The Claus Effect

by David Nickle

  Grimacing with the pain, Emily pulled herself up over the rim of the sleigh. She hung there for a moment, gathering her strength, then hoisted herself the rest of the way and collapsed gasping against the seat. In a moment, she would gather up the reins, give them a firm but gentle snap, and call out the reindeers’ names, one by one. Then she would take off into the sky, leaving Santa Claus amid the ruins of his obscene Toy Mill, and return to Murmansk. She’d come back for Claus later…

  Later…

  “Haha!”

  The voice came from distressingly nearby. “Haha, Emily, I know you’re in there!”

  In spite of herself, Emily peaked up over the edge of the sleigh. Not a dozen feet off, the Claus stood, feet spread and a look of supreme confidence on his ice-ravaged face. He held in his hand a small black snuff-box.

  “I knew I left this somewhere, little Emily!” Claus held it forward. “Do y’ remember?”

  “Stay back!” said Emily, and took hold of the reins.

  Santa Claus threw back his head and laughed. “Oh that’s rich,” he chortled. “You, take off in my sleigh! Haha! It’d never happen!”

  “I’m warning you…” said Emily.

  “I take it you don’t remember,” snarled Santa Claus, opening the top of the box. He reached in with two long fingers and removed a pinch of something that glittered and sparkled like tinsel in the arctic gloom.

  “Magic powder!” said Claus, looking at it wonderingly. “I made you with it once; and by Satan’s stench I’ll make you again!”

  Before Emily could duck, Santa Claus puffed and the sparkles settled on Emily’s forehead. Elf dust! Emily remembered now, and tried in vain to scrape it off. Claus was going to make her into an elf again!

  “Salaa kaboom,” said Claus, his eyes wide with his own version of elfish glee. “You’re an—”

  A blue bolt shot across the tundra, throwing Emily back. Claus looked into it with the surprised rage of a lifer caught in a guard-tower spotlight. His scream sent the bent finger of a smokestack tumbling to the ground, made the sheet-metal roofing of a warehouse sing like a saw. When the light vanished, the Claus stood naked before the night, layers of skin burned away, his beard nothing but a patchy tatter on the remains of his chin. Only his eye, a small red fury in the mess of his face, remained intact.

  The light came again, and when it dimmed, Santa Claus was gone. The reindeer stood shivering and dazzled in the new darkness, and after barely a second’s thought, Emily joined them.

  “Salaa kaboom,” said Emily amid the black ruin of her childhood. “I’m a woman.”

  Then, when she felt ready, she lifted the reins and took to the sky.

  Mr. Beland set down the joystick, and looked over to where Neil was crouched holding his knees for warmth. Mr. Beland didn’t seem in the least affected by the cold—indeed, his time at the computer console seemed to have invigorated him, brought back more of the man that Neil remembered from Station Black Ice.

  Gone was the uncertainty of his gaze, the twitch of his lips. He even seemed to have smoothed his hair down, straightened his collar. Neil was glad, he supposed, but Mr. Beland’s smile was gone too. He looked at Neil with a grim satisfaction.

  “Santa Claus is dead, Cadet Lieutenant Nyman,” said Mr. Beland.

  Neil grinned. “Mission accomplished.”

  Mr. Beland turned back to the machine. “Wrong, boy. Mission is half-way accomplished.”

  “Half-way?” Neil craned his neck to look over his commander’s shoulder. On the screen, he could see the tiny rectangular Emily-icon sitting now alone in the sleigh. Daintily, the entire graphic lifted from the virtual ground. “What do you mean by that? Sir?”

  “Your work is done, Cadet Lieutenant,” said Mr. Beland, centring the cross-hairs on the sleigh. “If you want to make yourself useful, you might try thinking up a story for the congressional hearings. Don’t leave out any details—those bastards are pickier than a UN inspection team when it comes to details.”

  TARGET ACQUIRED flashed on the screen, and Neil’s heart leapt into his throat as the realization struck him.

  Mr. Beland was going to blow up Emily!

