You don’t, she thought. ‘I’m not having some group of trigger-happy farmers riding round with me, nothing will get solved that way. I need to conduct this investigation by myself, thank you.’
‘I’ll be coming with you,’ Gary said as they left the governor’s office. ‘That was part of my brief.’
‘No,’ Paula said. ‘I need you here to keep Charan contained. The first thing he’s going to do now he knows the board isn’t sending his marshals is put together that posse, officially or otherwise. You outrank him, and you’ve got Wilson’s ear on this. Your job is to give me the clear space I need to work the case.’
‘Case?’ Gary asked as they left the administration block behind.
‘Case,’ Paula confirmed. She pushed her shades on against the hot sunlight. ‘As the Governor said, something agitated the Onid. People are the only new factor in their environment. One way or another, we’re to blame. We’ve done something wrong. That makes it a case.’
*
Communication was poor outside Lydian. There was no uniform planetary cybersphere, only small individual nets serving each settlement. Twenty miles from town her connection to the local nodes was operating on minimal bandwidth. Thirty miles and her OCtattoos could barely maintain a link to the primitive relay towers that had been put up. Not that there were many of them. The five com platforms Farndale had placed in geostationary orbit were basic antennae, providing little more than a guidance function; they were still waiting for upgrades to supply universal coverage. Out here it was emergency signals only. If you were lucky.
The Land Rover trundled on up into the higher rugged ground to the east of town. To start with the homesteads were a brochure image of what frontier life should be, neat silver-white bungalows surrounded by lush fields with their first crop a lustrous dusting of emerald green atop the rich loam. Then after thirty-five miles the enzyme-bonded road ran out. The vehicle’s drive array advised her to take manual control as the ground beneath the tyres turned to stony dirt. Her e-butler sent an acknowledgement, and the steering column slid out of its recess. She gripped it tight, her fingers making contact with the i-spots. OCtattoos on her skin completed the link, connecting her nervous system directly to the drive array.
She tried to keep going at thirty miles an hour, but more often than not she was crawling along at fifteen or twenty as the suspension lurched about on the rough surface. It had been a while since she’d driven manually, and her implanted memory skill was slightly foggy. Her main concern was the horsebox she was towing, which sought any opportunity to fishtail about behind her. Homesteads were still visible, bungalows identical to those in town, set back a good mile from the road on either side. For the first hour she watched tractorbots ploughing up the pale red-green grasslands in big neat squares. Wide craters of ash illustrated where clusters of trees used to be.
After a while the dirt track bled away to ordinary grassland. Tall marker posts stretched along ahead, strobes flashing weakly under the afternoon sun. Trees were prevalent on the rolling landscape again. The lumber clearance crews were among the first to retreat when the Onid went rogue. Native vegetation had gloomy green leaves suffused with maroon veins, darkening them down further. Trees shaded close to black. Thick clumps of willow-equivalents overhung small streams, with larger hardwood spinneys colonizing hollows with their flaky trunks packed close to present an impenetrable fence to any animals larger than a terrestrial dog.
By now, human activity had dropped off altogether. The homesteads strung out along the marker line were uninhabited. Expensive tractorbots were parked outside, motionless. It had an uncomfortable resonance with the Lost23 worlds, abandoned so fast possessions were discarded without thought. Finally, all she saw were big cargo containers dropped off in the middle of the wild, their contents unpacked and unassembled.
Sixty miles from town, Paula stopped the Land Rover. The horse Charan had found her was called Hurdy, a chestnut-coloured mare he promised was gentle with novice riders. Paula deliberately hadn’t told him that she’d spent a lot of her early childhood on ponies and horses at her parents’ home out in the countryside. Sure enough, Hurdy was skittish and bolshie until she got the saddle on and mounted up. Then the mare realized that Paula knew what she was doing, and didn’t try to assert herself any more.
