Manhattan in Reverse (33 page)

The local Farndale office provided a marque12 Land Rover which they drove into town. Governor Charan was waiting in his territory administration building, the largest structure in Lydian.

‘No disrespect, Investigator,’ was his opening line, ‘but you weren’t what I was expecting the board to send me.’

‘And the last thing you wanted,’ she concluded for him.

Charan shrugged eloquently. He was one of Farndale’s senior political managers; two years out of rejuve which gave him the appearance of a healthy twenty-five-year-old. His build was large, emphasizing the image of a no-nonsense administrator who was accustomed to dealing with the kind of real physical problems which pioneer territories always threw up. He wasn’t going to waste his time with corporate bullshit. ‘Frankly, I don’t see what you can do,’ he said levelly. ‘I’ve got a whole herd of Onid kicking the crap out of my homesteaders, and they’re tough families.’

‘Just one herd?’ Paula queried. That wasn’t quite how Wilson had pitched it.

‘So far. They’re running loose somewhere over towards the Kajara Mountains, and that’s rugged country. Lot of valleys and forests, which gives the vermin plenty of space to hide. Maybe you can work out where their refuge is, track them down somehow. That hypersonic you came in on, does it have area denial weapons?’

‘No,’ Gary Main said hurriedly. ‘It’s an executive passenger jet.’

‘Then I’m sorry but you’re wasting my time as well as yours. I have a situation here which needs resolving, and fast.’

‘Violence isn’t the answer,’ Paula said.

‘So much you know,’ Charan snapped. ‘You’ve been here twenty minutes. Not even that old biology guy, Dino, has offered me anything worthwhile, and he’s been out there well over a week now. Look, again, no offence, but if the board isn’t going to help I’m going to put together a posse and issue them with some heavy-duty weapons. Something that’ll finish this permanently. I can’t afford other herds turning rogue on me.’

Paula shot Gary Main a look. ‘Who’s Dino?’

‘Bernadino Paganuzzi,’ Charan said. ‘He was working over in the capital when it hit the fan. Turned up right after the first few attacks.’

‘Why?’ Paula insisted.

‘He was part of the original xenobiology team that classified the Onid as non-sentient,’ Charan explained. ‘Went off after the herd ten days ago, saying he was going to try and find out what’s got them stirred up. Hasn’t been in touch since. Probably got himself bodylossed, silly old sod. Looked like he was due a rejuve a decade ago.’

‘I’d better get after him, then,’ Paula said, quietly enjoying the annoyance spasming across Charan’s face.

‘Investigator, as near as we can make out there’s over two hundred of them in that herd. You might want to consider some back-up. Why don’t I assemble the posse, and you can lead them. That way if there is no nice and quiet solution you’ll be in a place when you can eradicate the herd for us. With all your experience, you’d make a perfect commander for this kind of operation. Everyone respects you.’

You don’t
, she thought. ‘I’m not having some group of trigger-happy farmers riding round with me, nothing will get solved that way. I need to conduct this investigation by myself, thank you.’

‘I’ll be coming with you,’ Gary said as they left the governor’s office. ‘That was part of my brief.’

‘No,’ Paula said. ‘I need you here to keep Charan contained. The first thing he’s going to do now he knows the board isn’t sending his marshals is put together that posse, officially or otherwise. You outrank him, and you’ve got Wilson’s ear on this. Your job is to give me the clear space I need to work the case.’

‘Case?’ Gary asked as they left the administration block behind.

‘Case,’ Paula confirmed. She pushed her shades on against the hot sunlight. ‘As the Governor said, something agitated the Onid. People are the only new factor in their environment. One way or another, we’re to blame. We’ve done something wrong. That makes it a case.’

*

Communication was poor outside Lydian. There was no uniform planetary cybersphere, only small individual nets serving each settlement. Twenty miles from town her connection to the local nodes was operating on minimal bandwidth. Thirty miles and her OCtattoos could barely maintain a link to the primitive relay towers that had been put up. Not that there were many of them. The five com platforms Farndale had placed in geostationary orbit were basic antennae, providing little more than a guidance function; they were still waiting for upgrades to supply universal coverage. Out here it was emergency signals only. If you were lucky.

