Red Claw

by Philip Palmer

  Sorcha shuddered, and raised her middle finger to Isaac. Isaac cawed.

  “Did you get that?” Sorcha said bitterly to Saunders.

  “Hey,” said Saunders, “Isaac has a sense of humour.”

  Hugo was cooking fish, from concentrate. He arbitrarily blended seabass with snapper and fabricated a vast potato rosti to accompany it. It was to be washed down with wine. He added poison to Ben Kirkham’s portion, and served the meal with some sense of triumph.

  “Hidden talents, Hugo,” said Ben snidely.

  “Leave the man alone,” said Clementine. Her long black Afrohair was a mess, after being crunched up in her helmet all day long. Hugo was aware that all of them stank, with the cloying odour of people who have been trapped for a long time in a small space with inadequate ventilation. The AmRover’s force field was up, and they were stationary.

  “A toast,” said Hugo, raising his glass.

  The alarms began to ring.

  “Another time, huh?” said Ben.

  They began to suit up.

  Sorcha was shy.

  “What’s wrong?” said Saunders, touching her naked body.

  “The birds,” she said, as his fingers played with her special spot, and sent spasms of pleasure through her.

  “What about the birds?” asked Saunders, touching himself to be sure he was hard.

  “Can they . . .”

  “Can they what?”

  “See us?”

  “We’re in a cave. No one can see us.”

  “I mean, see our minds,” said Sorcha. She looked at Saunders, at his skinny but muscular naked body. And Saunders looked at her, the glory of her nudity.

  “Surely not,” chuckled Saunders, and entered her.

  On the clifftop outside, Isaac saw it all, from Saunders’s eyes and then he saw it all again, from Sorcha’s eyes, and he cawed with delight.

  There was a huge crashing sound and the AmRover lifted up in the air and turned over. Hugo was half into his armour and he went flying and smashed face-down on the ceiling. Bodies flew around him. Clementine and Tonii were already in their armour, and their flying bodies were like missiles. Tonii’s boot barely missed Mary; a fraction to the side and she would have been killed.

  Then they were floating in air again, then rolling around, then upside down, then right way up, then falling again. There was a huge smash and they were sliding and — they stopped.

  “What the fuck just happened?” roared Ben.

  “Something came into the cavern, and picked us up,” explained Mary, “and took us outside, and dropped us.”

  “I thought we had a fucking force field!” Ben bleated.

  “It, ah, only works against guns and bombs.”

  “What sort of fucking force field is —”

  “Let’s just deal with this, huh?” said Clementine crisply. She closed her helmet and subvoced a request for visuals. On her helmet visor she saw they were out of the cavern and on the red sands, in view of the ocean. And she could see also that the AmRover was upside down.

  THUD. The AmRover was picked up again and dropped again. Bodies went flying. The force field could protect them from a nuclear bomb, but it couldn’t stop them being worried at like a dog’s bone.

  “I’m going outside,” said Clementine. “To recce.”

  “I’ll cover you, “said Tonii.

  They shucked their helmets into place.

  “Nine, ten,” said Clementine, and opened the emergency door and rolled out. Tonii followed.

  Clementine and Tonii hit the ground and rolled into position and inspected their attacker. It was a land-monster of some kind, vast, looming above them, with golden scales and triple horns on its anvil-shaped head. Clementine put her gun on smart laser and popped a red dot on the forehead of the beast. Then she pressed the trigger.

  A shaft of laser light lunged from the gun and hit the creature in its skull, burning through bone and whatever else this creature possessed in its head. But the creature didn’t shift. Its brain was therefore, probably, not in its head. But the creature seemed baffled, unsure how to proceed against prey that could not be killed by being dropped from a great height, and puzzled too, perhaps, at the sudden draught that had appeared in the middle of its skull.

  The monster picked up the AmRover again, and dropped it again. Tonii winced. Then he and Clementine opened fire with a hail of explosive bullets — which, to their astonishment, bounced harmlessly off the creature’s armoured scales.

