Red Claw

by Philip Palmer

  And, perhaps, Django mused, this was his moment. Perhaps this was when he would become the hero of the hour, and go down in history?

  Django hurried towards the evacuation chute and was two yards away when a DRscalpel crashed through his helmet and ate his face.

  Django’s screams were stifled when his tongue was consumed, and he died in agony, mute, of his injuries.

  Mia dived into the chute and found herself in Number 3 AmRover Bay. Two DRs were shooting at each other, and the plasma sheen on the walls of the hangar gave it an orange glow.

  Mia aimed her laser snipe and picked off the DRs one by one, with a single focused beam each through the two robot brains. She hated plasma guns, they were just raw brute energy. But though she was a civilian, she had a skill-chip that made her a championship-level markswoman with a laser pistol and she relished a chance to use her skills.

  But why, she wondered, anxiously, has the world suddenly gone completely mad?

  Hugo Baal was still in the lab when Private Clementine McCoy rushed in and grabbed him. She saw with dismay he didn’t have his armour on. “Evacuate,” she screamed, “means get the fuck out of here, now!”

  Hugo blinked and realised he was in the midst of a crisis. “You came to save me?” he marvelled.

  “You big dolt,” Clementine told him, and tugged him away.

  A Humanoid DR appeared at the doorway and Clementine fired a plasma blast. The DR sustained a head injury but carried on moving.

  “Instructions, please,” the DR said calmly, back in robot-mode, walking around in stupid circles, and Clementine and Hugo ran past it to the evacuation chute. Clementine dived. Hugo hesitated. Then he saw DRs in the corridor. He eased his fat frame into the chute.

  And found himself tumbling down, as if on a fairground ride, and ended up in the AmRover Bay. It was a scene of bloody horror and destruction. A shattered DR body lay on the floor. The limbs and blood of its victims formed a carpet between them and the one surviving AmRover.

  “Move!” screamed Clementine, and Hugo picked his way across the dead and dying bodies, ignoring groans and whimpers, until he reached the AmRover. They clambered in. Clementine started up the AmRover.

  “Quite the resourceful one, aren’t you?” he murmured.

  Ben Kirkham was trying to work out where the missiles had come from. If Juno had fired them, why hadn’t he seen a radar trace from space five or ten minutes before impact? But if Juno didn’t fire them, then . . .

  On his virtual screen, Ben could see a Replay image of Xabar’s dome shattering into pieces. “So much for unbreakable,” he muttered. He hated having no MI link to Juno, and found that talking to himself was a comforting alternative.

  “Ben, this is Helms, I’m outside Xabar with a small group of survivors, where are you?”

  “I’m still inside. How come you can talk to me, the MI link is down.”

  “I, ah, installed a radio network that will connect up the MI transmitters within a range of half a mile. Just a precautionary measure, you know. Ben, please, I implore you, get out of there now, we need you! AmRover Bay 1 is blown, head for 3 or 2.”

  “On my way,” said Ben, exultantly. He fumbled in the cabinet for his boxes of pills — his mood-stabilisers, concentration-boosters, anti-depressants, and of course his anti-psychotics — and realised he was wasting time so he ran out empty-handed to the evacuation chute. He took a deep breath and dived into it.

  Sheena had led twelve Noirs out of the base via the back doors and towards the Shuttle Bay. And there they found themselves subject to withering attack from the DR sentries whose job it was to guard the Shuttle from would-be hijackers.

  Santana and two others were killed in the first wave of the attack. Sheena and the rest took cover behind the vast bombproof storage sheds. The DRs began firing mortars that blasted pockmarks in the toughmetal walls of the sheds, but as the bombs flew and landed and exploded, Sheena used her secret command codes to summon a fleet of dumb missiles which flew out of the storage shed. The missiles circled; then Sheena launched them in a full-frontal attack on the the DR position.

  She then used a virtual display to guide their trajectory, controlling thirty missiles simultaneously. The “dumb” missiles kinked and danced in the air, dodging the mortar bombs, hurling out chaff, and astonishingly avoiding the continuous waves of plasma fire that the DRs were hurling at them.

