There were eleven survivors, including herself. Dr Ben Kirkham, Dr Mia Nightingale, Private Tonii Newton, Private Clementine McCoy, Sergeant Xavier Anderson, Dr Mary Beebe, Dr Hugo Baal, Dr David Go, Dr Jim Aura and Professor Helms. They had two AmRovers, weapons, and supplies, so the prospects were not entirely bleak.
But even so, she blamed herself.
Eleven survivors!
Her Soldiers should have stayed in their body armour, they should have carried their plasma cannons, there should not have been any dancing.
Dancing!
Sorcha had thought the Depot was secure. But the DRs had planned a perfect ambush; they got to Helms City first and simply lay in wait.
She blamed herself, intensely, for several hours, as Soldiers were prone to do.
Then she got over it.
Tonii felt awed, and privileged to be still alive.
All his life he had been told that death was Glory. His father, his mother, indeed most of his family and all of his friends had died Gloriously. And he had been schooled to believe that one day he too would find his destiny in Glorious death.
But Tonii had realised some time ago, vividly and thrillingly, how false the Soldier’s Faith was. For Life was glory. Death was just — well —
Stupid.
Mia was too stunned to have any emotion. She’d thought the fighting was over, the battle was won. But the battle had only paused.
It was obvious, now, that the DRs were toying with them. They were merely mice, being chased by armies of cats. It was only a matter of time before the rest of them died, and Mia felt crushed and overwhelmed by dread.
Jim Aura had always been a fatalist, even before he became a Noir.
He was also a clandestine and bitter enemy of the Galactic Corporation’s regime. He’d studied film footage of the Dolph Games, the extermination of life on Pixar, the wholesale rape and enslavement of entire planets. He wasn’t surprised at all that had happened; he welcomed it as confirmation of his own dark philosophy of life.
So as a pessimist, and a fatalist, he wasn’t often shocked.
But the death of Sheena, Queen of the Noirs, had shocked him.
Why her? Why not Helms? Why not Major Molloy? Why not someone who hadn’t already suffered by being blinded?
Sheer caprice. Random stupid luck.
Life is a fucking bitch. Trust no one.
From now on, Jim resolved to reject life, and its snares, and its lies. He wouldn’t kill himself, but nor would he take any joy whatsoever from the act of living. He would live in a state of permanent grief.
He would become a ghost with a pulse.
Mary Beebe was lost in despair. William was gone, and life had lost all taste and purpose.
She and William had been together for two hundred years, without even a night apart. And as the AmRover landed in the clearing, she stared at Helms. And Helms knew what she was thinking.
“Whoah there, psycho killer,” said Ben.
“They were ahead of us,” said Mary, in steely tones. “They burrowed under the base.”
“That’s my surmise, too,” said Helms.
“Why?”
“They must have hacked the systems,” Helms explained. “Found the location of the Depot. I’d encrypted it — I never thought they . . .”
“That’s how, I said why. Why do they hate us?”
“That, I do not know.”
“I think you do,” said Mary Beebe, and her calm and unforgiving tone commanded fear from all who heard her.
“We’ll talk about this later,” said Helms, mildly.
The mood was icy.
They landed, and debarked from the AmRover and looked at the verdant prison that surrounded them. Night fell fast. Ben lit a fire, and Sorcha assigned all the surviving Soldiers to sentry duty, except for herself.
“OK,” said Sorcha. “Let’s talk.”
“Fine by me,” said Helms, tensely, fearing the worst.
They sat around the fire, with Tonii Newton, Clementine McCoy and Sergeant Anderson at their sentry posts, but listening through their MI-radios, throwing in occasional comments.
Helms glanced around him, slowly and anxiously. He thought of all the deaths he had caused, at Helms City and at Xabar, and his spirits were bleak. He thought about William Beebe, and he hated himself. He thought of the Noirs, all dead apart from Jim Aura, and wondered how lonely the man must feel.
Out of a population of nearly 400, only eleven remained. And it was all his fault.
