Rage Against the Machines

by Mike Wild

  THE ABC WARRIORS

  RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINES

  "Hey, are you guys the robots with the pizza?" she asked drunkenly. "Only, if you are, you're six hours late. The President said he ain't payin' if you're-"

  Blackblood cocked his weapon and the girl stared at it, open-mouthed. "Do we look," Blackblood challenged, "like the robots with the pizza?"

  "Sure..." the girl said. She stared at the entrail-dripping meks. "All the guys from Pavement Pizza look like you."

  "Not any more," Joe said.

  "Whaddya mean? They broken down or something?"

  "This ain't no technological breakdown," Joe said. "Oh no, this is the road to hell."

  Deadlock stared at him. Sometimes he wondered if Joe listened to his personal stereo a little too much.

  THE ABC WARRIORS

  #1: THE MEDUSA WAR - Pat Mills & Alan Mitchell

  #2: RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINES - Mike Wild

  JUDGE DREDD FROM 2000 AD BOOKS

  #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

  For Joe and Charlie Halliwell

  Love, Unkul Mikule

  The ABC Warriors were created by Pat Mills, Mike McMahon, Kevin O'Neill & Brendan McCarthy

  A 2000 AD Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  www.2000adonline.com

  1098 7 65 4321

  Cover illustration by Karl Richardson.

  Copyright © 2005 Rebellion A/S. All rights reserved.

  All 2000 AD characters and logos © and TM Rebellion A/S."ABC Warriors" is a trademark in the United States and other jurisdictions."2000 AD" is a registered trademark in certain jurisdictions. All rights reserved. Used under licence.

  ISBN (epub.): 978-1-84997-074-7

  ISBN (mobi.): 978-1-84997-115-7

  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

  RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINES

  MIKE WILD

  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 deadly 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. He 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, 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

  Captain Conrad Turner was nothing if not cool under fire.

  "Sincere apologies for the bumpy ride, ladies and gentlemen," he intoned calmly on the aircraft PA. "But as you may have noticed, we are currently experiencing some mild... turbulence."

  Maggie Sidewinder gagged and snorted Wooze out of her nose, spraying the hair of the passenger in front with the noxious fizz. The guy didn't care much, having been dead a while. He had been skimmed by a heat-ray whilst boarding, but Maggie didn't know that. She whipped out a tissue anyway and was apologising profusely when she accidentally dislodged his head. She yelped then sat back with a puzzled frown, pondering over how he'd made it this far. Outside her window something detonated with a WHUMP! The plane rocked as if an angry giant had slapped it. Maggie was thrown violently from side to side, and unfortunately found her cheek resting against her window at the exact moment that the body of an obeast came hurtling out of nowhere, impacting on the glass with a mushy slap, before exploding like a water-filled balloon. The sack of skin dropped away, but Maggie's view of the goings-on outside was thoroughly spoiled by the greasy-red slick that it had left behind. Lagging behind the rest of his body, one of the obeast's eyeballs slowly slid down the pane. It revolved languorously in its own gore until it was staring in at her. Oh frag, that's revolting, Maggie thought. Pulling a face, she grabbed the hand of the boy in the seat next to her, squeezing it hard.

  "Hey, lady, that hurts," he said.

  "Grow a backbone, kid."

  She felt the plane shudder. Turbulence, she thought. Pretty good going considering the plane was still on the ground.

  The plane rocked again. Maggie decided that it would be a very good time to snap on her seat belt and she pulled the strap tight over her lap. She thought she could hear thunder rumbling outside, but it wasn't the weather at all. Flashes of lightning illuminated the sky intermittently, but Maggie knew it wasn't that either. For one thing, the flashes were green.