  Then the missiles landed, one at a time, each one scoring a direct hit on an outwitted Doppelanger sentry, pulverising each of them instantly.

  The nine survivors, including Jim Aura, then formed a defensive formation around Sheena, and ran towards the doors of the Shuttle Bay.

  Concealed Sniper Guns killed three of them en route. But six survived and managed to climb on board the Shuttle.

  “We’ll go into space,” said Sheena, “and from there we’ll —”

  The Shuttle exploded. The six Noirs fell out of the ship through the emergency hatch, pursued by shafts of shattered toughmetal. They were being attacked by three Humanoid DRs.

  “Back inside,” said Sheena, but a laser beam locked on to her helmet. She rolled over and tried to block the beam. Her helmet shattered but Jim Aura picked her up in his arms and ran with her.

  The Sniper Guns opened fire again; five more Noirs died. But Jim ran fast, and evasively, still with Sheena in his arms, and hurled himself through the back doors and into the base. He found himself surrounded by death and screams, and a whimpering young woman with a gut wound begged him to help her. But he ignored it all and ran towards the evacuation chute, and leapt backwards into it, dragging the two of them down it in a tight embrace.

  At the bottom of the chute he was helped to his feet by Sheena. Her eyes were burned out by the laser blasts, leaving empty sockets, but she lifted him easily up off the ground.

  “Which way?” she said calmly.

  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.

  Once more a robot butcher dies, in a blinding flare of plasma energy. The Five pause. The Batman reloads another battery into the One Sun plasma cannon.

  A deadly moonbeam pauses, then flits again. It is a Humanoid DR moving fast, impossibly fast, dodging shells. Plasma blasts hit it but are absorbed by its armour. Then it stands still to aim its gun and plasma fire is fiercely focused on it as One Sun reloads.

  But the Humanoid DR has a One Sun of his own. It fires once, at the Bat Man.

  A flare of light extinguishes the man, the armour, the casings of the Bostock batteries.

  And all the energy contained in all the guns and the batteries erupts in a single and utterly devastating moment.

  “Glory!” scream the Berserkers but their cries are lost.

  “Stop. Look back,” Sorcha said.

  The AmRover stopped. They could see the fire on the screens but they moved as one to the Observation Bubble to see with their own eyes. Helms stared with horror at the sight.

  A pillar of fire burned on the site where once Xabar stood. Above, the green Canopy vanished in palls of smoke.

  “What the hell . . . ?” he murmured.

  “The Bostock batteries blew,” Sorcha explained. “No one is left, nothing is left.”

  “Are we safe?” asked Helms. He feared a conflagration that would consume the entire planet.

  “We’re more than twenty kilometres —” Sorcha began.

  “That much heat!” insisted Helms. “If it spreads towards us —”

  “Fuck,” said Sergeant Anderson, realising the implications.

  “The city force fields are still in place,” Sorcha said. “Even though the dome is down. That will contain the energy. It’ll be focused upwards. Like a torch beam.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “It’s happened before,” Sorcha said casually. “Twice that I know of. It’s a pretty effective weapon of war in fact; the strategy is, we blow the B
Bs inside a force-fielded city, and destroy all enemy forces contained within.”

  Helms was shocked at her callous tone.

  “That’s what you call a weapon?” he said savagely. “Everyone in that city is dead because —”

  “They’re dead because they chose to give their lives for us,” Sorcha told him bluntly, and Helms felt ashamed.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “They were brave Soldiers.”

  “I said, I’m sorry,” said Helms, at a loss.

  Sorcha shrugged, accepting his apology.

  “They gave their lives,” Anderson intoned, into his MI-radio, to reach out to the survivors in the other AmRovers.

  “They gave their lives,” Sorcha echoed.

  “So are we safe?” asked Hugo Baal, who was now in AmRover 5.

  “Fuck no,” said Sorcha.

  “Nothing could survive an explosion like that,” protested Sergeant Anderson. “Those fucking robots must all be —”

  “There are at least a dozen DRs patrolling outside the boundaries of Xabar,” Sorcha explained. “And more robot bodies in the basement bunkers, five miles outside the city walls. Plus an entire battalion guarding the Space Elevator. Plus, Juno has antimatter bombs, fusion bombs, and more DRs in storage. We don’t stand a chance,” she concluded.

