by Neal Asher
Shardelle wormed out of her tent, smelling coffee and feeling a deep overpowering need for it. For a moment she could not figure out what was different, then she saw it: the frame tent was gone, the hooder’s cowl and two attached segments were in pieces. Jonas was sitting crosslegged on one of the limestone slabs, sipping a self-heating coffee. He gestured to another sealed cup resting nearby. She walked over to him.
“You’ve finished?” she asked incredulously.
He grinned. “Amazing what you can achieve when you have no need for sleep. I’ve been working for Taxonomy for fifty-three years. In my last eighteen years of being asomnidapted I’ve done more work than in the previous thirty-five.”
“Perhaps I should consider that for myself,” said Shardelle, pulling the tab on her cup. She preferred the coffee from her machine in the Tagreb, but here this convenience was preferable.
While she waited for her drink to heat, she observed that he had a piece of carapace resting on a brushed aluminum box before him.
“Any conclusions?” she asked, leaning her buttocks against a nearby slab.
“Very definitely.” He reached inside his coat and removed a small handheld gun.
Shardelle recognized it as a quantum cascade, QC, laser.
“I promise not to steal your research,” she quipped.
He grimaced. “It’s not the stealing I would worry about, but how it may well be hushed up.” He pointed the laser at the carapace and fired. A wisp of smoke rose, picking out the beam in the air. There was a red glow at the point of contact, but whether from heat or simply reflected light, Shardelle could not tell. But nothing else was happening to the carapace.
“You know, every piece I’ve managed to study has been old and partially broken down by bacteria. These are the freshest remains I’ve ever studied.” Still he was firing the laser, and still the carapace was unaffected. “You see, a piece of old carapace would have started disintegrating by now, that’s because certain nanostructures inside it would have broken down.”
He turned off the laser, then abruptly put his bare hand flat down on the carapace.
Shardelle leaned forward. “An insulator?”
“You’d think.” He poured coffee on the aluminum box and it immediately sizzled into steam.
“Shit!” Shardelle squatted down beside the box to peer closely at the carapace. She then looked up at Jonas. “Conductive … superconductive?”
“Carbon fullerene nanotubes. When was the last time you saw something like that naturally produced?”
“About never.”
“They’re laced through the carapace material, which bears some resemblance to the shock-resistant composite laminates we use in our spaceships. The interesting part is that the nanotubes link down deep into the hooder’s body. I’ll have to look closely at the scans but my guess is that the more you heat up one of these bastards the faster it moves.” He picked up the piece of carapace. “Of course, though you won’t see stuff like this naturally produced, you can find it elsewhere.”
“Sorry?”
He looked at her directly. “Polity battlefield armor.”
“What? … What are you saying?”
“The genome was the first clue: so short, so concise, so exact. What I’m saying is that hooders, though living creatures, are artifacts; biogenetic artifacts.”
Ahead lay a plain of flattened flute grass, boring and level as it disappeared into misty distance. Shardelle set the ATV on automatic, monitored by Rodol, and decided it was time, as Jonas was now doing, to check into the virtual world. She took her aug from a pocket of her envirosuit and plugged it in the permanent plug behind her ear, closed her eyes, and booted up.
First she checked her messages and was appalled to find over four thousand of them awaiting her attention. She opened only those from recognized sources. Some of them were personal; from her brother, from two of her three children, one from her third husband, another from her great-grandmother. The first ones were easy enough to answer with pages from her diary run through a personalizing program. The one from her great-grandmother, who was a xenobiologist of some standing, she took rather more care over. As she laid out the reply, detailing her frustrations and nascent theories, she wondered if Jonas knew her great-grandmother. She had been in Xeno for seventy years and he in Taxonomy for fifty-three, perhaps they had met at some time? Other messages updated her with news from the Tagreb. A gabbleduck’s bill had been discovered in the mountains. In her absence it had been measured and analyzed ad nauseum, but nothing new learned. Still other messages debated the merits of this linguistic theory or that one, and it was with a sinking sensation that she opened some of the messages from unrecognized senders to find links to where papers on The Gabble had been published. She turned her attention to the linguistic net.
The hardcore had now dropped down to below a thousand. It seemed that most of the lunatic fringe had dissipated, hence the appearance of all those papers. Most serious theorists did not publish until they had something worth publishing. That was accepted protocol to prevent too much rubbish clogging up the informational highways. Nothing new on the net. Returning to her messages she deleted every one from unknown sources. Only then did she spot the message from the haiman Kroval on Earth:
“Every bird sings for a reason, similarly do dogs bark. Perhaps the Anglic similarity is misleading and the morphemes longer than we would suppose … maybe the length of a gabbleduck’s life. Perhaps they are all saying the same thing?”
That made Shardelle pause. She groped for meaning and it seemed to her to be lurking out of reach.
“The meat is forbidden,” the dracoman child had said.
