Red Claw

by Philip Palmer

“Before we kill them all,” Margaret repeated, bitterly.

  “Incoming xenohostiles,” said Ben over the MI-radio.

  “Brace yourself,” the pilot, McKenley, told the two women as the Juggernauts lumbered into view.

  “Wait!” Margaret had her camera out and was filming. She started talking into the camera mike: “Two adults and a child, I think. These specimens are larger than those previously observed. Juggernautus rufus, the red-scaled beast. Note the absence of eyes. We think the skin on the head is a large retina, the head is a huge eyeball. Zooming in now.”

  The Juggernauts were getting closer.

  “Fire when you’re ready,” McKenley urged Sorcha.

  “Doing ultrasound scan,” said Margaret, calmly.

  The Juggernauts were getting closer.

  “Remember, those creatures can leap,” said Ben over the MI-radio, and one of the Juggernauts leaped high, high enough to reach the front of the convoy. But as it leaped, Sorcha fired the craft’s plasma cannon and ripped an opening in its torso, then incinerated its head and carried on firing as the two other Juggernauts plunged into the jungle, only to be pursued by a constant hail of plasma fire. McKenley sent the Flyer swooping after them as Sorcha laced the creatures with red cutting fire. Heads fell off, the bodies were ripped open, Butterfly-Birds flew up into the air then turned and attacked the Flyer with savage beaks. Margaret triggered the sonic boom switch and the creatures were stunned and dazed, and Sorcha could pick them off one by one.

  All the xenohostiles were dead, and McKenley turned the Flyer around.

  “Let me get a close-up of the corpse,” Margaret pleaded.

  “We need to rejoin the convoy,” Sorcha said sternly. She could never understand these Scientists; they had no fucking sense of urgency.

  The Flyer resumed its position at the arse-end of the convoy.

  Behind them Sorcha could see a trail of gore and blood and a mewling, squeaking, crawling creature which, she later discovered, was the baby Juggernaut’s brain.

  “Here it is!” a voice called out.

  “My God,” said Hugo Baal, in awe, as the convoy slowly came to a halt. Before them loomed a vast and green and impossible mountain.

  “OK, people, you know what to do,” said Sorcha in the flyer, over the MI-radio link.

  The Flesh-Webs had died away, to be replaced by the Jungle-Wall, a sheer mass of compacted vegetation. The wall soared up from the ground to the canopy, then burst through the canopy itself to form an organic barrier that nestled against the stratosphere, well above the height at which AmRovers could comfortably fly. And it snaked an awesome course across the mainland, moving slowly over time, as billions of six-headed insectoid creatures — Six-Heads — wove this wall-web out of their own barely digested excrement.

  It was an awesome wonder of nature; shit turned into landscape.

  The convoy bunched up. AmRover nestled against AmRover, and Sorcha’s Flyer bumped up against the last Rover in the convoy. The Point Teams all rejoined their vehicles. Helms returned to his cabin and took control on his virtual screen. The plasma cannons in the first two AmRovers, including Helms’s Rover, were charged from the Bostock batteries. Helms waited a full minute to allow his people to psych themselves up. Then he gave the signal and the AmRovers rolled forward.

  The plasma cannons fired sheer bursts of energy and ripped a huge and perfectly circular hole in the Jungle-Wall. Flames and billowing smoke darkened the air outside the AmRovers and millions of Six-Heads scurried out of their protective nests and massed dangerously. When the hole was a circle a hundred metres in diameter, Helms gave the order and the lead truck accelerated. The cannons kept firing, the wall kept burning and the convoy crashed into the opening and inched its way through the growing hole. The Six-Heads swarmed over the AmRovers and the Flyer, blotting out their windscreens, striving to find a crack that would allow them to attack the attackers of their vegetal home. But the hardglass and toughmetal held, and the AmRovers crawled forward and crunched insects under their treads as the convoy plunged deeper and deeper into the hole in the Jungle-Wall, until all light was gone and the convoy was lost inside the insect-woven mass.

