Red Claw

by Philip Palmer

  “You don’t need him! He failed in his duties today. Replace him.”

  “He’s our best —”

  “Fuck-up! If he was one of mine, I’d kick him out of the airlock.”

  “I concede that he does occupy his own unique niche on the autistic spectrum,” Helms acknowledged gently.

  “Fuck-up!”

  “Well, you have a point,” Helms sighed, then added: “Good day, Major.” He made an amusing little wavy hand gesture to bid her farewell, as was his wont.

  “You’re dismissed when I say so,” she snapped, and Helms visibly bridled. He hated military authority.

  “So will you be attending the —” he said, stalling, knowing what was to come.

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Good. Then, I’ll, ah, um.” Helms ran out of road on that one.

  An awkward pause followed.

  “Very well, you’re dismissed,” said Major Sorcha Molloy, and briskly clicked her left heel on the ground, and fist-saluted. Helms sighed, and copied her salute, as he had been taught to do. It was a visible effort.

  Sorcha stifled a smile.

  Sorcha returned to the Military Quarter and verbally reported to Commander Martin in his book-lined office.

  “Any problems, Major?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No problems?” Martin’s tone used incredulity like a club.

  “Inadequate warning of xeno-hazard, sir, but we were on top of it.”

  “You shouldn’t delegate surveillance and security to a civilian.” Martin spoke mildly, luringly.

  “Those were your orders, sir.” And as she spoke, Sorcha knew she should not have said such a stupid thing.

  “Blaming me?” Martin’s tone was now enraged.

  “No, SIR my mistake, SIR, I fucked up, SIR.”

  “Hmm.”

  Silence was the goad now. Sorcha endured it.

  “Ten minutes to subdue the Godzilla,” said the Commander, eventually, with even greater incredulity than before.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Nice work.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Martin’s tone was brisk, and unimpressed, and sardonic, and hyper-critical, and Sorcha had to fight to keep her cool.

  “That will do, Major.”

  “Thank you, Commander.”

  “Dismissed.”

  “Sir!”

  Click, fist-salute, about turn, and she left the room, wondering, marvelling even, why the hell a serving Soldier would read books.

  Then Sorcha went to the gym and spent an hour working out on the punchbags and robo-pads. Afterwards, she needle-showered under a hot fast spray that massaged as it cleansed.

  And then she went to her quarters. The room was dark, lit by candles. Professor Richard Helms was waiting for her.

  “I thought you had an autopsy to conduct?” she told him sternly.

  “It’s scheduled for 8 p.m. We have plenty of time.”

  “Why the candles?”

  “It gives you a golden glow. I find it — alluring.”

  “You’d like me naked, I take it?”

  “That would be nice.”

  She took off her major’s tunic and trousers and knickers. Then she straddled him, bit his lip brutally, fumbled for his cock, and slipped him inside her.

  “Is this what the military call foreplay?”

  She grabbed his head with her hands and shook him and moved her hips on him and the orgasm hit her like a punch.

  She was quiet, apart from a few long gasps, for several moments.

  “I needed that,” she conceded.

  “Christ,” said Helms, weakly.

  Then she slipped off him and stripped fully and she moved naked and slowly for him in the dim golden candlelight, and her body was beautiful, and graceful, and sublime. Then he reached out for her and

  Afterwards, he slept in her powerful arms.

  He rarely slept at night these days; only after sex. It was a blissful time for him, his body content, his mind at rest.

  As he drowsed against her, Sorcha was subvocing her orders for the next day. The sweat had dried on her naked body. She was amused at how thin and scrawny Helms’s body seemed, when you saw it next to hers. But Sorcha loved these moments of post-coital repose.

  After a while, she woke Helms up, and with a few unambiguous gestures instructed him to go at it a third time. This time he excelled himself, and she came five times in a row, like waves hitting a cliff.

  Then she rolled off him, and started to dress.

  It occurred to Helms that his affair with Sorcha had lasted two months, in which time he had never had a single interesting or personally revealing conversation with her.

