The Medida War Page 19

  Zigzagging to avoid their fire, he raced towards the sand sea and dived in, sinking far beneath it. With his anti-detector devices on full, to prevent mortar or depth charge fire, he swam far below the surface in the direction of Damnation Island.

  As he swam through the quicksand, he thought again about the ludicrous nature of high-tech weaponry. People believed in manana and a better tomorrow, so they didn't have to live today. They were always excited by new and "superior" gadgets that they thought would either make their lives better or kill more people. Or both.

  This was why Joe collected weapons through the ages. You could pick up some beautiful "obsolete" weapons for next to nothing, simply because they had been replaced by some new "wonder-weapon."

  Three armed sandmen swam towards him through the quicksand. They were some form of genetically modified human. They looked related to the humpies: they had horrible drooping air sacs on their faces, pulsating sacs on their backs, and webbed hands and feet. Joe wasn't particularly interested in what they were. He didn't care. He just thought they looked disgusting and that they should die.

  He vaguely realised they were firing some sort of weapons at him, but he had no idea what because his exterior defence field took care of them. Their missiles exploded harmlessly a good safe distance from him. It was a bit embarrassing; his defence field didn't even bother to file a combat report on them afterwards. It was the equivalent of scratching yourself and not being aware you were doing it.

  But he had been longing for the chance to use his Bowie knife. He wasn't going to waste it by throwing it at an enemy. He ripped the first sandman open from his groin up to what looked like his gills, and Joe was so impressed by the way it cut right through him. So easily. Now that's craftsmanship, he thought. It was equally effective on the second sandman and he turned to try it on the third.

  The fool was swimming off at high speed, trying to lose himself in the darkness of the quicksand, which was naïve of him, given Joe's infra-red vision. That was when Joe brought his old Magnum Macho 3000 sniper rifle to bear. It was a beautiful weapon, absolutely nothing wrong with it, and yet it had been obsolete for hundreds of years. It had a large sniper sight and it was a little chunky, perhaps, for some people's taste, with a relatively short barrel, but that's why Joe liked it. Modern guns just got bigger and bigger until they looked really stupid. And Joe had fired a few of them himself. But the magnum macho had always been a favourite. And perhaps now, after all these years, it was time for him to go back to his first love.

  It blew the back of the sandman's head off. Perfectly.

  Well satisfied, Joe sent a decoy nanobot in the opposite direction to him. It didn't look like anything in particular, it was just a serviceable, functional, micro-machine. How they were meant to be. Joe regarded Deadlock's use of colourful nanobots as rather pretentious. The decoy should hopefully fool the guards for at least three or four hours. By the time they sent down more sandmen or called in a mini-subtereen to investigate, he would have reached Juanita.

  He clambered out of the sea and up onto the rocks of Damnation Island. It was dark now and he used the semi-cover of the night to move along the shoreline in the general direction of Senator Diaz's country domes.

  He approached the bridge connecting the island with the mainland. He scanned ahead to the domes. There were clone guards everywhere on the lookout for him. This wasn't good and he considered how he was going to deal with this new problem.

  As he weighed up various possibilities, his attention was caught by a sand skimmer that had just crossed the lowered swing bridge. Clone guards were checking out its occupants and insisting on looking through every object of their cargo.

  There was something familiar about the arrogant voice of the robot that was explaining to the guards that they were giving a private showing of the Pharaoh collection to the senator and his wife - by invitation. It was Sheer Herren Sad with Sheen Zano, the supermodels from the Mars Fargo coach. They were telling the guards the clothes would be ruined if they were all dragged out.

  Nevertheless, the guards insisted on it. They told them there was a dangerous assassin on the loose and they could not afford to take any chances. Some of the guards opened up the boxes of clothes. Others began frisking the human and robot models.

  The clones took absolutely no interest in the beauties. They professionally patted them down in a bored, disinterested sort of way, which annoyed the models rather than pleased them.

  This was the opportunity Joe needed and he was not slow to seize it. He hid his weapons and waited until the guards had almost completed their work and were busy around one side of the skimmer - and Sheen Zano was around the other.

  Then he called her over. "Psst! It's me. John Steel. Remember?"

  "John!" Sheen's beautiful face lit up.

  "What are you doing here?"

  "Keep your voice down. I followed the skimmer. I had to see you again."

  "But why?"

  "Because I'm crazy about you."

  "You never said anything!"

  "Because your friend was around."

  "Yeah, I've heard that from guys before," she sighed. "Most of them hate her. She's such a pain."

  "Can I come with you?"

  "I'd love you to."

  "But I haven't got a pass."

  "Don't worry about that. Pretend you're one of the porters."

  "Thanks. What about Sheer?"

  "That's no problem. If she makes any more trouble, I'll finish with her. I'm so angry about the way she behaved on the coach. She's on her final warning."

  Carrying a large box in front of him to hide his features, Joe pretended to be one of the porters.

  On board the sand skimmer, he leaned back and relaxed. Sheen leaned into him and held onto his arm, smiling tenderly up at him. "I knew it was meant to be from the moment I saw you," she said happily.

  "Me, too," said Joe.

