Red Claw

by Philip Palmer

  It took Saunders two hours, two awful and humiliating and painful hours, to get the pencil plasma gun out of his arse.

  First he had to get his body armour off, which was difficult enough, since he was both cuffed and shackled. Second, he had to strip off his trousers and underpants. And, then, third, he had to insert his fingers —

  Anyway! At one point a host of Rat-Insects swarmed over his half-naked body and he had to use a sonic-scream to get them off. The jungle was generally hot and humid, but it was also blighted by savage cold breezes. Saunders found the pain of the windchill on his unprotected body appalling. It was one thing to savour the breeze on your cheeks, quite another to endure the bizarrely hot–cold New Amazonian temperatures whilst bare-arsed.

  Even when he had removed the gun from its sticky niche, he still had to re-dress himself in clothes and body armour. Only then could he set about the task of burning through the connecting cables of his cuffs and shackles. And only then could he burn the diamond-hard tether that wrapped around his neck, and held him fast to the Aldiss tree.

  It took twenty minutes of burning before the tether snapped. Then Saunders began walking through the jungle.

  The plasma gun contained a micro-thin Bostock battery, so though it was a tiny weapon he was confident it would last him some months. The priority now was to get away from this part of the jungle. The flares had ignited in the lower atmosphere, on a faintly sloping trajectory, so Saunders had mentally calculated that the DRs would have to search more than sixty square kilometres of jungle to find him. That was, Saunders guessed, a deliberate strategy on Sorcha’s part — the longer it took the DRs to find and kill him, the longer Sorcha and her people had to get away to safety.

  Her logic was impeccable, but she was wrong. It was now appallingly obvious that Hooperman would have programmed the robots to kill every single person who had ever worked with his enemy and nemesis, Carl Saunders. This wasn’t a targeted revenge, it was to be a massacre.

  This must explain why Saunders was still alive. He was being taunted and mocked, forced to play a role in a Grand Guignol theatre event. Hooperman wanted his enemy to know that all his friends and colleagues had been horribly and brutally killed, before he would allow the DRs to, horribly and brutally, kill Saunders himself.

  But Saunders had a few tricks to play yet. He set his body armour on high hover and soared up into the air and flew just below the level of the Canopy. From time to time poison shit rained down, making his armour sizzle, but he was making good time. He hadn’t seen any Dravens. Maybe he would get away from this region without encountering the enemy.

  And then he saw them. Six flying DR Humanoids. They spotted him and formed an attack formation.

  Saunders tilted his body and flew upwards, then plasma-blasted a hole in the tree canopy and flew through.

  Sorcha lurched forward in her seat, as the low-hovering AmRover abruptly halted, froze briefly in mid-air, then crashed to the ground.

  “What the hell?”

  Sorcha patted herself for broken limbs. Ben was staring at her, puzzled.

  “Check the engine,” she snapped.

  They got out and inspected the vehicle. Ben snapped the bonnet open and peered down into the AmRover’s engine. He touched the smooth metal with a finger, and it came out green and sticky.

  “Corrosive vegetation,” he said.

  “Not possible,” said Sorcha.

  “Microscopic spores,” speculated Hugo. “They could have been here months. The heat of the engine is enough to germinate them.”

  “These are sealed units!”

  “Microscopic,” explained Hugo, “may mean micromicroscopic. Smaller than air molecules.”

  “Let’s all move into the other vehicle,” grumbled Sorcha.

  The remaining AmRover was spacious enough to take all ten survivors. But Sorcha hated the fact that they were reduced to one vehicle. There was no margin for error now.

  “We drive day and night,” she said.

  “You’re the boss,” Ben told her, in tones that implied he thought she damned well shouldn’t be.

  Saunders exploded through the tree canopy and saw clear blue sky above him for the first time in a year. The sun was bright yellow with a hint of blue corona and three times larger than any sun he had ever lived under. He could see some nearby asteroids, virtually moons.

  Saunders carried on flying upwards, then he looped and looked down.