Paula set off over the empty undulating land towards the long band of forest which smothered the foothills to the southeast. Rising up behind them were the Kajara Mountains, their snow-covered peaks gleaming brightly under the hot violet sunlight. Something in the local grass-equivalent oozed out a scent of musky cinnamon, which made the humid air even more oppressive. Outside the Land Rover’s air conditioning, she was sweating in minutes.
The Gorjon family’s homestead was her first point of call. It had been attacked two days ago, an act which decided it for most of the remaining settlers, who had headed back to Lydian to shout at Charan. If she could find any clue as to what was happening, it would be there.
She reached it after forty minutes riding. The attack method was interesting. Examining the ground outside the depressingly standard bungalow she decided it had been completely surrounded, every curly blade of grass-equivalent was trampled and mashed into the soil by three-clawed hoofs – a match for Onid feet. Stones had been dug out and flung at the building. All the windows were smashed, the heat-reflective pale silver coating of the walls was shredded, with the tough composite itself scarred and stressed from thousands of impacts. The ground around the building was piled high with loose stones and clods. Peering through the broken glass she saw the floor inside was also littered with stones.
It was all the Onid had, she realized, their one method of attack. The xenobiology team report mentioned their lack of decent teeth and the relative strength of their forelimbs – primarily used for clawing at the soil so they could reach their base food, the marak root.
Two hundred of them flinging stones at the same time would be frightening enough for humans caught at the centre, even if they’d been equipped with a decent weapon to shoot back. And all Farndale allowed its homesteaders was a weak maser to kill off vermin; the last thing they wanted was any kind of range war out here.
Paula circled the battered bungalow. There were no Onid corpses, and a vermin maser wasn’t a difficult weapon, the beam would have caught a few of them, she was sure. The survivors must have dragged the dead herd members away for burial.
But why? She couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary about the homestead. There was nothing here to antagonize anyone. She mounted up again and rode Hurdy over to the patch of ground which a tractorbot had been ploughing. Like the bungalow, the tractorbot had been victim to a huge barrage of stones. Stones had wedged into the wheels and axles where they’d been ground up and jammed various mechanisms until the safety limiters had cut in. Paula walked away from the forlorn machine until she was in a fresh patch of ploughed land. The tractorbot hadn’t ripped up any marak roots. Even with retinal inserts on high resolution, and her e-butler running visual pattern recognition programs, she couldn’t spot the long grey-speckled leaves of that particular plant anywhere.
So it’s not about food. That just left territory. Staring out across the vast rumpled land she couldn’t quite credit a non-sentient working out that this was an invasion. Whereas a proto-sentient might figure something was wrong. But then how come this is the only trouble spot? No other herds on this continent have reacted like this. It has to be something specific to this area.
She rode Hurdy round in a wide circle until she found the herd’s tracks. They led away towards the sprawl of forest dominating the foothills, which were at least half a day’s ride away. Hurdy started off down the path of battered grass, with Paula keeping an eye on the darkening clouds now twisting above the southern horizon.
After a couple of hours, the clouds were thick in the sky, with the front of the storm now visible as it slid in from the south. Paula had already got an oiled leather riding coat out of its roll at t
he back of the saddle, ready for the deluge. Then her e-butler received a weak emergency signal.
‘From where?’ she asked.
‘The Aleat homestead,’ her e-butler replied. A map slid up into her virtual vision. She was three and a half miles away.
‘Nature of the emergency?’ As if I don’t know, Paula thought excitedly.
‘Unknown. It is a high-power beacon emission. Standard issue to all homesteads.’
‘Come on girl,’ she told Hurdy. The horse began to pick up speed, galloping across the dark grass-equivalent.
She was still several hundred metres away when she heard the sound. The Onid were warbling away as loud as they could in a weird tenor mewling, a din which was frightening in its intensity. They might not have had a language, but the cries expressed intent with shocking clarity. They were angry. Very angry.
