“Of course.”
“It’ll make a wonderful documentary.”
Saunders marvelled at the view, and at the stupidity of Sorcha.
“They’ll never make a movie of this planet, Sorcha,” he said gently. “That bridge is burned.”
“I guess,” she conceded.
“You look gorgeous.”
“Do I?”
Sorcha looked like shit: like she’d fallen into a quicksand swamp, and walked for days in the blazing skin-searing heat, and for long nights with her face lashed by icy winds, then been swallowed alive by a monstrous hedge and spat out again; but yes, she also looked gorgeous. “Would I lie about a thing like that?” Saunders said gallantly.
Sorcha remembered a few things about Professor Carl Saunders. He was nearly six hundred years old; he had been divorced sixteen times; he had once been accused of bigamy. And he was famous for his charm, and womanising zeal.
“Hmm,” she said.
“He’s mad, you know,” Saunders told her. “Hooperman. Or rather, he’s become mad, over the centuries. The Andrew Hooperman I knew was an angry and vengeful and, let’s face it, frankly annoying bastard. But he would never have done all this. He would never have massacred innocent men and women. So Hooperman must have gone mad, it’s the only explanation.”
Sorcha shrugged. “Whatever.”
“Which is tragic if you think about —”
“Skip the fucking philosophy. How do we kill him?” Sorcha said bluntly.
“We can’t, if he’s a Ghost. He’s not alive, he’s incorporeal, he’s beyond our power to hurt him. So all we can do is smash and obliterate every single Doppelganger Robot on the planet. And then we have to rebuild a civilisation without robots, and without AI. Because then, Hooperman will have no way of attacking us. He’ll be a spirit, without flesh, without metal, sans everything.”
“That sounds like a plan,” Sorcha said, and felt the breeze on her cheeks, and exulted in anticipation of war to come.
“It’s great, seeing all of you back with your science projects,” said Mia with a shy laugh.
“It’s what we’re here for! We’re Scientists, for heaven’s sake!” Ben told her. “That’s what that idiot Anderson never understood.”
“You’re right. Absolutely right. I wish I —” She broke off, embarrassed.
“What?” he prompted, gently.
“Well, I envy you, really,” Mia said, disarmingly. “I’d love to have been a Scientist. I was always hopeless at that stuff, I flunked my maths degree. So I admire people who can do maths and science without, you know.” She grinned. “A brain implant and things.”
“Oh there’s no shame in getting answers from a brain implant,” said Ben, with ostentatious generosity.
“Still, I’m trying to train myself to think more scientifically,” said Mia. “So — can I just ask —” She conjured up her virtual screen, and was presented with an endless array of photographs of skeletons of New Amazonian animals.
“— you to explain to me,” she said, “about the two sorts of vertebrate?”
He smiled. “Of course,” he said. “Well, where shall I begin?” And he began, using the photographs on his virtual screen to illustrate his points.
“This is Type A: creatures with a bonelike vertebra, or double vertebra, or triple vertebra, or those with a latticelike vertebra made, strangely, of copper. This is a good example of Type A,” he said, tapping the mid-air image with his finger. “And this is a Juggernaut, with a copper lattice infrastructure. And this is a Basilisk.”
“And Type B?”
“Has anyone ever told you,” said Ben gently, “that you’re a wonderful, warm, special, sexy woman?”
Mia laughed, a lovely bell-like laugh, which she had copied from Mary Beebe because it was so cute. “Not nearly enough people!” she admitted, smiling.
“You like men, don’t you?” Ben continued.
“Actually, I’m gay,” Mia told him.
“But you like flirting with men.”
“I’m not a flirt!” she protested, and laughed another bell-like laugh.
“And you like telling men you’re gay, because they immediately have an image of you naked with another woman, and that turns them on.”
Mia’s smile faltered. She held back on the bell-like laugh.
There was something not right about Ben’s tone; was he mocking her?