Something there … something.
After time, her frustration became too much and she removed her aug. Once again taking up the controls of the ATV, she noticed that Rodol had reset its course, taking the vehicle away from the big gabbleduck. The reason was obvious: a hooder only five kilometers away from it.
With a quick glance at Jonas, Shardelle manually overrode that and put them back on course. She was damned if she was going to miss seeing it on the way back to the Tagreb. Jonas had made his big discovery. Maybe she could come out of this with at least something.
A minute later, Jonas looked at her and said, “Rodol just informed me that you are taking us closer to a hooder than might be safe.”
Shardelle pointed at the map screen.
He nodded. “Just be ready to run. Hooders move damned fast when they want to.”
Shardelle felt almost angered by his reasonable attitude, and felt too ashamed to analyze too closely the reason for that.
Afternoon, and they were back into still-standing flute grass. Shardelle spotted the gabbleduck when they were still kilometers away from it. It sat, a pyramid of alien flesh, its green multi-eyed gaze fixed on the horizon, bill swinging gently from side to side.
“How close would be safe?” Jonas asked when they were only a kilometer away.
Shardelle looked down at her hand gripping the joystick. Her knuckles were white. “I’m going to approach it. I’m going to walk up to it. You can stay in the ATV if you want.”
Five hundred meters, two hundred meters. Shardelle felt her frustration increase. The gabbleduck had not even turned to look at them. It was as if it could not be bothered to acknowledge their presence. At a hundred meters she just trickled the ATV forward.
“That thing is fucking immense,” said Jonas. He had abandoned his seat to go into the back of the vehicle. She saw that he was clutching an ECS pulse-rifle.
“What do you intend to do with that?”
“I’ll just keep watch. If it goes for you maybe I can drive it off, though seeing it now I realize it might just ignore this popgun.”
Shardelle nodded, and brought the ATV to a halt ten meters away from the monstrous creature. Turning on her shimmer-shield visor, she maneuvered past him and headed for the door. When she finally stepped down onto the rhizome mat and began pushing her way t
hrough the flute grasses, she heard The Gabble.
“Umbel shockadisc po frzzzt,” the gabbleduck grumbled to itself.
A few paces took her out of the standing flute grasses to where the creature sat. She recognized the stack of grazer bones beside it. The gabbleduck had returned to a previous location.
“Pthog,” the gabbleduck intoned, “Erb scugalug.”
It just made Shardelle angry. She marched forward and round until she was standing directly in front of the creature. It was indeed massive: folds of flesh hanging down from its body and almost concealing its powerful rear limbs. When it moved through the flute grasses its three sets of two forelimbs slotted neatly together to form two composite forelimbs so it seemed to run on all fours like, as Jonas had observed, a bear. Now those forelimbs were folded on its chest, and, sitting like this, it seemed some immense alien Buddha. Shardelle glared up at it.
“I’ve listened to over a thousand hours of that crap!” she shouted. “What the fuck are you saying?”
“Frogijig unth,” it observed.
All so close to meaning, but no meaning there. Returning her attention to its fleshy torso she saw that it had acquired a whole ecology all its own. The gabbleduck was crawling with prawnlike crustaceans. These were most numerous around wet looking sores, and the occasional lumpish growth leaking milky fluid.
“Shardelle! Shardelle! Get back here quick!”
Those crustaceans…
A sudden excitement filled her. It was the very same species they had seen crawling around the dead hooder: carrion eaters, they never fed on living flesh, but, like vultures, possessed an instinct for death.
“Shardelle!”
This gabbleduck was dying! She would have her corpse!
Then, through her aug: “This is Rodol. You must flee your current location at once. A hooder approaches.”
What?
Shardelle turned and gazed out across the plain the gabbleduck viewed. A black train was heading toward her, weaving back and forth. The hooder bore some resemblance to a giant millipede with its segments and many paddlelike legs. It also moved with the fast oiled smoothness of that insect. Shardelle froze to the spot, not out of fear, but through incredible angry frustration. She could not have this taken away from her, not now. It just was not fair.
“For fuck sake get in here! Maybe it’ll ignore us!”
The ATV was parked right next to her. She had not heard it arrive.
“Brogon ahul bul zzzk,” said the gabbleduck.
She suddenly realized how jealous and stupid she had been, and that both she and Jonas might pay for that. She ran for the door of the ATV and piled inside, hauled herself forward. Jonas was in the driving seat trying to get the thing into reverse. He did not take the power off and with a crunching shudder the vehicle stalled.
“Fuck fuck fuck.”
They both looked through the screen. The hooder was close, its front end rising off the ground like the striking head of a cobra. Inside its cowl was a mass of glittering knifish movement through which two vertical rows of red eyes glared. It was not focused on them. It was focused on the gabbleduck. Surely it would respond to this. Shardelle looked at the exterior intercom Jonas had been calling her through to check it was still on. No need really. She could hear the hard oily clattering of the hooder’s movement.
