Manhattan in Reverse

MANHATTAN IN REVERSE

It was five days after Easter, and Paris was soaking up the heat from an unseasonably bright sun. Paula Myo, Deputy Director of the Intersolar Commonwealth’s Serious Crimes Directorate, slipped her shades on as soon as she emerged from the marbled archway of the Justice Courts. Her escort squad pushed past the unisphere reporters crammed on the broad stone stairs. The clamour of shouted questions merged into a single unintelligible burst of noise. Even if she’d wanted to comment on the verdict she would never have been heard. It always amazed her how stupid reporters were, as if any one of them could have gained an exclusive under this kind of circumstances.

Not that her opinion would’ve been welcomed by the large crowd of protestors shouting and jeering behind the cordon which the city gendarmes had thrown up across the big boulevard outside. They’d certainly picked up on the Easter theme. Glaring holographic placards demanded RESURRECT OSCAR NOW. FREE THE MARTYR. OSCAR DIED FOR US, SAVE HIM FOR OUR SINS.

Her deputy, Hoshe Finn, was standing beside the Directorate’s dark Citroën limousine which was waiting at the foot of the broad stairs. ‘Congratulations, Chief,’ he muttered as the malmetal door curtained open for her.

Paula took one last glance at the snarling faces of the protestors, all directing their venom at her. It wasn’t what she was used to. Disapproval and not a little bigotry because of what she was, certainly. As the one person from Huxley’s Haven, otherwise known as The Hive, to live in the Greater Commonwealth she had long since accepted her own notoriety. Like all of Huxley’s residents she was genetically profiled to excel at her job, which in her case was police work, a profession which normally brought a decent amount of approval for the conclusion of a successful case.

Not this time.

The long Citroën turned smoothly into the Champs Elysées, and headed for the Place de la Concorde.

‘You know, even I’m wondering if I did the right thing,’ Paula said quietly.

‘I doubted,’ Hoshe said, ‘until you brought the families into the office to prepare our case. You were right when you said time doesn’t diminish the crime. Their children still died, a real death, not just bodyloss.’

‘Yeah,’ Paula said. Doubt unsettled her. It wasn’t what she was supposed to feel, not with her psychoneural profiling. Everything should be clear-cut, with no room for messy little emotional distractions. Perhaps the geneticists who designed me didn’t know quite as much about DNA sequencing as they thought they did.

Ten minutes later they drove down into the modern underground garage that had been cut out below the ancient five-storey building which housed the Directorate’s Paris office. Secure gates unfurled behind them. She wasn’t really worried about anyone trying to physically confront her; although the number of displaced from the worlds lost during the Starflyer War was still alarming now, eleven months after the war had ended. The amount of homeless and destitute people roaming the streets was too high, despite the city authority’s sincere efforts to find them places in restart projects on the fresh worlds.

A lift took them up to the fifth floor and the open-plan office she commanded. Her team were all behind their desks, which was unusual enough. They shot her concerned looks, as if they were sharing a collective guilt.

Alic Hogan was rising to his feet. ‘Sorry, Chief,’ he said. ‘He didn’t have an appointment, but we couldn’t really say no…’ Alic trailed off with a subdued glance over at Paula’s own office.

The door was ajar, showing her someone sitting in front of her desk.

Paula was quite pleased with herself as she went in and shut the door behind her. There weren’t many people in the Commonwealth who could walk into the Directorate building without being invited, let alone get all the way up to the fifth floor. And fewer that would want to. She’d narrowed the probables down to a list of three — Wilson Kime was the second.

‘Admiral,’ she said cautiously.

Wilson rose and shook her hand courteously. But then he was over three and a half centuries old, with manners from a bygone era; she wasn’t expecting an angry altercation. ‘So it really is true,’ he said ruefully. ‘You always get your man.’

‘Do my best,’ she said, annoyed with herself for sounding defensive. She was what she was, why should she ever apologize for that? ‘Though your lawyers were good.’

‘Best that money could buy. But you threw up a hell of a case, Paula.’

‘Thank you.’

‘That wasn’t exactly a compliment. Oscar Monroe sacrificed himself so the human race could survive a genocidal attack. Doesn’t that count for anything with you?’

‘Yes. But not at the intellectual level which I work at. I can’t allow that to influence me.’

‘Jesus,’ Kime muttered.

‘I did recover his memorycell myself,’ Paula reminded the old war hero. She didn’t go into how risky that had been. Kime’s own sacrifices during the final showdown with the Starflyer were at a level far above hers.

Millions had suffered bodyloss on the worlds invaded and obliterated during the conflict. Clinics across the Commonwealth were overwhelmed with people undergoing re-life procedures, where their force-matured clones were integrated with memories taken from their original bodies. Even so, a place could have been found for one of the human race’s greatest selfless heroes. Oscar’s personality was still intact in the memorycell she’d removed from his shattered corpse, it just needed a body to animate.

Instead she chose to put him on trial for previous crimes, namely a terrorist action at Aberdan Station decades before, which had killed dozens of innocent people. Defence council had argued that the young Oscar had been indoctrinated by extremists, that the passenger train wasn’t the actual target. The lawyer Wilson had retained was good, adding pleas for clemency from serious public figures, including Wilson himself. But Paula had prepared her case with equal proficiency. Time did not lessen the severity of the crime, she argued, and included testimony from the victims, the parents of children killed at Aberdan, all of whom were too young to have memorycells. They hadn’t bodylossed, they’d died a real death.

The judges had found Oscar guilty by three to two. He’d been sentenced to one thousand one hundred years’ suspension; as he was currently bodyless the senior judge ruled he shouldn’t be re-lifed until after the sentence was served. That was a judgement the defence team were already planning to challenge when Paula walked out of the court.

‘I hope you’re not here to ask a personal favour,’ she said to Wilson. ‘You know I can’t do that.’

‘I know,’ he said.

‘What’s your next move? Appeal to the President for clemency and a pardon? I suspect you have the political clout to bring that off.’

‘Something like that. I’ll get him back, Paula. I won’t let him face the fate you have in store for him.’

‘The courts decided. That’s the trouble with this case, everyone thinks it’s personal. I don’t do personal.’

‘So you said.’

‘So what do you want?’

‘I’m here to ask a favour.’

‘Ha!’ she grunted as she sat behind the desk.

Wilson gave her a small smile. ‘Look, you need a break. We all do after what we went through on Far Away.’

‘I’m okay now, thank you.’

‘You’ve got half the human race gritting their teeth in scorn and anger when you walk past. Politically, you need to keep a low profile right now. Maybe do something else for a while.’

Paula opened her mouth ready to explain.

‘Yes!’ Kime said. ‘I know you have nothing else other than your work, that it’s how you were profiled. And that’s why I’m here. You remember Michelle Douvoir?’

‘No.’

‘One of Jean Douvoir’s daughters. She was living on Sligo when the Prime fleet hit it. She was lucky to get off.’

‘Yeah. Hoshe was there, too. He said it was tough.’

‘She didn’t want any special treatment, though God knows she could have had a mansion in any city on Earth if she’d asked. We owed her that much after what her father did. But I made sure she got to Menard; it’s one of the planets in phase three space which the Farndale company is fast-developing. Everything got accelerated after the war to give the refugees from the Lost23 worlds somewhere to stay. It’s a decent enough place, not too heavy on industry right now, of course, but somewhere she can start over.’

‘Glad to hear it. So why come to me with this?’

Wilson Kime gave a small grimace. ‘There’s a problem brewing on Menard. That’s maybe too strong a word, but it’s odd. And it’s causing trouble. Michelle called me directly about it.’