  Once, a plasma cannon’s pillar of fire wavered, and died, and it was instantly replaced by a backup cannon. And the hole grew, as plasma burned through vegetable iron. But the fire spread with painful slowness and the tunnel in which they were wedged was blocked with acrid black smoke. And meanwhile, at the back of the convoy, the wall was growing back, as the Six-Heads began weaving their web again. Before long the entrance to the hole would be filled and the smoke would be trapped inside. If the AmRovers were too slow, or the wall didn’t burn fast enough, the webs would be woven around the vehicles themselves, leaving them caged and doomed inside the Jungle-Wall.

  Helms hated the darkness that filled the glass windscreens of the AmRover cockpit. The vehicle rolled and bucked and toppled forward, the plasma cannons fired into nothing and nowhere, and Helms had to trust to experience to support his belief that a hole was in fact being burned into their jungle prison. The cab of the AmRover was airtight but Helms could vividly imagine the acrid fumes outside and visualise the billions of Six-Heads swarming over the AmRovers and the Flyer, all the while shitting out their viscous green and purple glue.

  “Are you OK, Sorcha?” he said over his MI-radio link.

  “Are we slowing down?”

  “We’re slowing down.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I have my foot on the accelerator.”

  “Are the plasma cannons working?”

  “The control lights are on. I can’t see what’s actually happening out there.”

  “Are you sure we’re still moving?”

  “The speed dial says we are, just about.”

  “I can’t feel myself moving.”

  “That’s an illusion. No visual clues.”

  “Maybe we’re not moving. Maybe we’re stuck. Maybe these fucking creatures are sealing us in.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t know that, though, not for certain.”

  “I don’t know that, no, not for certain,” he conceded.

  The world had vanished, sensation had vanished. All Helms had were his instruments to tell him they were slowing down, and that the plasma guns were still firing. He checked the dials again. Only one bar’s worth of charge left. He switched to Recharge and the circuit failed. Damn!

  The guns kept firing, relentlessly, releasing enough plasma energy to warm a city. If they carried on much longer firing at this rate, they’d run out of power. And if they ran out of power, they would not be able to blast any more hole.

  Helms felt like a rat in a pipe that was sealed at both ends.

  Sweat was dripping from his chin, it was drizzling down his throat, under his body armour. He had to force himself to breathe. He wondered if the air was getting staler.

  He closed his eyes and fell asleep for two seconds and woke with a start of horror. How could that have happened? How could he have slept?

  “We’re through,” said Mulligan, who was monitoring the ship’s sensors, but Helms kept the plasma cannon on Fire. He set the hull to Heat, to burn off the Six-Heads, and eventually, when he was as sure as he could be without a visual reference that he was in the open air, he spun the AmRover around in a three-point turn and stopped.

  “We’re through,” said AmRover Number 9, as it followed behind him.

  “Through,” said AmRover Number 1.

  “Through,” said AmRover number 7.

  “Through,” said Ben, in AmRover 3.

  “We’re through,” said Sorcha in the Flyer.

  Acid jets fired out from vents in each of the vehicles and sprayed over the hulls, and after about thirty minutes the windscreens and clear walls were free of insects and the world returned. It was a sunny day. The sunlight burned Helms’s eyes.

  “How long did that last?” he asked.

  “Five hours.”
/>   “Let’s carry on.”

  DAY 4

  From the diary of Dr Hugo Baal

  June 25th

  I have collected the intact corpses of a hundred Six-Heads. Many were crushed by our AmRovers or plasma-blasted, some were burned by the heated hull, but the best samples I have are still fairly intact, albeit dead. I found no live specimens, and to date no one has studied a living Six-Head. Sometimes they are alive when you scoop them into the bag, and then the damned things are dead when they come out again. Perhaps they are highly sensitive to the shock of capture.

  They are beautiful creatures, like stars that crawl. Each head has a chin that acts as a leg, and the central segment has a dozen legs with what appear to be arms with opposable claws, as well as the wings on top. I’ve found traces of Jungle Web substrate, aka Green Goo, in the mouths of many of the specimens, and it seems fair to deduce that they eat and excrete through the same orifice, i.e. the mouth.

