“What stupid edict?” asked Sorcha.
“The Genocide Edict, of course!” This was the law that had led to the deaths of countless trillions of aliens; it was the legal justification for the terraforming of thousands of planets with thriving, rich ecologies.
“And why is that a problem?” Sorcha asked. Mary glared at her, furiously.
“Because you can’t terraform a planet that’s got life,” Saunders said, angrily.
“We do it all the time,” Sorcha replied, snidely.
“Not in my day,” Helms retorted. “Hope was a barren planet without water; it was irrigated; life was seeded there. Cambria was a hothouse Venus-type planet; it was cooled, then seeded with Earth life. There are plenty of terraformable planets in the Habitable Zones of the Solar Neighbourhood. We don’t need to exterminate alien species. That’s not what we do!”
“Why not? We are the human race. It’s our universe,” Sorcha pointed out.
“That’s what Hooperman said. But it’s not. It’s just not.” Saunders was lost for words, for a few moments, then he ploughed on: “Life is, well, it’s life. Sacred. Unique. You can’t exterminate alien species. That’s what Hitler would have —”
“That’s what William used to say,” Mary said in hollow tones. “Hitler would have — but oh no, no, that’s a false comparison. You can’t compare Hitler with — his Reich lasted barely a decade. Whereas —” She broke off, mindful of the angry stares that the Soldiers were directing at her. “William and I always thought the Genocide Edict was — well — arguably, in some ways, a slightly flawed strategy,” she concluded, in a feeble attempt to avoid self-incrimination.
“On that we are agreed,” said Saunders, crisply.
Sorcha tapped the handle of her gun. It was an act of treason punishable by death to query the CSO’s edicts. And Sorcha, like all Soldiers, was trained to enforce these edicts instantly and brutally.
But surely, Saunders hoped desperately, after all that had happened on New Amazon, even brainwashed Soldiers could no longer have any loyalty to the old regime?
Sorcha’s eyes burned into him. “Continue,” she said, scornfully, “with your abject confession.”
“Right. Then I shall. Cutting to the chase,” Saunders continued, shakily, “I told Hooperman my plan. I would travel to a planet rich in alien life-forms, then falsify the records so that it was logged as unterraformable, destroy the mother ship’s computer, and keep the alien life-forms alive and flourishing. It was masterly, in my view.”
“No, it was treasonous,” Sorcha said savagely. “If you’d told me that was your plan, I’d have shot you, or turned you in to the authorities for them to shoot you.”
“Well, as it happens, I told Hooperman, and he turned me in to the authorities,” Saunders said bitterly. “The next day the Soldiers came to interrogate me. I denied everything, naturally. But I was interrogated for three months, then found guilty without a trial, and dismissed from all my academic posts. My Nobel Prize was revoked. Just because of a single conversation I had with Hooperman! And then I was told that I would continue to work as a xeno-phylogenist, but in solitary confinement, under house arrest, for the rest of my life. So I used my influence, placed some bribes, then escaped from custody and fled Earth, in order to start afresh. And —”
He hesitated.
“Hooperman,” Sorcha prompted.
“Yes, indeed,” said Saunders, and his tone was crisper, more abrasive than it had ever been as Helms. He thought for a little while, judging with care the words he was about to utter, and then he smiled, and it was a cruel smile.
“And then I sent a book bomb to Hooperman. Because he deserved to die, after betraying me to the CSO. And then I went into space with a face transplant and a new identity.”
“But Hooperman survived.”
“Indeed,” Saunders said sourly. “You know that bit of the story?”
“Of course. He —”
“He was lucky. I used a close-proximity charge, but he had a robot servant to open his mail. Even so, I maimed the bastard. Hurt him real good. He claims he’s now living in intensive care, in dire agony, that the body transplant failed. But who’s to know? That may just be another of his lies.”
“And so that’s why?” Mary whispered. “You were angry with Hooperman and you tried to kill him? And that’s why William died?”