Hurdy cleared the last ridge. Ahead of Paula, what looked like a small dense typhoon of dark particles swirled through the air above the homestead. The Onid herd was circling round and round, moving at a startlingly fast run for a creature with so many limbs. And Charan had seriously underestimated their numbers; there must have been close to five hundred of them. As they ran they bobbed down in a smooth motion, high forelimbs ripping something from the ground every time, a stone or chunk of tough dried earth, and then flung it at the homestead as hard as they could.
‘Ho crap,’ Paula grunted. Hurdy had come to a stop, allowing her to scrabble round and extract the maser carbine from its saddle holster. Even now she was reluctant to shoot.
Then a human wail pierced the air, carrying above the Onid’s angry racket. Paula knew it was female, and probably quite a young girl. Her OCtattoo sensors helped her work out the direction.
The homestead’s tractorbot. Standing alone two hundred metres from the bungalow where it had stalled. Over twenty Onid were already circling it. Stones were tumbling down on the curving red bodywork. And Paula caught sight of the petrified girl, squeezing herself into the small gap between the rear wheel and the power casing.
Her OCtattoos were also telling her someone was firing maser shots out of the bungalow’s broken front door. Peripheral vision caught a couple of Onid falling.
‘Damnit,’ she yelled. She didn’t want to fire on the Onid around the tractorbot, because if they had anything like the herd mentality of terrestrial animals they’d probably charge her, which would leave her no choice. She did have enough firepower, but . . .
Then another horse was racing in towards the homestead from the opposite direction to Paula. Her OCtattoos tracked a couple of small objects streaking away from it, arching through the sky towards the herd. Then she could hear nothing. The soundblast which erupted was deafening. She had to jam her hands over her ears. No choice.
Hurdy reared up in fright. Paula lost the carbine in a desperate attempt to hang on. With her hands off her ears, the sound was like a lance hammering against her brain. The mare began to canter away from the homestead. Paula clung to Hurdy’s neck with one arm, trying to turn the mare’s head with the reins wrapped tight round her free hand.
She caught snatched views of the Onid herd. They’d broken from their circular stampede to stream away from the bungalow. In less than a minute they’d all gone, racing away in panic from the noise.
The vicious screaming cut off. It was like an implosion, sucking all sound from the plains. Paula couldn’t hear a thing. She tried to soothe the frightened mare as best she could. Eventually Hurdy had stilled enough to allow a reasonable dismount. Paula still couldn’t coax her closer to the homestead. She tethered her to the stem of a bush on the ridge, retrieved the carbine, and hurried off down the slope towards the bashed-up bungalow.
Away on the far side of the tractorbot Paula could see the other horse rider chasing after the fleeing herd. Bad idea, she thought and hesitated on her downward charge. She still couldn’t hear anything other than a nasty sharp buzzing in both ears. That meant the other rider wouldn’t hear any shout to stop. Retinal inserts zoomed in for a close-up, seeing the figure on horseback raise a small fat gun. OCtattoo sensors tracked the projectile he fired. It was a lot larger than a normal bullet, and considerably slower. It hit one of the Onid, who didn’t even seem to notice the impact.
The rider reined his horse in, and watched the retreating herd as he slotted the strange gun back into a holster. A man and a woman came sprinting out of the bungalow, heading straight for the tractorbot. The little girl sagged out of the narrow shelter and collapsed onto the ground. From what Paula could make out, she was about eight, and sobbing helplessly.
By the time she joined them, the girl was hugging her parents with wild strength. They were clutching her back, arms tight around her as all three of them wept.
‘Are you okay?’ Paula yelled at the Aleats. She could barely hear herself through the persistent buzzing in her ears.
The man nodded sharply. He glanced at the carbine in her hand. ‘Did you scare them off? Did the governor send you?’
She shook her head. That was when the second rider trotted up, and dismounted with a smooth practised motion that belied his age.
‘Dino?’ Paula shouted.
He plucked small green plugs from his ears. ‘What?’
‘You must be Dino, the biologist.’
‘Good guess. Xenobiologist, actually. But no need to screech.’ Biologically he was in his late fifties, shorter than average with thinning dark hair turning grey. When he grinned at her she couldn’t help but grin back, his face was that kind of happiness. When he was rejuved he’d probably be quite handsome, an errant thought flashed through her brain.
