Red Claw

by Philip Palmer

  The Gryphon cawed, as if alarmed. Its head tilted upwards, towards the sky, and it cawed and cawed. And Saunders made a “cawing” noise in response, and pointed a finger up at the sky.

  Yes, his cawing said: I come from outer space.

  After twelve hours of brutal high-hovering in the AmRover, including two hours once again spent cutting through a Jungle-Wall, they were close to their destination. Ben had his eyes fixed on the computer screen, as the dot of the AmRover grew ever closer to the pink part of the electro-map, the bit where jungle ended.

  Then, in real life, the AmRover trundled over the hill and the jungle vanished.

  “We’re through,” said Mary Beebe.

  “I can see that,” Ben told her, still staring at his screen.

  Sergeant Anderson grunted.

  Tonii opened up the hatch and flew out of the AmRover to get a better view. Behind them was the knotted density of dark jungle. In front lay a vast expanse of yellow grass, and clear blue skies above. Six-legged and three-legged and no-legged grazing animals of various unknown genuses grazed. Small shrubs flourished, and some moved around. A stream ran through the grass, and sparkles and splashes in the water indicated the presence of aquatic life. And beyond the grasslands was the sea, tree-haunted and tempestuous, as the New Amazonian winds sent waves crashing high up into the branches of the Ocean-Aldiss-Tree.

  They all got out of the AmRover and recced. Mary took some grass samples. Tonii checked their position.

  “The grass is toxic if eaten,” said Mary.

  “Then don’t eat it,” said Ben.

  “There’s no cover,” Sergeant Anderson pointed out.

  “Then whatever is coming, we’ll see it,” said Ben.

  “Who made you the fucking boss?” Sergeant Anderson complained.

  “You want to be the boss?”

  A beat. “Yeah,” Anderson growled.

  “Too bad.” Ben smiled, with effortless self-confidence, and Anderson stared at him flintily.

  “I guess we should have a vote,” said Hugo.

  “You want to be in charge?” said Ben.

  “Well, no, but —”

  “How about you?” Ben said to Mary Beebe. She shook her head.

  “You?” David Go shook his head.

  Ben looked at Mia; she shrugged; no.

  Jim Aura shook his head; no way.

  “Well, that’s a decision,” said Ben, smiling like a wolf. “I’m civilian leader, you’re the senior ranking Soldier, Sergeant Anderson. And naturally I’ll defer to you in any military emergency, but I think you should trust me on this kind of high-level strategic decision-making, don’t you? I mean, considering I have four PhDs and I’m Professor Emeritus of World Building at the Galactic University, whereas you, ahem, forgive my candour, are an NCO?”

  All eyes were on Sergeant Anderson. He flushed, catching the mocking intellectual arrogance in Ben’s tone, as anyone but an imbecile would, but not knowing how to react to it. He scowled. He thought about how to deal with this delicate situation, but no answers came to him.

  “Whatever,” he said, at length.

  “We’ll make our home here,” said Ben, and they looked across at the grass, and the sea, and the sheer cliffs.

  “Good call,” said Hugo, snidely.

  Sorcha was cautious about using the MI-radio network, because of the danger of the signal being intercepted by DRs. But she had to know which way to go, so she risked a download from the Satellite, which gave her a sighting of the AmRover two hundred kilometres west, by the sea.

  Then she ran a maproute program, and was appalled at how treacherous the terrain was going to be for a solo traveller. The other option was to fly above the canopy; but then she’d be an easy target for flying predators.

  And even then, she realised, once she hit the Jungle-Wall she was fucked. She could fly like a bird with her body-armour jets, supported by the thick atmosphere. But to fly over the top of the wall she’d need to go way up high, at virtually escape velocity, and that was beyond her power limits.

  But Sorcha had no choice; if she couldn’t find Saunders, she had to rejoin her team.

  She flew as high as she could for a few hours over swamp and snakegrass. Twice she was attacked, by creatures she had never seen before — a ball with spikes that crashed into her armour and tried to open her up like a tin, and a jelly-like being that erupted out of the snakegrass, flew upwards fast and enveloped and blinded her. In both cases, a combination of heated body armour and wild plasma blasting as she whirled around in the air saved her.

