Red Claw

by Philip Palmer

  And, as I say, he never talked about himself much. Or, indeed, at all. He kept himself to himself, even after our shared trauma at the Depot. Though perhaps by that point he was in mourning, for the rest of the Noirs? I suppose he was, in a sense, the last of his kind?

  Even so, we all thought he was rather spooky. Or at least, I did. Although, looking back, I wonder if —

  Well, I suppose. Maybe —

  But no. No maybe about it! We definitely should have made more effort to talk to him. After all, we’re all in this together aren’t we?

  Except he’s not. Not any more.

  But those black eyes! So alienating. And yet —

  Anyway. His death has shocked us. It was an unnecessary death. A foolish death.

  The impact of Jim’s body hitting the earth created a vast hole in the ground, deeper than any we have dug. We attempted to retrieve the body but a landslide took it away from us. We have analysed soil samples and discovered that at a depth of forty metres and more the soil here is infested with and almost possessed by a complex interlocking micro-organism. The soil in this region is, it seems, alive.

  But I have no zest for analysing this in any more detail. Jim was a bright and brilliant spirit, so I’m now told, and had a dark wit and a wonderful sense of humour, though I never experienced it myself, as well as black eyes. I feel his death as though it were my own, well OK, not quite, but I am certainly very moved by it.

  Things are not good.

  Saunders flew with the Gryphons, way up high, to the very limits of the atmosphere. This was a realm rich in weird jellyfish creatures, which danced on the thermal currents that gusted in the thinning air. The Gryphons never seemed to tire. Saunders’s body armour wasn’t capable of horizontal flight at this altitude, so he held on to Isaac’s back and let the huge bird carry him. And he flew with his helmet retracted, though he knew that sooner or later he’d have to face the issue of oxygen deficit.

  He’d been with the Gryphons almost a week now, and had learned so much about them, and yet even now he found them hard creatures to fathom. They were vicious, generous, smart, stupid, and utterly strange.

  And now Saunders flew with the Gryphons on a mission whose purpose he did not fathom. They flew far and wide, to a region beyond the tree canopy, to a land where grass grew and lakes meshed. Then they soared down low and Saunders saw creatures he had never seen before. Dancing creatures of shadow and light that seemed to be able to hide in the sunshine. And they flew on further and further, to a strange land of low hills and yellow grass that slithered and moved.

  And there they paused and waited. And there, in the yellow fields of living and slithery grass, the battle began.

  It took Saunders some time to realise what was happening. The yellow savannah below them was thronged with a variety of Grazers and smaller land animals, which stalked the “grass” with eerie intensity. But then he saw a large ball-like creature the size of an elephant wobble into sight. The creature was like a giant porcupine, with vast quills sticking out of its body. The Grazers skittered away nervously when it approached. The Giant Porcupine stopped. And then another Giant Porcupine appeared. And another.

  A Godzilla rumbled past, alarmed at the sight of the Giant Porcupines, and tried to trundle away. But one of the Giant Porcupines turned, and a hail of quills erupted from its body. And the Godzilla was harpooned. Blue flashing lights shot out from its body — clearly, the quills carried a deadly electric charge. Within minutes the Godzilla was dead.

  Saunders was awed. It took an entire team of Soldiers with plasma guns almost as long to kill a Godzilla.

  More of the eerie Porcupine beasts appeared, forming a semicircle, as Saunders and the Gryphons hovered above.

  Saunders glanced around and saw that the Gryphons had also formed themselves into a semicircle in the air, mimicking the Porcupines’ positioning.

  Then a vast six-armed beast lumbered into view. It was four times as tall as the largest Porcupine, twice as large as a Godzilla, and covered with orange fur rather than scales. Its back legs were huge, its two feet broad, each of the six arms had claws, and the head was crowned with horns. The shape of its jaw gave it a ghastly mock-smile, and in the centre of its forehead was an eye.