“But you’re not,” said Ben, “not really.”
“I’m sorry, Ben?” said Mia, baffled.
“People think you are, but you’re not,” explained Ben. “You’re not wonderful at all, or warm, or special. Far from it. You’re mediocre. Tediously average. Deplorably pointless. And you’re not sexy, either,” he continued, in the same gentle tones. “You’re not even highly sexed. Sex is something you endure, but it gives you no pleasure. Because you’re emotionally frigid,” he said, still gently. “Aren’t you?”
She blinked. Something had gone badly wrong here.
“You’re sad,” said Ben. “Sad. Empty. Pathetic. People feel sorry for you, don’t they, Mia? Or rather, sometimes they do. But usually they just think you’re a sluttish, stupid, manipulative bitch.”
The walls and floor were collapsing in Mia’s world. She’d wanted to win Ben’s friendship. Why was he taunting her like this?
“That’s not true,” she replied, pathetically.
“You act like a whore. You flirt with men and with women, with total lack of shame. You’re insincere. And you ingratiate yourself with people,” Ben explained. “Don’t you? Hmm? You’re like a chameleon. But there’s no real you, is there? You’re just a nothing, a sycophant. But the truth is, when your back is turned, people laugh at you.”
Mia flushed, stifling her rage, knowing it was all true.
“But don’t take it personally,” Ben continued, in calm, reasonable tones. “It’s just the way you are. Some people have oodles of charisma and sex appeal. But there’s only so much to go around, isn’t there?”
“Fuck off, Ben.”
“Ah. I’ve struck a chord.”
“No, you haven’t!” She didn’t know how to counter him: denying what he had said felt like an impossible task. “I was just asking you,” she said tensely, “about what passes for bone on this godforsaken —”
“I’d really hate to be you, Mia,” Ben crooned at her. “You’re so utterly fucking useless. But I am, really, I’m fond of you.” Ben stroked her hair, teasing some strands away from her face, sending shivers down her body, but of hate, not desire. “But don’t worry your pretty little head about the science,” he told her. “You just work on your cooking skills, and keeping yourself pretty and cheerful and being nice company. Because you know what? You’re going to be a Mummy soon, aren’t you? You’re going to have dozens and dozens of little babies, and that will be your role in life from now, until you die.”
“I’m — looking forward to that,” Mia said coldly, her heart in hiding.
Saunders was on his knees, inspecting some insectoid creatures with his visor magnifier.
“Are we done?” asked Sorcha.
“Not nearly done.”
“I’m bored.”
“How can you be bored?” he marvelled. He beckoned her to look. “You see that rock?”
“No.”
“Look. The rock.”
She bent down and looked. She used the magnifier and did an ultrasound scan. “It’s alive.”
“It’s alive.”
“So it’s not a rock.”
“It’s not a rock.”
“So, who gives a fuck?”
“It’s a previously undiscovered life-form,” Saunders told her. “A new genus, a new species.”
“Does it move?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you polish it, and put it on a necklace?”
“It’s a living creature, Sorcha.”
“It’s kind of a nice colour,” she admitted. She picked up the rock. It was red, like
a ruby the size of a thumb. As she moved it, patterns of light appeared on the rock. “It would look pretty neat on a necklace.”
“Put it back.”
The rock evaporated. Sparkles tumbled from her fingers. “I killed it.”
“Maybe not. Maybe that’s part of its life cycle.”
“Let’s go back, huh, spend some time in the sack? Or do I mean, on the rock? Whatever.” She laughed.
“It was so wrong,” Saunders said.
“What was wrong?”
“What we were planning to do on New Amazon. It was evil.”
The blank look in Sorcha’s eyes alarmed Saunders. He persisted.
“Rocks that dissolve into sparkles. The millions of life-forms. The Aldiss trees, the Rat-Insects, the Flesh-Webs, the Juggernauts, the Exploding-Trees, the Gryphons — do you really think I could bear to kill all that?”