‘What sort of problem?’ Paula told her e-butler to call up a basic file on Menard. Planetary data ran across her virtual vision, infinity-focus neon graphics partially obscuring Wilson.

‘Michelle is living in Lydian, that’s a town on the Jevahal continent.’

The map image shifted in Paula’s virtual vision, showing the second largest continent whose northernmost tip jutted out to straddle the peninsula; various colourful symbols swarmed the land, provisional Farndale corporation development designations. ‘Arable country,’ Paula observed.

‘Great soil, good rainfall, warm climate, minimal intrusive native microbial ecology; it’s perfect for farming. And if the planet is going to accommodate a good percentage of the refugees from Lost23 worlds they’re going to need to eat. Farming is a priority for us. We need to get as much of those big open plains under the plough as possible.’

Paula gave him a critical glance as the virtual imagery faded to a shadow spectre. ‘Didn’t we try that in the Amazon basin once? The Environment Commission are still running restoration projects in that part of the globe.’

‘This is an emergency situation, Paula. We have the Lost23 populations to resettle now, and those from the Second47 planets can’t be held in temporal hiatus forever. Building them replacement worlds for when they emerge is going to cripple our economy for decades to come. Sometimes we have to take short cuts.’

‘Sometimes?’

Wilson gave her an exasperated stare. ‘I’m not here to argue corporate politics with you. This is something else entirely. The natives on Jevahal are attacking the homesteads. The whole settlement project around Lydian is starting to stall. That can’t go on, Paula, and it certainly can’t be allowed to spread across the whole continent.’

Paula hesitated. ‘Natives? You mean the original pioneer landowners.’

Wilson Kime took a long breath, clearly ill at ease. ‘No Paula, I mean the indigenous life.’

‘Aliens?’ she asked in shock. ‘There are sentients there? Wilson, what have you done?’

‘Nothing,’ he said quickly. ‘The animals concerned are called Onids. Think fat kangaroos with spider legs and you’re getting close.’

Her e-butler was already retrieving the small xenobiology encyclopedia files on the Onid stored in the unisphere. The image did just about match Wilson’s description, once you’d thrown in dark-purple fur. ‘Your xenobiology team classified them as non-sentient,’ she read. ‘They were in a hurry, weren’t they? They had to open the planet for settlement for the Lost23 refugees. Farndale’s board put them under pressure.’

‘No. Categorically not. Check the dates. Menard was cleared for settlement before the Starflyer War began. It was a legitimate assessment by the xenobiology team, and in any case they’re independent, they have to be.’

Paula shot him a suspicious glance. She knew just how impartial things became when a company as vast as Farndale was involved. The amount of money involved in opening up a planet for settlement was phenomenal. There wasn’t much which could prevent the awarding of an H-congruent certification once the process had begun. Certainly not an independent scientific team with a foolish case of integrity.

‘Believe me, Paula. Farndale didn’t override anything here. That classification was genuine.’

‘All right, so what’s happened?’

‘That’s the billion-dollar question. It began about three weeks ago, with the Onid raiding some of Lydian’s outlying homesteads. Now it’s getting more serious. Packs of them are attacking any human they can find. Nobody’s going outside the town. Our local governor is asking the Farndale board for a squad of marshals with enough firepower to eradicate every Onid herd in the territory. And each day he’s asking louder. So far we’ve kept this out of the media, but that won’t last…’ He gave her a forlorn look. ‘We’ve just had a war that nearly ended in genocide. We stopped that, Paula, you and me. We played our part. Out of everybody, we now know that kind of situation cannot be allowed to happen again.’

‘What the hell do you want me to do?’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s hardly a crime in the conventional sense. Someone screwed up in the classification. You’re going to have to pull out of Menard.’

‘But why now?’ Wilson asked. ‘Humans have been there for nearly ten years; first a batch of science teams running tests, then preliminary construction crews building infrastructure. The Onid didn’t even notice us.’

‘They reacted because there’s more of us now?’ Paula ventured. ‘That always happens when new lands are conquered, the natives eventually realize what a threat the invaders are and start to fight back.’

‘How would they know how many of us there are? How would they know we’re spreading out across the continents? They’re animals, they don’t have any communication. They live in isolated herds.’

Paula waved her hands about in a gesture of futility. ‘How would I know? I’m not a xenobiologist.’

‘No,’ Wilson said softly. ‘But you are a puzzle-solver.’

‘Oh, please!’

‘You have to admit it’s fascinating, almost paradoxical.’

‘I find it mildly interesting — in the abstract. I also happen to believe the solution lies with your original classification. Either way, it doesn’t matter. This is not a Directorate problem, unless you do give the governor what he’s asking for. If that were to happen I would order a very thorough investigation.’

‘Which nobody wants, and if you personally were to shut down a new planet to immigration, especially at this time, your meagre popularity would hit zero and then fall off a cliff.’

‘I’m not in this job for popularity.’

‘No, but you know very well that to function properly at the level your cases run at you have to have political influence. Securing that verdict against Oscar lost you every credit you won during the war. You can get that back with this case.’

‘It is not a case.’

‘Take a break, Paula. Christ knows you’ve accumulated enough leave time over the last century. That would leave you free to do whatever tweaked your curiosity. I could appoint you to any position you wanted in Farndale. Adviser to the Lydian territory governor, for instance.’

‘You have got to be kidding.’

‘It’s practical. It’s logical. It’s different. And you’d be helping a lot of people — actually, two species. I’m amazed you’re even hesitating.’

She wanted to tell him why, but couldn’t actually come up with a valid reason. The wretched thing was, it did intrigue her. For all his faults, Wilson Kime was an honourable man. If he thought (or knew) the xenobiology team had screwed up he wouldn’t be here. ‘I really can’t afford more than a couple of days,’ she said weakly.

‘That’ll be all you need,’ Wilson said with a grin.

The next morning Paula took a trans-Earth-loop train from Paris through the connecting wormhole to Madrid, then London, New York, and into Tallahassee, where she caught the express shuttle to Los Vada, an industrial world owned entirely by Farndale, which served as their manufacturing and financial base. Total time elapsed: forty-two minutes, which wasn’t bad for the notoriously piss-poor timekeeping of loop trains.

It was just after midnight local time on Los Vada when she arrived. The CST station there was enormous, a junction to over fifty worlds in phase two and three space; the commerce it had to carry was phenomenal, with over a thousand freight and passenger trains charging through every hour. There were five passenger terminals to cope with the volume of people, two of which were just for passengers arriving and departing Los Vada itself; the others were for interconnecting trains. Paula got off at the fourth, and took a small transfer capsule over to terminal five, which handled all the trains to planets in phase three space.

Her train left from platform 49H. Eight fat carriages crammed with refugee families, people who had fled their homeworld after the Prime assault wrecked the biosphere outside their city force fields. Since then they’d either been living with generous family members or endured Spartan accommodation in a government emergency transit centre. It was only in the last few months that the Commonwealth government was finally starting to get on top of the displaced populations problem and accelerating the opening of phase three space planets that had been in their provisional stage of development back when the war broke out.

The train trundled across the dark yard outside the huge terminal buildings, then slowly accelerated towards the distant cliff of machinery producing the wormholes. Over half of the circular rifts across interstellar space were open onto the daylight continents of their respective worlds, which shone an impressive variety of star-spectrums out into Los Vada’s moonless night. Menard was close to Sol’s standard white, with just a hint of violet staining the thick beam which the train track curved round to line up on. They slid in behind a long freight train whose open trucks were carrying big civil engineering bots, and construction machinery along with a host of infrastructure systems vital to support a planet whose population was currently expanding at a rate of thirty thousand a day, with a bump up to fifty thousand scheduled in four months’ time. According to Paula’s e-butler, trains were being pushed through with barely a minute’s separation. That’s a lot of traffic, she acknowledged. Empty freight trains were hurtling past on the return track.

