Red Claw

by Philip Palmer

  Helms grinned. “You’ll be asking me to salute you next.”

  Sorcha saw no humour in that. Helms felt a lurch in the pit of his stomach.

  “I’m sorry. Whatever you say, Major,” he said smoothly, and was suddenly consumed with rage at his own words. “Oh for fuck’s sake —”

  “Don’t you —”

  “After all we’ve —”

  Sorcha touched Helms’s eyes with her fingertips. He realised the threat: she could blind him in an instant.

  And she would, he knew it.

  She really would!

  “Consider,” he told her, calmly, “your situation. There is no Earth. There is no Galactic Corporation. Do we really need these displays of military bravura?”

  She patted his eyes with her fingertips and he saw stars.

  “Fuck!”

  “Just a warning.”

  “That hurt.”

  “It will hurt less when your eyes pop out, that’s what shock does to you,” she said sweetly. “But trust me, in a few days’ time, the empty sockets will sting like fuck.”

  “Sorcha! Please! Why the hell can’t we just —”

  Sorcha took her hand away. Her stance changed. It was a kata stance, a state of total awareness and relaxation, preceding a deadly strike. Helms knew he had two choices: capitulate just in time, or just a few moments too late.

  “Major Molloy,” he said hastily, gabbling like a fool, “I’d, um, very much, um appreciate your guidance on what we should, ah, do next.” He realised his voice was shrill, and hated himself for it.

  And Sorcha smiled. She was dominating him now, with her body, with her eyes, with her authority.

  “I’ll let you know that in due course.”

  “Good, good. That’s great. That’s — well. Great.”

  “But remember this: military law will remain in force, even though we have lost contact with Earth.”

  “I would expect nothing less, um, Major,” he sycophanted.

  “There is only one way we can survive,” she said generously, “and that is if you unquestioningly heed my authority. Are you prepared to do that, Professor?”

  “Yes! Yes, of course,” said Helms, with a shit-eating smile.

  “Good.”

  There was a jagged pause.

  “So, as I was saying, what’s your plan, Major?” Helms asked. And though his tone was courteous, his intellectual contempt for her shone through.

  “We go back to Xabar and rebuild the city, using the raw materials in the underground bunkers outside the city walls. The city is gone but the bunkers are vast and well fortified. So we can —”

  “No.”

  “We go back. We need —”

  “No! There’ll be boobytraps. Robot-mode DRs with orders to kill us.”

  “— raw materials and supplies and energy batteries, all of which are to be found in the bunkers, and yes, there will be some combat, but —”

  “We’re not doing it.”

  “Professor,” said Sorcha, warningly.

  “It’s folly, I won’t allow it.”

  “I have given my orders, now you must —”

  “What are you going to do, clap me in irons? Or do that stupid eye trick again?” And suddenly, it became clear that he did not fear her after all; for Richard Helms did not fear anyone.

  “We return to Xabar!” Sorcha roared.

  “Hmm? Yes? That’s your plan?” Helms taunted. “What about the Depot?”

  Sorcha was floored.

  “What Depot?”

  “What the fuck,” said Ben Kirkham sourly, staring past the Soldiers to watch the Major and the Professor, lost in debate, occasionally touching each other, “are those two love birds up to?”

  “I think it’s sweet,” David Go said.

  Ben swivelled and fixed the hapless Go with his fiercest patronising glare.

  “It speaks!” he sneered.

  “Yes, I speak. In fact —” said David Go calmly, and to his horror Ben Kirkham turned and walked away as he was halfway through a sentence.

  Tonii was lost in the kata. He moved with grace and speed and his body sang.

  Hugo cut open the Two-Tail’s cranium and peered inside at the complex whorls and patterns of its brain.

  “It’s beautiful,” he muttered to himself.

  Sheena listened to the jungle.

  Her eyes were healing well. There was no infection. But also, no chance of getting replacement eyes.

  She was blind, and so she listened to the jungle. Intently, remorselessly, carefully. Until she heard so much that she could visualise it, creating images out of sounds.

