They dismounted as soon as they reached the first of the little mounds. The silver lines of Paula’s OCtattoo appeared again over her hand, spreading a delicate lacework back down her forearm. She knelt beside the first grave, and slowly waved her hand over the wispy grass-equivalent.
The results of the scan materialized in her virtual vision, tight bright graphics superimposed over what she was seeing. ‘Holy crap,’ she gasped.
*
It wasn’t difficult to track the riders’ trail across the open grassland. Paula and Dino took four hours to reach the thick woodland it led into. She sent another small flock of eyebirds flitting through the trees as they walked forwards cautiously. The airborne sensors scanned round for any sign of human activity. Three more of the little gadgets zoomed high above the wood, which produced an almost immediate result. The trees were crowded around a lake. Right in the centre was some kind of crude raft with a plyplastic tent for a cabin. Sensors saw a couple of people moving round. Paula hurriedly withdrew the eyebirds in case the riders had their own sensors.
‘Now what?’ Dino asked.
Paula put her force field skeleton suit on over her clothes and ran a fast integration and function check. ‘I go and deal with them,’ she told him, and pulled the carbine out of its saddle holster.
Dino gave her an uneasy look as she clipped more weapons hardware to her belt. ‘Deal with them how, exactly?’
‘Take them into custody, and fly them back to the capital for trial.’
‘Right.’ He eyed the janglepulse pistol she was checking. ‘Okay, so what do I do?’
‘Wait here. This is what I do. Trust me.’
‘And the totems?’
‘Once I’ve recovered them, we’ll return them to the herd. You might want to think about how we do that.’
‘Paula . . . I saw the eyebird images of the raft. That was a big tent, and there are four horses we know about. They’ll be armed. Maybe we should get Charan’s posse out here to help.’
‘I don’t need help, but thanks for your concern.’
For a moment it looked like Dino might object, but in the end he just threw up his hands and said: ‘Your area.’
‘That it is.’
*
Paula skirted the lake, walking parallel to the shore until she found the outflow stream. The ground on either side of the gurgling water was sodden, more sludge than mud, sludge that bubbled with the most noxious gases imaginable, farts from as-yet unclassified microbes. All of which made it ideal for a tall reed-equivalent plant to flourish. Her chest and trousers were painted thick with the sludge as she slithered forward through the prickly strands. Then she was right up to the edge of the lake, elbows in the water, parting the last of the reeds. She hadn’t activated her force field skeleton yet, if the riders had even a modest sensor system on the raft they’d spot it.
Her retinal inserts zoomed in to give her a clear image. It was actually two rafts. The main one, with the hemispherical tent on top, was firmly anchored with four thick ropes leading down into the water, one at each corner. Docked to it was a smaller raft, with a high railing around it. Four horses stood on its rough planks, placidly munching through the contents of their nosebags. A ferry rope stretched away from the main raft to a tree above the shore; it ran through a couple of iron hoops secured to the planks on the smaller raft.
Not a bad hideaway, Paula acknowledged. The Onid couldn’t swim, that was very clear in the original report; and the thick woods shielded the gang from any casual human observation. One of the men walked out of the tent, dressed in jeans and a yellow T-shirt. He carried a bucket in one hand. A belt holster held a rapid-fire automatic pistol. It would probably decimate the Onid herd, but didn’t pose any danger to her, not in a force field.
The man went down to the other end of the raft, where some badly made wire cages were strapped to the decking. Paula was surprised to see each cage contained a baby Onid; squatting miserably in their own excrement, fledgling upper limbs squashed against the galvanized wire. The man opened the top of the first cage, and scooped a flaccid olive-brown marak root out of the bucket. He dropped it into the cage, where the little Onid grabbed it eagerly, gnawing at the mushy pulp with bad immature teeth.
‘Why oh why?’ Paula mumbled to herself. It was almost rhetorical. Everything she’d seen, all the factors of the investigation were coming together in her hyperactive subconscious as they always did.