Then they were through. The pressure curtain tingled across her skin like some fast phantom drizzle, and raw sunlight was blazing through the carriage windows. There was no sign of the wide open lands which Wilson prized so much on this world. Instead the two-mile length of track between the wormhole and the station ran straight through the marshalling yard, with stacks of containers forming a near-solid wall on either side. They formed their own mini-city, with avenues sliced by tracks where big old fission-powered shunters trundled along day and night. Giant loader gantries slid above the ever-changing stacks on eight-storey legs, malmetal tentacles reaching down to pull individual containers out of the stack and place them on the flotilla of trucks rolling along behind.

The CST planetary station was a lot more basic than usual, consisting of just five platforms, all prefabricated, and sheltering beneath a tinted polymesh dome which did absolutely nothing to cut down the equatorial sun’s intensity.

Gary Main was waiting for her on the platform as the train pulled in. He introduced himself as an aide to the Planetary President, a fourth-life Englishman five years out of rejuvenation, with a spiderweb of purple and yellow OrganicCircuitry tattoos mottling his face.

‘Wilson Kime assigned me to you for the duration,’ he shouted over the noise as everyone else thronged down the platform on their way to local trains. It was Farndale’s policy to simply shunt all the new arrivals on to the lands they were due to occupy as soon as they arrived. Nobody wanted a huge out-of-work population occupying the capital.

‘Thanks,’ Paula shouted back. ‘How do I get over to Jevahal?’

‘We have a plane waiting for you.’

Several of the nearby crowd paused to give them a look. A couple must have recognized Paula judging from the frowns. Or it could have been envy at her transport. They were all due up to a month on trains and ships and buses before they got to their promised patch of frontier dirt.

Wilson had laid on a ten-seat corporate hypersonic jet at the city’s single airport. Paula had to smile at that. He really was giving her mission top priority. Cruising speed was Mach eight, which gave them a flight time of two hours. Paula spent it reviewing the xenobiology team’s report on the Onid. After an hour’s reading she reluctantly concluded that the team’s original certification might have been correct — based on the research data provided. The Onid showed no sign of sentience, they were basic herd animals roaming the plains and forests of Jevahal. Each herd had its own territory, which they were fiercely protective of. They didn’t demonstrate even elementary tool-building, nor language. Their only communication was a few hooting sounds to alert each other of any danger. However, they did bury their dead. Each herd had an area set aside for their graves. They weren’t particularly neat, just holes scraped out of the soil. But the team had recorded them dragging bodies a long way from where they’d died to the herd’s burial ground. There were a lot of speculative notes on group identity, and rudimentary community awareness. A thesis backed up by the totem. Every Onid was buried with a totem: a stone or stick. They weren’t carved or shaped, but something was always dropped into the grave as the soil was scraped back over the corpse. It didn’t qualify as a presentience marker on any methodology the Commonwealth used to determine emerging awareness.

Paula didn’t know enough to make a judgement, but she certainly followed the tribal cohesion argument in the appendix. The conclusion was that the totems were simply instinct, like peeing on a tree, it marked territory.

The hypersonic landed on a field just outside Lydian’s latest boundary. The town had only been in existence for five months, its whole history could be measured in rings of construction activity like tree-years. Farndale had shipped in every building along a laser-straight highway of enzyme-bonded concrete that led all the way back to a port on the coast. The same colossal JCB roadbuilders that had extruded the highway had stayed on to lay out Lydian’s concentric grid. Silver-shaded housing was now erupting across the long curving blocks; bungalows whose walls and roofs had been flatpacked together in giant containers that could be assembled by a minimum number of bots. The larger civic buildings were also modular, clipped together to sprawl across the ground. Nothing was over a single storey high. Why bother? Land here cost next to nothing, and vertical assembly was an additional expense.

Lydian’s purpose, like a hundred other towns springing up across Jevahal, was a transport and market centre for the homesteads that were busy converting the plains to arable country. Soon there would be a railway for the prefabricated station already built on the western side; the tracks were only three hundred kilometres away now, and coming closer at the rate of two kilometres a day. With them would come a whole new level of prosperity. Concrete foundations for the grain silos were laid ready, with their metal load pins marking circular outlines where the giant cylinders would dominate the town’s skyline for decades to come.

Like a smaller version of the capital, it was supposed to receive the busloads of recently arrived settlers and ship them out across the eternal plains to their new lives. Paula had seen several roads radiating out from Lydian during the hypersonic’s approach, a simple spiderweb pattern of concrete that gradually devolved into thick dirt tracks. She hadn’t noticed much traffic on them.

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.

‘Damnit,’ she yelled. She didn’t want to fire on the Onid around the tractorbot, because if they had anything like the herd mentality of terrestrial animals they’d probably charge her, which would leave her no choice. She did have enough firepower, but…

Then another horse was racing in towards the homestead from the opposite direction to Paula. Her OCtattoos tracked a couple of small objects streaking away from it, arching through the sky towards the herd. Then she could hear nothing. The soundblast which erupted was deafening. She had to jam her hands over her ears. No choice.

Hurdy reared up in fright. Paula lost the carbine in a desperate attempt to hang on. With her hands off her ears, the sound was like a lance hammering against her brain. The mare began to canter away from the homestead. Paula clung to Hurdy’s neck with one arm, trying to turn the mare’s head with the reins wrapped tight round her free hand.

She caught snatched views of the Onid herd. They’d broken from their circular stampede to stream away from the bungalow. In less than a minute they’d all gone, racing away in panic from the noise.

The vicious screaming cut off. It was like an implosion, sucking all sound from the plains. Paula couldn’t hear a thing. She tried to soothe the frightened mare as best she could. Eventually Hurdy had stilled enough to allow a reasonable dismount. Paula still couldn’t coax her closer to the homestead. She tethered her to the stem of a bush on the ridge, retrieved the carbine, and hurried off down the slope towards the bashed-up bungalow.

Away on the far side of the tractorbot Paula could see the other horse rider chasing after the fleeing herd. Bad idea, she thought and hesitated on her downward charge. She still couldn’t hear anything other than a nasty sharp buzzing in both ears. That meant the other rider wouldn’t hear any shout to stop. Retinal inserts zoomed in for a close-up, seeing the figure on horseback raise a small fat gun. OCtattoo sensors tracked the projectile he fired. It was a lot larger than a normal bullet, and considerably slower. It hit one of the Onid, who didn’t even seem to notice the impact.

The rider reined his horse in, and watched the retreating herd as he slotted the strange gun back into a holster. A man and a woman came sprinting out of the bungalow, heading straight for the tractorbot. The little girl sagged out of the narrow shelter and collapsed onto the ground. From what Paula could make out, she was about eight, and sobbing helplessly.

By the time she joined them, the girl was hugging her parents with wild strength. They were clutching her back, arms tight around her as all three of them wept.

‘Are you okay?’ Paula yelled at the Aleats. She could barely hear herself through the persistent buzzing in her ears.

The man nodded sharply. He glanced at the carbine in her hand. ‘Did you scare them off? Did the governor send you?’

She shook her head. That was when the second rider trotted up, and dismounted with a smooth practised motion that belied his age.

‘Dino?’ Paula shouted.

He plucked small green plugs from his ears. ‘What?’

‘You must be Dino, the biologist.’