  “I know nothing about you,” he marvelled, as they both got ready to return to the lab.

  “I’m a Soldier. There’s nothing to know,” she told him, blankly puzzled.

  Sorcha was ten years old when she killed her first man. He was a prisoner, captured during a rebellion on some colony planet, she never knew which one, and released to the Soldier Planets as training fodder. Sorcha was given a knife and sent into the forest and told to track the man down. When she found him, she cut his throat, and watched him slowly die, then daubed the blood on her forehead. It was called “blooding”. Sorcha loathed the experience. She didn’t know the man, nor did she hate him. She felt sorry for him really. But her father and mother had told her she needed to become a woman, and a Soldier, and this was her rite of passage.

  And so, and then, her childhood ended.

  When Sorcha was twelve, she served in her first war, as munitions backup on an attack vessel that was repressing a rebellion on another colony planet. She loaded the guns, and served sandwiches and cold drinks to the Soldiers as they flew low over the land shooting rebels at will.

  When Sorcha was fourteen she met her first Doppelganger Robot. It was one of the Humanoid models, seven foot tall and silver, and it was terrifying. But by then Sorcha was a fully trained and battle-hardened Soldier and she knew that DRs weren’t any match for a trained and disciplined human warrior. They were just machines, remotely controlled by game-playing amateurs on Earth who had nothing at stake bar their pride.

  But Soldiers were warriors, born and bred, fuelled by the fear of death. And Sorcha knew that (provided the Soldier was wearing body armour with a full complement of built-in weaponry) in a fight between a DR and a Soldier, the Soldier would always win.

  However, by the rules of her world, the Earth humans who controlled the DRs were the governing élite of human space. And so this particular DR — controlled by a tag team of fools and idiots — was the Commanding Officer of her regiment, and it was his responsibility to lead the attack on a rebel planet.

  He did so incompetently, and recklessly, and stupidly. The battle was lost, and most of the Soldiers slaughtered, including many of Sorcha’s closest friends.

  But no one protested, and no one minded, and no one mourned. For Soldiers were bred and trained and put into the world to serve, and fight, and die in glory.

  Sorcha loved being a Soldier. It gave her focus and purpose. She never had doubts or second thoughts or angst or melancholy or despair. Being a Soldier was a religion, and a cause.

  The joy of giving and the prospect of receiving death exalted her.

  Twenty minutes later Sorcha entered the lab to find Helms hard at work, Hugo and Django at their work stations, and Mia reviewing her footage on her virtual screen. Sorcha gave Helms a withering glare; in return, he gave her a humble, self-deprecating smile.

  And no one suspected a thing. Which was fortunate, since the consequences of exposure would have been severe. In theory, Helms could be sacked as the expedition leader for fraternising with a Soldier; and Sorcha would almost certainly face demotion, or even a court martial.

  The danger added a spice to their relationship; it was, for both of them, a mad folly. For two whole months, Sorcha and Helms had been lost in lust, defying their society’s most fundamental taboo,
based on the unbridgable divide between the Soldier caste and the Scientist caste. But so far, their mutual cunning had kept their secret hidden from everyone.

  “Are we ready?” Sorcha asked.

  “We’re ready,” Helms told her.

  They moved into the main autopsy room, where the Godzilla was stretched out on the dissection table. Hugo took his place at the control desk, Helms fastened on a throat mike to record his words, rather than using his MI; Django checked the beast’s vitals; Ben put on his virtual goggles; two Soldiers stood by just in case. And Mia began filming the whole affair with a hand-held cam.

  DRscalpels hovered in the air like hummingbirds; DRcams flew among them more sedately, like owls peering at prey. Ben controlled them all effortlessly. His expertise at gaming gave him an exceptional ability to manipulate the various Doppelganger tools.

  “Ultrasound scans show a different organ structure in this specimen,” said Helms, “which we here label G433. It has two hearts not one, though it may be these are not hearts at all. The lungs are larger and more complex. We are exploring the possibility that this is a radically different species of Godzilla, or indeed a different genus entirely. First incision, please, Ben.”

