A huge “cawing” echoed through the cavern. The noise deafened him, almost knocked him off his feet.
Message received; they knew he was from space.
Then he visualised an image of a Doppelganger Robot recklessly firing its plasma gun. He thought of a Gryphon being shot to pieces by the DR’s plasma gun. And he imagined the beast with its body rent in twain, falling to its death.
The cawing was even more intense. They got the message. And it was clear they hated DRs too. Because every month, since the planet was first discovered, Earth humans had been using DR bodies to hunt the native fauna with bloody excess — and many Gryphons had been killed by the hunters.
Then Saunders visualised Earth, its beautiful blueness, the richness of its greens, the Moon orbiting around it.
A powerful cawing. They knew that this was his home planet.
Saunders visualised himself, riding on the back of a Gryphon. His way of saying, let’s be friends.
A Gryphon flew over to him, on his narrow ledge, grabbed his arm, and pulled him off the ledge.
Saunders fell and for a few seconds he thought about firing his body-armour jets. Then something hit him from below — a flying Gryphon — and he was being carried around the cavern on the Gryphon’s back. Then the Gryphon looped the loop and Saunders fell off. He turned on his boot jets and side jets, and righted himself, then hovered in mid-air.
The cawing was even more intense. The Gryphons were impressed.
And so Saunders hovered there, in the cathedral cavern, an armoured speck surrounded by flying psychic behemoths.
And he started to think about the possibilities.
DAY 16
Ben woke up, exhausted, with someone shouting in his ear.
“Come on, you lazy fuck!” said Sergeant Anderson. “Time to get moving!”
“I normally get up, urgghhh! a bit later,” Ben grumbled.
“Not any more!” Anderson thrust his face close to Ben’s. “Not on my watch.”
Ben stumbled out of bed and found there was a queue for the shower. So instead he went to have a shit and there was a queue for the AmRover toilet too. One toilet per vehicle was ample normally; but not when the AmRover was being used as a home.
“You’ll find your duties rostered on the following sheets,” Sergeant Anderson explained to them all, once they had gathered for their morning briefing in the Rover’s living space. “Civilians will now take an equal share of sentry duty. And our priority is to get a dome in place within the next six months.”
“What about stealth?” said Mary Beebe, astutely.
“Good point,” said Anderson, who had given no thought whatsoever to how they were going to hide their presence from the Doppelgangers. “Suggestions please.”
“We were OK when we were hidden under the tree canopy,” Tonii pointed out. “But now we’re out in the open, it’s just a matter of time before a Draven spots us and the DRs come in. Our current location is much too easy to see from the air, even with the cliff overhang.”
“Good point,” said Anderson, alarmed at their initial folly in setting up camp in such a stupid place. “What the hell are we doing here then?”
“Beats me.”
“Maybe Sorcha had a plan.”
“Typical fucking Soldier, they never plan ahead.”
“If you’re so clever, why didn’t you —”
“All right, all right!” roared Sergeant Anderson. Silence descended abruptly. “Suggestions, anyone?”
“We move back into the jungle.”
“We find a cave.”
“We go back to the Depot, see what we can salvage.”
“Too dangerous.”
“Yeah, but —”
“We —”
Anderson interrupted: “Can we plasma-blast a cave in that cliff?”
There was a moment’s silence, as all considered it.
“No problem, Sergeant,” said Private Tonii Newton.
“Maybe that’s what Sorcha intended?” said Private Clementine McCoy, the one Anderson wanted to hump until she squealed.
“Don’t defend that bitch, I’m in charge now,” Anderson snarled.
“If we create a cave, maybe we could build a new lab there?” said Hugo, hopefully.
“Forget the science, we don’t need it,” Anderson told him brutally. “Listen up: this is what we do. We get a roof over our heads. We build a dome so we can breathe air. Then we carve ourselves an ecological niche, we survive, we thrive, then we dominate. And I don’t give a shit how many alien fucks die in the process.”
