iv) We have to defeat him, or flee; but either way we need to get to the Satellite in order to stand a chance.
v) Hence,
“Stop writing your journal and drive the fucking jeep!” roared Clementine.
Fair enough.
To be continued.
DAY 29
“Oh fuck,” said Saunders, as they flew towards the Space Elevator. They had been travelling for two gruelling days, flying in their body armour over the jungle with their Gryphon escort without a break.
“Why? What?” Sorcha asked.
Saunders was staring down, looking at the Space Elevator Base Camp. He was transfixed by the sight, the awful, terrible sight, of the thing that was not there.
He pointed. And Sorcha couldn’t see it either.
Because it wasn’t there.
“It’s all over,” Saunders said, with utter weariness. “Hooperman was smarter than us. We’ve lost.” They flew closer and saw the AmRover. “They’re alive!” said Saunders in delight. “The others, they’re alive.”
But Sorcha didn’t answer. She still was looking down, at the thing that wasn’t there.
For the Space Elevator had at its base a small squat building, the Elevator HQ, which connected to the Satellite by a thick and almost unbreakable carbon nanotube cable, balanced many miles away by a counterweight cable that extended out from the Satellite into space. Cargo trucks and lifepods could be sent up and down this cable at will; it was the simplest and cheapest form of space travel ever devised, a simple wire-pulley system linking the ground and outer space.
But the cable snaking through the air like a beam of light reaching to the stars — that was the thing that wasn’t there. Instead, there was just a vast pool of wire on the ground. Hooperman had cut the cable. He was already up in the Satellite.
They were too late.
Saunders and Sorcha entered the Elevator HQ. It was a cavernous building, with a glass dome offering views up to the sky above. The Elevator had been built in one of the largest jungle oases, and above them was clear blue sky and a winking light — the Satellite.
Saunders was in a sombre mood; and he didn’t much relish the prospect of a reunion with the last survivors of his scientific expedition. But he felt he owed it to his people to put a brave face on things.
So he fastened on his best, charming, self-deprecating smile, and confidently walked into the spartan HQ building.
Hugo Baal strode towards them, out of his body armour, his stout frame striding fast. “Professor,” he exclaimed, and there was a light of joy in his eyes.
“We’re too late,” Saunders told him, through his helmet mike. “Hooperman —”
“We know, we know,” said Hugo cheerfully. “Come through, we have a lounge. Major Molloy, delighted you survived.”
“We’re too late,” Sorcha told him, bitterly. “That means —”
“Yes I know, I know,” said Hugo, with a trace of impatience. “Doom, destruction, the end of everything. But at least we’re out of that fucking hole, pardon my French. David! We have guests!”
David Go, the microbiologist, with his cautious rabbit’s face, emerged into the central hall of the HQ, and greeted them. “We have air, you know, you don’t need body armour,” he said, gently.
“I’ll keep this on.”
“Helmets off at least,” said Hugo, also gently. They were joined by Private Tonii Newton, Dr Mary Beebe, Mia Nightingale and Private Clementine McCoy, in an exoskeleton.
Saunders shucked his helmet back and breathed air. “Where’s Dr Kirkham?” he asked.
“Dead,” Hugo said.
“Jim Aura?”
“Killed by Rocs.”
“Sergeant Anderson?” asked Sorcha.
“Dead also,” said Hugo mournfully. “You know, you sound like a tin man through that helmet mike. You’re with friends now, come, come.” Hugo was fussing in that annoying way he had. Saunders bit back a sarcastic comment. Sorcha sighed, and shucked back her helmet.
Hugo promptly raised a plasma gun and pointed it at Sorcha’s head. Mary Beebe had a plasma gun pointed at Saunders’s head. David Go, Mia and Clementine also had their weapons raised.
“Take your body armour off,” said Hugo.
“Hugo,” said Saunders wearily.
“Shut up, Professor,” said Hugo. “Now, this is the situation, just to be clear about it: You are our prisoners.”
From the diary of Dr Hugo Baal
July 3rd
We have arrived at the Space Elevator, and have been reunited with Professor Saunders and Major Molloy. It was really rather nice to see them again alive.
