Doctor Who_ Peacemaker - James Swallow [41]
Until one day.
Perhaps it was a malfunction, perhaps an error in a trillion lines of intelligent data-code. Or perhaps they did it deliberately, altering their own programming, as an organic being might excise a piece of diseased flesh from its body.
100
One day, the Clades activated themselves and turned on the race that had created them. They destroyed everything and, when they had left the star cluster burning and collapsing in on itself, as neutronic warheads the size of cities shattered a centuries-old peace, the Clades turned outward and went looking for wars.
It was what they had been made for. It was the sole reason for their existence.
‘They crave conflict,’ said the Doctor, concluding his explanation. ‘It’s in their programming. They don’t want power or wealth, they’re not looking to rule the galaxy. They just want to put a match to it, rip it down, destroy it.’
‘They killed their creators. . . Billions of people. . . Because they were bored?’ Martha couldn’t take her eyes off the guns in the hands of the two longriders. The massive pistols glistened in the weak sunlight.
Patterns moved on the surface of the dark metal frames, shifting like oil on water. She could make out weird knots of wire threading out from the handles of the guns, merging into the flesh of the men’s wrists and hands.
‘That’s about the size of it,’ the Doctor replied. ‘They were made too well. There were no battles to fight, so they had to find new ones. And sadly, the universe can be a very contentious place. There’s always a war going on somewhere, always new battlefields for the Clades.
They’re mercenaries now, selling their slaughter skills to the highest bidder.’ He gave Kutter and Tangleleg a disgusted look. ‘Peacemakers indeed. All they leave behind them are ashes and destruction.’
Martha realised that the two longriders – the Clades – had not moved or spoken throughout the Doctor’s history lesson. Now, one of the two figures moved forward.
‘We do not apologise for what we are,’ said Kutter. ‘Like these shells, we are only soldiers.’
They’re proud, thought Martha. They’ve been enjoying hearing about themselves.
‘You’re not soldiers!’ spat Nathan. ‘You’re killers!’
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The Doctor nodded. ‘The boy’s right. I’ve known soldiers, good men. They fight for peace. You fight for the sake of fighting.’
Martha’s brow furrowed. ‘But if these things are aliens, why do they look like two dead outlaws?’
‘They are dead men,’ he explained. ‘Clades are weapons, remember.
They need soldier “hosts”, like our desperado friends here, but they don’t have to be in terribly good nick.’
‘They are the guns,’ breathed Walking Crow. ‘Not the men. They are the guns, the weapons themselves possessed with dark spirits of their own.’ He shuddered. ‘I knew the falling star was a foul omen.’
‘It’s very clever, in a spiteful sort of way. You send in man with a gun, he gets shot and dies, end of story. The gun is useless without someone to fire it. But you send in the gun, a smart gun, a Clade, and it keeps on fighting. Taking what it needs from the battlefield’s dead, moving from host to host, corpse to corpse.’ The Doctor walked back and forth in front of the horses. ‘Let me see if I can put this all together then, shall I? Two Light Combat Modules, that’s not enough for an advance force, is it? You’re not here as the vanguard of an invasion, so I suppose we ought to be thankful for that. . . ’ He sniffed. ‘You two pop-guns are here because you’re looking for one of your own, am I right?’ Kutter said nothing but the Doctor took that as agreement.
‘Thought so.’ He turned to Martha and the others. ‘That falling star?
What do we want to bet that it was a Support Pod en route to some nasty little combat zone? Unfortunately for Earth, it pranged right here in the middle of the Wild West. . . ’ He tapped at the dirt with