She drew a small kinetic gun from her belt, wrinkling her nose up as the movement burst yet more bubbles in the sludge. Her e-butler reprogrammed the enhanced explosive tips in the bullets, dialling them down to their absolute minimum. She took aim carefully on the ferry rope where it was secured to the tree. Her e-butler fired the gun – avoiding the minute motion of her finger squeezing a physical trigger, which might throw the aim off a fraction. She needed accuracy for this. A maser or X-ray laser would have worked, and been completely silent, but again she didn’t want to risk sensors picking up the shots.
The bullet hit the trunk and detonated with a tiny thuck sound. Her amplified hearing could just make it out, but only because she was listening for it. The man feeding the captive Onids certainly didn’t. The rope fell into the water with barely a ripple.
Paula shifted her aim, the targeting grid centring on an anchor cable where it went into the water. Thuck. A small plume of water burped up, and the cable went slack.
She got two more anchor cables before the man raised his head, glancing round with a puzzled frown. Refusing to rush, Paula lined up on the last cable, slicing it cleanly.
The man was peering over the side of the raft now, trying to work out what was wrong. Eventually he let out a grunt and bent down to haul up one of the anchor cables. The frayed end was held up in front of his face. Paula couldn’t help chuckling at his classic expression: ape examines pretty colours of hologram projection.
He started shouting in alarm. Three more men and two women came out of the tent. More shouts reverberated over the still lake as they discovered all the anchor cables were cut. Surprise turned to anger. Paula started wriggling backwards, retreating into the trees. The next stage was going to be the slowest snare in history. They’d realize that eventually, and when they did that anger would turn to fright. That was when they’d get desperate.
She waited patiently, with a single eyebird hovering in the cover of a tree at the opposite end of the lake, revealing the raft’s painful progress to her. It wasn’t exactly a large amount of water which the streams brought into and out of the lake, but the current was steady.
Sure enough, when they were forty metres away from the mouth of the stream, the gang on the raft brought out their weapons. Paula catalogued two old military-grade maser carbines, a hunting rifle, the automatic pistol, and a couple of pump-action shotguns. She began to walk along the stony stream bed towards the lake. Her force field skeleton activated, cloaking her in the dimmest of purple shimmers.
‘There!’ one of the men bellowed as she emerged from the darkness of the overhanging trees. She stood at the mouth of the stream, dripping slime into the water like the original swamp monster. Every gun they had fired simultaneously. They weren’t very good shots. Those beams and bullets which did strike her were easily deflected by her force field. It rarely even flared blue.
The horses on the smaller raft began to whinny, tossing their long necks in panic, jostling against each other. The raft wobbled alarmingly.
Amid the barrage, Paula calmly drew her janglepulse, and shot the flank of a horse with a low-level pulse. It shrieked and reared up, front hoofs cycling in the air before crashing down, tipping one side of the barge below the surface. Then the poor frenzied animal jumped through the rail into the water, and began swimming. The other horses charged after it. Mud and water churned up around them in a filthy slush as they made their way towards the lakeside, angling away from the glimmering purple figure at the head of the stream.
The raft drifted onward, dragged inexorably by
the current. When it was twenty metres away Paula shouted: ‘I am Investigator Paula Myo. You’re under arrest, please throw your weapons into the water.’
‘Fuck you, bitch!’
‘Uh huh,’ she grunted as the masers opened fire again. Phosphorescent sparkles shivered through the air about her as the shotgun blasts reached her. She raised the kinetic gun, cranked up the explosive tip to full, and fired straight into the tent.
She’d been completely wrong. A plyplastic tent was exactly like a balloon; when the bullet detonated, the whole thing burst apart with a bright violet flash. Fluttering strips of shrinking plastic whipped savagely at the gang, ripping clothes and lacerating exposed skin. The yells were more from shock than pain, the damage was mostly superficial. Paula used the janglepulse on maximum power to shoot the man who’d fed the Onid. The raft was only fifteen metres from the stream mouth now. He spasmed, and collapsed unconscious onto the decking.
‘Throw down your weapons,’ she repeated. ‘I won’t ask again.’
They hesitated, then one by they let their weapons drop into the lake.