However, as a precautionary measure, we have taken them both prisoner pending a further investigation into the causes of our troubles on this planet.
So many have died, after all, and on the face of it, it does appear to be all Professor Saunders’s fault. And if Major Molloy has allied herself with him, she too is suspect.
We would all, I feel, like to know the truth before we die. Because there’s little doubt that we will all die, soon. There are no DRs left at the Elevator HQ, the compound was unguarded, and we have encountered no opposition. However, the Space Elevator itself has been sabotaged; the superhard cable which connects the planetary surface with the orbiting Satellite (TFS) has been severed. And we have no other way of reaching the Satellite. All the space shuttles in Xabar were blown up in the blast and subsequent fire. I had hoped to utilise the three other spaceworthy vessels that were hidden in a secret silo near the Elevator HQ, but Hooperman found them and they have been destroyed. I fear we are doomed.
The next stages are inevitable. The Satellite — the Horseman of Death, as some call it — will rain down destruction upon the planet, acting in concert with the three other Satellites which are in orbit around this planet. The oceans will burn, the atmosphere will ignite, poison torrents will drench the soil, and every last trace of life, every animal and plant and spore and seed and bacterium and nucleara cell and soil-based organism, all will be eradicated. Only when life is extinct will the nanonets fall and the process of oxygenating the dead planet begin.
I am familiar with the process; I have allowed it to happen on the many planets I have studied. This time it’s different. This time I, too, will be rendered extinct.
Rather than morbidly obsessing about my imminent and terrible and untimely and unfairly soon death — oh my God I’m going to die!!! — I try to focus on more positive matters. I try to keep busy.
And this is one of the reasons we are staging a trial for Saunders. It’s a way to keep busy; to spend our last hours in pursuit of the truth about what has happened to us.
Oh, I have asked Clementine McCoy to marry me, and she has said yes. Due to her injuries, however, it will be impossible for us to consummate our marriage before the heavens erupt and all life on New Amazon, including ourselves, is — no, no more of that! Stay positive.
Dr Mary Beebe has agreed to conduct the marriage service1 and David Go will be my best man, but we don’t even know if there will be time to marry, before —
Move on, Baal.
I’ve been studying the Gryphons.2 They are remarkable creatures. They are intelligent tool-users, they are beautiful in flight, and they practise an extraordinary form of visual telepathy. I visualised to one creature an image of my mother, cradling me, when I was a baby. It reciprocated with an image of a Baby Gryphon ripping the infant Hugo Baal limb from limb. It was, I surmise, a joke, but it certainly shook me.
I would like to spend longer on this planet. There is so much to learn.
I would like to have a wedding night.
I would like to live.
However, none of these are tenable options; we will die very soon.
“Kiss me, Carl,” said Sorcha.
And, still in his handcuffs, he did so, passionately, urgently, sadly.
Saunders was calm as he addressed the makeshift court. They were in the lounge of the Elevator HQ, and a coffee machin
e bubbled on the kitchen counter behind them. Clementine was stretched out on a sofa. Sorcha had sworn a parole, and had been unshackled. Saunders, also unshackled, was in an armchair, facing Hugo, who sat at a desk surrounded by papers, looking a little confused by his new role as judge.
“Right, let’s get started,” Hugo snapped. Everyone stared at him; what was the procedure meant to be?
“Don’t I get a defence attorney?” Saunders prompted.
“No, that’s a waste of time,” said Hugo briskly. “Just tell us the truth.”
Saunders nodded, hiding his amusement, and wondered if this court had the power to order his execution. And whether, if they did so, they’d be quick enough, and efficient enough, to execute him before they all died.
“I’ve told you the truth,” said Saunders calmly. “Hooperman hates me. That’s why he’s killing all of you people.”
Hugo glanced at David Go, somewhat at a loss. David nodded encouragement. So Hugo stared beadily at Saunders again: “Why?”he barked. “Why, I mean, does he hate you so disproportionately much?”
“Because I tried to kill him.”
