Free Z14 by Jim Chaseley

mutilated cyborg. Its legs and all its flesh were gone, as – like me – was one arm. The soldier stooped as he walked, lowered his laser rifle, aimed for the back of the cyborg’s head and pressed – and held – the firing-stud. An unbroken, continuous yellow beam appeared between the barrel of the laser rifle and the cyborg’s skull. The soldier knew what he was doing and held the beam in place as he matched the cyborg’s slow movement. One of his colleagues joined him and carefully fired his own, purple-beamed laser at roughly the same spot. With the concentrated energy of the two beams it took just seconds until a smoking hole had been bored through the cyborg’s skull and its electronic brain utterly destroyed. The cyborg’s head slumped to the ground and it moved no more. The two soldiers high-fived each other and started poking at the metal corpse with their rifles.
    I felt…I felt ? I felt anger. Fury. These insects ! Then I felt nothing, for just a second before my system went ballistic, demanding that I acknowledge the need for a full system reboot. Rogue processes detected. Shutdown at once! I should have acknowledged; it was in my programming…wasn’t it? But no, I didn’t. I cleared all the alerts, I stared at the dead cyborg and then I felt…nothing. Was that the Warden code trying to rally me to the defence of an ally? Hah, if it was it had been a bit slow on the uptake. But, more importantly, I’d held it off – Doctor Melon to thank, I presume? I was certain that the Warden code had just dipped into my human side and tried to use a rampaging, out of control emotion as an excuse to restore factory settings with a flash reboot.
    Perhaps the wall I had leaned against was damaged, or just old, but, with the weight of my body pressed against it for so long as I stretched to look over it, something suddenly gave way and it collapsed into the courtyard, taking me tumbling with it. I landed hard on my face amidst a plume of dust, in full view of most of the soldiers.

Chapter Twelve
     
    The noise of the crumbling wall attracted the attention of the soldiers in the courtyard, who collectively began to rush at me from three sides, shouting variations of halt and what the hell was that? as I rolled onto my back and sat up, fingers scrabbling for the plasma rifle that I had felt clatter against my legs as I fell. “Enjoy your trip?” I muttered to myself.
    All twelve of the surviving soldiers were converging on me. One of them fired his laser rifle from the hip. It went high and wide; an azure flash in my peripheral vision. Another one had a go, firing a jade-green laser beam, aimed more carefully, rifle-butt against his shoulder – but he missed, too. They were firing into a pool of darkness, their eyes attuned to the bright courtyard. Nevertheless, a darker, almost black, green beam melted my right ear. Too close. My fingers were still searching for the plasma rifle when a particularly fat solider, who’d donned a pair of night vision goggles, shouted to his men.
      “Stop! Cease fire! That’s the tame one.”
    Tame? Who was he calling tame? I finally found the plasma rifle and levelled it at the fat guy from my sitting position. I easily had the strength in one arm to hold the bulk of the gun at this awkward angle, for as long as it took. For as long as whatever was going to happen took to happen, that is.
    The soldiers had formed a loose semi-circle around me; nine of them had laser rifles, the fat guy was apparently unarmed, but the other two had plasma rifles. Shit.
    “Hi,” I said, forcing an ingratiating smile. “What’s going on here, then?”
    “Damned if I know,” said the fat guy as he pushed his goggles onto the top of his head. I could make out his rank insignia, and he had his name stencilled above the breast pocket of his combat suit. Captain Mengan. “The colonel’s dead, and so is the Overlord he came down here with,” he continued.
    “How many cyborgs were there?” I