The two Gryphons circled high in the air. One of them was Isaac; the other, a larger bird with a black and white pattern on its neck ruff, who Saunders had decided to call Gottfried.
Saunders had been watching the birds play and gambol in the air for quite some time, but it wasn’t until they began to lunge and rip and hiss and scream that he realised they were trying to kill each other. Isaac and Gottfried swooped high and dived low and every now and then their beaks engorged and became monstrous spiked shovels that clashed loudly in mid-air, and the two creatures hissed some more and roared at each other.
The other Gryphons were perched on rocks, watching. Saunders tried to think of a way of asking what was going on. He visualised a question mark, but that was meaningless.
So instead he observed, and compared, and hypothesised. He noticed that Isaac and Gottfried were both large and magnificent specimens, with richer colouring than many of the other Gryphons and more complex patterns on their ruffs. He observed that no other Gryphon attempted to intervene, and instead they formed a perfect circle from which to watch, like the audience in an amphitheatre. He realised swiftly that the two fighting birds were sparring, not merely brawling. There was a definite ritual: a clash, a hiss, a hover, then one bird would sink like a stone while the other flapped backwards. Then the sinking bird would fly back up and battle would recommence. It was like dancing, with danger.
Saunders thought about the most recent and the more ancient theories of flock and swarm behaviour, made some obvious comparisons with Earth zoology, and developed his working hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1: Isaac and Gottfried were Dominants, the other Gryphons were Submissives or Followers. In that case, this was a simple case of ritualised aggression to establish a linear dominance hierarchy. Isaac and Gottfried were fighting to become the Pack Leader among a herd of passive beasts who wanted to be led by the strongest and most vicious of their kind. It was the equivalent of two silverback gorillas vying for power.
Hypothesis 2: They were bickering about a favourite crag of rock on which to sun-bask, or some other such unfathomable disagreement.
Hypothesis 3: This wasn’t a fight to the death, it was a work of living art, which might end in death, which would mean these creatures were very scary aesthetes.
Hypothesis 4: This was an elaborate and stylised courtship ritual, which would culminate in sex. (Though Saunders had no notion what genders Gryphons might have.)
Hypothesis 5: Gottfried wanted to kill Saunders, and Isaac was fighting him in order to save his human friend.
An image came into Saunders’s mind, in an eerie moment of psychic violation. It was an image of himself, stark naked, but without a penis or body hair, with his stomach gashed open, and an improbable blue and green scaly organ being pulled out of it by a Gryphon with a black-and-white ruff, i.e. Gottfried. Saunders realised two things; first, Gryphons knew fuck all about human anatomy.
And, second, it was
Hypothesis 5.
Gottfried lunged and Isaac went tumbling backwards. Blood dripped from a wound in his chest, splashing the rock below. Isaac soared low and as he flew past Saunders, his head fell off and purple blood spouted and Saunders screamed and Gottfried plunged and pecked Saunders in the head, then ripped his stomach open, and pulled out an improbable blue and green scaly organ from his insides.
Then reality returned. Isaac was still alive, so was Saunders, and the blue and g
reen scaly organ, which he did not possess, had not been ripped out of his bleeding corpse. Saunders gave Isaac a thumbs-up sign. He got it, he really did!
And the battle to the death continued, with Saunders’s life at stake.
Saunders was oddly touched by Isaac’s heroism. It startled, excited and puzzled him. What did Isaac hope to gain? Was he ruled by selfish genes, or by self-destructive memes? Or was he just, well, fond of his human captive?
The two Gryphons fought and cawed and pecked in the bloodied air above him. The volcano crater below the fighting birds was a bloody mess of broken bones of bird chicks, spat out and excreted by the Gryphons. When Saunders retracted his helmet he felt the cold winds on his skin and smelled the stench of death.
Then the circle of watching Gryphons suddenly arose as one, and flew/shuffled over to the crater’s edge and watched as Isaac and Gottfried glided and fought above the crater itself, catching updrafts of hot air, effortlessly sliding on layers of atmosphere, still pecking and gashing with talons. Then Isaac pounced, and went for the kill.
