genome. There is, however, a vast number of superfluities, accounting for immune response identifiers.”
“That makes no sense. If it’s old enough to acquire so high a level of immune response, it will have acquired parasitic DNA as well.”
“You’d think.”
There was something he was not telling her. She let it rest. At present she felt the most relaxed she had been in some time-just thinking about nothing and watching the world. She did not need his frustrations right then.
“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 were 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 adjusted up the strength of a gravplate 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 meters high, and moved swiftly across the terrain in delicate arching steps carrying them many meters 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 tire 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 rewarding 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 defense than speed. Why then did hooders need armor 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 a crater that 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 armor, and their speed, but mostly the armor.” He paused for a moment. “You know there are other creatures with thick armor 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. If you want to damage one of those creatures, you need to upgrade to APWs and particle weapons, and even then you’re talking about the kind of armament most people could not even carry.”
“Maybe some other predator now extinct?”
“But what the hell would that be?”