  Ben nodded, and his hands waved over his virtual controls. The DRscalpels soared down and pecked at the creature’s tough hide, as Ben controlled them with precision movements of his fingers, hands and arms, whilst using the goggles to see through their “eyes”. A morsel was held in the scalpels’ “teeth” and it was bagged and the bag was flown into the Repository.

  “Commencing DNA sampling,” said Hugo, and flicked the switch. He compared two histograms. “Different species, different genus — in fact, different Kingdom,” he said, in slightly awed tones. “In other words, it appears to be plant not animal. This Godzilla has hide that is identical to the tree bark we found during the expedition on February fourteenth.”

  “This is a tree, pretending to be a dinosaur?” said Django sceptically.

  “Advanced mimicry?” speculated Ben, remembering Hugo’s comment the previous day, and brazenly passing it off as his own idea. “To deter aggressors?”

  “Or maybe the tree we thought we found on February fourteenth was actually a Godzilla, resting?” speculated Hugo, facetiously.

  “Oh, hell,” said Professor Helms. This planet was driving him insane.

  “Ready to cut?” said Ben.

  Hugo watched the dissection intensely, rapt, his mind whirring with possibilities.

  “Cut,” said Professor Helms. Two robot scalpels plunged, their blades grew and they carved a line across the creature’s body. Blue-red gore spilled out and a host of Butterfly-Birds flew out of the stomach cavity, to be scooped up by DRscalpels in their sample bags and flown into the Repository for analysis. Then the great Godzilla woke up and roared a terrible roar.

  “Who’s in charge of the anaesthetic?” Helms said irritably.

  “I’m on it,” said Django, and fired a compressed-air cylinder containing genetically engineered curare into the beast’s body. The beast roared again and stood up on the slab and fell off, and its internal organs spewed out. And then with stunning speed, the creature lunged and ate two DRscalpels and glared at Helms and his team.

  “You want a fight?” snarled Helms and gestured to Ben, who waved his hands. Several DRscalpels leaped off the bench and plunged through the monster’s hide and into its body. Then ran amok inside, cutting and gouging. The creature roared and writhed and its eyeballs tumbled out. Great rivers of blue-red blood torrented into the air, drenching the floating robots and the Scientists and Soldiers, and eventually the beast stopped moving.

  “The Godzilla is now dead, we are recommencing the autopsy,” said Helms, as the creature split into four parts and each part scurried across the floor with teeth bared.

  A haze of plasma fire appeared from behind them, as the two Soldiers on sentry duty calmly did their job, and the alien beast dissolved.

  “Autopsy officially fucked up,” said Helms calmly. “Django, I thought you said you could anaesthetise the beast?”

  “Well, I thought I could,” marvelled Django.

  “Another fiasco,” concluded Helms, still calmly. “Can we commence the clean-up?”

  He glanced at Sorcha and winked and, taken off-guard, she blushed.

  Django saw it, and was startled, and amused.

  Sorcha seethed at Helms’s foolish blunder.

  Helms wondered: Why the hell did I just do that?

  Hugo Baal blinked; he’d missed all of this, he was so rapt in marvelling at the indefinable beauty of the horror they had just witnessed.

  Ben MI’d a command and the drone robot appeared — a squat watering can that waddled on four legs. He instructed the machine to start cleaning up, but the robot drone didn’t move.

  “Clean up this mess!” Ben instructed it, just to be doubly sure.

  Still the drone didn’t move.

  “We have another minor malfunction here,” Ben told the Professor, anxiously.

  “What the hell is going on?” snapped Django.

  “Juno, what’s wrong with this drone?” Sorcha said to the ship’s computer.

  But there was no response from Juno.

  “Juno?”

  “Yes, Major?”

  “I asked you a fucking question, tinbrain!”

  “There’s no point in, um, swearing at a computer,” said Ben Kirkham, helpfully.

  “Maybe we should reboot the drones?” Hugo Baal suggested.