  “Of course the simplest way out,” continued Mr. Beland, “is to feign amnesia. I’ve used that twice, but the real master is former President—”

  Neil didn’t let him finish. He swung the Tokarev in a wide arc, and when it connected with the back of Mr. Beland’s skull it made a cracking sound. Mr. Beland fell forward, and Neil gratefully noted that the cross-hairs had swung wide from the sleigh-icon. Uncle Augustus wouldn’t have approved—you don’t strike a commanding officer!—but Neil was past caring.

  The field flashed white for an instant as the Black Globe fired blind, and as the hologram returned to normal Neil strained to see what had become of the sleigh.

  But a hand reached from behind and grabbed him by the neck, pulling him away before he could see anything. Another hand snatched the Tokarev from his grip and tossed it clattering off the tower.

  “That’s the second pistol-whipping I’ve had today, boy,” snarled Mr. Beland as he held Neil choking in the air. “And let me tell you, I didn’t take too well to the first one, either.”

  Neil struggled to breath. “Wh-why?” he managed.

  Mr. Beland’s lips curled back into a sneer. “Why? Why what?” He threw Neil onto the stones, and drew his own handgun.

  Neil lay gasping for a moment, then finally managed: “Why kill Emily? She’s on our side.”

  Mr. Beland shook his head. “What do they teach at West Point these days? My God, boy, think of the things she’s seen! The things she knows! What do you think, Cadet Lieutenant? That the Soviet Union’s had a little change of government, and suddenly the United States of America doesn’t have any enemies?”

  “That would be naive,” admitted Neil.

  “More than naive, boy.” Mr. Beland lifted the gun and aimed it at Neil’s skull. “That kind of thinking is dangerous. It leaves us open to all kinds of threats.”

  “What kind of threat is Emily?” Neil asked as he propped himself up on his elbows.

  Instead of answering, Mr. Beland motioned for Neil to get up. Neil obeyed, and Mr. Beland waved him over to the Black Globe console.

  “You want to be a soldier, don’t you, Cadet Lieutenant?”

  Neil wasn’t so sure anymore, but he nodded anyway.

  Mr. Beland’s eyes glinted orange in the combined glow of the hologram and the light on his chest. The wind picked up, sending a gust of snow between them.

  “Then sit down, soldier, and finish the job.”

  Neil looked at the hologram. The Black Globe might have lost its target, but it was still following the sleigh. Somewhere, far to the north of here, the great caldron was crossing the moon, its skis leaving frozen contrails in the stratosphere. The sleigh’s icon seemed to be moving cleanly, Neil noted, even with the jumbled nuclear payload hanging off its stern. Emily had obviously flown in the sleigh before.

  Mr. Beland thrust the joystick at Neil. “Do as you’re ordered, Cadet Lieutenant Nyman!” Mr. Beland screamed over the wind. “Kill that civilian, before she can tell!”

  The light in Mr. Beland’s pocket had begun to pulsate, like a tiny irradiated heart. He brought the gun down inches from Neil’s face, and repeated:

  “Kill her!” The wind lashed spittle in long snotty lines across Mr. Beland’s face. “Kill her, you misbegotten coward!”

  Neil took the joystick, and leaned over the keyboard. Mr. Beland lowered his gun.

  “Good soldier!” Mr. Beland’s head bobbed a little too enthusiastically as he shrieked: “Excellent soldier!”

  Call me a coward, will you? thought Neil as he typed in the seven-digit datastring that had been running through his head like an old Archies song. The co-ordinates of the hangar burned across the screen in crimson sans-serif, as big as Santa Claus’ sleigh.

  Mr. Beland might have been about to scream something else, but Neil didn’t give him a chan
ce. He hit the macro, pressed ‘Y,’ and threw himself to the stones as the night sky lit up with the cleansing blue flame of the Black Globe.

  High above the roped-off remains of Emily’s house, the Black Globe satellite found itself immersed in sudden silence. Only an instant before, the more-or-less constant chatter of the ground-link at Murmansk had bathed it in comforting noise, a pleasant after-dinner conversation that ranged from the bad weather they were experiencing in Idaho to troop movements in Central America.