  The aircraft was taxiing through the heart of Sojourner Airport, or more accurately, what was left of Sojourner Airport since the Martian war machines had turned it into a battle-zone
. Maggie flinched as three rays of intense, green light - Martian heat-rays - lanced past her window. They struck the eyeball, which was still sliding down, with an intense blast of heat, instantly drying the viscera into veined, brown stains. She whipped her arm away from the glass just as the fine hairs on her arms had begun to fizz and shrivel. It was too fragging close, she thought. She shielded her eyes as the rays impacted with the airfield a little further ahead, super-heating the concrete so it cracked and exploded. The explosion had pocked the taxiway with unavoidable craters, which forced Captain Turner to skew the plane urgently to the left. At that same moment, Maggie heard the rapid, bass-like pulse that was the sound of more Martian heat-rays charging-up. She ducked quickly back the other way. Half of the windows on the opposite side of the plane cracked with a noise like a whiplash as the fuselage was seared, turning the hull momentarily a glowing, smoky green. A woman, who had been rubbernecking at her window, staggered back holding her face and screamed.

  Maggie took a good slug of Wooze and prayed that the alcotranq, "the sedative with a bite", did exactly what it said on the tin, which it did. Whilst she was sufficiently numbed, she risked a quick rubberneck for herself. All over Sojourner Airport, planes just like their own had already fallen victim to the alien weapons. They lay crumpled with their noses down on the ground, as if in supplication to a greater power, conceding that it had been a folly to attempt to fly. The passengers who somehow had survived death scrambled from the wrecks in a daze. They looked for refuge and found none.

  Everywhere, people ran and crawled, bleeding and wailing. Some of them were on fire, whilst some of them were little more than twitching lumps of reddened flesh and charcoal. The tripods - the strange Martian machines that had appeared from nowhere at dawn - stalked those who could still flee across the tarmac. They plucked the helpless figures into the air and deposited them, arms flailing, into maws located in their hulls. Some of the tripods did not bother to incarcerate their prey at all, but simply battered them against their metal sides until they were dead. The tripods smeared themselves with human blood as if it were war paint. Then, simply flinging the corpses aside, they let out an ululation that was part Banshee and part - Maggie wasn't sure what - something desperately lonely, but it chilled her to the bone. UUULAAH! She imagined it carrying on the wind, far beyond the main terminal of the airport, which was razed to the ground, and beyond the smoking skyline of Viking City - what had been Viking City - like a refrain for a dying planet. Turbulence struck the plane again.

  She felt it was Armageddon.

  Why, Maggie asked herself? Why the fragging hell did she always find herself smack in the middle when the biol hit the fan? Only that morning she had been fired from her job as an exotic prancer at Whores & Cart. It was just a small misunderstanding involving a horseshoe and a client's teeth. She decided that she had had her fill of the pseudo-Egyptian hellhole that called itself Viking City. All she had been trying to do was blag a ride to anywhere, when those bloody tripods had decided to check in as well.

  She had allowed her long leather coat to drape open, revealing the prancing gear beneath. It hadn't worked too well with the three-legged freaks. It looked like she was going to be an involuntary passenger in one of them until fate lent a hand. A kid, whose mom had been fried, who was too scared and confused to do anything except hold Maggie's hand, also held two slightly-singed tickets that his mom had let him look after, so that he could feel like a grown-up. In view of the circumstances, it had not been hard to get him to surrender them to a real grown-up and to coax the brat quickly through the departures gate. She intended to dump him as soon as possible.

  She had forgotten, of course, that the tickets would be for adjacent seats. It was the last thing that she needed, but she had inherited a brat. Now, there they both were, on the last flight out of Dodge. At least she hoped it was the last flight out of Dodge.

  Maggie took another gulp of Wooze and offered it to the kid, who refused. She had to hand it to the captain of Viking Airline's Flight 613, and not just for trying to make light of their predicament. The man Turner - the man, as far as she was concerned - was not easily fazed. As destruction raged about the plane, he somehow managed to remain in control and avoid further hits, swinging the craft to port then to starboard as if it was a two-man sod-hopper, rather than the Galasphere 747 it actually was. Eventually, he spied a breach in the endless wreckage and, even though his instruments indicated he wouldn't make it, squeezed the behemoth's undercarriage between the wrecks of two burned-out fire trucks. As they passed, Maggie swallowed and raised her can to their deceased occupants. Carbonised instantly in the immolation that had finished them, they stood with their mouths open in mid-scream, their arms in the air. It looked as if they had been waving goodbye.