‘Good guess. Xenobiologist, actually. But no need to screech.’ Biologically he was in his late fifties, shorter than average with thinning dark hair turning grey. When he grinned at her she couldn’t help but grin back, his face was that kind of happiness. When he was rejuved he’d probably be quite handsome, an errant thought flashed through her brain.

‘I’m Paula Myo,’ she said, trying to judge a normal volume. ‘What did you use to scare them off?’

‘Screamers. Standard issue for xenobiology exploration teams. Very humane. Most animals shit themselves when they go off; they can’t get clear fast enough.’

‘Ah. Right.’ Sonic weapons were hardly standard issue for Directorate field equipment packs.

Dino glanced back towards the Onid herd. ‘I should get after them.’

‘What!’

‘Will you stop shouting.’

‘I’ll try. Why? Why go after them?’

He gave her that grin again. ‘I want to know where I went wrong. I need to find out what’s going on.’

Paula eyed the shaken homestead family. ‘Humans provoked them.’

‘Okay. How?’ Dino’s hands swept round the land, gesturing at the solitary bungalow.

‘I don’t know. That’s…’ what I’m here to find out.

‘The Paula Myo, huh? I’ll enjoy working with you, Investigator.’

‘I work alone.’

‘Oh. So are you getting a signal from your tracer?’

Paula looked out towards the distant foothills, but the herd had vanished from view amid the folds in the land. She sighed. ‘You need to get back to town until this is over,’ she told the three Aleats. The girl pushed herself closer in to her mother, seeking comfort.

‘Town?’ the father spat. ‘Back to town! I’m getting off this whole bloody planet. And I’m going to sue Farndale. We nearly died out here. You’re my witness.’

Which made Paula give the heavens a brief resentful glance. Actually, she supposed it was a sign of civilization, nobody reaches for a gun any more, just their lawyer.

When she dropped her gaze back to Dino he was trying not to smirk. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘What sort of range does that tracker have?’

The rain was a great deal heavier than she’d been expecting. In fact she’d been on few planets which produced a downpour with such volume. Her broad-brimmed hat and range coat with its high collar were almost irrelevant. The water hit so hard it seemed like it was soaking straight through the coat’s guaranteed waterproof layers. It was cold, too. Making her shiver even though she could still see the hot late-afternoon sunlight pouring down from a clear sky on the western horizon.

Both horses plodded forward through the deluge, their heads hung low, snorting and steaming. Her OCtattoos were showing her the tracker was barely fifty metres ahead of them now, somewhere in amongst a rambling stone outcrop. Without a word, she and Dino dismounted simultaneously. They both hunched down and crept forwards.

In these conditions infra-red vision was next to useless as they slithered among the thick stone spines. Paula scanned round as far as the sensor inserts on her arms and head could reach, which in this weather wasn’t much beyond two hundred metres. There were no other Onid showing up in any spectrum she had available — though admittedly the inserts weren’t configured for this kind of work. The herd must have left the tagged one behind. But why?

Twenty metres. The signal was perfectly steady. Coming from behind a big chunk of flaky sedimentary rock nearly twice her height, and leaning at a slight angle away from her, forming an overhang where the tagged Onid must be sheltering. Water ran down its sides, making them slick; even the streaks of grey-blue moss in the crevices had turned to soggy sponge.

She pointed to Dino to take the left side, and held up her janglepulse pistol, which theoretically should work on Onid nerve fibres. Dino moved surprisingly fast, and Paula rolled herself round the rock, guided by targeting graphics to bring the pistol into perfect alignment on…

‘Shit!’

There was no Onid. The little tracker pellet lay on the mud, its adhesive side still sticking to a strip of flesh.

A frowning Dino picked up the small neutral-grey pellet, wrinkling his nose up at the dangling flesh. ‘This was torn off,’ he exclaimed.

Paula could just about hear him clearly now. The buzzing in her ears had declined to a nasty tinnitus ringing during their pursuit across the grasslands. ‘Why would they do that?’ she asked.

Dino’s shrug was eloquent enough, even with his long coat obscuring his shoulders. ‘Wrong question. How did they know it was there?’

‘If something whacks you in the arse, you tend to know about it.’

He shook his head. ‘Naah, don’t believe it. Not an animal. It wouldn’t know this from a nut dropping off a tree. Besides, the tracker is designed to flex on impact, reduce the smack so there’s no suspicion.’

‘So you’re saying a proto-sentient might manage to work out that the tracker was something bad?’

‘Even if we ballsed up the classification, and they are proto, how would it know?’

Paula shoved the pistol back in her holster. ‘Simplest solution applies: someone told it.’

‘Really? Someone sat down and explained the principles of encrypted digital radio tracking to a creature who has a total of two grunts, one for “food” and another for “danger”?’

‘You classify by vocabulary?’

‘It’s a big part of the assessment process, yes. Communication is the bedrock for sentience; as an indicator for self-awareness it has yet to be beaten. The greater your comprehension beyond the range of simple instinctual triggers, the higher up the scale you are.’

‘Okay, so how did it know to get rid of the tracker?’ She gave the device and its incriminating flesh another look. ‘And it must have really wanted to get rid of it, tearing that off must have hurt like hell.’

Dino started examining the mud around the rock. ‘They don’t have good teeth,’ he mumbled. ‘So… Ah, here we go.’ He fished a slim shard of rock out of a puddle, and held it up, squinting. ‘Interesting. My inserts can just detect cellular material on the edge here. Rudimentary knife, I’m guessing.’

Paula winced. The ‘edge’ wasn’t that sharp. ‘So they do know tools?’

‘Possibly. We never saw any evidence of tool usage before. It’s probably just an instinctive solution.’

‘I’d say you’d have to think about a solution like that.’

‘Good job you’re not the expert filing these reports, then. Dropping a snail on a rock to crack its shell: sign of tool usage, or instinct?’

Paula gave him a look, doubtless wasted with her skin soaking wet and sodden ebony hair plastered to her cheeks. ‘We need more information.’

‘Of course we do. That’s why we’re here.’

She couldn’t work out if he was deliberately being rude, or he unconsciously talked down to non-xenobiologists. ‘We can set up camp here for the night. I seriously need to get dry. Their trail will be easy enough to follow in the morning.’

‘Did you bring a tent?’

‘I’m sure my assistant remembered to pack one for me.’

Paula was pleased to see he didn’t oversleep. Like her, Dino was up at dawn, ready to begin the day. Not a classic academic, then.

Her hemispherical plyplastic tent shrank back down to a ball barely larger than her fist while she got on with triggering the thermal tabs on her breakfast packs. Chilled orange and mango smoothie to start with, then hot tea with a smoked salmon and scrambled egg bagel.

‘Creature comforts, eh?’ Dino said as he folded away the more traditional lightweight tent he’d spent the night in.

She grinned as she bit into the bagel. At least he was using packs rather than trying to light a Cro-Magnon campfire and spear something to eat. ‘We’ve spent centuries building up the benefits of civilization. Why abandon them now?’

‘My tent is simple yet perfectly adequate. Yours is the extreme end of consumerism technology. Ten times the cost, and you can’t patch it up if you puncture it.’

‘Plyplastic doesn’t tear easily. It’s not a balloon.’

‘You’ve reinvented the wheel.’

‘We’ve refined the wheel. We took your circle of wood and gave it a tyre and suspension. Because that’s what we do, improve things.’

Dino pushed the last of a bacon sandwich into his mouth. ‘I wonder if the Onid agree with that.’

‘If they philosophize about that kind of thing, then they’re definitely sentient.’

‘Yes.’ He started strapping various packs onto his saddle.

‘So are they? Something alerted them to that tracker. They knew it was wrong, or dangerous. Doesn’t that indicate a rational analytical process?’

