menacingly on a shocked Hoodwink.
There was nowhere left for Rosesand to run now. No more tricks. No way to persuade Joe to show mercy.
Fortified on neuropeptide-A, Hoodwink regarded his end without fear, even though Snnktts, or one of his kind, would be waiting for him in the fourth dimension to claim his soul. Thanks to his chemically induced courage, he faced the prospect with equanimity. In any event, he had been host to Snnktts for so long, there was little human left of him anyway. All that remained were a few personality traits and mannerisms that gave an illusion of humanity. The conclusion of the Faustian pact to claim his soul would be little more than a formality.
The exit of Snnktts from his brain had not enhanced Hoodwink's appearance any. His face looked like a deflated balloon. The two sides of it no longer bore any kind of relevance to each another. The mouth didn't seem to know where to go anymore. It floated aimlessly in the pulsating mask-like mess. It was barely able to mouth out the words, "I hate you," before Joe put an explosive bullet through Hoodwink's head, blowing it off his shoulders.
Then Joe turned and went to look for Deadlock.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Mr Thomas Botwright's retirement clock struck twelve o'clock.
Midnight.
Gravely, Steelhorn looked up from Mr Brian's desk. He turned to Medusa who was waiting for him, seething and crackling impatiently in the grate. Her hissing snake flames writhed over the biol blocks, feeding on the synthetic food and sending acrid-green, chemical fumes up the chimney.
He spoke sadly and formally, as
befitted the gravity of the occasion. "I am speaking to you tonight from the offices of the Sunset Motor Company. Four weeks ago, your representative delivered an ultimatum to the extra-martials' president stating that unless we heard from them by twelve o'clock tonight that they were prepared at once to stop terraforming and agree to our other requests, a state of total war would exist between us. I have to tell you that no such understanding has been received and that consequently, Mars is at war with the extra-martials."
"Yessss!" spat Medusa, as she burnt a large one. "War!"
Steelhorn stared grimly through the windows at the giant hangars of Area 66. He opened them and stepped out onto a small balcony. It was here that Mr Brian used to stand and watch the very latest versions of the Sunset Boulevard lumber past below on their way to the showrooms.
Steelhorn unscrewed one of his horns and put it to his lips. Releasing a compressed air jet, he emitted an ear-splitting blast.
"Vvvvvvrrrrooohhhh!"
The hangar doors slid automatically open and the machines within began to move out in long, uniform rows. They strode forward in disciplined, well-ordered regiments. Hundreds of them.
Thousands of them.
Marching triumphantly, heroically, eagerly forward into the night with all the choreography of a Nuremburg Rally.
"Boilers on stilts, striding like men," said Steelhorn.
Meanwhile, the tenth claw was about to be stabbed into Deadlock. In the split second before he died, Deadlock considered a number of spells, and realised, even before he began the incantations, that Snnktts would have anticipated them and protected himself from them.
The solution was simple, yet of dreadful reverence to a wizard such as Deadlock who had worked for centuries to undiscipline his mind. He had to go back to basics. He projected the sign of Khaos into the air, with its arrows spreading out from a central source, and called out, "Let this unholy sign scramble the systems of sanity. Embrace uncertainty! Reject the sickly sweet pile of reason! So won't it be!"
Snnktts looked repelled at the loathsome sign of Khaos. It was everything he detested and secretly feared. For demons such as he had always secretly worked behind the scenes of Order, initiating and directing civilisations.
Deadlock followed it up without another round: "I, Deadlock, sky pilot of the first unreformed church of the lunatic fringe, dancer at the doors of delirium, do bid thee be gone! So won't it be!"
"No! You are insane! Order is the one true way!"
"Ha! Order is stasis, the crystallisation of all that should be fluid. The fundamental desire to maintain the status quo without question. It is Order and not Khaos which is truly mad."
"Order has always triumphed over Khaos," Snnktts insisted.
"It is true that your way has destroyed countless planets and tribal peoples. Where wild oats once flourished, your miserable grinding wheels of Order have reduced them to sacks of bland and tasteless flour."
"You mock the great creations of civilisation: the pyramids, the wonders of technology, the fantastic cities-"
"The junkyards! Nobody plans or designs a junkyard. They plan perfect pieces of machinery. Yet everyone knows a junkyard is where they'll end up."
"Where you will end up?" interjected Snnktts, trying to stab the final claw into him and yet unable to do so, thanks to the sign of Khaos.
"It's where civilisations always end up. But there is no junk or waste in nature," continued Deadlock, now really on one. "Khaos is a continually creating and destroying system, always fluid, always dynamic and never wasting a drop."
The Sirian squelched back from the sign, spitting angrily at it. It had come down to a matter of conviction. Which was more powerful, Order or Khaos? And who believed it the most? It was a kind of cosmic version of two kids arguing about whether "My dad is bigger than your dad."