  Helms retracted his helmet, and gestured at Sorcha to do the same. Anderson, too, retracted his helmet, so he could hear Helms speak.

  “I believe,” said Helms, carefully and confidentially, “that there’s a chance, if luck is on our side, that we may in fact prevail.”

  Sorcha shot him a baffled look. Anderson scowled, sceptically.

  “I’ll explain,” said Helms, softly, “later.”

  Xabar burned. Huge columns of smoke rose into the sky, and high in the tree canopies, arboreals and insects and birds in their nests coughed and spluttered as the black smoke possessed their habitat.

  And as the fire peaked and peaked, the pillar of fire stood higher and higher upon the ashes of the city as the heat of the exploded Bostock batteries coalesced into a tube of burning plasma that ripped a hole in the air and evaporated clouds and scorched a path through the stratosphere until it collided with the empty blackness of space itself.

  The huge yellow star at the heart of the New Amazon system peered down at the planet that circled it, and that spat energy at it, as for a few astonishing hours the planet itself hurled a bitter sunbeam towards its own sun.

  But soon, the fire would burn out. No trace of the domed city would remain, no trace of soil or earth, and only the bare exposed mantle of the planetary crust would give testament to the vast explosion that caused the Burning of Xabar.

  There had been nearly four hundred people living in Xabar. Fifty-two of them gathered at the jungle rendezvous point. The others were lost elsewhere in the rainforest, if they had managed to escape from the city in time. And if they didn’t escape, they were dead, and not just dead; obliterated, their every last molecule seared and shattered by the heat.

  “Django?”

  “Dead.”

  “Major Johnson?”

  “Dead.”

  “Alan Carr?”

  “Dead.”

  Helms surveyed his meagre army, and felt despair at how many had been lost.

  But at least William and Mary Beebe were here. And so was Ben Kirkham. And old Hugo Baal. And the Noir, Sheena, he’d always admired her. She wore a black band around her eyes, but her expression was intent, and curious.

  But his deputy, Professor Craddock, was dead. Commander Martin was also missing presumed dead. And so were most of the Techies, the Technician corps who had kept the dome running efficiently all this time.

  Helms stood up, and beckoned the survivors to heed his words. He had recovered his composure by now, and he worked hard to keep his tone light, yet sombre and professorial.

  “This has been,” he said, “a truly terrible day.”

  Haunted eyes stared at him. Helms was no orator, but he knew the power of silence. He stood, and was silent, and let his regret seep out of him.

  “We have,” he explained, “survived an attempt to destroy us and our mission. We don’t know the reasons behind it, we only know that the Juno computer answers to the CSO and the other members of the Galactic Corporation Board. And for whatever reason, they have decided we should die.”

  “You can’t know that,” Sorcha argued.

  “Of course I know it,” Helms snapped. “What other explanation could there be?”

  “Earth rebels,” said Sorcha, confidently.

  “If they were rebels,” Helms said gently, “they would have killed the Soldiers. They wouldn’t have killed us.”

  “You don’t know that,” said Sorcha, but there was doubt in her voice.

  “What happened to the dome?” said Ben Kirkham. “Why did they blow up the dome? How did —”

  “That was Juno,” said Helms. “It fired its ship’s stealth torpedoes at us. That’s why we had no warning of it. And then the DRs were ordered to kill on sight everyone they saw. But fortunately,” he added, “our security measures evacuation procedures were of course fully implemented. And, crucially, I authorised a retaliatory strike.”

  There was a satisfyingly stunned pause at this last comment.

  “Professor?” said Sorcha, baffled.

  “What the hell are you on about?” marvelled Ben.

  “Let me show you,” said Helms. “Look up at the sky.”

  They looked up, through the gap in the canopy. It was daytime, but a single star shone bright. Juno, in close orbit around the planet.

  “Now lower your helmets,” he told them, and they did so.

