Red Claw

by Philip Palmer

  “With only nine people?” commented Private Clementine McCoy.

  “And only three are women,” commented Sergeant Anderson.

  “Four,” Ben reminded him. “Sergeant Newton is child-bearing.”

  “We’re talking in vitro, I hope,” said Tonii nervously.

  “What about the DRs?” said Mia.

  “They should have killed Saunders by now. We’re safe.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “True,” conceded Ben.

  “Hooperman must be here, on the planet,” said Mary, and the rest of them blinked. “Think about it,” she urged. “If he was on Earth, how could he remote-control the DRs? Juno is gone, so is the Quantum Beacon, we’re cut off from Earth completely. So Hooperman must be on New Amazon. He’s holed up somewhere, controlling the DRs with his virtuality helmet on a long range wireless network.”

  “Or the Quantum Beacon may still be intact.”

  “We saw Juno blow up.”

  “We saw a flash of light in the sky,” said Hugo, accurately.

  “The second option,” said Ben doggedly, “is to risk all by travelling till we reach the Space Elevator, fight the DRs who will be implacably defending it, and then make our way up to the Satellite. Make that our colony ship.”

  “I like it here,” protested Mia.

  “I thought you hated it here.”

  “I hate it everywhere. I hate it less here.”

  “I vote,” said Mary Beebe, “that we stay here. Make New Amazon our home.”

  “I vote we leave for space,” said Tonii.

  “Stay here!” Hugo protested. “Our work is barely begun.”

  “Stay here.”

  “Space,” said Clementine.

  “Stay here,” said Sergeant Anderson.

  “Stay here,” said Ben Kirkham.

  Jim Aura was silent. They all stared at him.

  “Stay here,” he murmured, though he didn’t really care.

  “Seven to two, we stay,” Ben summarised.

  He hid a grin. This was just the result he had wanted.

  “And I’m gonna be your leader,” said Sergeant Anderson, and Ben’s smile faded.

  DAY 15

  From the diary of Dr Hugo Baal

  June 36th.

  Deplorable news: yesterday Sergeant Anderson has appointed himself as our new leader, on the grounds that he is stronger and more dangerous and more skilled at violence than the rest of us; he has scoffed at our calls for a general election.

  We are in a state of some confusion and disarray and the group is breaking up into factions — those who hate Anderson and want to defy him, and those who hate Anderson and want to placate him. We are united in one thing only: we all hate Ben Kirkham, and we can’t imagine why we ever let him become leader.

  However, despite all these problems, our work continues.

  Today we went foraging for molecules. We flew the AmRover across the plain and over the red sand and into the heart of the Ocean-Aldiss-Tree.1 It’s a rich habitat, with creatures that resemble rotting corpses2 growing from the tree barks and a host of previously unknown insects and birds, too numerous to taxonomise just yet.

  We saw no other trees; the Ocean-Aldiss-Tree dominates to a terrifying degree, and all life in the ocean is in one form or another, a parasite or symbiote of the Aldiss mare. We connected a gather pipe and began sucking up tons upon tons of the Aldiss mare bark and leaves and all the flying insects and sessile sealife we could encounter. These will be stored in the AmRover’s bilge and converted, over the next few weeks, into edible3 protein.

  The ocean is now our garden and our farm. It is a less hazardous habitat than the land; we have yet to encounter any predators and there aren’t any of those ghastly swamps and quicksands that have killed several of my most esteemed colleagues4 in our years on New Amazon.

  I caught a fish today! It was embedded in an Aldiss tree trunk, with only its head and gills emerging. And it had a mouth that could rapidly engorge and became large enough to swallow a puppy or a kitten, if anyone had been rash enough to bring a puppy or a kitten along on this expedition.

  I’m assuming that this creature has de-evolved from ocean animal to sessile excrescence over the course of several eons. We call it Stuck in the Bark. I haven’t yet performed a morphological analysis and taxonomy, and I can’t for the life of me think of a Latin name for it, but honestly! What a stupid and pathetic creature! Given a choice between being a fish, swimming freely in the ocean, and being a trapped and helpless creature unable to move and at the mercy of any passing predator, which would you rather be?