  And her helmet could see for her. It whispered instructions. It told her who was near her, told her to step right, or step left. She could fly, with the help of her helmet’s whispering. She could walk, thanks to her helmet.

  But would she ever again be able to see?

  Major Sorcha Molloy addressed the assembled team of Scientists, flanked by her body-armoured Soldiers.

  “As the senior ranking Soldier, I am now Commander of the military forces,” she explained, “and hence also leader of the scientific expedition. Professor Helms will be my civilian second in command, in a purely advisory capacity.”

  “We’re not being told what to do by the military,” protested Ben.

  Twenty Soldiers locked and loaded in unison.

  “Maybe we are,” conceded Ben.

  “My Warriors will ensure your safety. But all the science team will have responsibilities assigned to them. Doctors William and Mary Beebe, you’re in charge of supplies and team morale. Dr Ben Kirkham, you will maintain the equipment, making sure the plasma guns are fully charged at all times. Mia Nightingale, you’re my liaison between the Soldiers and the science geeks. Four of the five AmRovers will each carry a team of ten, with a minimum of three Soldiers in each team, AmRover 1 will carry a team of nine, including Professor Helms, with myself and two others in the Flyer. Each Scientist will be supplied with a plasma cannon and a plasma pistol, and each team will have a proportionate share of the flash grenades and mortars.”

  “You’ve really thought this out in detail, haven’t you?” said Hugo, wryly.

  “We have five Amazon Rovers, one Flyer, and a Scooter. Who brought the Scooter?”

  “That was Ashley,” said Tonii Newton.

  “Our objective is to create a new base camp at the Weapons and Provisions Depot, map reference B453. Do you have that?” said Sorcha.

  There was a baffled silence.

  “What Depot?”

  “There is no Depot.”

  Ben checked the map reference on his helmet display. “It’s jungle there. It’s never even been reconnoitred. This Depot doesn’t exist,” said Ben.

  “Just here,” said Helms, pointing at his own virtual screen.

  “We don’t have a Weapons and Provisions Depot!” Ben complained. “If I say it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist.”

  “Oh, actually, it does,” said Helms, with a shy smile, as he quietly asserted his authority over the meeting. “It just doesn’t exist on the computer record.”

  Sorcha stayed deadpan, allowing everyone to believe she’d known about the Depot all along.

  All eyes were on Helms. He tapped the grid reference on his virtual screen. A map of the jungle appeared and floated in mid-air. On it a building was clearly marked, partially underground, concealed from the air by the Canopy. And it was vast.

  “Why would you build a thing like that?” asked Ben, savagely. “And not tell anyone?”

  “Just a little trick,” Helms said, waving down his virtual screen, “that I learned when I was a university bursar. Some things are best kept hidden away from official scrutiny.”

  Ben was shaken. He glared at Helms with unconcealed hate at having being publicly proved wrong.

  “What’s at this Depot?” asked Mia.

  “Guns, grenades, spare body armour, a generator, food synthesisers and biomass, 10,000 BBs, helicopters, a
space shuttle.”

  “Ye gods,” said Hugo.

  “Why don’t we just go back?” William reasoned. “To Xabar. There may be stuff we can salvage from the bunkers.”

  “No, that’s a stupid idea,” said Sorcha firmly.

  “There may be DRs who survived the blast,” Helms explained diplomatically. “And their little robot brains will still be obeying their last given order, namely, to eliminate us, violently. We have to keep out of their way. It’s a big jungle. So long as they don’t find us, we’re safe.”

  “And pray remind me,” said Hugo, “why all this happened in the first place. Why the blazes would Juno want to kill us?”

  Helms fixed him with an intent stare. “I wish I knew,” he said with burning intensity. “But I don’t.”

  They all pondered on this a moment.

  “So there you go,” Helms concluded crisply. “Now, to business. Let’s begin our march.”

  Gloria Baker was on point duty, and she had big dreams.