But Gottfried kinked in the air and was past him. He arched back his beak and a sharp tongue flew out and burrowed a hole in Isaac’s head and Saunders’s bird cawed with fear and pain and flew backwards. Gottfried lunged again.
The birds locked beaks, their tongues pecked, their wings thrashed against each other. Neither bird could fly now and they plummeted, but before they crashed on the crater’s floor they broke beaks and flapped away.
Rich purple blood was flowing richly over their blue-black scales now. Isaac cawed angrily.
Gottfried lunged again and dug into Isaac’s throat and Isaac’s claws grew and gripped the other bird’s torso and ripped.
They broke again and Isaac was bleeding badly. He could barely hover.
Gottfried went in for the kill, Saunders waved a hand in the air, and unseen by all a thin beam shot out of the pencil plasma gun and bored a hole in Gottfried’s neck. Gottfried almost froze in mid-air and Isaac plunged to the attack. His teeth ripped out Gottfried’s throat.
Gottfried plummeted and crashed into the crater. His wings flapped but none went to help.
Isaac did a victory roll, and an image appeared in the minds of all those present, the Gryphons and the human being, of Saunders sitting on Isaac’s broad black back with his arms held high in triumph.
The Gryphons cawed their assent. And suddenly Saunders’s mind was jumbled with a thousand separate images, of himself, on Isaac’s back, Isaac flying, and Saunders raising his arms up high, in triumph. He thought his head would explode, with the bellow of the cawing, and the massive image overload.
Then the cawing stopped. All the Gryphons turned their bodies and stared, with foreheads and breasts, at Saunders. Saunders raised his arms in the air in triumph, and said, rather bathetically: “Caw!”
And this was the way of it: Carl Saunders, Human Being, was now Isaac’s ally, and his friend.
After a day and a night in the tree, with no sign of help arriving, Sorcha was so fed up she got out of the tree and began walking.
Sorcha was strong; she could bench-press 200 kilos, and run twenty miles in full military kit including a portable oven and a collapsible six-person tent. But the body armour was punishingly heavy, and each step was laborious agony.
“Ready,” said Sergeant Anderson. Tonii checked the mount on the plasma cannon. “Fire,” said Sergeant Anderson, and Tonii clicked the switch to turn the gun on to its highest setting.
A pulse of hotter-than-burning plasma ripped out of the cannon and hit the cliff face. The blinding heat burned through rock in seconds. Another pulse followed. And another.
“Stop firing,” said Sergeant Anderson, and Tonii turned the cannon off.
“Sweep,” said Sergeant Anderson, and the Scientists and Soldiers moved forward and began shovelling and sweeping away the shards of rock. The dust was hoovered up by Mary Beebe, wearing what looked like an old-style spacesuit with a nozzle attachment. Then when the hole was clear of debris, they all moved back and to one side.
“Fire,” said Sergeant Anderson, and Tonii turned the plasma cannon on.
It took eight hours to build a cavern they could live in. At the end of it, all of them were exhausted, except for Sergeant Anderson.
Saunders visualised a naked man and a naked woman having sex. He focused on the man’s large erection and the woman’s vulva, and graphically visualised the moment of penetration.
Then he visualised a schematic diagram of a sperm swimming down the vagina and fertilising an egg.
Then he visualised the egg growing, multiplying, developing into a foetus. He visualised the baby emerging from the woman’s vagina. He visualised happy smiling faces, a diaper being put on the boy baby, and then cut straight to a grown naked man. (To visualise all the childhood tantrums and teenage strops went way beyond his reserves of visual stamina.)
Then Saunders paused. And he said: “Sex.”
Isaac said: “Caw.”
Saunders visualised the man and the woman fucking, missionary style, like an animated version of a sex education film, and visualised the letters: S E X.
The Gryphon cawed. Was it laughing? Then Saunders cleared his mind of all thoughts. And Isaac cawed again.
And then, unbidden, an image appeared in Saunders’s mind: S E K.
