by Neal Asher
“But that results in the snail being unable to breed. There’s always some balance to be upset. I’d also expect to see some hooders uninfected-thin-shelled.” He shrugged. “Then again, a general infection of them all may account for their low population.”
“Perhaps you’ll find the answers on that beach.”
“Perhaps.”
Abruptly Shardelle slowed the ATV. He glanced at her and saw she was peering intently at the further edge of the crater. There were figures over there, humanoid.
“Dracomen,” she whispered excitedly.
Jonas initiated a visual program in his aug, magnified what he was seeing and cleaned up the image. Six dracomen, two of them carrying some animal corpse strapped to a pole between them, the other four scattered around them. Two of the others were small-dracoman children.
This was the first time Jonas had seen them and he studied them closely. Though humanoid, their legs hinged the wrong way, like birds. Their scaling was green over most of their bodies but yellow from groin to throat. Their heads were toadish, jutting forward on long necks. They carried rifles of some kind.
Shardelle set the ATV moving again, altering its course to intersect with theirs.
“What are you doing?” Jonas asked.
“I want to talk to them.”
“We’re not here to study dracomen. There’s a whole branch of ECS that does that-military, now dracomen are being recruited.”
“Not study. You’ve got your corpse, but I still want mine. Dracomen hunt, as we can see-I’d just like some information on what exactly they do hunt.”
The dracomen obviously spotted that the ATV was heading in their direction. The two carrying the pole laid it down and then they all stood waiting. As Shardelle and Jonas drew closer, and he could see them more clearly, Jonas began to wonder if this was a good idea.
These creatures looked dangerous. Then he dismissed the idea as unworthy. They may have looked like something out of a VR hack-and-slash fantasy, but, from what he knew, they might well be more sophisticated and technically advanced than most Polity citizens. Shardelle parked the ATV on the brow of the crater edge ahead of them. Turning on their masks, the two of them left the ATV.
“Good morning!” said Shardelle, holding up a hand and advancing.
One of them moved forward, its head tilted as it eyed her, almost like a cockerel coming to inspect a grub.
“We greet you,” it said, halting.
Jonas eyed the rifle this one carried. It appeared to be made of translucent bone and something shifted inside it like visible organs. It seemed alive.
“If you don’t mind,” said Shardelle, “I have some questions I would like to ask.”
Jonas now saw that their catch was a mud snake: a fat grublike body terminating in a hard angular head that looked a bit like a horse’s skull. Yellow ichor ran from something that was stuck in the body just behind the skull: a short glassy shaft to the rear of which were affixed two testicular objects. The dracoman tracked the direction of his attention, then abruptly stooped and pulled the object from the mud snake. He now saw that this thing possessed a barbed point. It looked like a greatly enlarged bee sting. The dracoman did something with its rifle and the side of the weapon split open. It shoved the barbed object inside and closed the weapon up. All the time it did not take its eyes off Jonas.
“Ask,” it said.
“You hunt many animals,” said Shardelle.
That was not a question so the dracoman did not dignify it with a reply.
“Do you hunt gabbleducks?” she asked.
The dracoman exposed its teeth in something that might have been a grin. It glanced around at its fellows who grinned similarly.
“No,” it replied.
“Why not?”
“We only hunt prey.”
“Not predators?” She gestured to their catch. “Surely mud snakes are predators.”
“All predators are prey.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yes.”
“Do you hunt hooders?” Jonas interjected.
By the amount of exposed ivory he guessed that was a hilarious question to ask.
Shardelle waved a hand as if to dismiss his question. “Why don’t you hunt gabbleducks?”
“They are protected.”
“Under Polity law, yes, but I thought your people had been allowed hunting rights to feed yourselves … within limits.”
Some unspoken signal passed between the dracomen, for the two bearers once again took up the pole.
“Wait! You have to give me something!” said Shardelle.
Jonas glanced at her, realizing by the tone of her voice how desperate she was to find answers about the gabbleducks. The dracomen began to move off.
“Please,” she said.
One of the dracoman children halted and gazed up at her.
“The meat is forbidden,” it lisped, licking out a black forked tongue. It glanced at Jonas.
“Except to hooders.” Then the child scampered off after the adults.
“Delphic, just like their creator,” said Jonas.
“There was probably a wealth of information there, if we could figure it out,” Shardelle replied. She peered down the slope to where a tricone about half a meter long had breached.
This creature consisted of three long cones joined like Pan pipes, each revealing in their mouths gelatinous nodular heads which extended sluglike to lift the creature up, then propel it narrow end first back down into the ground.
“We will,” said Jonas, turning back toward the ATV, “given time.”
They made love on the second night, slowly, leisurely, and most of the time Jonas remained in the tent with her while she slept. He did not have to do that, but she was glad he did.
