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…’
‘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,
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.
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
‘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