  She was low-hovering in her body armour beside AmRover 1, as they made their way through the jungle to the Depot. Behind them drove the other four AmRovers; and at the back of the convoy was the three-person Flyer, with torpedoes primed and ready to use against any beasts pursuing them.

  Gloria’s big dreams included becoming an acclaimed Scientist, discoverer of a vast number of new species and inventor of a new biological synthesis that explained the vagaries of alien evolution. She also dreamed of being a hero, a fighter against injustice, and a campaigner for human rights.

  She also dreamed of being Professor Helms’s lover. He was a calm, impressive, strangely attractive man, a little arrogant perhaps, and rather too skinny for her taste, but his intelligence blazed from him. She’d love to be with a man like that, to mellow and exhilarate and inspire him.

  Gloria had big dreams, and wonderful dreams they were, but then she walk-hovered over a patch of swamp and even though she was five feet in the air the swamp water leaped up and sucked at her and ripped off her legs, body armour and all. Swamp marsh filled her body armour and she died with methane stench in her nostrils. Her body was slurped back down into the swamp and vanished.

  “One man down, Professor,” said Gloria’s best friend John. “Swamp got her.”

  “Why wasn’t she hovering?”

  “She was.”

  “Then hover higher.”

  The four remaining members of the Point Team hovered higher, and continued to plasma-blast their way through the suppurating animal flesh of the Webs.

  Helms absorbed the news. Another member of the team dead. Gloria Baker, biochemist and naturalist. He didn’t remember her. Or was she the one who . . . ? No, no. That wasn’t her.

  Helms cursed himself. He had a terrible memory for names and faces — species yes, but people no. So he took a look at her photograph on his virtual screen, and yes, he knew her now! The redhead with the loud laugh, the one who used to stare at him strangely sometimes, he didn’t know why.

  Helms read Gloria’s biog; and wished he’d got to know her better.

  Mia was editing her footage.

  She liked to edit three or four versions of the same sequence, in different styles, and sometimes even different genres. For the Godzilla Day, she had a wealth of material to draw upon — from the cameras in the AmRovers, the body-armour cams of all concerned, plus her own panoramas and master shots on the 3D cam.

  These were movies you could walk into and fly around. You just needed a pair of goggles or a retinal implant and a wireless MI in your brain, which everyone had these days. And the experience would then begin: flying through the jungles of New Amazon like a Soldier or a Scientist; zooming in to become the size of an insect and inhabiting a microscopic realm; then zooming out to see what was happening from the air and from space; even seeing the whole scene from the point of view of the Godzilla or the Cerberus.

  The entire day’s adventure was rendered into a perfect replica of the experience of being on the planet, with total interactivity. But this was just one piece in the overall jigsaw; the eventual movie would offer experiencers a chance to be on New Amazon for hours or days or months or even years. You could hunt Godzillas, or be a Godzilla, or you could be a Gryphon, or any one of the other New Amazon creatures. You could even be a hard-ass female Soldier and fuck the Professor in charge of the expedition (though for legal reasons, an actor-simulacrum was used to double for Professor Helms in all his scenes).

  Or, if you were not a nerd or a geek or a wonk, you could buy a package-download that allowed you a more varied smorgasbord experience of thousands of different planets. You would tank up with drugs or alcohol, set the control to shuffle, and spend an hour, or a night, or a week, inhabiting all the alien ecospheres of known space. You could be a Heebie-Jeebie, a Sparkler, a flame beast or a Godzilla; you could rape the native women on Cambria; or fuck the sexy hominids on Gazillion.

  There was a wealth of low-grade alien ecosphere material available, much of it concerned with killing and dissection and fornication with sentient beings. Mia, however, worked at the top end of the market; she created works of art, and works of science. But even she couldn’t afford to turn up her nose at occasional snippets of snuff and torture. It added spice to the curry, she felt.

  But Mia was first and last an artist: a visual genius, in the view of many pundits; a documentary film-maker of exceptional experience and talent. And the New Amazon footage was, she firmly believed, some of her best work to date.

