Red Claw

by Philip Palmer

  He began to run. He pushed through plants, and left huge boot prints in soil that had been freshly planted with fragile bulbs. He could hear more screaming from behind him, but he blocked off the noise and focused on running, and then he threw himself through the double doors and slammed them shut.

  He could still hear the screaming inside. He could distinguish words. “Help!” “Please!” “Help!” But he kept the doors closed.

  Mark closed his eyes and started to weep.

  “Who opened the fucking dome?”

  Professor Helms was halfway across the courtyard when the warning siren went off in his inner ear.

  “What’s happening, Juno?” he asked, and heard resounding silence.

  “The dome has been breached,” said Commander Martin’s voice in his ear.

  “But that’s not —” Helms began to say, then Martin logged off.

  Black rain drizzled down on to the shopping streets of Xabar, in the Mall area. A passerby looked up.

  And his eyes were eaten. His face was eaten. His tongue fell out of his mouth and moved like a living thing on the ground.

  He screamed, but no noise emerged.

  A giant oak tree dominated the city’s Central Park — a lab-created mutant that in six months had grown into a gnarled, vast, sprawling thing. But the leaves were falling from the tree now. Black darkness oozed from the bark.

  A squirrel fell from the tree, stone dead. Two children saw it fall and screamed.

  A Soldier saw it too; and raised his plasma gun; and the tree vanished in a haze of heat, and the darkness lay dead on the scorched ground.

  Sorcha was leaving the Soldiers’ Quarters, after a successful game of Knife Poker, when she heard the warning siren. She logged on to hear the details of the disaster, and listened intently.

  “Fuck,” she said, and accessed her squadron MI channel, and subvoced the Alpha Alert.

  Soldiers with paramedic training ran through the shopping streets and saw the writhing corpses on the ground. They raised their plasma guns and tried to burn the black darkness away but the darkness ducked and dodged, and the plasma blasts flew harmlessly past it.

  Helms had reached his study, breathless and concerned, when he got the update message on his MI.

  “Fifteen dead, so far,” the dispatcher told him.

  “Beware, xenohostiles swarming, dome has been breached, correction, the dome panels have been deliberately opened in three places, due to technical malfunction or human error,” the Juno said over the general MI network.

  “Close the fucking dome!” screamed Commander Martin.

  “Affirmative, that has been done already, eleven minutes and five seconds ago. However, you should be aware that this habitat has been infiltrated by alien life-forms, namely, Horde.”

  A few moments later, the remnants of the Horde trapped inside the dome struck.

  Soldiers carried away the dead, who had been blinded then brain-eaten by falling particles of Horde. Scientists sprayed the air with liquid poison. Screaming and whimpering filled the air, as the survivors felt the pollen-beasts move around inside their skulls, slowly and inevitably and incurably eating their thoughts and memories and motor impulses.

  The dome above was now closed tight.

  Helms sat at his desk, and waved a hand to conjure up his virtual computer screen. He spoke to it. “Xabar, exterior.”

  A bird’s eye view of the Xabar dome appeared in mid-air, surrounded by the rich and iridescent colours of the rainforest. He brushed the picture with his thumb and it zoomed and expanded. He brushed with his thumb again and the perspective flipped and became a ground-level robocam view of the jungle all around them. Now the air was filled with the purple of the canopy, the red suppurating undergrowth, the variously coloured Flesh-Webs.

  And then the Horde emerged like torrents of black water from leaves high up in the Aldiss trees, and they swarmed, and swarmed. And Helms saw this richly coloured miniature ecosphere — hovering in front of him like a ghostly vision — vanish from view as the air itself grew black, like a tornado turning septic.

  The sirens blared around the streets and offices and labs of Xabar, and all the Security Teams took their positions. The Xabar dome was hardglass, which in theory was impervious to anything less powerful than a fusion bomb. But the dome had opened itself once already; it could happen again. So Commander Martin instructed everyone to don their body armour and prepare for a breach of the dome by the descending Horde.