The truth hit Sorcha hard. “You always intended to do this. The fake attack on Xabar, blowing up Juno, the Depot.”
Saunders nodded, hiding a smug smile. “Hooperman forced my hand. But yes, this was always the plan. I’ve been preparing for it for the last two years. I built a missile silo, I built the Depot, I bought antimatter, I did all that I did, in order to save New Amazon.”
“All those people died!”
“Not my fault. Hooperman killed them. With my original plan, no one would have died. The missile attack was intended to be all sound and fury, killing no one, signifying nothing — that’s a quotation by the way. But I needed an excuse to justify destroying Juno.”
“That’s some elaborate scheme.”
“I’m the man who spent forty years devising a way to merge chess and Go. This, by comparison, was simple.”
They walked back to their camp. A cloud swirled above them, creating dark and light patterns in the air, then condensing into an oval shape, then sweeping away fast. Without even realising he was doing it, Saunders subvocalised a description of the cloud patterns for his MI, and speculated that it might be some kind of aerial life-form. So much to —
Sorcha interrupted his thoughts: “So the Gryphons are sentient, huh?”
“Yes.”
“How —” She screamed.
“What?”
“My father. My father! He’s right there.” She stopped in her tracks, and pointed madly into space. Saunders smiled. Behind them, Isaac cawed.
“I see nothing.”
“He’s there!” Sorcha could see him, tall, brooding, angry, just as he always was in life.
“He’s not there. It’s an illusion. His image is in your memory. The Gryphon plucked it out, made it manifest.”
“He was thinner than that, in real life,” she said accusingly, staring at the hollow-faced man who was staring accusingly back at her.
“Show me the security perimeter,” Ben said frostily to Private Clementine McCoy.
“Yes, sir.” She walked him through it. “We have four cameras here, four here. Three sentries on duty at any one time.”
“You use the Scientists as sentries, don’t you?”
“Yes, Sergeant Anderson told us to do that. It gives us a bit more time to —”
“Don’t you realise the Scientists have work to do? Important work.”
“I appreciate that, but Sergeant Anderson said —”
“Complex, unfathomable work. Work you could never begin to comprehend. Do you have a PhD, Private?”
“I have a BA. In Military Engineering. I —”
“I said, do you have a PhD? Do you know what that is? Can you do a Fourier Analysis? Do you grasp the topology of N-space? Name the atomic mass of four fundamental particles. You can’t, can you?”
“Give me a —”
“Don’t do a search, you good for nothing waste of fucking space.”
“No, sir.”
“You’re a good for nothing waste of fucking space, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir.” She was comfortable with this level of abuse.
“In future, don’t be so fucking useless.”
“No, sir.”
“And wipe that stupid smile off your face.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re like a little automaton, aren’t you,” said Ben, marvelling. “All I have to do is wind you up.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Take your armour off.”
“Yes, sir.”
One, two, three, four — it was a bewilderingly fast kit change. Clementine stood before him in vest and knickers, sweat trickling down her skin, past the goosebumps that sprang up on her flesh in the weirdly chill breeze.
Ben retracted his helmet. He took off his right gauntlet. Clementine stood to attention, semi-naked, utterly composed.
Ben kissed her, and tongued her, and touched her breasts with his one bare hand, then gripped her arse and squeezed. Clementine allowed it all, still standing to attention. She hated it, but this too was fairly standard military protocol.
“We may have rebels in our midst. I want you to kill them.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Will you do that?”
“Yes, sir. Just name them, sir.”
Ben grinned, a slow unfolding grin of delight. “In due course. Dismissed.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sorcha’s father vanished.
“So, what do you say?” Saunders asked her.
“About what?”
“About joining me in my mission to save New Amazon.”
“We’re marooned, had you forgotten? What’s to save, from what?”
“Before Juno exploded, it would have sent out a Mayday signal. Earth will send a rescue party.”