“Brogon,” the gabbleduck repeated, waving a black claw in the air.
The hooder froze. The gabbleduck turned its bill toward the ATV. It blinked some of its emerald eyes, then returned its attention to the hooder. After a moment it reached out with one claw and made an unmistakably dismissive gesture. The hooder sank down, turned in a gleaming arc and sped away.
“How do I get this damned thing started again?” Jonas asked.
“There’s no need. It’s gone.”
He snorted a harsh laugh. “Yeah, right. Well, when you’ve quit having your moment of epiphany, perhaps you’d like to take a look at the map screen.”
Shardelle did so, and for a moment could not make much of the graphics displayed there.
They did not seem to make much sense.
“About thirty of them,” said Jonas.
Then it did make sense. There were thirty hooders scattered all around them. They were moving, but seemed to be holding off for the present.
“You say the bill of a gabbleduck was found in the mountains?” Jonas asked.
“Yes.”
Jonas turned off the ATV’s engine. Moving the vehicle back into a stand of flute grass had been the best they could do. Hopefully the hooders would attack the gabbleduck and be too sated by that to attack them. There was no way to hide completely. He had studied the hooder sensorium and knew it would pick up body heat even through the skin of the ATV. Leaving the engine running would generate more heat to further attract attention.
“Nothing else?” he asked.
“It’s damned annoying. There should be more-bones at least.”
They were having a perfectly sensible conversation, sitting in the ATV, waiting to die. The nearest monitor force had sent a transport, but that would not be here for another hour. The hooders, it now seemed evident, were holding off until the gabbleduck finally expired. That could happen at any moment.
“But the tricones grind away all remains, which was why that bill was found in the mountains.”
Jonas wondered for just how many millions of years the tricones had been grinding stuff away. He auged through to the Tagreb and directly into the database maintained by those researching the mollusks. It did not take him long to discover that the tricone genome was just as concise and devoid of rubbish as that of the hooder. He connected then to the AI.
“Rodol, are you listening in?”
“I am.”
“Good.”
To Shardelle he said, “Three ancient races, the physical technological remains of which probably would not fill the back of this ATV.”
She glanced at him, seemed about to say something, then abruptly returned her attention to the gabbleduck. He thought she was swallowing tears.
“Tricones are biogenetic artifacts as well,” he added.
“I think it’s nearly dead,” she said.
The gabbleduck seemed a sleepy old man, its head nodding, bill lowering to its chest, then jerking up again. Removing his QC laser, Jonas laid it on the console before him. They both stared at it. He guessed she understood his intent. They both knew how hooders fed.
“But of biogenetic artifacts left by those races there are many: plants obviously made to refine metals from soil, worms made to accumulate radioactives in their bodies, and perhaps many others we don’t recognize. You know there are theories that even some Terran life forms are such artifacts? Why do some creatures carry a venomous punch so far in excess of that required to kill their prey? Why the chalk builders, the coral makers, why this, why that? Much was attributed to Gaean theories. Now there is some doubt.”
“You’ll be getting to a point sometime soon,” said Shardelle. “I think we are running out of time for discussion … Oh hell.” She leant forward.
The gabbleduck held out a claw.
“Kzzz lub luha Brogon,” it stated, its voice clear over exterior com, then it abruptly sagged and its bill came down to rest upon its chest. The light went out of its eyes.
Jonas lowered his gaze to the map screen.
“They’re coming.”
He picked up his QC laser.
A rushing hissing impinged. Jonas could feel the ATV vibrating. He closed his eyes and swallowed dryly. What did his theories matter now? And, should he not state them, Rodol would have most certainly worked it all out.
The first hooder came in from the right, its front end rearing thirty meters into the air, then coming down like a striking snake on the mountainous corpse. It began feeding, its long body rippling down its length. He did not see the second approach, just suddenly there were two hooders there, tearing at the corpse. Then a crash and the ATV shifted to one side, bouncin
g on its suspension as another of the monstrous creatures came past. Another rose up behind the others, vertical rows of eyes glowing, eating utensils opening out in a deadly glassy array. Down.
Corpse jerked this way and that. Limbs conveyed away, sheets of skin peeled, fat and muscle and sprays of milky blood. Soon there was more hooder to be seen than gabbleduck: a great black Gordian tangle, racketing with the sound of some vast machine shop. It took less than an hour. One hooder slid away, then another. Jonas waited for one to come straight at the ATV. He wondered when he would fire the first shot through the side of Shardelle’s head. When it hit the vehicle, when it tore it open, or at the point when one of those cowls poised above them? One of the creatures came close, shaking the ATV and jouncing it along the ground as its carapace worked like some giant rough saw down the side of the bodywork. Then they were all gone, and he was staring down at the map screen watching their transponder signals depart.
