The Claus Effect

by David Nickle

  Emily read off the numbers as she could, and waited for Neil to input them properly. Finally, he came back on.

  “I keep getting him and losing him again.”

  “What?”

  “Well I get that holographic cube up, just like before when the Claus was using it, and this little red triangle shoots up through the top.”

  “Well the Claus didn’t have that problem,” said Emily. “Why don’t you just—”

  And then she could say no more. Without even looking, The Claus grabbed the walkie-talkie from her, switched it to “listen” and flung it over the side of the sleigh. With a sinking heart, Emily listened to Neil’s diminishing cry:

  “Just whaaaaaaat?”

  “I think,” said the Claus, “that that is quite enough chit-chat for now.”

  “Just what?” Neil hit the walkie-talkie against the desk. “Just try what?”

  Only dead static answered him. Dejectedly, he turned back to the holographic cube, now an empty yellow hue, the red triangle long gone.

  “Trye effe one,” said one of the trussed-up elfs on the floor.

  Neil picked up the joystick. The Claus had used a joystick to shoot down those attacking aircraft. If Neil could figure out how to get back to the Claus’ original settings…

  “Effe one is ’a best way,” agreed the other elf.

  Neil looked up, at the last minute remembering to scowl. “What’s your problem, prisoners?” he snarled.

  “Nae priblim.” The first elf looked up with wide black-rimmed eyes. “But ye’ll niver git that thing tae werk if ye jist sit thar lookin’ fyulish.”

  “Who are you calling fyul-er, foolish?” Grudgingly, Neil pushed F1 on the computer keyboard.

  The yellow field was immediately replaced with a large block-letter graphic of the word HELP.

  Neil began scrolling. Time was wasting, and the longer he took figuring this machine out, the more likely it was that the Claus would be able to deliver his deadly parcels. He didn’t let himself think about Emily. Responsibility. She was absolutely right about that.

  Neil had just gotten into the part about Macros when one of the elfs pointed with his long, beak-like nose.

  “Thar ’e goos,” said the elf.

  Neil looked up in time to see the sleigh’s bloated shadow crossing the full moon. The warheads trailed behind in sacks like spider eggs.

  Macros. “The BG-1756-XN20 is equipped with numerous features to assist you in all your targeting needs. The Target Retrieval Macro system allows your Black Globe to track and target numerous objects at once, with the operator choosing which of those objects to either observe in a realtime framework, or to initiate action upon. And after a long day at the console, there’s no need to worry about nodding off. The BG-1756-XN20 will monitor even low-priority targets automatically through the night.”

  Neil studied the command chain for a moment, then pressed the escape key and fired up the macro.

  “Bingo,” said Neil as the screen reconfigured. “That’s what we’re after.”

  When the hologram formed again, the icon sat squarely in the middle of the familiar green cube. The sleigh was a tiny red sphere, and it would have been the easiest thing for Neil to simply centre the tiny red crosshairs overtop it, and pull the trigger…

  Obliterating Emily, and fulfilling his responsibility all in one heroic act.

  Heroic. The word tasted like bile in Neil’s throat.

  “No,” he said. “There has to be another way.”

  “Oooo,” said the first elf. “Beeg brayve soldier is gittin a wee bit chickin.”

  The second elf began making remarkably realistic farm noises.

  Neil flipped open the tutorial again, to the Precision Fire chapter. “The BG-1756-XN20 is capable of discerning objects one foot across and targeting objects three feet in diameter. In order to take full advantage of the BG-1756-XN20’s remarkable resolution…”

  Once again, Neil memorized the command chain and entered it into the system. And once again the screen changed. This time, it grew to seven times its original size, and was filled with an enormous and blindingly bright red sphere. Neil nearly dropped the joystick it was so bright, and it took him a moment to realize what he was seeing:

  A 200x blowup of Rudolph’s shiny nose.

  Neil went back to work.

  The Claus Effect

  They were crossing the pole.

  Emily didn’t have to look down to know. A chill more profound than even the arctic air cut through her bones, and the aurora borealis sketched circles around the sleigh like some hellish Maypole dance. The Claus whirled his whip in the air and chortled.

