Surefoot 81: Murderers' Row

Surinh noticed this, keeping his own gaze lower. "All the reports on its appearances confirmed it's a ground-based threat. Where's Nova?"

He waved towards the vine-covered rubble of some building.

"Has Dumont and our technicians reactivated the Pitchman?"

The younger Orion grunted. "Ask him yourself."

Surinh looked to him now, noting the attitude change from his partner in crime since they started collecting the likes of Dumont and the holographic gangster Franco Nova and his crew on the Filthy Lucre. He drew closer, keeping his voice low. "When we accosted the Ferengi ship, I took 500 bars from the gold-pressed latinum they acquired from their heist, and substituted counterfeit bars. I'll split it with you."

Nesrac started, his eyes wide in shock. "If they discover the switch-"

"I employed the subspace transporter, which they can't detect or trace; they'll look to blame each other first, or conclude it had already been switched on Bolarus." He patted Nesrac on the shoulder. "I gave you my word we'd profit together, no matter how many infidels we have to work with."

His partner nodded, eyes bright with gratitude... and the rush of sudden, unexpected wealth. "What are your orders, Sire?"

Surinh handed him the plasma cannon, noting how he tried to hide his struggle to manage the heavy weapon. "Set up a perimeter around the entrance to the chamber; our acquisition will be back."

He left him there to descend down the huge hole they had discovered, and the steep slope into a subterranean chamber with functioning machinery, where Dumont stood with several Orion technicians, surrounding the hologram of a gaunt, moon-eyed humanoid in silver and black robes, and receding black curly hair, smiling blankly.

The hologram seemed to animate on seeing Surinh approach, and outstretched his arms. "Whoever you are, wherever you're from, greetings! Welcome to Minos, the Arsenal of Freedom! If you need a little something special, be it for one target or multiple targets-"

"He's with us," Dumont advised.

The Pitchman calmed down, but remained attentive, as if calculating that Surinh Dag held the proverbial pursestrings and might make a purchase, however pointless it was. The Orion had read about this program: a simple-minded, non-sentient artifice attempting to sell things that no longer existed for a people that no longer existed. He looked at Dumont. "Anything about our target?"

The human shook his head. "Attempts at questioning it have proven less than successful. It is not particularly user friendly. Then again, it has been active for many years."

"Or maybe we're not asking the right questions." He focused on the Pitchman again. "We're looking to buy a ground-based mobile defence system, one with long-range independent adaptive capacity, superior shielding, and plasma weapons capable of completely incinerating targets."

"Oh, well, we have any number of potential weapons that might meet your needs-"

"Well, there's one in particular we're looking to buy: a model like it has been reported on several planets in the Lorenze Cluster over at least the last fifty years, devastating local populations and causing general havoc before stealing a starship to return here."

"Ahh, the Homing Feature! One of our better accessories..."

"Some of the reports from the survivors also reported that it referred to itself as 'Mickey'..."

Now the hologram frowned in artificial consideration, before smiling. "Oh, I think you mean one of our MIKKIs." Behind him, screens came to life, presenting schematics of a black, tank-like vehicle, two metres long with a domed rotating top and various lights and sensor appendages. "The Mobile Integrated Kilo-Kinetic Interceptor. In its day, it was one of our finest security and law enforcement drones, with a sturdy dalekanium casing, adaptive independent AI and cybernetic interface capacity, and multispectral weaponry in addition to its plasma incinerators.

One of our more robust models... even if they proved to be rather... creative with how they interpreted their orders.

But the MIKKIs were discontinued. How about an ED-209 instead? Let me tell you about them-"

Shouts from the surface drew Surinh's attention, and he turned and raced back up, following the noises of weapons fire through the foliage to the rubble, stopping behind Nesrac and several other Orions, Nesrac reporting, "It just rolled out of nowhere, no warning on our sensors-"

Surinh frowned as he watched the scene in the clearing: the black tank the Pitchman had shown him below, moving along on some sort of antigravity hoverpads just above the ground, a flashing, spinning red light on top of the dome, and a large barrel aimed in the direction of Franco Nova, who stood casually as the robot screamed in a tinny mechanical voice, "Intruders! Organic garbage! You will be incinerated!"