  Though come to think of it, we’re pretty well trapped too.

  Sorcha woke from one of those awful dreams where you dream you’ve been buried alive.

  And then she realised she couldn’t see anything in front of her or around her and her sensors recorded she was submerged in quicksand. She must have slowly sunk into it during the night, but hadn’t realised because she was wearing body armour and had no sense of touch.

  She turned on her backjets and the quicksand boiled and bubbled but she didn’t move.

  Then she reached out with her hands, and with a swimming motion, tried to gain some purchase on the quicksand. It was thick, like molasses, or molten lava, and it was actually possible to get a hand-grip. She pulled herself up, inch by painful inch, until her head was above the surface. All around her was a suppurating mess of yellow liquid shit. The previous night, this had been a field, with firm ground and luxuriant grass.

  Sorcha kept swimming and digging and tugging, until eventually she was close to firmer squelch. She fired her body-armour jets again, and this time she was propelled out of the clammy grasp of the quicksand and ended up in a huddle on purple grass. She rolled over and got her breath back. Then she tried to stand up but couldn’t. She turned on her suit’s self-clean, but nothing happened. She fired her body-armour jets but they didn’t fire.

  So she checked her emergency power. All gone. No Bostock battery, no emergency power. The suit was dead.

  Sorcha rolled over and slowly managed to get to her feet. Without the exoskeleton motors and the anti-inertia wheel, the body armour was a dead weight on her. She tried to walk and was immediately breathless.

  So she stripped off the body armour. Underneath, she was wearing knickers and a jogging vest. Her skin was damp with sweat, but the minute the winds struck her she was icy cold. She slapped her arms to keep herself warm, and realised that she couldn’t walk any distance without the suit. But nor could she walk any distance with the suit.

  Sorcha put the suit back on, clambered on to a rock, called for help on the MI-radio, which fortunately didn’t rely on the BB for power, and went back to sleep.

  “So how are we going to resolve this?” Sergeant Anderson asked.

  Hugo entered the cavern and was startled to find himself in the midst of a showdown between the two rivals for leadership — Ben Kirkham and Sergeant Anderson.

  Hugo hesitated, but didn’t dare leave, in case something intriguing might occur.

  The mood was electric. Ben and Sergeant Anderson were standing close together, face to face, without body armour, both exuding danger.

  Ben smiled, eerily. “You’re going to back down.”

  “No fucking way.”

  “I’m the best choice as team leader. I’m smarter than you are.”

  “Nah. You’re so clever, you’re stupid. I’m the smart one.” Anderson grinned, nastily.

  Ben grinned back, just as nastily.

  “Maybe we should all vote on this,” said Hugo firmly.

  “No,” said Anderson, who hated democracy.

  “No,” said Ben, who knew he would lose.

  “OK,” said Hugo, phlegmatically. He wondered if violence was about to erupt. He was fascinated by the dominance behaviour, as the two silverbacks vied for supremacy. How come, he wondered, I never get to vie for supremacy?

  “Look,” said Anderson, “there’s only one
way to decide this — you can fight me for the leadership.” Anderson was a solid mass of violent brawn; Ben was a lean aesthete.

  Ben eyed him. He calculated his chances. “Only if I get to choose the weapons,” he said cunningly.

  “Fine by me.”

  “Swords,” said Ben, who was a champion fencer, and was stronger than he looked.

  Anderson grinned. Ben did a search on his brain-chip, and discovered that Anderson had been galactic sabre champion three years running.

  “I’ll fight you blindfold,” said Anderson, “with the sword in my left hand. I’m right-handed by the way.”

  Ben searched again; Anderson had won five sword-fighting contests while blindfold and with the sword in his wrong hand, and had killed all five opponents.

  Maybe, Ben decided, discretion was the better side of valour.

  So Ben smiled a shit-eating smile. “Ah, what the fuck, you can be leader, I don’t care,” he said humbly.

  Anderson punched him in the face. Ben’s nose broke and he squealed with pain.