  Saunders mentally christened the creature Cyclops (Cyclops giganteus) and took photographs with his helmet camera. There were three of the Cyclopses against a hundred Giant Porcupines, with nearly five hundred Gryphons hovering in the air.

  By this point, Saunders did have some inkling of what was going to happen. The Grazers were fleeing now, some at a saunter, some galloping away. Saunders was low enough to see hundreds of grass-hugging creatures burrowing down to safety, or scurrying away. A vast shrub in the centre of the savannah space suddenly erupted and flew into the air and glided off, powered by jets from its branches.

  Then the Gryphons swooped.

  They moved fast, and the whirring of many wings became a roaring thunder in Saunders’s ears. And they plunged down first on one of the Cyclopses, gashing and ripping with their claws and gouging with their beaks, as the vast six-armed orange beast swung with long claw-hands and battered them out of the sky. The other two Cyclopses stood clear as the Gryphons ripped at the head and body of their companion. But the Cyclops was fast and skilful, and its reflexes were uncanny. It crushed Gryphon after Gryphon in its claws and swallowed birds whole, and when it had finished, green blood was pouring from its head but it was still standing and it roared in triumph.

  Then the Porcupines charged, in a slithering but rapid fashion, with their spines pointing out. A hail of quills flew through the air and the Cyclops was impaled a hundred times and flashes of light flew from its body as the electric charges pulsed through it. The Cyclops was shaken. It sank to its knees and stared with its huge forehead eye till light erupted from the eye and the lead Porcupines burst into flames. Again light flared, and again Porcupines exploded.

  Then the other two Cyclopses joined in, firing light from their eyes. Hails of quills ripped through the air and impaled flesh; triple bursts of light were discharged and each penetrated into Porcupine flesh and exploded the Porcupine bodies from the inside out.

  The eye wasn’t an eye; it was a receptacle for focusing light, an organic laser. Shrubs burned, grass burned, insects fled the conflagration and the Gryphons attacked again.

  Saunders looked at Isaac and tried to think a question at him, but he couldn’t think of an image that would carry his meaning. And besides, Isaac was lost in the battle now. He screeched horrifically and his feathers were raised and fierce and there was a gleam in Isaac’s eyes as he swooped that appalled Saunders.

  Wave after wave of Gryphons plunged to the attack, diving low on the Cyclopses and attacking their central eyes. Now the laser beams flared in the air, and Gryphons exploded. The Porcupines changed the focus of their attack and sent hails of quills into the air and Gryphons were impaled and died. Several quills crashed into Saunders, bruising him badly, but bouncing off his body armour. He was afraid of being caught in a Cyclops’s laser beam, he didn’t know if the armour could handle it.

  Saunders was now hovering on his body-armour jets, and below him he could see Isaac, diving and swooping and gouging. But then suddenly Isaac flew upwards, and all the Gryphons flew up too. And they hovered in a thick cloud in the air between the Porcupines and the Cyclopses. There were still hundreds of Gryphons left alive, though the corpses of their companions littered the ground.

  So there they hovered, low above the ground, motionless, easy targets for quills and laser beams. All the Cyclopses roared with angry anticipation, while the Porcupines slithered and snarled, and bowed down ready to loose their deadly quills. Saunders found himself yelling at the Gryphons to “move their fucking arses”, but they stayed in position.

  Saunders marvelled at the Gryphons’ folly. Up until now they had been losing with dignity. But their only weapons were speed and manoeuvrability. If they kept moving and dodging, they stood some chance. O
r if they flew up high and let the Cyclopses fight the Porcupines, they stood some chance. But now they had incurred the wrath of both sides and they were patiently waiting to be massacred.

  Were they really this dumb?

  Saunders flashed an image to Isaac of a battlefield littered with the corpses of dead Gryphons, with a weeping Saunders standing among them.