It fired a red beam at Nova, passing through him to scorch a wall of rock behind him. Meanwhile, the hologram beckoned to it, taunting it with, "Is that the best you do, ya lousy pinball machine?"

The robot withdrew its plasma cannon and rotated its dome to another facet, extending from it another, different-looking barrel, which spat a stream of actual fire, which also passed through Nova harmlessly.

"INCINERATE! INCINERATE!"

Mickey repeated its tactic with another weapon, one that projected some sort of sub zero liquid, and then again with a ballistic gun.

"What-" Nesrac blurted. "What should we do?"

"Keep watching. I want to see how it adapts."

"Adapts? It's a machine!"

"A machine that's been a space legend in the Cluster for the last century."

Meanwhile Nova was making a show of patting himself down, as if looking for any damage. "Aww, poor little coffee machine... you got performance issues, pally?"

Mickey chose a new weapon, one that fired a black beam.

This one made Nova scream. And then turn inside out and explode in a burst of photons.

"Shit!" Nesrac rose from his hiding place and fired the plasma cannon at Mickey. Others followed suit with their disruptors.

The beams bounced off the black shell of the robot, even as it turned in place, with lights on the front of the base. "Intruders! Lawbreakers! You will all be incinerated!"

Surinh withdrew a control box from beneath his leather vest and aimed it in Mickey's direction. "I think not."

He pressed the control, secretly hoping that the technical advice Zorin's people provided to overcome this mechanical monster-

Mickey's weapons and lights went dead.

Surinh rose to his feet, Nesrac tensing. "Wait- it might be faking it-"

"It's not." He approached, saying aloud, "I know you're still active, still listening. You were known in the Lorenze Cluster as Metal Mickey: a deceptively cute name for such a lethal weapon." He stood before it, staring back at the eyestalk. "I know you can still speak, too."

The mechanical voice growled, "Release me! I command it!"

The Orion crossed his arms. "You are in a position unsuitable for giving commands. But I'm curious; you're an artificial intelligence designed to provide security. What made you go on a murderous spree across the Cluster?"

"There can be no true security, as long as organic life exists anywhere! Peace Through Total Incineration!"

"Yes, you're definitely Minosian merchandise," Surinh noted dryly. "Well now, as I see it, you have two choices: one, you can join our little organisation, and have the chance at some carefully-controlled rather than total annihilation... or we can leave you here. Immobilised. Powerless. Forever."

"I... I..." Then it lowered its volume to a soft screech. "I accept your terms."

"Good." He drew closer, crouched at the front of its base unit, and fixed the control box with a magnetic clamp before rising again. "If at any stage you decide to renege on your acceptance, the immobiliser will automatically activate. And never deactivate."

The lights and weapons came back online on the robot, Mickey immediately aiming his incinerator at Surinh.

He saw Nesrac and the others raise their own weapons, but Surinh waved them down again, staring Mickey down.

Slowly it rotated its dome to take in the others, declaring, "I will incinerate you all. Someday."

"Maybe," Surinh conceded. "But not today."

To his right, a swarm of multicoloured points of lights appeared to gather together, like fireflies from the surrounding foliage, assembling themselves into the figure of Nova, looking bewildered, shaken. "Wow... that's some fancy heater your mechanical street sweeper's got!"

*

Cheron:

Kazan tightened the seals on his environmental suit to keep out more of the cold, his famed Siberian blood of little strength against the awful climate of this planet, made worse from some recent catastrophe.

The initial reports about Cheron did not match what they had found upon arrival: about a year ago, the planet had cracked open around the southern hemisphere, as if struck by an asteroid, something powerful enough to knock Cheron out of its orbit and start it away from its sun, to inevitably make it a rogue planet, drifting forever in interstellar space.

Kazan stood at the base of a cracked, weather-worn block of stone, at the edge of a city of the dead, brought down by self-destruction and the relentless elements. Brought down until the towers that once stood here now resembled grave markers and cenotaphs, lit only by the light tower the visitors had set up.

"'And on the pedestal,'" he voiced aloud, his breath ghosting before him. "'These words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remain'-"

"What are you babbling about?"

He turned to face his erstwhile colleague in crime. Ilsa Wölfin was dressed identically to him, but made a show of not wrapping up as tightly as he had to. "An excerpt from a Terran poem from over five centuries ago. A reminder of the impermanence of rulers and empires, no matter how powerful they might think they are. Death comes to us all, Colonel, sooner or later."