“It’ll be at least a hundred years before troops arrive,” Sorcha pointed out.
“That’s not so very long, in the scale of things,” Saunders retorted. “And once they arrive, they’ll terraform the planet according to the original plan.”
Sorcha thought hard. “What are you asking me to do?”
“I’m asking you to join with me,” Saunders told her, “to build a garrison planet, and fight the Earth expeditionary force when it arrives. To protect this beautiful planet.”
“You want me to take arms against the Galactic Corporation?”
“I want you to build an army that can fight them.”
Sorcha was stunned. Then incredulous.
“What army?” she mocked. “There are only eleven survivors. Even if we all start having babies, there won’t be —”
“Caw,” said Isaac, and Sorcha had another vision of her father, staring at her, accusingly, blood trickling from his eyes, dying. She shuddered, and her father’s body ruptured and he turned into a pool of water and the water glistened, and it turned into a floating globe. The planet of New Amazon.
“Ah,” said Sorcha, looking at Isaac, and the thousands of Gryphons in flight above her.
“Ah, indeed,” said Saunders, and smiled, with faith and hope and rich anticipation of the years to come, as the vast flock of Gryphons above them blackened the sky.
“There,” he told her, “is your army.”
“You miss him terribly, don’t you?” said Ben to Mary Beebe, as she filled the oxygen tanks with air catalysed from seawater.
“I don’t like to talk about it,” she told him curtly.
Ben didn’t take the hint; he lingered, standing rather too close to her.
“I’ve read William’s security file, of course,” he told her casually. “In my new capacity as military commander of the expedition.”
“I said,” repeated Mary, “I don’t like to talk about it.”
“He was unfaithful to you, apparently. Back on Lima.”
“That doesn’t bother me.”
“You had an open relationship, did you?”
“I don’t like to talk about it.”
“You know about his children there? The two girls? They must be eleven or twelve by now. Twins. By that allegedly very sexy spaceship trooper.”
A flash of pain appeared on M
ary’s face. She and William had chosen never to have children. This came as a shock.
“I don’t,” said Mary, hiding a world of anguish, “like to talk about it.”
Ben didn’t even bother to hide his smile.
“Can I tell you a secret, David?”
David Go liked to work in his cabin, alone, without interruptions. But Ben Kirkham insisted on an open-door policy: he liked nothing better than popping in to chat to his “team”.
“I don’t want to hear your secrets, Dr Kirkham.”
Ben leaned on the doorway, peering in, in a fashion that infuriated David. He liked doors that were closed!
“We’re all one big happy family here, David. We all look out for each other,” said Ben gently.
“That’s good,” said David grudgingly, and insincerely.
“Except, that is, for you,” Ben added. “That’s because everyone hates you, David. And do you know why? Because you’re an arse-licking bottom-feeding piece of shit.”
“If you’re trying to goad me, Kirkham, you need to be a lot more subtle than that.”
“Hugo Baal hates you more than anyone. ‘Why should he be alive?’ That’s what he said to me the other day. ‘Why is David Go still alive, when cleverer and more worthy men and women have died?’ ”
“Fuck off, Kirkham.”
“You’re a sad and lonely man, aren’t you? And mediocre. And socially embarrassing. And annoying to have around. But you should be nice to me, you know, David. Shall I tell you why? Because I’m the only person here who can actually bear your company.”
David gulped, and couldn’t speak; and realised, to his horror, that he believed every word of what he had just been told.
Tonii was working out on the punch and kick bags when Ben drifted in to chat.
“Hi there, my goodness, sweat and muscles, a potent combination,” Ben chortled. Tonii wiped himself down, and forced a grin.
“Hi there, Ben.”
“How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not missing Sergeant Anderson?”
“I’m a Soldier. I don’t ‘miss’ people.”
“So sharp! So droll! You really are a marvel,” Ben crowed, openly eyeing Tonii’s masculine/feminine torso.
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