  The Horde were pollen particles that fell from the tree Canopies with deadly regularity. With predatory zeal, these pollen balls could eat their way through metal. The evolutionary aim, it was supposed, was for the pollen particles to burrow deep into the earth in order to take root safely and free from any predators. But the pollen was a ripe target for all the aerial predators of New Amazon, so a bloody battle royal resulted every time the showers of pollen fell.

  All around Xabar, the air was black with “birds” and “insects” fighting motile, aggressive pollen. The pollen provided a luscious titbit for those creatures strong enough to crunch its tough coat; but thousands of living creatures fell dead from the sky as the pollen launched its counterattack.

  Commander Martin gave his orders, and the Xabar dome was heated to deter the Horde from landing again. But even so, a thick carpet of pollen soon covered the hardglass, blotting out the sun.

  “The dome is in danger of cracking,” Juno informed them.

  “We’ll use targeted defences,” Commander Martin said. At present, the entire dome was boiling hot, and the structure couldn’t sustain that intensity of heat for too long.

  Helms was following all this via his MI, as he saw the virtual dome above his desk being swept by clouds of black Horde, like a dolls’ house beset by an indoor hurricane.

  “I’ll take it from here,” said Professor Helms.

  “Go ahead, Professor,” said Commander Martin.

  Helms had already ordered his Noir Science Team to the virtual control room.

  “We need you to pick off the Horde clusters. Are you ready, Sheena?” he said.

  “Ready. We won’t let you down, Professor,” Sheena told him, and raised her fist; her signal to her team to begin their work.

  Sheena was Queen of the Noirs, and also head of Dome Security. And all her highly trained and highly specialised team were Noirs. No one else on the base liked working with the Noirs, because they were felt to be aloof and arrogant. Which, indeed, they were.

  And they were also all masters of virtuality.

  So Sheena stood now inside a virtual dome surrounded by swarming Horde, and touched her finger against a black-with-pollen patch. Her finger-touch was translated into a signal, which was sent to the real dome, which proceeded to a) heat up and b) blast acid on the intruders, all on a tiny patch of dome, allowing the rest of it to cool and recover its resilience. Every time a patch of black appeared she flicked it with her finger, and the dome repelled the attacker, then cooled again. A dozen flecks of black appeared on the virtual dome; and she picked them all off with effortless precision, with skill and psychic intuition, more quickly and accurately than any computer.

  Jim Aura watched, awed at Sheena’s beauty and blistering speed. Jim had been a geek and a goth and a fantasy-game-player all his life, but it was only in the last few months he had made the decision to go the whole hog — to have the surgery and become a Noir. For years he had been pale and skinny and pathetic; now he was pale and skinny and magnificent, clad in soft shiny leather as tight as skin, caped and hooded, with jet-black eyes in an etched and powerful face. A classic white Noir.

  But Sheena was a Black Noir — her skin was ebony, and her eyes pure white. Her hair, too, was white — not grey, but the colour of the sun at midday. Her body moved like mercury rolling on a ship’s table; her grace was uncanny.

  A virtual dome surrounded Jim too, and he was hard at work clearing the Horde. His movements were less graceful, but he was capable and experienced. The trick
was to single-touch the densest patches of pollen, let the dome heat to five times boiling point, then double-touch the dome to bring the temperature down again before the hardglass started to melt. It was a task that took phenomenal reflexes. Jim loved it because it was in essence real-life gaming, and gaming had been his life between the ages of six and fifteen.

  At one point, Sheena glanced across to watch her latest Noir at work. Jim projected insecurity, awkwardness, ill-at-easeness. He hadn’t yet learned that being a Noir is all about being as one with yourself, and your own body. He was, all in all, still a dreadful geek.

  But Sheena was fond of him.

  “Surely someone could invent a robot system to do this better,” Santana said to Sheena, as she touched and double-touched the non-existent dome.

