Manhattan in Reverse

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