James Bond and Moonraker (23 page)

‘And the knowledge that it was born from the greatest act of mass murder in history.’ Bond’s tone was cold and contemptuous.

Drax shook his head sadly. ‘It is always a mistake to bandy words with fools. I will not repeat it.’

He was turning towards Jaws when the observer spoke urgently from his console. ‘Unidentified craft closing distance fast. Recognition signals indicate U.S. space shuttle.’

‘Laser it!’ Drax spat out the words and turned back to Bond and Holly. His face was blotchy and glistening. A maverick tick invaded his misshapen eye. ‘It occurs to me that your view of the demise of our last visitor was limited. I think you should be nearer to the next spectacle.’ He smiled obscenely. ‘Much nearer.’

Now the pinpoints of red in the mad eyes were growing larger. Bond followed Drax’s gaze to the circular door set in the outer wall of the globe. With a new surge of fear he realized what was in Drax’s mad, bad mind.

‘Jaws... the airlock chamber.’ Drax turned back to Bond and Holly. ‘Observe, Mr Bond, your route from this world to the next. At least you will not be travelling alone. It appears that you will have some American companions. Doubly pleasing for you, Dr Goodhead. Your compatriots will be able to see you achieve your ambition to be America’s first woman in space.’

Jaws moved forward with grim relish and depressed the metal lever on the door. It opened with a hiss to reveal a small compartment in which two men might stand crouched. What was clearly the outer hatch to space had a transparent window which was a twin of that in the first door.

Drax addressed his guards. ‘Take them!’

Two men stepped forward, their laser torches trained on Bond and Holly. Bond shrugged and started to move across the platform. Within a few paces of the airlock chamber was an unmanned console. Prominent across its top were the words ‘Rotation Thrusters — Artificial Gravity’. Bond’s pulse quickened as he remembered Holly’s words when they had been docking: ‘We’d all be floating around like balloons if we went outside. Once the rotation thrusters are turned on, the station will start to rotate and we’ll have artificial gravity.’ And if counter-rotation thrusters were turned
off
? Bond glanced again and saw a handle recessed behind a transparent cover. On the cover were printed the words ‘Emergency Stop. Do not use unless station secured’. If he could just get to that handle there might still be a chance. Even as he thought, the hard knob of the laser torch jabbed him forward.

‘Enemy craft in range. Am matching co-ordinates.’ The cold, impassive voice of the laser gunner echoed down from the empty air. It was all happening at once. Bond’s destruction was as imminent as that of the investigating American shuttle. At any -second the next batch of nerve gas spheres would start rolling out into space. Already three hundred million victims waited unknowingly for the death that would be their fate when the spheres entered the Earth’s atmosphere and dispensed their deadly poison. Bond knew that he must do something — but what? The laser torch was still thrust into his back. He would die instantly if he made a dive for the rotation thrusters. Jaws showed his teeth in an uninviting grin. Behind him stood one of the astronauts Bond could remember being trained in California. Slim, handsome, an expression of detached superiority on his face. He looked like a monitor in an English public school watching a fourth former being led out for a thrashing. Bond looked back to Jaws. The lumpen features, the misshapen body, the totality that was so obviously an accident of nature. He turned and fixed Drag with his eye. ‘Are Dr Goodhead and myself the only people being ejected into space?’

Drax’s eyes narrowed. ‘Of course, Mr Bond. Why do you ask such a facile question?’

‘I was trying to some to terms with the rules of eligibility for this flying stud farm. You wouldn’t disagree that only those who conform to your own physical and mental standards will survive?’ Bond stared pointedly at Jaws.

Drax saw the look and hesitated before replying. ‘You are attempting to raise emotive questions which are irrelevant. Jaws — expel them.’

Jaws’s hand left the handle of the door to the airlock chamber. He took a step towards Bond. The guards closed in.

‘Co-ordinates matched. Count-down to fire T minus sixty seconds.’ The laser gunner’s voice spurred the words from Bond’s throat. He looked deep into Jaws’s eyes. ‘The questions aren’t irrelevant to you are they, Jaws? How long do you think you’re going to be allowed to survive us? Have you looked about you, Jaws? You don’t conform, and that’s fatal in this society.’ Jaws hesitated and looked towards Drax. His face wore the expression that it had when he looked into the zero-gravity globe.

