Red Claw

by Philip Palmer

  “Fifty press-ups,” said Sergeant Anderson, grinning.

  “You are kidding me,” David Go said, unflustered.

  “Now,” said Sergeant Anderson. David Go stared at him, stubbornly.

  “Private Newton,” said Sergeant Anderson. “Beat this man and then rape him.” Tonii got up, punched Go in the face, and started pulling his trousers down.

  “No!” said Mary Beebe, appalled.

  “That’ll do, Private,” said Sergeant Anderson. Tonii stopped the attempted rape, while David Go wept on the ground. The others sat and watched, aghast, afraid, and secretly relieved that it had been David Go, not any of them, who had incurred Anderson’s wrath.

  “Military discipline,” said Sergeant Anderson, “is a wonderful thing.”

  There were no midges or mosquitoes or comparable bite-y insect-like creatures on New Amazon, and hence, thankfully, no risk of being bitten. Sorcha used the laser setting on her gun to cut off the body armour’s utility belt, containing all her medical supplies, food pills, oxygen pills to supplement her implanted oxygen-release tube, and the holster for her plasma gun. Then she cut the feet off the armour to use as boots, which clung tightly to her calves and protected her from ground-lurking snakes and swamps. Her arms were bare, revealing her holographic tattoos of fire-breathing dragons (right arm) and revolving spirals (left arm). She wondered why they hadn’t thought to include a thin mesh armour in the suit’s supply kit for just this eventuality.

  But the answer, really, was that the suits weren’t expected ever to fail; the Bostock battery was meant to last for at least two years, and it was supposed to emit a warning siren when the energy level was running low. Sorcha had been using this battery for less than three months; and there had been, she realised now, no warning siren.

  She resumed walking, carrying the helmet in one hand. She was now only a day’s march from the sea, according to the satellite display. And the jungle was less dense here. The Aldiss trees were fewer, and there were more of the Bush trees, which had no trunk but expanded from the ground in waves of green round leaves to reach incredible heights.

  Sorcha was bored so she began to sing, not well, but loudly. She sang soul songs and roughmetal songs, she even sang a blues song, about a mutilated asteroid miner who had never lost his joie de vivre. The songs of distant Godzillas merged with her tuneless screeching, and she realised she was actually enjoying herself.

  When night fell, she climbed up a Spiderweb tree, with its interlocking branches, and slept fitfully.

  Saunders stood on the mountaintop, as dark crashed all around, and the distant red glow of the setting sun shone its last beams on the jungle below.

  And he felt a pang of pride at the sight of it, the glorious vista, the glowing skies, the beauty and the terror, the wildness and the unpredictability, of this world, his world.

  DAY 17

  From Dr Hugo Baal’s diary

  June 38th

  Sergeant Anderson has decreed that from this point on, no scientific work is to be done. No animals or plants are to be studied. No findings are to be discussed. All conversation should relate to personal matters or rostered duties. Shop talk will be punishable by flogging or beating, or other humiliating things which I do not care to discuss in this journal.

  Each of us has a full set of rostered duties, including cooking and cleaning. My own concern the food supply. I am expanding the AmRover’s synthesising tanks, and I am also tasked with the job of determining if we will ever be able to eat New Amazonian meat. But even this job cannot be done scientifically, at a microbiological level. I am simply told to thaw out some rat embryos, grow them fast to adulthood, then feed them dead Rat-Insects and Grophers to see if they live or die. This is empiricism verging on the practical; it’s no job for a trained Scientist.

  Privates Tonii Newton and Clementine McCoy are in charge of security. They have installed motion sensors at key points around our cavern and its environs. Concealed laser and plasma guns have been put in place. Buried mines can be exploded remotely. Sergeant Anderson fears a renewed attack by the Doppelganger Robots, and so we are on a permanent war footing.

  Mia Nightingale and Dr Mary Beebe are tasked with ensuring the oxygen supply. They will be seeding catalysts in the ocean which will convert water to oxygen which will then be conveyed to shore via a network of pipes. Each of us has a slow-release oxygen cylinder embedded in our lungs, which can sustain us for weeks without air. But without nanobots the task of removing and replacing the oxygen implants is beyond us; and so from now on we will be using the oxygen tanks on our body armour exclusively. No more taking off our helmets to feel the breeze on our cheeks; we will be breathing bottled air all the time now.