  “Many have tried; no one has succeeded,” said Sheena, as she and Jim Aura cast their spells.

  And black pollen fell from the trees and fought; and birds were eaten alive in mid-air; and living winds blew upon the dome. Sheena and the Noirs worked through the night with fingers dealing death, casting their spells, while outside the dome silver Humanoid DRs with hoses poured acid upon the falling Horde.

  And finally, after nearly ten hours, the Horde dispersed. The dome became clear again. The crisis was over.

  DAY 2

  From the diary of Dr Hugo Baal

  June 23rd

  Thank Heaven that’s over! And we can see daylight again.

  Such crises are alarming, and worryingly common. This is without doubt the most dangerous planet I have ever studied.1

  For obituaries of the fifteen deceased, click here. What idiot left the roof open? There is a theory that it was a computer malfunction, but of course that’s preposterous; Juno never malfunctions. Maybe we have a saboteur in our midst? Far more likely.

  No matter; I’ve been in this kind of situation before.2 And I’m acutely aware there is nothing I can contribute when it comes to military/civil war/rebellion against the Galactic Corporation stuff; but fortunately there are other, equally important, things to think about, where my expertise does count for something. Namely, scientific discovery!

  I have spent the first three hours of the day since 5 a.m. reviewing the results of the abortive xeno autopsy. We have established that this specimen is either a) a species or subspecies of the Godzilla genus which differs radically from the Godzilla helmsi that we dissected twelve weeks ago or b) belongs to a rival genus that mimics the form of the Godzilla but has a plant origin not an animal origin, or c) is an animal in a symbiotic relationship with a plant which provides the animal with skin in return for nutrients, or d),3 whatever d) might be.

  My initial theory which I expounded to the group in the bar afterwards, namely that the cells of the dead creature could wilfully recombine in new forms, giving it the ability to reincarnate as any kind of creature it chose to be, proved to be fanciful, and I was much mocked for it.4 Hmmm.5 Although it’s certainly the case that every cell in the creature’s body remains alive and viable even after the death of the larger organism. This raises the possibility that all large animals on New Amazon are gestalt organisms built up of swarms of individual cells acting in concert, like an ant colony on legs. However, more of this anon.56

  I have now decided, in the absence of any intelligent contributions from my esteemed colleagues on this matter, to abandon our existing taxonomy and to create three new Kingdoms. These are: Animaliaplantae, Plantaeanimalia, and Kingdomshifters, which I don’t know the Latin for. This avoids the annoying ambiguities entailed in describing creatures which have both animal and plant characteristics. I shall write more on this in due course.

  For the moment, I would catalogue yesterday’s creature thus:

  Mimic-Monster

  Kingdom: Animaliaplantae (aka “Animalish”, a neologism of my

  own, which I rather like)

  Phylum: Chordata

  Subphylum: Vertebrata

  Class: Reptiliacorticis7

  Order: Duocorus8

  Genus: Mimicus

  Species: Mimicus godzilla

  I am assembling the charred pieces of the dead creature and hope to have some firm conclusions within a . . . oh bloody hell, what is it now?

  Sorcha had been put in charge of the dawn raids. A dozen Technicians were dragged from their beds, naked or in body-hugging pyjamas, and hurled into the white-noise room. Forensic tests of all the equipment were made, and Sorcha had a team of Soldiers inspecting all the dome-camera footage for evidence of espionage.

  The results were negative. No one had sabotaged the dome; none of the Techies confessed; two of them lost their minds and had to be relegated to low-level Slave status — dumb servants, with all the legal rights of robots, namely none. Sorcha felt guilty about this. Good Techies were at a premium, though she always marvelled at how badly these genius types coped with a bit of basic torture.

  Sorcha’s report attributed the dome failure to General System Error, a technical euphemism for Act of God.

  “Juno, can you shed any light on this?” Sorcha asked.

