Red Claw

by Philip Palmer

  It was obvious now that Sorcha had fallen for a simple ambush strategy. The DR had isolated and destroyed the convoy’s only Flyer. And now, she guessed, the DR would melt away and bide its time. The convoy would be in full defensive posture, invulnerable to all but the most ferocious of assaults. So why bother attacking? Why not wait until Helms and his people got bored and started driving again? And then launch another ambush . . .

  Sorcha sifted through her memories of the Humanoid DR that had fired at them. It had run fast and skilfully, zigzagging through the undergrowth, with its back-arsenal firing out an endless cloud of chaff to impede following fire. But the DR hadn’t been running away from her; it had simply laid a trail of poisoned meat that Sorcha had voraciously swallowed.

  Sorcha walked fast through the Flesh-Webs, stepping on green algae-like stuff and slippery brown turdlike growths. Her helmet was back in position and she could hear her own breathing. Then she saw the Basilisks and her breathing got louder, more desperate. Her heart beat faster and the pulse in her temple pounded, like a dagger being plunged into her skull.

  Helms stepped outside his AmRover. The communal energy shield assured almost total protection to all inside its perimeter, so he retracted his helmet and breathed in stale air and rotten eggs. Then he beckoned Ben to join him.

  “What kind of xenohostile?”

  “It wasn’t,” said Ben.

  “Not an alien?”

  “A DR.”

  Helms felt a jolt of panic. “This far from the base? How would it have found us?”

  “It’s a robot. It has search software. It’s implacable. Go figure.”

  “How many DRs?” Helms queried, in his calmest voice.

  “Just one, as I say. I didn’t spot it until it was too late. It must have stealth capacity too.”

  “What kind of super fucking robot is this?”

  “We should keep the force fields up,” said Ben.

  “Of course we should,” Helms conceded.

  “And wait for survivors to reach us,” said Ben.

  “I know,” said Helms.

  “Twenty-four hours max, then we move on. We’ll be handicapped without the Flyer,” said Ben, “but . . .”

  Helms realised his heart was racing; his palms were damp. He could only think about one thing, one person, and that was Sorcha. He ached with desire for her, and was overwhelmed by an urge to protect her.

  Protect her? Was he mad?

  Sorcha didn’t need his protection! She could kill him with a single finger-strike. At times, when they made love, she was so powerful that he feared she would break him like a stick. She was the embodiment of a resourceful, dangerous, ruthless Warrior. And yet —

  “I’m going back to fetch them,” said Helms, abruptly, and Ben stared at him, speechless, wholly unable to believe what Helms had just said.

  Margaret was getting drowsy.

  Stay awake! Stay awake!

  Her helmet was up and locked. Her body armour could withstand an attack from a projectile bullet, or a medium-intensity plasma blast, or a mauling from any normal predator. On one occasion, a team member had been eaten alive by a Godzilla, and survived, with shit-smeared armour and a phobia about small dark places, but intact and unhurt. So her chances were good. They — no! Awake!

  Margaret’s leg had been badly crushed by the impact of the plasma bullet, but the armour’s doc function had contained the bleeding. Neomorphine was pumping through her body to contain the pain. coagulants stopped her bleeding out. The armour had self-sealed. Her heart-boost implant was keeping her blood pumping. She could survive for days. If she could — only —

  Stay awake!

  The stimulants in her bloodstream weren’t helping to combat the drowsiness. The painkillers weren’t killing the pain either. And the stress, the pain, the horror, were making her tune out. She was losing her grip on the moment, losing consciousness.

  Stay awake!

  She still had her plasma pistol and her flash grenades. The only serious danger would be if the DR returned. Otherwise, she could endure in this jungle until her body had healed, and in a couple of hours she could start walking. However dangerous the creatures, they were no threat to a soldier with modern weaponry and state-of-the-art body . . .

  Stay awake!

  If only she could stay awake. She was safe, but only if she could stay awake.

  Stay awake!

