Rage Against the Machines

by Mike Wild

  Deadlock stepped through the gap.

  "If it is your wish that I fight for your planet, my lady," he said in deep and determined tones, "then I will gladly oblige. But I shall do so as myself." There was a pause and with a sound like the unsheathing of Death's scythe itself, he withdrew his Ace of Swords.

  "Bring it on," Deadlock said.

  Medusa, who was halfway across a phantasmic courtyard, already erasing her fantastical conceit with a wave of her hand, stopped dead in her tracks. She turned, visibly shaken. Then she clapped her hands together like a little girl, and smiled.

  "Done," she said happily.

  Medusa was as good as her word. They came then, all of the enemies she had in her Burroughsian repertoire: the priest-like but deadly Therns with their Banths; Black Pirates and the yellow men of Okar; the Lotharians, the Manator Knights and the Hormad; the Jaharians, Malagors; White Apes and the Fu.

  Medusa's castle was under siege. Launching spells with one hand while his Ace of Swords despatched his opponents with the other, Deadlock took on them all and emerged victorious.

  Finally, the courtyard of the castle was slicked with a rainbow lake of severed limbs and alien blood, so much that the ABC Warrior had to wade through.

  Medusa stared at it, at Deadlock, breathlessly.

  In fact, by the way she was purring, she appeared to be rather turned on by the whole thing.

  "I am impressed, Champion," she said.

  Deadlock sheathed his sword. It sounded a sigh, as if with deep contentment.

  "That is what I can achieve in a fair fight, my lady," Deadlock said. "Withdraw your armies from the surface of Mars and I give you my personal pledge that I will fight to save your world from the injustice that has been done to it."

  Medusa paused and looked at him, drawing the occasional shuddering breath. It was obvious that she was making up her mind.

  "You will make things right?" Medusa said.

  Deadlock bowed his head solemnly. "I will make things right."

  Medusa began to walk towards him. Her challenge was over. Deadlock knew that he had won.

  "My lady!" a voice called out.

  Medusa stopped, turning.

  "What the...?" Deadlock thought.

  Heading towards Medusa, through the fading remnants of her fantasy castle, was a small Martian dressed as a page, a messenger of some kind.

  "My lady, stop. I have urgent news," it said.

  I don't like the sound of this, Deadlock thought.

  The messenger approached Medusa and she bent so that it could whisper in her ear.

  "Really?" she said as she listened. "You don't say? Diaz, eh? My, that is interesting..."

  Diaz, Deadlock thought bleakly. What the frag is Diaz doing getting involved here? Especially after Tripolis.

  "Medusa, what is it?" Deadlock asked.

  "Oh, nothing," Medusa said sweetly. Then she looked up at Deadlock and her eyes shone with renewed fire. "Just that I may have a champion who is better than you."

  "Diaz?" Deadlock said incredulously.

  "Diaz," Medusa repeated.

  EIGHTEEN

  Mek-Quake had tried dodging the spotlights, but they had got him every time. Generally at the first building, which caused much amusement for the guards. A demolition robot, even in humanoid form, was just not built for stealth.

  Mek-Quake had tried helping with a tunnel, removing the sand that was excavated by the spademen and dumping it from a number of cunningly concealed bags tied to his tank-tracks in the courtyard. Invariably, the courtyard had been filled with a number of very large sand dunes that the demolition robot had found difficult to explain away.

  Mek-Quake had tried building a glider, painstakingly assembling the flying machine from spare parts high in the prisoner's quarters, only to find that it and he were far too big to fit through the window.

  He had even for a while tried joining the escape committee, but his one repeated suggestion on avoiding his captors - "HIDE HERE UNTIL WAR OVER!" - was deemed to be perhaps not very well thought through.

  Mek-Quake had to face facts.

  He was not cut out to be a Prisoner Of War.

  The siege at the Sweet Dreams Motel had not turned out to be fatal for them, after all. Both Mongrol and Mek-Quake had taken severe damage, but had managed to deploy sufficient counter-measures against the tripods to enable them to maintain a pretty good defence of the humans in the motel. As had happened before in Viking City, they had not been able to inflict much damage on the Martian war-machines, and again, their sheer unexpected number had ultimately overwhelmed them.

