Red Claw

by Philip Palmer

  “Not good enough!” roared Hooperman DR, and then the Gryphons flocked above his head.

  “Is this your army?” taunted Hooperman DR.

  Saunders thought an image: the Gryphons flying away. Then: Hooperman DR firing plasma blasts, killing Gryphons. The clearest possible warning. The Gryphons flew away.

  “How did you do that?” marvelled Hooperman DR.

  “What else can I say! I apologise! I bitterly regret what happened, what I did to you,” said Saunders, passionately, and truthfully.

  The silver DR studied him for a long painful moment.

  “In that case,” said Hooperman DR, “I forgive you.” And he smiled an eerie silver-faced smile.

  “You forgive me?”

  “I do.”

  “No revenge?”

  “I’ve had my revenge. All those people who died. Their deaths are on your conscience. That’s enough for me.”

  Saunders laughed, relieved. He was safe! After all those years of running, all that fear, he was —

  Guilt struck him, like a physical blow.

  He remembered all those who had died. William Beebe, Django, Sheena, the other Noirs. All the hundreds of Scientist colleagues and Soldiers who died on New Amazon, plus the two librarians on Rebus who were caught in the cross-fire in a gunfight between Saunders and two DRs, and the passengers and crew who died in the plane crash on Paxton, and the dozens who died during the torpedo strike at Asgard. And he realised that they would all be alive if it weren’t for him. His arrogance. His single-mindedness. His obsession.

  How could he have been such a monstrous selfish fool?

  “Oh you bastard,” he snarled at Hooperman.

  “You deserve it.”

  “They didn’t.”

  “You brought it on them.”

  “I did. I did.” Saunders was consumed with self-hate.

  “And these birds. These Gryphons. You’re fond of them?”

  “They’re an amazing species.”

  “You’re uplifting them?”

  “I’m giving them a helping hand.”

  “They could be a threat to humankind.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, they might be.”

  “Yes,” conceded Saunders. “They might be. But —”

  Hooperman DR fired up his jets. “You’ve got twenty-four hours, Carl.”

  “For what?”

  “To enjoy your dying days.”

  Hooperman DR flew off.

  Saunders was pale.

  “What did he mean?” Sorcha said, tensely.

  “His final revenge. He’s going to terraform the planet.”

  From the diary of Dr Hugo Baal

  July 1st

  An amazing thing has happened. We have been saved from certain death, just in the nick of time. Just as we had all sunk into total heartwrenching despair. It’s a miracle!

  I therefore distrust it utterly.

  Imagine my chagrin — more than chagrin, my absolute and total humiliation — when I tried to use my plasma gun to blow our way back out of the great big hole we were in. Only to find that the blast was being reflected back by the soil, baking and burning us.

  Once we realised the plasma guns were useless, we tried to tunnel our way out of the soft, flaky soil. But that simply packed it even tighter around us. We were still all able to breathe, thanks to our oxygen implants, and talk to each other, via the MI-radio links. But my plan to save us from the acid rain had failed miserably. We were doomed to die of thirst and starvation deep under the ground.

  It was claustrophobic too. The earth was packed around my mouth and nostrils, I was breathing in earth, and spitting out Hornbeetles and lord knows what other creatures. The touch of the soil was clammy. I could not see, I could only silently scream; but my silent screams were agony for my companions, since they could hear them via the MI link, and at one point someone threatened to use their stun setting to silence me.

  One learns a great deal about oneself, when buried deep in the soil in an alien planet.

  Desolation. Despair. Lonelineness. I plumbed the depths of each of them.

  And also Hope. Optimism. Joy. I explored those too. I am not, and have never been, a despairing kind of person. And hope — hope is important to me. I always hope for the best, it’s just the way I am. And I always take joy in what I’m doing — my work, and, and, and — well, my work, and criticising the half-baked efforts of others, these are the things that always bring me joy. And optimism — that is my natural state of being. I always assume there will be an answer, a solution, a way through.