  Stay

  Helms insisted on taking one of the precious plasma cannons, and a spare Bostock battery. He asked for volunteers to help him and got none. He was defying all military protocols by attempting a rescue mission in the face of Level 1 danger, and he wondered if his authority would ever recover from this blow.

  However, looking on the bright side, he mused, he probably wouldn’t survive long enough for that to be a problem.

  Sorcha started walking towards the Basilisks. The jungle was dense here, so she couldn’t use her body-armour jets to fly over them. And it would take too long to go around. She knew she only had twenty-four hours to recover her position with her unit before they left without her.

  Sorcha firmly believed that Margaret stood a chance, once she was past the six-hour self-healing period and able to walk again. But Sorcha wasn’t prepared to jeopardise her own survival by waiting for Margaret to be fit to walk. That would be foolish, and unmilitary.

  Sorcha toyed with the idea of seeking and stalking the DR, and destroying it in order to safeguard the larger group. But the chances were that she’d just wander blindly and not find it, and would lose her life for no purpose. That was too great a risk to take. For Sorcha knew she was a valuable asset, the product of vastly expensive military training, and it had to be her priority to keep herself alive.

  Sorcha continued, walking carefully and quietly through the field of Basilisks. She had no idea what these creatures could do if provoked, but she’d once seen a flock of them stalk a Godzilla, and she’d been chilled at their eerie patience as they slowly crept towards the slumbering beast. In the end the Godzilla had heard something, and was spooked and fled, and the Basilisks had returned to their natural, slithering state, wrapped around tree trunks, or half-buried in soil.

  There were many thousands of these snakelike creatures here, she realised; they formed a carpet over which she hovered, and some were large enough to span an entire tree trunk. The Basilisks, like most New Amazonian creatures, had no eyes. And to her amazement she saw one Basilisk fall from the tree canopy and fly downwards in slow gliding movements.

  Sorcha moved slowly, ever more slowly, but the field of Basilisks began to stir. They could, she deduced, sense her by some form of echo-location.

  Then the ground below her erupted. A Basilisk the size of a spaceship seized her in its claws and she commenced to fire her plasma cannon. Blood gushed into the air when she blew the monster’s head off and she fell from its mouth to the ground and was ensnared in powerful snake coils that strangled and crushed her, but she carried on blasting, rose to her feet and hovered with her boot jets and flew her way through the forest of flesh.

  Entrails and scarlet blood rained around her as she flew through the Basilisk horde, plasma-blasting remorselessly. She marvelled at the sharp teeth and claws of these creatures, which emerged from every part of their black cylindrical bodies, and finally she was through and past the hazard, and she cut her jets and hit the ground and commenced running.

  Her heart was pounding again. She felt as if the drumbeats of her pulse were going to rip her in two. She had almost died back there, and the realisation shot jolts of panic and exhilaration and fear through her body. She was driven by her own hysteria, exulting because she had so very nearly died but instead had fought and won and lived.

  Sorcha paused a moment, and checked her bearings. She was off course. She began to trek eastwards, fording a fast river that was covered with a steam haze of methane gas. Another few hours and she’d be back with the convoy. She just had to keep moving.

  And so on she wa
lked, panting, frightened, anxious, tired, excited, and alive.

  Helms still had an MI-radio connection with the Satellite, which could track Sorcha and Margaret and McKenley via a spectrum analysis of the jungle that caused their energy-retarding body suits to loom out like shadows in noonday sunlight.

  He feared the continuing danger from the DR, even if it was just a stupid robot; he feared the Godzillas, which he believed were growing more intelligent; and he feared there might be some unknown predator species that might be strong enough to kill him through his body armour. He also feared himself, for he didn’t understand why he was risking so much for a woman he hardly knew and barely liked. They were lovers, admittedly — but why was he risking his life for her?

  He had three body armours highlighted in his helmet map-display. One was moving, two were static. He made a swift scenario calculation and flew through the jungle towards the two static body armours.

