Red Claw

by Philip Palmer

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

Take an entirely unexpected voyage through the cosmos in a space opera dubbed "an intelligent action adventure replete with intellectual rigour, human insight and superb storytelling" by The Guardian. From Space Marines to alien jungles filled with terrifying monsters and killer robots, you'll lose yourself in Philip Palmer's utterly inventive, wild journey -- an extraterrestrial scientific expedition that goes horribly awry. "It's been a while since I've read a science fiction novel as invigoratingly original in approach and theme as this one Morning Star Red Claw moves at a relentless pace . . . I was hooked" -- TheBookBag.com

Release date: September 30, 2009

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 464

Sample

Credit: Charlie Hopkinson

PHILIP PALMER’s first novel was Debatable Space, but he has previously written for radio, television, and film. He lives in London. Find out more about Philip Palmer at
www.philippalmer.net.


 

 

If you enjoyedRED CLAW,

look out for

 

BELLADONNA

by Philip Palmer

The Cop was in a cheerful mood. The sky was a rich blue. The twelve moons of Belladonna shone like globes on a Christmas tree
in the daytime sky. He could smell orchids.


He was one-day old. He would, his database warned him, grow more jaded with the passage of time. But for the moment, life
felt good.


It was a short walk from the spaceport to the crime scene. He was in constant subvocal contact with the Sheriff, Gordon Heath,
and the crime scene photos scrolled in front of his eyes as he walked. But the air was fresh, and the orchids were fragrant,
and so were the roses, and the hollyhocks, and the grass. The Cop registered felt a faint stirring of remembered regret.


“I’m Sheriff Heath.”

“I’m aware of that,” said the Cop.

“Pleased to meet you too,” the Sheriff chided, and the Cop registered the hint of irony, but decided it would be politic to
ignore it.


The Cop and the Sheriff were standing outside a twelve-storey hotel made of black brick with a spire that touched the sky.
Police officers had cordoned off the area with holos proclaiming POLICE and MURDER SCENE — KEEP AWAY. Pedestrians on moving walkways were gawping as they swept past, thrilled at the glimpse of a terror that had passed them
by.


“Sheriff, feel free to call me Luke,” the Cop added, in a belated attempt to build a rapport, though this was not and never
had been his name.


“Sure, I’ll do that. ‘Luke.’ ”

This time, there was a hint of lurking scorn, but the Cop chose to ignore that too.

Sheriff Heath, the Cop noted, looked shockingly old — too old perhaps for cosmetic rejuve? — though his body was fit and strong.
He was bald, heavily wrinkled, with a grey walrus moustache, and peering blue eyes. The Cop had been impressed at his bio:
soldier, pirate, artist, scientist and bartender. Now, he was Sheriff of the 4th Canton of Lawless City.


“Through here.”

The holograms of the crime scene didn’t do justice to its horror. Blood and human flesh spattered the walls and ceilings.
A screaming severed head was impaled on the bed; inside the mouth, which gaped unnaturally large, was a human heart, squeezed
and squirted.


The Cop adjusted his decontam forcefield and hovered back and forth a centimeter from the ground. He used his finger-tweezers
to take samples of blood and flesh, and mentally tried to keep a tally of the corpses. He saw legs and hands and entrails
and a set of lungs that had fallen under the bed, and he noted that the carpets were damp with piss and strewn with half-digested
food from the shredded stomachs of the victims.


At one point the Cop glanced behind, and was startled to see that the Sheriff was pale, and looked as if he wanted to throw
up.


“Murder weapon?”

“We found nothing. We don’t know what could have done this.”

“Plasma beam? Samurai sword?”

“Look closer.”

The Cop looked closer.

 

 

From the diary of Dr Hugo Baal

June 22nd

It’s raining acid piss again. The rainbow effects are rather striking. I’m sitting on a rock typing this on my virtual screen.
The rainbow is hopping about in mid-air, I’ve never seen that effect before — it’s — what’s the word? Is there a word for
how that looks, and how it makes me feel?

Hmm. Apparently not. Well, there should be. Anyway, it’s extremely extraordinary and rather wonderful. I’m taking a photograph
now for posterity, you can see it here, in my Miscellaneous Epiphanies folder.