  There are three distinct types in my samples — fully winged, with no dagger wings, dagger-winged only, and fully winged but with one additional set of dagger wings and brightly patterned central segments. The “wings” in fact may not be wings at all, they may be neural organs, or indeed sexual organs, or possibly eyes, but if they are wings that suggests that the Six-Heads are capable of flying to distant locations to forage for plant matter, though in fact no one has ever seen them airborne.1

  I am analysing the stomach contents of each of the Six-Heads to determine the planetary source of the vegetation they have ingested.

  Provisionally, I have labelled the creatures thus.

  Six-Heads

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Arthropoda

  Sub-Phylum: Chelicerata

  Class: Insecta

  Subclass: Pterygota

  Order: Gladiatorius

  Family: Carnivora2

  Genus: Sexticeps

  Species: Sexticeps alesum

  Sexticeps sinealesum3

  Sexticeps coloratum

  The chelicerae are hollow and may allow the Six-Heads to spit venom as well as vomiting/excreting plant and animal matter.

  The joy of this creature is that it can easily be categorised within existing taxonomies. It is an arthropod with a segmented body and chelicerae around the mouth, which are morphologically comparable to those possessed by Earth spiders.

  It’s such a treat to find such a remarkably normal creature! It’s very much the kind of insect one might expect to find in an English country garden — apart from its six-heads, dagger wings, flesh-eating tendencies, and its habit of creating vast impermeable walls thousands of feet high.

  The journey continues to be slow, and tedious, and dangerous in the extreme.

  DAY 5

  From the diary of Dr Hugo Baal

  June 26th

  No scientific work was done today, due to the traumatic events which occurred.

  For obituaries of the deceased, click here.

  Sorcha was aware of a strange mood in the cab of the Flyer. Margaret Lamarr was an impressive woman — a brilliant academic and also a skilled spaceship pilot. But she didn’t conform to any of the standard personality types with which Sorcha was familiar. She was not Alpha Female, but nor was she Quietly Task-Driven, and she was too emotional and articulate to be Geek. She was friendly, inappropriately so, and chatty, annoyingly so, and Sorcha wished that she could get her transferred to one of the AmRovers. The two-person back seat of the Flyer was a cramped space, and Sorcha would much rather share it with someone taciturn and prosaic.

  But why the atmosphere? The sour face? The one thing that was more annoying than Margaret chattering away and confiding personal details about herself was Margaret glowering and saying nothing.

  Was it something Sorcha had said? Had she been rude?

  But Sorcha was always rude. People were used to it.

  Was Margaret losing faith in Sorcha’s ability to do her job?

  But that was impossible! Sorcha was legendarily capable, and fearless. That’s why she’d risen so far in the army hierarchy.

  Sorcha recalled an incident the previous day when she’d blown a Roc out of the sky with a plasma blast. Helms had queried her rationale for wasting power in such a way; but she’d sharply counter-argued that the Roc might have been descending in a predatory fashion, prior to dropping its trademark shit bombs.

  In reality, Sorcha had shot the Roc just for the hell of it, to practise her hand-eye battle coordination, and because she loved killing aliens. She might, it belatedly occurred to her, have even said so to Margaret. So had that caused offence? Was there anyone in the universe so prissy and buttoned up that they didn’t take joy in zapping, smashing and exterminating alien creatures?

  It was hard to believe; but Sorcha had a sneaking suspicion it was so.

  “What the fuck is your problem?” said Sorcha, bluntly.

  “No problem.”

  “You’ve got a face like a fucking smacked arse. What’s wrong?”

  “I’m reflective.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of life. Skip it. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “It’s the Roc, huh?”

  “The what?”

  “Killing the Roc. Yesterday. For no reason.”

  “Why would that bother me?”

  “Beats me.”

  “It’s an alien.”

  “Some people don’t believe in killing aliens.”

  “Which people?”

  “Some people. They think life is sacrosanct.”

  “I don’t think that.”

  “Thank fuck.”

  “What makes you think I’d think that?”

  “You seem the type.”

  “What type?”

