Red Claw

by Philip Palmer

  “What happened?”

  “They counterattacked first,” said Ben, cheerfully. “But don’t worry, they botched it. I’m fine.” He retracted his helmet and wiped the blood off his forehead.

  Clementine raised her plasma gun and blasted Ben in his unprotected face. His skull exploded and melted, and only the memory of his sneer remained.

  There was a long pause.

  “What the fuck?” said Tonii, tensely.

  “It’s done!” Clementine shouted.

  Hugo, Mia, Mary, and David Go drifted back.

  “Are you with us, or against us?” said Clementine to Tonii.

  Tonii was frozen, conflicted, confused. “That was cold-blooded murder,” Tonii said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Yes, of course it was,” said Hugo.

  “Ben told me to kill all the Scientists,” Clementine explained. “Every single one of them. To give us a better start. He faked the AmRover breakdown. The batteries are fine. This whole excursion was just a trap. Are you with us or against us?”

  “If I’m against you,” asked Tonii cautiously, “do I die?”

  “No. But you’ll be on your own.”

  “With,” said Tonii decisively. “That man was a prick.”

  Hugo was elated as they began marching back towards the AmRover. His plan had been brilliantly conceived and audaciously executed. It was hard to kill a man in full body armour, even with a bomb or a plasma blast. But Hugo knew it was human nature to retract your helmet after being blown up. The minute Ben had felt fresh air on his cheeks, he was doomed.

  “I’m the new military leader of this expedition,” Clementine told Hugo as they walked, their helmets retracted so they could savour the rich aromas of the jungle.

  “Fine by me,” said Hugo, humbly.

  “You don’t have a problem with that?”

  “No problem,” said Hugo.

  There was a long pause, as they walked on.

  “So, um, what do we do now?” asked Clementine.

  “We walk back to the AmRover,” said Hugo, patiently. “And after that, we follow Kirkham’s plan. It was a good plan, even if he was too stupid to know that. We can’t live in a cave for ever, so we have to go to space. Travel to the Space Elevator, destroy or outwit the DRs, if there are any, but there may not be, travel up to the Satellite. Create two bases, one on the land, one in the sky. There’ll be a supply Depot near the Space Elevator, we can restock there, and make it our capital city.”

  “How do you know there’ll be another Depot?”

  “It’s the kind of thing Saunders would do. He’s a sly bugger. Also, we need a celebration tonight, to bond us as a team. You need to be a bit less military. Make Tonii your official Number Two. He doesn’t like you, you’ve got to win his love, you can’t expect him to just blindly obey any more. Oh, and beware of Mary Beebe. She’s still in trauma, she’s flaky. Don’t forget the Doppelgangers are out there. We’re still at war.”

  “Have you finished?” Clementine said, acidly.

  “No. We’re running low on fresh water. We need to dig a hole and replenish. That’ll take us half a day. We’ll start on it tomorrow.”

  “We’re fine for water.”

  “No, you’re wrong. We’re running low. We should always have a month’s supply of water at any given time. I explained this to Ben but he was too stupid to listen. There’s an underwater lake under us now, but it ends a kilometre away. It’s on the map.”

  “I read the map. I didn’t notice —”

  “Trust me, I’m right.”

  “We’ll dig for water,” Clementine said decisively.

  “You’re the boss,” said Hugo, and stopped dead. A few moments later he swore. “Fuck.”

  Mary Beebe also stopped dead. But she didn’t realise that was about to happen, so her body carried on walking and she toppled over, and rolled like a turtle. Then Mia, distracted by her own body armour’s malfunction, walked right into Mary and tripped over her. The two of them flailed on the ground, helplessly. Tonii watched it all, awestruck, then he also stopped dead.

  Clementine moved her arms and legs. She was fine.

  David Go screamed. “I can’t move!” he shouted.

  “He sabotaged you,” said Clementine, realising. “All of you. Just me and him would have survived. He drained your Bostock batteries.”