“I was rebelling against —”
“Don’t give me that,” Mary Beebe said, fiercely. “Hooperman may have been a coward, but he wasn’t your enemy. You just hated him — because you were and are a petulant, arrogant man. You brought this down on us. You dragged us into your stupid fucking feud, and hundreds of innocent people are now dead, including my husband, all because Hooperman hated you, and you hated him.” She paused, and spat the final words at him: “You deserve to die, Professor Saunders, and you will. For what you have inflicted upon us, you will never be forgiven.”
Ben sat in the cockpit of AmRover 3 and remembered the exhilaration of battle. The smell of burning flesh. The screams.
He’d been among the first to escape from the Doppelganger Robots when they attacked at Helms City. But he’d got separated from the main party, so he’d fled to the East Evacuation Bay, where he encountered a group of six Scientists who hadn’t bothered to attend the dance. They’d all breathed a sigh of relief when he joined them, appalled at what they’d witnessed through the surveillance TV screens. And they were all, clearly, delighted to find that being party-pooping workaholics had saved their lives.
Ben had regaled them all with the tales of the horrors he had been through.
And then he’d charged up the plasma cannon he had taken from a dead Soldier, and fired it at his unwary companions. His close-quarters high-energy plasma blasts and explosive bullets ripped through the body armour of those hapless fools, and popped heads, and gouged huge holes in bodies. Torrents of blood poured out of the torn suits. He could smell burning flesh, and hear screams, and then they were all dead and it was quiet again.
Later, it occurred to Ben that his meds were no longer working. He was now completely, clinically, mad. But it also occurred to him — he no longer needed medication!
For, as a diagnosed homicidal psychopath, he’d always been told it was essential to keep his emotions strictly regulated, in order to function and conform in civilised society.
But now that they were fighting for their lives against Doppelganger enemies of devilish malignity, it seemed to him that a man possessed by a paranoid kill-lust was precisely what was required.
Sorcha drove. It helped her to focus on a practical task, because her thoughts and emotions were in a state of turmoil.
She’d trusted Richard Helms. She’d felt a rapport with him. They’d been lovers, and colleagues, and — so she had thought — friends.
And he’d lied to her, from beginning to end, and at every moment in between. He’d lied about everything, including his age and his area of specialism. He wasn’t a geologist, he was a zoologist, a taxonomist, a First Contacter.
Because of Richard — Carl? what the hell should she call him? — hundreds of people had died. It was entirely his fault. He’d brought this curse on them.
And he’d lied to her. Constantly. Every word he had ever said was a lie. That much was beyond doubt.
So when he had said to her, in his soft and gentle tones, that he loved her — was that a lie too?
“Where are we going?” Clementine McCoy asked her, and Sorcha’s focus returned.
“I don’t know.”
“Then why are we going so quickly?”
“They’ll be behind us. They’ll follow. We have to put some ground between us.”
“They can follow faster than we can run.”
“I know.”
“They can use the Dravens to scour the area.”
“It’s a big area. They won’t know which way to go. The further we are from Helms City, the more ground they have to search.”
“You
shouldn’t have relaxed security at the dance,” said Private Clementine McCoy.
“I know that.”
“Just so my observation is noted.”
“It’s noted. I accept liability.”
“Fair enough.”
“You lost a lot of friends back there,” Sorcha conceded.
“They died a Glorious death,” said Clementine, casually, then brooded. And eventually she said: “Perhaps we should stand and fight.”
“We wouldn’t have a hope.”
“I know. But —”
“You want a Glorious death?” said Sorcha, scornfully.
“Of course,” said Clementine, shocked at her senior officer’s tone.
“And so do I,” said Sorcha, hastily. “But let’s explore the other options first. I’m not going to fail a second time. We’ll find a way to live.”
Tonii and Mia were in the Observation Bubble of AmRover 1.
Mia was in tears. Tonii was baffled. He held her, as she cried and cried.
“Why aren’t you crying?” she asked, eventually.
