Red Claw

by Philip Palmer

But orders were orders. She jogged to the nearest evacuation chute and plunged inside.

  After the emergency alarm had proved to be a malfunction, Private Tonii Newton had returned to the hot tub in the spa. He basked in the hot waters, allowed jets of steam to relax his muscles, and savoured being in his own body.

  Moments later, he got Sorcha’s strange order to get battle-ready, so with a curse he left the spa waters and put on his battle armour. Then he sat by the pool, body-armoured up, and waited for further instructions. This, he reflected, was going to be one of those days.

  Then the explosion hit.

  Torrents of water went hurling upwards and descended in a wet blow. He was swept off his feet, but got up again in moments.

  “Private N 47 reporting, sitrep please, Control.”

  There was no response from Juno Control. Then Tonii heard Helms’s voice over his MI:

  “We’re being attacked by Juno. Repeat, Juno has gone rogue. Evacuate. Treat all Doppelgangers as potential enemy targets. Get your armour on, seize your weapon, head for the AmRover bay. And do it now. Run!”

  Tonii heard the faintest of noises and threw a flash grenade long and high and it hit the Humanoid DR that was entering the spa. The explosion blew the creature backwards and Tonii was running. He reached the corridors and saw two unarmoured Soldiers in a firefight with a Humanoid DR and two DRscalpels. Suddenly they started screaming and their bodies opened up like fruit being peeled from the inside. Tonii sprayed the DR with plasma fire, then switched to a hail of smart bullets, which burrowed into then exploded inside the mid-air DRscalpels.

  Then Tonii ran down the corridor. He saw two Scientists, in their blue body armour, emerge from a lab, clutching plasma rifles to their bodies as if they were Christmas presents. To his surprise they were chatting to each other cheerfully, showing no hint of anxiety.

  “We should, I suspect, be swift,” the male Scientist, who Tonii recognised as William Beebe, unhurriedly suggested.

  “I don’t consider I was dawdling!” his wife — Mary? — rebuked him.

  Tonii beckoned impatiently and William and Mary Beebe followed him.

  He walked fast, eyes and ears attuned, firing bursts of plasma into the ceiling whenever he heard the distant vibration of a DR on the floors above. They reached the evacuation chute, and William clambered in and vanished from sight. A few moments later Mary followed and tumbled downwards. Tonii glanced around. Two red-and-black-armoured Soldiers appeared round the corner of the corridor, one with an arm missing. Tonii beckoned them to join him, but the Soldiers vanished in a mist of blood as a DR plasma blast incinerated them. Tonii hurled himself into the evacuation chute.

  He fell face downward, down the narrow pipe, his rifle screeching against the tough metal. Then he landed with a thump in the AmRover bay to be confronted by the barrels of a dozen rifles.

  “Private N 47, password Andromeda,” he shouted via his helmet mike and was hustled away from the chute by Soldiers.

  The AmRover bay was crowded and bloodied. The gates were open and a packed AmRover was driving out.

  “The DRs have the second and third floors,” said a Soldier, and then a flock of DRscalpels flew out of the chute and the bay was lit with the flares of controlled plasma energy that ate the metal monsters with heat beyond heat.

  “Anyone know what’s going on?” said Tonii.

  “Juno’s gone rogue.”

  “Not possible.” But of course it was possible.

  Tonii thought about all the likely explanations for Juno going rogue. It couldn’t be rebels, he decided — no mere rebel could subvert the Earth Computer, or sabotage Juno. So that meant it had to be Earth humans playing games, again. Murdering and pillaging, as they had done so many times before. Massacring an entire community of people, just for the hell of it.

  Once again.

  Tonii waited, in line, as the AmRovers were loaded up. He thought about a galactic civilisation where murder was considered to be a sport, and his soul was rent with pain.

  Professor Helms ran fast and clumsily down the corridor in his blue body armour, escorted by three Soldiers running at full tilt.

  He was astonished at the horrors all around him. The DRs had run amok. There were bodies everywhere. He hadn’t expected this.

  “Professor, we need you out of there now,” said a voice in his head. It was Commander Martin, over the MI-radio link.