‘I’m Paula Myo,’ she said, trying to judge a normal volume. ‘What did you use to scare them off?’
‘Screamers. Standard issue for xenobiology exploration teams. Very humane. Most animals shit themselves when they go off; they can’t get clear fast enough.’
‘Ah. Right.’ Sonic weapons were hardly standard issue for Directorate field equipment packs.
Dino glanced back towards the Onid herd. ‘I should get after them.’
‘What!’
‘Will you stop shouting.’
‘I’ll try. Why? Why go after them?’
He gave her that grin again. ‘I want to know where I went wrong. I need to find out what’s going on.’
Paula eyed the shaken homestead family. ‘Humans provoked them.’
‘Okay. How?’ Dino’s hands swept round the land, gesturing at the solitary bungalow.
‘I don’t know. That’s . . .’ what I’m here to find out.
‘The Paula Myo, huh? I’ll enjoy working with you, Investigator.’
‘I work alone.’
‘Oh. So are you getting a signal from your tracer?’
Paula looked out towards the distant foothills, but the herd had vanished from view amid the folds in the land. She sighed. ‘You need to get back to town until this is over,’ she told the three Aleats. The girl pushed herself closer in to her mother, seeking comfort.
‘Town?’ the father spat. ‘Back to town! I’m getting off this whole bloody planet. And I’m going to sue Farndale. We nearly died out here. You’re my witness.’
Which made Paula give the heavens a brief resentful glance. Actually, she supposed it was a sign of civilization, nobody reaches for a gun any more, just their lawyer.
When she dropped her gaze back to Dino he was trying not to smirk. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘What sort of range does that tracker have?’
The rain was a great deal heavier than she’d been expecting. In fact she’d been on few planets which produced a downpour with such volume. Her broad-brimmed hat and range coat with its high collar were almost irrelevant. The water hit so hard it seemed like it was soaking straight through the coat’s guaranteed waterproof layers. It was cold, too. Making her shiver even though she could still see the hot late-afternoon sunlight pouring down from a clear sky on the western horizon.
Both horses plodded forward through th
e deluge, their heads hung low, snorting and steaming. Her OCtattoos were showing her the tracker was barely fifty metres ahead of them now, somewhere in amongst a rambling stone outcrop. Without a word, she and Dino dismounted simultaneously. They both hunched down and crept forwards.
In these conditions infra-red vision was next to useless as they slithered among the thick stone spines. Paula scanned round as far as the sensor inserts on her arms and head could reach, which in this weather wasn’t much beyond two hundred metres. There were no other Onid showing up in any spectrum she had available – though admittedly the inserts weren’t configured for this kind of work. The herd must have left the tagged one behind. But why?
Twenty metres. The signal was perfectly steady. Coming from behind a big chunk of flaky sedimentary rock nearly twice her height, and leaning at a slight angle away from her, forming an overhang where the tagged Onid must be sheltering. Water ran down its sides, making them slick; even the streaks of grey-blue moss in the crevices had turned to soggy sponge.
She pointed to Dino to take the left side, and held up her janglepulse pistol, which theoretically should work on Onid nerve fibres. Dino moved surprisingly fast, and Paula rolled herself round the rock, guided by targeting graphics to bring the pistol into perfect alignment on . . .
‘Shit!’
There was no Onid. The little tracker pellet lay on the mud, its adhesive side still sticking to a strip of flesh.
A frowning Dino picked up the small neutral-grey pellet, wrinkling his nose up at the dangling flesh. ‘This was torn off,’ he exclaimed.
Paula could just about hear him clearly now. The buzzing in her ears had declined to a nasty tinnitus ringing during their pursuit across the grasslands. ‘Why would they do that?’ she asked.
Dino’s shrug was eloquent enough, even with his long coat obscuring his shoulders. ‘Wrong question. How did they know it was there?’
Manhattan in Reverse Page 25
