Red Claw

by Philip Palmer

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “There’s just something I wanted to say.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Um, there’s no tactful way of saying this,” Ben admitted, and paused.

  “Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir.” Tonii waited. “What, sir?”

  “Tonii,” said Ben, smiling, “you are not normal.”

  Tonii flinched; then cursed himself. A Soldier never flinches.

  Ben continued in the same soft tones: “You are not normal. You are not even human. You are not man, nor are you woman, you are just — a — pathetic — fucking — freak.” And this time, Tonii remained stony-faced.

  “Yes, sir,” he said flatly.

  “What are you, Soldier?” Ben asked. “Hmm? What are you? Answer me. That’s an order, you piece of shit. What are you?”

  “A freak, sir,” said Tonii Newton with familiar, awful, numb, unquestioning obedience.

  “You’ve done what?” said Hugo, disbelieving.

  Hugo was in the galley, cooking Two-Tail meat to feed to his rats. To his annoyance, it simply wouldn’t darken or show any other signs of cookedness.

  “I’ve deleted your diary entries,” said Ben, smirking. “By remote computer link. We don’t need your silly jottings, man, we have the official log and the download of the Encyclopedia of Alien Life to rely upon.”

  Hugo grinned. “Don’t be so —”

  “I mean it. I’ve done it.”

  Hugo’s look of desolation and despair sent a shudder of joy running through Ben’s body.

  Hugo slept badly that night, and every night, because of the sound that cracked the darkness of the AmRover dorm, a shuddering gasping sound that ate away at his soul.

  Mia couldn’t sleep either, because of the same, ghastly sound.

  Mary Beebe was on sentry duty outside the AmRover, but even she could hear the gasping/shuddering sound through her helmet amp.

  Tonii Newton was on sentry duty inside the AmRover; the relentless moaning noise was driving him insane.

  Finally Clementine McCoy shook David Go awake. “You’re doing it again,” she said fiercely, and David looked up at her with panic in his eyes, begging for her forgiveness, and her pity. “Just,” she said more kindly, “stop making that fucking noise.”

  David nodded, and lay back down. And he was silent for a while.

  And after a long period of silence, sleep came to Mia and Hugo and Clementine; while Tonii and Mary were able to keep their watch in peace.

  But eventually David too fell asleep. And he began to dream dark nightmares. He dreamed of being raped and humiliated, he dreamed of being snubbed and disregarded, and he dreamed, most of all, of being treated like a nobody.

  And in his dreams, he began to weep, again, and the sound of his anguished, gasping sobs cracked the night, again.

  In the morning Ben Kirkham, who now slept in the soundproof and heavily fortified Observation Bubble, woke as fresh as a daisy. He couldn’t understand why everyone else looked so tired.

  From Dr Hugo Baal’s diary (covert)

  June 44th

  This is a living hell. I don’t know who I hate more — Ben Kirkham, for being an evil manipulative blackhearted monster, or David Go, for his incessant fucking nightmares.1

  I have made a worrying discovery about Dr Ben Kirkham. Well, not so much a discovery as a hypothesis, or even a theory, but worrying nonetheless.

  I am now convinced that Kirkham is the murderer of Sergeant Anderson. But I’m quite happy to condone and indeed celebrate that. The man2 deserved it, and it was essential for our survival that someone killed him. So good luck to Kirkham for having the balls to do it.

  But Dr Kirkham, as well as being a murderer, appears to be a seriously strange individual, even by the standards of xenobiologists. He’s introverted, but sometimes wildly extroverted. He’s brilliant, but also slapdash. And there are times when it seems to me he doesn’t understand anything, literally, not anything at all, about human psychology.3

  I’ve made a detailed analysis of Ben Kirkham’s behaviour over the last two years, and I have cross-collated it with the following, the checklist of psychopathy which we used to use to test the sanity of our lecturers back at the University of Pontus:

  Key Symptoms of Psychopathy

  Emotional/Interpersonal Social Deviance

  glib and superficial impulsive

  egocentric and grandiose poor behaviour controls

  lack of remorse or guilt need for excitement

  lack of empathy lack of responsibility

  deceitful and manipulative early behaviour problems

  shallow emotions adult antisocial behaviour

  Like most of us, I’m sure, I score five out of ten on this scale. Eccentric and grandiose, and proud of it! Lacking in remorse and guilt! (Well, I never do anything wrong, do I?) Deceitful and manipulative, c’est moi. And an endless need for white-knuckle-ride daredevil excitement, of course,4 coupled with a dreadful addiction to chocolate, though an addiction to chocolate isn’t on the list, I concede.

  But Kirkham scores ten out of ten. He is a human being who does not feel emotion, who pretends emotion, who acts emotion. He is acerbic, cruel, unreliable, mocking, his hand gestures are large and elaborate, and he playacts all the time. (I’ve even seen him wear spectacles when he wants to seem professorial, even though his eyes are less than ten years old.)

  He is, in short, a clinical psychopath.

  And his behaviour since the death of Sergeant Anderson has been appalling. He has undermined and belittled every member of our small company. He has no respect for our academic authority, he taunts the Soldiers with their inefficiency, he issues impossible orders and berates us for not obeying them. And as for David Go, who of course is still traumatised by his near-rape experience during Anderson’s vile regime — Kirkham constantly goads him in a way that is unendurable to witness.

  Most unforgivably of all, he tried to use the network Censor system to delete my diary entries, not realising that not only do I wirelessly connect every diary entry with my brain implant, but I do so twice, the second time using a secure imaginary number code of my own devising, on a frequency that, according to the textbooks, does not exist. In the old days, apparently, this was known as the belt and braces strategy.5

  Kirkham is a danger to all of us. He is a predator in our herd of whatever it is we are a herd of.

  He has to die.

  Sorcha watched the Gryphon Egg Ritual, and wasn’t even remotely shocked.

  “They inseminate themselves,” explained Saunders, “by eating the chicks of other birds.”

  “Yeah, I got that. Cool, huh?”

  “Cool?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “It’s appalling! Savagery beyond belief!”

  Sorcha laughed at his earnestness. “You should see some of the things they did to us in basic training!” she joked.

  Saunders chose not to enquire further.

  “This is a very difficult moment for all of us,” Dr Ben Kirkham explained to his army of two — Privates Clementine McCoy and Tonii Newton.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Private Tonii Newton hated Ben Kirkham with all his soul. But Tonii was trained to obey, and he always did obey. So he stood to attention and waited to hear his new boss out.

  “In order to survive, we have to be ruthless.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Tonii.

  “Yes, sir,” said Clementine.

  “I think you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Clementine.

  “No, sir,” said Tonii.

  Ben sighed. “The Scientists have to die,” he explained.

  “Beg pardon, sir?” Tonii asked, incredulous.

  “They’re a burden. They don’t pull their weight. And they are going to consume all our rations if we let them.”

  “They’re part of our team, sir,” said Tonii loyally.

  “We don’t need them. They’re not Soldier
s.”

  “No, sir. Nor are you, sir. Sir.”

  “Don’t be insubordinate, Private.”

  “No, sir.”

  “I estimate that we could live for four hundred years or even longer with what we have on the AmRover, if there are just three of us eating. Longer still if we access the supplies and equipment on the Satellite, if we can safely get to it. We have all we need to rebuild a civilisation. We have the gene stock, the gender balance. We could create an entire new human race, between the three of us.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  This man’s a fucking lunatic, thought Private Clementine McCoy.

  This man is totally fucking deranged, thought Private Tonii Newton.

  And no way am I fucking him! Clementine resolved.

  And if he thinks I’m going to fuck him . . . ! Tonii thought, appalled.

  “This is the plan,” Ben explained.

  Mary Beebe and Mia Nightingale were watching the flowers fly. It was a slow, tedious job, but it was a relief to finally be back studying nature.

