Neal Asher - The Gabble

Many of the soil makers had obviously not known when to stop and burrowed straight out of the soil to fall and smash themselves. When they eventually reached the hooder it seemed more like some rock formation than any beast, being over two meters wide and a hundred meters long.

Wind-blown sand had mounded around it. It seemed ancient: a dinosaur skeleton in the process of being revealed. She brought the ATV to a halt in the lee of the monster.

“Let’s take a look,” said Jonas.

The moment they exited the vehicle they smelled decay. Shardelle noted black insectile movement in the heaped sand, then spied one of the creatures close to her feet. It looked like a small prawn, but black and scuttling like a louse.

“Every living world has its undertakers,” Jonas explained. “Let’s just hope they haven’t destroyed too much.” He pointed toward the hooder’s cowl, much of which Shardelle now saw was buried in sand. “I’ve brought a few hundred liters of repellant. I’ll confine direct physical autopsy to the cowl and a couple of the segments behind it. I don’t suppose the rest will tell me much more.”

“But you’ll scan it entire?”

“Yes.” He turned to her. “If you could dig out the terahertz scanner and run it down both sides a segment at a time?”

Shardelle grinned. “I can do that.”

“Start with the cowl and those front two segments. It’s going to be hard work, but I’ll run a carbide cutter through there,” he pointed to a section behind the two mentioned segments,

“then we can use the ATV to haul the front end over and drag it free … let’s get to work.”

Shardelle nodded as he headed back toward the ATV, but, instead of following, she walked up close to the massive corpse, reached out and ran her fingers over the stony surface.

Unlike the vertebrae of a spinal column, this was all hard sharp edges seeming as perilous as newly machined metal. It was not metal-more like rough flint and with the same near translucence. Seeing holograms, pictures, film of this creature in action in no way imparted the sheer scale of this lethal machine of nature. She shuddered to think what it would mean to be this close to a living specimen. But this one was definitely dead. She sensed an aura of some awesome force rendered impotent.

The circular saw was gyro-stabilized, but it bucked and twisted as its diamond-tooth blade bit into hard carapace. Already the disk blade had shed three of its concentric layers of teeth, and Jonas’s shimmer-shield visor was flicking off and on to shed the sweat that dropped from his face onto it. He had cut only halfway through, taking out wedges of carapace just as a woodsman would remove wood with an axe. Now he was into the soft tissue of the creature,

“soft” in this case meaning merely of the consistency of old oak rather than carbide steel.

Glancing down the length of the monster’s body he saw that Shardelle had nearly reached the tail with the terahertz scanner. All hard work, but he was satisfied. The scans alone, taken at close range on a static target, should reveal masses of features not detected with distance scans. And, soon, he himself would be delving inside that wonderfully complex, and macabre, cowl. He shook more sweat from his face and continued to work.

Three replacement blades later, he had broken through. Shardelle, bored with waiting, had maneuvered the ATV into position, sunk its ground anchors into the sand, and run out the cable from its front winch to the hooder, where she secured it through a hole diamond-drilled through the further edge of the cowl. Jonas backed out of the carnage he had wrought, lugging the circular saw, which now seemed to have doubled in weight. He gave her the signal to go ahead, and moved aside.

Shardelle started the winch running, the braided monofilament cable, thin as fishing line, drawing taut. After a moment, the note from the winch changed and the far side of the cowl began to lift. Black carrion-eaters began to swarm like ants. Sand poured from the cowl as it came up vertical to the ground, then in a moment turned over completely.

Jonas spotted something revealed where the cowl had lain and walked over. Carrion eaters were thick on the ground there amid a tangle of bones and tatters of leathery skin. He had wondered why they had been so numerous around the hooder itself, for it seemed unlikely they could feed upon its substance before time and bacteria had softened it sufficiently. The creature had obviously gone to its death still clutching recent prey. He returned, picking up the saw on the way, to Shardelle.

“Drag it over there.” He pointed to the cliff. “We’ll spray with repellant and set up a big frame tent over it.”

She looked askance at him.

“Please,” he added.

The cowl, with two body segments still attached, sledded easily across the sand. Jonas took a tank of the repellant from the ATV, slung it from his shoulder, and, using a stemmed pressure sprayer, walked around this section of the beast, liberally coating it. Carrion eaters fled in every direction. The tent, which came in a large square package, he sat on the first body segment and activated from a distance. Within seconds the package spidered out long carbon fiber legs, stabbed them into the ground, then dropped fabric down like a bashful woman quickly lowering her skirts.

“Let’s get the equipment set up,” Jonas said.

Later he was delving into the cowl: pulling up jointed limbs that terminated in scythe blades as sharp and tough as chainglass, or in telescopic protuberances that looked like hollow drills; excavating one red eye from the carapace, jumping back when it fluoresced, laughing and returning to work; running an optical probe down into one small mouth to study the cornucopia of cutting and grinding gear inside.

“You know, the present theory is that the hooder requires all this so it can deal with a kind of grazer living in the mountains. Those creatures feed on poisonous fungi, the toxins from which accumulate in the black fats layered in their bodies. When the hooders capture them under their hoods, they need to slice their way through their prey very meticulously, to eat only what are called the creature’s white fats.” He glanced at Shardelle who was watching with fascination.

“They don’t kill their prey,” she observed.

“Apparently. When the hooder goes after a fungus grazer, the grazer immediately starts breaking down the black fat to provide itself with the energy to flee, and then its blood supply and muscles become toxic, too. So any serious damage to either could release poisons into the uncontaminated white fat. The hooder dissects its prey, not even allowing it to bleed. It eventually dies of shock.”

“The same with any prey it catches,” Shardelle added. “Including us.”

“I don’t believe it for a minute,” said Jonas. “The fungus grazers are only a small part of its diet, and many hooders don’t even range into the mountains.”

“Why, then?”

“I just don’t know.” He lifted out another jointed limb, this one terminating in a set of chisel-faced pincers. “All I do know is that when they’ve finished with their victim there’s usually nothing left larger than a coin.”

He continued working, only noticing much later that the tent’s light had come on, and that Shardelle had gone. Looking outside he saw that she had set up her own tent, and no light showed inside. He went back to work, only stopping in the morning to get something to eat and plenty to drink, and to then sit meditating for an hour while his asomnidapted body cleared its fatigue poisons. As Calypse gazed down and the rising sun etched fire across the horizon, he experienced a moment of deep calm clarity. He knew now, felt that somewhere, deep inside, he had always known. So much confirmed it. Total confirmation had come from close nanoscopic study of the carapace. The sun had breached the horizon when he returned inside to package his samples. He needed no more from this beast now. Others could come here if they wished.