“Tell us the truth,” said Sorcha. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know,” Helms said, tired now, his candid and innocent tone of voice worn ragged.
“This is the end of the road,” said Mary. “Stop lying to us. Or I will kill you with my bare hands.”
“What the hell are you on about, Mary?” Hugo said, alarmed, but hugely impressed at her bravado.
“This man’s a fucking liar.”
“Easy, Mary,” said Helms, with a nasty tang in his voice.
“Yes, be a bit more respectful, Mary,” said Hugo. “After all this is, you know, the Professor to whom you are talking.”
Mary glared.
Sorcha looked at Richard Helms, slowly and carefully. He met her gaze with a look of total sincerity. And she knew. He was lying.
The flames crackled. Insects howled. Helms could hear a crash in the far distance, as a tree canopy collapsed into the Flesh-Webs with the explosive impact of an earthquake. All of them had their helmets retracted, and the cold night air chilled their cheeks.
“Who or what is doing all this?” Sorcha insisted.
“The CSO, it has to be,” Helms lied. “Even though the Quantum Beacon is down, he must have found some other way to —”
“Liar,” said Mary, with a drumbeat rhythm.
“If you think I’m a liar,” said Helms, firmly, “then prove it.”
Hugo blinked approvingly. That was of course the correct scientific response.
Sorcha looked at Mary. She absorbed the full force of the other woman’s passion and rage.
And then Sorcha took out her plasma gun and fired a short burst into the fire. The wood exploded and sparks flew. Helms was enveloped in a haze of black cinders. He coughed. He took out his own plasma gun and Sorcha tasered him and his body spasmed to the ground.
“Disarm him,” Sorcha snarled, and the Soldiers hurried from their sentry posts and stripped Helms of his weapons.
“Is that necessary?” asked Hugo.
“Good moves,” said Ben, impressed.
“Why the fuck didn’t they kill me?” Sorcha ranted. “I was this close to a DR. It had a gun aimed at me. It could have killed me. Why didn’t it kill me?”
Helms coughed and got his breath back.
“Because you’re my girlfriend,” he said at last.
Sorcha’s face filled with rage. “This is all about you?”
“Let me explain,” said Helms.
He hesitated. Then, finally, he told the truth:
“My name is not, in point of fact, Richard Helms,” he explained.
Hugo blinked.
“My real name,” Helms continued, “is Saunders. Professor Carl Saunders.”
The words shocked them all: it was as if a dinner guest had revealed himself to be Aristotle.
“Then who is trying to kill us?” said Mary Beebe, in a hushed whisper.
“Well that would be Hooperman. Andrew Hooperman.”
This time, the gasps came in synchrony.
“Impossible! He’s dead. You killed him,” Mary accused.
“Not,” said Professor Richard Helms, aka Professor Carl Saunders, with characteristic understatement, “entirely.”
DAY 12
From the diary of Dr Hugo Baal
June 33rd
Yesterday was an awful, and terrible, and yet it has to be said, a truly amazing day. A day full of incidents and horrors and marvels.
I think back on it all: our arrival at Helms City, th
e dinner, the dancing, the unexpected ambush by the DRs, the death and destruction, the loss of our second base, and the shocking realisation that many of my esteemed colleagues and, dare I say it,1 friends on this expedition are now dead.
And now, to cap it all — let us call it the silver lining in a black black cloud — and please do not think me heartless, in finding pleasure from this, in the midst of terrible grief2 — I have just met one of my greatest heroes!
And mark my words, this is no ordinary man. He is the first among equals, the finest xenobiologist in the history of science — nay, the very inventor3 and deviser of that discipline!4 The man who rewrote evolution and designed the Gene Scope. The man who made First Contact with the first sentient species ever discovered by mankind, the Lyras; the most brilliant scientist of our age, a veritable Newton among us.
Unfortunately he is now being held in protective custody, following his selfish and deranged actions which led to the death of 383 Scientists5 and Soldiers on New Amazon, in two separate ghastly massacres and a few skirmishes in between,5 and hence my opportunities to question the Great Man about his work and ideas have been severely circumscribed.