  Saunders got, in return, a scarily vivid image of himself being sexually penetrated by his own penis. The quick translation: Go Fuck Yourself. (Saunders briefly marvelled at the anatomical precision of the image; Isaac must, he surmised, have seen him getting undressed.)

  The battle recommenced. The Cyclopses fired their laser beams. The Porcupines fired their hails of quills. It was a massacre. Gryphon after Gryphon fell from the sky, burning alive or impaled with electric quills, or both. Some of the Porcupines were now partially denuded of quills, and the sky was turned into raining death and blazing death-giving light. Then the skies were empty, and the ground was littered with dead Gryphons, five hundred or more, the bodies stacked up like a bloodied wall.

  Then one of the Cyclopses roared with pain and two of its arms fell off, its eye exploded, its skull opened up, and its brains flew into the air and splashed to the ground. Two Porcupines flew up in the air, turning upside down, discharging quills in blind panic and hailing death down on the other Porcupines before falling and smashing on to the hard ground.

  Another Cyclops was whirling round and round, giant eye staring up, as blood gushed from its arse and a long coiling substance was pulled out of its anus — its entrails were being ripped from its body! And then its head fell off and the searing light from its eye ceased.

  The third Cyclops tried to run, but blood was gushing from its face and a long rip appeared in its stomach. Its eye exploded and it fell to the ground and roared, and whimpered, and died.

  And the Porcupines were milling wildly now, spouts of blood gushing from the naked skin where they had lost their quills. More and more of them flew up in the air squealing with rage, firing quills madly, and were dropped to a ghastly death.

  And so the battle continued, as the Porcupines fought and lost to an invisible enemy, and one by one the dead and broken Gryphons on the ground vanished with a magic flourish until only fifty or so corpses remained.

  And finally, Saunders got it. He blinked, and his mental image of the scene changed as his eyes finally saw what was actually in front of them: a host of Gryphons goading and biting the Porcupines, lifting them up in the air and dropping them, then biting their flesh open and ripping out their entrails.

  When the carnage was over, the savannah was an abattoir, the slithery grass was black with blood, and the corpses of all the Cyclopses and all the Porcupines lay dead upon the ground.

  The Gryphons made no attempt to feed upon the creatures they had slaughtered. Instead, they gathered in the sky and performed a ceremonial circuit over the battleground.

  And they flew home, with a terrified Saunders in their midst.

  “I haven’t done this sort of thing for” (puff) “years,” said Mary Beebe, as she clambered up the Ocean-Aldiss-Tree.

  “Try not to fall,” said Mia.

  It was a blessed relief to be away from the camp. After Jim Aura’s death, Sergeant Anderson had become even more tyrannical and appalling. Even the Soldiers found it hard to endure his endless petty bullying.

  “I shan’t.”

  Mary reached the topmost branch and fastened the pipe tether to the bark with a rivet gun. She threw the water-catalyser box up into the air, and moments later they heard a splash.

  “Fasten here,” said Mary, and Mia secured the pipe tether in place.

  “And here.”

  The tether pipe was ten centimetres in diameter. Once the catalyser was operative it would send a steady flow of oxygen to shore. But their job was to make sure the pipe wasn’t too near the water, because they’d seen Crock-Fish with teeth jagged and sharp enough to rip a hole in the tether’s hardplastic cover. There was still a risk that arboreals like the Two-Tails or the Tree-Wolf would take a fancy to the pipe tether, but overall it was felt that the branches were the safest home for it.

  Which meant that Mary and Mia had to crawl like monkeys through those branches, securing the pipe tether to the tree trunk or branches all the way from sea to shore.

  “This reminds me,” said Mary Beebe, and crawled to a new branch. A long pause followed as Mia, dangling upside down, fastened the tether, but finally she spoke:

  “Yes?”

  “What?”

  “You said, ‘This reminds me.’ Of what?”

  “Of what? Oh. Sorry.” Long pause. “Had a brief moment of fugue there. This reminds me, yes indeed it does, of a similar experience on Cloaca. Climbing through dense vegetation, when your body-armour jets had malfunctioned.”

