Red Claw

by Philip Palmer

  And there they sat, or stood close by on sentry duty, and each of them and all of them were lost in thought and reflection.

  William and Mary Beebe were closest to the fire, savouring the heat, and each other’s nearness.

  Hugo Baal sat typing up his journal, sniffing occasionally as the smoke drifted across, carrying with it reminiscences of other fires, other expeditions, other tragic losses.

  Ben Kirkham sat a little way back, on a hummock of New Amazonian soil and rock, as far away from Baal as he could contrive. He marvelled at his own uniqueness, and at the Professor’s ingenuity in destroying Juno. Who would have thought the scrawny little bastard had it in him!

  Sorcha, sitting nearer the fire, was tormented with guilt. A war had been fought and she had fought it. But if her enemy was the CSO, and the Galactic Corporation — did that make her a traitor?

  Tonii Newton, standing at his sentry post, savoured a secret joy; the joy of being alive.

  Nine other Soldiers were encircling the camp. Some were using the AmRovers as their cover in case of attack, some were standing in the shadow of Aldiss tree trunks; all were standing fiercely to attention. Eight other Soldiers kept guard in the five AmRovers, including Private Clementine McCoy; two per vehicle, sitting in the cockpit in front of the sonar and energy-detecting screens, ready to fire up the AmRover engines and turn them back into weapons of war.

  But unlike Tonii, all these Soldiers were full of bitterness that they had been forced to flee, rather than staying and fighting and dying a Glorious death.

  Mia Nightingale sat inside AmRover 3, away from the comfort of the camp fire, checking her film footage. Her coverage of the Attack on Xabar was astonishing. She watched again, as men and women died screaming, and DRs blasted plasma into flesh with callous efficiency.

  Around the fire, thirty-three other survivors were clustered. Some sat alone, reflective, or depressed; some gathered in groups sipping whisky or wine from their emergency rations, sharing quiet reminiscences of friends now gone.

  Dr David Go also spoke to no one. He saw Anderson pissing where he sat, and felt rather disgusted by it.

  Sheena, Queen of the Noirs, sat close to the fire, and felt the heat of the fire on her cheeks; and imagined she could see the flames.

  Jim Aura sat next to her and stared at Sheena, as firelight painted glory on her face and cast shadows around her blinded eyes.

  And sitting near her, Professor Richard Helms, saviour of all his people, stared also into the flames, seeing patterns where they did not exist. The fire spat white sparks, which shot high then died out. Smoke billowed out, black and purple, from tough Aldiss tree bark. Flames crackled and voices whispered.

  “Fuckings DRs.”

  “Can’t believe we —”

  “Always knew it would —”

  “We had no choice but to —”

  “Did you see how I creamed those m —”

  “I hate this fucking planet.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “No going back.”

  “I’m glad at least that —”

  “Oh my sweetheart, why am I alive while you are —”

  Helms spoke very little that night. He listened to the conversation that swirled about him, the words of regret and loss and hope and confusion, he drank in the rich stench of the rainforest that surrounded them, and marvelled at the strange sounds all around.

  “What’s that?” asked Sorcha at one point, as she heard a strange noise among the cacophony of strange noises in the jungle beyond.

  It was a sound like a man being flayed, slowly. An awful screaming that started on a high note then rose higher and higher in an upward glissando. Then it began again. And again.

  “A Howler Cockroach,” said Hugo. “It’s about this small.” He indicated with his finger and thumb the tininess of the beast. “It expels air from its thorax, which in fact is its head, to create that noise. We don’t know why.”

  “Plant or animal?” asked David Go.

  “Animal. Insectae. It’s very similar to an Earth cockroach in fact. Small, with a hard skin, and segmented. Convergent evolution in action yet again.”

  “That one?” Jim Aura mimicked the noise. It was a slithering, sucking noise, that had a chilling effect on all who heard it. It was like the sound of a soul leaving the body. Slurp, slurp.