  The two reminded themselves to do a better recce next time - but they had not been destroyed. They had continued fighting, in fact, until Steelhorn had appeared and announced he had a neutron missile aimed directly at the cabins. The bootleg had been playing with them all along.

  Surrendering, both the ABC Warriors and the humans had been rounded up. Steelhorn had communed with Medusa and received his instructions.

  His instructions had been to bring them here.

  Escorted across the desert by night, refused permission to speak with their ex-teammate, neither Mek-Quake nor Mongrol had known what to expect, but the coming of dawn had revealed to them what their ultimate destination was.

  Balanced on a foreboding crag somewhere in the Olympian Heights was an equally foreboding grey castle. After two thousand years the two ABC Warriors knew Mars pretty well, and both were reasonably certain that it hadn't been there previously.

  They were correct. It hadn't. Medusa had decided to indulge her occasional World War II fixation and create a German Stalag in which to incarcerate those she was kind enough not to burn to a crisp. And she had done so with considerable style.

  The castle loomed dramatically, imposing, solid and strong against the red-hued backdrop of the Martian skyline, its high walls blending almost seamlessly with sheer and precipitous cliffs. Inside the walls was the courtyard and this was bordered on all sides by multi-storied quarters in which the prisoners were kept. The quarters themselves were dwarfed by the castle's towers and these thrust into the sky at various points around the compound, petrified grey edifices that looked like missiles cheated forever of a launch. In the lookout posts within these towers, the Martian guards were in a position to see everything, observe everything and retaliate at a single move.

  The castle was meant to be the ultimate prison. It was designed to be inescapable. Medusa named it after her little Martian friends. She called it Coldmitz.

  Oddly enough, it was not the inescapability of the place that troubled Mongrol, as the gates had slammed shut behind himself and the convoy. It was why the place stank so fraggin' bad.

  The answer came when he had tested its security for the first time. The ABC Warrior had decided to crash through the perimeter walls, but instead of crashing through had rather embarrassingly bounced straight off them, landing on Mek-Quake with a sickening thud.

  He knew, then. Even with her planetary powers, there was no way that Medusa could have organised the materials and labour to construct the sprawling mass that was Coldmitz so quickly. So instead she had grown it.

  Marshrooms, Mongrol had thought. He'd been in prisons made of far tougher things than marshrooms. A doddle if ever there was one. And he immediately began to rip his way through the wall.

  Which is when he discovered that Medusa had infused the marshroom walls with an acid that could bypass even the ABC Warrior's self-learning defence programs.

  That had hurt.

  Instead, Mongrol decided to shoot at the walls from a safe distance. It was here that he learned why he and the others had been allowed to keep their weapons. They didn't work. Coldmitz was shrouded in a suppression field that jammed all ordnance apart from that belonging to the guards.

  The old hag wasn't playing around. She had, apparently, thought of everything.

  So it was that Mongrol sat in the courtyard of the castle, listlessly bouncing a baseball back and for
th off Mek-Quake's head and wrinkling a metaphorical nose. He still hadn't gotten used to the stink.

  Mek-Quake himself was playing unnervingly happily with the children in the sand - building sandcastles of all things. This particular pastime had begun when Mek-Quake had spotted a small hole in the courtyard floor.

  "A hole," he had whispered conspiratorially to Mongrol. "Maybe Mek-Quake can dig himself out from here?"

  "Possibility," said Mongrol, dryly. "Perhaps we should ask the guards to bring us a very big spade?"

  "Mek-Quake has big spade!" Mek-Quake had replied with sudden excitement. "Mek-Quake has big bucket, also." Out of one of his lockers he had ejected said spade and a huge, brightly painted bucket with a picture of Blackpool Tower on it.

  Mongrol stared. The ABC Warriors had always known that Mek-Quake carried around all kinds of junk inside his body - just in case of emergencies, he led them to understand - but where the frag did he get these things? "I was being facetious, you bootleg."

  "Fas...?"

  "Flippant. Cutting. Deprecating."

  Mek-Quake had nodded. "Understand now."

  "You do?"