‘Expel them!’ Drax shouted the words and there was an edge of panic in his voice. It revealed itself in the sudden emergence of the Prussian accent. Bond gestured towards the open maw of the vacuum chamber. ‘Come on, Jaws. There’s room for all of us if we squeeze.’

‘Expel them!’ Drax took a step forward as the guards closed in. The laser gunner started his final count-down. Bond braced himself as Jaws’s hands slowly rose. Then they clamped down on the two guards and crashed their heads together. Bond snatched up a laser torch and dived for the rotation thrusters. To a background of screams and shouts he tore open the transparent cover and hauled at the handle marked ‘Emergency Stop’.

Immediately Bond felt as if he was in a vehicle that had crashed into a brick wall. The handle tore itself from his grasp and he smashed against an unidentifiable object with a force that threatened to break both shoulder and collar bone. He slid across the floor and arrived against the wall of the globe. Around him was every article of furniture that had not been anchored to the floor, and most of the people in the chamber. The lights flickered madly and the air was full of the screams of men crying out in pain and terror. Bond tried to struggle to his feet and felt himself at the mercy of total weightlessness. Something bumped into him and he pushed it away to feel a sticky substance on his hand. It was blood. Blood from one of the Drax guards that Jaws had dealt with. The side of his head was smashed in like an empty eggshell. Bond shook free of the dead embrace and looked out of a window into space.

Keeping pace with the space station, a hundred feet from it, was a U.S. shuttle, the white star plainly visible on the fuselage. From an open hatch a stream of space marines poured out as if making an inverted parachute drop. Bond’s heart exalted as he saw the white space suits, helmets and back-packs with built-in oxygen supplies and hand-operated propulsion units. Like a skein of geese the marines converged on the space station.

Bond turned away from the window as a streak of bright laser light passed above his shoulder. There was no sight of Drax, and Holly had also disappeared. The main action:oncentrated around Jaws who was manoeuvring an uninchored console like a battering ram. As Bond watched, he took advantage of the zero-gravity to force three Draxites back against the outer wall and press the life out of them as if they were the last half inch of a tube of toothpaste. Bond clawed his way with difficulty to a position near the lift column and aimed his laser torch at a Draxite who was drawing a bead on Jaws. The light snaked across the room and a thin spurt of flame sprouted from the man’s neck. His arms spread out and he hung in space as if taking part in a levitation experiment. Bond twisted his head and looked out of the nearest observation slot.

Like fierce rain against a window pane, the rays of confronting laser guns criss-crossed the void. A stream of Draxites had emerged to give battle in space, and as Bond watched a space marine was hit in the chest. His suit momentarily swelled and then, as if fired from a catapult, he shot backwards, accelerating into infinity. Bond shuddered. What a death. For those who were disabled and drifted away the end was even more horrible. They would travel through space until their oxygen ran out and they slowly died. Without enough oxygen a man would suffocate and his space suit would become a tomb perpetually orbiting Earth. Burial in the sky. How many tin cans were there in space rattling with skeletons?

A bright light flared momentarily and Bond saw that one of the moored Moonrakers had been attacked and was aligned at the side of its satellite. Some of the Draxites were operating one-man globular space carts with laser guns mounted in the nose gun. They seemed to possess a defensive shield that made them less vulnerable to attack. Despite the opposition, the space marines were pressing in against the side of the space. station like swarming bees. Bond knew that he had to help them get in; also to stop any more spheres of nerve gas being released. Picking his way through the floating debris he made for the exit tunnel which he estimated would lead him to the interior of the globe-launching tube. The other side of the chamber Jaws was still fighting for survival. And still winning. A Draxite who had strayed within reach of his great hands sailed across the chamber to fold against the elevator shaft like a rag doll that had lost most of its stuffing.