On a more scientific theme: Yesterday, I identified two new species of land creature and have entered their images and key data on the database. Professor Helms tacitly agrees with my hypothesis that both creatures could well be animal-plant kingdomshifters,1 though as yet there is no way to confirm this since the specimens are a)2 missing and b)3 exploded. And for the time being we are going to continue with the current4 narrowly defined Kingdom demarcations.

The first species is small and wiggly like a worm. The other species is an Exploding-Tree with claws and motile roots. Click here for photographs5 and ultrasound scans6 and key data if you failed to do so when instructed so to do in the previous paragraph.

The Wiggly-Worm has already escaped. It managed to dissolve its hardglass cage and burrow through the metal floor and into
the earth below. This was quite unexpected, since by this point the creature had already been dissected, skinned and its organs
and notochord and roots (??)7 removed. The skin and other remnants of the Wiggly-Worm are now being kept in a secure cage, in case they transmute into some
other life-form.

Tentative classification:

 

Wiggly-Worm

Kingdom: Animalia or Plantae

Phylum:       Platyhelminthes (provisional, probably wrong)

Class:            Clipeum8

Order:              Uredo

Family:               Serpentiforma

Genus:                   Wigglius

Species:                    Wigglius davidi

 

By general agreement, the creature was named after Professor Helms’s uncle David.

The tree was very large, like an oak tree, with a triangular trunk, so actually more like a Sequoia, with a shiny black bark,
and bright purple leaves. But when we approached the tree it exploded, knocking us over, creating a forest fire, and wakening
the undergrowth of sleeping Rat-Insects,9 which immediately swarmed aggressively, blotting out the sky, before raining down as dead carapaces at lethal velocity. Fortunately,
our body armour proved sufficient to protect all members of the exploration party from death or serious injury, on this occasion.

My surmise10 is that the Exploding-Tree is a plant with animal characteristics, though it’s also possible it’s an animal with plant characteristics,
or (as I surmised above) a kingdomshifter which mutates between the two kingdoms, or it could I suppose, now I come to think
about it, be a mineral growth with motile potential or maybe it’s just a tree which exploded because it was inhabited by explosive
parasites, or perhaps it’s something else entirely. Ha! You see what fun we have here? It will be such a shame when we have
to terraform11 this planet.


My provisional classification is:

 

Exploding-Tree

Kingdom: Plantae or Animalia, maybe

Phylum:      Spermatophyta???12

Class:            Don’t know

Order:              Can’t tell

Family:                Have no notion whatsoever

Genus:                    Fragorarbor

Species:                        Fragorarbor Type A.13

 

Morale among the scientific team is high. Today we are going to attempt to capture and dissect a Godzilla.



“Helmets off, I would suggest,” said Professor Helms, after completing his inspection of the shredded and scattered remnants
of the bloomed Flesh-Web. He retracted his helmet, and the cold wind sheared his skin.


The air was disgusting, of course. Breathing it was like drinking treacle with embedded broken glass. But Helms needed to
feel the breeze on his cheeks, and he loved to hear the singing of the birds and lizardflies and howling insects, the sighing
and moaning of the overhead branches with his own ears, not via the helmet amp.


Major Sorcha Molloy followed his lead, sliding her helmet back into its casing, then running one hand through her close-cropped
blonde hair. Hugo Baal, absent-mindedly, also retracted his helmet, and then he began blinking, surprised at the sun’s raw
beams. Then Django, Mia, Tonii and Ben all followed suit, savouring on their faces the bizarre blend of baking heat and icy
wind that was so typical of this planet.


Behind them, the wagon train of Scientists and Soldiers — housed in three AmRovers and a cargo truck — waited patiently, indulging
Helms’s eccentricity. They had plenty of bloomed-Web samples already. His true reason for stopping was just to “take the air”.


And all around them, like bloodied petals, a sprawling mass of suppurating flesh that was all that remained of a Flesh-Web
that had experienced its characteristic violent, quasi-orgasmic blooming.


Helms took a sip of water, and passed the bottle to Sorcha. She skied it, pouring the water into her open mouth, then wiped
her mouth with her soft glove. She was, he mused, magnificent, and terrifying, just like this planet.


Sorcha sensed his thoughts; she glared at Helms, for staring.

He hid a smile.

“Let’s go,” said Professor Helms, and they boarded the AmRover and headed back into the jungle.



