Manhattan in Reverse (34 page)

‘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 the 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?’

‘If something whacks you in the arse, you tend to know about it.’

He shook his head. ‘Naah, don’t believe it. Not an animal. It wouldn’t know this from a nut dropping off a tree. Besides, the tracker is designed to flex on impact, reduce the smack so there’s no suspicion.’

‘So you’re saying a proto-sentient might manage to work out that the tracker was something bad?’

‘Even if we ballsed up the classification, and they are proto, how would it know?’

Paula shoved the pistol back in her holster. ‘Simplest solution applies: someone told it.’

‘Really? Someone sat down and explained the principles of encrypted digital radio tracking to a creature who has a total of two grunts, one for “food” and another for “danger”?’

‘You classify by vocabulary?’

‘It’s a big part of the assessment process, yes. Communication is the bedrock for sentience; as an indicator for self-awareness it has yet to be beaten. The greater your comprehension beyond the range of simple instinctual triggers, the higher up the scale you are.’

‘Okay, so how did it know to get rid of the tracker?’ She gave the device and its incriminating flesh another look. ‘And it must have really wanted to get rid of it, tearing that off must have hurt like hell.’

Dino started examining the mud around the rock. ‘They don’t have good teeth,’ he mumbled. ‘So . . . Ah, here we go.’ He fished a slim shard of rock out of a puddle, and held it up, squinting. ‘Interesting. My inserts can just detect cellular material on the edge here. Rudimentary knife, I’m guessing.’

Paula winced. The ‘edge’ wasn’t that sharp. ‘So they do know tools?’

‘Possibly. We never saw any evidence of tool usage before. It’s probably just an instinctive solution.’

‘I’d say you’d have to think about a solution like that.’

‘Good job you’re not the expert filing these reports, then. Dropping a snail on a rock to crack its shell: sign of tool usage, or instinct?’

Paula gave him a
look
, doubtless wasted with her skin soaking wet and sodden ebony hair plastered to her cheeks. ‘We need more information.’

‘Of course we do. That’s why we’re here.’

She couldn’t work out if he was deliberately being rude, or he unconsciously talked down to non-xenobiologists. ‘We can set up camp here for the night. I seriously need to get dry. Their trail will be easy enough to follow in the morning.’

‘Did you bring a tent?’

‘I’m sure my assistant remembered to pack one for me.’

*

Paula was pleased to see he didn’t oversleep. Like her, Dino was up at dawn, ready to begin the day. Not a classic academic, then.

Her hemispherical plyplastic tent shrank back down to a ball barely larger than her fist while she got on with triggering the thermal tabs on her breakfast packs. Chilled orange and mango smoothie to start with, then hot tea with a smoked salmon and scrambled egg bagel.

‘Creature comforts, eh?’ Dino said as he folded away the more traditional lightweight tent he’d spent the night in.

She grinned as she bit into the bagel. At least he was using packs rather than trying to light a Cro-Magnon campfire and spear something to eat. ‘We’ve spent centuries building up the benefits of civilization. Why abandon them now?’

‘My tent is simple yet perfectly adequate. Yours is the extreme end of consumerism technology. Ten times the cost, and you can’t patch it up if you puncture it.’

‘Plyplastic doesn’t tear easily. It’s not a balloon.’

‘You’ve reinvented the wheel.’

‘We’ve refined the wheel. We took your circle of wood and gave it a tyre and suspension. Because that’s what we do, improve things.’

Dino pushed the last of a bacon sandwich into his mouth. ‘I wonder if the Onid agree with that.’

‘If they philosophize about that kind of thing, then they’re definitely sentient.’

‘Yes.’ He started strapping various packs onto his saddle.

‘So are they? Something alerted them to that tracker. They knew it was wrong, or dangerous. Doesn’t that indicate a rational analytical process?’

‘I don’t know, okay? I spent most of last night trying to put this together, and I got nowhere. There’s nothing in any of our data which could have anticipated this behaviour. We’re missing something.’

‘All right then, let’s go and find it.’

The herd’s track was easy enough to find again. After leaving the Aleat homestead they’d headed for the Kajara Mountains, cutting a straight line of trampled grass-equivalent across the land.

‘Do they have some kind of home we can track them to?’ Paula asked. ‘A nest, or warren, or something?

‘The burial ground is always their centre,’ Dino said. ‘Herds don’t normally stray too far from it, just enough to graze for food.’

‘They’re herbivores, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘So they don’t have an instinctive attack methodology?’ Paula mused.

‘Correct,’ Dino said as he mounted up.

‘They’re sentient, then,’ she said insistently. ‘They worked it out for themselves.’

Dino just shook his head dismissively, and flicked the reins.

Paula let out a small curse of dismay as Hurdy plodded on beside him. She could see that Dino’s team had got the classification wrong, even if he refused to admit it. At the very least, everything she’d witnessed would force an official re-evaluation.

It would be hellishly difficult to evacuate every human off the planet, she knew. Or more likely impossible. The people who’d flooded across this world in the wake of the war to build themselves a better life had an edge about them, a determination the Commonwealth hadn’t known for a couple of generations. They wouldn’t bow down and accept some well-meaning law imposed by a distant government about allowing aliens a chance to develop freely, not these days.