Mary Beebe was twenty-nine years old when she first met the man who would become her husband. She was a doctoral student who had rashly decided to write her doctorate on flame beasts. For eleven years she had lived among these bizarre creatures in a space station circling the planet Luce. The flame beasts had entertained her and told her tales and quizzed her about her favourite television programmes, and she’d discovered absolutely nothing about their physiology, anatomy, evolution, cytology (assuming they had cells), morphology or even their basic physics. Her instruments had failed to identify the particular kind of “flame” that constituted the flame beast. It wasn’t fire, as such, nor was it plasma, as such, nor was it hot to the touch, except when the flame beasts wanted to burn things, and then it was incandescent and could ignite metal. It was, she eventually concluded, some kind of fundamental “stuff”, on a par with electrons and muons. But it was not, she eventually concluded, animal, vegetable or mineral. She confirmed the genus, Flammabestia, but was unable to identify any species, let alone subspecies (since the flame beast doesn’t procreate, can it have different species?).
Her work was a marvel of futility! She and William laughed about it often, her glorious, wasted years chit-chatting to superbeings. William had written his own doctoral thesis on the multiple digestive system of the Traskian dung beetle, and had hence won himself a place in xenobiological mythology. But though Mary’s thesis wasn’t worth the paper it wasn’t written on, William had seen her potential, and intelligence, and insight. They had become devoted colleagues. And eventually, after a number of years working together in the most appalling of environments, at the very closest of quarters, they had become lovers.
But she couldn’t believe . . . that he . . .
“Move this fucking thing!” Sorcha roared as tendrils descended upon the AmRover, and some kind of sessile animal attempted to eat them, and plasma guns roared and they were free again.
She couldn’t believe . . . that . . .
The flame beasts had grown very fond of Mary, and eventually they towed her spaceship to the neighbouring planetary system of Fecunda, where they knew she would be able to study a vital, complex habitat with fleshly creatures who could be categorised. And that’s how William first came across her: to his utter astonishment, she was delivered to his Research Camp in a one-person lifeship conveyed by a dozen pillars of living flame.
She could still remember that moment vividly. William staring up, aghast, as she descended from her lifeship, with the flames dancing in homage around her.
Mary raged; it was all so random! They’d almost got away from the DRs. They’d both seen the hole in the wall and were about to leap through it. Then Mary turned to check William was OK, but his head had fallen off and the neck stump was gushing blood, and she should have stayed and died with him but her reflexes kicked in and she allowed herself to be led away to, to, to life.
She knew he was dead, of course he was dead, his head was severed, but she hadn’t stopped to check, in case he might be just a little bit alive, she hadn’t . . .
William had hired Mary as his research assistant, he had assessed her second dissertation on Fecunda’s most prolific life-form, the Death Toad (Nex viridis, Nex purpura and Nex turpis), and after twenty-four years of intimate professional collaboration on a variety of planets, he and Mary had sexual intercourse in a two-person tent, and then they got married the following day.
Now William was dead, his head cut away from his body by the plasma blast of a Doppelganger Robot, and it was all because of that fucking bastard Professor Carl Saunders, DPhil, MA, FRS, Nobel Laureate, twice winner of the Genius Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievements, author of the definitive text on xenobiology, and fugitive.
Mary vowed that Saunders’s death would be a painful one. And she wished that she could be allowed to kill him herself, with her bare hands and teeth. That might help to ease the — ease the —
For she couldn’t believe — William was actually dead? She missed him. The pain of loss was unendurable.
She remembered William’s smile. His wit. His gentle sarcasm. His brilliance. His look of pure joy when he first saw a Death Toad inflate and fly. His huffy look when she wasn’t paying attention to him.
Now, no more joy, no more sarcasm, no more huff.
Beebe william.†
No more.