  “I’ve never been to Cloaca.”

  “No, of course you haven’t. I meant William. William’s jets. William was with me. We were together. His body-armour jets failed. Happened a lot in those days, they used to outsource the technology to a slave planet that liked to sabotage stuff. He told me to fly back to base to get someone to rescue us, but instead —” Mary laughed. “Ah.”

  They crawled onwards through the branches, to the next tether point.

  “Instead, what?” asked Mia.

  “What?”

  “You said, ‘Instead’. Instead, what?”

  “Instead we . . . well, I didn’t leave him. Of course not. We clambered through the branches. It took days. The vegetation was mainly comprised of Hex-Trees, they have serrated edges. Quite deadly if you don’t have body armour, though of course we did. Although of course —” Mary laughed, gently.

  “Of course, what?”

  “What?”

  “You said, ‘Of course’.”

  “Sorry, yes, of course. I was thinking of that other time. Remember?”

  “Huh?”

  “No, of course you don’t, you weren’t there. That other time. Where was it? Planet beginning with X.”

  “I don’t know, I still wasn’t there. Xavier?”

  “Xerxes.”

  “What about Xerxes?”

  “Well, that was the other time.”

  “What other time?”

  “I was talking about body armour, the jets failing, technology . . . It reminded me of that other time, when that cockroach type creature ate a hole in my body armour, in my groin region . . .”

  “And?”

  “What?”

  “I said, ‘And,’ in pointed tones. You’ve only told half the story. Cockroach, armour, hole. And?”

  “Ah yes. I see. ‘And’ meaning, ‘Tell the rest of the story, you old fool.’ Well, all right. I shall. You see, the atmosphere was corrosive as well as poisonous. I could have had my clitoris burned off, and that really wouldn’t have done. And so you had to keep your hand tightly fastened on my crotch as we flew back to base, snuggling on my back, one arm around my neck to secure you in place, the other hand on my privates, remember? Very sexy, if I may say so. And funny too, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know, I wasn’t there.”

  “I know you weren’t there. I was talking about my husband, William.”

  “I rather liked William.”

  “Oh good, he always loved grudging praise.”

  “I didn’t mean to . . .”

  “Oh that’s all right. Nothing like a bit of understated belittlement, that’s what William always used to —”

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. Dr Beebe . . . I didn’t mean to . . .”

  “For heaven’s sake, Mia, I’m just teasing.”

  “You’re not angry with me?”

  “I’m furious. I hate you. I’m going to rip your BB out and leave you for dead, you horrid bitch.”

  “You’re teasing me again, aren’t you?”

  “It’s a habit. Forgive me.”

  “Do you . . . miss him?”

  “Who?”

  “Wi
lliam?”

  “Who’s William?”

  “Your husband?”

  “Oh that old bastard. I’m well shot of him.”

  “You’re teasing again, aren’t you?”

  “I’m being ironical.”

  “I can’t always tell.”

  “It’s easy. I’m always ironical.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “You really are a literalist, aren’t you? You should have been a Soldier.”

  “I can tell you two must have been close. Even though, well.”

  “Even though, well, what?”

  “Even though you two were always quarrelling.”

  “I never quarrelled with William. He always quarrelled with me. It’s a fine distinction.”

  “I don’t think I understand.”

  “[Sigh].”

  “I think I do understand. How long were you two married?”

  “Two hundred years. And never a cross word.”

  “Never a cross word?”

  “Foul invective, or total silence. We never went for that halfway stuff.”

  “I’ve never had a long-term relationship.”

  “I thought you said you were married for twenty years?”

  “Oh yes. But never anything long-term.”

  “Did he chuck you, or did you chuck him?”

  “She.”

  “You’re gay?”

  “Didn’t you know?”

  “No. I always thought —”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You thought — she’s such a slut, she must be hetero?”