  Tonii’s face was a portrait of betrayal. Despite his promises, Ben had never intended him to live.

  “Then you’ll have to carry us,” said Hugo.

  “All of you?” said Clementine, scornfully.

  “Then we’ll stay here, you go for help.”

  “I’ll go for help,” said Clementine.

  “We’ll stay here,” Hugo concurred.

  “We can take the armour off and walk,” protested Tonii.

  “Too dangerous,” Hugo decided. “We’ll stay here.”

  Clementine set off into the jungle, at a brisk pace. Hugo shucked his helmet back into place.

  And Hugo and the others waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  After a few hours, the earth below them began to shake. It felt as if a monster from the depths was going to rip the ground apart. Instead, pillars of steam ripped through the soil in countless fountains. Hugo took a spectrometer reading. It was oxygen. Pure oxygen!

  This, Hugo realised with dawning delight, was how life was able to thrive on this planet. Oxygen storms! Ripping through the planet’s crust and billowing through the jungle, and replenishing the oxygen sacs of these nitrogen-loving but oxygen-needing organisms.

  After twenty minutes the storm abated. The ground returned to normal. Hugo’s oxygen meter read High; they could take their helmets off and breathe the atmosphere. Except, Hugo noted, the oxygen was blended with gaseous sulphuric acid and would burn their lungs. So better, perhaps, he concluded, to keep their helmets on.

  Night fell. The oxygen level slowly dipped, the acid drifted away, and the atmosphere returned to its normal, non-toxic, unbreathable form.

  DAY 24

  The sun rose.

  Hugo, David, Mia and Mary were still frozen in place, like overzealous players of Musical Statues who had failed to notice the band’s departure.

  Clementine’s suit warned her there were predators nearby. She stopped hovering and glided to a halt. She hunkered down behind a Flesh-Web and waited.

  After an hour a troop of Basilisks slid past. Clementine was silent. Her armour gave off no odour, her camouflage blended perfectly with the Flesh-Webs. She waited patiently for the danger to pass. She could if need be defeat these creatures, but the risk wasn’t worth taking.

  When the coast was clear she stood up and stretched and took two steps forward and stood on the landmine. The impact threw her six feet in the air, and when she landed she could feel her spine snap.

  DAY 25

  Another day of ghastly waiting.

  Hugo was desperately hungry.

  Mia managed to lie down, by falling flat on her back. She found it more comfortable.

  David was suffering acute claustrophobia.

  “Clementine, come in please, Clementine, come in please,” said Mary, in a continuous loop.

  Hugo succumbed to a desperate torpor, and was filled with despair.

  Motionless.

  Tired.

  Bored.

  Afraid.

  Waiting.

  DAY 26

  Another slow, tedious day of even more ghastly waiting.

  Until —

  “That’s fucking it,” said Tonii. “We’re walking!”

  Hugo didn’t attempt to argue.

  They took their body armour off and spent an hour flexing and stretching. Then they turned the food pouches into makeshift haversacks and loaded up as much of the suits’ food and water supply as possible. They were all heavily armed, but they had no protection against armoured predators, or against the acid rain.

  They walked. And walked.

  The
jungle was less dense here; but it was raining leaves from the canopy. A whirlwind of purple leaves blocked their vision and slapped viciously against their faces and bodies, leaving them bruised and bleeding. But they carried on walking.

  An Exploding-Tree exploded fifty metres away from them. By this time they were so jaded and fed up they didn’t even break step. Hugo noticed, with some interest, that the Exploding-Tree had managed to burst through into the canopy. Did the trees commute between ground and canopy? Was that the reason for the exploding?

  And on they walked.

  David Go feared the acid rain, even though he knew they were on the second day of a rain-every-ten-days weather cycle. He was fed up, but didn’t wish to grumble, because he was always being told he grumbled too much.

  Tonii imagined how he would look if the rain fell. His skin would peel, his eyes would fall out, he would die ugly, and in pain. It was not what he wanted for himself. He missed his armour badly.