  Over the course of that conversation, the satellite had obediently tracked its cameras across the one-eighth of the globe within its sights, and when the command came through, it had switched on its targeting subroutine and fired tube-clearing blasts of charged particles along mathematically perfect lines of trajectory. The conversation had sent those lines through a single-family residential unit in southern Ontario; two Harrier jump-jet fighters over the Barents Sea; into the North Pole itself; and finally, through nearly a kilometre of solid rock in the wilds to the south of Murmansk.

  The Black Globe’s six onboard computers did not possess the processing capacity to correlate the location of that final target with the location of the ground-link. Even if they had, there would have been nothing they could have done to interrupt the command—if the ground-link wanted to disintegrate the earth from beneath it and cut directly through the two-metre thick twist of cables that supplied its electricity, that was the ground-link’s business. So the Black Globe had readied its gun, adjusting the beam’s intensity and timing to cut through the kilometre of rock between it and its target. Had the satellite’s orbit placed it directly overhead, it might have shot straight down the silo, cutting through just a metre of cement and steel. Two second burst, maximum.

  But cutting through all that rock, at an angle of less than thirty degrees, was a different story. The six computers performed the necessary calculations, and the Black Globe relayed the following message:

  This target will require a 67.23 second blast at 87 per cent power draw. Are you sure? (Press ‘Y’ or ‘N’)

  Y came the reply.

  That was the last word the Black Globe would ever hear from the Murmansk groundlink. When it withdrew its core rods and turned off the particle beam a minute later, the most powerful weapons satellite then orbiting the Earth was utterly, silently alone.

  Neil thought he should be getting the hang of weathering explosions from the top of castle towers, but the last explosion had nothing on this one. When he’d entered the location co-ordinates of the hangar and pressed ‘Y,’ Neil had expected a quick burst from the sky, setting off some of the conventional weapons and rocket fuel stockpiled far below and creating enough of a distraction for him to get the jump on Mr. Beland.

  But the beam didn’t stop. And incredibly, it seemed to be coming not from the sky, but from below—he and Mr. Beland crouched in the tower’s shadow as the world around and below them sparked brilliant blue, the ground underneath them shook and shifted.

  Neil felt like throwing up, but he swallowed and forced himself onto his hands and knees. Mr. Beland was curled tight with his head between his knees—the position reminded Neil of images of schoolchildren in old newsreel films from the Cuban missile crisis—head between your legs, kiss your petootie goodbye. The two elfs sat stock still in their bonds, their eyes screwed shut.

  Neil crawled toward the top of the stairs. He was about to lower himself, then glanced guiltily over at his prisoners. It really wasn’t their fault that the low crenels he’d leaned them against were beginning to crumble.

  With a sigh, Neil crawled over to the elfs.

  Words were impossible over the steady roar of the particle beam, so Neil flipped the elfs over on their stomachs and set to work on the bonds. No sooner were they free than the elfs bolted for the stairs and dove into the dark.

  Neil turned to follow, but was stopped short once more. A jagged Etch-a-Sketch line of a fissure crossed the middle of the tower. On the far side, Neil could see Mr. Beland rolling out of his ground-zero huddle and pushing himself up against the shifting bulk of the now-dark groundlink. The fissure widened, and Mr. Beland grew more distant even as he bolted to close the gap.

  The tower was separating, Neil realized—any minute now, one half or another was going to fall.

  And Emily, Neil realized, had been saved. He was mildly disappointed to note that this second realization did nothing to quell the naked terror brought on by the first realization. Neil cast about blindly for something solid to grab onto. He finally settled for one of the crumbling crenels.

  What the hell had gone wrong? The beam should have shot straight down on the hangar, straight down from the sky. Just like…

  Oh.

  Just like the last time.

  Neil thought back to the last time he was up here, when the Claus had shot down the jets. The beam hadn’t come from high in the sky, but had shot across the horizon. The Black Globe was over the equator—not Murmansk. There was no way it could have shot down the launch tube. If it was going to hit the hangar, it would have to bore through the mountain.

  Evidently it had to shoot through the mountain directly underneath this tower. Through God knew how many metres of solid, at-one-point-structurally-sound dirt and rock.

  Neil felt the crack through his bones as the tower beyond the fissure finally separated and fell into the brilliant fire. An instant later, that fire vanished and Neil found himself enmeshed in a perfect, celestial darkness. His eyes burned with the afterimage of the plummeting stonework, and he searched that afterimage in vain for any sign of Mr. Beland.