  But then she reached the Jungle-Wall. She tried to plasma-blast her way through, but soon realised that without an AmRover’s plasma cannon this might take years.

  So she fired her body-armour jets and took off into the air. This was the danger point — she was totally exposed, and any passing Draven or native predator would see her immediately. But she rose as fast as she could until she reached the canopy of trees, which merged with the wall. The branches were thickly tangled, but she could see a narrow gap between canopy and Jungle-Wall, shielded by the branches. So she clawed her way in and crawled painfully through.

  Within seconds she was trapped, and could feel the wall and the canopy closing in on her. Above, the branches gripped her body in a predatory fashion; below, the Six-Heads swarmed over her, knitting her into their rotted vegetal palace. Her vision vanished as swarming insects covered her helmet visor. Her sensors indicated she was experiencing severe pressure trauma on her body armour. She took some calming breaths and made a search in her database — “Jungle-Wall, Help, Now!” — that found one of Hugo’s diary entries, entitled, How to scream your way through the Jungle-Wall.

  So she followed Hugo’s emergency wall procedure; she switched off her helmet earpieces, and released a loud sonic and ultrasonic blast:

  Blast!

  And again.

  Blast!

  And again. And again. And finally the branches of the Aldiss tree recoiled, and the Six-Heads fled. A gap appeared between canopy and wall, and she could squeeze her way through a little further.

  She was crawling blind now, relying on her visor to show her the route she was pursuing. Hugo had discovered that the branches of the wall, though vegetal, had certain animal qualities, in that they could react to stimuli swiftly and dramatically; and they reacted badly to high-frequency sound. So every sonic/ultrasound blast allowed her to scare her way a few precious feet further inwards.

  Every now and then acidic vomit and shit and piss rained down on her from above, but her body armour self-cleaned it off. Sorcha could vividly imagine herself getting stuck in this ghastly trap, and over a period of weeks becoming part of the jungle substrate, before she died of starvation and thirst. But she kept dragging herself through, hacking a path with raw sound energy, following the red line on her visor that kept her on the straightest of paths.

  And finally, after about five hours, she was through the Jungle-Wall. And there was nothing beyond it . . . She started to tumble from the sky, and so she swiftly turned her body-armour jets on.

  But nothing happened. She continued to fall. Faster. And —

  She clicked the rocket switch again and again — nothing! So, falling like a stone now, she switched to emergency power.

  Jerkily, her fall halted, and she lurched upwards, and badly shaken she began to fly again. And as she flew, she checked the Bostock battery on her body armour. To her horror, she realised it was running on Empty. It must have been damaged earlier, and been slowly leaking power ever since.

  Sorcha panicked. She was flying miles above the ground in a spacesuit without batteries. The emergency power wasn’t meant to last more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time, before being recharged by the Bostock battery. And it dawned on her — she could tumble from the sky at any moment, to be inevitably killed by the crash-landing.

  So should she glide back down to earth? But that way, she’d be trapped on the ground. So instead, she took out her plasma
gun and cut a path through the maliciously thick and convoluted branches of the canopy.

  When she’d cut a big enough gap, she lunged out and grabbed hold. And she climbed up into the canopy itself.

  She had to rip a path through the brambles and vines that snarled around the main Aldiss tree branches. Inch by inch, she crept along the branches until she emerged on to the topside. Then she staggered to her feet, and looked around.

  It was a whole other jungle, high up in the air. Trees larger than houses grew on the top branches of the Aldiss tree. Flowers flourished up here, a carpet of blazing colour. Sorcha saw deerlike animals grazing. She saw a horned beast with no head and fire flaming from its arse. She saw Butterfly-birds flying free, swooping and pouncing. She saw a red bird with no beak but a bright blue head and vast wings strutting on a branch, then gliding down, and trilling all the while. She saw insects, a horned creature of some kind, Basilisks, and hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of Two-Tails and Two-Tails with three tails (Three-Tails?) scampering from branch to branch.

