by Neal Asher
… perhaps some mechanism based on predator prey ratio….” He sat gazing off into space.
“You were saying,” Shardelle prompted.
“Yes … yes. They are practically indestructible but for one big fault. As you know, the sea tides here are vicious-the moons and Calypse all interact in that respect. Hooders sometimes stray down onto the eastern banks at low tide, get caught there, then washed into deep water where they eventually drown. It takes a while, but it’s deep off the banks and hooders are very heavy.”
“And?”
“Occasionally a hooder corpse will get dragged up by the bank current and deposited ashore.”
“I see-you have your corpse.”
“And no way of getting a large field autopsy kit to it.”
Shardelle gazed up at the screen. “Where is it?”
Jonas touched his aug for a moment, frowned, then pointed. “Five hundred and thirty kilometers thataway-straight to the coast.”
Shardelle nodded at the screen. “He is about three hundred kilometers in the same direction.”
“Your point?”
“Of course you can use my ATV, but under one condition: I’m coming with you.” Shardelle knew there was more to her decision than the gabbleduck’s presence on the route. There was the escape from the frustration of her research, which in that moment seemed to have translated into sexual frustration.
From the chainglass bubble cockpit Jonas glanced into the back of the ATV. Apparently these had been used as troop transports during the rebellion against the theocracy. Now either side of it was stacked from floor to ceiling with aluminum and plasmel boxes, strapped back against the sides, with only a narrow gangway leading back and elbowing right to the side door.
It had been necessary for them to remove much of Shardelle’s equipment, including the chair, but she did not seem to mind. He realized she was glad of this excuse for a journey to take her away from the meticulously boring research into gabbleduck biology, and the seemingly endless and fruitless analysis of The Gabble.
“How long will it take us, do you think?” he asked, now looking ahead. They were leaving the Tagreb enclosure, rolling across an area of trammeled flute grass through which new red-green shoots were spearing.
“How long do you want it to take?”
“Your meaning?”
“Sixty hours if we go non-stop. Rodol can guide the ATV during the night … do you need sleep?”
“No-I’m asomnidapted.”
“Ah, well I’m not.” She glanced back. “I guess I could bed down there overnight.”
Jonas shook his head. Now that they were on their way his urgency to get to the dead hooder had decreased. “No, let’s stop during night time. I may not need to sleep, but I don’t want to spend that length of time just sitting here. There’s camping equipment in the back, so you can get your head down.”
Shardelle guided the ATV down one of the many paths crushed through the flute grass and leading away from the Tagreb.
“And what will you do meanwhile?”
He tapped his aug. “Continue my research. Rodol is sequencing the hooder genome and transmitting the results to me. I’m running programs to isolate alleles and specific coding sequences. I intend to build a full virtual model of hooder growth.”
“But first you need to be rid of the parasitic and junk DNA to get to the basic genome.”
“Yeah, obviously-I’ve got programs working on that.”
“It’ll probably be a massive task. The assumption has always been that hooders are the most ancient creature on the planet’s surface. The gabbleduck is probably younger, and its genome is immense.”
“Yes, quite probably,” Jonas replied, then after a moment, “I don’t really like the term junk DNA.”
Once, centuries ago, no one had known what all the extra coding was for. Now it was known that it was history: old defensive measures that no longer applied, viruses incorporated into the genome, patches much like additional pieces of computer code to cover weaknesses in a program. Some biologists likened much of it to the scar tissue of a species, but Jonas felt that not entirely true because it could, on occasion, provide survival strategies. Perhaps a better analogy would be to the scar tissue and consequent experience of an old warrior.
“You have a better one?” Shardelle asked.
“Reserve, complementary or supplementary.”
“Very good.”
By mid-morning the sun was passing underneath Calypse, throwing the gas giant into silhouette. Jonas spotted the snout spurs of mud snakes cleaving the rhizome layer ahead of them-attracted by the vibrations the vehicle created-but they disappeared from sight, perhaps recognizing the inedibility of ATV tires. Checking her map screen, Shardelle turned the vehicle from flattened track and nosed it into flute grasses standing three meters tall. The cockpit skimmed this, its lower half in the grass. A faint hissing sound impinged under the varying hum of the hydrogen motor and hydrostatic gearing. Eventually they broke from the flute grasses and began negotiating a compacted slope where the old grasses had been flattened by the wind.
Reaching a low peak, a vista opened to one side of them. A fence stretched out of sight in two directions. Over the other side the ground was black, hazed with occasional reddish patches where new grass was sprouting.
“Quarantine area,” Shardelle observed. “You were here for six months before the Tagreb arrived. Do you know what they’re so worried about?”