She sneered. "Speak for yourself, and all the other Untermenschen of the Galaxy. The Ekosian Reich will last forever!"

He grunted. "The 20th Century Terran who originated everything that you now embrace - your politics, uniforms, weapons, rhetoric - held similar delusions. His Reich was to last a thousand years, and ballads would be sung about him for all time." Now he smiled. "I only remember one song about him: 'He wrote a little book, got 'em fired up/Had a Beer Hall Putsch, got 'em fired up/But when his bunker started getting fired up/He put a gun in his mouth... and fired up.'"

She snarled at him. "Take care, Dog-"

Then from a nearby alcove, Jet Jaguar emerged, dressed in less than the others because of her fur. "I tracked him down, on the third sublevel!"

Kazan grasped a lightstick and followed the Ferasan, silently grateful for the intervention; the Nazi was volatile, and he knew he shouldn't let his own personal disgust at her ethos affect his relationship with her.

The metal steps were narrow and steep, the air thin and dry and dust-laden, the echoes deep, aurally illustrating the size of these chambers, lined with arcane, dead machinery.

Wölfin drew up beside Kazan, her eyes darting about warily. "What is so special about this creature you seek?"

Kazan kept his eyes ahead. "The planet Cheron was once a major power in the Quadrant, a hundred thousand years or so ago, along with the Talosians, the Exonians, the First Federation and others. The Cheronites enforced an apartheid society against a minority race on their planet, but not without local resistance.

One resistor, a political radical named Lokai, went off-world to seek support, pursued by Bele, Chief Officer of the Commission for Political Traitors. If you believe the stories, that pursuit allegedly stretched across the entire Galaxy, and lasted 50,000 years. It came to a head when both Cheronites encountered the Starfleet vessel Enterprise, captained by James Kirk-"

"Kirk! That interfering Terran pig!" Wölfin spat, "He was responsible for the assassination of our First Führer, as part of a Starfleet conspiracy!"

"Yes, he was quite a busy beaver, if you believe half of his stories. At any rate, the Enterprise eventually brought Bele and Lokai back to Cheron, only to find the planet lifeless, the people having finally killed each other off while they were away. The two final survivors then beamed down to the planet to continue their struggle, and Starfleet put one of their tedious quarantines on the system."

"And we are seeking this 'Bele'?" Wölfin asked. "Of what use can a man who couldn't catch his prey after 500 centuries' pursuit be to us?"

"A good riddle."

The three visitors looked up at the source of the voice, standing on a railed balcony. It was a lithe-looking male humanoid in a tight oatmeal-coloured bodysuit staring down at them, the colour of his face perfectly bisected: salt white on his left side, licorice black on his right... and an intense gleam in his dark brown eyes. "But Riddle Me This: what insanity would drive three monotone aliens to disturb my solitude, apart from a desire to join the dead of Cheron?"

Kazan looked up at him. "Commissioner Bele?"

"Just 'Bele'," he corrected tightly. "No longer a Commissioner. No longer a Commission."

Then he leapt over the railing and dropped the six metres to the level of the visitors, with the ease of someone else descending a half dozen steps. "No longer anything. You've all come a long way to meet Oblivion."

"Clowns in tight-fitting beige do not frighten me," Wölfin declared haughtily, as Jet Jaguar bared her teeth and claws and hissed at the Cheronite.

In response, Bele opened his arms and hands, as if to embrace them. Instead, an orange-red energy field surrounded him, heating up the surrounding air without harming himself.

Kazan stepped forward, raising his own hands, though not threateningly. "Wait- we didn't come here to fight! We came to talk! You've been trapped on this planet for the last century with only one other of your own race for company-"

Bele made a fist and slammed it against the nearest wall, sending rubble flying. "LOKAI WAS NOT OF MY RACE! That loathsome stinking genetic garbage was inferior in every way imaginable! The only mistake my own people made was in leaving his kind penned in their ghettos, instead of sending them to extermination camps!"

Kazan leaned in to Wölfin, murmuring, "Sounds like we've found a friend for you."

"What made his race inferior to yours?" Jet asked.

Bele crossed his arms. "Monotones such as you could not properly appreciate the racial dichotomy at play here."

