Manhattan in Reverse

  ‘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.

  And I’m the one who is going to be reporting the wrong classification. Knowing full well how much vilification that would bring down on her, she wondered briefly if Wilson had set her up. Payback for the Oscar case? But no, even as she considered it, she knew it wasn’t true. Plunging Menard into chaos, ruining the lives of millions of refugees, along with depressing the already fragile Commonwealth economy just to settle a personal score was not something Wilson Kime would consider, let alone instigate.

  How ironic, then, that he’d chosen the one person in the galaxy who would not shirk from delivering the bad news of the Onid’s true status to the Commonwealth authorities. Because it is the correct and legal thing to do. Her psychoneural profiling ensured she would always do what was right and proper. It was what she was.

  ‘Horses,’ Dino said.

  Paula reined in Hurdy and scanned round. Her inserts couldn’t find anything moving across the rustling grasslands.

  Dino gave her a smug look, and pointed down. ‘When you do as much fieldwork as I have, you aren’t completely reliant on sensors and recognition programs.’

  Paula zoomed her retinal inserts on the patch of ground he was indicating just beside the track the herd had left, finding the pile of horse dung.

  ‘Three or four days old,’ Dino said. ‘Judging from this trail I’d say there were four of them, and riding quite fast. See how far apart the broken blades are? That’s some speed, almost a flat-out gallop.’

  Paula dismounted and studied the ground. Now she knew what she was looking for, the riders’ trail was clear and obvious. They merged here, but before that the riders had galloped along not quite parallel to the herd’s battered-down path.

  ‘I think we just found our reason,’ Dino said.

  Paula glanced over to where the Kajara Mountains were standing tall above the grasslands. The foothills and their broad skirt of forests were only five miles away now. Turning the other way, she tried to work out where the horse tracks were leading. Some large stretches of woodland in
the distance were the only distinguishing features. According to the map her e-butler threw into her virtual vision that whole area of the plains was empty, there were no claims, no homesteads allocated. Nothing. Not even the marker posts had reached that far yet.

  ‘Yes,’ Paula agreed reluctantly. ‘The riders have stirred them up. But why? What are they doing?’ She gave Dino a sharp look. ‘What does Onid meat taste like?’

  ‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘They’re biologically similar, but not compatible. The cellular proteins are all wrong for us, and nitrogen content is way too high as well. Barbecue one of these little beauties and best case – you’d spend the next day throwing up. That’s not your answer.’

  ‘What do they excrete?’

  ‘Ah, nice try, Investigator. You’re thinking it might be valuable, like guano?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Again: no. Their poop is nothing special. There’s a high-ish iron content, but that’s from the marak root. It’s all in the report.’

  Paula scanned the foothills with their thick covering of dark trees. ‘So what’s in there that is so valuable to someone that they risk all this?’

  ‘This is what I love about my current job,’ Dino said. ‘So much unknown to explore.’

  ‘Let’s go do your job, then,’ Paula countered, and climbed back up on Hurdy.

  Both sets of tracks ran side by side to the fringe of the woods. Inside, the straggly undergrowth was hard to read, so much of it was churned up by horses and Onid. There had been a lot of traffic passing through the whole area over the last few weeks.

  ‘It’s a general thoroughfare here,’ Dino declared.

  ‘That’s good for us,’ Paula declared. ‘They both have the same objective.’ They dismounted, and started leading their horses past the fat trunks. Hoofs crunched loudly on the flakes of bark carpeting the ground. Paula’s inserts started scanning, alert for any Onid moving about in the forest. After forty minutes the trees thinned out again, revealing a long open valley with a wide river flowing swiftly along the bottom. The foothills which built up the top end of the valley were quite steep, with a great many streams churning down their crinkled, boulder-strewn slopes.

  Paula stood in the shade of the last clump of trees, running a wide scan across the valley. Several Onid were visible, moving slowly as they bent down and scrabbled for marak roots. She slipped back behind a trunk.

  ‘Now this is what I expect to see,’ Dino said, peering round the tree next to her. ‘All very tranquil. There’s nothing here that anyone could want.’

  ‘Let’s see what we can find,’ Paula muttered. She led the way back into the forest where they’d tethered the horses. Now the only way they’d be detected was if an Onid walked directly into them, a chance she was willing to take. She opened one of her saddlebags and took out a slim case with eight eyebirds in it. The little gadgets were disc-shaped, five centimetres in diameter, comprising a slim outer ring crammed with sensor systems, and a central contra-rotating fan. Their motors spun up silently, and they rose out of the case to hover in front of her while her e-butler loaded in a search pattern. As soon as the procedure was complete, they swarmed off into the valley, rising up to a level fifteen-metres altitude.

  Images slid up into Paula’s virtual vision. The eyebirds were crammed with an astonishing number of sensors. If there was any kind of abnormality she was sure they could find it for her. It would be a tough search, she admitted after the first five minutes. The valley seemed a pleasantly bucolic place. None of the eyebirds could detect a large thermal source that might indicate a predator of some kind. It was a theory quite high on her probables list, that humans had lost some kind of animal, possibly one of the endangered terrestrial species. She knew that cheetahs and panthers and lions and several other types were bred in secret colonies on some worlds. You paid a small fortune for the privilege of hunting them, but there were always people with that kind of money. And a world like Menard would be the perfect place to set up such an enterprise.

  ‘I’ve got the burial ground,’ Dino said. ‘Eyebird three, look. But what’s happened to it?’