“No monitor will answer direct questions, but, by the methods used, I’d guess biogenetic weaponry was employed.” He gestured to the blackened terrain. “What you see here is only the flash-over area-the perimeter of a firestorm. I’d guess that the hypocenter was the strike point of an orbital beam weapon. They burnt that inner area right down to the bedrock and now they’re watching to make sure nothing survived.”
“Seems rather excessive.”
Jonas decided to tell her the whole story, and wondered if she would think the actions ECS had taken here so excessive then. “You have to consider: how did one man ‘steal’ a Polity dreadnought? Mary Cole, a monitor I know, let slip that the research vessel Jerusalem was here for a time. You know what that means.”
She glanced at him. “Jain technology?”
He nodded. “A few fragments sit in the Tranquility Museum on the Moon. That part of the museum can be instantly ejected and destroyed by CTD. It seems that fact is the biggest part of the attraction of the exhibit, because what sits there in a chainglass case just looks like a few bits of coral. It’s the potential though: a complexity of dead nanomachinery that still, as far as I know, defies analysis.”
“Someone used active Jain technology?”
“It would seem so. First to steal the dreadnought, then use both dreadnought and technology to hit this place.”
“I’m surprised anyone has been allowed here at all.”
“I’d guess the AI view is that they can’t be overprotective. Three distinct and extinct ancient races have been identified: the Jain, Atheter, and Csorians. Remnants of their technologies exist, so it’s no good us burying our heads in the sand in the hope they’ll go away.
We have to learn how to deal with them, hopefully before we run head first into something that might destroy us.”
“And, of course, there are those that are not extinct, like whatever created Dragon.”
“Precisely.”
She looked at him, waiting for something more, then prompted: “Do you think we’ll ever get the full story of what happened here?”
“The bones will be fleshed out in time. We know the Theocracy was supplying Separatists on Cheyne III and used technology, bought from Dragon, to destroy an Outlink station. The Polity supported the rebellion here that finally overthrew the Theocracy. Dragon changed sides, apparently because it did not like blame being attributed to it for the destruction of the station, and assisted that rebellion before suiciding on the surface. The guy who stole the dreadnought?
S
ome Separatist coming here on the side of the Theocracy. He and his ship were incinerated while pursuing Polity agents to the Elysium smelting facilities.”
“But is that really what happened here? The whole thing could be a cover for something deeper, something the AIs have been doing out here, perhaps some experiment that went wrong,” said Shardelle.
Jonas snorted. It amazed him how scientists, whose entire ethos was based on logic and empirical proof, sometimes wanted to believe complete rubbish.
“I’ve never put much credence in conspiracy theories,” he stated, which killed the conversation for some time.
Shardelle listened to the engine wind down, and to the slow ticking of cooling metal. She had parked the ATV on a hillock that she knew extended in a ring some kilometers in diameter. It was a good place to camp, the ground being too dry for mud snakes. She liked the view as well and felt safer being able to see for kilometers in either direction. Rodol was watching over them by satellite and would warn if anything was getting too close, but this vantage gave them the opportunity to eyeball any of the natives and decide themselves whether it might be necessary to run. She turned to Jonas.
His eyes were closed, but, obviously, he was not sleeping. He was auging-probably deep in some virtuality in which the hooder genome lay across his entire horizon and, godlike, he peeled away clumps of it for analysis and compiled the resultant data. She studied his profile, the hard intensity of his features, the natural tan that came from spending a lot of time outside.
Eventually she unstrapped herself and left him to it, turning on her shimmer-shield visor and snagging up her field tent and related equipment on the way out of the ATV. The landscape was red gilded by the nebula when he joined her an hour later. She was sitting in her camp chair before her tent, her visor flicking off and on as she sipped coffee.
“My apologies,” he said. “I tend to get annoyed when anything blurs my focus.”
“Me too,” she replied. “But I’ve been focused on The Gabble for so long I need a break.
Incidentally I don’t put much credence in conspiracy theories, myself, and you really need some practice in recognizing irony.”
“So no sinister experiments conducted by the AIs?” he queried, raising an eyebrow.
She laughed. “No … I see here the results of some ECS action which for a while will be considered a net gain for the Polity until the dirt starts to surface.”
“Mmmm … and talking of dirt: Rodol has finished sequencing the hooder genome.”
“Dirt?”
“There is none, or rather, surprisingly little.”
“What do you mean?”
“Still a lot of analysis to do, but thus far we’ve found nothing that can be identified as parasitic in the genome. There is, however, a vast number of superfluities, accounting for immune response identifiers.”
“That makes no sense. If it’s old enough to acquire so high a level of immune response, it will have acquired parasitic DNA as well.”
“You’d think.”
There was something he was not telling her. She let it rest. At present she felt the most relaxed she had been in some time-just thinking about nothing and watching the world. She did not need his frustrations right then.