Close, thought Saunders, overwhelmed by a familiar sense of awe at the presence of alien sentience. He focused again:
X, Saunders visualised.
S E X, Isaac thought at him.
Saunders raised his arms high in triumph.
Isaac cawed.
Saunders waited.
An image appeared in his mind: a bird, flying. It was one of the three-winged birds they’d seen — with a finlike extra wing on its back — but Saunders didn’t recognise this particular variation. Was this a caterpillar stage of the Gryphons’ lifecycle?
The three-winged bird was in a nest of some kind. It was eating sluglike or wormlike things.
Saunders was now inside the bird’s body. A slug had been swallowed whole and was swimming down the creature’s intestine. The slug merged with a cell in the bird’s body. A new cell was formed. It grew. It became an embryo.
It plopped out of the bird as an egg.
The egg was being incubated by the three-winged bird. Then it was joined by another bird, with two sets of wings. It was the Biplane-Bird! The three-wing and the Biplane were nuzzling each other — Saunders guessed they were the male and female of the species, despite their radically different anatomies.
Then the Biplane was in the nest, protecting the eggs. All alone. Three-wing was off, foraging for food no doubt.
Then a Gryphon pounced and killed the Biplane-Bird and a host of other Gryphons carried away dozens of eggs from the nest in their mouths.
This was all looking eerily familiar.
Then crash cut to another image: the volcano crater, full of thousands of such eggs.
Then the eggs were hatching, and chicks were emerging, and the Gryphons pounced and ate the chicks. Just as Saunders had witnessed.
Then Saunders was inside the body of a Gryphon. Mashed up bits of chick were recombining all around him. He peered closer, and saw the bits of chick were forming into an embryonic replica of a Gryphon inside the body of the adult Gryphon.
Then Saunders saw an adult Gryphon vomiting. In its vomit, a squirming creature squealed. It picked itself up and waddled away. It was now clearly recognisable as a baby Gryphon.
“Oh my God,” said Saunders, trying not to let any negative images drift into his mind as he vented his disgust, “that is so absolutely appalling.” He took a deep breath, and tried not to be subjective, or judgemental, or inappropriately disapproving. And he failed, and was subjective, and judgemental, and highly disapproving:
“Isaac,” he said savagely, “yours is the most obscenely barbaric species I’ve encountered in the course of my entire career.”
“Caw,” said Isaac.
&n
bsp; Sorcha woke and it was dark. Then she realised she was lying face-down in the dirt.
She tried to get up and couldn’t. Eventually she managed to roll over. There was something on top of her. She screwed herself round to see.
A Basilisk.
She clawed and managed to get her plasma gun out. The Basilisk had its coils wrapped around her body armour, and was tightening its grip. It was actually buckling the armour. She could feel her head pulsing, her eyes bulging. She remembered how Margaret had died. She fired the plasma blast high in the air, then waited. Moments later, hot plasma rained down on to her, on to the body armour, and the Basilisk squealed and broke into two separate parts.
Sorcha rolled away and got to her knees. The two parts of the Basilisk were hissing, still alive. She rained plasma on both, until they were ashes and memory. Then she got to her feet, and fell over.
She blacked out again.
Next time she woke up, she could see. She was face up, looking at the canopy. There was nothing on top of her.
Painstakingly, she began to shed her body armour. If it rained, she would die. But she couldn’t carry on walking with this monstrosity on her.
“I’d like to say a few words,” Sergeant Anderson said, as Tonii tried to get the Aldiss tree fragments to burn in the fire. The cave was small, but it felt safe. They’d driven the AmRover inside, and posted two sentries. In time, they would be able to carve tunnels all the way through the cliff, with a hardglass biodome nestling up against the rock for extra security. And so long as they were in here, they couldn’t be detected by Dravens.
“There are going to be some changes around here,” Sergeant Anderson said.
“Now that the military crisis is over, I vote we vote on who should be our democratically elected leader,” said David Go, with surprising boldness.
Red Claw Page 20