‘I don’t know, okay? I spent most of last night trying to put this together, and I got nowhere. There’s nothing in any of our data which could have anticipated this behaviour. We’re missing something.’

‘All right then, let’s go and find it.’

The herd’s track was easy enough to find again. After leaving the Aleat homestead they’d headed for the Kajara Mountains, cutting a straight line of trampled grass-equivalent across the land.

‘Do they have some kind of home we can track them to?’ Paula asked. ‘A nest, or warren, or something?

‘The burial ground is always their centre,’ Dino said. ‘Herds don’t normally stray too far from it, just enough to graze for food.’

‘They’re herbivores, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘So they don’t have an instinctive attack methodology?’ Paula mused.

‘Correct,’ Dino said as he mounted up.

‘They’re sentient, then,’ she said insistently. ‘They worked it out for themselves.’

Dino just shook his head dismissively, and flicked the reins.

Paula let out a small curse of dismay as Hurdy plodded on beside him. She could see that Dino’s team had got the classification wrong, even if he refused to admit it. At the very least, everything she’d witnessed would force an official re-evaluation.

It would be hellishly difficult to evacuate every human off the planet, she knew. Or more likely impossible. The people who’d flooded across this world in the wake of the war to build themselves a better life had an edge about them, a determination the Commonwealth hadn’t known for a couple of generations. They wouldn’t bow down and accept some well-meaning law imposed by a distant government about allowing aliens a chance to develop freely, not these days.

And I’m the one who is going to be reporting the wrong classification. Knowing full well how much vilification that would bring down on her, she wondered briefly if Wilson had set her up. Payback for the Oscar case? But no, even as she considered it, she knew it wasn’t true. Plunging Menard into chaos, ruining the lives of millions of refugees, along with depressing the already fragile Commonwealth economy just to settle a personal score was not something Wilson Kime would consider, let alone instigate.

How ironic, then, that he’d chosen the one person in the galaxy who would not shirk from delivering the bad news of the Onid’s true status to the Commonwealth authorities. Because it is the correct and legal thing to do. Her psychoneural profiling ensured she would always do what was right and proper. It was what she was.

‘Horses,’ Dino said.

Paula reined in Hurdy and scanned round. Her inserts couldn’t find anything moving across the rustling grasslands.

Dino gave her a smug look, and pointed down. ‘When you do as much fieldwork as I have, you aren’t completely reliant on sensors and recognition programs.’

Paula zoomed her retinal inserts on the patch of ground he was indicating just beside the track the herd had left, finding the pile of horse dung.

‘Three or four days old,’ Dino said. ‘Judging from this trail I’d say there were four of them, and riding quite fast. See how far apart the broken blades are? That’s some speed, almost a flat-out gallop.’

Paula dismounted and studied the ground. Now she knew what she was looking for, the riders’ trail was clear and obvious. They merged here, but before that the riders had galloped along not quite parallel to the herd’s battered-down path.

‘I think we just found our reason,’ Dino said.

Paula glanced over to where the Kajara Mountains were standing tall above the grasslands. The foothills and their broad skirt of forests were only five miles away now. Turning the other way, she tried to work out where the horse tracks were leading. Some large stretches of woodland in the distance were the only distinguishing features. According to the map her e-butler threw into her virtual vision that whole area of the plains was empty, there were no claims, no homesteads allocated. Nothing. Not even the marker posts had reached that far yet.

‘Yes,’ Paula agreed reluctantly. ‘The riders have stirred them up. But why? What are they doing?’ She gave Dino a sharp look. ‘What does Onid meat taste like?’

‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘They’re biologically similar, but not compatible. The cellular proteins are all wrong for us, and nitrogen content is way too high as well. Barbecue one of these little beauties and best case — you’d spend the next day throwing up. That’s not your answer.’

‘What do they excrete?’

‘Ah, nice try, Investigator. You’re thinking it might be valuable, like guano?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Again: no. Their poop is nothing special. There’s a high-ish iron content, but that’s from the marak root. It’s all in the report.’

Paula scanned the foothills with their thick covering of dark trees. ‘So what’s in there that is so valuable to someone that they risk all this?’

‘This is what I love about my current job,’ Dino said. ‘So much unknown to explore.’

‘Let’s go do your job, then,’ Paula countered, and climbed back up on Hurdy.

Both sets of tracks ran side by side to the fringe of the woods. Inside, the straggly undergrowth was hard to read, so much of it was churned up by horses and Onid. There had been a lot of traffic passing through the whole area over the last few weeks.

‘It’s a general thoroughfare here,’ Dino declared.

‘That’s good for us,’ Paula declared. ‘They both have the same objective.’ They dismounted, and started leading their horses past the fat trunks. Hoofs crunched loudly on the flakes of bark carpeting the ground. Paula’s inserts started scanning, alert for any Onid moving about in the forest. After forty minutes the trees thinned out again, revealing a long open valley with a wide river flowing swiftly along the bottom. The foothills which built up the top end of the valley were quite steep, with a great many streams churning down their crinkled, boulder-strewn slopes.

Paula stood in the shade of the last clump of trees, running a wide scan across the valley. Several Onid were visible, moving slowly as they bent down and scrabbled for marak roots. She slipped back behind a trunk.

‘Now this is what I expect to see,’ Dino said, peering round the tree next to her. ‘All very tranquil. There’s nothing here that anyone could want.’

‘Let’s see what we can find,’ Paula muttered. She led the way back into the forest where they’d tethered the horses. Now the only way they’d be detected was if an Onid walked directly into them, a chance she was willing to take. She opened one of her saddlebags and took out a slim case with eight eyebirds in it. The little gadgets were disc-shaped, five centimetres in diameter, comprising a slim outer ring crammed with sensor systems, and a central contra-rotating fan. Their motors spun up silently, and they rose out of the case to hover in front of her while her e-butler loaded in a search pattern. As soon as the procedure was complete, they swarmed off into the valley, rising up to a level fifteen-metres altitude.

Images slid up into Paula’s virtual vision. The eyebirds were crammed with an astonishing number of sensors. If there was any kind of abnormality she was sure they could find it for her. It would be a tough search, she admitted after the first five minutes. The valley seemed a pleasantly bucolic place. None of the eyebirds could detect a large thermal source that might indicate a predator of some kind. It was a theory quite high on her probables list, that humans had lost some kind of animal, possibly one of the endangered terrestrial species. She knew that cheetahs and panthers and lions and several other types were bred in secret colonies on some worlds. You paid a small fortune for the privilege of hunting them, but there were always people with that kind of money. And a world like Menard would be the perfect place to set up such an enterprise.

‘I’ve got the burial ground,’ Dino said. ‘Eyebird three, look. But what’s happened to it?’

Paula, who was accessing the feeds from eyebirds eight and five, switched her attention over to three. One of the long stretches of meadowland at the base of a tall rock cliff was the heart of the herd, with the graves showing as small mounds of earth. It needed to be a big area, there were a lot of the mounds, she realized, the oldest were almost flat. The majority were covered in the local grass-equivalent, but a good fifth of them had been dug open. It hadn’t been done neatly, long spills of fresh earth were scattered around each one. Whoever did it was in a hurry.

‘Are you sure there are no native predators around here?’ Paula asked.

‘We never saw any. There’s a beast in the northern part of this continent, a Gruganat, which is close to a terrestrial lion, but a lot faster. They feed on Onids and other animals. But none have been spotted here.’

‘Could this be the first one? Humans are settling in the north, too; we could have driven them out of their traditional hunting grounds.’

Dino pulled a sour expression. ‘Gruganats prefer fresh meat. And they wouldn’t have any problem killing it here.’

