Red Claw

by Philip Palmer

  “My gods,” said Ben Kirkham.

  “How did it happen?” said Mia.

  “That bastard! If anyone deserved to die, he did,” muttered David Go, viciously.

  “His armour must have ruptured,” said Hugo soberly. “There’s a lesson to all of us there.”

  “Where’s the body?” asked Ben.

  “It’s . . . well it’s out there somewhere. But it will have been eaten by now.”

  “The body armour?”

  “Too heavy to carry. I salvaged the weapons and the Bostock batteries.”

  “Good man,” said Ben. His eyes glittered.

  Clementine was visibly elated. Hugo remembered a rumour that Anderson used to sexually harass the subordinate women in the company, treating them as sex slaves. Motive for murder?

  And what about Tonii? He had been remorselessly humiliated by Anderson, day after day. He had every reason to resort to murder.

  And David Go was untypically quiet. He was a proud man, who had every reason to loathe Anderson, after the near-rape incident.

  They all had ample motive to kill him.

  In fact, Hugo realised with a sense of relief, he himself was delighted that the bullying shit was dead. And, after all, it didn’t really matter who had murdered him. It wasn’t up to Hugo to play detective.

  The killer had done them all a favour.

  The Gryphon flock flew high above the Canopy. Sorcha clung on to the back of her beast and she marvelled at Saunders. He’d been left for dead, tethered and without weapons, in the middle of a deadly jungle with killer Doppelgangers on his trail, and now here he was, alive, unharmed, in cheerful spirits, and commander of a legion of flying monsters.

  How the hell did he do it?

  As the wake, known by some cynics as the “Thank Fuck the Bastard’s Dead Party”, began, Mary took Hugo to one side.

  “What really happened out there?”

  “Like I said. A tragic accident.”

  “You can’t kill a Soldier in full body armour that easily.”

  “Something did.”

  “Something, or somebody?”

  “Are you suggesting —” said Hugo indignantly, and Mary froze him with a scornful stare.

  “Oh all right, you’ve got me,” said Hugo, cheerfully. “The ignorant wanker was manually strangled.”

  “Lord above,” murmured Mary.

  “As you say, he was a trained Soldier. Body-enhanced. And yet one of us managed to strangle him to death.”

  “Who the devil could do a thing like that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Clementine. Or Tonii. Unless it was you?”

  “Of course not,” Mary protested.

  “Well, it was definitely one of us who killed him. Which means, of course, one of us is a killer,” Hugo told her.

  Mary winced — not at the facts of the case, but at Hugo’s use of repetitious, tautologous diction. William would have —

  “But who cares? Anderson deserved to die,” Hugo continued, sternly.

  “True,” conceded Mary, “But.”

  “But?”

  “But.”

  “Articulate your subtext please,” said Hugo.

  Mary shrugged. “But,” she said, “who dies next?”

  “You live here?” Sorcha marvelled.

  She leaped off the Gryphon’s back and stared out at the vast landscape of craggy mountain summits.

  “Top of the world,” said Saunders.

  The sheer drop induced in Sorcha a sense of vertigo akin to blind terror. It was exhilarating.

  “What the hell,” Saunders asked softly, “are you doing here?”

  “I was worried about you.”

  “You left me to die.”

  “So I guess I had cause to worry about you.”

  “You were right to leave me. Your logic was sound.”

  “I couldn’t bear to —”

  “What? Couldn’t bear to what?”

  “Don’t make me fucking say it,” Sorcha snarled, and Saunders smiled.

  “It wouldn’t have worked,” he told her. “Killing me, it wouldn’t have made you safe. Hooperman won’t stop till we’re all dead. Every last one of us.”

  “Not Hooperman. Just a bunch of damned robots,” Sorcha told him.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Saunders confessed.

  It was the ultimate space-age urban myth. And for years, Saunders had dismissed it as superstitious nonsense.

  But now, after the events at the Depot, he was beginning to wonder.