  “This is madness,” Helms told him, desperately. “I can’t believe what’s happening . . . this should be . . .”

  “Get him out of there please,” said the Commander’s voice, and the Soldiers picked Helms up and threw him down a chute.

  When he landed, strong hands grabbed him and picked him up.

  “Are you wounded?” said a familiar voice. He looked up, and saw it was Sorcha.

  Helms felt a sudden, unexpected lurch of delight at seeing her alive.

  The first ten minutes of the attack were carnage, in which the DRs killed and maimed with callous efficiency.

  The eleventh minute was when the Soldiers fought back.

  Commander Martin was in his office, surrounded by virtual screens, which gave him a second-by-second visual account of the fighting. His door was bomb-proof, the computer program he was running superseded the Juno programs, and he was in full body armour.

  He saw twelve Soldiers engaged in a bitter hand-to-hand fight with the main body of the Humanoid DR forces, in the corridor that led to the Green Area evacuation chutes. He issued a silent prayer, and blew up the corridor. Twenty DRs were incinerated, plus twelve of his own people. He breathed a swift subvocal prayer: They gave their lives, in Glory. Then he carried on the fight.

  Cameras buried in the walls and ceilings gave him a total sweep of every part of Xabar. He saw a flock of DRscalpels heading down a corridor, and fired the laser beams hidden in the cameras and twenty or more were blown out of the air.

  He could see DRtanks and Humanoids lying in wait outside the AmRover Bays. He marked the area on the screen with a red circle, and pulled down a missile strike. Concealed missile silos hurled nil-brain rockets — not connected to the Juno mainframe — as deadly rain upon the would-be ambushers.

  And he still had a hundred and fifty or so Soldiers inside Xabar, fighting with all their skill and courage.

  Commander Martin was a new breed of Soldier — an academic and a thinker. But he was also a veteran of a dozen xeno-wars. He had fought silicon aliens and spacefaring aliens and Van Neumann machines built by aliens rendered extinct a billion years or more ago. And he’d spent years war-gaming a scenario in which the CSO used the Doppelganger Robots to kill his own people. It was, after all, given that merciless bureaucrat’s track record, a pretty likely scenario.

  So Commander Martin felt more than ready for this conflict. The Doppelganger Robots were tough, powerful, heavily armed and fast — since they were being controlled by the super-swift computer mind of Juno. But Martin’s Soldiers were men, and they were women (and indeed, two of them were both), and war was in their blood.

  Martin’s hands moved swiftly on the virtual joysticks, he clicked bombs to explode, he barked instructions and sitreps to his troops via their secure short-range radio link, and he killed robot fucker after robot fucker after robot fucker, with glee.

  The Soldiers split up according to pre-ordained and memorised orders into two packs, the Bodyguards and the Kill the Bastards. The Bodyguards swept through all the labs, scooping up Scientists and guarding them and hurling them down evacuation chutes into the AmRover Bays where other Bodyguards were waiting to protect them and get them out of Xabar.

  The Kill the Bastards had the best job; they got to fight. They fought in Fives, tightly knit units who trained together and whose reflexes had merged so that they functioned almost as a single entity.

  Two Soldiers in each Five were Berserkers. Their job was to keep up a continual hail of covering fire against whatever enemy they faced. They wore heavy body armour with no force field, their a
rms were adapted to serve as plasma guns, they could also fire grenades or mortars, they could even fire explosive shells from their breastplates.

  A third Soldier acted as the Sniper, and this was their ace in the hole. Snipers wore a lightly armoured reflective suit that made him or her close to invisible. They carried a laser pistol in one hand and a smart rifle firing three-inch nuclear bombs in the other. When the Berserkers launched their frenzied attacks on an enemy, the Sniper slipped along with them, impossible to see, rolling and ducking and diving, firing precision shots at the enemy’s vulnerable points.

  The DRs, however, had no vulnerable points. Their armour was impervious to an ordinary plasma blast. Bullets bounced off them. And they were fast, fast enough to dodge a missile fired at point-blank range.

  But they lacked intelligence. The DR robot brain was a sad and simple thing, able to initiate only the very simplest of actions, but for most of the time the DRs were controlled remotely by humans, or, as now, by Juno, a quantum-computing AI of near-infinite capability.

