Neal Asher: The Gabble

“They’re coming.”

He picked up his QC laser.

A rushing hissing impinged. Jonas could feel the ATV vibrating. He closed his eyes and swallowed dryly. What did his theories matter now? And, should he not state them, Rodol would have most certainly worked it all out.

The first hooder came in from the right, its front end rearing thirty meters into the air, then coming down like a striking snake on the mountainous corpse. It began feeding, its long body rippling down its length. He did not see the second approach, just suddenly there were two hooders there, tearing at the corpse. Then a crash and the ATV shifted to one side, bouncing on its suspension as another of the monstrous creatures came past. Another rose up behind the others, vertical rows of eyes glowing, eating utensils opening out in a deadly glassy array. Down.

Corpse jerked this way and that. Limbs conveyed away, sheets of skin peeled, fat and muscle and sprays of milky blood. Soon there was more hooder to be seen than gabbleduck: a great black Gordian tangle, racketing with the sound of some vast machine shop. It took less than an hour. One hooder slid away, then another. Jonas waited for one to come straight at the ATV. He wondered when he would fire the first shot through the side of Shardelle’s head. When it hit the vehicle, when it tore it open, or at the point when one of those cowls poised above them? One of the creatures came close, shaking the ATV and jouncing it along the ground as its carapace worked like some giant rough saw down the side of the bodywork. Then they were all gone, and he was staring down at the map screen watching their transponder signals depart.

“I guess they’ve eaten enough,” said Shardelle.

There was nothing solid left, only fluids spattered on ground that looked as if it had been ploughed.

“Bones as well-everything,” said Jonas. “But then that is probably their purpose.”

She looked at him, sharp, annoyed. He stood and headed for the door and she followed.

“You want to know what The Gabble is?” he asked, standing at the edge of the churned ground.

“Of course I do.”

He gestured to the mess before them. “Something made the hooders and the tricones.

The hooders were most certainly a weapon in some war and the tricones made to digest the physical remnants of a civilization.”

“But why?”

“We’ll probably never know the answer to that. Tricones and hooders possess the same planetary genome as the gabbleducks, which means the gabbleducks probably made them. But their final purpose might not be the gabbleduck’s own.”

“You hinted that you knew what The Gabble is,” said Shardelle stubbornly.

“Maybe it’s a language of non-meaning: words spoken by a race that has given up, withdrawn, even chosen to forego intelligence. A race become so self-effacing it has made tricones to wipe out every trace of its civilization, and turned its own war machines to the purpose of destroying even the remains of its own devolved descendents. Or perhaps it’s even worse than that.”

“How could it possibly be worse?”

“Perhaps they lost some war, and this was done to them by the victors: their civilization erased, their creatures turned upon them-just enough mind remaining to them so they always remember what happened, that scrap of intelligence just enough for them to know how to hold off the hooders until they die.”

Shardelle shivered. Jonas felt an immense sadness at the core of which grew the seed of new purpose. Calypse hung above the far horizon, etched out by the setting sun, and, silhouetted, came the ECS transport. Tragedy here, or choice-he did not know. He swore to himself, in that moment, that one day he would.