  “Increase your anti-glare to maximum,” he advised them, over the MI-radio link.

  They did so.

  “Now watch.”

  For a long long time, almost twenty minutes, nothing happened. But no one stopped staring, not even the Soldiers; there they all stood, en masse, looking up at the sky, seduced by Helms’s utter self-confidence. They waited and waited, for they knew not what: a symbol, a sign, a rescue mission?

  And finally, they saw it; the bright star of Juno was joined by a host of other stars. Flashing lights were flickering all around it, and they all recognised it as the distant token of a vast space battle.

  Juno was being attacked!

  “We have twelve interplanetary missiles as part of our armoury on New Amazon,” said Helms. “All twelve were fired at Juno.”

  Sorcha was visibly shocked at this; so was Hugo. Sergeant Anderson grinned. Respect!

  But then a cackling laugh assailed their ears over the MI-radio link, and all turned to see Dr Ben Kirkham, in paroxysms of mirth.

  “You idiot,” chortled Ben.

  “It’s our only hope of survival,” Helms explained. “While Juno is still up there, we can’t —”

  “It’s Juno. Juno!” said Ben, in his most cutting, patronising, talking-to-an-imbecile tones. “Professor, with respect — WANKER! WANKER! Those missiles don’t stand a chance!”

  “I’m aware that Juno is —”

  “You’ve signed our death warrant. The battle was over. But now, once Juno has blown those missiles out of the sky, she’ll be good and angry. And she’ll —”

  “She won’t —”

  “Of course she will, you abject fool! Juno sits inside a Corporation battleship! She has state-of-the-art defensive —”

  The sky lit up as a huge fireball ignited. It was like a sun going nova. Without the anti-glare shields, all watching would have been blinded.

  Then the glare ebbed, and the sky was empty. Juno was gone.

  One by one, they all shucked their helmets back.

  “OK, you win,” said Ben, grudgingly, and Helms fixed him with a triumphant stare.

  “Antimatter bomb?” guessed Hugo.

  “Indeed, so,” said Helms triumphantly. “And now Juno is gone. The Quantum Beacon is gone. The remaining DRs still have their robot brains, but t
hey can’t be controlled by Juno or by anyone on Earth.” He gave them a few moments to absorb this, then he added the killer coda: “And so, we are free!”

  There was a longer, more stunned silence.

  Helms patted his hands together, softly, dropping a broad hint that the assembled throng might now like to consider applauding him for his handling of the crisis. A few obedient souls did so, but most stood silent and incredulous.

  “Free of what?” asked Hugo, endearingly baffled.

  “Free of the CSO and his evil regime,” explained Helms, barely hiding his impatience.

  “Oh, that,” Hugo acknowledged, absently.

  There followed a further awkward, indeed painful silence. A ghastly miasma of dead air engulfed them.

  And Sorcha and Ben and Mia and Hugo and all the others looked at Helms sceptically, all of them thinking the same thing.

  Free? What the hell was Helms on about!

  They didn’t have a base camp, three quarters of the Soldiers were dead, they were trapped in the deadly New Amazon jungle, surrounded by Godzillas and killer plants and a vast array of unpredictable and unknown predators, with limited reserves and no way of recharging their plasma guns and AmRovers if they ran out of power.

  Free?

  They travelled as far as they dared through the afternoon and into the early evening. Then night fell, fast, with shocking darkness.

  On Sorcha’s orders, they made a wagon train out of the AmRovers, and lit the camp with the headlights. A few stars were visible through a small gap in the thick canopy above. But beyond that gap, the sky was blotted out.

  The mood among the survivors was a blend of fear and elation. The camaraderie was intense, even between Scientists and Soldiers. All of them had faced a common foe. For the first time ever, they felt as if they might actually be on the same side.

  Helms supervised the building of a fire, using Flesh-Webs as tinder and Aldiss tree bark for logs. It took them almost an hour, but it was time well spent. The smoke drove away insects and mini-birds, the flames soothed and reassured, and the crackle of the fire created a comforting and familiar backdrop to the scary sounds of the night. And with sentries posted, the survivors sat around the fire and felt the glimmerings of relief.