The lead AmRover low-hovered, and its plasma cannons roared in a slow rhythm, burning a path through the densest patches of
unbloomed Flesh-Web — the luridly multicoloured animal flesh that constituted the undergrowth of this alien jungle.


The other two AmRovers, huge armoured vehicles with silver and red livery, and the even vaster and uglier cargo truck swept
behind in stately cortège. They moved without noise, supported on pillars of air, hovering like vast frogs over knotted grasses,
shrubs and sessile animals that struggled to survive amidst the swiftly growing Webs. And all around them the thick impermeable
trunks of the Aldiss trees loomed high, creating a cathedral-like effect amidst the bleeding leaves.


Three Soldiers flew beside and above the four vehicles, plasma weapons at the ready. Their job was to protect the two Scientists,
Hugo Baal and David Go, who flew one each side of AmRover 1. And their job was to film every plant and animal and patch of ground with versatile cameras that could “see” in the visual, ultraviolet
and infrared spectra, and also functioned as microscopes and, if necessary, telescopes.


Hugo and David flew erratically, zipping across to capture close-ups of interesting wildlife, constantly forgetting they had
a zoom lens on the camera of exceptional power and pixel-quality. The three Soldiers felt like sheepdogs cursed with lively
and inquisitive sheep.


To make their task even harder, the expedition’s docu-director and camerawoman, Mia Nightingale, was constantly hovering and
darting around amongst them all, capturing wonderful shots of the imperious wagon train crashing through the jungle, the flying
Scientists filming wildlife, and their brave Soldier escorts swooping along beside them.


Hugo soared fast and low, captivated by the sheer variety of small birds which flew along with him, attempting to mate with
his body armour.


Sorcha, meanwhile, was piloting AmRover 1, with Professor Helms and Dr Django Llorente with her in the cockpit.

From time to time Helms looked up at the vast canopies of purple leaves above as they shimmered in the mist, and at the varied
flocks of birds that patchily filled the air above them, like ants marching in file through the sky.


“Hugo, can you catch me a couple of those little green birds?”


“Yes of course, Professor.”


Hugo soared up high, and hurled a nanonet that caught the flock in flight. Then he dragged the net behind him and deposited
it in the AmRover’s roof hopper.


“Nicely done.”

“Thank you, Professor.”


The cockpit of the AmRover was spacious, with hardglass surrounds offering a vivid view of the surrounding jungle. And the
air in front of each of them was filled with vast virtual screens, which allowed Helms and Sorcha and Django to check their
data and their emails obsessively, as the AmRover continued its hovering flight through dense alien forest.


“Did you catch that, Django?”

“I did. Five-legged creature, the same colour as the Flesh-Web.”

Sorcha narrowed her eyes. She hadn’t seen anything.

Django was a handsome dark-skinned man, with eerily staring eyes. Helms had never warmed to him, but no one could doubt his
intelligence, or blazing ambition.


Professor Helms himself was less than handsome, skinnily slender, not tall, not especially good-looking, and had once-myopic
eyes that now were blessed with 20/20 vision but had left him with a tendency to squint. He had a gentle, mellifluous voice,
and rarely spoke louder than a murmur.


Beside him, on the curving front couch of the cockpit, sat Major Sorcha Molloy. As always, Sorcha was scowling and anxious,
anticipating potential disasters. She’d lost thirteen Soldiers in two years to the New Amazonian habitat, through a variety
of terrible mishaps:


shaken to death by predators (6)

blown up and brain-damaged by the blast of Exploding-Trees (2)

boiled alive in their body armour by forest fires of impossible heat (2)

consumed by pollen (1)

eaten alive by insects that had nested in their body armour (2)

She had come to regard the planet as an enemy of appalling duplicity and malice.

Sorcha was tall, at least a head taller than Helms, and muscular, with close-cropped blond hair and pale blue eyes. She steered
with one hand on a virtual wheel, occasionally flicking a virtual joystick with her other hand to control height and speed,
and treating the notion of small talk with the contempt she felt it deserved.


Django sat in the brooding silence, longing for chit-chat.

Helms sighed, but didn’t dare risk embarking upon a conversation, so instead listened to a concerto on his mobile implant.