The Land Rover trundled on up into the higher rugged ground to the east of town. To start with the homesteads were a brochure image of what frontier life should be, neat silver-white bungalows surrounded by lush fields with their first crop a lustrous dusting of emerald green atop the rich loam. Then after thirty-five miles the enzyme-bonded road ran out. The vehicle’s drive array advised her to take manual control as the ground beneath the tyres turned to stony dirt. Her e-butler sent an acknowledgement, and the steering column slid out of its recess. She gripped it tight, her fingers making contact with the i-spots. OCtattoos on her skin completed the link, connecting her nervous system directly to the drive array.

She tried to keep going at thirty miles an hour, but more often than not she was crawling along at fifteen or twenty as the suspension lurched about on the rough surface. It had been a while since she’d driven manually, and her implanted memory skill was slightly foggy. Her main concern was the horsebox she was towing, which sought any opportunity to fishtail about behind her. Homesteads were still visible, bungalows identical to those in town, set back a good mile from the road on either side. For the first hour she watched tractorbots ploughing up the pale red-green grasslands in big neat squares. Wide craters of ash illustrated where clusters of trees used to be.

After a while the dirt track bled away to ordinary grassland. Tall marker posts stretched along ahead, strobes flashing weakly under the afternoon sun. Trees were prevalent on the rolling landscape again. The lumber clearance crews were among the first to retreat when the Onid went rogue. Native vegetation had gloomy green leaves suffused with maroon veins, darkening them down further. Trees shaded close to black. Thick clumps of willow-equivalents overhung small streams, with larger hardwood spinneys colonizing hollows with their flaky trunks packed close to present an impenetrable fence to any animals larger than a terrestrial dog.

By now, human activity had dropped off altogether. The homesteads strung out along the marker line were uninhabited. Expensive tractorbots were parked outside, motionless. It had an uncomfortable resonance with the Lost23 worlds, abandoned so fast possessions were discarded without thought. Finally, all she saw were big cargo containers dropped off in the middle of the wild, their contents unpacked and unassembled.

Sixty miles from town, Paula stopped the Land Rover. The horse Charan had found her was called Hurdy, a chestnut-coloured mare he promised was gentle with novice riders. Paula deliberately hadn’t told him that she’d spent a lot of her early childhood on ponies and horses at her parents’ home out in the countryside. Sure enough, Hurdy was skittish and bolshie until she got the saddle on and mounted up. Then the mare realized that Paula knew what she was doing, and didn’t try to assert herself any more.

Paula set off over the empty undulating land towards the long band of forest which smothered the foothills to the southeast. Rising up behind them were the Kajara Mountains, their snow-covered peaks gleaming brightly under the hot violet sunlight. Something in the local grass-equivalent oozed out a scent of musky cinnamon, which made the humid air even more oppressive. Outside the Land Rover’s air conditioning, she was sweating in minutes.

The Gorjon family’s homestead was her first point of call. It had been attacked two days ago, an act which decided it for most of the remaining settlers, who had headed back to Lydian to shout at Charan. If she could find any clue as to what was happening, it would be there.

She reached it after forty minutes riding. The attack method was interesting. Examining the ground outside the depressingly standard bungalow she decided it had been completely surrounded, every curly blade of grass-equivalent was trampled and mashed into the soil by three-clawed hoofs – a match for Onid feet. Stones had been dug out and flung at the building. All the windows were smashed, the heat-reflective pale silver coating of the walls was shredded, with the tough composite itself scarred and stressed from thousands of impacts. The ground around the building was piled high with loose stones and clods. Peering through the broken glass she saw the floor inside was also littered with stones.