  On this occasion, however, I could see none such. Despair was the only sensible course. And so I despaired.

  After a while, I and the rest of the Buried Doomed began to talk to each other. We shared stories. We reminisced. And rather to my astonishment, no one reproached me for my error of judgement in burying us alive in such an astonishingly stupid fashion. No one carped, or niggled, or undermined me. And for that I was profoundly grateful.

  After a while, we played the game of “Favourite Day”.

  But that got a bit boring because we all said the same kinds of things. The Scientists talked about their great moments of scientific discovery; the Soldiers talked about the great battles they had won. So then we played, “Favourite Day That Doesn’t Involve Anything Scientific Or Any Acts of War and Carnage”, and I remembered the day I rode my bike down the hills of Shadalia and the bike actually took flight and I was only seven years old and I thought it was marvellous. And it was a wonderful story to tell, because I’d never told it before, not to my father, not to anyone. It was a solitary joy, half-forgotten, and now I was sharing it.

  Others had similar wonderful stories. And for a time there was a mood of camaraderie, a tenderness, a closeness.

  After a few more hours, however, all that wore off. We all became very aware of the fact that we were BURIED ALIVE and would stay that way until we choked to death, or starved to death, probably in about four weeks’ time, when our food and water implants ran out.

  I slept and dreamed and talked in my sleep and they all shouted at me and I woke up.

  I had some kind of New Amazonian beetle in my mouth, and I ate the fucking thing. What did I have to lose?

  Someone suggested playing “I Spy” and that notion was poorly received, I mean, really, no one saw the funny side of it at all.

  I began to hallucinate. I could see nothing, I had my eyes tight shut to stop soil or microbes crawling into my eyes, and after a while the floaters in my eyes began to obsess me, and then I started seeing multicoloured pillars of light. They danced, they whirled, they formed into new patterns. I was becoming hypnotised by my own hallucinations.

  I let my mind disengage. I drifted. I thought about all the things I wished I’d done with my life, and most of them involved having friends, and that made me feel a bit pathetic.

  Then the earth began to move.

  We whispered to each other — was that really happening?

  The earth moved again.

  I wondered if we were about to be eaten by an earth-burrowing creature of some kind, but I chose not to articulate my fears.

  Then the earth moved again — and suddenly we were free! Strong hands were pulling us up, at astonishing speed. We landed in a huddle on the surface, blinking into the light, five soil-baked near-corpses. And a silver-skinned Humanoid DR stood above us, surrounded by a miasma of DR scalpels. We looked at the DR in fear and dread, but he waved at us, cheerfully. This, we realised, was our saviour.

  “I’m Dr Hooperman,” said the Humanoid DR. “Greetings.”

  I stammered out some kind of response. Inchoate, incoherent, enraged, and pathetically grateful.

  “You probably all hate me,” Hooperman DR said, “for what I have done to you and your colleagues. But now, I’m glad to say, the fighting is over. You’re safe.” Then he threw us into the hull of a Draven and an hour later we were dumped outside the AmRover.

/>   Then he left us. Filthy. Bewildered. Shocked.

  We were no longer buried alive. It was a concept that took some getting used to.

  And then we crawled inside the AmRover and into the shower and bathed together in a single sodden muddy heap. The alien soil we were covered in was seething with life, I had organisms all over me, and in every orifice. I had to boil them off, and did things to clear the orifices which really don’t bear recounting. But the pain was welcome. It made me feel alive.

  A few hours later Clementine was also deposited outside the AmRover by the Humanoid DR and his army of flying robots. We welcomed her joyfully. She was exhausted, crippled, anguished, but alive.

  A miracle indeed.

  But as I say, I mistrust miracles. I think this is Hooperman toying with us. No one else agrees, there’s now a general mood of elation, and salvation. The consensus is that we should be glad that Hooperman finally came to his senses, and we shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

  But I disagree. Hooperman is a bastard; this is a trick.