  David Go is acting as Sergeant Anderson’s liaison, passing on his orders and interpreting his needs. This is a real lickspittle job for which Dr Go is eminently qualified.

  I am plunged into total despair. I do not mind danger, I can endure pain, I don’t fear death; but the thought of spending the rest of my long life on this planet without ever being able to do proper science fills me with horror.

  There is so much, so very much wonderful work to do here. And instead, all we’re going to do is survive.

  DAY 18

  From the diary of Dr Hugo Baal

  June 39th

  Today I dug a great big hole in the jungle, which is going to be our latrine. Sergeant Anderson had first shit. The Sergeant believes strongly that we have to conserve our supplies of absorbent underwear, and that the queues for the AmRover toilet are becoming untenable. So the Sergeant has decided that the vehicle’s toilet will be reserved for senior ranking officers, i.e. himself, and from now on the rest of us will perform all bodily functions outdoors. Some of us have argued that we risk contaminating the New Amazonion ecosphere with our alien (to it) micro-organisms, but Sergeant Anderson responded to that concern with disdain, and imaginative invective.

  Hence, the hole.

  DAY 19

  From the diary of Dr Hugo Baal

  June 40th

  We cut down many trees, and at the end of the day I had my first Number 2 in the new latrine. It is really quite an elegant construction: a series of hardplastic benches with holes in their middle leading to a central cesspit, viz, the great big hole I dug.

  However, the undergrowth is already growing back, and Rat-Insects are poking up through the earth. So I cauterised the soil with sulphuric acid, and put up a big sign: DO NOT STAND NEAR THIS AFTER DEFECATING. Dr Hugo Baal, MSc, PhD, FRS.

  I saw many creatures in the course of my work on the latrine — flying insects, mammalian octopods, birds with horns and suchlike — but my mood was so bleak that I made no notes about them. I am so fucking tired. The highlight of my day was having a shit in the new latrine, and not having my arse burned off by acid.

  And I —

  Octopods?

  Did I really see octopods?

  Surely not. So far all the terrestrial animals we’ve seen have been tetrapods.

  It’s dark, I’m tired, I need to sleep.

  I am so fucking tired. I have lost my will to live. My will to —

  Octopods? Yes, they were! Yes, I’m definitely right.

  Hmm. I wonder if —

  No. Forget it. Sleep. Tomorrow is a —

  This is puzzling me. Why didn’t I take a photograph? Why didn’t I look closer? Birds with horns, who gives a damn, but land animals with eight limbs not four means —

  I have to know more. But I can’t —

  Sergeant Anderson won’t —

  Hold on — he doesn’t need to know. I could —

  Yes.

  That’s it. I can —

  After all, I have a torch. I have a plasma gun. I have body armour. Perhaps . . .

  I’m back.

  It is 5 a.m. I have just returned after four hours in the jungle in the dark. It’s a wholly different experience, you know. The jungle is a gentler and more wonderful place, once the sun has set.

&nb
sp; And this was a good time to go hunting for eight-limbed things. It turns out that the octopods are mainly nocturnal — there are thousands of them out there! — and they are also bioluminescent. So I played a hunch, and laid a trail of sulphuric acid, which they followed and ate. The acid made them glow more brightly. Sweet, n’est-ce pas?

  The octopods are endlessly varied. Some are furry, some have scales, some have pale soft skin like a small baby. Some glide from tree trunk to tree trunk. Some scurry through the undergrowth. I must have seen more than a hundred different species — different species, nay, different genuses! They are playful, and they wholly dominate the night life of the jungle. But you have to be patient. I spent an hour waiting for the first octopod to appear. And then it flipped in front of me, rolling cartwheels, like a hamster in a wheel, glowing scarlet and silver.

  This of course represents a wholly different evolutionary line. This planet is no dull Earth, with its relentless catalogue of terrestrial tetrapods — for dinosaurs, humans, birds, dolphins, they are tetrapods all! All descended from the same lobe-finned bony fish that took to the land and miraculously conquered the world.