  The story of this myth is always couched as something that “happened to a friend of mine”. And sometimes the friend comes from New York, sometimes from London, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Mumbai or Sidney, sometimes the Moon, or Mars, or the Asteroid Belt. Allegedly this “friend” is murdered by his jealous wife while having virtual sex with a woman on an alien planet. And this “friend” is then carried away in a body bag. And then the Doppelganger Robot marries the woman — and they live happily every after . . .

  In another version the “friend” is a middle-aged man who has foolishly neglected his rejuves, and who likes to spend his spare time killing aliens on an exotic alien planet in a Doppelganger Robot body. Then this idiot suffers a massive heart attack, induced by the stress of all the alien-killing. But his mind lives on, and he is still there now, killing aliens all day and all night, and will be there till the end of time . . .

  Some say there are coma wards in every hospital in every city full of Gamers whose minds never returned from their Doppelganger sojourns. But, it’s further alleged, this scandalous truth has been hushed up by the authorities — because the Galactic Corporation has a desperate need for volunteers to keep donning virtual helmets for stints of 10–20 hours a week, in order to maintain its control over the Colony Planets.

  There are also stories of rich dying men who upload their minds into Doppelganger Robots made as perfect replicas of their human form, in order to achieve immortality. No one has ever verified any of these accounts, but whenever men and women meet in bars and tell tall tales, the stories of Doppelganger Ghosts are legion.

  There is even a theory to explain it — based around the concept of “persistence of consciousness”. When the mind of a human inhabits the cybernetic circuits of a robot, it is postulated, something new is created — a free-floating “virtual mind” that dwells in the cybercircuits and that can survive the death of the actual human being.

  Saunders was now convinced that this was what had happened to Hooperman. He was still here, on New Amazon, as a mind-without-a-body, parasitically inhabiting a myriad robot bodies, mocking and taunting the human survivors.

  But was this Hooperman Ghost really the man Saunders once knew? Or was he just a shadow of the man, a remnant of what used to be Hooperman?

  There was no way of telling. But the voice that had spoken to him after the massacre at the Depot was certainly Hooperman’s. Arrogant, snide, whiny, contemptuous — that was no tape recording. That was Hooperman — or rather, Hooperman-Ghost-in-the-Machine.

  And if all this was true, Saunders realised, then Hooperman would never die, so long as there were robot brains for him to inhabit.

  It was a terrifying prospect.

  Sorcha and Saunders talked for hours, sitting on the mountaintop, as clouds danced below them.

  Saunders explained to her his theory about Hooperman’s Ghost. He’d expected scepticism, but Sorcha believed it utterly, and at once. She was, after all, a Soldier, and all Soldiers believed in Ghosts. It was part of their conditioning.

  “My father and my mother,” she told him, confidingly, “are Ghosts in Valhalla. And my brothers too. That is where we go to live, after the body dies, and we cross the river Styx, that river of death that flows below the glorious Rainbow Bridge.”

  “Yes, of course,” Saunders said, drily. He hated all religion, but especially this one. It was a cynically devised invention, a junkyard of mythologies.

  “If I thought,” Sorcha adm
itted, “that there was no life after this one, I couldn’t endure it.”

  “So you really believe there is a Valhalla?” Saunders taunted.

  “Of course there is a Valhalla.” Her scornful tone implied that this was like debating whether there is a sky.

  “I hope you’re right,” said Saunders kindly.

  “But there is, I regret to say, no Valhalla for Scientists.”

  “So I understand.”

  “That’s just the way it is. You don’t merit an afterlife.”

  “Hmm,” said Saunders, hiding a smile. “So what happens when we worthless soulless boffins die?”

  “Nothing. Kaput. It all ends.”

  “That’s a bleak prospect.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know how you sad fucks deal with it.”

  Saunders toyed with the idea of explaining to her how Soldiers were originally evolved, and how it was possible to brainwash an entire society of human beings into believing that slavery is empowering. He’d read the major textbooks on mind-melding — all banned books on the Soldier planets — and he knew the theory in detail. It was one of the great accomplishments of the CSO in his two hundred years in office: the quiet supplementation of robots with killer humans who had an inbuilt, conditioned death wish.