Paula moved eyebird two to cover the burial ground in more detail, directing it down to hover over one of the opened mounds. It wasn’t a particularly deep excavation, the decomposing corpse was just visible at the bottom of the shallow oval hole.

‘It wasn’t a carnivore doing that, then,’ Dino said. ‘The body hasn’t been touched.’

‘Agreed,’ Paula said. ‘And look at the edges of the hole. They’re clean, straight. That was a spade. This is what those riders have been doing.’

‘The totems,’ Dino exclaimed in a shocked tone. ‘They’ve taken the totems. Each Onid is buried with the tribe’s totem. No wonder they’re so angry.’

‘Why? What would anybody want with the totems? Your report said they were just stones.’

‘They are. Pebbles, sticks, even a flower once; each herd has a different one. All they do is reinforce the herd identity, that’s what we thought.’

‘What does this herd use?’ Paula asked.

‘I’ve no idea. Each herd has something that’s abundant in their territory.’

Paula moved eyebird two over to an intact grave. Its sensors gave the mound a fast sweep. ‘There’s some kind of metal in there.’ She read off the results table that slithered across her virtual vision. ‘Definitely metallic, a small lump.’

‘Metal?’ Dino asked. ‘Are you sure?’

She sent the eyebird over to the next grave. Sure enough, it contained a lump of metal, the signature was almost identical. ‘Metal detecting is about the oldest science there is. I can’t determine the composition, unfortunately. There’s only so much you can pack into an eyebird.’ She raised her hand up in front of her face. The slim lines of an OCtattoo materialized across her skin, as if her veins were being invaded by quicksilver. ‘I need to get a bit closer for a decent readout. I don’t want to desecrate anything the way those riders have.’

‘Where does the herd get metal from?’ a puzzled Dino murmured.

‘I don’t know. But it’s got to be valuable to humans somehow.’ She couldn’t think how. ‘Maybe an alien starship crashed nearby, and they’re picking up the wreckage.’

‘Is that likely?’

‘Not really,’ she admitted. ‘We’ll have to get down there to find out for sure.’

‘We can’t risk getting caught,’ Dino said. ‘The herd’s upset enough as it is.’

‘Are they heavy sleepers?’

Before Dino answered, eyebird six sent an alert; several solid objects were airborne below it. They weren’t large, and they didn’t rise quite high enough to strike it. They fell back to the ground, but not before the next barrage was rising.

Paula looked directly through the eyebird’s camera. A dozen or so Onid were clustered below it, flinging stones. She hurriedly instructed it to raise altitude. When it was thirty metres above the ground, she paused it. The Onid were still there, still throwing stones. More were joining them. Their hoots of alarm were slowly crossing the valley.

‘How the hell did they see it?’ she asked incredulously. ‘It’s silent, the fan balances on superconductor bearings, and the colour is dehanced-grey.’ She glanced up at the clouds scudding past the mountain peaks. ‘It’s practically impossible to see it against a sky like this. Do they have some kind of ultra-vision?’

‘No,’ Dino said. ‘Their eyesight isn’t even as good as ours.’

‘Then how…’

‘I don’t know.’ He looked back towards the edge of the forest. ‘We really need to know what’s in those graves.’

Paula focused back on the images from eyebird six. There were twenty Onid below it, scraping stones from the ground and flinging them up. She instructed the eyebird to fly slowly down the slope towards the fast river at the bottom of the valley. The Onid followed it as if it was their guru. ‘How?’ she whispered. The question would have to wait, this provided her with a perfect tactical opportunity. She quickly directed four other eyebirds to join up with number six, sending them low over the ground, weaving about so they passed close to various batches of Onid. After half an hour, with the creatures’ hoots and squeals echoing across the valley, the five eyebirds were together in a loose V formation. Below them now, and still hurling their ineffectual missiles, were over a hundred Onid, with what looked like every other member of the herd heading across the valley towards them.

The eyebirds drifted towards the end of the valley and the forest beyond. Holding station five hundred metres above them, the remaining three eyebirds watched the burial ground and the surrounding land. It was now devoid of any Onid.

‘If they were sentient they would have left guards,’ Dino said as they rode out of the forest close to the burial ground.

‘Yes,’ Paula conceded. Hurdy trotted along the base of the cliff, keeping to the thick shadow it was throwing. If the Onid did have poor sight as Dino claimed, they’d be hard to see in such shade. Even so, she eyed the fissures in the grey rock warily, holding the carbine ready for any ambush.

They dismounted as soon as they reached the first of the little mounds. The silver lines of Paula’s OCtattoo appeared again over her hand, spreading a delicate lacework back down her forearm. She knelt beside the first grave, and slowly waved her hand over the wispy grass-equivalent.

The results of the scan materialized in her virtual vision, tight bright graphics superimposed over what she was seeing. ‘Holy crap,’ she gasped.

It wasn’t difficult to track the riders’ trail across the open grassland. Paula and Dino took four hours to reach the thick woodland it led into. She sent another small flock of eyebirds flitting through the trees as they walked forwards cautiously. The airborne sensors scanned round for any sign of human activity. Three more of the little gadgets zoomed high above the wood, which produced an almost immediate result. The trees were crowded around a lake. Right in the centre was some kind of crude raft with a plyplastic tent for a cabin. Sensors saw a couple of people moving round. Paula hurriedly withdrew the eyebirds in case the riders had their own sensors.

‘Now what?’ Dino asked.

Paula put her force field skeleton suit on over her clothes and ran a fast integration and function check. ‘I go and deal with them,’ she told him, and pulled the carbine out of its saddle holster.

Dino gave her an uneasy look as she clipped more weapons hardware to her belt. ‘Deal with them how, exactly?’

‘Take them into custody, and fly them back to the capital for trial.’

‘Right.’ He eyed the janglepulse pistol she was checking. ‘Okay, so what do I do?’

‘Wait here. This is what I do. Trust me.’

‘And the totems?’

‘Once I’ve recovered them, we’ll return them to the herd. You might want to think about how we do that.’

‘Paula… I saw the eyebird images of the raft. That was a big tent, and there are four horses we know about. They’ll be armed. Maybe we should get Charan’s posse out here to help.’

‘I don’t need help, but thanks for your concern.’

For a moment it looked like Dino might object, but in the end he just threw up his hands and said: ‘Your area.’

‘That it is.’

Paula skirted the lake, walking parallel to the shore until she found the outflow stream. The ground on either side of the gurgling water was sodden, more sludge than mud, sludge that bubbled with the most noxious gases imaginable, farts from as-yet unclassified microbes. All of which made it ideal for a tall reed-equivalent plant to flourish. Her chest and trousers were painted thick with the sludge as she slithered forward through the prickly strands. Then she was right up to the edge of the lake, elbows in the water, parting the last of the reeds. She hadn’t activated her force field skeleton yet, if the riders had even a modest sensor system on the raft they’d spot it.

Her retinal inserts zoomed in to give her a clear image. It was actually two rafts. The main one, with the hemispherical tent on top, was firmly anchored with four thick ropes leading down into the water, one at each corner. Docked to it was a smaller raft, with a high railing around it. Four horses stood on its rough planks, placidly munching through the contents of their nosebags. A ferry rope stretched away from the main raft to a tree above the shore; it ran through a couple of iron hoops secured to the planks on the smaller raft.

Not a bad hideaway, Paula acknowledged. The Onid couldn’t swim, that was very clear in the original report; and the thick woods shielded the gang from any casual human observation. One of the men walked out of the tent, dressed in jeans and a yellow T-shirt. He carried a bucket in one hand. A belt holster held a rapid-fire automatic pistol. It would probably decimate the Onid herd, but didn’t pose any danger to her, not in a force field.