But Deadlock had absolutely no doubt that his dad was bigger. He had known all his life the false nature of Order. And deep down, Snnktts knew it too. Ultimately Khaos would always triumph. The amphibian staggered back in defeat. As he did so, his claws sprang out of Deadlock's body.
Deadlock raised his Ace of Swords and stabbed it into the Sirian's body. Once would not be enough to send it back into the fourth dimension, or whatever hell it came from. It took nine more thrusts before Snnktts finally gave up his ghost and returned it to the fourth dimension.
Deadlock had finally had his revenge
He rejoined his fellow Warriors. They mind-commed each other, with their updated positions. They patched up their wounds and prepared to move out. Now the Red Death was defeated, Joe wanted to go after Senator Diaz and rescue Juanita.
"It is time," he explained to the others.
"There's no time," said Deadlock. "We must return to Viking City at once."
"Why?" asked Joe.
"Because it is time," replied Deadlock.
At the Sunset Motor Company, Steelhorn watched the tripods march past him. "It is time," he said.
Everyone seemed more obsessed with time than the speaking clock.
When they reached the extra-martials' pyramids in Viking City, the real destruction would begin. The tripods were a threat not even his ex-comrades could defeat.
Columns of them marched in regimental order through the works exit of the Sunset Motor Company. There were smaller Striders that still bore the sign "Sunset Solid" on their backs. Other later versions, with telescopic legs climbed over the fence. These machines had Martian writing on their backs. Written in a language dating back to Martian civilisation millions of years earlier, it could roughly be translated as "Death to the binary ones."
A command tripod stepped up to Steelhorn's balcony. A hatch opened and Steelhorn caught a glimpse of its driver within. The creatures that controlled the tripods had emerged from Medusa's biomasses deep beneath her planetary crust. They were genetic copies of beings that had lived on Mars one hundred million years ago. Steelhorn stepped out onto the command deck and the hatch closed behind him.
From his office window, Fred Ravine saw the tripods scurrying, scuttling and striding in the direction of Viking City, and the enormity of what had been going on in Area 66 became clear to him. The threat these monstrous machines posed to humanity. And the extent to which he had been used by Mr Le Guerre. He could no longer fool himself there was an innocent explanation for the mysterious activities of the past three years.
Fred knew that much of the responsibility for the nightmare about to be unleashed must lie on his shoulders.
"What have I done? What have I done?" he whispered.
And then, more pertinently, "What am I going to do? What am I going to do?"
As if in answer, he heard the "Song of Medusa" inside his head:
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'll never be unhappy again.
He knew exactly what he had to do. With a smile on his face, Fred took a gun out of a drawer. He took one last look at the war machines marching beneath him.
Then he blew his brains out.
In the command tripod, Steelhorn repeated the words of H G Wells' War of the Worlds, Medusa's inspiration for the tripods. She had discovered it in the colonists' collective subconscious and thought it singularly appropriate, although she didn't like the ending very much. She thought that could have done with a little tweaking. It was to act as her bible in the military campaign that was about to commence. As always, she had changed things to suit her own agenda and her own point of view.
"Who would have believed in the Age of Sleep, that Mars was being observed from a remote distance? They regarded the Red Planet with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans to colonise it? So vain were these creatures and so blinded by their vanity, they could not believe intelligent life might have already developed on Mars and would not welcome invaders."
"These creatures had wrought ruthless and utter destruction on their own
world; were they such apostles of mercy as to complain if Mars waged war against them in the same spirit?"
And from the tripods came a dreadful answering cry: "Ullllaaaaaaaa!"
"For the last time, Blackblood, I've told you. It was purely platonic."
"So you didn't score?"
"Of course not," answered Hammerstein.
The Warriors were flying back to Viking City in their personal jet and Blackblood had begun tormenting Hammerstein already over his relationship with Mass Destruction.
"Good. Because robot females are just too much trouble, as you saw for yourself. Now take my advice, Hammerstein. Next time, don't get involved with them. And, whatever you do, never, ever let them get papers on you." Blackblood was referring to a robot version of the marital contract, whereby - after a legally sanctioned interface - a male robot signed away all his components to his female partner.
Hammerstein nodded silently, hoping against hope that Blackblood would shut up. He didn't.
"Now when you're on the pitch, you've got to know how to body swerve to avoid commitment. And when it comes to scoring, it's better to go for your own goals. I can put one in the net myself any time I like. All I need is my faithful vacuum cleaner and a good imagination."
Hammerstein made a strange buzzing sound. It was the robot equivalent of a long sigh.
"Yes," continued Blackblood. "Gladys, my trusty goblin, does for me very nicely. When I hear her cheery tones, 'Shall I do you now, sir?' before she starts on the downstairs carpets, it warms the cockles of my heart. She has the same mental capacity as my electric cocktail stirrer. And a similar function, come to think of it. They share a single brain cell between them."
This was more information about Blackblood's private life than anyone needed to know. But Blackblood wasn't going to leave it there. "And she's a lot less bother than a hover," he added.