*
Paula launched a comdrone, which shot up to a two-kilometre altitude. From there it established a link to Lydian’s diminutive cybersphere, allowing her to make the call. Twenty minutes later, the Farndale executive hypersonic was landing beside the woods in a downblast of air that sent a wild cyclone of grass and leaves swirling about. Greg Wise hurried down the airstairs to stare at the sullen captives standing beside Paula and Dino.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘They aggravated the herd by graverobbing,’ Paula told him. ‘That’s why the homesteaders have been attacked. The Onid didn’t know how else to vent their anger over the violation. Any invader is a target for them, they can’t distinguish between us. But it’s over now.’
‘Graverobbing? What the hell is in an Onid grave?’
Paula and Dino exchanged a look. Paula held up one of the dozen bags they’d recovered from the raft. Greg gave her a surprised glance when he felt the weight, then opened it tentatively. ‘Shit!’ he pulled out a nugget longer than his thumb. ‘That’s gold.’
‘The real raw thing,’ Paula confirmed.
‘Every herd uses a different totem,’ Dino said. ‘This herd had the misfortune to pick gold. To them it’s nothing, a different kind of rock, to us . . .’
Paula waved at the Kajara range dominating the horizon. ‘There must be some rich veins in the ore up there and the nuggets wash down from the mountains. The whole area around their burial ground is laced with streams.’
Greg shook his head at the nugget. ‘So they just grab the closest shiny thing, huh?’
‘Yeah,’ Dino said.
‘Poor them,’ Greg said. ‘So do all the herds along the mountains use gold?’
‘Not all,’ Dino said. ‘And certainly not the next few along. But if it’s prevalent, they’ll use it.’
‘Damn. I wonder how much ore is up there? We completely missed that in the geological survey. Not that the preliminary satellite scans are ever particularly detailed.’
‘I’m sure Farndale will rectify that soon enough,’ Paula said. She removed the bag from Greg’s grasp. ‘In the meantime, we need to keep this quiet. I’ll take this gang back with me to Paris, the prosecutors can charge them with endangering the settlers. It means they can be kept in isolation for the immediate future.’
‘Sure,’ Greg said. ‘That fits in with my brief. So will the herd stop now?’
‘We’ll take the totems back,’ Dino said. ‘That should satisfy them.’
‘Take it back?’ Greg gave the bags a startled look. ‘You’re going to give it to the animals?’
‘It’s the only way to stop the raids on homesteads,’ Paula said.
‘Someone else is going to find out what they’ve got soon enough,’ Greg warned. ‘There’ll be a stampede of prospectors out here. They’ll bring heavy machinery into the mountains. Everything will get shoved aside.’
‘I’ll talk to Wilson Kime,’ Paula said. ‘See what we can work out.’
‘Your call,’ Greg said.
‘That it is,’ for now, anyway, she added silently. ‘Get these prisoners away to the capital now; then come back for me. I shouldn’t be more than another day here.’
*
Paula and Dino rode across the grasslands, heading straight for the herd’s valley, making no attempt to conceal themselves. They led three of the horses from the raft, who were laden with the bags of gold. The seven baby Onid freed from cages bounded along beside the horses.
‘I know what the Onid have,’ Paula said as they entered the forest surrounding the valley. ‘I know how they saw the eyebirds, and how they knew about the tracker.’
Dino gave her a startled look. ‘What?’
‘Process of elimination. Besides I have it myself.’ She held up her hand as her e-butler activated the sensor mesh. The silver threads of the OCtattoo gleamed in the bright sunlight. ‘They can see electricity. Terrestrial bees have something similar, don’t they?’
‘A magnetic sense,’ Dino said. ‘Of course! That fits everything. They can sense metal like the nuggets lying about. Hell, it might even be why they can always find marak roots. The tubers have a high iron content. Damn!’ He grinned happily.
Paula was still smiling as they came out into the open. The baby Onids started to hoot enthusiastically. Before long every adult in the valley was heading for them.