  The Humanoid DRs burst through the canopy in pursuit of him. The Roc nest he had crashed into was now a wreck and a hapless Roc chick was circling aimlessly, old enough to fly but not mature enough to defend itself. A flock of Deadbirds appeared as if from nowhere and ripped it to shreds in moments. Then a few seconds later a flock of adult Rocs appeared and turned the Deadbirds into dead birds.

  The Humanoid DRs were in the midst of this, and the Rocs plunged at them. A haze of plasma fire lit the sky, turning the canopy an even more lurid green.

  But the Rocs had scales that could, miraculously, deflect plasma bolts. They were roused to rage and plunged in on the Humanoid DRs.

  Saunders flew on, amused at the sight of the most powerful robots of all time being ripped limb from limb by a flock of birds the size of killer whales.

  Ben’s head was throbbing. He was sick with desire. He beckoned to Private Clementine McCoy with the time-honoured “Shall we fuck?” finger-flick signal, but she frowned and shook her head.

  “I’m important to this mission, you should think of my morale,” he pointed out acidly. He knew that Soldiers were hard-wired to be promiscuous — all sex was casual to them — so what was this bitch’s problem?

  “Oh for heaven’s sake,” she told him scornfully.

  “You’ve done it with me before,” he said sulkily.

  “Only when drunk.” She replied, lightening her words with a smile.

  “Oh don’t be such a spoilsport.”

  “Back the fuck off, Ben. I’m not in the mood, OK?” She wasn’t smiling any more.

  “Just a quickie?”

  “No!” Clementine was baffled at his eerie persistence.

  “Go on. You’ll hardly notice.”

  “No!”

  “No? No?” Ben was consumed with blinding rage. He could suddenly see himself strangling Clementine to death, and pleasuring himself upon her corpse.

  “You don’t look well,” she told him gently.

  “Are you sure that was the right thing to do? Leaving the Professor to die?” Hugo said to Sorcha.

  She was angry with him for questioning her judgement. And startled that he had spoken to her about something that wasn’t a scientific issue.

  “It’s the only way to divert the DRs,” she said carefully. “Saunders is the one they want, not us.”

  “We don’t know that,” said Hugo pedantically.

  “Of course we know that! Hooperman is the one who set his dogs on us, and he and Saunders have been enemies for more than two hundred years.”

  “True,” Hugo, conceded, but couldn’t resist adding: “But it was all Hooperman’s fault, you know — well, that is, apart from the bomb bit. After all, I mean, he was the one who told those stupid lies about what happened in the Amazon rainforest. I always knew Saunders would never have —”

  “I don’t care why they hate each other, I just care that they do.”

  “It was all nonsense! What Hooperman said, after he crawled —”

  “Let’s not rehash this now.”

  “In fact,” Hugo continued, inexorably, “Saunders honestly believed that —”

  Sorcha glared at him.

  Hugo subsided, grudgingly.

  Sorcha drove on, in blessed silence.

  But then a mist covered her eyes, and she blinked swiftly to clear it.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Hugo.

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re upset.”

  “Something in my eye.”

  “Of course,” Hugo realised, “it must have been hard fo
r you to leave Saunders behind. Considering —”

  “That has no bearing on the matter.”

  “But you were —”

  “We had sex. That’s all. He was one of my conquests. I didn’t even like the odious little shit,” Sorcha said, with all the arrogance and emotional disdain of the born and bred Soldier.

  “Oh, I see,” said Hugo, his theory crushed.

  Sorcha drove on.

  “Well,” said Hugo, thoughtlessly. “If Saunders isn’t dead yet, he will be soon.”

  “Good,” said Sorcha. “I’m glad. The useless bastard!”

  She drove on, stony-faced.

  The sky was black with Gryphons. Saunders knew that if they saw him as prey, and plunged, and attacked him, he stood no chance.

  They did not plunge. Saunders flew on.

  Sorcha realised with a sense of horror that she couldn’t do this.

  She slowed the AmRover down, and glided gently to the ground.

  “I’m going back.”

  Hugo stared at her aghast. “What? What are you on about?”