  "Yes. Mongrol talking phit again."

  "Go build a sandcastle or something," Mongrol had said.

  So Mek-Quake had.

  Mongrol caught the baseball and this time held onto it. Something had been bothering him since they had arrived - and it had suddenly struck Mongrol what it was. Why were they here? Not just themselves but the humans as well - why had their convoy been spared and not annihilated like everyone else who had stood in the tripods' way?

  It wasn't just the convoy, either. Apart from their own people, there were hundreds of other humans who had also been incarcerated here in Coldmitz -- a selection of people from all over the planet. Why did Medusa want to keep them?

  The answer was forthcoming.

  Mongrol looked up as three shadows blocked out the sun, and saw that looming over him were three guards, the same kind of Martians who piloted the tripods. These creatures normally spoke only in a series of gurgles and ullaahs, but it appeared that they had been taking lessons from some very bad film actor.

  "Raus," one of them said.

  "Filthy, rotten Englander!" said another. This Mongrol presumed was just for effect as he had no idea what an Englander was.

  "You vill come vith us," ordered the third. "Schnell!"

  Mongrol regarded them coolly. He just couldn't take the guards seriously. He could only imagine that Medusa had enlisted them here as the tripods themselves were busy incinerating things elsewhere, but there was something seriously lacking in their - what was the word - gravitas that really had to be sorted out if they were going to strike any fear at all into the hearts of meks. The tentacled, stubby Martians simply looked ludicrous in their helmets, greatcoats and jackboots, he thought. Like the free toys you got with Happy Meals, or Weebles in fancy dress.

  Mongrol wondered if he could make them wobble and fall down.

  Unfortunately there was nothing ludicrous-looking about the machine-guns that they carried. They'd be useless against an ABC Warrior, of course, but Mongrol could not risk the possibility of a rogue bullet from the guards hitting one of the humans should he try to resist them.

  Sighing, he stood and followed the three guards, unable to resist putting on a Ministry of Silly walk. After a second, Mek-Quake did a silly trundle behind.

  "Remember," Mongrol whispered to the killdozer, "don't mention the War of the Worlds."

  The ABC Warriors were escorted to a Kommandant's office and shown inside.

  "Steelhorn," Mongrol said as he laid eyes on the figure behind the Kommandant's desk. The ex-ABC Warrior looked quite resplendent in a full Nazi officer's uniform and, apart from his horns protruding through his officer's cap, really quite convincing in the part. "I'd heard you were back... from the dead."

  "Welcome, gentlemen," Steelhorn said, slapping a small cane into his palm. "It has been... quite a while... has it not?"

  "A millennium or two," Mongrol said calmly. "Georgeeee with you?"

  Steelhorn stared coldly at the mention of his old host body, the Gargantek. But there was a faint flicker of something in his eyes. "George," he said, "could not make it."

  "But the rumours of your not making it with him were obviously greatly exaggerated."

  "Oh, noooo," Steelhorn said, amused. "Not exaggerated at all. But now, thanks to the good Medusa, the rumours of my resurrection I can happily confirm in person."

  Mongrol had figured enough. With Medusa's irritating habit of bringing back the dead every five minutes, he should have known. "And you're on her side now? Is that it?"

  "Yes," Steelhorn said simply. "That is exactly it."

  "Steelhorn, he kill Hammerstein," Mek-Quake rumbled slowly. "Mek-Quake want kill Steelhorn."

  "Easy, big fella," Mongrol advised.

  "Yes, I did kill Hammerstein," Steelhorn admitted. "I am sorry about that." He sucked in a breath and laughed. "But as they say, war is hell."

  Mongrol stared at his old colleague. This was not the Steelhorn he once knew, at least not completely. It was obvious that when Medusa had reformed him she had chosen not to reinstall his more pacifistic leanings.

  "Why, Steelhorn?" Mongrol asked. "Why do this - ally yourself with Medusa? You knew we were here - you could have sought us out... Rejoined the ABC Warriors!"

  "We had vacancy," Mek-Quake said sadly. "Then we had two."

  "The ABC Warriors," Steelhorn repeated derisively. He snorted. "Another Broken Cause."