  After an hour he found the wreckage of the Flyer and the dead body of the pilot, McKenley. He picked up scattered supplies, including a KM45 plasma cannon and a food kit. And he visually scoured the scene for the remaining body armour indicated on his helmet screen. Eventually, he found it, about five hundred yards from the plane. It was wrapped in the coils of a Basilisk, which now slept, replete. The coils dug so tight that they had warped the armour. But the body armour hadn’t broken; instead, the helmet itself had shattered, under the appalling force exerted by brains and skull being squeezed against it. The Basilisk had literally crushed its prey until the hardglass helmet had fractured and the brain and skull and internal organs had erupted like bloodied lava through the hole.

  But Helms had no way of telling if the empty armour belonged to Margaret or to Sorcha. Eventually, he found a speck of body tissue and scanned it and the DNA result came back swiftly: Margaret Lamarr.

  Then he saw another speck of red tissue on the green undergrass, and saw it move. He adjusted the helmet to full magnification and saw that a patch of dead body was being carried by a Six-Head, with its legs stretching up above its head to support the weight of its spoils. As Helms watched, a hundred thousand or more Six-Heads swarmed around his feet, each carrying flecks of skin and tiny parts of body organs. They moved with synchronised purpose out of the clearing, carrying remnants of a dead human being to be used as part of their godforsaken Jungle-Wall.

  Helms briefly mourned Margaret, then he filmed the scurrying Six-Heads and their cargo of corpse fragments, sent the images to his brain implant memory, and carried on.

  Sorcha’s helmet mike could hear the distant footsteps of a DR, and the helmet hissed at her to be silent. “Beware, hostile, two klicks,” the helmet said.

  “Thanks,” Sorcha breathed, to her helmet computer.

  She stood silently and waited. The helmet’s computer translated the doppler shift of the footsteps for her: “Approaching. Still approaching. No footsteps now. Now moving again, receding. Receding. Safe to proceed.”

  Sorcha walked on.

  Helms was afraid to use his MI-radio link again, in case the DR could intercept the signal.

  So he retracted his helmet and screamed: “Sorcha! It’s me! Professor Helms!” — hoping to be heard by her helmet’s sensitive mikes.

  “Voice in audio range. Message: Sorgum, sammy, pressure home,” the helmet told Sorcha, and she quickened her pace, baffled.

  “Flying robots approaching,” the helmet told Helms, and he took cover behind the trunk of an Aldiss tree, as a swarm of DRscalpels descended in a search pattern. He tagged them with his gunsight and fired. And the flying scalpels vanished from the air with a soft shearing noise.

  “Gunfire,” the helmet told Sorcha. She hurried on.

  Helms quickened his pace. “Sorcha, it’s me!” he screamed. “DRs in the air! Beware Doppelgangers, above you, in the air! DRs in the air! Sorcha! In the air!”

  “It is a message to you: ‘DRs in the air,’ ” the helmet told Sorcha.

  “Who is speaking?” Sorcha yelled, at her own helmet.

  “Professor Helms,” said the helmet computer, which could have given her this information quite some time ago, had she only thought to ask.

  Two dozen DRscalpels hovered through the air, controlled by a single mind, awkwardly flocking and swarming. Sometimes they collided so badly that several fell injured from the sky like shot raptors. But the controlling mind finally managed to harness their chaos and sent them on their course, deeper into the jungle. The target was not Helms, it was Sorcha. She was to die, as painfully as possible.

  That was their mission.

  Helms could see the flying DRscalpels pass above his head. He guessed they were heading for Sorcha. He ignored his helmet display, and instead he fired his body-armour jets and flew up into the air, and followed the deadly machine flock as it closed in on its prey.

  Sorcha looked up and the sky was black with tiny robots, armed with scalpels and cutting tools, able to burrow through flesh or body armour with equal ease. She tagged one with her gunsight and fired but then the rest descended and she fired at will.

  The “shuck shuck shuck” sound of a second plasma weapon joined in. She saw a body-armoured man at the edge of the clearing, picking off DRscalpels. He was fast and accurate, even though he was clearly shooting without the help of smart targeting.