  And so they changed gun settings. Sheets of plasma tore out of their weapons and the beast was engulfed in flame. But the plasma beams were reflected off its tough shiny scales. It didn’t ignite, didn’t even seem perturbed, but merely peered around, looking for the source of the heat. Fortunately, it hadn’t yet noticed the two puny Soldiers standing beneath it.

  Clementine looked at Tonii; Tonii looked back.

  Fuck.

  Then Clementine beckoned, and Tonii moved over to the AmRover. It was an upended turtle now. Its rockets were pointing up at the sky, not down. So she took a firm grip on one side, ignited her boot rockets and fired. She flew up in the air millimetre by painful centimetre, gripping the AmRover, until the power of her exoskeleton combined with the boot-rocket thrust enabled her to flip the AmRover back into position.

  As Clementine did this, Tonii waited in position, with his plasma cannon ready to blast. He wasn’t at all confident he could kill this creature before it could pick him up and dash his brains out, so he just waited.

  The doors of the AmRover were flipping open and the Scientists were getting out to inspect.

  “It’s not dead!” protested Ben Kirkham.

  “Sssh,” said Clementine, spooking everyone. The monster continued to peer down at them.

  “What shall we call it?” asked Hugo.

  “A Tricorn,” hazarded Mary.

  “A Golden-Rhino.”

  “Move back, get behind those trees,” said Clementine, and added: “Oops.”

  The creature pounced. Its jaws picked up the AmRover and hurled it away, and its claws reached for the Scientists.

  “Narrow beam, full power,” said Clementine, and she and Tonii fired thin plasma beams which locked together at the beast’s mid-point. The beast moved forward, but the plasma beams didn’t waver. And suddenly, the cumulative energy of the plasma beams caused the creature’s hide to catch fire.

  But even that didn’t perturb the beast and, engulfed in billowing flame, it carried on attacking. It spotted Mary Beebe and gripped her in its claw. Tonii changed to laser setting and managed to saw the foot off, so that Mary fell back to the ground. The Scientists joined in, firing erratically and burning vegetation all around but landing the occasional lick. And Tonii and Clementine kept up their continuous bursts of plasma power, firing bullets of energy that slowly melted the damned creature’s almost impermeable hide until it finally realised it was in pain, and started to roar.

  The Tricorn ran, and the Soldiers ran after it. They fired an explosive shell over its head, which landed and blew a hole in the ground that the Tricorn fell into. And then they rained blasts of plasma down on the trapped creature as it howled with rage.

  And finally, the plasma did its job. The Tricorn fell to pieces, and the pieces turned to ash, drifting in the wind.

  “That was close,” observed Clementine.

  “We didn’t even see it coming,” marvelled Tonii.

  “From now on,” said Ben, “two of us on extra-vehicular sentry duty. We can’t risk any further attacks on the AmRover.”

  Hugo thought about his meal — ruined. And about the poison — scattered around the cabin.

  Would he ever have a second chance?

  Sorcha and Saunders flew above the canopy, in the heart of a vast flock of Gryphons. The sky was jagged with sunset. Rocs hovered far above, eager to pounce, afraid to fight the massed ranks of the Gryphons. But from time to time a Roc plummeted and scales exploded and blood poured from a dying Gryphon and the Roc
flew away pursued by angry caws.

  Below them, for mile after mile, the canopy swept, a vast purple-floored world above a world. Saunders knew they were flying over the ocean now, but still the canopy held, as the Ocean-Aldiss-Tree loomed high and joined the canopy created by the Earth Aldiss. Saunders always admired the sheer chutzpah of the Aldiss tree in capturing the entire damned planet for its greedy self. Now that was a tree he could respect.

  But now the canopy was thinning. Below they could see red sands starting to emerge. They flew over the red sands, and past a range of mountains, until the desert began. Here the flock of Gryphons flew down, and Saunders and Sorcha with them.