And Sorcha sat, and worried, and scowled. She hated this planet; she despised Scientists; she hated science in totality; and
she loathed all aliens.


Her scorn followed her like a familiar.



Helms felt his stomach lurch.

The AmRover was meant to be gyroscopically controlled, but it juddered and plunged every time there was an obstacle or a leaping
predator or a scary-looking plant form. And whenever they passed close to the Flesh-Webs, tendrils leaped out and clung to
the hull and cockpit of the vehicle. It made him feel as if spiders were weaving webs over his eyes.


And now, with his visor on full magnification, Helms could see how the Webs were constantly oozing red pus down on to the
soil, propagating and forming rivers and ponds of scarlet excrement, from which new Webs would eventually emerge.


He considered it to be a wondrous sight; like watching blood give birth.



“Target dead ahead,” said Dr Ben Kirkham over his MI, and Helms’s spirits soared.


The wagon train emerged into a jungle oasis. This was a vast, eerie clearing fringed by more huge tree trunks, where the Flesh-Webs
were unable to thrive because of the poisonous soil. The soil also exhaled a methane-based smog, creating a grey miasma of
vileness all around them.


Helms debarked from the AmRover, and hovered in his body armour above the deadly soil. Light shone through the purple leaves
of the Canopy in thick beams, bouncing off the mirror-leafed plants that thrived in soil that was too barren for almost any
other living thing.


And there, grazing on mirrored bushes and shrubs in the fog-infested oasis, lurked the Godzilla. It was sixty feet high, scarlet-scaled,
reptilian in appearance, with no eyes, and a barbed tongue that could be expelled like a sword being ripped from a scabbard.


“Start filming,” Professor Helms subvoced into his MI.




Mia flew forward with her camera on its bodymount, capturing the Godzilla in full panoramic 3D glory. She circled around it,
then flew above to get the aerial view, and the Godzilla became aware of her and turned its head to face her. Mia kept her
distance, using her zoom to capture glorious close-ups of the monster’s spittle and slime.




“Ultrasound, please,” said Professor Helms.

From AmRover 1, Django fired an ultrasound pulse at the Godzilla, which troubled it visibly. A full interior image of the
beast appeared on their helmet screens, revealing two hearts, a complex lung structure, and the usual abundance of Butterfly-Bird
symbiotes.


“It’s very different,” David Go subvocalised cautiously to the others on their MIs.


“One heart more than it ought to have,” said Hugo.


“If those are hearts,” mused Professor Helms, judiciously.


Beside him, Sorcha subvoced to her team: “Alpha, move closer, Beta, prepare for covering fire, Gamma, wait for my command.” The body-armoured Soldiers moved into position.


Django completed a spectrometer scan. “I’m getting clear traces of chlorophyll.”


“Perhaps it’s a different species which mimics the Godzilla form,” suggested Hugo.


“Or a later stage in the creature’s life cycle.”

“Or just different.”


“Let’s take it down,” Professor Helms suggested.


“Let’s take it down,” Sorcha ordered, and the Soldiers moved into firing positions.




Dr Ben Kirkham sat in front of his virtual computer screen in AmRover 1, and 3D holograms encircled him as he waved his hands
in swift, wizardly fashion. He was watching the take-down via Mia’s camera feed. He was also studying the choreography of
the attack team based on their satnav positions, as well as the aerial views from the hull cameras of the hovering Dravens
and the footage from the army of robocams that flew randomly in a ten-kilometre area around the AmRovers, to keep an eye out
for other xenohostiles.


In theory, Juno was able to keep track of such dangers; in practice, computer brains were sometimes slow to read complex meaning
into complex data. That’s where human intuition came in so handy.


So Ben multi-tasked effortlessly, slipping from location to location with practised skill, all the while checking the cloud
density and weather prediction models, just in case there was a storm on the way.


Nothing was amiss; the nearest predators were a herd of Juggernauts, nine klicks away, milling, not moving aggressively. He
also saw Gryphons in flight. Buzzswarms over the Fetid Lake. A cloud shaped like a jigsaw. A hailstorm, brewing, but far away,
over the area to the south of Xabar. A minor earth tremor, on the continent of Quetzalcoatl. A battle between rival gangs
of arboreals in the canopy, three kilometres from here. Nothing to worry about.


