The Gabble and Other Stories

by Neal Asher

  ‘I’m going to lie down now.’ She cast away the dregs from her cup and returned it to her pack. Standing, she faced him. ‘Would you care to join me?’

  ‘I don’t sleep,’ he said, looking distracted.

  ‘Don’t be obtuse.’

  He turned to her, focused, grinned.

  ‘I promise not to be too rough with you,’ she added, and to save pride turned away and entered her tent. She felt slightly miffed that he took so long following, and came in after she had turned on the oxygenator and stripped naked. He bowed in, quickly closing and sealing the entrance behind him. Shedding his breather gear he said, ‘You surprised me.’

  ‘Are propositions so rare for you?’

  ‘Not rare, but frequently problematical.’ He paused thoughtfully, as if about to launch into further explanation.

  Shardelle reached across, snagged the front of his envirosuit and pulled him into a kiss then down on top of her. He seemed reluctant for a moment, then softened into it. His hands began caressing her with almost forensic precision, as if he was checking the location of all her parts. Eventually he backed off and struggled out of his envirosuit. There was not much foreplay after that. She did not want any, and came violently and quickly. After cleaning herself with wipes from her toiletries she said, ‘Perhaps we should continue this in the morning.’

  ‘Perhaps we should,’ he replied.

  She lay back relaxed, her body heavy on the ground as if someone had stepped up the strength of a giravplate below her. Closed her eyes for a second … He was shaking her by the shoulder.

  ‘Come see.’

  Shardelle lay bleary and confused before realizing that she must have fallen asleep. Checking her wristcom she saw that five hours had passed. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Heroynes.’

  She took up her breather gear only, clicking only mouth mask into place, and stepped out naked with that up against her mouth. Out there, striding through the flute grasses, were four heroynes. She studied one closely. It stood on two long thin legs that raised it high above the grass itself, much like its namesake. Its body was L-shaped and squat with a long curved neck extending up from it. To its fore, numerous sets of forearms were folded as if in prayer. It had no head as such; the neck just terminated in a long serrated spear of a beak. Each of these creatures stood a good ten metres high, and moved swiftly across the terrain in delicate arching steps carrying them many metres at a time.

  ‘Always weird,’ she said into her mask.

  She turned to him. He was fully dressed and watching her.

  ‘Are you still tired?’ he asked.

  Her answer was no, and he took her from behind bent over the tyre of the ATV, then again in the morning, long and slow in the tent, before they set out. Shardelle felt this trip out was most therapeutic for her.

  Jonas smiled to himself as he considered the night past. He felt enlivened and humanized by the experience, and certainly it had been beneficial for Shardelle. She seemed relaxed and easy, sated. But Jonas compartmentalized it as she started the ATV on its way, and returned his thoughts to some things that had been bothering him throughout the long watches of the night.

  Hooders. Damn them.

  Perhaps the sex had blown the crap out of his system because certain biological peculiarities now seemed clear to him.

  The superfluities in the hooder genome could explain the lack of virally implanted parasitic DNA. The creature might have quite simply, from the beginning, had a powerful and almost complete immune response to viral attack. Dubious, but explainable. What was not explainable was something so obvious, he cursed himself as an idiot for not seeing it. The hooder was the top predator here. Hooders did not fight each other. Their prey were on the whole soft-bodied grazers with little more defence than speed. Why then did hooders need armour capable of stopping an anti-tank round?

  ‘You know how hooders are hard to kill?’ he asked.

  The ATV was rolling down the hill into what was known as Dragon’s Fall. Shardelle glanced at him with that slight lustful twist to her mouth. ‘I know. It’s why the Tagreb perimeter is supplied with proton weapons.’

  He nodded, tried to concentrate on the matter in hand. ‘It’s their armour, and their speed, but mostly the armour.’ He paused for a moment. ‘You know there are other creatures with thick armour capable of bouncing bullets, but that’s usually because there’s something in their environment with a fair chance of cracking through it. The laminated chitin on a hooder stops most projectile weapons. Even lasers have little effect. You want to damage one of those creatures and you need to upgrade to APWs and particle weapons, and even then you’re talking about the kind of armament most people couldn’t even carry.’

  ‘Maybe some other predator now extinct?’

  ‘But what the hell would that be?’

  She gestured ahead into the crater. ‘We’ll probably never know. ECS apparently had teams excavating this place for ages trying to find draconic remains. They didn’t find much.’

  ‘Tricones.’ Jonas nodded.

  The molluscan soil-makers of this planet were a problem in that respect. There were some fossils to be found in the mountains, but only there. Out here the tricones crunched up nearly everything solid down to a huge depth, and mostly all that could be found below the deep soil layer was the chalk then limestone remains of the tricones themselves.

  ‘Maybe there’s a parasitic reason for the thick shell,’ Shardelle suggested. ‘I’m thinking in terms of the Earth parasite of snails that thickens their shells to protect itself.’

  ‘But that results in the snail being unable to breed. There’s always some balance to be upset. I’d also expect to see some hooder uninfected – thin-shelled.’ He shrugged. ‘Then again, a general infection of them all may account for their low population.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll find the answers on that beach.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Abruptly Shardelle slowed the ATV. He glanced at her and saw she was peering intently at the further edge of the crater. There were figures over there, humanoid.

  ‘Dracomen,’ she whispered excitedly.

  Jonas initiated a visual program in his aug, magnified what he was seeing and cleaned up the image. Six dracomen, two of them carrying some animal corpse strapped to a pole between them, the other four scattered around them. Two of the others were small – dracoman children. 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 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, for the two carrying the pole laid it down and then they all stood waiting. As they drew closer, and he could see them clearer, 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 ri
fle this one carried. It seemed 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 something like a horse’s skull. Yellow ichor ran from something that was stuck in the body just behind that 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 gabble-ducks. 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 metre long had breached. This creature consisted of three long cones joined like Pan pipes, each revealing in its mouths gelatinous nodular heads which extented sluglike to lift the creature up, then propel it narrow end first back down into the ground.

  ‘We will,’ said Jonas, turning back towards 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 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 travelled 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 travelled the remaining kilometre 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 armour 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 by the wind of even dead flute grass.

  After auging for a moment, Jonas replied, ‘Go right.’

  Shardelle tracked elevation lines with her finger. ‘Yeah, I think I see it.’

  They travelled along above the beach for a kilometre, but downhill with the cliff growing shorter as they travelled and eventually petering out. A steep slope brought them down onto the sand and from there they travelled back below the cliff. Lower down it was jagged limestone. Shardelle looked up and saw burrows in the compacted soil above that, and many falls. Tricone shells were embedded up there, and many more shattered on the limestone. 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 metres wide and a hundred metres 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 smelt 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 towards the hooder’s cowl, much of which Shardelle now saw was buried in sand. ‘I’ve brought a few hundred litres 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 A
TV to haul the front end over and drag it free …let’s get to work.’

  Shardelle nodded as he headed back towards 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 giro-stabilized, but it bucked and twisted as its diamond-tooth blade bit into hard carapace. Already the disc 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 manoeuvred 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.