Bond pulled himself along a lopsided corridor, using the guard rail, and came face to face with a door marked ‘Nerve Gas Launch Assembly’. The door was of steel, and Bond hesitated. Supposing some of the nerve gas phials had been thrown across the room and had smashed when he pulled the Emergency Stop handle? To open the door would be to step into certain death. So was he going to turn his back and crawl away? Bond took what he knew might be his last deep breath and turned the handle of the door. He pressed and waited, his nerves jangling. No deadly gas rushed to his lungs. Neither did the door open easily. The reason was soon apparent. A body was wedged against the other side, beneath a collapsed row of metal shelves. Bond squeezed inside the door and found that he was alone with a corpse and two badly wounded men in light green tunics. They had obviously been hurled against the side of the space station when it went into zero-gravity. Three nerve gas spheres were lined up in a metal cradle that led out to the launch tube. The launch tube was empty. This must be the second batch of spheres ready for launching. It was not conceivable that another batch had been released after the handle had been pulled.

Wielding his laser torch with extreme care, Bond directed the beam on the machinery that operated the launch mechanism. Within seconds it was knotting into molten worm casts. If Drax wanted to launch any more spheres he would have to manhandle them to the nearest airlock chamber. Bond finished destroying the launching apparatus and looked round the wrecked room. A conveyor belt of globes ran round the walls and disappeared through a hole to what was presumably another chamber where they were stored. Bond hesitated and then decided against tampering with the globes. The risk of accidentally releasing the gas was too great. The moment to sacrifice his own life might not be too far off, but it had not yet arrived with certainty.

Outside in space the battle still raged and the Draxites were fighting desperately to beat off the marines gathered against the side of the central globe. A space cart moved in on them and was caught in the crossfire of two laser beams. Its own fire was extinguished and it began to melt like a moth trapped in a lamp.

Bond looked up to the top of the globe. What he saw made him draw in his breath sharply. The scene of carnage that prevailed in the Nerve Gas Launch Assembly room was not duplicated in the turret that housed the laser gun. There he could see figures moving and the long barrel of the gun being brought to bear on the U.S. space shuttle, which was still keeping pace with the station’s drift through space. Would the pilot of the shuttle be aware of what had happened to the Russian satellite? Almost certainly the position of the satellite would have been plotted and its sudden disappearance commented upon. No doubt this was the reason why the Americans had come straight in to the attack. They had treated the disappearance of the Russian craft as evidence of a hostile presence in space and not risked pausing to make a challenge.

Bond could almost hear the seconds ticking away. At any moment the laser gun turret might open fire and obliterate the shuttle. He must do something. But to reach the turret would be a labour of Hercules. The largest contingents of Drax’s men would be gathered near the dormitories, which were directly below the turret. With the space station lopsided and in a state of zero-gravity he would have to fight his way, weightless, through a confused warren of passages dominated by those of Drax’s men who were still in a condition to give battle. For support he could rely only on Jaws and Holly — if they were alive and if he could join up with them. He peered out of the window and another possibility entered his mind. All his plans were based on the premise that he should attack the turret from inside the station. But if he were to approach it via space...

Bond prized open the door and clawed his way back down the corridor. He recalled passing an airlock chamber. Through the transparent viewing panel he had glimpsed that it contained two space suits. If they were equipped with propulsion units he might be able to let himself out of the airlock and manoeuvre his way to the turret. He pulled himself along the corridor again, knowing that he was battling against time. Ahead, three Draxites moved clumsily across an intersection. They looked towards him but took no action. They were concentrating on the threat from outside. Bond found the airlock chamber and pulled down the lever. The inner door swung open and he seized one of the space suits and started to pull it on. It was a cumbersome thing to wield at the best of times but in a weightless situation and with time running out, the effort frayed nerves and fingers. Eventually it was on and he secured the helmet and turned on the oxygen supply. Now he could breathe in space; but could he move through it? Bond contracted his gauntleted hands and felt his power supply convert to forward thrust. In principle this should propel him through space like a human jet aeroplane. In principle. Bond had never tried it in practice. Already he was sweating, and not only because of the space suit. He twisted uncomfortably and looked up towards the laser turret. The gun was traversing. He turned and looked for the shuttle. There was no sign of it. For a moment his heart stopped. Then he realized what must have happened. Either by accident or design, the shuttle had dropped back to a position behind one of the satellites that projected from the main globe. The laser gunner dared not fire for fear that he would destroy his own space station.