“This is not real time or interactive so don’t bother asking questions. I just want you to know that one of our coastal survey drones picked up precisely what you want, here…” The location downloaded into his aug. “That’s only five hundred and thirty kilometers from you. Have a nice one.”
As the image blinked out Jonas was already groping for his aldetox. “Rodol, I need the field autopsy gear, the big stuff, and I need it now!” he bellowed.
“What you require is available, but unfortunately the transport situation has not improved. All the gravplatforms are out and aerofans will not suffice,” the AI replied.
Jonas gulped water to wash down the pills. He was already starting to feel sober even though the aldetox had yet to take effect. “What about the ATVs?”
“There are three here. Two require new drive shafts, which one of the autofactories is currently manufacturing. The other is assigned to Shardelle Garadon. Perhaps you should speak with her.”
Jonas returned to his chair while the aldetox took effect. One of the ATVs had room enough to carry all the equipment he would require, initially, then came the problem of bringing specimens back. Perhaps he could get some help there from ECS? Something for a later date, he thought-plenty of work to do before then. After a moment he made a search for Shardelle’s aug address, found it, and tried to make contact. Annoyingly her aug was offline. Instead, he found her apartment address within the Tagreb, stood, and unsteadily headed for the door.
Fifteen hundred and thirty-two linguists remained: the hardcore. The rest dismissed The Gabble as having less meaning than the sounds lower animals made. At least those sounds had a reason, some logical syntax, some meaning related to alarm, pain, pleasure, or the basic “I’m over here, let’s fuck.”
Unfortunately only a third of that hardcore consisted of linguists who Shardelle felt had anything meaningful to contribute. Of those, one Kroval-a haiman based on Earth who, in the silicon part of his mind, held nearly every known language in existence-had the most to contribute. His analysis fined down to, “The phonemes are 80 percent the anglic of Masada, and their disconnection from coherent meaning seems almost deliberate. I can say with certainty that they are not parroting the language, and perhaps a degree of understandable human paranoia engendered by the unknown, or possibly unknowable, leads me to feel they might be deriding it.”
The latest offering from a small group of the others, who Shardelle labeled the lunatic fringe, had been, “It must be what is not said: meaning can be attributed to the synergetic whole of negatives. We just need to isolate the network of dissaffirmative monads in a…” and so it had continued until the speaker in question seemed in danger of disappearing up his own backside. It was this last that had led Shardelle to disconnect her aug and cast it aside.
They seemed to be getting nowhere. In fact, over the last six months, more imponderables had entered the equation. On the biological front little more was known than had been obtained by close scanning and sampling, and that had cost them fourteen mobile scanners and seven beetle-sized sampling drones-gabbleducks swatted them like flies and then, if they were shiny, ate them. What Shardelle had been waiting for, like so many others in the Tagreb, was a death. Other researchers had obtained their corpses: a siluroyne, a heroyne, and loads of mud snakes. But it seemed gabbleducks were in no hurry to die, and not one corpse or any remains had been picked up by the vast number of ECS drones constantly scanning the planet.
Shardelle wondered about that: why so much scanning activity, why the quarantine areas still, what was it that ECS was keeping quiet? No matter, she had enough puzzles to concern her at present. Perhaps she should slip out one night with a pulse rifle and solve the corpse problem.
The Gabble, and its source, frustrated her that much.
Time to sleep, she decided. Thinking like that was a sure way to get her expelled from the Tagreb and the planet. Nothing gets killed, unless in self-defense, until its sentience level has been properly assessed. Just then, as she was about to head for her bed, there came a hammering at her door. Shardelle grimaced and considered ignoring it, but there was urgency in that hammering-maybe the corpse? She opened the door expecting to see one of the others on her team. Who was this?
He held out a hand. “Jonas Clyde … hooders. May I come in?”
Shardelle stood aside and waved him into her apartment. He looked younger than she had expected, but that meant nothing. His blond hair was cropped and he moved with athletic confidence. His face was tanned and his eyes electric green. His hands looked … capable. He scanned around quickly, his gaze coming to rest on her screen. The big gabbleduck was lolloping through the flute grasses.
“Moves like a grizzly bear,” he observed.
She, of course, recognized his name. Jonas Clyde was something of a legend in Taxonomy and usually studied exactly what he wanted on any new world. It had come as a pleasant surprise to Shardelle, upon hearing he was on this mission, that he had not chosen the gabbleducks.
“Substantially larger, though,” she said, closing the door.
He obviously auged through to her screen control, for figures appeared along the bottom.
“Eight tons-not something you’d want to be standing in the path of.” He turned to her. “I hear they eat people.”
“Chew, certainly … coffee?” She walked over to her coffee maker-an antique almost three centuries old-and began making an espresso.
“Yes please-same for me. You say ‘chew’?”
“Humans obviously disagree with their digestion, but if someone annoys them sufficiently they chew them up and spit out the pieces. But of course, like everything else with them, their behavior is puzzling. Gabbleducks have pursued human prey across hundreds of kilometers, for no particular reason, and killed them. There was one case of a hunter shooting a clip from an Optek into one creature and it ignoring him completely. A recent one we observed via holocam: a gabbleduck abandoned its territory, crossed five hundred kilometers, and drowned a pond worker in her squirm pond. We don’t know why.” Bringing two cups of espresso over, she nodded to her sofa. He sat down. Placing the cups on the table between, she took the armchair opposite. “I was surprised you did not choose them as your subject for study.”
He grimaced. “They were my initial choice, but I have experience with dangerous fauna so it was suggested, rather strongly, that I choose the hooders. Obviously gabbleducks are dangerous, but not so lethal that it was felt necessary to fit every one with a transponder to know their locations.”
“I see,” Shardelle nodded, sipped her espresso. “So what can I do for you?”
“I want your ATV,” he replied.