  “No idea.”

  “Volpes terra, a land shark,” said Helms softly.

  “Never heard of it,” Hugo conceded.

  “It’s like a koala bear, with fangs.”

  “That one?” Sorcha whistled the notes.

  It was bird song, melodious and rhythmic, though every note was subtly out of tune to human ears.

  “That’s a Godzilla.”

  “They sing?”

  “Through their tail. The tail is not primarily a weapon, it’s a vocal organ.”

  Helms nodded, confirming this hypothesis, which he in fact had initially suggested, and later proved.

  “What’s that?”

  It was a grating, clacking noise, like two sticks being rubbed together.

  “Don’t know,” Hugo conceded.

  Hugo glanced at Helms, who shook his head. Both made a mental note to explore this mystery further.

  “And that?” asked Sorcha. “The bells?”

  Bells were ringing in discordant array. Big bells, and small tinkling bells. They listened intently to this melodious, eerie symphony of bells, with jangling chords and metallic arpeggios, which merged with the sounds of the Howler cockroaches and the constant crackle of the camp fire.

  “Amazonius campanologus,” hazarded Hugo.

  “Nice try.”

  “Did you know,” said Sorcha, “that the trees make a noise if you stab the trunk? Like a dog barking.”

  “I’ve heard that sound. Must be air being expelled.”

  “Or this planet has trees that can bark.”

  “Maybe,” said Tonii, mischievously, “on this planet, the trees bark and piss on the dogs?”

  “Except there are no dogs.”

  “There’s that headless thing.”

  “The No-Brain.”

  “Quadrupes sinecep.”

  “Maybe that could be domesticated.”

  “It tried to kill us.”

  “It’s still feral, like a wolf. Maybe we could tame it.”

  “No,” said William Beebe, “it’s not cute enough.”

  “What is cute enough then?” asked Mia Nightingale. “Hmm? What could we have as a pet? As our team guinea pig?”

  “Nothing is cute,” said Mary Beebe, firmly. “That’s an anthropomorphic projection.”

  “I bet a baby Gryphon would be cute,” said Tonii.

  A silence fell.

  “So what next?” asked Mary Beebe.

  “We survive,” said Helms, softly.

  “The CSO tried to kill us!” said Ben Kirkham, enraged.

  “We don’t know that,” Sorcha told him, firmly.

  “Something made Juno go rogue.”

  “I always feared,” said Mary Beebe, “that one day the computer would turn on us.”

  “Computers kill humans all the time,” Sorcha reasoned. “They’re a weapon of war. But all of us were logged on the database as Friendly! Juno knew each and every one of us by name and was duty bound to protect us. Someone would have had to override that with new code. But who?”

  “It has to be the CSO. No one else would have authority.”

  “But why!” raged Ben Kirkham. “It’s all so fucking — random.”

  The camp was now richly lit by the red glow of the fire. The AmRover headlights had been switched off and the sentries stood in shadow, but they had set up panoramic torches on posts to light all the possible approaches to their camp. Occasionally a luminous insect flew by, fast, drawn by the fire’s light then deterred by its heat. But otherwise, the golden lights of the flames and the encircling flares of the panoramic torches were all that stood between them and pitch-black nothing
.

  And as the flames flickered, Helms’s mood was growing increasingly sombre.

  “Time we all hit the sack,” said Sorcha, with military firmness.

  “I think I’ll linger,” said Ben.

  “Me too,” said Hugo.

  “We’re making an early start,” Sorcha told him icily.

  “The campsite must be cleared by 5 a.m., anyone who falls behind schedule will be abandoned,” Tonii added.

  Hugo blinked. “Oh,” he said, and stood up. “Are we setting alarms?”

  Professor Helms laughed, softly and mockingly.

  “I think the jungle will wake us up,” said Mary Beebe.

  DAY 3

  When the sun rose, the dawn chorus erupted.