  “Home, eh Emily? Just like old times! Ha ha!”

  “R-r-r-right.” Emily shut her eyes. “Makes you feel all warm and nostalgic, eh you old bastard?”

  “Don’t give me any of your lip, you ungrateful whelp,” snapped the Claus. “Don’t forget who made you what you are.”

  “Oh give me a large break,” retorted Emily. “ValueLand made me what I am today—a contributing member of society!”

  “Ha!” The Claus grinned terribly at her. “You were a contributing member of society long before those unimaginative boors got hold of you—a contributing member of my society. I made you, Emily! You might have turned out to be a happy girl if it weren’t for old Santa Claus!”

  Emily was about to reply, but she stopped herself. This was Claus’ game—make some repugnant assertion, back it up with something even more repugnant, then point to the most repugnant thing of all: the truth.

  But this time, Emily wouldn’t bite. She scowled resolutely as Claus cackled and cried out to his reindeer:

  “Down! Down you misbegotten lackeys!”

  Claus glanced down at Emily’s scowl and whooped to make the borealis resonate:

  “Down to the Toy Mill!”

  “There!”

  Neil leaned back and admired his handiwork. The hologram cube had settled on a volume three feet on a side, and the sleigh had resolved itself into discrete icons: a big black inverted triangle for the sleigh itself; overlapping spheres representing the nukes hanging off one end; eight tiny rectangles with four prancing lines beneath each of them, representing the reindeer; and in the sleigh, more complex collections of shapes representing the Claus and what Neil could only presume to be Emily.

  Of the two, the Claus’ icon was more recognizable. His head was a great diamond, the top triangle red representing his cap, and the bottom winter-white for his beard. His body was an inverted triangle, suggesting the frame of a body-builder, and his arms were long red sticks which gesticulated in an uncomfortably familiar pattern.

  Emily, on the other hand, was represented by a single blue triangle. The Black Globe system could not even resolve a separate icon for her head and arms.

  “Widdid I till ye?” said the first elf. “Effe one. Werks every time.”

  “I have to admit…” began Neil, then stopped himself. He wasn’t here to make small talk with the enemy. He picked up the joystick and called up the Black Globe crosshairs.

  “Now you old bastard,” snarled Neil, “eat particle beams!”

  The cross-hairs swung across the field in a stroboscopic red arc, locking and unlocking on various parts of the sleigh until they settled on the Claus-icon. Neil swallowed. This was really it. This time, there was no way…

  Neil leaned forward. Something was happening to the sleigh. It was…banking.

  The reindeer-icons moved first, arcing towards Neil, then the triangle of the sleigh tilted behind them. Then the reindeer curved downwards, and the sleigh followed. Neil glanced at the GPS datastring below the picture: ninety degrees latitude, zero degrees longitude…altitude dropping so fast it registered only as a blurred string of eights on the screen. Neil took his hand off the joystick and shivered.

  The Claus was diving on the North Pole.

  He was going back to the Toy Mill.

  The sleigh and reindeer straightened into a perfect
vertical line, plummeting at an impossible speed which the crosshairs managed to track flawlessly nonetheless. Had Neil decided to, he could have pressed the joystick button and finished it there, but to do so would have left Emily alone in the falling sleigh, with bags-full of armed nuclear warheads only a nanosecond behind her. He might as well have zapped them before they left the hangar for all the difference it would make to Emily.

  The reindeer-icons arched up suddenly, snapping the sleigh-icon like the end of a whip. The nuke-spheres bounced off one another like clacker-balls as the reindeers’ stick-legs scrabbled against the virtual arctic air, and Claus-icon’s diamond head swivelled back atop its triangle strongman body.

  Slowly, like a reef emerging in low tide, other icons rose from the base of the cube.

  These icons were not solid shapes like the sleigh, but rather contoured distortions from a grid of white lines at the base of the hologram. The distortions formed shapes eerily familiar to Neil: twists of steel, half-decimated brick walls, pavement buckled by cold and explosive so the reinforcement cable twisted like snake-spines into the cold.