  Then she turned her hearing back on; and was awed at the symphony of sounds. Hissings, screaming, squawkings, trills, bells, bassoons, oboes, the howling of arboreals, the lilting melodies of trees, and flowers that could sing. The sounds were varied and overwhelming and intense; and yet they blended into a single rich crescendo and decrescendo and allegro and andante and piano and forte, a brutally savage and unbearably sweet soundscape of evocative disharmony.

  Sorcha marvelled, briefly. Then she filmed the panorama, capturing all the sights and sounds, and took a few close-ups of the creatures nearest her. She saw shards of glass nestling in the higher branches of one of the Parasite trees (as she mentally dubbed them) and was puzzled. Looking closer, she saw that the shards were in fact one continuous mass of glass-like material, which sprawled from tree branch to tree branch as far as the eye could see. She ran some tests and confirmed her hypothesis: it was a frozen lake, that spanned the gap between the trees. But what was it made of? It couldn’t be frozen water; despite the icy winds it was far too humid up here for water to freeze. It must be —

  But Sorcha decided she could wait for another day to discover whatever the hell it must be. For the moment, survival was her priority.

  And so Sorcha began to walk as swiftly as she could through the canopy. She used vines and lianas to pull herself along, supplemented with occasional boosts of power from her body-armour jets to keep her airborne between trees. As long as the emergency power lasted, the exoskeleton of her body armour gave her enhanced strength, so after a while she was able to leap and fly from tree to tree like a primate, much faster than walking speed, but using far less power than if she flew.

  The sun above dazzled her when it stole through a crack in the tree cover. She marvelled at the strange life-forms growing on the Aldiss tree trunks up here. And on she travelled, leaping and swinging from branch to branch, occasionally attacked by Basilisks or spitting insects or fang-toothed bat-creatures or flailing predator vines or other horrible things she could not name or identify.

  Then she saw the head of a Humanoid DR, nestling in the undergrowth. She stopped to inspect it, prodded it with her foot. Its eyes opened, and she had a lurch of fear — but the silver lids flapped shut again at once. It was lifeless, severed from its power source.

  But what the hell was it doing here? Who or what had killed it?

  Sorcha looked closer and saw gouges and scratches on its neck. Bite marks? Or maybe peck marks? Either way, it looked as if the DR had been ripped to pieces by some New Amazonian predator.

  Sorcha marvelled. The Doppelganger Robots were built to be super-warriors, but even they were no match for this infernal planet.

  She moved on, and after a while she checked her bearings. Another ten hours at least to get to the coast. She decided to gamble that she had enough emergency power to descend on her body-armour jets, so she pointed her plasma gun down and fired and the canopy burned.

  Then she leapt through the hoop of burning fire and dived to earth.

  Saunders carefully explored the territory to which he had been carried by the Gryphon, on the top of a mountain that soared high above the canopy of trees. From his vantage point he could see right the way across the jungle to the ocean. In the other direction he could see the vast sweep of the canopy across the continent, interrupted by towering Jungle-Walls that forced through the canopy and extended beyond the clouds, thick vegetable mountains that seemed to almost touch the stars.

  It was a stunning panorama. He took photographs with his helmet camera, and tried to imprint the magic of the moment in his mind and memory, as well as in his brain implants.

  All around him were strange white domelike structures. These, Saunders guessed, were the Gryphons’ nests. There were tunnels connecting the different domes, forming a kind of mountaintop city. And Saunders could also see holes in the cliff, caves that had either formed naturally or been hewn out by the Gryphons’ beaks.

  Hundreds of Gryphons strutted on the bare rock. Gryphon chicks played, rolling pebbles between them, hurling them up in the air and catching them in claws. Some of the Gryphons were silver, some a bright rich dark blue. Saunders wondered if that was how the sexes were differentiated. But in their Gryphon autopsies, no one had ever fathomed which bit of the beast was the sexual organ.

  Suddenly, to Saunders’s utter astonishment, a spaceship appeared. A Kelly Lander, with its octagonal body turning slowly in the air as it descended. On its side, a giant H. H for Helms. It was his Kelly Lander. They one they’d used to land on New Amazon, that they’d had to leave behind in —

  The Lander vanished. Saunders blinked. The sun was lower in the sky, the clouds were different. It was a different day. He hadn’t seen the Lander; he’d seen the memory of the Lander.