“At what?”
“So many died!”
“But I did not,” he said calmly.
Mia looked at Tonii curiously. “You don’t care, do you? All your friends are dead, and you don’t care?”
“No.”
“So long as you’re alive, you’re happy.”
“Yes.”
“So long as your Glory is intact, you’re content.”
“Yes.”
“You’re not any different, are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re the same as the others. The other Soldiers. You’re all KMs. Killing Machines.”
“Of course,” said Tonii, surprised at her scathing tone, and pseudo- philosophical censure. “It’s what we’re bred for.”
“Don’t talk like that! ‘Bred’! We’re human beings!” said Mia, anguished.
“No, you’re human. We are more so. Because we do not fear death.”
“You’re really telling me you’re not afraid to die?”
Tonii hesitated, and knew he had to lie.
“I long for death, so long as it’s Glorious.”
“You fucking . . .” Mia struggled to find the word, “freak.”
Saunders hated being tethered in the secure cage in the back of the AmRover.
He felt like a specimen, a xeno, or a captured lion. Or, indeed, the most apt comparison of all in his case, a caged bird.
He remembered all the birds they’d captured in the Amazon, he and Hooperman, and the guileful use they’d made of call birds and trap-cages. Now, he was in a trap-cage. Locked in the boot of the AmRover, bouncing every time the vehicle veered to avoid a root or a swamp or a predator.
This was Hooperman’s revenge.
Nice one, Andrew.
Saunders’s guess was that Hooperman must have spent longer on New Amazon than he’d realised before launching his attack. He’d hacked into the Juno mainframe, broken into all Saunders’s secret files, reprogrammed the DRs into hunter-killers, and given them detailed information about the Depot. So the fact that Hooperman himself had now lost contact with New Amazon was no obstacle to his revenge. The robot monsters were acting as his pawns and his agents.
Saunders had underestimated his old enemy. Hooperman wasn’t just evil, he was smart.
DAY 13
From the diary of Dr Hugo Baal
June 34th
I slept badly last night, haunted by nightmares, most of which were, curiously enough, less terrible than what has been actually happening in the daytime.
I eventually got out of bed at 3 a.m. and spent two hours talking at length and in detail to Professor Saunders,1 who unfortunately was in some discomfort, since he was tethered with toughmetal wire to an Aldiss tree.
A fascinating man — strange how I underestimated him when I thought he was just a geologist!
We chatted about this and that, as you do, though his small talk is, I must admit, not of the best, and chiefly consisted of his asking me to “cut the fucking wire”. I told him how I’d always dreamed of meeting him, and how, when I was just a tubby six-year-old with social impairment issues,2 he inspired me to devote my life to the study of phylogeny and morphology and taxonomy.3
I quizzed him about Hooperman — I’d always been intrigued by Hooperman, that old rascal — but Professor Saunders was taciturn to the point of rudeness on this topic. So instead I told him a few reminiscences of my life on the road as a roving xenobiologist. That soon palled, and I became overwhelmed by the fear that I was squandering an opportunity of a lifetime — a chance to find out at first hand about, oh, so many things that Saunders had done or written or thought in the course of his long and brilliant career.