  "Thanks for coming after me."

  "Anything for you," said Joe.

  He felt bad about leading her on, but said to himself: All's fair...

  It was the only way he'd get inside the domes.

  Sheer looked on jealously but said nothing; she was too frightened of losing her friend.

  The skimmer drove effortlessly past the clone guards that patrolled the grounds. The human super models ignored them. They were too busy gossiping about the news that talented young fashion designer Stella Lowry had bought the "Pig-U-Like" chain specialising in sportswear for obeasts.

  "She'll come up with something even better than the Max-Swell swimsuits."

  "Maybe a Max-Swill?"

  "Ha, ha, ha!"

  "She's so talented."

  "Yes, but the problem with Stella is she has to support her ageing rock star dad. Spending all that money on yet another comeback for him. She's just subsidising him."

  The skimmer approached the domes of Camp Diaz.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Hammerstein continued to see Nikita whenever he could arrange a secret meeting with her. He hadn't thought it necessary to tell his comrades he had been seeing her. After all, it was when he was off duty, so it had nothing to do with them. There was something innocent about his relationship with the Russian, despite his experience of life over many centuries. Blackblood used to say, "Hammerstein is like an eternal virgin. He wakes up every day anew."

  It was true. Hammerstein did constantly reinvent himself.

  He had been an ABC Warrior on Earth and Mars. After his discharge, he ended up for sale as ex-army surplus, with a choice of two heads. He and the garbage robot called Ro-Jaws were the last two robots for sale in the showroom. He was eventually bought by Robusters, a corporation who used robots to deal with disasters. That's where he first met the giant machine, Mek-Quake. Mek-Quake's duties included destroying robots who were no longer useful to Robusters, and he and Ro-Jaws were nearly recycled by Mek-Quake.

  Later, escaping from his human masters, Hammerstein reformed the old ABC Warriors team. With all
these experiences behind him, it was necessary to erase some of his memories to prevent infolation. And this gave him his somewhat naïve manner. As Deadlock said, "He really is the ultimate straight."

  Or as Ro-Jaws put it, "He's a bit of a toaster."

  Now, with his almost youthful innocence, he became infatuated by all things Russian. When she walked towards him, he heard Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition." She was his Baba Yaga and he was under her spell. He longed for her Great Gates of Kiev to open and to spend a night on her bare mountains.

  When she smiled at him, he lit up like a Geiger counter from Chernobyl.

  When they danced, he felt like a rampant Cossack.

  They saw Russian romantic tragic-comedies like Easy Steam together and he preferred her translation to his own. He watched her, rather than the movie. He laughed in all the right places though he had no idea what was going on.

  They listened to the haunting songs of Pyckue Pomahcbl, sterner and more heart rending and more tragic than Edith Piaf. She strummed his heartstrings as if he was a balalaika.

  They wrote their names together in Cyrillic. Cyril didn't seem to mind. Her robot friend had always wanted Hammerstein's autograph.

  There was something mysterious and tragic about Nikita. She told him the tragic story of her country of manufacture. Her tragic tales warmed his heart. The more tragic they were, the happier he was. She described what happened during the tragic years of the Volgan War. How robots like her suffered during the tragic Allied siege of Volgograd.

  Perhaps, commented Hammerstein, they might even have met? And when she talked about the cramped conditions in the tragic post-war years, with fifty robots packed like sardines in one tiny room, he just wanted to get closer to her.

  And yet he knew, deep down, that their relationship was doomed. It could not last.

  There was something tragic about it.

  It was to be more tragic than Hammerstein could ever imagine.

  At Camp Diaz, Juanita considered her desperate situation. She had become a human robot, like the clones, pre-programmed to react in exactly the way Senator Diaz wanted. To be the perfect, dutiful, always happy wife, totally in love with him. He intended to become a Foundation Father himself soon, so her offspring could carry on his proud family name. He was so confident of his absolute power over her that he even used to sing in the shower, "Love bomb! Love bomb! You're my love bomb!" before dancing across the bedroom to join her.

  Only a man who wears a suit with "Recyclage Chariots" written on the back can do this.

  The shock of being love-bombed was so great that Juanita could remember little of it now. And what she remembered she couldn't believe.

  She thought she must be an evil person for thinking such things about a man she also firmly believed she loved. There must be something wrong with her.

  "It's not possible. It can't be true. I cannot believe it," she told herself every morning. If it had really happened, then she would remember it properly. But that was the art of love-bombing; it left only disassociated, dream-like memories.

  During the day she was okay, but it was the nights that bothered her. The awful memory of Sodom and Gomorrah leering down at her. Their foul breath. The blood of clones dripping from their fangs.

  What was she going to do? Who could she turn to? If she saw a doctor, he would say she was crazy and have her locked up or injected with drugs to turn her into a zombie. Whichever way she went, she lost and Diaz won.

  And so she desperately blocked her "wicked" thoughts out and concentrated on being the perfect politician's wife. She had lost all her memories of Joe Pineapples and had accepted the senator's view that the ABC Warriors were a threat to the future of the colonists. And so she had made that astonishing speech on Human Pride Day.