“In the morning we should come upon your big friend,” he said at one point. “What do you intend?”
Shardelle grinned at him, suddenly unreasonably happy. “Well, I’d like to ask him what he and the rest of his kind have been talking about. Do you think he’ll tell me?”
He smiled. “You know there’s a kids’ interactive book you can find here. The technology is Polity stuff but the stories were created here-distortions of old Earth fairy tales. When I said to you it moves like a bear, I was thinking of one particular fairy tale: Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but in this case the three bears were gabbleducks.”
“Your point?” Shardelle asked.
“Well, she crept into their house to try their food and their beds….”
“Yes, I know … and baby gabbleduck’s bed was just right….”
“It was,” said Jonas, “and baby gabbleduck thought Goldilocks just right when he ate her.”
“Is there a moral to this?”
“Just be careful. I don’t want to lose you now that I’m getting to know you.”
Frustration awaited in the morning with Rodol telling them to divert from their course.
Two hooders lay in their way. It would be too dangerous to approach the giant gabbleduck.
“They might attack it,” said Shardelle, half minded to ignore Rodol’s warning.
Jonas reached out and put a hand on her arm. “On the way back-I promise you.”
They passed through an area where the shore wind had blown fragments of dead flute grass inland and mounded it in drifts, then into an area clear of everything but new shoots.
Evening sunset revealed the sea and the beach. They spent the night inside the ATV, Shardelle bedding down on the floor. At sunrise they traveled the remaining kilometer to the edge of a cliff, and they soon located the dead hooder.
The dune across which the enormous creature was draped imparted a curve to its forward segments emphasizing its resemblance to a spinal column. Shardelle was reminded of ancient saurian exhibits in museums on Earth, and models and diagrams from the early years of the science of osteopathy. Its head was spoon-shaped, concave side down to the sand, its armor plates spreading in a radial pattern from the neck
. Judging by the grooves leading down from the creature to the water’s edge, its first discoverers had dragged it up the beach. They must have used some aerial craft to do this, since there was no sign of any other track marks in the sand.
“Do you know how we can get down there?” she asked, tapping up an elevation overlay on her map screen. The ATV rested above the beach just back from a steep muddy cliff. All around them the ground was level and had been scoured of even dead flute grass by the wind.
After auging for a moment, Jonas replied, “Go right.”
Shardelle tracked elevation lines with her finger. “Yeah, I think I see it.”
They traveled along above the beach for a kilometer, but downhill with the cliff growing shorter as they traveled and eventually petering out. A steep slope brought them down onto the sand whereupon they traveled back below the cliff. The lower part of the cliff was jagged limestone. Shardelle looked up and saw burrows in the compacted soil above that, and many falls. Tricone shells were imbedded up there, and many more were shattered on the limestone.
Many of the soil makers had obviously not known when to stop and burrowed straight out of the soil to fall and smash themselves. When they eventually reached the hooder it seemed more like some rock formation than any beast, being over two meters wide and a hundred meters long.
Wind-blown sand had mounded around it. It seemed ancient: a dinosaur skeleton in the process of being revealed. She brought the ATV to a halt in the lee of the monster.
“Let’s take a look,” said Jonas.
The moment they exited the vehicle they smelled decay. Shardelle noted black insectile movement in the heaped sand, then spied one of the creatures close to her feet. It looked like a small prawn, but black and scuttling like a louse.
“Every living world has its undertakers,” Jonas explained. “Let’s just hope they haven’t destroyed too much.” He pointed toward the hooder’s cowl, much of which Shardelle now saw was buried in sand. “I’ve brought a few hundred liters of repellant. I’ll confine direct physical autopsy to the cowl and a couple of the segments behind it. I don’t suppose the rest will tell me much more.”
“But you’ll scan it entire?”
“Yes.” He turned to her. “If you could dig out the terahertz scanner and run it down both sides a segment at a time?”
Shardelle grinned. “I can do that.”
“Start with the cowl and those front two segments. It’s going to be hard work, but I’ll run a carbide cutter through there,” he pointed to a section behind the two mentioned segments,
“then we can use the ATV to haul the front end over and drag it free … let’s get to work.”
Shardelle nodded as he headed back toward the ATV, but, instead of following, she walked up close to the massive corpse, reached out and ran her fingers over the stony surface.
Unlike the vertebrae of a spinal column, this was all hard sharp edges seeming as perilous as newly machined metal. It was not metal-more like rough flint and with the same near translucence. Seeing holograms, pictures, film of this creature in action in no way imparted the sheer scale of this lethal machine of nature. She shuddered to think what it would mean to be this close to a living specimen. But this one was definitely dead. She sensed an aura of some awesome force rendered impotent.