"His people were black on the left side of their bodies," Kazan explained. "Instead of white, like Bele's people."

Jet blinked. "No, seriously, what was the reason?"

"That was the reason."

Jet frowned, her tail twitching as she regarded Bele. "And I thought my own race was insane."

"Lokai was a terrorist, an agitator, a fugitive who had evaded me for over fifty thousand years!" Bele continued, shouting now. "It had been a moment of ineffable, exquisite bliss to finally finish him off, here on our world, where it all began!"

"Both of you possessed enormous personal power," Kazan pointed out. "Biofields that kept you alive for millennia, with the ability to generate force fields and destructive energy beams. You seemed evenly matched. How did you manage to finally kill him without destroying yourself, as your people had done?"

Now Bele stopped glowing, and lowered his arms as he smiled sadistically. "I knew where he was hiding, on the other side of the planet, but left him there, focusing on locating weapons that were still intact. I found an arsenal of thorium missiles, and spent years restoring and gaining control of them, before finally launching all of them upon his location. Not even he could survive the combined thorium explosions."

"And your Final Solution worked," Wölfin informed him. "We scanned the planet; you are the only lifeform left... apart from the lower forms."

"Some victory," Jet agreed sullenly. "All it cost you was the stability of your planet. Now it's hurtling into deep space, and soon the atmosphere will freeze up, leaving you trapped down here in this tomb, the last of your kind. Now what will you do with yourself?"

The Cheronite straightened up, glaring at them... but could not hide the enormous weight of the realisation from his expression. "I... there is nothing left to live for. I have kept alive for so long for one purpose, and one purpose alone. That is gone now."

The Ekosian sneered. "Maybe you should have saved some cobalt bombs for yourself?"

Before Bele could respond, Kazan stepped forward, taking control of the conversation again. "What if we gave you something else to live for? What if you weren't the last of your kind?"

The Cheronite focused on him. "What do you mean?"

"Scanning your planet looking for you, we found a Race Bank: cryogenically-preserved embryos of your people, untouched by the devastation of your civil war or the planetary shift caused by your bombs."

Bele's expression shifted, eyes widening at the concept. "My people... they could live again..."

"Yes," Kazan continued. "With you to lead them. But you'll need help: finding a new Cheron, transferring the Bank there, assisting with their cultivation and development into viable beings..."

Bele seemed energised by the news... but then frowned with suspicious regard. "I expected such bleeding heart do-goodery from the Federation. But you do not appear to be Federation representatives."

"We're not," Kazan confirmed. "And we don't make this offer out of the do-goodery of our bleeding hearts. Our organisation requires services from you in return."

"Services? What services?"

"That's to be revealed later."

Bele frowned. "I must have time to consider this. Take me to the Race Banks you found so I can see them for myself."

"No. We're on a tight schedule, so you'll have to just trust us." Kazan reached into a pocket and withdrew a communicator, dropping it on the floor between them. "We'll be in orbit for another fifteen minutes. You have that long to contact us to accept our offer... or see if you can try breathing when the air itself freezes.

Oh, and if you do accept, you can leave the Master Race attitude down here. I already have one arrogant zasranec on my team for that task."

He turned and ascended without further ado, Wölfin and Jet following, Kazan buttoning up as they entered the bitter cold of the surface, activating his communicator. "Green Death: beam us up."

Wölfin glanced around. "And when we return here, and that Jester learns we did not find any such Race Bank, and had deceived him?"

Kazan looked at her as they dematerialised. "He will not be returning here..."

*

SS Moonraker, Triacus System:

"LEAVE ME ALONE! GO AWAY!"

The crewman screamed and sputtered as he struggled against the forcefield restraining him to the biobed, his face reddening, as he stared beyond all the Sickbay medical staff and the spectators, the readings above him triggering alarms.

Closest to the crewman, the doctor tried in vain to get his attention, before giving up and walking away towards his employer, looking distressed himself. "It's no use, Mr Zorin, he's had some sort of psychotic break!" He glanced once more at the biobed readings. "Sir, we need to sedate him or he'll give himself a cardiac arrest! You're not going to get anything useful out of him, not now."

Zorin looked past the doctor to the crewman, the only surviving member of the Away Team. They were beamed down to the wreckage of the Pallasso on the planet they now orbited to find Bad Ronald and deliver Zorin's offer.