  And it might have continued in the way the senator planned. Until one evening she overheard Diaz and Rosesand making their plans. Hoodwink needed the more "liberal" President Cobb as his public mouthpiece, but his fellow Arch-Angel Diaz was his man behind the scenes.

  Hoodwink's alien master wanted Hell on Mars and Diaz wanted to go "back to basics," to the traditional, decent values of the Foundation Fathers. They had much in common.

  They were in the temple dome, an edifice separate from the other domes. Diaz had never permitted his wife to visit the place. But unable to sleep, she had wandered in the grounds and seen a light on inside. Normally, the door would have been locked but this seemed to be an emergency. Rosesand had arrived by personal jet from Viking, he had not stopped for dinner, and had barely acknowledged her presence. He had headed straight for the temple for an urgent meeting with Diaz.

  When she peered through the door, she gazed in wonder at the star-painted dome. Diaz and Seraph were beneath it, both wearing angels' wings, and both were standing on a small dais.

  "There must be a flap on for you to come here at such short notice, guardian angel," said Diaz.

  "There is indeed. The latest opinion polls show the ABC Warriors are winning the battle for the peoples' hearts and minds."

  "No wonder your feathers are ruffled."

  "Yes Snnktts isn't happy about it either."

  "Gghhkhkxxvz!"

  "I agree."

  "We could lose the election."

  "So what have you got in mind?"

  "There's only one thing for it," said Seraph. "We'll have to bring back the Red Death."

  "Slimes?"

  "Yes. Subsurface lithoautotrophic microbial ecosystems."

  "I thought that had been eradicated?"

  "It has. But we've still got samples in the laboratory, of course."

  "Of course."

  "It's a virus native to Mars, so the public will naturally blame it on Medusa."

  "Naturally. As I recall, it's an extremophile; a life-form that can live in totally hostile conditions."

  "And it lives off fear and there's plenty of that about right now. It can turn a healthy human into a skeleton in a matter of minutes."

  "So it will cause chaos and misery throughout Mars."

  "Before we produce a wonder antidote."

  "And the public will agree to tough new measures against the planet and the ABC Warriors."

  "As always, Diaz, we can fool all of the people all of the time."

  Juanita listened with mounting horror as the Arch-Angels continued their arch conversation.

  "Obviously we'll be safe."

  "Yes. Just make sure your people drink plenty of neuropeptide-A. The heroism it induces will make them immune to Slimes."

  "Regular neuropeptide has no medicinal value?"

  "Don't be ridiculous."

  When Juanita had worked for Redpeace she had heard stories about the origins of neuropeptide-A, known as "liquid courage." She read a report that said it was a natural brain chemical that had first been isolated as long ago as 2002. A director of the American National Centre for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder said at the time, "If we could somehow bottle this or actually find out how to train people to mobilise this chemical, it would be exciting stuff."

  The Right Stuff.

  There were rumours going around that clones were tortured so their brains produced large quantities of neuropeptide-A which was then extracted by robots. But Juanita had never believed them.

  Until now.

  "After an outbreak of Slimes, we should wing the next election," said Seraph.

  "Yes, we certainly don't want those odd birds from Redpeace gaining power."

  "I've a location in Marineris to disperse the virus from. I'm going to take care of it myself."

  "Very good. What if the ABC Warriors intervene?"

  "I'm bringing MD along in case of trouble. He's been working on a way of dealing with the ABCs."

  "Excellent."

  Juanita considered what she had discovered. If her husband was capable of such calculated wickedness, then perhaps the rest was true? Perhaps all those other dreadful things really had happened to her? The thought of it made her head spin as s
he tried to come to terms with the truth.

  She was married to a monster.

  With no further security checks, the skimmer had pulled up around the back of one of the domes. Joe helped the other robots take the merchandise out of the vehicle while Sheen and Sheer looked on.

  After they had finished, Sheen smiled at him. "Let's find somewhere to be alone."

  "Sure," Joe said, straining to sound interested.

  They entered the main dome. It was beautiful, spacious and formal, like an empty palace. Mercifully, Diaz kept his antique road signs elsewhere.

  "Isn't this exciting?" she giggled.

  "Let me check around and find somewhere," he said, trying to get away from her so he could find Juanita.

  "I'll come with you," she said firmly.

  This was going to be more difficult than he'd thought.

  "What about there?" she said, pointing to a large white space capsule with the United States flag on the side.

  "What is it?"

  "The first manned spaceship to land on Mars. Come on!" she giggled, and pulled him inside.

  It would be a new variation on the mile high club, even for Joe.

  Inside the cramped capsule, she threw her arms passionately around Joe and pressed her lips to his.

  She pulled back as she realised her passion was not being returned.

  "What's wrong, John?"

  "Sheen, there's something I haven't told you."

  "You don't like me?"

  "It's not that. I think you're fantastic, but-"

  "There's someone else?"

  He didn't reply.

  She looked at him coldly. "You were never interested in me at all."

  "I'm afraid so."

  "You used me to get into Camp Diaz."

  "I'm sorry."

  "You're the assassin they're looking for. I'm calling security."