  The icon representing Santa Claus’ sleigh settled onto the icon representing the ruins of the Toy Mill. Five hundred miles to the north, Emily and the Claus got out of the sleigh and stood, too close for a safe shot, in the midst of the field of ruins.

  “Why are we stopping here?” shouted Emily. “We blew this place up already.”

  The Claus didn’t answer immediately. They had landed atop a rise that afforded an apocalyptic view of the destruction in every direction. Santa Claus held Emily pinned between his left arm and his bony chest, a human swagger stick, and his eyes held an uncharacteristic melancholy as they cast about the black, twisted wreckage. The arctic wind howled like a new widow.

  “Yes,” he finally murmured. “We blew this place up already. Gouts of flame. Shards of metal. Blizzards of ash. I remember, Emily Elf.”

  “I’m not your elf anymore.”

  Claus licked his lips with a tiny blue-tipped tongue and looked down at Emily with a chilly gentleness.

  “Like hell you’re not,” he said softly.

  It was actually uncomfortably warm in the Claus’ armpit, but Emily shivered nonetheless. In all her dealings with the Claus, she had never seen him precisely like this: still, thoughtful…

  And more homicidal than ever.

  Emily forced herself to keep talking.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” she said. “Why are we here?”

  “I think I already have, my tiny toy elf,” said Claus. “We’re home. This is the place we shared, Emily. This is the place where you and I, where we both took the world into our hands. Do y’ remember?”

  “I remember,” said Emily. “This is the place where you destroyed Christmas. Where you tried to, anyway.”

  Claus shook his head, like a grandparent trying to explain the value of higher education to a rock musician. “Semantics,” he said. “I could well say the same thing for you, treasonous little proletariat that you were. Truth is, Emily, we had Christmas well in hand. That pact you made with that, that…eel—”

  “Your wife,” Emily corrected.

  “Semantics,” said Claus again. “That pact came as close to destroying the season as anything I’ve ever done.” To illustrate, he swept his free hand over the bleak vista.

  “The season has muddled through,” said Emily.

  Santa Claus chuckled at that. “And so, my dear elf, have I.”

  “So why are we here? You’ve got thermonuclear bombs to deliver and the night won’t last forever.”

  Santa Claus looked up at the borealis and made a cavalier gesture with his free hand. “Tradition, I suppose. I’ve always started my Christmas Eve run from here. Somehow, the northern-most sea port of the former Soviet Union just doesn’t rate, eh? And with you along, there’s a certain symmetry to this spot as well.”

  Emily tried to squirm out from under the Claus’ armpit, but as she did so he tightened the lock. The now-useless GPS ground against her ribs.

  “After all,” he continued mildly, “you killed me, just about where we’re standing. It’s the least I can do to return the favour.”

  Homicidal. Emily was right. Santa Claus had gone crazy, even by his own warped standards.

  The pressure from his arm made breathing increasingly difficult, and for a moment Emily was sure that was how it would end. Santa Claus would crush the life out of Emily like some bug, and then get back in his sleigh and lash his reindeer into one final trip, to deliver his payload of Cold War gifts to the sleeping world. As her vision greyed, and the ringing in her ears drowned even the howl of the polar wind, a final, terrible thought occurred to Emily:

  In the nuclear winter, every day is Christmas.

  “Don’t move an inch or I’ll blow your Bolshevik brains clear across the parapets.”

  Neil sat stock still in front of the hologram display. The command had come from behind him, and it was accompanied by the sound of the safety coming off an auto-pistol. And the inflection was clearly American. Neil even thought he might have recognized it.

  “Don’t shoot,” he squeaked, “I’m an American.”

  The voice sniggered. “Right. And I’m Vladimir Lenin.” The voice paused as its owner shuffled across the stone rooftop. “Well what have we here? Looks like a BG-1756-XN20 man-portable command unit. Now what would Ivan be doing with a shiny piece of American know-how like that?”

  “I told you,” repeated Neil. “I’m not ‘Ivan.’ I’m cadet lieutenant Neil Nyman, and I’ve commandeered this piece of stolen ‘American know-how’ to stop Santa Claus before he blows up the world!”