The man went down to the other end of the raft, where some badly made wire cages were strapped to the decking. Paula was surprised to see each cage contained a baby Onid; squatting miserably in their own excrement, fledgling upper limbs squashed against the galvanized wire. The man opened the top of the first cage, and scooped a flaccid olive-brown marak root out of the bucket. He dropped it into the cage, where the little Onid grabbed it eagerly, gnawing at the mushy pulp with bad immature teeth.

‘Why oh why?’ Paula mumbled to herself. It was almost rhetorical. Everything she’d seen, all the factors of the investigation were coming together in her hyperactive subconscious as they always did.

She drew a small kinetic gun from her belt, wrinkling her nose up as the movement burst yet more bubbles in the sludge. Her e-butler reprogrammed the enhanced explosive tips in the bullets, dialling them down to their absolute minimum. She took aim carefully on the ferry rope where it was secured to the tree. Her e-butler fired the gun — avoiding the minute motion of her finger squeezing a physical trigger, which might throw the aim off a fraction. She needed accuracy for this. A maser or X-ray laser would have worked, and been completely silent, but again she didn’t want to risk sensors picking up the shots.

The bullet hit the trunk and detonated with a tiny thuck sound. Her amplified hearing could just make it out, but only because she was listening for it. The man feeding the captive Onids certainly didn’t. The rope fell into the water with barely a ripple.

Paula shifted her aim, the targeting grid centring on an anchor cable where it went into the water. Thuck. A small plume of water burped up, and the cable went slack.

She got two more anchor cables before the man raised his head, glancing round with a puzzled frown. Refusing to rush, Paula lined up on the last cable, slicing it cleanly.

The man was peering over the side of the raft now, trying to work out what was wrong. Eventually he let out a grunt and bent down to haul up one of the anchor cables. The frayed end was held up in front of his face. Paula couldn’t help chuckling at his classic expression: ape examines pretty colours of hologram projection.

He started shouting in alarm. Three more men and two women came out of the tent. More shouts reverberated over the still lake as they discovered all the anchor cables were cut. Surprise turned to anger. Paula started wriggling backwards, retreating into the trees. The next stage was going to be the slowest snare in history. They’d realize that eventually, and when they did that anger would turn to fright. That was when they’d get desperate.

She waited patiently, with a single eyebird hovering in the cover of a tree at the opposite end of the lake, revealing the raft’s painful progress to her. It wasn’t exactly a large amount of water which the streams brought into and out of the lake, but the current was steady.

Sure enough, when they were forty metres away from the mouth of the stream, the gang on the raft brought out their weapons. Paula catalogued two old military-grade maser carbines, a hunting rifle, the automatic pistol, and a couple of pump-action shotguns. She began to walk along the stony stream bed towards the lake. Her force field skeleton activated, cloaking her in the dimmest of purple shimmers.

‘There!’ one of the men bellowed as she emerged from the darkness of the overhanging trees. She stood at the mouth of the stream, dripping slime into the water like the original swamp monster. Every gun they had fired simultaneously. They weren’t very good shots. Those beams and bullets which did strike her were easily deflected by her force field. It rarely even flared blue.

The horses on the smaller raft began to whinny, tossing their long necks in panic, jostling against each other. The raft wobbled alarmingly.

Amid the barrage, Paula calmly drew her janglepulse, and shot the flank of a horse with a low-level pulse. It shrieked and reared up, front hoofs cycling in the air before crashing down, tipping one side of the barge below the surface. Then the poor frenzied animal jumped through the rail into the water, and began swimming. The other horses charged after it. Mud and water churned up around them in a filthy slush as they made their way towards the lakeside, angling away from the glimmering purple figure at the head of the stream.

The raft drifted onward, dragged inexorably by the current. When it was twenty metres away Paula shouted: ‘I am Investigator Paula Myo. You’re under arrest, please throw your weapons into the water.’

‘Fuck you, bitch!’

‘Uh huh,’ she grunted as the masers opened fire again. Phosphorescent sparkles shivered through the air about her as the shotgun blasts reached her. She raised the kinetic gun, cranked up the explosive tip to full, and fired straight into the tent.

She’d been completely wrong. A plyplastic tent was exactly like a balloon; when the bullet detonated, the whole thing burst apart with a bright violet flash. Fluttering strips of shrinking plastic whipped savagely at the gang, ripping clothes and lacerating exposed skin. The yells were more from shock than pain, the damage was mostly superficial. Paula used the janglepulse on maximum power to shoot the man who’d fed the Onid. The raft was only fifteen metres from the stream mouth now. He spasmed, and collapsed unconscious onto the decking.

‘Throw down your weapons,’ she repeated. ‘I won’t ask again.’

They hesitated, then one by they let their weapons drop into the lake.

Paula launched a comdrone, which shot up to a two-kilometre altitude. From there it established a link to Lydian’s diminutive cybersphere, allowing her to make the call. Twenty minutes later, the Farndale executive hypersonic was landing beside the woods in a downblast of air that sent a wild cyclone of grass and leaves swirling about. Greg Wise hurried down the airstairs to stare at the sullen captives standing beside Paula and Dino.

‘What happened?’ he asked.

‘They aggravated the herd by graverobbing,’ Paula told him. ‘That’s why the homesteaders have been attacked. The Onid didn’t know how else to vent their anger over the violation. Any invader is a target for them, they can’t distinguish between us. But it’s over now.’

‘Graverobbing? What the hell is in an Onid grave?’

Paula and Dino exchanged a look. Paula held up one of the dozen bags they’d recovered from the raft. Greg gave her a surprised glance when he felt the weight, then opened it tentatively. ‘Shit!’ he pulled out a nugget longer than his thumb. ‘That’s gold.’

‘The real raw thing,’ Paula confirmed.

‘Every herd uses a different totem,’ Dino said. ‘This herd had the misfortune to pick gold. To them it’s nothing, a different kind of rock, to us…’

Paula waved at the Kajara range dominating the horizon. ‘There must be some rich veins in the ore up there and the nuggets wash down from the mountains. The whole area around their burial ground is laced with streams.’

Greg shook his head at the nugget. ‘So they just grab the closest shiny thing, huh?’

‘Yeah,’ Dino said.

‘Poor them,’ Greg said. ‘So do all the herds along the mountains use gold?’

‘Not all,’ Dino said. ‘And certainly not the next few along. But if it’s prevalent, they’ll use it.’

‘Damn. I wonder how much ore is up there? We completely missed that in the geological survey. Not that the preliminary satellite scans are ever particularly detailed.’

‘I’m sure Farndale will rectify that soon enough,’ Paula said. She removed the bag from Greg’s grasp. ‘In the meantime, we need to keep this quiet. I’ll take this gang back with me to Paris, the prosecutors can charge them with endangering the settlers. It means they can be kept in isolation for the immediate future.’

‘Sure,’ Greg said. ‘That fits in with my brief. So will the herd stop now?’

‘We’ll take the totems back,’ Dino said. ‘That should satisfy them.’

‘Take it back?’ Greg gave the bags a startled look. ‘You’re going to give it to the animals?’

‘It’s the only way to stop the raids on homesteads,’ Paula said.

‘Someone else is going to find out what they’ve got soon enough,’ Greg warned. ‘There’ll be a stampede of prospectors out here. They’ll bring heavy machinery into the mountains. Everything will get shoved aside.’

‘I’ll talk to Wilson Kime,’ Paula said. ‘See what we can work out.’

‘Your call,’ Greg said.

‘That it is,’ for now, anyway, she added silently. ‘Get these prisoners away to the capital now; then come back for me. I shouldn’t be more than another day here.’