  “Systems check in progress,” Juno countered, with a hint of acid in its computer tone.

  As the drone started clearing up the carnage. Helms realised he was spattered with alien blood. And he sighed.

  Mia came up to him, reviewing her film footage on her camera as she walked. She frowned, reframed, clicked; and that was a wrap.

  “You hate killing these things, don’t you?” she said to Helms, with a shy and pretty smile, putting the camera away in her bag, rather too ostentatiously.

  “Of course not,” Helms said cautiously. “Our secondary purpose is to study these creatures. Our main purpose is to prepare this planet for human habitation.”

  “I’m not filming you, you know.”

  “A sentimental attachment to the sanctity of life runs counter to the CSO’s Guidelines for Scientists,” Helms explained, still in that same stiff stilted tone.

  “My camera is in my bag and switched off!” Mia twinkled.

  “And you don’t have hidden cameras in your contact lenses?” Helms countered.

  “Touché,” said Mia, “but you can’t blame a girl for trying.” Mia loved scenes of controversy and dissent in her docs. The highlight of her career was when she filmed a Major General dissing the CSO, calling him a “callow little shit” (her follow-up film on the Major General’s execution was a ratings buster). But these days, everyone was so cautious in what they said.

  “I abhor waste,” said Helms. “That’s why we perform autopsies on live animals. So we can stitch them up again and then release them back into the wild.”

  “And how many Godzillas will you be saving for the Galactic Zoo?” Mia asked, sweetly. Her contact-lens cameras caught a wonderful image of Helms’s face darkening with impotent rage.

  At last count, Helms knew, there were fourteen million Godzillas on the planet of New Amazon.

  “Two,” said Professor Helms.

  The Xabar dome was almost invisible in daylight. The city of black towers and squat silver buildings looked weirdly out of place amongst the lush jungle habitat.

  Then a dark cloud slowly drifted down on the dome. And settled there, in a fine dark haze.

  The dome opened, and the darkness seeped inside.

  The lab was almost deserted now; but Hugo stayed behind, taking biopsy samples from the slime on the ground. After each sample was taken, he stepped away to let the drone suck up what was left of the Godzilla.

  Django was back at his work station, cursing his own s
tupidity. How could he have failed to keep the beast unconscious? Perhaps its neural network was immune to electronic anaesthesia. And yet . . . ?

  He checked his log and realised, with some astonishment, that the figures for the anaesthesia levels were all wrong; the sedation had been mild to the point of futility. He’d totally screwed things up.

  And yet, as he thought back on it, he was sure he’d typed in the right levels! He was famously thorough, obsessively careful. All the same, on this occasion he must have been incompetent. Unless . . .

  No! That was impossible. Computer error was a thing of the past.

  Django concluded he must have been daydreaming, or had simply mistyped the figures.

  A tendril of fear coiled around his heart. He never made mistakes. Ever. But this had to be his fault.

  There was simply no other explanation.

  Ben Kirkham was considering a dangerous possibility. What if —

  Mia returned to her cabin and replayed her footage of the Godzilla attack.

  She zoomed in on the expression on Professor Helms’s face. Everyone else in the 3D picture looked afraid, or alarmed. Scientists were like that: they always panicked in the face of deadly peril.

  But Helms — he looked almost elated.

  And the darkness continued to seep in, in three separate places. Above the Botanical Gardens, above the Shopping Mall, and above the Central Park.

  Mark Jones, Hydroponics Supervisor, was in the Botanical Gardens when the plants started to die.

  At first it was merely perplexing. A monkey puzzle tree started to shed its bark. An orchid deflowered, like a consumptive sneezing. A mist of pink petals rained down from the cherry trees. He began to wonder if —

  Then he heard screaming. When he looked around he saw the Gardeners on the floor, writhing, and he realised that the Gardens were becoming engulfed in a black haze.

  He clicked on his MI. “This is, um,” he began, and was suddenly too frightened to subvocalise. The deadly swarm began to move towards him. He realised that the trees were being eaten from inside, and the canopies of leaves above him were already dead.