  So in this particular war the Sniper’s role was to break the Juno connection, with carefully judged electromagnetic pulses that, for four or five seconds, broke the beaconband link to the Mother Ship.

  The battle raged. For ten minutes, the Humanoid DRs swaggered swiftly from room to room, incinerating all within with their plasma guns and energy balls. But then, in the eleventh minute, the Fives struck back. Berserkers fired vast sheets of energy while emitting ultrasonic and subsonic and sonic blasts to disorientate, while the Snipers rolled and weaved and ducked amongst them, firing electromagnetic pulses at the head of the DRs.

  Every successful headshot stopped the DR in its tracks, just for a few moments. And in that brief window of time the fourth member of the Five stepped forward — the One Sun. The One Sun was a Soldier wearing a body armour that was built around a gun, a portable energy cannon of exceptional power, based around a cold-fusion generator that in a single focused beam could in a few seconds emit a huge blast of energy — allegedly, as much power as the Earth Sun generates in a single hour.

  And that, the super-gun, that was the One Sun.

  Energy, screaming, balls and trails of fire, rolling bodies, ceilings crashing in, silvery monsters flitting like deadly moonbeams out of the way of explosive shells, and suddenly the pause, the one still beat, as the Doppelganger Robot stood stunned and the One Sun fired the plasma cannon. Whoosh.

  The flare of the One Sun was intense, and focused. The Doppelganger Robot burned with an awesome heat and was gone. And then the air itself turned white as a pillar of raw energy soared upwards, upwards, searing the air in an energy-tornado that cut effortlessly through the Canopy and rocked and billowed the clouds and carried on upwards until it seemed to be be seeking to touch the sun, until finally the energy liberated by the One Sun began to slowly dissipate in space.

  Then, back on the ground, the One Sun was reloaded by the fifth member of the team, the Bat Carrier, who carried the team force field, and the replacement BBs. One 20 cm x 10 cm-sized Bostock battery contained enough energy to fire a single round from the One Sun. The Bat Man carried fifty of them, clad in body armour like an armadillo.

  Energy, screaming, balls and trails of fire, rolling bodies, ceilings crashing in, silvery monsters flitting like deadly moonbeams out of the way of explosive shells, One Sun. Whoosh.

  Then the Bat Man helped the One Sun reload, and it all began again.

  Professor Helms sat in the AmRover, longing to escape. He was pale and shivering, and disorientated. Sorcha sat opposite him, listening intently to her MI, watching the scene outside on the screens. He tried to speak to Sorcha. “We should —” he began, but he lost his train of thought.

  “Don’t be such a fucking coward, man,” Sorcha snarled at him, and Helms registered how unfair she was being. He was cold, and he was also hot, and he was confused. It occurred to him he was in shock.

  “We should — go,” he eventually managed to say.

  “When I say so! Survivors. We’ll wait.” Sorcha’s brusque words shook Helms. He felt that he wanted to weep.

  “Let’s go now,” screamed another of the survivors.

  “When I say so. We wait till then,” Sorcha told her, and her subtext of “Heed my words or you will die, fucker” shone through.

  The doors of the AmRover opened, and two more Scientists were hurled in by Soldiers. “Five more minutes, no more!” Sorcha snapped to the helmeted-up Soldier who was escorting them.

  “Some DRs came down the evacuation chute, sir.”

  “Did you destroy them?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Five minutes, no more.”

  “Four minutes, forty-five seconds now, sir.”

  The sounds of grenades exploding in the hangar outside them echoed around the AmRover cockpit. The Soldier returned to the fray.

  “You were right,” Sorcha told Helms. “Juno has gone rogue. The DRs are . . . What is happening, Richard?”

  “How should I know?” Helms muttered feebly. Then: “Gamers?” he hazarded.

  “Could be,” she conceded, and a spasm of rage convulsed her. “The bastards!” she muttered.

  Helms tried to speak, to agree with her, but he couldn’t.

  “Who the fuck do they think they —”

  “Yes! Who the fuck! Damn it all!” Helms’s eyes glittered with rage.