On his staggering array of virtual screens, he saw all this, saw the Godzilla fall to the ground via Mia’s panoramic 3D camera,
and also saw a half-dozen different versions of the moment from the body-armour cameras of everyone else at the scene.




Private Tonii Newton was flying up close to the action when the Godzilla fell. The huge beast was clearly shocked and baffled
as the Soldiers fired batteries of low-level plasma blasts at its body, whilst simultaneously hurling grenades at its feet
to rip away the ground it was standing on. And thus it fell, and the impact threw small creatures out of trees and made the
earth shake.


Tonii’s helmet and body armour were drenched, as sheets of humidity splashed upwards from the undergrowth like rain in reverse.
The Godzilla lay on the ground and roared with rage and, presumably, pain. The Soldiers’ plasma blasts had left burn marks
on the vast creature’s scales. It should be unconscious but clearly it wasn’t.


Because a bare moment later the Godzilla leapt up in a single fast and fluid movement and was back on its feet, standing on
bomb-ploughed soil, swinging the tail that was attached to the back of its head like a club. Tonii veered to one side, only
just avoiding the blow, and his heart painfully skipped a beat.


“Phase One unsuccessful,” Helms murmured subvocally, as the Godzilla ploughed into the other two Soldiers and scattered them like skittles. The Soldiers
bounced and crashed but suffered no lack of dignity.


“I’ve got it covered!” screamed Tonii.


“Do not use lethal force, repeat, do not use lethal force, please,” said Helms, in his infuriatingly calm voice.


Tonii wanted to weep with frustration. The creature was smashing one of his colleagues with its huge tail, he yearned to blow
its body into pieces. “Fire a dart,” said Helms. Tonii fired his neural dart and it landed in the creature’s scales and shot thousands of volts into the monster’s
body, to very little effect.


Tonii hovered, as the creature worked out where he was and what he had done. He could swear it was angry with him. But he held his position, hovering in mid-air, as the Godzilla steadied itself to strike.


It struck with its head-tail, and Tonii dodged skilfully out of the way, then flew back and hovered close to the beast, using
himself as bait.


The Godzilla lunged again — but at precisely that moment the Dravens, remotely controlled by Ben Kirkham, soared swiftly downwards
and opened their hulls. Sticky nets tumbled out and dropped over the Godzilla.


The vast beast promptly sweated corrosive acid from its pores, as all these New Amazon creatures tended to do, and the nets
dissolved.


“Do not use lethal force, do not! Hold fire!” Helms repeated, as Tonii angrily turned his plasma gun to full blast. He could see the two skittled Soldiers were back on
their feet, unscathed, but even so the killing rage was on him.


But by now the Godzilla was disorientated from its fall, and out of poison pus. So Tonii repented his rage, and switched the
plasma gun off, and fired another neural dart, and this time the beast faltered.


Tonii was joined by the other Soldiers — two grunts and Major Molloy. They hovered in formation and fired more neural darts
and this time the Godzilla spat and roared and the gale blew them out of the air.


Damn!

Tonii hit the ground hard, and bounced back up, and watched as the Harpoons flew into position — dumb-robot spears, remotely
controlled by Juno, that hovered above the ground and then plunged unerringly into the Godzilla’s midriff. The Harpoons then
fired fast pulses of ultrasound into the creature’s inner torso, causing it to tremble uncontrollably, brutally disabling
its motor impulses. Suddenly the Godzilla could not move, or roar, or fight. It was frozen to the spot, like a mammoth in
ice.


From start to finish the whole battle had taken about ten minutes.

And Tonii sighed inwardly with regret. He knew he had played his role well; but he always hated it when the robots got to
take down the beast.




Before the Godzilla could stir, Dravens dropped more sticky nets, which hardened as they touched, and left the monster completely
trapped. Once the sticky fibres had fully set, these diamond-hard containing ropes would be virtually unbreakable.


“A job well done,” Helms murmured on his private MI channel to Sorcha.


“We could have killed the fucking thing in half the time,” Sorcha muttered back.


Helms remembered to click off his MI link before he sighed, despairingly.

“Stampede approaching,” Ben said suddenly, over the general channel, then added, with just a hint of anxiety in his tone, “Approaching fast. Four Godzillas and a, and a, well, some other kind of thing, I’m uploading the image now.”