  Neil felt more than heard the muted explosions from the subterranean hangar, and he both felt and heard the snapping and swaying of the remains of the tower underneath him.

  Arms trembling, Neil let go of the crenel and inched over to the lip of the fissure. His eyes were re-adjusting to the sub-arctic night, and as he squinted over the ragged stone, he could see well enough to guess at the damage.

  It seemed as though the tremors had cut a wedge off the top of the tower. Immediately below Neil could see the shattered remains of the staircase, and the ancient wooden joists from two storeys of tower that had been cracked open by the collapse. It was easily a thirty foot drop before the staircase became usable again.

  Farther down, Neil could make out the dim shape of the main keep. Its roof had been obliterated by the fallen rubble, and as Neil watched, a section of the ancient stone wall collapsed inward with a despondent rumble. The stink of centuries wafted up through the freezing air.

  And directly below him, the second storey down, Neil caught a glimpse of red light. It was the same light that he’d seen moments before, in Mr. Beland’s flight suit.

  As fast as he’d seen it, the light vanished.

  Neil opened his mouth, but his throat felt as though it had been freeze-dried. If he were going to scream, it would have to be later.

  Neil scrambled backwards from the edge of the fissure. There was literally nowhere to run: if Mr. Beland was going to attack, Neil would have to face him.

  And Neil had already played his last card. There was nothing he could use as a weapon on the windswept top of the tower.

  What had he been thinking when he pressed the ‘Y’ key? At the time, Neil had barely considered the geometry of the gambit, let alone the repercussions. It was, he supposed, better than frying Emily for the CIA or whichever clandestine government agency it was that Mr. Beland represented. But if Neil had pulled a stunt like this at West Point, Station Black Ice would seem like a furlough compared with the things they’d do to him.

  Maybe, thought Neil as the thing that was once Mr. Beland dragged itself onto the tower roof and glared at him in the light of its three Christmas-red eyes, it was time to think about transferring to a less-demanding school.

  The Claus’ icy fortress was lit up like a road-flare, and although it took some convincing before the reindeer would fly in that direction, Emily had no problem sighting it.
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br />   By the time the sleigh drew near enough, the blue light from orbit had been replaced by orange fireballs which periodically shot up from the hangar-crater along with enormous clouds of mountain-snow that glittered like bloodied stardust above the conflagration.

  “On Donner! On Cupid! On Dancer! Come on people! We have to pick up Neil before the elfs murder him! This is really important!”

  There was no way Emily was going to use the whip—not after all the beatings she’d seen the Claus administer over the years. Emily vowed that she would use nothing more pain-inducing than good sense and logic to motivate the reindeer. After all, somebody had to break the cycle of punishment and reward that had driven the human race to the brink of nuclear destruction. And that somebody might as well be Emily.

  Reluctantly, the reindeer conceded her point and the sleigh banked into a steep arc towards the crumbling remains of the castle.

  Spotting Neil was almost as easy as finding the fortress: if the explosions from the hangar were a flare, then the glow that pinned Neil on the diminishing surface of the tower roof was the brilliant red of the lights on a speeding police cruiser.

  Three eyes, and all of them glowing. At least now Neil knew what the glow in Mr. Beland’s pocket reminded him of: the Claus’ severed eyeball, first at the North Pole and more recently at the business end of Neil’s plunger. Now that glow had transferred to Mr. Beland’s own eyes, and Neil was sure he could see a strong measure of the Claus in them. The third eye swivelled in Mr. Beland’s flight suit and glared at Neil along with the other two.

  “I spared you, you ungrateful little bastard.” Mr. Beland’s voice was like a saw through lake ice. “I spared your life.”

  Neil supposed Mr. Beland had a point, but he couldn’t bring himself to utter even an insincere thank you to the monstrosity before him.

  Mr. Beland had been transformed by more than a two-storey fall in the middle of a particle-beam storm. His face seemed to have twisted and stretched, exaggerating his features in ways that would have been comic if his eyes weren’t glowing that particularly maniacal shade of red. His flight suit was torn in a dozen places, and where flesh showed through it was a glacial white.