  Behind him, he heard a smug caw. He turned, and saw his Gryphon, the one who’d found him, and grinned. It was messing with his head.

  Saunders walked across and stroked the creature’s head and it purred like a cat, and once again Saunders marvelled at the wonders of convergent evolution. Then, to verify his forehead-eye hypothesis, he raised a hand in front of the Gryphon’s forehead skin and held up two fingers.

  Caw! said the Gryphon, excitedly, and raised two talons. It was mimicking his action.

  Confirmation of his hypothesis that it could see through its forehead!

  But then, on a hunch, he shielded its forehead with one hand, then held his other hand in front of the creature’s breast, which was marked with a lurid zigzag pattern. He held up three fingers. The Gryphon cawed.

  Caw. Caw. Caw. Three times.

  He held up two fingers.

  Caw. Caw.

  He held up five fingers, twice in in a row.

  Caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw.

  It could count to ten — and it had eyes in its breasts!

  Saunders was exhilarated. He said “Saunders. Saunders. Saunders,” and the bird did nothing.

  He remembered a photograph of himself, looking dapper and handsome, and thought the image at the bird, and said: “Saunders.”

  “Sawdaw,” cawed the Gryphon. Close enough.

  Saunders had now discovered that the Gryphon could hear, it could communicate through sound, but it could only say syllables ending in “aw”. No wonder the wretched creature had been forced to evolve visual telepathy.

  Then an image of a Gryphon, his Gryphon, appeared in his mind’s eye, wings outspread, and Saunders felt a surge of warmth and love towards it.

  “Gryphon,” he said, determined to teach the damn bird to speak English.

  “Caw,” said the Gryphon.

  Ben convened a council of war inside the AmRover. They were still parked in the grasslands near the sea, but after a bitter debate, and at Hugo’s insistence, they had moved the AmRover across to shelter under the shadow of the escarpment, with exit routes on either side. Sergeant Anderson was outside the AmRover on sentry duty, connected to the discussion via MI-rad
io link. Tonii Newton was seated in front of the Hostile Alert grid, with half an ear on the conversation. The rest of them were clustered on the armchairs in the AmRover’s living area — Mia Nightingale, David Go, Clementine McCoy, Hugo Baal, Ben Kirkham, Mary Beebe and Jim Aura.

  David Go, the only surviving microbiologist, raised the first item for the agenda: Hugo Baal’s controversial “animalish” and “plantish” expansion of the Kingdom system instituted by Professor Richard Helms, as was.

  “I propose,” said Go, angrily, “that we take this opportunity to entirely revise the taxonomy of New Amazon on a microbiological basis.”

  Ben looked at him in astonishment. “We’re talking about our fucking survival here!” he pointed out.

  “I’m talking about science,” Go retorted waspishly.

  “I don’t think,” said Hugo, “that the fact the Professor has brought destruction and death upon us all should affect our work on the classification systems.”

  “Can you guys cut the crap?” said Sergeant Anderson on the MI-radio.

  “We have two options,” said Ben firmly. Hugo waited excitedly. “In terms of our survival,” Ben added, and Hugo’s spirits were dashed. “We can build a new city here, with the resources available in the AmRover. Or we can travel along the coastal region until we reach the Space Elevator.”

  Jim Aura tilted his head and listened, but felt disengaged from the whole debate. He thought about Sheena, and wondered if she’d loved him.

  “Can we have a breakdown of what those resources actually constitute?” asked Tonii.

  “Five Bostock batteries,” said Mary Beebe. “Giving us enough power to last for almost a century, provided we don’t fight any more wars. Two tanks of nanobots, and enough hardglass seeds to build a small Dome. Two spare plasma cannons with projectile-firing capacity, plus the KM45s the Soldiers are carrying, twelve plasma pistols, three lasers and a flashmortar. Two spare sets of body armour. And an intact food-synthesis kit. It’s enough to build a civilisation, just about.”