Neal Asher: The Gabble

This was the first time Jonas had seen them and he studied them closely. Though humanoid, their legs hinged the wrong way, like birds. Their scaling was green over most of their bodies but yellow from groin to throat. Their heads were toadish, jutting forward on long necks. They carried rifles of some kind.

Shardelle set the ATV moving again, altering its course to intersect with theirs.

“What are you doing?” Jonas asked.

“I want to talk to them.”

“We’re not here to study dracomen. There’s a whole branch of ECS that does that-military, now dracomen are being recruited.”

“Not study. You’ve got your corpse, but I still want mine. Dracomen hunt, as we can see-I’d just like some information on what exactly they do hunt.”

The dracomen obviously spotted that the ATV was heading in their direction. The two carrying the pole laid it down and then they all stood waiting. As Shardelle and Jonas drew closer, and he could see them more clearly, Jonas began to wonder if this was a good idea.

These creatures looked dangerous. Then he dismissed the idea as unworthy. They may have looked like something out of a VR hack-and-slash fantasy, but, from what he knew, they might well be more sophisticated and technically advanced than most Polity citizens. Shardelle parked the ATV on the brow of the crater edge ahead of them. Turning on their masks, the two of them left the ATV.

“Good morning!” said Shardelle, holding up a hand and advancing.

One of them moved forward, its head tilted as it eyed her, almost like a cockerel coming to inspect a grub.

“We greet you,” it said, halting.

Jonas eyed the rifle this one carried. It appeared to be made of translucent bone and something shifted inside it like visible organs. It seemed alive.

“If you don’t mind,” said Shardelle, “I have some questions I would like to ask.”

Jonas now saw that their catch was a mud snake: a fat grublike body terminating in a hard angular head that looked a bit like a horse’s skull. Yellow ichor ran from something that was stuck in the body just behind the skull: a short glassy shaft to the rear of which were affixed two testicular objects. The dracoman tracked the direction of his attention, then abruptly stooped and pulled the object from the mud snake. He now saw that this thing possessed a barbed point. It looked like a greatly enlarged bee sting. The dracoman did something with its rifle and the side of the weapon split open. It shoved the barbed object inside and closed the weapon up. All the time it did not take its eyes off Jonas.

“Ask,” it said.

“You hunt many animals,” said Shardelle.

That was not a question so the dracoman did not dignify it with a reply.

“Do you hunt gabbleducks?” she asked.

The dracoman exposed its teeth in something that might have been a grin. It glanced around at its fellows who grinned similarly.

“No,” it replied.

“Why not?”

“We only hunt prey.”

“Not predators?” She gestured to their catch. “Surely mud snakes are predators.”

“All predators are prey.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes.”

“Do you hunt hooders?” Jonas interjected.

By the amount of exposed ivory he guessed that was a hilarious question to ask.

Shardelle waved a hand as if to dismiss his question. “Why don’t you hunt gabbleducks?”

“They are protected.”

“Under Polity law, yes, but I thought your people had been allowed hunting rights to feed yourselves … within limits.”

Some unspoken signal passed between the dracomen, for the two bearers once again took up the pole.

“Wait! You have to give me something!” said Shardelle.

Jonas glanced at her, realizing by the tone of her voice how desperate she was to find answers about the gabbleducks. The dracomen began to move off.

“Please,” she said.

One of the dracoman children halted and gazed up at her.

“The meat is forbidden,” it lisped, licking out a black forked tongue. It glanced at Jonas.

“Except to hooders.” Then the child scampered off after the adults.

“Delphic, just like their creator,” said Jonas.

“There was probably a wealth of information there, if we could figure it out,” Shardelle replied. She peered down the slope to where a tricone about half a meter long had breached.

This creature consisted of three long cones joined like Pan pipes, each revealing in their mouths gelatinous nodular heads which extended sluglike to lift the creature up, then propel it narrow end first back down into the ground.

“We will,” said Jonas, turning back toward the ATV, “given time.”

They made love on the second night, slowly, leisurely, and most of the time Jonas remained in the tent with her while she slept. He did not have to do that, but she was glad he did.

“In the morning we should come upon your big friend,” he said at one point. “What do you intend?”

Shardelle grinned at him, suddenly unreasonably happy. “Well, I’d like to ask him what he and the rest of his kind have been talking about. Do you think he’ll tell me?”

He smiled. “You know there’s a kids’ interactive book you can find here. The technology is Polity stuff but the stories were created here-distortions of old Earth fairy tales. When I said to you it moves like a bear, I was thinking of one particular fairy tale: Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but in this case the three bears were gabbleducks.”

“Your point?” Shardelle asked.

“Well, she crept into their house to try their food and their beds….”

“Yes, I know … and baby gabbleduck’s bed was just right….”

“It was,” said Jonas, “and baby gabbleduck thought Goldilocks just right when he ate her.”

“Is there a moral to this?”

“Just be careful. I don’t want to lose you now that I’m getting to know you.”

Frustration awaited in the morning with Rodol telling them to divert from their course.

Two hooders lay in their way. It would be too dangerous to approach the giant gabbleduck.

“They might attack it,” said Shardelle, half minded to ignore Rodol’s warning.

Jonas reached out and put a hand on her arm. “On the way back-I promise you.”

They passed through an area where the shore wind had blown fragments of dead flute grass inland and mounded it in drifts, then into an area clear of everything but new shoots.

Evening sunset revealed the sea and the beach. They spent the night inside the ATV, Shardelle bedding down on the floor. At sunrise they traveled the remaining kilometer to the edge of a cliff, and they soon located the dead hooder.

The dune across which the enormous creature was draped imparted a curve to its forward segments emphasizing its resemblance to a spinal column. Shardelle was reminded of ancient saurian exhibits in museums on Earth, and models and diagrams from the early years of the science of osteopathy. Its head was spoon-shaped, concave side down to the sand, its armor plates spreading in a radial pattern from the neck. Judging by the grooves leading down from the creature to the water’s edge, its first discoverers had dragged it up the beach. They must have used some aerial craft to do this, since there was no sign of any other track marks in the sand.

“Do you know how we can get down there?” she asked, tapping up an elevation overlay on her map screen. The ATV rested above the beach just back from a steep muddy cliff. All around them the ground was level and had been scoured of even dead flute grass by the wind.

After auging for a moment, Jonas replied, “Go right.”

Shardelle tracked elevation lines with her finger. “Yeah, I think I see it.”

They traveled along above the beach for a kilometer, but downhill with the cliff growing shorter as they traveled and eventually petering out. A steep slope brought them down onto the sand whereupon they traveled back below the cliff. The lower part of the cliff was jagged limestone. Shardelle looked up and saw burrows in the compacted soil above that, and many falls. Tricone shells were imbedded up there, and many more were shattered on the limestone.