  Sorcha fired and a flying robot vanished. She fired again, and again . . .

  Her body was covered with a half-dozen robot surgical machines. They were burrowing through her armour, blood was spurting, and the man was running towards her with his plasma cannon held out. He fired and a pillar of flame rippled through the air and enveloped her.

  Sorcha ignited and was engulfed in a fireball. The DRscalpels exploded on her in a series of powerful bangs and then the plasma cannon was shooting fire-retardant foam at her. Now her helmet was broken open and she was coughing and her face was hot.

  Sorcha passed out.

  When she woke up, she’d been lifted out of her charred and torn body armour and was semi-naked on the undergrass. Helms was looking down at her.

  “What are you doing here?” she snarled.

  “I came to rescue you,” he explained, and Sorcha was shocked beyond all measure.

  “You could have done a better job of it,” she sneered.

  Helms smiled. “Come on, let’s go,” he said.

  “Like this?” Apart from a thin body overall that left her arms and legs bare, she was entirely unprotected from the New Amazonian elements.

  “You’ll be OK,” said Helms, and started to walk away. She leaped to her feet in a single fluid movement, so she could follow him.

  But then Helms paused a moment, and turned, and added casually: “Provided, of course, it doesn’t rain.”

  And Sorcha winced in fear.

  DAY 6

  It was 4.30 a.m., and the New Amazonian sun was dawning.

  Sheets of red fire curled among the leaves and branches of the tree canopies. The Flesh-Webs glittered as the dew melted off them. The night chorus of nocturnal birds and scurrying grubs with rattling thoraxes ebbed, and the dawn chorus of angry Godzillas and Bigfeet and Tritons and Forest Sharks roared their ownership of their territory, while the birds in the canopies screeched and shrilled and the insects in the Flesh-Webs howled as the sun woke them.

  Six Scientists and five Soldiers were dead: all those in the AmRover that had been blown up, who had died instantly, and Margaret Lamarr. But Helms and Sorcha were now reunited with the others, after walking safely back out of the jungle.

  All those who had died had been abandoned where they fell, but Helms felt it necessary to hold a brief memorial service in their honour.

  Forty-one Scientists and Soldiers gathered in the clearing as Helms spoke calmly and precisely about honour and sacrifice and the randomness of death that comes to all of us, paraphrasing from the many evangelists he had mocked over the years. But his restraint and dignity were exemplary; and he managed to entirely hide the childish, solipsistic sens
e of relief he always felt when others died, and he had not.

  Helms was aware of the many anxious looks that were cast at him. It was clear to everyone now that Sorcha was special to him, and that he would jeopardise everything to protect her.

  This meant his authority was in the balance, but Helms didn’t care. He felt defined, and exalted, by his simple act of heroism.

  “From now on,” he said, “if the Commander agrees” — he nodded at Sorcha and she nodded her assent — “we drive through the night. We have to reach the Depot before our enemies find us again.”

  “Enemies!” snorted Ben Kirkham.

  “The DRs,” clarified Helms.

  “Why are they following us?” William Beebe asked bluntly. “The Quantum Beacon is gone, so it’s not the CSO any more, and it’s not the Earth Gamers. Why would stupid robots be so determined to kill us all?”

  “Because the CSO’s people programmed them to do so,” Helms told him firmly. There was a pause; his power tottered in the balance.

  William thought about what Helms had said. The logic was sound, but his intuition screamed “No”.

  Furthermore, William had been quietly checking up on Helms on his implanted database.

  And he was rapidly coming to the conclusion that there was something, indefinably, not quite right about Professor Richard Helms and his scientific career. Helms was a geologist whose specialism was terraforming. His job was to destroy the flora and fauna of New Amazon, not to study them. And yet, as they all knew, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of alien life-forms and taxonomic systems, and he supervised alien autopsies with extraordinary skill and expertise. William himself had, on many occasions, deferred to Helms’s judgement on areas on which he, William Beebe, was supposedly the authority.