  These highly trained human warriors proved to be far more effective than either AI robots or Doppelgangers. For fleshware Soldiers were more adaptable, better at battle strategy, more ingenious in devising methods to destroy the enemy: in short, they were the perfect killing machines.

  But Saunders said nothing. Sorcha was who she was. A killing machine. A Valhalla-junkie. A slave who thought she was a master.

  “How do you cope?” she asked him wonderingly, “with the thought of a death that ends everything?”

  “I guess I kind of assume,” admitted Saunders, in a rare moment of candour, “that it’ll never happen to me.”

  It was getting cold. Sorcha was starting to shudder. Saunders took out the thermal wraparound from his body armour’s storage cavity. She cuddled up against his armoured body.

  “You’re lucky it didn’t rain.”

  “I guess.”

  A few moments later, it started to rain. A gentle patter fell down on the grey glorious rocks. Above them the Gryphons cawed and whirled in the air, savouring the soothing drizzle. Their scales protected them from the burning effects of the acid, and because they had no eyes, they could not be blinded.

  Another blob of rain landed on Sorcha and Saunders. Sorcha winced in pain.

  “Let’s get you inside.”

  Saunders led her into the Gryphons’ cavern, and the carvings and paintings on the walls leapt out at her like colours at dawn.

  “They did these?” She sounded impressed.

  “And more. There are sculptures deep inside the cavern. Giant Gryphons, Godzillas, Juggernauts giving birth. This is a species possessed of true artistic genius.”

  Sorcha marvelled at the artwork on the rock walls. She saw scenes of Gryphons killing Godzillas, Gryphons killing Two-Tails. She saw Gryphons fighting and killing each other. This was a warrior species, and Sorcha felt a glow of kinship.

  “This proves they are sentient, did you realise that?” Saunders told her.

  “I did,” she said, “for I am sentient too.”

  He blinked, then took the insult on the chin.

  “They’re as smart as we are,” he clarified.

  “Bullshit. We have spaceships and plasma guns. They live in caves and flap their wings.”

  “They paint, they sculpt, they have culture. They can communicate complex concepts. They can manipulate tools. And they sing. Their songs are wondrous.”

  The Gryphons dangled upside down, mute.

  “When? When do they sing?”

  “When they like you.”

  Sorcha thought about that; it was a weirdly stupid idea.

  “You’d better get me my body armour back,” she told him. “I can’t live long like this.”

  “Of course.” Saunders stood up.

  Saunders left the cavern, emerging from darkness into light, and walked to the edge of the cliff. He leapt and fell. When he saw the canopy loom towards him, he fired his jets and he flew.

  Four hours had passed.

  Sorcha wondered if Saunders had got lost. She’d given him the exact coordinates, but Scientists were notoriously bad at directions.

  She sat crosslegged on the rock, in the heart of the Gryphons’ Cave, and stared through the narrow crack in the rock at the world outside, and at her only way in and out. The clouds outside darkened.

  If she had been a different person, she mused, and not a Soldier, this situation might have frightened her. She was alone, it was dark, she was surrounded by perching avian monsters, and it was pissing down deadly acid outside.

  But, as she was a Soldier, and a Warrior, none of this alarmed her in the least. Nor, indeed, was she remotely worried about the fact that Saunders had been gone so long.

  Although, in fact, now she came to think of it, perhaps she was just a little bit worried.

  Saunders had been gone for more than four hours! She had no plasma gun, no armour. She was easy prey for these fucking monsters.

  But Soldiers are never afraid. And so, fear was not an option.

  She waited — calmly, fearlessly, but checking her watch every fifteen minutes — and watched the Gryphons as they perched like upside-down dragons. Their body scales gleamed like armour in the flickering light. She wondered where the light was coming from. It wasn’t just from the entrance — there must be tiny cracks in the rock.