  And my initial instinct is to tell the rest of the party that they are wrong to be celebrating their release. That they are all just gullible, shortsighted fools — because it’s obvious to anyone with half a brain that Hooperman is toying with us, like a cat with a mouse!

  And I come very close to saying all this; and it is, I must concede, very much the kind of thing I usually say.

  But on this occasion, I think twice, and I bite my tongue. For I realise that it would be crass to damage the mood of elation and salvation with my usual sarcastic tirade. Instead, I go with the flow; I drink the champagne; and I hug my fellow survivors, repeatedly, whilst drunk. Because I realise — they need this! And I need it too. We’ve been through so much, we deserve a moment of relief, a breathing space from all the horrors we have endured, however illusory our salvation.

  However, secretly, I begin planning for a variety of worst-case scenarios. I believe it is essential for me to anticipate in detail what might happen next, so that I can plan countermeasures for every possible eventuality.

  What, I wonder, could Hooperman have in store for us?

  Sorcha got dressed. Her bruises hurt. Saunders was in a sombre mood.

  “So that was Hooperman, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “As you say, he’s fucking nuts.”

  “Indeed.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Sorcha, there’s something I want to tell you.”

  They were clothed now, but not yet in their body armour. Their bodies sang with the cold and baked with the heat. Her arms were brown and muscled. Her eyes blazed with her usual wild energy.

  “What?”

  Saunders hesitated.

  “I — it doesn’t matter. Nothing. Forget it.”

  She glared at him.

  He hesitated again. Then he kissed her. “You’re a very special woman. That was it, that’s what I wanted to say.”

  “You don’t need to flatter me, you’ve already had your fuck for the day.”

  He grinned.

  And Saunders looked at Sorcha, intently, at her radiance, her beauty, her youth. He exulted in her spirit, her herness.

  “You do realise, it’s the end of the world soon?” he said to her.

  “Maybe,” she said. “We’ll see.”

  And her eyes sparkled with the anticipation of battles to come.

  From the diary of Dr Hugo Baal

  June 48th (cont)

  I am busy drafting ways to defeat Hooperman, assuming that he is, as I fear and suspect, a duplicitous shit.

  But there are many other pressing concerns that I have to deal with.

  I’m worried, in particular, about Clementine. She is maimed, perhaps permanently. We don’t have the resources to rebuild or replace her spine. I have to keep her confidence high, but some instinct tells me I can’t do that by being nice to her. I have a hunch she would find that patronising.

  So instead I constantly make rude and sarcastic comments about her pathetic failure to rescue us. I swaggeringly challenge her to a one-armed press-up competition (which she would win, by the way, even with a fractured spine), and she grins, and feels better, because I’m not humouring her, or pitying her.

  And, I must concede, I’m fond of Clementine. There’s a wonderful quality to her, and she is an undeniably attractive young woman.1 And to be perfectly honest,2 I never thought a girl like that would look at a tubby and annoying little geek like me.

  But after all the horrors we’ve been through, I know it’s now my job to protect her, to boost her confidence, to keep her strong.

  And sometimes I think, though I may be wrong, that she actually rather likes me.

  I’m worried, too, about Mary Beebe.3 Mary is still, even now, grieving for her dead husband. But it seems to me that Mia Nightingale has fallen in love with her, and that Mary is encouraging it. In Mia’s mind, she has already replaced William Beebe, and she is the new Mary’s soulmate.

  But my feeling is that Mary doesn’t reciprocate.4 She doesn’t love Mia, she doesn’t need her as a friend, she’s not even bisexual. She’s leading her on, and there’s a very good chance that Mia is going to get her heart broken.

  It’s not that Mary is deliberately deceiving Mia, or using her. She’s just being — a little bit selfish, I guess, and thoughtless. And it’s understandable: Mary enjoys having someone to talk to, someone who can banter as William did.

  I do feel terribly sorry for Mary, and I know that it’s my job to protect her.

  But I also have to protect Mia. She doesn’t deserve to have her heart broken, and I can’t afford to have her morale damaged.

