Neal Asher - The Gabble

“How long will it take us, do you think?” he asked, now looking ahead. They were leaving the Tagreb enclosure, rolling across an area of trammeled flute grass through which new red-green shoots were spearing.

“How long do you want it to take?”

“Your meaning?”

“Sixty hours if we go non-stop. Rodol can guide the ATV during the night … do you need sleep?”

“No-I’m asomnidapted.”

“Ah, well I’m not.” She glanced back. “I guess I could bed down there overnight.”

Jonas shook his head. Now that they were on their way his urgency to get to the dead hooder had decreased. “No, let’s stop during night time. I may not need to sleep, but I don’t want to spend that length of time just sitting here. There’s camping equipment in the back, so you can get your head down.”

Shardelle guided the ATV down one of the many paths crushed through the flute grass and leading away from the Tagreb.

“And what will you do meanwhile?”

He tapped his aug. “Continue my research. Rodol is sequencing the hooder genome and transmitting the results to me. I’m running programs to isolate alleles and specific coding sequences. I intend to build a full virtual model of hooder growth.”

“But first you need to be rid of the parasitic and junk DNA to get to the basic genome.”

“Yeah, obviously-I’ve got programs working on that.”

“It’ll probably be a massive task. The assumption has always been that hooders are the most ancient creature on the planet’s surface. The gabbleduck is probably younger, and its genome is immense.”

“Yes, quite probably,” Jonas replied, then after a moment, “I don’t really like the term junk DNA.”

Once, centuries ago, no one had known what all the extra coding was for. Now it was known that it was history: old defensive measures that no longer applied, viruses incorporated into the genome, patches much like additional pieces of computer code to cover weaknesses in a program. Some biologists likened much of it to the scar tissue of a species, but Jonas felt that not entirely true because it could, on occasion, provide survival strategies. Perhaps a better analogy would be to the scar tissue and consequent experience of an old warrior.

“You have a better one?” Shardelle asked.

“Reserve, complementary or supplementary.”

“Very good.”

By mid-morning the sun was passing underneath Calypse, throwing the gas giant into silhouette. Jonas spotted the snout spurs of mud snakes cleaving the rhizome layer ahead of them-attracted by the vibrations the vehicle created-but they disappeared from sight, perhaps recognizing the inedibility of ATV tires. Checking her map screen, Shardelle turned the vehicle from flattened track and nosed it into flute grasses standing three meters tall. The cockpit skimmed this, its lower half in the grass. A faint hissing sound impinged under the varying hum of the hydrogen motor and hydrostatic gearing. Eventually they broke from the flute grasses and began negotiating a compacted slope where the old grasses had been flattened by the wind.

Reaching a low peak, a vista opened to one side of them. A fence stretched out of sight in two directions. Over the other side the ground was black, hazed with occasional reddish patches where new grass was sprouting.

“Quarantine area,” Shardelle observed. “You were here for six months before the Tagreb arrived. Do you know what they’re so worried about?”

“No monitor will answer direct questions, but, by the methods used, I’d guess biogenetic weaponry was employed.” He gestured to the blackened terrain. “What you see here is only the flash-over area-the perimeter of a firestorm. I’d guess that the hypocenter was the strike point of an orbital beam weapon. They burnt that inner area right down to the bedrock and now they’re watching to make sure nothing survived.”

“Seems rather excessive.”

Jonas decided to tell her the whole story, and wondered if she would think the actions ECS had taken here so excessive then. “You have to consider: how did one man ‘steal’ a Polity dreadnought? Mary Cole, a monitor I know, let slip that the research vessel Jerusalem was here for a time. You know what that means.”

She glanced at him. “Jain technology?”

He nodded. “A few fragments sit in the Tranquility Museum on the Moon. That part of the museum can be instantly ejected and destroyed by CTD. It seems that fact is the biggest part of the attraction of the exhibit, because what sits there in a chainglass case just looks like a few bits of coral. It’s the potential though: a complexity of dead nanomachinery that still, as far as I know, defies analysis.”

“Someone used active Jain technology?”

“It would seem so. First to steal the dreadnought, then use both dreadnought and technology to hit this place.”

“I’m surprised anyone has been allowed here at all.”

“I’d guess the AI view is that they can’t be overprotective. Three distinct and extinct ancient races have been identified: the Jain, Atheter, and Csorians. Remnants of their technologies exist, so it’s no good us burying our heads in the sand in the hope they’ll go away.

We have to learn how to deal with them, hopefully before we run head first into something that might destroy us.”

“And, of course, there are those that are not extinct, like whatever created Dragon.”

“Precisely.”

She looked at him, waiting for something more, then prompted: “Do you think we’ll ever get the full story of what happened here?”

“The bones will be fleshed out in time. We know the Theocracy was supplying Separatists on Cheyne III and used technology, bought from Dragon, to destroy an Outlink station. The Polity supported the rebellion here that finally overthrew the Theocracy. Dragon changed sides, apparently because it did not like blame being attributed to it for the destruction of the station, and assisted that rebellion before suiciding on the surface. The guy who stole the dreadnought?

Some Separatist coming here on the side of the Theocracy. He and his ship were incinerated while pursuing Polity agents to the Elysium smelting facilities.”

“But is that really what happened here? The whole thing could be a cover for something deeper, something the AIs have been doing out here, perhaps some experiment that went wrong,” said Shardelle.

Jonas snorted. It amazed him how scientists, whose entire ethos was based on logic and empirical proof, sometimes wanted to believe complete rubbish.

“I’ve never put much credence in conspiracy theories,” he stated, which killed the conversation for some time.

Shardelle listened to the engine wind down, and to the slow ticking of cooling metal. She had parked the ATV on a hillock that she knew extended in a ring some kilometers in diameter. It was a good place to camp, the ground being too dry for mud snakes. She liked the view as well and felt safer being able to see for kilometers in either direction. Rodol was watching over them by satellite and would warn if anything was getting too close, but this vantage gave them the opportunity to eyeball any of the natives and decide themselves whether it might be necessary to run. She turned to Jonas.

His eyes were closed, but, obviously, he was not sleeping. He was auging-probably deep in some virtuality in which the hooder genome lay across his entire horizon and, godlike, he peeled away clumps of it for analysis and compiled the resultant data. She studied his profile, the hard intensity of his features, the natural tan that came from spending a lot of time outside.

Eventually she unstrapped herself and left him to it, turning on her shimmer-shield visor and snagging up her field tent and related equipment on the way out of the ATV. The landscape was red gilded by the nebula when he joined her an hour later. She was sitting in her camp chair before her tent, her visor flicking off and on as she sipped coffee.