  And they beheld a city. From the air, the white sands shimmered in the heat; but on the surface of the dunes, patterns emerged and solidified. Saunders marvelled at the sight. Huge octagonal buildings had been raised out of the sand. Sand towers soared high, in place of the Aldiss trees. And there was a vast dome, held up by tiny pillars of sand.

  “They live here?” Sorcha subvoced.

  Isaac cawed and hovered before them, and flashed an image into Saunders’s mind. It was just the same shimmering city of sand with towers and pillars, but the image was growing larger, they were moving closer to it. And Saunders could now (in his mind’s eye) see Gryphons flying through the city, which was even vaster and more magnificent than it had been in real life, and he was flying past the towers which shone like jewels, and now he was inside the city, and he could see below him on the ground Rocs and Godzillas pulling carriages like horses, and everywhere Gryphons flew and plucked hapless prey from the air and danced patterns of aerial dance in a whirlwind of freedom.

  “You see it?” Saunders marvelled, to Sorcha.

  “Yes. But what? What is it?” Sorcha said, over her MI-radio.

  “It’s a dream.”

  “This is what the Gryphons dream of?”

  “A dream, and also a blueprint.”

  They landed. Reality returned. The city was impressive, but much less magnificent than the dream of it, and utterly devoid of life. There were no Rocs inside, no jewels on the towers, no dancing Gryphons or fearless prey. And Saunders hunkered down and picked up a handful of sand. He used his helmet magnifier and saw a dozen tiny Rat-Insect-shaped creatures wriggling in his palm, each clutching a grain of sand.

  “See these?”

  “I’ve seen them before. Rat-Insects.”

  “Not so. Twelve legs not six. The thorax is larger. Claws on the back. They don’t look at all like Rat-Insects.”

  “They all look —”

  “Don’t ever say that,” Saunders rebuked her.

  “Don’t get huffy.”

  “This is as much like a Rat-Insect as a rhino is like a koala bear.”

  “Can you get over yourself? Why am I looking at this creepy-crawly thing?”

  “Let’s call them,” said Saunders, mulling, “Sand-Ants. Harenaformica Sorchae.”

  “Sorchae. That sounds like Sorcha.”

  “It does.”

  “You’re naming it after me.”

  “I am,” said Saunders, basking in the warm glow of his own generosity.

  “What the fuck for?”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s a creepy-crawly. If you’re going to name something after me, make it a scary predator. Not a fucking —”

  “Let’s keep to the point.”

  “What point?”

  “These creatures. The Harenaformicas. They built the city. They made this monument. It’s the same process as the Jungle-Wall; the city is built out of sand that’s been processed and turned into builder’s cement by this creature’s digestive system.”

  Sorcha looked at the city, its vast scale, the grandeur of its architecture, and blinked.

  “But why? There’s no nourishment in sand. Why eat sand and shit it out as cement? What’s the evolutionary purpose of that?”

  “They have no purpose. They see an image of the city and they build it, but they don’t know why.”

  “The Gryphons make them do this?” said Sorcha, awed.

  “Yes,” said Saunders. “This city, it’s the Gryphon vision of a better place. A safe place. This city is the Gryphon Heaven, built for them by Sand Ants.”

  Sorcha felt a sudden, cold, overwhelming shudder of fear.

  “I have gathered you together,” explained Ben Kirkham, “to explain our new and brilliant survival strategy.”

  Then he beamed, like a dog with two-tails, three cocks, and a brand-new bone.

  Clementine was in despair; but it was her duty to obey orders.

  Tonii was in despair. He desperately wanted to disobey his orders. But he knew that if he did rebel, Clementine would kill him.

  Hugo seethed with rage about the fact that his plan to murder Ben Kirkham had failed.

  And David Go was, as always, for every moment of every day, simply in despair.

  One hour later, at Ben’s orders, they abandoned the cavern and started driving the AmRover through unexplored and treacherous terrain.

  The new plan was to travel to the Space Elevator, and thence to the Satellite. This, Ben had abruptly decided, was their best hope of salvation.