Paula and Dino rode across the grasslands, heading straight for the herd’s valley, making no attempt to conceal themselves. They led three of the horses from the raft, who were laden with the bags of gold. The seven baby Onid freed from cages bounded along beside the horses.

‘I know what the Onid have,’ Paula said as they entered the forest surrounding the valley. ‘I know how they saw the eyebirds, and how they knew about the tracker.’

Dino gave her a startled look. ‘What?’

‘Process of elimination. Besides I have it myself.’ She held up her hand as her e-butler activated the sensor mesh. The silver threads of the OCtattoo gleamed in the bright sunlight. ‘They can see electricity. Terrestrial bees have something similar, don’t they?’

‘A magnetic sense,’ Dino said. ‘Of course! That fits everything. They can sense metal like the nuggets lying about. Hell, it might even be why they can always find marak roots. The tubers have a high iron content. Damn!’ He grinned happily.

Paula was still smiling as they came out into the open. The baby Onids started to hoot enthusiastically. Before long every adult in the valley was heading for them.

‘Just keep going for the burial ground,’ Dino said as the herd swarmed round the horses. This time they didn’t pick up stones, but they still circled quite fast.

When they reached the mounds at the base of the cliff, Dino got down and unhitched each of the bags, cutting them open so the nuggets spilled across the ground. The herd rushed in, claiming the nuggets, clutching them close and then running off to find an open grave.

Paula was amazed to see them scamper past the closest desecrated mounds. Instead, each Onid choose a specific grave for the totem they carried. ‘They know which grave each totem belongs to,’ she said.

‘Their ancestral identity is everything to them,’ Dino said. ‘We saw that right from the start.’

‘That kind of memory must count for something. Surely they must be classed as proto-sentient now?’

‘Possibly.’

The replacement process took over an hour. ‘I have a theory, too,’ Dino said when only a few nuggets remained. He picked one up, and in his other hand he held a flashgem. They’d been popular in the Commonwealth years before; an artificial crystal which stored photons directly, then released them at random to produce elegant sparks. The Onid who came to reclaim the nugget hooted softly, staring at the gentle sparks. It reached for the flashgem. Dino withdrew the bauble, and proffered the nugget instead. The Onid reached for the flashgem again.

Dino persisted for a while, denying the Onid the flashgem each time until he finally dropped the nugget at the Onid’s feet and stood up, pocketing the flashgem. The action agitated the Onid, but it eventually picked up the nugget and rushed off to find the grave to which it belonged.

‘What are you doing?’ Paula asked.

‘Suppose one of the herd dies, and they can’t find a nugget for its totem?’ Dino asked. ‘After all, the water is washing them down those streams the whole time. They’re not static. There’s no guarantee.’

‘So?’ Paula asked. ‘They wait until the rains wash down another batch.’

‘No. The graves and the herd are everything to the Onid. I think they do it differently.’

The last totems were retrieved and carried off to the graves. ‘Watch the one I offered the flashgem to,’ Dino said.

Paula saw it scrabble soil back into the mound’s hole. When it was finished, it scurried off to the base of the tall cliff, and disappeared into one of the fissures.

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Good reasoning, Dino, I’m impressed. We could make an Investigator out of you yet.’

‘Yeah, in ten lives’ time when I’m so utterly bored with everything else.’

The Onid reappeared, carrying a new nugget. It was large. The Onid had to use both its forelimbs to hold it.

‘Well what do you know,’ Paula said. ‘A genuine cave full of treasure. Thank heavens the raider gang never found that. They’d own Lydian by now, probably half of the continent to boot. How much do you think is in there?’

‘Enough,’ Dino said. The Onid hurried over, and Dino gave it the flashgem in return for the new nugget, which was half the size of his fist. He produced another flashgem. The Onid raced back to the fissure.

Paula leaned forward, resting her hands on the front of the saddle. ‘Just how many of those flashgems have you got?’

‘Not enough. I need to bring a crate back here. Will you give me that time. Please?’

‘Dino…’ She paused because what he was saying was completely out of character. Then she thought she saw tears in his eyes. ‘What do you want that kind of money for?’

‘What would have happened if the asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs back on Earth had missed?’

‘Er…’

‘Would they have evolved into sentients eventually? Would they be the ones who’d just fought the Starflyer War?’

‘That’s a rhetorical question, right?’

‘Actually, no. It’s a romantic question. They had millions of years to develop rationality, and failed. We, on the other hand, have only been around in our current form for about thirty to fifty thousand years depending who you listen to, and already we’re here, two hundred light-years from Earth. But this is a deciding moment for the Onid; we’re their dinosaur killer, Paula.’

An Onid bounded up, carrying the biggest nugget they’d seen. Dino smiled ruefully at it, and swapped the precious metal for another flashgem. ‘How about that. I’m the new Peter Minuit.’

‘Who?’

‘Peter Minuit, the Director General of the New Netherlands province. In 1626 he purchased some land from a tribe of the Wappinger Confederacy, allegedly using trinkets and cloth to a total value of 60 guilders. It was the best land deal the human race has ever known.’

‘Manhattan Island,’ Paula said.

‘Correct.’

‘So you want to buy the Kajara Mountains.’

‘And all the Onid lands surrounding them. Buy them, lease them, whatever deal I can strike with Farndale.’

‘And then what?’

‘The gang had worked it out as well,’ Dino said. ‘That’s why they’d captured the baby Onid. See, the Onids’ value extends a lot further than some ore in those mountains. Don’t you see, they’re walking metal detectors. And better than that, they’re smart with it. At least as bright as a terrestrial dog. Though by what we’ve seen here today I’d say smarter. I believe I can even justifiably argue for them to be given proto-sentient status.’

‘That’s good,’ she said, trying to sound supportive.

‘No no. They’re at the cusp right now. The gang were going to take those babies away and breed them, just like humans did with dogs. And they’d concentrate on all the wrong traits. Those with the strongest magnetic sense will be prized above everything. Not intelligence, and certainly not an independent streak. That will be the first thing breeders will eradicate. Do you understand? Humans will have an economic incentive to meddle with the potential of another species. Every wilderness homestead on every new planet will want to own an Onid: they can do everything a dog can, with the added bonus they’ll find anything valuable in your land. An effective non-technological sensor, one you can keep expanding for zero-cost through procreation.’

‘Are you sure they’re proto-sentient?’

‘No. And that’s what makes this such a terrible crime. They might never make that climb out of proto-status, and we’ll never know because it won’t happen for another ten thousand years. But that’s it, Paula. With shits like that gang flooding across this land and stealing the herds, they never ever will. Definitely. I have to stop that, Paula. I have to protect their one fragile chance to evolve naturally.’

‘By buying the Kajara? What will you do, set up some kind of protectorate?’

‘Yes. They threw the Native Americans off Manhattan Island. I’m going to do the opposite. This will be a Manhattan in reverse. I’ll keep them safe here. It will be an enclave where evolution can run its course, without any interference.’

Paula watched the herd. They were dispersing from the burial ground now. Except for a persistent five or six who hung around Dino in the hope of more trinkets. That seemed like a clever thing to be doing to her. ‘That sounds very admirable.’ So much so it appealed to her instinctive sense of order.

‘Will you help?’

‘Yes. I’ll talk to Wilson. At the very least I can get you that time to come back and trade your trinkets for gold. And I can support any application to change Onid status to proto-sentient.’

‘Thank you. That’s a good start.’

‘On a very long road,’ Paula warned him. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing. This isn’t going to be easy.’

‘Change never is. That’s what makes it so worthwhile.’