“Hah! We know that. The question is — why?” Hugo snapped again, abrasively.
Hugo was starting to get his rhythm now. And he rather relished inhabiting the roles of judge, jury, defence and prosecution, all rolled into one.
Saunders sighed. His body language was relaxed, his tone assured, but he was about to take an irrevocable step. He looked at Sorcha, her soft skin, her brimming energy, and marvelled at her beauty and her passion and her potential for rage. And he hoped that he wouldn’t lose her. Not now, not after all they had been through.
“It was an accident,” Saunders said, at length.
Puzzled looks hurtled around the room.
Hugo snorted. “You expect us to believe that?” he roared. “You put a bomb in Hooperman’s book by accident?” David Go nodded approvingly at Hugo’s lawyerly tone, and deft use of sarcasm. “You’ll be saying next that —”
“May I continue?” Saunders interrupted. Hugo screeched to a halt, and nodded.
“The bomb,” explained Saunders, “wasn’t intended for Hooperman. It —” he hesitated, and then finally, after all this time, after centuries of lying, he told the truth: “It was intended for the Cheo.”
There was a shocked silence.
The silence persisted, and evolved into awed silence.
And then — a roar of anger from Sorcha.
The others came to life. Hugo blinked, astonished. David Go instinctively subvocalised, audibly to all of them, “Fuck.” Tonii and Clementine braced themselves for what was to come.
“You evil bastard!” screamed Sorcha, more bansheee than woman. “You swore to me, you told me —”
“I didn’t think you —”
Sorcha leapt at him. Tonii stunned her with the taser setting of his plasma gun but she carried on moving. Tonii braced himself to shoot again.
But then the strength went out of Sorcha’s legs. She crawled her way to Saunders. “Private Newton! Private McCoy!” she cried. “He’s a traitor, kill him, now!”
Clementine didn’t move.
Tonii hesitated.
Both knew, as they knew that air had to be breathed, that treason against the Cheo was instantly punishable by death. It was therefore their sworn duty to execute Saunders. Their every conditioned instinct told them both to draw their plasma guns and start blasting.
But neither did.
Tonii looked at Clementine. She looked back. She met his eyes and shook her head, and a silent vow was exchanged between them: no more. No more being a slave to their conditioning. No more being a vassal of the Chief Executive Officer of the Galactic Corporation. Those days were gone.
“Hear the man out,” said Tonii. Sorcha was dragged back to her chair and shackled.
And Saunders told the tale.
“I discovered the first sentient species. The Lyra. They weren’t beautiful creatures but they were profound. I had many friends among the Lyra, in the Galactic Zoo. I used to visit them often. They used to ask me Why? Why did we do what we did?
“Why did we destroy the Lyra? They were no threat to us. But we took their planet and terraformed it and killed every species that lived there and all but two dozen of the billion Lyrans living there. Then we followed their spaceships and destroyed them. We found their secret colony and blew it up with an antimatter bomb. This was all, you see, to pre-empt retaliation on their part. They might have wanted to take revenge for the destruction of their home world.
“The Lyrans in the Galactic Zoo were wonderful poets. I spent many days there, listening to their songs-made-of-words. I was fluent in Lyran, I caught every nuance. They spoke poems about great heroes and wondrous battles, although the Lyrans were herbivores who had never fought a single battle in the history of their entire civilisation.
“The Lyrans did not blame me for the excesses of humanity. But they did blame humanity. I tried to explain that humans are essentially decent honourable people. It was just one man who was doing all this! One evil dictator! Peter Smith! The Chief Executive Officer of the Galactic Corporation.
“He was to blame for everything. The murders, the rapes, the slave planets, the use of DRs to crush and colonise, the enforced whoredom of entire generations of people, the breeding of brainwashed Soldiers. He was to blame for every rancid bit of it.
“But the Lyrans firmly believe that leaders have no power if no one follows. And they observed that almost everyone in the human universe followed and obeyed the edicts and laws of the Cheo, and CSO, and the other members of the Corporation Board. Out of fear, out of duty, out of blind obedience. But follow they did.