  On the screen, Santa Claus’ icon had stepped away from the Emily-triangle, which now lay motionless next to a distortion of brickwork.

  “Was that a note of irony I detected in your voice, Ivan?”

  “What?”

  The voice chuckled. “Irony, boy. When you said ‘American know-how.’ Commies can never resist a jab.”

  “Look,” said Neil impatiently. “I’ve got Santa Claus in my sights. Are you going to let me shoot him, or not?”

  Neil’s captor stepped around the other side of the hologram. They squinted at one another through the flailing polyhedrons of the Claus-icon as it descended a virtual ramp to the pulverized remains of a loading bay.

  Neil could have been looking at a mountain man. The gunman’s eyes were jumpy, and his lips twitched uncertainly over his jaw. He wore some kind of jumpsuit—a weird red light glowed through the fabric of the left breast pocket—and his hair, although not long, stood in patches over a dirty, bruised forehead. Underneath, the man’s brow crinkled with recognition.

  “Wait a minute,” he growled, gesturing with his gun-barrel straight through Santa Claus’ midriff, “you’re not Ivan.”

  “Thank you,” said Neil. “Now will you please give me the gun?”

  “You’re that kid from Station Black Ice.”

  “From Station—” Neil pointed excitedly as he spoke. “The submarine captain! Umberto! Right?”

  The captain lowered his gun and laughed. “That’s right, boy. One and the same. But I’m called Mr. Beland. You ever hitch up with old Umberto?”

  “It was only a code name,” said Neil, and the two of them leaned into the hologram and high-fived through a grid-defined smokestack. Mr. Beland lowered his sidearm.

  “Well,” said Mr. Beland, withdrawing from the smokestack, “looks like I won’t be needing this gun anymore. You’ve done well for yourself, Cadet Lieutenant Neil Nyman, working your way through the guards and traps to get this far.” Between them, the Claus-icon glanced up, down, and began scrabbling at something on the ground.

  “Thanks, sir,” said Neil, standing straight in the presence of a superior officer.

  Mr. Beland nodded approvingly.

  “Now,” he said, “I think you’d better let your commander take over from here.”

  In the hologram, a virtual manhole c
over came away from the grid of the ruins, and the Claus stepped into it. The crosshairs flickered and were replaced by a large yellow question-mark as the Claus-icon disappeared in the hole in the bottom of the hologram.

  Mr. Beland and Neil stared at one another through the empty hologram cube. Wordlessly, Neil handed the joystick across the table, through the virtual arctic night.

  “It’s all yours, sir.”

  Emily was sure she had broken a rib. Every time she inhaled, it felt like something sharp was jabbing into her lung, and every time she exhaled it seemed as though something serrated was being drawn back out. Claus had left her on her back beside the runners of the sleigh, and he appeared to have left her for dead. Doubtless, Emily thought, if she had been in his shoes she would have made the same mistake.

  As Emily tried to move, she revised the broken rib theory. She could stand, so they weren’t broken, but nearly every one of them ached mightily. For the first time in days, Emily wished she could see her Auntie—for the purposes of medical advice if nothing else.

  With no small amount of difficulty, Emily got to her feet. After having been unconscious and therefore motionless, the cold was incredible, and the fact that she couldn’t move much now without hurting herself made it that much worse.

  In desperation, Emily moved towards the reindeer, who at least were warm, and huddled gratefully against Donner’s matted coat. She could feel the poor creature’s heart still pounding from the exertion of the flight here.

  And that flight would be nothing compared to the rest of the night…

  Emily shook her head, as much in surprise at her own defeatism as anything else. True, the Black Globe ploy had failed; true, she was now alone and injured at the North Pole with Santa Claus, enough nuclear warheads to incinerate the earth twelve times over, and his eight tiny reindeer; and true enough, she was armed with nothing but her now-useless Global Positioning System and her wits…

  But Santa Claus was nowhere in sight, and the sleigh loaded with all those nukes was completely unguarded.