  “Is there a problem?” asked Private Clementine McCoy, from the AmRover’s recreation room.

  “Why the fuck have we stopped?” snarled Sergeant Anderson, from the back seat of the cockpit.

  “The Professor,” Sorcha explained to Hugo. “I have to be with him.”

  Hugo fought his bewilderment. “But you left him to die.”

  “And I shouldn’t have,” Sorcha said, anguished. “I have to go back, before it’s too late.”

  Hugo did his best to follow this bizarre switch from loathing to loving. He failed.

  “Um, I don’t think I follow,” he said.

  “Have we stopped?” asked Jim Aura, blinking awake.

  “What’s your problem, Soldier?” Sergeant Anderson snarled.

  “Start the fucking truck!” roared Ben.

  “I’ll be getting out here,” Sorcha said, sadly.

  Through his helmet amp, Saunders heard a whirr of wind and suddenly he was ripped out of the air and buffeted and battered.

  It took him several seconds to realise what was happening. A Gryphon had attacked, and was gripping him by his head. He flailed helplessly for a moment, then managed to take out his plasma pencil and fired. Feather-scales flew and the Gryphon’s head was severed, but its beak had pecked at his hardglass helmet, scratching it, and the power of the whiplash caused Saunders to black out.

  DAY 14

  It took a day and a night for Sorcha to walk and fly back to where they had abandoned Saunders.

  At last, she arrived at the clearing where they had left him. She checked her bearings; this was definitely the right spot. She looked anxiously for him, amazed at the way her heart leaped and skipped, and —

  He wasn’t there.

  His tether was cut. An Aldiss tree was weeping pus from where it had been burned by a plasma blast.

  Sorcha subvoced a curse, and raged at her own stupidity. Now she didn’t have Saunders, she didn’t have an AmRover, and there was a very good chance she was going to end up dead.

  What the fuck was wrong with her?

  Saunders woke, his head pounding, and a Gryphon sat before him, huge and sharp-beaked and terrifying.

  He realised he’d been unconscious for some time, nearly a day. His body armour had been sedating him while it healed his injuries. A visor display showed him the X-ray of his fractured skull, now almost knitted back in place.

  Saunders calmed his breathing, and tried to meet the Gryphon’s eyes, but then he realised it had no eyes. There was a trace of blood on its beak from a recent kill. With his peripheral vision, Saunders tried to piece together where he was. Not in the jungle — because there were clouds above him but also below him. And there was a crack in the centre of his field of vision. The hardglass helmet was cracked. A few savage pecks and the Gryphon might well be able to break it.

  Saunders looked closer at the creature before him. It was large, twice the size of an Earth lion. And it was similar to a bird in shape, but it was a far more terrible creature. It had no eyes, a bullet head, and a “beak” that had serrated edges and held several dagger tongues. The “beak” was in fact a manoeuvrable claw, which it used to rip food.

  The scales were blue and silver, and finely polished. And the Gryphon had six sets of claws, with bilateral symmetry. Saunders estimated that when its wings were fully expanded it would be nearly twenty feet from tip to tip.

  The Gryphon flicked its deadly tongue towards him, and Saunders flinched in fear. Belatedly, he fumbled for his plasma pencil — and found the holster empty. The Gryphon cawed. It raised up one huge talon. It was holding his plasma pencil.

  It knew that it was a weapon. Saunders began revising his opinion of the Gryphon. It was smarter than the average avian. He found himself counting the neck scales, and making a mental estimate of the distance between beak and forehead. There was definitely a patch of differently coloured skin on the forehead, maybe that was the retina-skin.

  The Gryphon brain, Saunders recalled from his autopsies, was situated in its chest. And inside the skull, there was —

  It was putting the plasma pencil down! Its claws were surprisingly delicate, and it laid the thin plasma gun on the ground between them, as an offering. Saunders smiled. “Thank you,” he said loudly, “I come in peace!” And he mentally calculated how he would do this; a quick plasma blast to blow the creature’s head off, then he would roll sideways, and —

  The Gryphon snatched the plasma pencil up, and cawed angrily. It lunged forward and pecked Saunders’s helmet savagely. It felt like being hit by a crowbar. It pecked again and again, and Saunders rolled himself up in a ball. Then he screamed, shrilly, and that silenced the bird. It was a peace-screech, they’d recorded the Gryphons using it in flight, and it was his secret weapon.