“And I began to wonder — who should we blame most? The evil, or the good? For the evil are following their own nature. But the good — the people like us — me, and all of you — we just obey because we don’t believe you can “beat the system”. We are complicit in genocide, year after year, each of us, every one of you. You all have blood on your hands, not just the Soldiers. All of you.
“So I decided to make a difference. I conceived a conspiracy to thwart the CSO by saving an alien planet from genocide, just as I told you earlier. And I confided my plans in Andrew Hooperman. And, as you know, he betrayed me. So I bribed my guards to allow me to escape from Earth. And before I left, I conceived a new plan, a cold-blooded conspiracy to murder Dr Jeremy Marston, the Chief Scientific Officer of the Galactic Corporation, and all the other members of the Board. Including the Cheo himself.
“I planted nanobot bombs in the airconditioning of Westminster Abbey, timed to explode during a Board meeting when I knew the Chief Executive of the Corporation would be present. And for backup, I put a bomb in Hooperman’s book of the Tree of Life, which he was due to present to the Cheo in person.” Saunders stared at his accusers. “And I thought, with all of them dead, Marston, Peter Smith, the whole corrupt gang of them, I thought there’d be some chance to — no matter. I failed.
“You see, the nanobots were disabled by the Board’s security systems. And the nuclear missile I launched from a warehouse on the South Bank of the Thames was blown out of the sky by satellite lasers. And Hooperman was snubbed by the CSO and the Cheo, and never got to hand over the fucking book to them. And so he went home and he was blown up by mistake, and you know the rest.
“I wasn’t acting alone. I had a dozen co-conspirators, the best and the brightest and the boldest men and women in the world. None of them informed on me. All remained steadfast. Between us, we built the bombs and the nuclear missile and cracked the Cheo’s security systems and we almost succeeded. But we didn’t succeed. We failed. His empire is too great, his security too perfect, his Doppelganger Robots too powerful, his Soldiers too loyal. No one can ever defeat the Cheo; and so I predict his regime will prevail until the end of time.
“All of my co-conspirators were captured and, I don’t doubt, died in agony. I managed to flee, and for centuries I have been f
leeing. Pursued by the deranged Hooperman, but also wanted by the Cheo’s secret police. I have lied to all of you and I feel no shame for that. I have deceived everyone, and I am proud of it. I am a failure in my life’s mission, to make a better universe for humans, but I exult in the fact that at least I fucking tried. And that’s my story. That is me.”
There was another stunned silence.
“Why didn’t you tell us all this earlier?” Mary Beebe said bleakly.
“Because Major Molloy and the other Soldiers would have killed me on the spot,” Saunders said. “It’s the first principle of the Soldier’s Code: to protect the Cheo with their lives, and to kill anyone who threatens the Cheo. It’s their conditioning. So I had no choice. I had to lie, to protect my life.”
Mary turned to look at Sorcha, still shackled to the chair. Then she looked at Tonii and Clementine. “Is this true?” she asked.
“It’s true,” said Tonii.
“Yes,” said Clementine.
“Yes,” said Sorcha. “I’m sorry, but I have to kill you, Carl. The minute you let me go, I will execute you.”
There was an extremely awkward pause. Then Mary looked back to Tonii and Clementine, who were both armed and body-armoured. “And what about you?” Mary asked.
“I — must,” said Tonii, and wrestled with his conscience. “No! I owe no loyalty to the Cheo. Not any more.”
“Clementine?”
“This is my tribe now,” said Clementine. “What’s done is done.”
“Traitors!” Sorcha roared.
“Sorcha — please —” Tonii begged.
“Make a fresh start?” Clementine implored.
But Sorcha wrestled wildly with her bonds, and with her killing rage, and would not heed their words.
“Sorcha, I love you,” Saunders said wearily.
Sorcha spat at him and fought to get free. She rocked the chair until blood dripped from her wrists, and still the bonds didn’t break and finally she was still. She sat and glared at Saunders, her enemy, thinking her hate at him as if communicating with a Gryphon.
Red Claw Page 31