  Mary Beebe wished William was here, so she could criticise him, to take her mind off this godawful fucking walk.

  Mia admired Hugo for his resourcefulness in killing Ben Kirkham. Who would have thought that tubby, funny little man had it in him!

  And Hugo — Hugo was worried about Clementine.

  Worried — and puzzled, and indeed, intrigued by her too. She was a quietly spoken, decisive, courteous warrior. But was that all there was to her? Did she have hidden depths? Hobbies?

  Clementine was immensely calm, and capable and competent, in a way that Hugo admired, and had a style and a swagger that he adored. He himself was brilliant, analytical, insightful, arguably a genius. But never capable or competent, except in purely scientific matters. And never calm. And he never ever, except in his academic writings, swaggered.

  Yes, he admired her very much indeed.

  Hugo wondered if she’d managed to reach the AmRover yet.

  He wondered if she was in any peril.

  He wondered if a DR had found her and killed her; or if a Godzilla had stomped her; or if she’d been overpowered by Basilisks; or carried off by Rocs; blown up by an Exploding-Tree; or buried alive in a mountain of Wiggly-Worms.

  And he also wondered, idly, irresponsibly, and with mischievous glee, if one day, she might ever consider fucking a geek such as himself.

  But no! Surely —

  It began to drizzle.

  Mia felt it first — a scalding pain on her shoulder. Then the drizzle thickened and they were all jumping and hopping, stung by the painful rain.

  Hugo looked up at the dark stormclouds abruptly gathering. “Monsoon,” he predicted, sadly.

  “But the rains aren’t due for —”

  “It’s fucking raining! It’s the weather!”

  “But —”

  “Let’s walk back to the suits?”

  “No chance.”

  “Then?”

  “We die, in agony, flesh peeling?” suggested David Go.

  “Oh fuck,” said Mia, and there was panic in her voice.

  “What do we do?” Mary asked Tonii.

  “I — don’t know,” he muttered.

  “You’re a Soldier! You must have some idea!”

  “Find shelter? Under a tree?” said Tonii, pathetically.

  “I think I may have the glimmerings of a notion,” said Hugo.

  Mia let out a wail of utter fear.

  David Go closed his eyes and counted his blessings. It didn’t take long. His eyes flicked open again instantly.

  Mary conjured up a memory of William; she wanted that to be the last thing she ever saw.

  “I said,” Hugo repeated impatiently, “I have an idea.”

  “What?” said Tonii.

  “What?”

  “You do?” said Mary, with relief.

  “What is it?”

  “This,” said Hugo. He took out his plasma gun. “Let’s dig a hole.”

  Clementine knew she was close, and the knowledge filled her with a savage exhilaration.

  She had crawled, inch by inch, for almost two days, with a broken spine. Her guess was that the landmine had been seeded randomly by a DR, or a Draven. She was a fool not to have considered that possibility. Though it still seemed bizarre to her — it was a big planet, how could she have been so damned unlucky?

  After a while she’d stopped crawling, and had given up, and had lain unconscious for some hours, and the Flesh-Webs had attempted to envelop her. But her suit had self-sealed, healing serums were pumped through her veins and arteries, and then she woke up again and through sheer will-power she kept herself conscious. Occasionally, she subvoced a Mayday call, but she was out of radio range now.

  But she kept her nerve and carried on dragging herself towards the AmRover. She was crawling face-down, gripping the earth with her gauntleted fingertips, and pulling herself forward in a complex slithering motion that covered the ground with remarkable speed, at a terrible cost to herself.

  Only pride and hate and a desire for revenge kept her moving.

  “One, two, three, fire.” At Hugo’s cue, they opened the plasma guns to Full and blasted the ground. The blazing heat incinerated soil and carved a long trench into the ground.

  “Now move.” They moved and blasted the ground from the other side. The aim was to create a triangular wedge in the ground that could be collapsed from the inside.

  A streak of lightning shot across the sky.

  “And more.”