  One of the Techies had told her that a computer virus sent from Earth and affecting Juno herself might have been the cause of the mishap. Sorcha had no idea if that was credible.

  “No, I cannot.”

  “Did you cause the dome breach?”

  “I don’t know,” admitted Juno. “Last night — well, I have to admit. It’s a blank. I can’t remember anything.”

  Puzzled, Sorcha reported to Commander Martin. “It may be a computer virus,” she said. “Perhaps from Earth. If so, Juno is compromised.”

  “That’s impossible,” he told her, scathingly.

  “How’s it going?” Professor Helms said gently.

  “Hmm?”

  “What?”

  “The dissection.”

  “What?”

  “The —”

  “Ah!”

  “Oh! You mean — oh no! No.”

  Helms smiled.

  “We haven’t —”

  “We didn’t —”

  “It’s OK,” said Helms, amused. “What you’re doing is OK. On the squeamish side, but I’m fine with it.”

  Dr William Beebe and his wife Dr Mary Beebe were meant to be analysing the morphology of the Butterfly-birds (Avespapilio parasitum) taken from the Mimic-Godzilla’s intestines. But Mary couldn’t bear the idea of dissecting these beautiful creatures — even if they were stitched up again afterwards. So the two of them had managed to construct a wind tunnel tomography scanner, using ultrasound bursts to build up a picture of the organs and muscles of one of the birds as it flew into a whirlwind of air.

  “Beautiful,” murmured Helms, entranced.

  “Yes, but,” mused William, “why? Why do they fly at all?”

  “Indeed,” said Mary.

  “Since they don’t need to,” William added, unnecessarily.

  Mary sighed; and William repented of his unnecessary words.

  Helms realised: these two didn’t fully realise he was there, so lost were they in their rapport.

  “Perhaps,” Mary continued, “they live in the organism until it dies then they have to fly long distances to reach the next organism?”

  “The jungle is busy enough,” Helms argued. “They could walk a few yards and hop on another Godzilla without any trouble.”

  “True,” said Mary, blinking as she absorbed the fact that Helms was talking to her, and actually talking sense. “And of course,” she added, forlorn at the abrupt death of her hypothesis, “the wings are a liability for creatures living inside a host body. They must have to keep them furled up.” Mary illustrated by hunching her arms and body to illustrate how the minuscule Butterfly bird must spent its day within the stomach and colon of vast predators like the Godzilla.

  “And yet,” William reasoned, “they must long to live thus.” He raised his arms and flapped around the lab, to illustrate the freedom and exhilaration of being a Butterfly bird that is able to fly through th
e sky.

  Helms stifled a grin. He loved being with William and Mary; and he was enjoying getting away from the burdens of command.

  “Do such creatures ‘long’?” said Mary reprovingly.

  “Does the leopard love to run?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Watch.”

  William took a jar containing a dozen Claw-Scarabs (Ungula scarabus, flying insects a little like beetles but with claws on every section of their segmented bodies). He clipped the jar to the wind tunnel and slipped the lid off. The Claw-Scarabs flew inside and hovered in mid-air near the Butterfly-Bird.

  Within moments the Butterfly bird had tilted its body and lunged. One Claw-Scarab vanished into its beak. The others flew wildly up and down, but the Butterfly bird was remorseless and swift. It could turn its head 360 degrees in mid-air so its wings could still capture the lift from the wind jets as it swivelled its head and ate. And it could also plunge and swoop and soar with astonishing speed. Within twenty seconds all the Claw-Scarabs had been devoured and the Butterfly bird resumed its solitary lonely flight in the wind tunnel.

  “Why would a creature capable of such effortless predation,” argued William, “choose to live up a dinosaur’s arse?”

  “Perhaps —” Helms began.

  “What a stupid bloody question! You’re much too philosophical,” Mary reproved her husband.

  “And you have no soul,” William chided.

  “That’s because there’s no such thing as ‘soul’,” Mary mocked, mercilessly.