  Sorcha woke with a crick in her neck. She disentangled herself from Helms’s naked embrace, astonished at the penetrating and ceaseless sound of his snoring. She crawled out of the AmRover and saw dawn speckling the Flesh-Webs and making the tree trunks glow as they absorbed the sun’s energy.

  She wore no body armour, and the cold air shocked her skin. She could smell bacon. She rubbed her arms, warming herself, basking in the alienness of this planet, and tried not to breathe, because that was just wasted effort.

  She wondered what had made her go to Helms’s cabin the previous night. Someone was bound to have seen her; and the twelve people who shared the AmRover with them would surely have heard the sounds of their frantic and passionate late-night love-making.

  But Sorcha didn’t care. She was now the most senior Soldier on the planet, so no one could discipline her for an infraction of the fraternisation rules. Earth held no authority over her any more; and she really had needed that fuck.

  It was more than just a fuck, admittedly. For it was good, and warm, and comforting, after a day of terror and horror, to spend a night sleeping next to another human being. Even if Helms was just a Scientist, and not a Soldier; and even though he, bizarrely in this day and age, snored.

  And now she felt fresh, and alive, and awake. The deaths of the previous day were now just a distant memory. Those who had died were dead and gone. She wasted no energy brooding on them.

  Sorcha did wonder, though, about precisely why Juno had turned rogue. Her fellow Soldiers had shared their judicious speculations on the matter the previous night; and the Scientists, as you’d expect, had a myriad explanations, some of quite staggering and paranoid complexity.

  But her guess was that they would never know the truth. The Galactic Corporation was constantly subject to power struggles, and even at the best of times was by no means a rational entity. And Sorcha herself had participated in many wholly unneccessary massacres, many caused by the incompetence of bureaucrats who ordered the destruction of entire societies because of administrative errors. So it wouldn’t surprise her if she and the other humans on New Amazon had been the victim of an utterly futile and indeed erroneous mass-execution order.

  It was, she honestly felt, a damned shame. She was willing to die a Glorious death for the Galactic Corporation; why should that option be taken away from her?

  She walked, cold and literally breathless, out into the jungle, until she reached a clearing where there was no tree canopy above. She stared and stared upwards, at the vast blue sky and speeding clouds, and tried to find Juno. But there was nothing. No bright dot. No Juno in orbit above them.

  And that meant no Quantum Beacon, no way for Earth to communicate with them. She would never again receive orders from her commanding officers, or from the Galactic Corporation.

  Sorcha knew she should be appalled at the destruction of the Mother Ship, and the loss of her command structure.

  But, strangely, she was not.

  From the diary of Dr Hugo Baal

  June 24th

  Last night, I dreamed that I was a Gryphon, flying high above the planet of New Amazon, able to see every living thing. I can see the crawling creeping writhing animals in the undergrowth and the insects and the bugs and the flying insects that can suck the sap out of trees or pierce body armour with their eerily sharp antennae-claws. I can see the Big Beasts — Godzillas, Land Krakens, Juggernauts — I can see the Tree Creatures, the Two-Tails and the Leapers and the Tarzans, I can see the canopy of trees stretching as far as the eye can see, and I can see all the creatures of the air, Gryphons like myself and Serpent-Birds and Bat-Beasts, and I can see where they nest and I fly onwards and onwards until I reach the Ocean of Trees, the vast mangrove swamp that crowds the watery ocean and turns it into wetland not sea, and I can see it all, I know the name of every single creature even though there are millions upon millions of them, but when I wake I can only remember a handful of the names.

  Yet even so, I remember, oh so vividly, what it was like to be a Gryphon, flying high, above my planet.

  Anyway. That was my dream.

  Today we have been given strict survival duties, with no time for scientific work. But I hope to recommence writing this diary in a few days.

  Professor Helms was having breakfast with William and Mary Beebe.