  The breach was the plane's gateway to freedom. Maggie felt when its undercarriage bumped up onto a smoother surface - the runway itself - and tipped to her left as Captain Turner swung the plane about. They had manoeuvred for take-off and, after a second, Maggie felt the plane had begun to push her gently in the small of her back. The engines made a rushing sound.

  Just for that moment Maggie had allowed herself to believe that she and the brat... The brat, she repeated to herself. Okay, where did that come from? She thought that she might actually make it out of there alive. Nice one, Skip.

  The runway began to shake.

  "What is that?" someone said. "Marsquake?" It was the woman who had screamed earlier, who, despite serious charring to her face, was rubbernecking again. "Last thing we need is a Marsquake." She craned her neck to see behind the plane, then flopped back in her seat. She decided not to tell the others how she had seen some tripods flinging the fire trucks aside. "Nope," she said with a hopeless sigh. "Not a Marsquake..."

  "Oh Gaia, those are footsteps," a guy to the rear of the plane said. "The bastards are following us. They're following us!" He careered up the aisle between the seats, dishevelled and desperate, forcing his way between an obeast and a Trimorph stewardess, scattering the contents of a Black Bag, which the stewardess had been hurriedly trying to stow away. Cash - hard cash, the real stuff, not the ubiquitous Martian Es - plumed into the air and scattered. It was one measure of the gravity of the situation, in which the obeast had been carrying the illegal and highly suspect package openly, because at that moment, no one at all cared about the contents.

  The runner continued his flight up the aisle, as if the few extra yards he had gained might somehow save him from his demons, be they imagined or not. As he neared Maggie, he collided with a marzah nun who had been playing guitar to a sick young girl in the next aisle. The neck of the guitar dislodged the child's drip-feed and she began to spasm. Tutting, the nun replaced the feed. This had obviously happened before.

  Maggie stuck her foot out into the aisle and sent the runner flying.

  "Mars-hole," she snapped.

  The runner picked himself up and continued, but ultimately, of course, there was nowhere left for him to go. He began to hammer hard on the cockpit door. "Get us up! GET US UP NOW! They're following us!" There was no response from Captain Turner and the man spun around to face the rest of the plane, slapped flat against the unyielding partition, as if he was trying to leave an impression in the metal. Dripping with sweat, he stared back up the aisle and his eyes skirted insanely. "Oh God, oh Gaia, I can hear them coming."

  Turner's voice came over the intercom. "As can I, sir. And now that this particular fact has been established, will you kindly return to your seat and bloody well belt up!" There was a pause before he added, calmly and quite probably by way of apology for his momentary loss of sangfroid, "I'd recommend the same for the rest of you as well."

  As Turner spoke, the plane surged forward. Maggie felt herself pushed further into her seat and the pressure in the small of her back became a dull ache in her kidneys. Turner was going for broke now, putting his foot firmly to the floor. The engines of the plane roared and whined, pushed to their absolute limits. But disturbi
ngly, even over the deafening whine that the engines were making, the advance of their pursuers could still be heard. Or, more precisely, the advance could be felt: THUNK. THUNK-THUNK. THUNK-THUNK-THUNK.

  Mister Lost-His-Marbles was right about one thing, Maggie thought. They're definitely coming.

  Seconds passed. The runway whipped past Maggie's window without an end, without any escape. She noticed that the side of the runway, at this point, was pocked with the wreckage of further planes, which like them had made it this far and no further. Martians - actual Martians and not their tripod shells - were crouched on the tarmac and sucked up the blood of humans who lay dead, in prone positions. They regarded the plane as it passed. The sudden, chilling thought - that the tripods had let them reach this point only to spring some final trap - leapt into Maggie's mind. Was it possible they were just playing some kind of game?