  Paula, who was accessing the feeds from eyebirds eight and five, switched her attention over to three. One of the long stretches of meadowland at the base of a tall rock cliff was the heart of the herd, with the graves showing as small mounds of earth. It needed to be a big area, there were a lot of the mounds, she realized, the oldest were almost flat. The majority were covered in the local grass-equivalent, but a good fifth of them had been dug open. It hadn’t been done neatly, long spills of fresh earth were scattered around each one. Whoever did it was in a hurry.

  ‘Are you sure there are no native predators around here?’ Paula asked.

  ‘We never saw any. There’s a beast in the northern part of this continent, a Gruganat, which is close to a terrestrial lion, but a lot faster. They feed on Onids and other animals. But none have been spotted here.’

  ‘Could this be the first one? Humans are settling in the north, too; we could have driven them out of their traditional hunting grounds.’

  Dino pulled a sour expression. ‘Gruganats prefer fresh meat. And they wouldn’t have any problem killing it here.’

  Paula moved eyebird two to cover the burial ground in more detail, directing it down to hover over one of the opened mounds. It wasn’t a particularly deep excavation, the decomposing corpse was just visible at the bottom of the shallow oval hole.

  ‘It wasn’t a carnivore doing that, then,’ Dino said. ‘The body hasn’t been touched.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Paula said. ‘And look at the edges of the hole. They’re clean, straight. That was a spade. This is what those riders have been doing.’

  ‘The totems,’ Dino exclaimed in a shocked tone. ‘They’ve taken the totems. Each Onid is buried with the tribe’s totem. No wonder they’re so angry.’

  ‘Why? What would anybody want with the totems? Your report said they were just stones.’

  ‘They are. Pebbles, sticks, even a flower once; each herd has a different one. All they do is reinforce the herd identity, that’s what we thought.’

  ‘What does this herd use?’ Paula asked.

  ‘I’ve no idea. Each herd has something that’s abundant in their territory.’

  Paula moved eyebird two over to an intact grave. Its sensors gave the mound a fast sweep. ‘There’s some kind of metal in there.’ She read off the results table that slithered across her virtual vision. ‘Definitely metallic, a small lump.’

  ‘Metal?’ Dino asked. ‘Are you sure?’

  She sent the eyebird over to the next grave. Sure enough, it contained a lump of metal, the signature was almost identical. ‘Metal detecting is about the oldest science there is. I can’t determine the composition, unfortunately. There’s only so much you can pack into an eyebird.’ She raised her hand up in front of her face. The slim lines of an OCtattoo materialized across her skin, as if her veins were being invaded by quicksilver. ‘I need to get a bit closer for a decent readout. I don’t want to desecrate anything the way those riders have.’

  ‘Where does the herd get metal from?’ a puzzled Dino murmured.

  ‘I don’t know. But it’s got to be valuable to humans somehow.’ She couldn’t think how. ‘Maybe an alien starship crashed nearby, and they’re picking up the wreckage.’

  ‘Is that likely?’

  ‘Not really,’ she admitted. ‘We’ll have to get down there to find out for sure.’

  ‘We can’t risk getting caught,’ Dino said. ‘The herd’s upset enough as it is.’

  ‘Are they heavy sleepers?’

  Before Dino answered, eyebird six sent an alert; several solid objects were airborne below it. They weren’t large, and they didn’t rise quite high enough to strike it. They fell back to the ground, but not before the next barrage was rising.

  Paula looked directly through the eyebird’s camera. A dozen or so Onid were clustered below it, flinging stones. She hurriedly instructed it
to raise altitude. When it was thirty metres above the ground, she paused it. The Onid were still there, still throwing stones. More were joining them. Their hoots of alarm were slowly crossing the valley.

  ‘How the hell did they see it?’ she asked incredulously. ‘It’s silent, the fan balances on superconductor bearings, and the colour is dehanced-grey.’ She glanced up at the clouds scudding past the mountain peaks. ‘It’s practically impossible to see it against a sky like this. Do they have some kind of ultra-vision?’

  ‘No,’ Dino said. ‘Their eyesight isn’t even as good as ours.’

  ‘Then how . . .’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He looked back towards the edge of the forest. ‘We really need to know what’s in those graves.’

  Paula focused back on the images from eyebird six. There were twenty Onid below it, scraping stones from the ground and flinging them up. She instructed the eyebird to fly slowly down the slope towards the fast river at the bottom of the valley. The Onid followed it as if it was their guru. ‘How?’ she whispered. The question would have to wait, this provided her with a perfect tactical opportunity. She quickly directed four other eyebirds to join up with number six, sending them low over the ground, weaving about so they passed close to various batches of Onid. After half an hour, with the creatures’ hoots and squeals echoing across the valley, the five eyebirds were together in a loose V formation. Below them now, and still hurling their ineffectual missiles, were over a hundred Onid, with what looked like every other member of the herd heading across the valley towards them.

  The eyebirds drifted towards the end of the valley and the forest beyond. Holding station five hundred metres above them, the remaining three eyebirds watched the burial ground and the surrounding land. It was now devoid of any Onid.

  ‘If they were sentient they would have left guards,’ Dino said as they rode out of the forest close to the burial ground.

  ‘Yes,’ Paula conceded. Hurdy trotted along the base of the cliff, keeping to the thick shadow it was throwing. If the Onid did have poor sight as Dino claimed, they’d be hard to see in such shade. Even so, she eyed the fissures in the grey rock warily, holding the carbine ready for any ambush.