  They were standing, with their body armour in stealth mode and helmet visor magnification on High, next to a flowering shrub that wended its way past the Flesh-Webs. It was essential to remain motionless, but it was an uncomfortable experience, especially since — because of the shortage of waste-absorbent underwear — both Mary and Mia were using catheters.

  “How did you start going out with him?” Mia asked over the MI-radio, after a few hours had elapsed.

  “Hmm? With who?”

  “With William. Your husband.”

  “Ah.”

  They both savoured a long pause.

  “We were on a xeno mission together,” Mary replied. “Sharing a two-person tent. One thing led to —”

  “Ah, I’m with you.”

  “Inadvertent frottage led to mutual masturbation, which led to aeons of exquisite love.”

  “That’s often the way of it,” said Mia.

  “Really?” said Mary.

  “Not really, I was being ironical.”

  “Ah,” said Mary, hugely amused.

  “Yes, indeed, ‘Ah,’ ” retorted Mia. She was getting the hang of this.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “What?”

  “About William?”

  “He’s all you ever think about, and I’m a believer in going with the flow.”

  “Very astute.”

  “I think so.”

  “And this, pray do tell me, is this how gay women chat up other women? By asking about their dead husbands?”

  “Invariably.”

  “Smart tactics.”

  “I think so.”

  “Do you really?”

  “No.”

  “Ah.”

  Mia loved the way her banter with Mary flowed; rarely, indeed, had she ever talked such precisely phrased bollocks.

  And it soothed and enlarged her soul — to be liked, to be thought amusing, to be allowed to flirt and brag a little. After all Ben Kirkham’s endless psychological undermining, it was only her times with Mary that kept her sane.

  “I’ve been reading up about him,” said Mia, tenderly. “His biog. His published writings. He was a very vivid personality.”

  “For ‘vivid’ read, ‘full of himself’,” Mary snorted, lovingly.

  “I think I would have liked him. If I’d known him. I mean, if I’d known him better.”

  “He was a cantankerous old bastard.”

  “That’s what I would have liked about him.”

  They waited, and watched.

  Then Mia continued, with hard-achieved casualness: “I’ve read all your joint articles as well, you know. Well, the summaries anyway.”

  “William wrote them all. I could never turn a word. Detailed observation was my forte.”

  “I’m the same. It’s why I became a film-maker.”

  “I look, and look, and see what others miss.”

  “Like the trembling of that stamen.”

  “Just like that.”

  “And that flower. That’s not a flower. It’s an insect.”

  “Well spotted.”

  “See, it has a dozen microcreatures on its tongue. There.”

  “I saw it.”

  “The tongue must be all of .5 millimetres.”

  “I’d agree with that estimate.”

  “The insects hover around the flowers, but they don’t seem to inseminate.”

  “I count forty-two species of insects.”

  “I count forty-three.”

  “One just flew away.”

  “So it did.”

  “If the insects don’t pollinate the flowers, why are they hovering so near?”

  “They like the colours of the flowers?”

  “It’s a vile colour. Fuchsia. I had a flat painted that colour once.”

  “I rather like it, as colours go.”

  “William liked it too.”

  “We have one thing in common then.”

  “You have several things in common,” Mary conceded.

  “Such as what?”

  Mary hesitated, then compiled her list: “Acute intelligence. Dry wit. Attention to detail. Refusal to bullshit and pretend you know more than you actually do know, like some people who I shan’t mention — Ben Kirkham! A sense of humour akin to my own, and, last but not least, a kind soul.”

  “I — ah. Well. I don’t know what to say to all that.”

  “Sorry, I’ve embarrassed you, through my excessive fulsomeness.”

  “I’m just not used to being flattered.”

  “Well, that serves you right for spending time with unappreciative imbeciles.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “And so it was intended.”

  “Look. The flowers are trembling. They’re about to fly.”

  The thirteen-petalled fuchsia-coloured flowers suddenly erupted from the plant and flew into the air and hovered. They danced patterns around the hovering Gadflies and Pinpricks and Spiky Arses and Blue ’n’ Reds, making whorls of colour in the air. Then they swept away like a mist and landed in a patch of ground a good sixty metres away.