  I must give more thought to the question of how to handle this delicate issue, without hurting either of these decent, honourable and yet unutterably lonely people.

  And Tonii Newton, of course, is also extremely lonely. I increasingly find him to be a delightful man: beautiful, and courteous, and kind. Not like a Soldier at all really. But he’s much too self-contained. He sees himself as some kind of new human, Homo omnis, but he’s clearly subject to deep depressions and lack of self-esteem, and I honestly think that, unlike every other other Soldier in the galaxy, he actually fears death.

  Tonii and I are fast becoming good friends. We play chess together; we are developing a nice line in chit-chat; and I can see his dawning realisation that, regardless of biology, and whatever sexual equipment one carries, everyone needs friends. And I would like to believe that, one day, I might be Tonii’s friend.

  David Go is one of the most interesting members of the party. To be honest, I never used to like David,5 mainly because he’s such a typical microbiologist and looks like a frightened rabbit; but now I admire him more and more. He’s a quiet achiever, one of those people you never notice even when they’re in the room, or the conversation, but who are able to make things happen, and who never get the credit for what they do.

  All in all, David has a sensible head on his shoulders, and real integrity. But deep down, or in fact not all that deep down, he’s afraid, and paranoid, and convinced that he doesn’t “fit in”. I have to find a way to integrate him into the group, and to draw out his better qualities. He has much to offer; he needs to know that he belongs, and that we care for him. So I’ve started teasing him, and letting him tease me. He enjoys that — I’m an easy target for his mordant sense of humour. And I would rather be mocked and treated as a buffoon, than allow one of my people to slip into depression and despair.

  These are difficult times, for all of us; and I am weighed down by the knowledge that I have many challenges ahead of me. But one consolation is that I find I am no longer afraid of things. And that is because I can no longer afford to be afraid of things. I have too many responsibilities for fear to be an option.

  For, you see, it’s now my job, my role, my duty, to protect everyone.

  The sky was black with birds. The Gryphons formed a huge cloud and in their midst flew Sau
nders and Sorcha.

  They flew blind, held aloft by Gryphon claws, wary of using their body armour jets in case the flames burned their protectors. And as they flew, they heard a slow thunder around them. Occasional gaps appeared in their protective escort. Dying Gryphons screamed with pain and fell to earth, their bodies smashed open, blood pouring out of them in torrents.

  Hooperman was firing missiles at them, to blow them out of the sky. And the vast Gryphon flock was absorbing the punishment of the plasma blasts and explosive shells intended for Saunders and Sorcha.

  Saunders had conveyed to Isaac a vivid image of what would happen to their planet if Hooperman had his way: the death of everything, and all of them. And Isaac had passed on those same images to the rest of the Gryphons. So all of them knew what was at stake.

  The Gryphons were fighting for their survival.

  From the diary of Dr Hugo Baal

  July 1st (cont.)

  Where is Hooperman? On Earth? Is the Quantum Beacon still working? Or is he, as Mary Beebe once surmised, holed up somewhere on New Amazon?

  I wish I knew.

  I have completed my Worst-Case Scenario plans, which are detailed and bloody but rely a great deal on blind luck to save us from Hooperman’s tireless robot killers.

  I now consider there are three hypotheses which explain our current situation, with varying degrees of plausibility:

  1) Hooperman has mellowed, and no longer wants to kill us.

  2) Hooperman is dead, and someone else has control of the Doppelganger Robots. Saunders?

  3) Hooperman is toying with us, as a prelude to ghastly horror of some kind or other.

  After a healthy discussion with the team6 it was unanimously7 agreed that we should proceed on the basis of Hypothesis 3. Hooperman is toying with us; that’s the proposition. The logical corollaries are:

  i) He will kill us soon.

  ii) He will kill us in a way that is even more painful and horrible than dying of starvation and thirst whilst buried under the soil of an alien planet.

  iii) He will also wreak some kind of havoc on this planet, out of sheer spite.