  Saunders screamed shrilly again, and the Gryphon backed off. Saunders’s cry was an uncanny impersonation; he’d always had a remarkable knack for imitating bird cries. (His party-piece was a nightingale being eaten alive by a kestrel.)

  Saunders then tried out a short trilling noise, another Gryphon sound he had recorded and memorised. He had no idea what it meant, but hoped it would have a lulling effect.

  The Gryphon was calmer now. It was shaking its head from side to side, as if considering its options. It raised the plasma pencil up to its forehead and peered . . .

  Oh my God! Saunders was consumed with excitement. This was proof positive that the forehead skin was the creature’s retina. It was peering at his plasma gun!

  He hoped that it didn’t have enough dexterity in its claw to activate the gun’s trigger.

  And suddenly, strangely, an image was in his mind, of a Gryphon chick being hatched, and taking flight, and being killed by flying Robots.

  Saunders blinked. What had just happened? Was that a hallucination? Was he still concussed?

  Another image filled his mind: himself, falling from the sky. Hitting the ground, hard. Stirring, groaning, swearing. Where did this image come from? He hadn’t witnessed it, he couldn’t have seen himself fall.

  He looked at the Gryphon and then he knew. This was the Gryphon’s memory of what it had witnessed. The Gryphon was planting images in his mind . . . !

  The Gryphon’s forehead stared at him. And an image appeared in his mind: himself, bedraggled, bloodied, mad-looking, staring at the Gryphon.

  He was seeing himself through the Gryphon’s eyes.

  Saunders marvelled, and immediately began wondering how this was possible. An electromagnetic pulse, transmitting brain waves? Was that possible? Especially since the images were being passed between different species?

  A gust of wind sent rocks scrabbling past them. They clattered down the mountain crag. Saunders ignored them. He kept his focus on the Gryphon. It occurred to him that the Gryphon’s brain was in its chest, and in the skull there was a spongy organ which seemed to serve no function. So perhaps the spongy organ was an organic electro-magnet
ic amplification device? And maybe, indeed, instead of having one brain that does many things, the Gryphon had two brains. A brain in its chest for doing and thinking, and another in its skull totally devoted to seeing?

  Saunders thought: My name is Carl Saunders. I am a human being. The Gryphon was impassive. No reaction.

  Saunders conjured up an image of a body-armoured Soldier killing Doppelganger Robots by the score.

  The Gryphon cawed, with seeming delight.

  Just images, then, not thoughts. Not telepathy, projective vision. And it must involve some kind of resonance effect that allowed neurons or whatever passed for neurons in the Gryphon’s brain to spark neurons in his brain.

  An image appeared in his mind: a flock of Gryphons flying through the acid rain. Steam was boiling off their scales. The sunlight was creating a vivid moving rainbow out of pillars of falling acid. It was an uncanny and a beautiful sight. And the image was moving against the backdrop of the sky; it was a POV recollection of what the Gryphon had seen once when it had flown through the rain.

  Saunders remembered going on a trip to Niagara Falls, when he was twenty. He was with a girl, pretty, blond, well stacked, who always wore very tight shorts. Jennie? She’d been mesmerised by the sight of the waterfall, the sheer power of nature, the clouds of spume and the roar of water crashing against rock. He remembered it all now, in acute detail. And he tried to send the image.

  The Gryphon cawed. It patted him with a talon. The image had been received.

  Saunders remembered spacewalking outside the colony ship that had brought him to New Amazon. He saw the spaceship below him, its squat body, its portholes, its Bridge jutting out from the bow like a bump on a head. And beyond it, he remembered seeing space all around, stars, a vast panorama of space, with galaxies and nebulae jostling for attention in the black backdrop.