‘Just keep going for the burial ground,’ Dino said as the herd swarmed round the horses. This time they didn’t pick up stones, but they still circled quite fast.
When they reached the mounds at the base of the cliff, Dino got down and unhitched each of the bags, cutting them open so the nuggets spilled across the ground. The herd rushed in, claiming the nuggets, clutching them close and then running off to find an open grave.
Paula was amazed to see them scamper past the closest desecrated mounds. Instead, each Onid choose a specific grave for the totem they carried. ‘They know which grave each totem belongs to,’ she said.
‘Their ancestral identity is everything to them,’ Dino said. ‘We saw that right from the start.’
‘That kind of memory must count for something. Surely they must be classed as proto-sentient now?’
‘Possibly.’
The replacement process took over an hour. ‘I have a theory, too,’ Dino said when only a few nuggets remained. He picked one up, and in his other hand he held a flashgem. They’d been popular in the Commonwealth years before; an artificial crystal which stored photons directly, then released them at random to produce elegant sparks. The Onid who came to reclaim the nugget hooted softly, staring at the gentle sparks. It reached for the flashgem. Dino withdrew the bauble, and proffered the nugget instead. The Onid reached for the flashgem again.
Dino persisted for a while, denying the Onid the flashgem each time until he finally dropped the nugget at the Onid’s feet and stood up, pocketing the flashgem. The action agitated the Onid, but it eventually picked up the nugget and rushed off to find the grave to which it belonged.
‘What are you doing?’ Paula asked.
‘Suppose one of the herd dies, and they can’t find a nugget for its totem?’ Dino asked. ‘After all, the water is washing them down those streams the whole time. They’re not static. There’s no guarantee.’
‘So?’ Paula asked. ‘They wait until the rains wash down another batch.’
‘No. The graves and the herd are everything to the Onid. I think they do it differently.’
The last totems were retrieved and carried off to the graves. ‘Watch the one I offered the flashgem to,’ Dino said.
Paula saw it scrabble soil back into the mound’s hole. When it was finished, it scurried off to the base of the tall cliff, and disappeared into one of the fissures.
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Good reasoning, Dino, I’m impressed. We could make an Investigator out of you yet.’
‘Yeah, in
ten lives’ time when I’m so utterly bored with everything else.’
The Onid reappeared, carrying a new nugget. It was large. The Onid had to use both its forelimbs to hold it.
‘Well what do you know,’ Paula said. ‘A genuine cave full of treasure. Thank heavens the raider gang never found that. They’d own Lydian by now, probably half of the continent to boot. How much do you think is in there?’
‘Enough,’ Dino said. The Onid hurried over, and Dino gave it the flashgem in return for the new nugget, which was half the size of his fist. He produced another flashgem. The Onid raced back to the fissure.
Paula leaned forward, resting her hands on the front of the saddle. ‘Just how many of those flashgems have you got?’
‘Not enough. I need to bring a crate back here. Will you give me that time. Please?’
‘Dino . . .’ She paused because what he was saying was completely out of character. Then she thought she saw tears in his eyes. ‘What do you want that kind of money for?’
‘What would have happened if the asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs back on Earth had missed?’
‘Er . . .’
‘Would they have evolved into sentients eventually? Would they be the ones who’d just fought the Starflyer War?’
‘That’s a rhetorical question, right?’
‘Actually, no. It’s a romantic question. They had millions of years to develop rationality, and failed. We, on the other hand, have only been around in our current form for about thirty to fifty thousand years depending who you listen to, and already we’re here, two hundred light-years from Earth. But this is a deciding moment for the Onid; we’re their dinosaur killer, Paula.’
An Onid bounded up, carrying the biggest nugget they’d seen. Dino smiled ruefully at it, and swapped the precious metal for another flashgem. ‘How about that. I’m the new Peter Minuit.’
‘Who?’
‘Peter Minuit, the Director General of the New Netherlands province. In 1626 he purchased some land from a tribe of the Wappinger Confederacy, allegedly using trinkets and cloth to a total value of 60 guilders. It was the best land deal the human race has ever known.’
Manhattan in Reverse Page 27