  Sorcha locked stares with him.

  For a moment the two of them were bonded, united in adversity.

  The moment popped. “We need to go,” he told her. “I can’t — we can’t risk staying any longer.”

  Then a burly soldier — Sergeant Anderson — clambered into the AmRover. His body armour was pockmarked with plasma blasts and was literally steaming.

  “Are we done?” Sorcha asked, over the MI radio.

  “We’re done,” Sergeant Anderson replied.

  “Sergeant,” Helms acknowledged.

  “Professor,” Anderson said curtly. He was a big, scowly, curt man; Helms didn’t like him much. “Those fucking bastards!” Anderson roared.

  Helms nodded, numbly; indeed, fucking bastards they were.

  “How could those mfs do a thing like this?” Anderson raged.

  “I don’t — know,” said Helms. “I can’t believe — so many — so much . . .” His words trailed off.

  Anderson curled a lip. “It’s a Glorious battle,” he conceded.

  “Please, let’s go,” wept a female Scientist in the cockpit.

  “Yes,” said Helms. “We should go.”

  “Let me just . . .” Anderson carried on mid-air typing. Sorcha saw a flashing red symbol that showed the booby bombs were primed.

  “There are still people coming down the chutes!” she protested.

  “You think so?” said Anderson, and Sorcha turned and looked.

  A Humanoid DR emerged head-first from the evacuation chute and began firing. Anderson revved the AmRover and drove out fast, into the New Amazonian jungle.

  One two three four five six seven eight BOOM.

  The boobytrap bombs they’d left behind exploded, destroying a half dozen or more Humanoid DRs. The AmRover almost overbalanced but Sergeant Anderson kept control.

  “Good call,” Helms conceded, as Sorcha started up the AmRover. Anderson retracted his helmet.

  “So can someone explain what the fuck is going on!” screamed Anderson.

  “We think, maybe Gamers,” said Sorcha.

  “Or the CSO has gone mad,” Helms offered.

  “That bastard already is mad,” said Anderson, heretically, and grinned.

  As they drove off, Helms could see the dome of Xabar had shattered utterly, scattering shards of hardglass far into the jungle. He could see the debris of exploded AmRovers, he could see limbs and heads scattered on the road in front of him. And he tried to ignore it all, the signs of carnage all around.

  He forced himself to gather his thoughts, to remember his strategy.

  He willed hims
elf to once again be in control of his emotions, and to keep the terror out of his voice.

  And eventually, he succeeded.

  “Rendezvous all survivors Map Reference D 43,” Helms said calmly into his helmet mike, “please.”

  Django was astonished at the havoc around them. Missiles were raining down, the DRs were running amok, randomly shooting at the labs and at each other. There were dead bodies everywhere, and the walls of the corridors were stained with blood and entrails.

  But Django wasn’t afraid. He revelled in danger. This was what he was born for — to be a warrior in battle, not a desk jockey or a lab Scientist!

  As a child, Django had nursed a powerful secret: the certain knowledge that he was better than other people. Not smarter, though he was pretty bright. Not more beautiful, though he did have moderately smouldering Latin good looks. Not braver, or more resourceful, or more imaginative.

  Just better.

  His father had been and still was a civil servant on Kornbluth. His mother had died in childbirth, or so Django had been told.

  But he’d always disbelieved that story. Wasn’t it far more credible that she’d been a freedom fighter murdered by the Galactic Corporation’s secret police? Or that she’d been an astronaut, sent on a perilous mission in the certain knowledge that even if she wasn’t killed, she’d never see her husband and kids again?

  Django never told anyone his secret — the truth about his “better-than-others-ness”. But it had sustained him through his difficult early years as a bullied child. His contemporaries at school had always picked on Django. But it was not because he was vulnerable, or disadvantaged; it was because he was rude to them, because he mocked and taunted them.

  The teachers at Django’s school constantly berated the rest of the class for the awful way they treated Django. And Django had just sat and smiled, because he knew that being the most bullied child in school made him special, and, well, better than those doing the bullying.

  One day, he had resolved, with unquenchable confidence, he would show them all. They would all regret having bullied Django; they would concede their own lesser status!