It occurred to me then that I should ask him about his account4 of the Frantic Assembly5 of Gullyfoyle, one of the most remarkable swarm intelligences yet to be encountered in the human-explored universe. I have a long-held theory that the Frantic Assembly are the regressed version of the Bugs,6 but Saunders poured scorn on this notion. Undeterred, I patiently, and comprehensively, and rather impressively I felt, pointed out the following areas of similarity and dissimilarity:
1) Microscopic life forms (FA and B)
2) Swarming ability, coupled with emergent behaviour (FA and B)
3) Ability to mimic forms and shapes of other creatures at macroscopic level (FA and B)
4) Ability to spell out English words in mid-air (B)
5) Ability to destroy life-forms and inanimate objects within seconds (B)
Saunders attributed all these similarities to simple convergent evolution, and pointed out that there are 541,000 genuses of “tree” on many thousands of different planets, all of them separately evolved. I naturally mocked this notion, because the prevalence of trees owes much to the tendency of lazy scientists to think anything Plantae that grows upwards and is tall and has a hard surface is a tree. Some trees have exoskeletons made of cadmium! It’s tantamount to describing anything with four legs as a lion. But the Frantic Assembly/Bug comparison is based on a more judicious and thorough and academically brilliant intellectual differentiation.7 There are only two creatures in all of Known Space that are microscopic and yet can swarm to become macroscopic, the Bugs and the Frantic Assembly.8 Coincidence, or eerie connection? I put it to you, as I put it to Saunders, rather forcefully in fact, but fortunately he was still tethered to the tree and couldn’t stalk off in a huff, that it is the latter. In which case, should we not consider the possibility that the Frantic Assembly remnants now being kept in zoos could re-evolve into a Buglike intelligence? Is it really sensible to allow them to survive? I mean! It’s madness, isn’t it!?!9
Saunders eventually conceded this point, rather grudgingly, at about the time that the dawn broke over the trees, in a glittering colourfulness of myriad light,10 at which point the Military Commander of the expedition Major Sorcha Molloy arrived and announced that we were departing immediately, and further explained that Professor Saunders was to remain in this location, chained and tethered to the Aldiss tree.
The Professor was somewhat distracted after receiving this news, and pointed out that he was being doomed to a certain and ghastly death. This point was conceded by Major Molloy, who then returned to the AmRover, in a state of some agitation. I asked Professor Saunders what, with the wisdom of hindsight, he now felt was the most interesting aspect about his first-ever First Contact, either from a morphological or an evolutionary or simply a taxonomic perspective.
Professor Saunders declined to respond, and commenced to swear and yell and, to my amazement, weep, and at this point I was forced to leave him, in order to join the rest of the expedition.
Sorcha drove the AmRover fast through the jungle. Plasma blasts blew a path through the Flesh-Webs. There were tears on her cheek and she didn’t bother to brush them away. The sharp yellow sunlight brushed her skin and made her flesh shimmer like rippled water at dawn. She took a dee
p breath, and drove and drove.
She’d voted in favour of letting Saunders die. He was tied with unbreakable wire to an Aldiss tree. He had no weapons, just his body armour. And before they’d left they had fired twelve rockets high into the sky to allow the Dravens to pinpoint his position.
Sorcha was confident that Saunders would be found and killed within hours. And, finally, the rest of them would be safe.
“A brilliant man, we’ll never see his like again,” Hugo muttered defiantly, and Ben seethed with rage. He was sick of Baal’s so-called witticisms, his pedantry, his sheer annoyingness. The man was impossible, and shouldn’t be allowed to blight the lives of others.
Ben resolved to wait a few hours, then find an excuse to go into the jungle with Baal and kill him. Slowly and painfully and horribly. It was no more than the man deserved, for being such a tedious ass.
“Although, in fairness,” Hugo added, “and contrariwise, I did find Saunders, as we must now categorise him, to be a little bit on the pompous side. N’est-ce pas, old chum?”
He has to die soon! Ben thought to himself, with the mental equivalent of gritted teeth.
Sorcha was studying the virtual map of New Amazon. “The coast,” she said at last. “That’s where we should go. Away from the jungle, away from the Flesh-Webs.”
“It’s going to be bitterly hard driving to get there,” Tonii counselled. “We’ll need to cut through another Jungle-Wall. And there’s uncharted terrain most of the way. Gods only know what we’ll encounter.”
“It’s worth it,” said Sorcha. “There, we’ll be safe. Sea. Surf. Red sand. We can build there. We can make a new world.”
And she flashed them all a confident glance, to prove she was still their leader and that nothing scared her, and that she wasn’t just a sad and vulnerable woman mourning the inevitable and imminent death of the man she loved.
Red Claw Page 16