  “Liberal.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Double thank fuck.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “So what’s your problem?”

  “Nothing,” said Margaret, pursing her lips even more.

  Sorcha had a moment of epiphany.

  “Helms . . . !” she breathed.

  After that first night with Helms, in the aftermath of the massacre at Xabar, Sorcha had decided it was pointless to keep her “relationship” with the Professor a secret any longer. And so every night since then, she and Helms had been sleeping together in his AmRover quarters, fucking loudly and often. All the camp had heard their love-making. And all of them marvelled — what on earth did a man like Helms see in her! — or mocked — why the hell would the Major fuck him? – but no one really cared. Scientists and Soldiers alike, they were used to living cheek by jowl, and privacy wasn’t a priority.

  But Margaret’s cheeks were now bright pink. Sorcha’s guess had hit its target; Margaret was jealous. Jealous!

  “Oh fuck you,” said Margaret sourly, and then the DR appeared and started firing.

  “Xenohostile,” said Ben calmly, then the DR’s missile landed on AmRover No. 9 and blew it off the road. The undergrowth ignited and a vast flare spread all around them. Smoke billowed. Ben targeted the hostile and fired a smart anti-aircraft missile which soared high and crashed down on the track behind them, and at precisely the same moment Sorcha opened fire with her explosive bullets, but the DR was running.

  The blast from the anti-aircraft missile shook Sorcha’s teeth in their sockets but McKenley revved the Flyer and hurtled forward through the flames.

  “Missed!” screamed Ben, appalled. He’d tagged the target on his screen, the smart missile should have linked up with the satellite tracking system to guarantee a successful hit. This wasn’t hi-tech, it didn’t need Juno’s computing powers, it was basic military technology. But it had failed.

  “In pursuit,” said Sorcha over her MI.

  “Take defensive positions,” ordered Helms. The AmRovers rolled around into a circle and a force field linked them.

  Sorcha and Margaret hurtled after the running DR, laying down tracks of blazing plasma fire, until the DR turned and hovered an
d fired two bursts from its arm cannons.

  Sorcha engaged the defensive shield, which was designed to absorb the energy of a plasma burst and redirect it back at the attacker.

  But the defensive shield didn’t work. The plasma burst was pulsed at a frequency that wasn’t recognised by the shield’s programming, and the burning bullets of plasma hit the Flyer and the Flyer spiralled out of the sky and crashed to earth.

  Sorcha felt her body and limbs smashed by an unseen god. She heard a screaming sound; it was herself. The cab was on fire, but ceiling jets doused the flames with flame-retardant spray and she pressed Eject and suddenly she and Margaret were lying on their backs in the undergrowth. “Helmets,” said Margaret, engaging her helmet, and Sorcha saw that Margaret was screaming with pain — her leg had taken a hit from an explosive bullet. Sorcha helmeted-up, then picked Margaret up bodily and carried her away from the crash site. Sorcha subvocalised again but Margaret was looking at her blankly, so Sorcha opened her helmet up and spoke in real air: “Are you OK?”

  Margaret’s thigh armour was crushed; the leg was clearly shattered beneath it.

  “I’ll survive,” Margaret whimpered.

  “McKenley?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Sorcha crawled back to the Flyer. McKenley had been hit by the plasma blast, he was dead. Sorcha crawled back to Margaret.

  “Draw your weapon please,” said Sorcha.

  Margaret took out her plasma pistol.

  “I’ll fetch help,” said Sorcha calmly, and suddenly there was a look of panic in Margaret’s eyes.

  “You’re not leaving me?”

  “You’ve got oxygen, subcutaneous food and water, healing implants. You’re good for a week or more. But you can’t walk with that leg.”

  “I could make a crutch. You could support me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’ll die if I’m on my own.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You’re leaving me, aren’t you? You’re not coming back.”

  Sorcha left. She tried again to engage her MI-radio to get a satellite position, but failed. So instead she used her brain-chip nav backup, which gave her a grid reading of her location plus a diary entry for the last known location of the convoy. She was only six klicks away. Sorcha began walking.