  Mongrol sighed to himself. This only confirmed what he had thought a moment before.

  Mek-Quake growled. Supporting his friend, Mongrol laid his own hand on a weapon.

  "You do realise that is pointless," Steelhorn said. He was referring to the suppression fields.

  "Mek-Quake still have Maniaxe," the killdozer said.

  "And I my fists," contributed Mongrol. "Mongrol SMUSH anyone?"

  "Pointless also," Steelhorn advised. "Considering that I share the traits of our tripod friends."

  "Let's put that to the test, shall we?" Mongrol said.

  Steelhorn held up a finger. "One sound and the guards shoot a selection of humans." He paused, letting the threat sink in. "Any suggestions as to whom?"

  "You bootleg."

  "Which," Steelhorn went on, ignoring the barb, "brings me to my point." He cracked his cane into his palm once more. "Doubtless you have been asking why the humans are here? Why we have kept them and yourselves alive?"

  "It had crossed my mind," Mongrol said.

  "It... had?" Mek-Quake interjected slowly.

  Steelhorn smiled. "Food, my friends," he said coldly.

  "You bootleg," Mongrol said again. Because he realised exactly what it was that Steelhorn meant. The more humans the tripods killed, the less blood would be available for their pilots.

  They needed somewhere to sustain their supply - a store cupboard. And for their future -- a breeding ground.

  Mongrol refused to even think of that possibility. He was going to find a way out of this. But for the moment all he could do was play for time.

  "And what about Mek-Quake and me?" he asked.

  "Trash compactor," Steelhorn said simply, and it was immediately obvious what the "trash" was that he had in mind. "Mek-Quake, my idiot ex comrade - you will be the shell in which the trash is compacted. And my old friend Mongrol - your fists will do the compacting. After you have been reassembled, of course. "

  Steelhorn pressed a buzzer on his desk. "Guards, they are ready to be taken away."

  Outside the office could be heard the thud of boots and Mongrol and Mek-Quake looked at each other.

  "Mek-Quake go nowhere," Mek-Quake said, "except out of Coldmitz."

  Steelhorn laughed. "Don't be ridiculous, you fool. You already know that there is nothing you can do."

  "Mek-Quake think Steelhorn should think again," the ABC Warrior said.

  Mongrol looked at him questioningly,
as did Steelhorn.

  Suddenly, the renegade ABC Warrior was sucked across the room, finding himself stuck fast on a strange trumpet like protrusion on the front of Mek-Quake.

  There hadn't been a sound, not even a clang. Steelhorn struggled silently like a fly stuck on a web.

  "Your Slurp Gun," Mongrol said. "I'd forgotten you had that."

  "Hur-hur-hur," said Mek-Quake.

  "Steelhorn," said Mongrol. "It appears you're in a bit of a - sorry, I can't resist - a bit of a Mess."

  "We escape now?" said Mek-Quake.

  "Yes. Let's get out of here," Mongrol agreed.

  Steelhorn perched in front of them as a hostage shield while the two ABC Warriors made their way into the courtyard and demanded that the Martian guards open the main gates. They were gambling that the guards didn't know that they couldn't hurt Steelhorn - and their gamble paid off. The main gates opened and they began to usher the human prisoners to freedom.

  The convoy, its ranks bolstered by the other humans in Coldmitz, began to descend the hill away from the castle.

  "ACHTUNG!" a voice said.

  Mongrol and Mek-Quake looked back.

  Martian guards had appeared on the battlements. They had a number of children as hostages and they were pointing their machine-guns at them.

  "Little ones..." Mek-Quake said sadly.

  "Fraggin' Weebles..." said Mongrol.

  Returned to the prison, Mongrol found himself locked in solitary confinement as punishment, which was a bit of a shame because as he was bundled in he learned there was going to be a World War II film festival screening in the mess that afternoon. Steelhorn had left Coldmitz for further battles and the regime had become a little more lax.

  Rumour had it that Medusa herself had selected some of her favourite films. These included Where Beagles Dare, The Longest Heat-Ray, and, of course, the epic Enslaving Private Ryan. Mongrol wondered whether they would sell ice creams in the intermission. He could've done with an ice cream.