  “Now watch the insects,” said Mary.

  The insects hovered still above the flowerless plant.

  “I’m watching. What am I watching?”

  “Measure the mass.”

  “I’m measuring.”

  “It’s an increase of .002 grams per insect.”

  “The insects are growing.”

  “The insects feed on the flowers.”

  “But they didn’t touch the flowers!”

  “They feed on something the flowers emanate.”

  “A gas of some kind? They breathe in nutrients from the flowers’ farts?”

  “That seems the most tenable hypothesis.”

  “Farting flowers. Hmm.”

  “This is the sixteenth time I’ve encountered such a phenomenon.”

  “You’re kidding me?”

  “Well yes, I am, actually. Though I have come across something a little bit similar. A tree on Romola that exhaled methane.”

  “But why? What evolutionary advantage is there in flowers feeding insects?”

  At that moment the insects pounced upon the flowerless shrub. Within minutes the shrub had been eaten, and all that was left was shreds of root.

  “Damn!” Mary marvelled. “I’ve not seen that before.”

  “The flowers feed the insects, the insects kill the plant,” Mia said.

  “They kill the old plant. And the new plants thrive, because they haven’t got to compete with their parents. It’s so elegant.”

  “It’s awful, really,” said Mia.

  “Awful. And stupid. And deliriously and preposterously amusing.”

  Mia laughed out loud at Mary’s lugubrious, mock-serious tone. “You have a lovely turn of phrase,” she told her.

  “Thank you.”

  “What do you think to Hugo Baal
’s notion?”

  “What? About killing Ben Kirkham?”

  “Yeah.”

  “His logic seems irrefutable.”

  “Dr Kirkham is a prick. He deserves to die,” said Mia.

  “He, the flowerless shrub, we the insects.”

  “A lovely metaphor,” Mia assured her.

  “Rather arch and over-elaborate, I felt.”

  “Not at all, you are a poet, madam.”

  Mary laughed. Mia glowed with pleasure.

  The Gryphon cawed, and Sorcha had a vision of herself-as-Gryphon flying through the sky, and plunging down, and ripping a hairy tetrapod of some kind limb from limb. She shuddered, and forced a smile.

  “What do I do?” she whispered.

  “Think beautiful thoughts.”

  She thought about the garden in her military academy, the rich colours, the peonies and hollyhocks and Scarlet Flowers and the roses, and her regiment’s mascot, a dog called Ruth, which Sorcha had adopted as her own.

  The Gryphon cawed. And Sorcha’s mind was suddenly filled with an image of her beloved dog, Ruth, being ripped limb from limb by a Gryphon.

  Sorcha gulped.

  Then she thought about their colony ship, squat and grey and leaving a trail of faintly glowing ion particles in its wake as it flew through deep space. And she tried to recollect the star patterns they would have seen, but she couldn’t, and instead was forced to visualise a generalised haze of stars. The colony ship was battered, and deeply shadowed, but every now and then a burst of flame from the ion drive turned the hull into a sparkling marvel. Sorcha had tether-flown along with the spaceship from time to time, tugged at speed through deep space. That image too was vivid in her memory, and she focused hard on transmitting it.

  And then, once again, her thought-image abruptly changed, as the Gryphon dabbled in her mind. And now she saw a giant Gryphon flying through black space, and then ripping the colony ship apart, into bloodied pieces.

  “These creatures,” said Sorcha.

  “Yes?” said Saunders.

  “They may be sentient, but they’re not what you’d call smart.”

  “They have a one-track mind,” Saunders conceded.

  The Gryphon, Isaac, sensed Sorcha’s unease. A new image filled Sorcha’s mind; it was herself, her helmet retracted, short blond hair shining in the sun, walking through the New Amazonian jungle. Then, out of nowhere, a Gryphon pounced, and ripped her limb from limb, then pulled out her improbable entrails like stuffing from a toy bear.