It was all the Onid had, she realized, their one method of attack. The xenobiology team report mentioned their lack of decent teeth and the relative strength of their forelimbs – primarily used for clawing at the soil so they could reach their base food, the marak root.

Two hundred of them flinging stones at the same time would be frightening enough for humans caught at the centre, even if they’d been equipped with a decent weapon to shoot back. And all Farndale allowed its homesteaders was a weak maser to kill off vermin; the last thing they wanted was any kind of range war out here.

Paula circled the battered bungalow. There were no Onid corpses, and a vermin maser wasn’t a difficult weapon, the beam would have caught a few of them, she was sure. The survivors must have dragged the dead herd members away for burial.

But why?
She couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary about the homestead. There was nothing here to antagonize anyone. She mounted up again and rode Hurdy over to the patch of ground which a tractorbot had been ploughing. Like the bungalow, the tractorbot had been victim to a huge barrage of stones. Stones had wedged into the wheels and axles where they’d been ground up and jammed various mechanisms until the safety limiters had cut in. Paula walked away from the forlorn machine until she was in a fresh patch of ploughed land. The tractorbot hadn’t ripped up any marak roots. Even with retinal inserts on high resolution, and her e-butler running visual pattern recognition programs, she couldn’t spot the long grey-speckled leaves of that particular plant anywhere.

So it’s not about food
. That just left territory. Staring out across the vast rumpled land she couldn’t quite credit a non-sentient working out that this was an invasion.
Whereas a proto-sentient might figure something was wrong. But then how come this is the only trouble spot? No other herds on this continent have reacted like this. It has to be something specific to this area
.

She rode Hurdy round in a wide circle until she found the herd’s tracks. They led away towards the sprawl of forest dominating the foothills, which were at least half a day’s ride away. Hurdy started off down the path of battered grass, with Paula keeping an eye on the darkening clouds now twisting above the southern horizon.

After a couple of hours, the clouds were thick in the sky, with the front of the storm now visible as it slid in from the south. Paula had already got an oiled leather riding coat out of its roll at the back of the saddle, ready for the deluge. Then her e-butler received a weak emergency signal.

‘From where?’ she asked.

‘The Aleat homestead,’ her e-butler replied. A map slid up into her virtual vision. She was three and a half miles away.

‘Nature of the emergency?’
As if I don’t know
, Paula thought excitedly.

‘Unknown. It is a high-power beacon emission. Standard issue to all homesteads.’

‘Come on girl,’ she told Hurdy. The horse began to pick up speed, galloping across the dark grass-equivalent.

She was still several hundred metres away when she heard the sound. The Onid were warbling away as loud as they could in a weird tenor mewling, a din which was frightening in its intensity. They might not have had a language, but the cries expressed intent with shocking clarity. They were angry. Very angry.

Hurdy cleared the last ridge. Ahead of Paula, what looked like a small dense typhoon of dark particles swirled through the air above the homestead. The Onid herd was circling round and round, moving at a startlingly fast run for a creature with so many limbs. And Charan had seriously underestimated their numbers; there must have been close to five hundred of them. As they ran they bobbed down in a smooth motion, high forelimbs ripping something from the ground every time, a stone or chunk of tough dried earth, and then flung it at the homestead as hard as they could.

‘Ho crap,’ Paula grunted. Hurdy had come to a stop, allowing her to scrabble round and extract the maser carbine from its saddle holster. Even now she was reluctant to shoot.

Then a human wail pierced the air, carrying above the Onid’s angry racket. Paula knew it was female, and probably quite a young girl. Her OCtattoo sensors helped her work out the direction.

The homestead’s tractorbot. Standing alone two hundred metres from the bungalow where it had stalled. Over twenty Onid were already circling it. Stones were tumbling down on the curving red bodywork. And Paula caught sight of the petrified girl, squeezing herself into the small gap between the rear wheel and the power casing.

Her OCtattoos were also telling her someone was firing maser shots out of the bungalow’s broken front door. Peripheral vision caught a couple of Onid falling.