  Helms had been networking since dawn. He had spoken to every member of his Science team, and to all the surviving Techies, and to every Soldier, and he had heard their concerns and their conspiracy theories, and allowed them to feel he was quietly and confidently in charge.

  The prevailing theory among the Scientists was that the days of scientific exploration were now over; the CSO had decided that planets should be terraformed without bothering to study and catalogue the native flora and fauna. This explained why Juno had turned against them — because of course the Scientists would have fought such a plan tooth and nail. Simpler just to kill them all, so that Juno could instruct the four Satellites to begin terraforming.

  The Soldiers, however, refused to believe that the CSO would have kept such a plan secret from them. After all, had they been so ordered, the Soldiers would have been entirely happy to slaughter all the Scientists.

  So the Soldiers preferred the theory that a computer virus had made Juno deranged; although some feared there had been a coup on Earth, which would mean the CSO had been replaced by someone even more lunatic.

  Helms listened carefully to all the theories, but at the end of the day, as he carefully pointed out, they would never know the truth of what had happened. So it was better, really, just to look to the future.

  The Beebes, however, had a different question to pose to him, as Helms poured three black coffees and stiffened at the aroma of pure caffeine.

  “May I ask,” William Beebe said.

  “Indeed,” added Mary Beebe, and allowed a pause to build.

  “What?” hinted Helms

  “How?” said William.

  “How what?”

  “How — well, you know.” William shrugged, and let his subtext fill the air.

  “How did I know this would happen?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t,” Helms said.

  “You had an antimatter bomb ready to blow up Juno,” Mary pointed out.

  Helms nodded, and made a self-deprecating face. “Simple contingency planning,” he said. “You never know when —”

  “You might need an antimatter bomb?” said William sceptically.

  “It’s happened before,” Helms asserted. “Scientific expeditions have been wiped out.”

  “When? Where?”

  “I wasn’t aware of that!”

  “That’s because it was covered up,” Helms explained.

  “Then how do you know?”

  “I was there. On Asgard. It happened there.”

  “I thought that particular expedition was wiped out by a meteorite.”

  “That was the cover story. In fact, the Mother Ship computer went rogue and fired a torpedo at the base. Earth Gamers. It’s the curse of our civilisation. I was able to escape on a shuttle, but many of my dear friends died that day. So I vowed — never again.”

  “So,” concluded William, “you have saved us. Or at least, many of us.�
��

  “Indeed,” Helms admitted.

  “I suppose we should say thank you,” Mary snorted.

  “No need.”

  “Thank you,” said William, fulsomely.

  “You’re very welcome,” Helms said, touched.

  “And what do we do now?” Mary accused. “How do we get home?”

  “We don’t,” Helms told her. “There’s no way home, ever.”

  “Then,” she said, looking around, not disapprovingly, “this is home.”

  “We could do worse,” said William, smiling at the prospect.

  Hugo had found a dead Two-Tail, and was skinning it with some delight. The meat was inedible to humans of course; but the autopsy was yielding some fascinating results.

  The Soldiers, meanwhile, were practising their kata in a jungle clearing. Sorcha was watching them, approvingly, as they dipped and lunged and breathed long inaudible breaths preceding killer punch and kick combinations of blinding speed.

  Helms sidled up to her, and indicated he wanted a private chat.

  And so Sorcha and Helms moved out of earshot of the Soldiers, under the shade of a vast Aldiss tree. Helms looked at her, and smiled mischievously, remembering last night’s coupling.

  Sorcha just stared at him coldly.

  “I’ve had a few notions —” he began.

  “Professor, I’m not interested.”

  Helms blinked, and smiled his humble smile. “Ah, right, fair point,” he said, his politeness laced with irony.

  “I don’t need advice from —”

  “Sorcha please,” he said mildly. “Is this really necessary? We’re all in this together and —”

  “Major.”

  He blinked again.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “You will address me as ‘Major’, or as ‘sir’.”