Hal Colebatch - The Wunder War

She put away the calculations she had been scribbling at. “An aircraft landed there and took off again,” she said. “That's the most probable thing. A fairly small one, but a good deal bigger than this. Not an ordinary private car. It landed and took off vertically but without chemical rockets—there's no sign of burning—and without jets or sufficient downdraft to damage the vegetation. But it hasn't left a ground-effect trail. That is very strange. In fact impossible.”

“Yes. I thought you might say that. I wanted someone else to confirm it.”

“Maybe it took your specimen.”

“Yes. What I'm worried about is the possibility that my specimen was flying it.”

Anyone else would have been brought up short by that. She took it in instantly.

“In that case it would hardly have made just one landing. Have you looked for other sites?”

“Not yet. There's too big an area to search.”

“Perhaps we can narrow it down. Why did it land here? What's special about this place.”

“The monastery.”

“Yes. Let's say your specimen landed near the monastery because it was curious. Maybe it's landed near other human dwellings. What about the marshmen's shacks? And perhaps the marshmen have seen something.”

I would have asked the marshmen the previous day, except that they tended to be highly unapproachable. On Wunderland, with plenty of good farmland for those who wanted it and good communications, hermits were hermits from choice. We were proud that here, unlike Earth, we respected individuals' privacy. But things had been different the previous day.

I pulled the car's nose up and we headed across the swamp. There was a bit more wildlife to be seen below us today, but it still seemed unusually shy and skittish.

There was old Harry's cabin on Hook Island. Or rather, there had been. There were a few pieces of walls and roof now, scattered about. There was a disturbed area about the same size as that in the grove.

The island had no trees, no cover anything could be hiding in, I thought. I did a couple of cautious passes and we landed.

The monastery garden had been silent but for the insects. This was a silence that was not perfect but of an utterly different quality.

There were the prints, obvious in soft ground. Very big, clawed prints, made by something very heavy. Water oozed into some, and one already had red froggolinas swimming in it. There was a kermitoid with markings I had not seen before… Most of the small creatures around seemed ordinary enough, even if I couldn't name them all. Grossgeister teamed with life in a huge variety of kinds and sizes, including creatures on the larger islands who occupied the ecological niches held on Earth by bear, swamp deer, or cougar. At any other time my professional interest in them would have been more intense. I must get on with my great project of classifying all this , one part of my mind remarked. My work in the caves was a preparation for the greater biological treasures of Grossgeister… I jerked my mind back to what was in front of me.

Tigers in the muddy Sundaband Islands. Swimming tigers. We were standing on a permanent island made by channels less than fifty meters wide. On the other sides of those channels were tall reed beds and other islands with higher vegetation that might hide anything. Part of the wonder of Wunderland was the variety of its animals, descendants of survivors of successive catastrophes caused by major meteor impacts. And the fauna boasted its full share of opportunistic predators.

Could something charge out of that vegetation and across the channel before we could get back to the car? I get the feeling we are babes in the wood here , I thought. I hadn't even a gun. The headland where the monastery stood was only a few kilometers away, but here in the channels of Grossgeister the vegetation hid any other horizon.

The swamp was silent, but, as it were, not quiet when one listened: water rippling and bubbling, the grunts of mudfish, the queer singing of the froggolinas and insectoids. But were these ignorable, day-to-day swamp sounds covering up any others? The sounds of something approaching? Cats stalked silently.

There were peculiar smells in the air, some of them natural odors of swamp vegetation, living and dead. Others that I didn't know.

There were the eyes and nostrils of a couple of small crocodilians in the still water, looking like pairs of floating Bob's Berries or drifting bubbles. In a way the sight was reassuring: the presence of adolescent crocodilians meant the probable absence of big ones. A twin-tailed serpiform thing sailed by with head held high like a periscope. Something very large and white and curved floating just under the surface brought me up short, heart jumping, until I realized it was the marshman's boat. Or part of it.

There has been violence and disaster here , I thought. I had occasionally had dangerous moments on field trips, but that had been different. My assistants and I had always been equipped and prepared. Here I felt prepared for nothing. What am I doing bringing Dimity into a place like this? The unknown is always dangerous. Get her out now! And not just because I love her!

“Nils! Look at this.”

Something metal glittering in churned-up mud, almost buried. A heavy automatic gun, the sort the marshmen used to kill the big crocodilians whose back armor might deflect even the needles of a strakkaker. Useless for specimen collecting, it would leave little of any specimen.

It was smashed. Twisted into junk.

It had been loaded with high-explosive bullets and set for automatic fire at 300 rounds a minute. Three rounds only had been fired. There were the casings on the ground. And there were stains on the recoil compensator and pistol grip that looked like blood. A predator?

“Nothing that powerful fits the ecology.”

“I know.”

“And this is the longest-settled part of the planet. If there was a predator like this here before we'd have known it. You would have seen it in all the other animals. Things would be faster, more powerful, better defended.”

She was confirming what I had thought. But I had needed her to confirm it. I didn't want to damage the evidence before any investigation, but now that I had handled the gun already I thought I had better take it back. It would be easy enough to separate my DNA from anything else that might be on it.

I saw the honker, an electronic fence device to keep crocs and other possible intruders away, including humans if necessary. Honkers were a good deal more potent than their name might suggest, and like most modern electronics they worked perfectly when they were in one piece. This one was in many pieces, strewn in the mud.

Then Dimity pointed again. There was something different in her walk and stance, as though she had changed into something like a hunting predator herself. The café coffee-drinker was not there. Her ears were laid flat back. I had forgotten she had that much Families blood in her. There was a dark pool of what I was now sure was blood, surrounded by froggolinas and covered with small insectoids, scraps of cloth, and, gleaming pinkish-white among them, what I recognized at once as a human femur, cracked open at the lower end, part of the pelvic socket still attached at the upper.

I dropped the broken gun as we ran to the car. I saw another bone fragment in the mud as we passed: it looked like part of the zygomatic arch of a human skull, but I didn't stop to examine it. There were other scattered fragments too, I now saw. I wanted to get back to the city fast, but was still unable to recognize the voice of my own survival instincts. We gained a reasonable height and turned a little farther into the swamp.

“The monastery looks like a fort,” Dimity said as we approached it. “High walls round the courtyard, no windows, the tower, the edifacium like a castle keep. It looks quite defensible. You've even got that.” She pointed to a tall, smooth-lined metal spire that rose out of a small wooden chapel some distance away. “It looks like a rocket or missile ready for launching. And the marshmen's shacks?”