  “Any trouble, any conspiring, any double-crossing, I’ll break every fucking bone in your body. I’ll cut out your intestines. I’ll eat them in front of you. I’ll shit them back out again. Then I’ll make you eat them. You got that?”

  “That’s a highly elaborate —”

  “Got that?”

  “I’ll be dead before —”

  “Got that?”

  “I got it. You’re top dog. You’re leader.”

  “Wasn’t so hard, was it?” mused Sergeant Anderson.

  Ben stared at him furiously. Then he lowered his eyes. Fear filled him. Anderson could smell it on him; Ben was afraid.

  Though what Anderson didn’t realise was that Ben Kirkham had been picked on and persecuted all through his childhood, and so he was highly skilled at pretending to give in to bullies. Inwardly, he seethed with rage. But, knowing that rage would get him killed, he forced himself to project abject cowardice.

  “You broke my fucking nose,” he whined, and Anderson grinned.

  Saunders explored the Gryphons’ mountaintop eyrie. It was strange to look down over the canopy of trees. The winds were even more bitter up here, and the skies were black with birds and huge insects riding the wind swells. Saunders saw a flock of Rocs slowly gliding past, almost touching wings, with extraordinary balletic precision.

  He walked on and saw evidence that this mountain was in fact an extinct volcano. Black magma had frozen into magnificent shapes. In places, the rock was warm. And when he climbed higher he saw an amazing sight — the dead crater of the volcano was home to thousands of vermilion eggs, delicately balanced on the wide rock rim, in perilous proximity to the sheer drop at the crater’s centre.

  Adult Gryphons were hovering over the eggs, blowing air on to them. Saunders guessed their breath was warm, and that this was the Gryphon way of hatching eggs.

  Then as Saunders watched, he realised that the red eggs were cracking. More Gryphons flocked across to watch the sight. Before long the lip of the extinct volcano was soldiered by a thousand and more adult Gryphons.

  The army of Gryphons waited, patiently, as the first chick emerged from its egg. Its body was damp, it had eyes, and it flapped membranous wings and tried to fly.

  Another egg cracked, then another. The scrawny awkward chicks toppled on slender legs, they rolled over, they picked themselves up and finally — oh joy! The tiny birds flapped their wings and hovered a foot or more above the ground. After a while there were thousands of chicks hovering above their cracked eggs. Saunders watched, rapt, curious, puzzled.

  Then the Gryphons pounced. They flew into the hollow of the volcano and they gulped up the baby chicks, sometimes two in a single mouthful. Gryphon bumped against Gryphon in their race to eat the squealing desperate chicks. The sound of soft bones crunching merged with the shrill keening of the dying newborns who tried and tried but could not fly any higher.

  It was ghastly, heartless carnage, and Saunders was shocked.

  His own Gryphon — Saunders had christened it Isaac — flew up to Saunders, cawing with delight. Saunders’s face was a picture of horror and disgust, and he hoped the Gryphon would not be able to tell how revolted he was. Then it dawned on him:

  These were not Gryphon chicks.

  The more he thought about it, the more sure he was. The body shape was different, the wing span proportionately smaller, they had eyes, and they did not have the typical Gryphon bulging forehead. And, of course, it made no sense that the Gryphons would eat their young. But there was nothing to stop them eating the young of some other species . . .

  Saunders tested his hypothesis by visualising a nest full of eggs being looked after by a cartoon bird. Then he visualised Isaac the Gryphon sneaking into the nest and stealing eggs. And he kept visualising this, while staring at Isaac, and tried to will his thoughts across.

  Isaac cawed with delight; exactly! And the image in Saunders’s mind started to shudder and change, as Isaac took control of his visual cortex. The cartoon bird was replaced by a real bird, a silver-furred creature with a small head and eyes and six limbs and two sets of wings. Saunders had never seen such a beast, but he automatically started to analyse and taxonomise it. He called it, just for the moment, the Biplane-Bird.

  And suddenly the Biplane-Bird was being attacked by Gryphons, and while it was distracted, other Gryphons were sneaking into the nest and carrying out the eggs. It was like a military raid; hundreds of eggs were conveyed away. And then, finally, Saunders had a mental image of the Gryphons carefully placing the eggs on the lip of the volcano. The rest he had seen for himself.