  Hailstones fell. The Flesh-Webs shuddered and closed up into black impermeable balls and steam arose from the ground where the hailstones hit. Hugo took a hail stone in the forehead. His eye stung and he could feel his own flesh burn.

  “Fuck!”

  “Let’s get in.”

  “Too soon, we . . . !”

  “Get in the fucking hole.”

  Hugo, Mia, Mary and David scrambled into the hole, pulling down earth on to themselves. The ground was hot, it was burning them, but the acid rain was burning them too. Hugo scrabbled desperately at the earth, then suddenly they collapsed downwards deep into the hole and there was an earthslide and the soil closed around them and above them.

  They were now trapped under the earth, dozens of feet below the surface, breathing air from their oxygen implants, with no certainty they would ever be able to get out again. But at least they were spared the acid rain.

  “Well, that went almost according to plan,” said Hugo cheerfully.

  “Swim?” said Saunders. Sorcha nodded.

  And they each leaped from the escarpment and landed in the icy cold tarn below. Both still wore their body armour, but in the water the suits no longer seemed bulky and inhuman. And the exoskeletons allowed them to swim powerful strokes.

  They dived deep under the surface and swam through shoals of Water-Beasts — water molecules in an organic lattice that blobbed like jellyfish from hither to thither. Saunders had seen remote robocam footage of these creatures but he’d never encountered them at first hand before.

  Then they swam/clambered a path through the underwater roots of the Freshwater-Aldiss-Tree, and spotted some Digger-Crabs. An Octagon swam lazily passed them. Saunders realised the Aldiss-Tree was flowering underwater and subvoced some notes.

  Sorcha spiralled elegantly in her black body armour, which was perfectly contoured around the swells of her body; diamond-hard, yet soft to the touch. The armour made giants of them both. But even though Sorcha was embedded in an exoskeleton nearly five inches thick, Saunders found her wonderfully sensual.

  “Are you OK, Carl?” she asked.

  “I’m fine.” He realised he’d stopped swimming, and was just floating free, staring at her. “Waxing inwardly lyrical again.”

  “You do that, don’t you?”

  “I do. Can I ask a question?”

  “Ask away.”

  “What do you think of the Gryphons?”

  “They scare me.”

  “Me too.”

  “Can we enslave them?”

  “Huh?” />
  “I said, can we enslave them?”

  “And I say again, Huh? Why would we do that?”

  “So they can fight for us. That was your plan, remember, a Gryphon army?”

  “I was thinking more in terms of asking nicely.”

  “How intelligent are they?”

  “On a scale of what?”

  “Humans are six, flame beasts are ten.”

  “I’d say four, five. But I might be wrong.”

  “They’re dangerous.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “You saw what they did to the Sand-Rats.”

  “They did nothing bad. Gave them a purpose in life. No, fuck that, I take your point. Any creature that can do that can — well, who knows what they can do.”

  “Agreed. And that whole visual telepathy thing is spooky.”

  “It’s worse: they’re evolving it.”

  “Huh?”

  “They’re evolving it.”

  “Again, and I’m quoting you here, Professor, Huh?”

  “I saw them wage a war. An unnecessary war. No land was at stake. Survival was not an issue. They just picked a fight with the two most dangerous predators on the planet and fucked them over. Just to prove they could. And as a way of honing their killing skills. This is how the visual telepathy evolved. Through war.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “But even so, they’re a gentle species. Generous too. I think of Isaac as a friend.”

  “He’s just a fucking bird.”

  “He’s more than that. He risked his life for me.” Saunders found himself strangely moved. “It’s a long time since I had a friend who would risk his life for me.” As soon as he subvoced it, he knew that was a lie.

  He had never before had such a friend.

  Clementine saw the Rat-Insects swarming over her body and turned her armour heater on. The creatures burned off her back. But they kept swarming and swarming on her, trying to bite off bits of her body armour. Before long, her body was enveloped in biting insects, but she kept crawling, and crawling, and dragging her body across the ground, her lifeless legs trailing.