  But here, the octopods and the tetrapods survive side by side, one occupying the daytime, the other the night.

  Perhaps the octopods were once arboreal lungfish, clambering along branches into the midst of the jungle for food then retreating to a watery home — until slowly the jungle became their home. While the tetrapods echoed the classic evolutionary line of Earth and so many other planets,1 of being swamp-dwelling fish with adapted fins and lungs that, one day, discovered the joys of the land.

  Perhaps too the octopods were once deep-sea dwellers — hence the bioluminescence — and then found that the ability to light up the jungle darkness secured them an evolutionary niche??? (!) ?

  We have been two years on this planet and I have just discovered — single-handed! — an entirely new Superclass of animal life.

  This has been a ghastly period. Many of my friends are dead. We face, I believe, certain death on this godforsaken planet, pursued by monsters, led by fools. I am fatigued beyond all measure, my arse stings because I just accidentally kicked over a carton of sulphuric acid near the toilet hole just as I was voiding myself, and I am bored and angry and frustrated.

  But none of this matters. I am the first to find the New Amazonian octopod.

  And I can hardly speak for joy.

  DAY 20

  From the diary of Dr Hugo Baal

  June 41st

  Disaster upon disaster! I overslept and had to be woken with a mild taser blast, which has left me with a runny nose. No one is interested in my accounts of and photographs of and theories about the octopods.

  And despite the sulphuric acid, the vile undergrowth has grown back over the cesspit, and the soil itself appears to have moved, so we can’t find the damn thing any more, and the earth all around where it might be is infested with millions of small furry creatures which vomit some kind of green slime when you go near them. We plasma-blasted the ground to a depth of ten feet, then dismantled one of the cabins in the AmRover and rebuilt it on the purged earth.

  However, I cooked lasagne for the whole team and it was generally acclaimed. We each drank a glass of wine fresh from the AmRover’s food synthesiser. In the night, I suffered badly from stomach cramps. I woke at 3 a.m. and wrote this diary.

  I miss my old life.

  DAY 21

  When dawn came Sorcha felt a familiar shock — colours leaped out at her, shadows vanished — but she carried on walking, step after painful step. She’d rest later, when the sun was high. It was easier, she had discovered, to travel by night, or in the morning and early evening.

  At night the Rat-Insects slept, the Flesh-Webs stopped growing; and the way was lit by flying and crawling bioluminescent creatures of a kind she had never seen before. The large predators that made it so dangerous in the daytime — Godzillas, Juggernauts, Basilisks — all seemed to sleep at night. It was a time for small creatures, grey ghostlike creatures, and vast pillars of the swarming howler insects, which swept like tornadoes through the jungle, but never approached or threatened her.

  In the daytime the ground was swampier underfoot. The heat haze induced a kind of visual paranoia. And the myriad tiny-bird-things that looked like gnats were constantly swarming in a haze of coloured feathers in front of her face. She had to use her plasma gun at its lowest setting to fly-swat the wretched things away, but even so they landed on her cheeks and got snarled in the roots of her hair and she had to semi-burn her own face and head to get free of them, leaving her flushed and sweaty and itchy.

  But at night, there were no tiny-bird-swarms, and she no longer had to endure the smell of her own scorched hair. And the absence of sun and of visible sky above was no longer oppressive to her, when it was actually dark. Sorcha missed the stars but she loved the way the purple canopy up there shone silver and gold as it was bathed by the rich starlight from above and the bioluminescent glows from below.

  “Major Molloy to Professor Saunders, come in please,” she muttered, on the Professor’s private channel. No response.

  As she walked, she kept a mental tally of all the new species she saw, but didn’t attempt to name or categorise them. She just used her implant to take photographs to show to the boffins later.

  “Major Molloy to Professor Saunders, come in please,” she muttered, but there was no reply.

  Sorcha was reconciled to the fact that she had lost Saunders for ever. It was no big deal; it caused her no pain.

  He’d always annoyed the fuck out of her anyway. With his arrogant sarcasm, and his assumption of superiority.

