Peter Hamilton - Manhattan in Reverse

‘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.