The circular saw was gyro-stabilized, but it bucked and twisted as its diamond-tooth blade bit into hard carapace. Already the disk blade had shed three of its concentric layers of teeth, and Jonas’s shimmer-shield visor was flicking off and on to shed the sweat that dropped from his face onto it. He had cut only halfway through, taking out wedges of carapace just as a woodsman would remove wood with an axe. Now he was into the soft tissue of the creature,
“soft” in this case meaning merely of the consistency of old oak rather than carbide steel.
Glancing down the length of the monster’s body he saw that Shardelle had nearly reached the tail with the terahertz scanner. All hard work, but he was satisfied. The scans alone, taken at close range on a static target, should reveal masses of features not detected with distance scans. And, soon, he himself would be delving inside that wonderfully complex, and macabre, cowl. He shook more sweat from his face and continued to work.
Three replacement blades later, he had broken through. Shardelle, bored with waiting, had maneuvered the ATV into position, sunk its ground anchors into the sand, and run out the cable from its front winch to the hooder, where she secured it through a hole diamond-drilled through the further edge of the cowl. Jonas backed out of the carnage he had wrought, lugging the circular saw, which now seemed to have doubled in weight. He gave her the signal to go ahead, and moved aside.
Shardelle started the winch running, the braided monofilament cable, thin as fishing line, drawing taut. After a moment, the note from the winch changed and the far side of the cowl began to lift. Black carrion-eaters began to swarm like ants. Sand poured from the cowl as it came up vertical to the ground, then in a moment turned over completely.
Jonas spotted something revealed where the cowl had lain and walked over. Carrion eaters were thick on the ground there amid a tangle of bones and tatters of leathery skin. He had wondered why they had been so numerous around the hooder itself, for it seemed unlikely they could feed upon its substance before time and bacteria had softened it sufficiently. The creature had obviously gone to its death still clutching recent prey. He returned, picking up the saw on the way, to Shardelle.
“Drag it over there.” He pointed to the cliff. “We’ll spray with repellant and set up a big frame tent over it.”
She looked askance at him.
“Please,” he added.
The cowl, with two body segments still attached, sledded easily across the sand. Jonas took a tank of the repellant from the ATV, slung it from his shoulder, and, using a stemmed pressure sprayer, walked around this section of the beast, liberally coating it. Carrion eaters fled in every direction. The tent, which came in a large square package, he sat on the first body segment and activated from a distance. Within seconds the package spidered out long carbon fiber legs, stabbed them into the ground, then dropped fabric down like a bashful woman quickly lowering her skirts.
“Let’s get the equipment set up,” Jonas said.
Later he was delving into the cowl: pulling up jointed limbs that terminated in scythe blades as sharp and tough as chainglass, or in telescopic protuberances that looked like hollow drills; excavating one red eye from the carapace, jumping back when it fluoresced, laughing and returning to work; running an optical probe down into one small mouth to study the cornucopia of cutting and grinding gear inside.
“You know, the present theory is that the hooder requires all this so it can deal with a kind of grazer living in the mountains. Those creatures feed on poisonous fungi, the toxins from which accumulate in the black fats layered in their bodies. When the hooders capture them under their hoods, they need to slice their way through their prey very meticulously, to eat only what are called the creature’s white fats.” He glanced at Shardelle who was watching with fascination.
“They don’t kill their prey,” she observed.
“Apparently. When the hooder goes after a fungus grazer, the grazer immediately starts breaking down the black fat to provide itself with the energy to flee, and then its blood supply and muscles become toxic, too. So any serious damage to either could release poisons into the uncontaminated white fat. The hooder dissects its prey, not even allowing it to bleed. It eventually dies of shock.”
“The same with any prey it catches,” Shardelle added. “Including us.”
“I don’t believe it for a minute,” said Jonas. “The fungus grazers are only a small part of its diet, and many hooders don’t even range into the mountains.”
“Why, then?”
“I just don’t know.” He lifted out another jointed limb, this one terminating in a set of chisel-faced pincers. “All I do know is that when they’ve finished with their victim there’s usua
lly nothing left larger than a coin.”
He continued working, only noticing much later that the tent’s light had come on, and that Shardelle had gone. Looking outside he saw that she had set up her own tent, and no light showed inside. He went back to work, only stopping in the morning to get something to eat and plenty to drink, and to then sit meditating for an hour while his asomnidapted body cleared its fatigue poisons. As Calypse gazed down and the rising sun etched fire across the horizon, he experienced a moment of deep calm clarity. He knew now, felt that somewhere, deep inside, he had always known. So much confirmed it. Total confirmation had come from close nanoscopic study of the carapace. The sun had breached the horizon when he returned inside to package his samples. He needed no more from this beast now. Others could come here if they wished.