Professor Carl Saunders, formerly known as Professor Helms, was still cuffed and bound, but at least they had found him a chair to sit on. The survivors surrounded him in a semicircle. And Sorcha paced around him, like a lion laying claim to a haunch of deer, as the interrogation began.
“OK,” said Sorcha. “Explain.”
“It’s complicated,” said Saunders calmly, then met her gaze and flinched at the hate he saw there.
“We have time.”
“I didn’t mean for any of this to —”
“Just,” said Sorcha, “fucking, talk.”
“Hooperman is trying to kill me.”
“We know that much.”
“Because of what I —”
“We all know the story of you and Hooperman. You attempted to murder him and failed.”
“I —” Saunders slumped. “I guess so.”
“And now he’s decided to take revenge.”
“He’s been trying to take revenge for the last two hundred years.”
For these last two centuries, Saunders had lived as a hunted man; changing identities, constantly fearful, never staying too long in the same sector of the Solar Neighbourhood. And for all this time, Hooperman — through his murderous Doppelganger proxies, and with the aid of his remarkable computer genius — was remorseless in pursuit. There were times when Saunders had longed for it all to be over. Times when he wished he could lose, and be killed, and put the end to the endless vendetta of Professor Andrew Hooperman.
“And you don’t deny you bombed Hooperman?”
“Well I don’t deny it. But I had my reasons. I —”
“I don’t want to hear your fucking reasons,” snarled Sorcha.
“I do,” said Mary Beebe. She stared intently at Saunders. “I want to hear. What possessed you, Saunders? You are arguably the greatest xeno-scientist of all time —”
“Hooperman would dispute —”
“Not a murderer. What were you thinking of? Did you really hate him so —”
“I didn’t hate him —”
“You attempted to —”
“Yes — but not because — I’m not explaining this well.”
“Take your time,” said Mary Beebe. “Because it’s the only time you have left.”
Saunders blinked. “Are you saying you’re going to —”
“Kill you? Yes of course. It’s what you deserve.” Rage burned in Mary’s eyes.
“Ah,” said Saunders, with infinite regret.
>
“So tell us. Tell us it all,” said Mary Beebe.
And so Professor Richard Helms, aka Professor Carl Saunders, DPhil, FRS, Nobel Laureate, told his tale.
“First, you have to understand how it was with Hooperman and me.”
A flock of Sunlights flew above them, catching the red embers of the sunset.
“He was my DPhil student, at the University of Oxford, England, Earth,” Saunders told them, “and he was brilliant. Charismatic. But also, annoying. Intense. He used to — no matter. We became friends, of sorts, and colleagues. And he was my first choice for the team I led on my Amazon Expedition of ’98. And he —”
“And that’s when you betrayed him, and left him for dead,” murmured Hugo Baal.
“No!” Saunders snapped. “That was just a stupid lie told by Hooperman, to make — oh forget it. The point is, we had a series of major quarrels during the Expedition. Our friendship fell to pieces. And then — then we found the hummingbird.”
Hushed awe spread between the Scientists at those words. They all knew the legend of the nocturnal Amazonian hummingbird, the last new species ever found on Earth. And here was Saunders himself, actually talking about it . . . !
“Hooperman became insanely competitive — and that’s why he told all those stupid lies about me. And then, later, the quarrel between us was exacerbated,” Saunders explained, “when he wrote those articles about me. He tarnished my reputation. He called me a liar, a plagiarist, he — he . . . Anyway, for many years, as you all know, we feuded, bitterly and shamefully. But I still had great respect for Hooperman. I always thought he was an honourable man. And then —”
The memories came washing over Saunders. He picked his way carefully through the wreckage of his past, as he tried desperately to argue for his life.
“You see, about two hundred years ago I had a meeting with the CSO, and he asked me to lead a new scientific expedition. I refused. Hooperman came to see me, and we drank a bottle of whisky together. And I explained to him my reservations about the project’s intended outcome. He made me realise that if I didn’t say yes, I would be killed. So I said yes. But I drafted a plan to thwart the CSO’s stupid edict.”
Red Claw Page 15