  And his droll humour.

  And his twisted smile.

  And his brilliance of mind, and his shameless flattery, and his blazing charisma.

  And his kindness. And his ability to peer into her soul and know her inmost thoughts.

  No, no way, she wouldn’t miss him at all!

  Sorcha reproached herself for risking her life to rescue Saunders in the first place.

  It was an act that ran counter to all her training, and her instincts. She was a killing machine; she didn’t do self-sacrifice. And as for love — that was just folly and moonshine.

  “Major Molloy to Professor Saunders, come in please,” she muttered, as she walked, on a strict twenty-minute rota. But there was still no reply.

  Sergeant Anderson believed that hard work was good for the soul.

  Other people’s souls.

  And so he drew up a tough schedule of manual jobs to be done by the other survivors, and spent every day in the AmRover, watching old movies.

  And from time to time he employed his unique leadership skills to persuade everyone to give of their utmost.

  “Bitch, you know what? You’re a fucking imbecile,” Sergeant Anderson advised Mia Nightingale.

  “You fucking moron!” Sergeant Anderson snorted at Hugo Baal.

  “Jesus fucking wept, they should’ve fuckin’ drowned you at birth,” Sergeant Anderson explained to David Go.

  “Fucking freak,” Sergeant Anderson muttered, every time he saw Tonii Newton.

  “You’re a short-arse fucking frump, but I’d give you one, sweetheart,” he reassured Mary Beebe.

  “Dyke!” he sneered at Mia.

  Clementine was his sexual partner of choice. She fucked him uncomplainingly, as was her duty as a Soldier, though she would have much preferred to be hanged.

  “I hate that man,” Mary muttered, as Anderson stomped past.

  “We all do,” Mia said.

  “We don’t need to do this stupid job,” Mary said. “It’s make-work.”

  “I know.”

  “This stupid hole we keep digging! We don’t need it. It’s just a way of keeping us busy. It’s a power thing.”

  Mia nodded; she still knew.

  “So maybe we should refuse to dig it?” Mary suggested.

  Mia shook her head.

  “Anderson
is the boss. We’re his slaves. Get used to it,” she said, and began blasting a new hole in the ground.

  Jim Aura was hovering high above the red sands when he saw the Rocs flocking towards him.

  He called Sergeant Anderson on the MI-radio. “Permission to descend, sir, I can see hostiles approaching.”

  “You’re a fucking lookout, Blackeyes. Keep looking.”

  “Hostiles approaching. A hundred Rocs. Coming straight at me.”

  “They’ll pass by.”

  “They look hostile.”

  “There’s no record of any human being attacked by Rocs. Besides, you have body armour, don’t you?”

  “I don’t like it, sir.”

  “Keep your position, Blackeyes.”

  “I’m coming down.”

  “Come down and I’ll fucking court-martial you. Keep your position.”

  The Rocs struck Jim like a thundercloud. His plasma blasts reflected off their scaled armour and made lightning jags in the air. One Roc grasped him in its beak and shook him and when the armour wouldn’t break it dropped him. Jim was mashed internally by the mauling. He was almost dead by the time he hit the ground and made a vast crater in it.

  And after that, he was entirely dead.

  “Good news,” said Sergeant Anderson. “You don’t need to dig another latrine today.”

  From the diary of Dr Hugo Baal

  June 42nd

  The death of Jim Aura has affected all of us badly.

  I didn’t know him well, I have to admit. I’ve never really connected with the Noirs. And there was something about Jim’s staring black eyes that repelled me. Though he was a fine Scientist, albeit of a practical bent. And, apparently, so I’m told, he had a wonderful singing voice. A lyric tenor, of professional calibre. Though he never sang for us. In fact, to be honest, we hardly ever spoke to him. Or at least, I hardly ever did. He was such a reserved and distant individual. He never got animated, even when the Fungists were in full rant. He always wore black, and apparently he always knew he was a Noir, though he didn’t have his eyes and the tattoos done until we reached Xabar. In fact, I think it was only a few months before the Hooperman attack that he made the final surgical commitments. Though I might be wrong about that, I didn’t really notice him to be honest.