  It was clearly a plan conceived on a whim, and Ben had allowed no discussion or dissent. Mary Beebe privately thought it was madness to go anywhere near the Elevator, because of the danger of meeting enemy DRs — it was the DRs, remember, who had already killed so many of them! But she didn’t say so, because that would have made Ben angry. And Ben angry was not a comfortable experience.

  The others were just blindly following, worn out by Ben’s boundless optimism and refusal to think about problems.

  The AmRover soared above the Flesh-Webs, and wove its way through tree trunks, but suddenly the engine started to stall. And then it cut out entirely.

  For a few seconds it continued to hover, out of sheer cussed refusal to believe in what had happened.

  Then abruptly, it crashed to earth.

  Saunders awoke, trembling.

  “What’s wrong?” Sorcha said.

  “Nothing . . . a nightmare.”

  She stared at him blankly. He looked down at his dinner tray, with its half-eaten dried food tablets taken from his body armour’s larder. He wasn’t in bed, he was sitting in the cavern, with Sorcha, and they were eating dinner. “I’m sorry. Did I fall asleep?”

  “As I was talking to you.”

  “It — happens sometimes. Petit mal. It’s a sign of age.”

  Sorcha looked at him with an expression of pity merged with fury.

  “What happened in your nightmare?” she asked, mildly.

  “I saw . . . a world in which I was king of the Gryphons. But all my people — my fellow Gryphons — turned on me and ate me and shat me out as they flew through the sky.”

  “You dreamed that?”

  “Someone dreamed that. Something dreamed that.”

  Sorcha was baffled; then she got it. “You were having a Gryphon’s nightmare?”

  “I must have been. Maybe they transmit images and thoughts without intending to.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Indeed, fuck.”

  Ben finished his inspection of the AmRover’s engine. He emerged smiling.

  “The AmRover’s Bostock battery has been leached of energy,” he explained. “It must have been damaged when the AmRover was dropped.”

  That’s impossible, thought Mary, but she said nothing.

  “Fortunately, there is a solution to our problems. We can walk to the Space Elevator,” said Ben, smugly. “It’ll take two or three weeks, but we’ve got the time to spare. Once we’re there, we’ll stock up on some batteries, then send the Soldiers back to put a new BB in the AmRover. And then, bingo, we’ll hop up into space and colonise the Satellite.”

  “But you still haven’t dealt,” explained Mary, “with the problem of what we do if we encounter DRs at the Satellite, and find they want to kill us. I mean, for heaven’s sake! If we don’t even have the AmR
over to —”

  “If we find any enemy DRs, we’ll destroy them, or reprogram them,” said Ben, casually. “Tonii and Clementine are Killing Machines, they’re pros, they’ll handle it. No worries. Trust me.”

  “But —”

  “Trust me,” said Ben, smiling even more now, which made it worse.

  “Yes, sir,” said Tonii.

  “Yes, sir,” said Clementine.

  He’s going to kill us on the journey, thought Hugo.

  Isaac picked up the plasma gun in his talons but couldn’t work the trigger.

  “Don’t show him how,” said Sorcha.

  Saunders was suddenly enveloped in a vivid image of himself being eviscerated (again!) by beak and talons. He paled. He took the plasma gun, slyly put it on Stun, then held the trigger. Isaac studied it.

  Then Isaac held the gun in two claws and manipulated the trigger with a talon. A haze of energy flew out, hitting a tree.

  Isaac flew off, carrying the plasma gun.

  “I shouldn’t,” said Saunders, “have done that.”

  The jungle was dense. Moisture rose up in hazy pillars from the earth. Hugo and Mary and David Go and Mia kept close together as they walked.

  “How are you doing?” called out Ben, and Hugo threw a grenade and blasted him off his feet.

  “Run!” screamed Hugo.

  The Scientists ran towards the jungle. “The Soldiers will kill us,” screamed Mia.

  “Just run!” And Hugo and Mary and Mia and David Go vanished into the purple and red depths of the jungle.

  Ben got to his feet. Blood poured from a cut in his temple, but the body armour had absorbed the blast. Clementine and Tonii ran up to join him.