Helms looked at the image projected on his camera. “What the —” he began to say, and almost swore.


And then the stampede struck.

The Flesh-Webs exploded; a terrible screaming/keening noise shrilled out; and the monsters stormed into the clearing like
demons fleeing hell.


“Another new species . . .” murmured Hugo, delightedly, as he realised the pack of four rampaging Godzillas was accompanied by a rhino-type beast
unknown to him with a central horn on each of its three heads.


“Let’s call it a Cerberus,” Hugo added swiftly, elated.


“That name has already been —” Helms began to say, then he was silent, for he knew what was about to happen.


“Engage the enemy!” said Sorcha, joyously, and she and two of her Soldiers went on one knee, plasma cannons raised. Tonii flew up above them,
to provide aerial support.


And suddenly Tonii was full of glorious energy. His plasma gun was charged to full. This was a battle to the —

Mia flew past him with stunning speed and hovered in front of the great beasts, smack in the path of his intended plasma beam.

“Out of the fucking way!” Sorcha roared.


The Godzillas saw her and thrashed their vast single-clawed paws at her. The rhino-type creature — the Cerberus — bellowed
and spat venom that splashed harmlessly off her armour and melted the undergrowth below.


“I said: Out. Of. The. Fucking. Way!” screamed Sorcha.


“You’re a marvel, Mia, get those close-ups!” howled Hugo.


Mia was flying and framing shots at the same time. Her flight path was erratic, but her exceptional flying skills kept her
well clear of the beasts. She got a wonderful panning sequence of the Godzillas, then filmed the charging Cerberus, still
keeping a safe height; but was astonished when whipcords emerged from the spines in its back and lashed a thousand metres
into the air to catch her and drag her to the ground.


Mia crashed hard, trying to keep her body loose. And the Cerberus lifted her again, ready to smash her to pieces.

“Fire and kill,” said Sorcha calmly. She and her Soldiers fired with unerring accuracy and a haze of plasma-beam energy ripped across the
clearing. There was a devastating flash of light as the plasma beams intersected, and the tribe of vast monsters disintegrated
into puddles of blood and gore.


The total obliteration of the army of monsters was achieved in less than a quarter-second. And the after-image of the burning
beasts lived in the eyes of all who witnessed it for a millisecond more, before their eyes cleared and then there was nothing.


“We could have taken that new one as a specimen,” Hugo said, plaintively.


“Urgh, fuck,” said Mia, lying on the ground, badly winded.


Sorcha glowered. These civilians had no fucking sense.



As the Scientists soared across to inspect the gloop that had once been alien flesh, Tonii flew over to Mia. He felt a deep
rage at her foolishness in hindering their battle, but when he spoke his tone was surprisingly gentle:


“Are you OK?”


She retracted her helmet and spat teeth. There was blood dripping from her nose. “You bet!” she crowed.

And then Tonii retracted his own helmet. His long black hair flowed in the icy breeze. He was amused at her beaming face,
and couldn’t resist grinning back.


And Mia, though she ached all over, couldn’t help adoring the perfect beauty of this calmly dangerous man.



“Let’s get this specimen back to base, if we may,” said Professor Helms.




Inside the AmRover, Ben waved his wizard hands, to guide the Dravens downwards.



The Dravens descended, until they were hovering low above the clearing, and then they began to winch the unconscious and sole
surviving Godzilla up in their super-fine net.




The battle was over; the beast was caught.

And Helms realised with some surprise that his pulse was still racing, his heart still pounding. He’d been shocked when the
monsters had suddenly erupted into the clearing; blind panic had seized him and he had been consumed by the bitter-sweet nauseous
exhilaration of being close to death.


It reminded him of those other times in his life when he had been so very close to death. In that moment of total terror,
like a drunk experiencing dizziness, his memories of his past fears merged with his present fear and coalesced into a single
fight-or-flight epiphany.


And he loved it. He loved being terrified. He loved hunting. He loved the thrill of the chase. He loved it when disasters befell them and
they had to escape by the skin of their teeth. He was, despite his calm professorial manner, despite his cautious and judicious
approach to things, addicted to danger.


“Are you all right, Professor?” Django asked.

“I’m fine,” Helms conceded, anxiously. “I do get rather tense at these moments, you know. I’m much happier,” he added, self-
deprecatingly, and