“I’m going to lie down now.” She cast away the dregs from her cup and returned it to her pack. Standing, she faced him. “Would you care to join me?”
“I don’t sleep,” he said, looking distracted.
“Don’t be obtuse.”
He turned to her, focused, grinned.
“I promise not to be too rough with you,” she added, and to save pride turned away and entered her tent. She felt slightly miffed that he took so long following, and came in after she had turned on the oxygenator and stripped naked. He bowed in, quickly closing and sealing the entrance behind him. Shedding his breather gear he said, “You surprised me.”
“Are propositions so rare for you?”
“Not rare, but frequently problematical.” He paused thoughtfully, as if about to launch into further explanation.
Shardelle reached across, snagged the front of his envirosuit and pulled him into a kiss, then down on top of her. He seemed reluctant for a moment, then softened into it. His hands began caressing her with almost forensic precision, as if he were checking the location of all her parts. Eventually he backed off and struggled out of his envirosuit. There was not much foreplay after that. She did not want any, and came violently and quickly. After cleaning herself with wipes from her toiletries she said, “Perhaps we should continue this in the morning.”
“Perhaps we should,” he replied.
She lay back relaxed, her body heavy on the ground as if someone had adjusted up the strength of a gravplate below her. Closed her eyes for a second … He was shaking her by the shoulder.
“Come see.”
Shardelle lay bleary and confused before realizing that she must have fallen asleep.
Checking her wristcom she saw that five hours had passed. “What is it?”
“Heroynes.”
She took up her breather gear only, clicking only mouth mask into place, and stepped out naked with that up against her mouth. Out there, striding through the flute grasses, were four heroynes. She studied one closely. It stood on two long thin legs that raised it high above the grass itself, much like its namesake. Its body was L-shaped and squat with a long curved neck extending up from it. To its fore, numerous sets of forearms were folded as if in prayer. It had no head as such; the neck just terminated in a long serrated spear of a beak. Each of these creatures stood a good ten meters high, and moved swiftly across the terrain in delicate arching steps carrying them many meters at a time.
“Always weird,” she said into her mask.
She turned to him. He was fully dressed and watching her.
“Are you still tired?” he asked.
Her answer was no, and he took her from behind, bent over the tire of the ATV, then again in the morning, long and slow in the tent, before they set out. Shardelle felt this trip out was most rewarding for her.
Jonas smiled to himself as he considered the night past. He felt enlivened and humanized by the experience, and certainly it had been beneficial for Shardelle. She seemed relaxed and easy, sated. But Jonas compartmentalized it as she started the ATV on its way, and returned his thoughts to some things that had been bothering him throughout the long watches of the night.
Hooders. Damn them.
Perhaps the sex had blown the crap out of his system, because certain biological peculiarities now seemed clear to him.
The superfluities in the hooder genome could explain the lack of virally implanted parasitic DNA. The creature might have, quite simply, from the beginning, had a powerful and almost complete immune response to viral attack. Dubious, but explainable. What was not explainable was something so obvious, he cursed himself as an idiot for not seeing it. The hooder was the top predator here. Hooders did not fight each other. Their prey were, on the whole, soft-bodied grazers with little more defense than speed. Why then did hooders need armor capable of stopping an anti-tank round?
“You know how hooders are hard to kill?” he asked.
The ATV was rolling down the hill into a crater that was known as Dragon’s Fall. Shardelle glanced at him with that slight lustful twist to her mouth. “I know. It’s why the Tagreb perimeter is supplied with proton weapons.”
He nodded, tried to concentrate on the matter in hand. “It’s their armor, and their speed, but mostly the armor.” He paused for a moment. “You know there are other creatures with thick armor capable of bouncing bullets, but that’s usually because there’s something in their environment with a fair chance of cracking through it. The laminated chitin on a hooder stops most projectile weapons. Even lasers have little effect. If you want to damage one of those creatures, you need to upgrade to APWs and particle weapons, and even then you’re talking about the kind of armament most people could not even carry.”
“Maybe some other predator now extinct?”
“But what the hell would that be?”
She gestured ahead into the crater. “We’ll probably never know. ECS apparently had teams excavating this place for ages trying to find draconic remains. They didn’t find much.”
“Tricones.” Jonas nodded.
The molluscan soil makers of this planet were a problem in that respect. There were some fossils to be found in the mountains, but only there. Out here the tricones crunched up nearly everything solid down to a huge depth. All that could be found below the deep soil layer was the chalk, then limestone remains of the tricones themselves.
“Maybe there’s a parasitic reason for the thick shell,” Shardelle suggested. “I’m thinking in terms of the Earth parasite of snails that thickens the snail’s shell to protect itself.”