  Thus, his hypothesis was confirmed. This was the Gryphon method of predation; to steal the eggs of other birds, incubate them over a period of months, hatch them, and eat them.

  It seemed, even to a seasoned xenobiologist like Saunders, a peculiarly vile thing to do.

  Sergeant Anderson drove the AmRover back to camp, feeling satisfied at the way the day had gone. They had tons of animal and plant matter in the bilge. Already, it was being processed and catalysed. This would be their lunch in a month’s time, to supplement the declining supply of dried food in the AmRover’s galley.

  His coup had gone effortlessly. Ben Kirkham was a coward, and it had taken very little effort to establish a humiliatingly hierarchical relationship between them.

  The others had capitulated swiftly. The truth was, most people liked to be bossed around, and Anderson was a natural boss. Things were now just as they should be.

  However, Anderson was already aware of tensions among his small band. Ben Kirkham might be a coward, but he was also sly, and an egomaniac. Hugo Baal was impractical. Tonii Newton was a good soldier, but a pervert. What decent woman would ever want to fuck a monster like him? Clementine, however, was a looker. Sergeant Anderson had resolved to take her as his personal mate.

  Mia was a sycophant, always wanting to be loved. Anderson hated the type. Mary Beebe was having some kind of nervous breakdown; if she didn’t pull herself together Anderson was going to have her shot. And David Go was taciturn, and boring, and an awkward customer. The kind who was never happy. Anderson knew the type, and hated it.

  All flawed, but Anderson had made do with worse in the past. He’d turn them into an army.

  It was a shame about Sorcha leaving them, though. She was a fine Soldier and a beautiful woman. He’d never fucked her — she didn’t like to fornicate with the lower ranks. But this might have been his opportunity to have sex with her, on a regular basis. After all — look at the useless men they were lumbered with! It wasn’t as if the competition was up to much. Nerds, geeks, Scientists, bores, and a man with a fanny.

  And this of course — the sexual thing — the man/woman thing — the breeding babies and getting fucked a lot thing — was going to be a major morale issue in the years to come, until they could age-accelerate embryos into new breeding stock.

  Still, Sorcha always did have a rod up her arse. And s
ince she outranked him, she would have insisted on being in command, which was not the way Anderson wanted to live the rest of his life.

  Anderson liked power. He was good at it.

  He was going to enjoy building his new empire.

  Isaac hopped along into the cave, and Saunders followed him warily. Then Isaac flapped his wings and vanished through a hole in the cliff. Saunders more laboriously picked his way over the jagged rocks, then clambered head first through the narrow rock opening.

  He emerged in a huge cavern with an echoing acoustic. Gryphons perched upside down on the roof of the cavern, like bats. There was a lake of something black and pungent, which Saunders guessed was probably flammable.

  Saunders stepped anxiously into the Gryphon lair, trying to radiate peacefulness and trustworthiness. Two Gryphons swooped on him and gripped an arm each in their beaks and lifted him up in the air. They carried him up high and dropped him on a rock shelf. Saunders wasn’t anxious, he knew he could use his body armour jets to get down from here. And from his shelf he could see the vast expanse of this cavern. He wondered if the birds could fly through it to an exit elsewhere.

  He touched the wall of the cavern and through his touch-sensitive gloves was surprised at how smooth it felt. He realised that the wall was broken up by pillars, carved and gnarled out of rock. And there were shapes in the rock too. That was an image of a Juggernaut. The carving over there was a Godzilla. A giant Gryphon was carved on the roof, its wings outstretched vastly, almost beneficently.

  It was magnificent — a Gryphon Cathedral, an art gallery, and also a diabolically spooky lair; all in all, a wonderful and complex work of alien art and architecture.

  Saunders wondered if the cavern itself was a natural formation, or if the Gryphons had pecked the whole thing out of solid rock with their beaks.

  Saunders closed his eyes and visualised a spaceship flying through the blackness of the galaxy.