  Her worry was, who would see this now? Juno was gone, the link to Earth destroyed. They were trapped on this planet for the rest of their lives.

  So who the hell was going to want to watch her movies?

  Helms was still reviewing, via his virtual screen, the lists of those killed at Xabar, after Juno’s attack. Hundreds. The names blurred, and so many were strangers to him. He remembered her, and him. And him. But he’d never seen her before, or him, or him, or him, or her, or him. Or — no, in fact, damn it all, that was Bill Jones, he was one of Helms’s closest friends . . .

  He forced himself to read the biogs and look at their faces. He even read summaries of some of their academic papers, to get a flavour of the lost lives.

  Sergeant Anderson was spooked by the scale of their defeat at Xabar.

  There were only twenty Soldiers left, plus Major Molloy as Commanding Officer, out of a force of 195. It was hard to believe that so many had gone to Glory. And Anderson kept making silly mental mistakes — thinking, I must talk to Fletcher or Walker about such and such, momentarily forgetting that Fletcher and Walker, and so many others, were all dead.

  But he was glad that Commander Martin was dead — Anderson had despised the man’s mealy-mouthed intellectualism. However, he considered Major Molloy to be a competent and credible commanding officer. She was decisive and ruthless and had proved time and again that she wasn’t afraid to die.

  But it was a shame that one of the freaks had survived. Sergeant Maria Laxton was dead, they’d not be seeing her beautiful blue eyes and taut male–female body again. But Private Tonii Newton was still with them, looking like a man, sounding like a man, but with female curves and breasts and a fanny and an appalling tendency to colour-coordinate whilst off duty.

  That freak was a . . . a freak! An abomination, an affront to the gods of nature. The very sight of him made Anderson want to puke.

  Although, Anderson had to grudgingly admit, he was a damned fine Soldier.

  The convoy inched its way through the gloomy jungle. “Birds” flew in the sky above them, “insects” hovered in the air creating a strange miasma. And, disconcertingly, they had to drive through a “jellyfish” colony, a vast flock of tens of thousands of translucent lighter-than-air creatures, that sucked juice from the Flesh-Webs and, when replete, drifted up to the clouds and shat red pus.

  Thus, before long, they were travelling through a Dante’s Inferno of ghost-like beings in a world where the air itself was red.

  �
�What are you working on, Professor?” William Beebe asked Professor Helms.

  The words scrolled down the virtual screen, security-coded so that only Helms could see them:

  Gregory, Richard. 34. Xenobiologist. Interests: Science, reading, being with my wife. Married to Helen Gregory.

  Gregory, Helen. 44. Xenobiologist. Interests: Science, fencing, being with my husband Richard.

  Hopkins, Michael, 232. Geologist. Interests: Running, swimming, poetry.

  Jenson, Angela, 132. Soldier. Interests: Getting to know my grandchildren.

  And more, and more, and more.

  “It’s nothing,” said Helms. “Nothing. Just —” He broke off, distressed.

  William stared at him, puzzled.

  “Have we met?” the dark-haired woman next to Sorcha in the Flyer said.

  “I’m Major Sorcha Molloy. Commander of the Military Forces.”

  “Yes, I know,” the dark-haired woman said patiently. “I’m Margaret. Margaret Lamarr.”

  “You’re the climatologist?”

  “I am.”

  “What have you found out about New Amazon?” Sorcha asked curtly.

  Margaret blinked. “Um, we’re still working on the oxygen question. With so much plant-life, why so little oxygen?”

  “Since photosynthesis is clearly operating.”

  “We think the Ocean-Aldiss-Tree sucks in oxygen. But we don’t know how.”

  “We’ll change all that,” said Sorcha casually, and Margaret flinched.

  “When we terraform, you mean?” she said acidly.

  “Well, that is the object of the exercise.”

  “The object of the exercise,” said Margaret, precisely, “is, or rather was, no damn it, is, to study this alien planet. And to catalogue all of its species, in the minutest detail.”

  “Before we kill them all,” said Sorcha.