  Unless the rock itself was glowing? She looked closer and saw shiny patches of rock that glowed out light. The patches moved. They were alive. Tiny rock-embedded creatures were illuminating the cave; living light bulbs.

  The knowledge of this bizarre fact made the cave feel even creepier.

  The rocks glowed, the dragon-birds cawed at her, water dripped from the rocks. Sorcha could hear her own heart thumping. As it grew dark, her night-vision implants kicked in, and the world of the cavern seemed even more strangely ethereal and unreal.

  And she started hearing things. An ethereal choir. An organ playing. A flute. The sound of a heart, leaping. The sound of joy, flying.

  It dawned on her. The fucking beasts were singing.

  “I like you too, guys,” Sorcha said, and felt an unfamiliar emotion, and managed to name it: awe.

  She heard a scrabble of rock and reached for her plasma gun, but it was Saunders. He flew into the cavern, followed by her body armour, which he was flying remotely.

  He landed on the ledge beside her, and carefully guided the body armour to the ground before he shucked his helmet back.

  “You OK?”

  “I’m fine,” she told him.

  “You weren’t —?”

  “Of course I wasn’t.”

  Saunders listened to the Gryphons’ singing. “They’re singing,” he marvelled.

  “It’s annoying me.”

  “You have no soul.”

  “Give me the suit.” She took the suit from him, and touched it, and felt a jolt.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing, I’m fine. Come here, baby,” said Sorcha, still stroking her body armour. She realised that the jolt was love.

  The body armour was soft to the touch, yet stronger than steel, body-morphic, and richly hued — jet-black, but with a warmth that suggested gold and silver lurking in the blackness.

  “Guess what?” said Helms.

  Sorcha had owned this suit for nearly fifteen years; she had fought eleven wars in it. It was a part of her.

  “What?” she said, utterly distracted.

  “I said, ‘Guess what?’ ” Saunders repeated. He took out her old BB from his armour pouch and held it in his hand, with that crooked smile on his lips.

  “Yeah, I think it must have been damaged when —” Sorcha began.

  “It was sabotaged.”

 
“What?”

  “Someone sabotaged it. Do you have enemies, Sorcha?”

  A burning hate filled Sorcha. She thought about the possible suspects, and realised —

  Ben Kirkham! It had to be. She knew from his biog and psych profile that he was a rehabilitated rapist and murderer. And Sorcha was of the old-fashioned school of thought that said once a murdering psycho, always a murdering psycho.

  “I guess so,” she said lightly, and hid her rage with a smile.

  Saunders powered the suit up. Sorcha stood, ready to put it on.

  “You’re going somewhere?”

  “I just want to put the armour on.”

  “You don’t need it on. We’re safe in the cave. Just use a breathing tube, you’ll be fine.”

  “I need to wear it.”

  Saunders shrugged. Sorcha dismantled the armour, then put it on section by section. First, the upper leg and groin armour. Then the boots and greaves. Then the breast and back plate, with the tent and paraglider neatly stashed within. The arms and gauntlets. The utility belt. She tested the systems: plasma cannons, side and back jets. She put the helmet on and breathed air. She engaged the helmet visuals, checked the hologram display, flexed her fingers and tested the slider on the sensitivity settings.

  Then Sorcha leaped in the air and hovered. She limbered up her arms, swinging each arm in a circle in turn. She flipped and hovered upside down. She fired a plasma blast at the cave wall, and carved her name with plasma in the rockface.

  Finally, she landed on the ledge beside Saunders again, and shucked the helmet back.

  “Happy now?”

  “Happy.”

  DAY 23

  The sun dawned red and the Canopy glowed. The jungle erupted, once more, into outraged wakefulness.

  Sorcha stood at the edge of the precipice, body armour on, helmet shucked back, and looked down and across at the beauty of sunrise over New Amazon.

  “It’s glorious, isn’t it?” Saunders said.

  “Have you filmed it?”