Something metal glittering in churned-up mud, almost buried. A heavy automatic gun, the sort the marshmen used to kill the big crocodilians whose back armor might deflect even the needles of a strakkaker. Useless for specimen collecting, it would leave little of any specimen.
It was smashed. Twisted into junk.
It had been loaded with high-explosive bullets and set for automatic fire at 300 rounds a minute. Three rounds only had been fired. There were the casings on the ground. And there were stains on the recoil compensator and pistol grip that looked like blood. A predator?
'Nothing that powerful fits the ecology.'
'I know.'
'And this is the longest-settled part of the planet. If there was a predator like this here before we'd have known it. You would have seen it in all the other animals. Things would be faster, more powerful, better defended.'
She was confirming what I had thought. But I had needed her to confirm it. I didn't want to damage the evidence before any investigation, but now that I had handled the gun already I thought I had better take it back. It would be easy enough to separate my DNA from anything else that might be on it. I saw the honker, an electronic fence device to keep crocs and other possible intruders away, including humans if necessary. Honkers were a good deal more potent than their name might suggest, and like most modern electronics they worked perfectly when they were in one piece. This one was in many pieces, strewn in the mud.
Then Dimity pointed again. There was something different in her walk and stance, as though she had changed into something like a hunting predator herself. The cafe coffee-drinker was not there. Her ears were laid flat back. I had forgotten she had that much Families blood in her. There was a dark pool of what I was now sure was blood, surrounded by froggolinas and covered with small insectoids, scraps of cloth, and, gleaming pinkish-white among them, what I recognized at once as a human femur, cracked open at the lower end, part of the pelvic socket still attached at the upper.
I dropped the broken gun as we ran to the car. I saw another bone fragment in the mud as we passed: it looked like part of the zygomatic arch of a human skull, but I didn't stop to examine it. There were other scattered fragments too, I now saw. I wanted to get back to the city fast, but was still unable to recognize the voice of my own survival instincts. We gained a reasonable height and turned a little farther into the swamp.
'The monastery looks like a fort,' Dimity said as we approached it. 'High walls round the courtyard, no windows, the tower, the edifacium like a castle keep. It looks quite defensible. You've even got that.' She pointed to a tall, smooth-lined metal spire that rose out of a small wooden chapel some distance away. 'It looks like a rocket or missile ready for launching. And the marshmen's shacks?'
Nothing like that. You saw what was left of them. Just thin walls and the honkers.'
'That may be the point: it looked defensible.'
The abbot might be a friend and glad to see me on the occasional evening when there was a bottle to be shared. But the monastery was a working organization, and my arrival unannounced in the middle of the working day, and with a woman, might well have been thought inconsiderate. All he said was: 'What's wrong?'
'Is it that obvious?'
'You look terrible.'
'There's trouble. We've been to six of the marshmen's cabins. They're dead. We've found… evidence. The cabins destroyed. We're on our way to the police. But first I need to ask the Brothers something. About that thing they saw.'
I showed them a small copy of one of the holos I had been shown the night before. 'This is a dead specimen, and not a very good picture now. But is that the same species?'
'Yes.' Three yeses. Three nods.
'Without a doubt?'
'Without a doubt.'
'And it ran from you. I wonder why.'
'It didn't want to alert the 'fortress,' ' said Dimity.
'We had no weapons when we saw it, no guns.'
'It's not scared of guns. And it had already eaten. It didn't want to be discovered, and it probably thought there were too many of you in a building of this size…'
'It thought…?'
'I can only tell you what you have probably guessed for yourself,' I said. 'These creatures are-obviously-highly dangerous, fearless of humans, and, we have reason to believe, intelligent.'
How intelligent?'
'Highly.'
'Where do they come from?'
'We don't know.' That was only too true.
I guessed the abbot must be a clever administrator to maintain an institution like the monastery in the modern world. I had not noticed before how penetrating his eyes could be.
'Let me put it this way,' he said. 'Are they going to come horizontally or vertically?' The other monks were hanging on the question. Dimity looked as if she already knew. I didn't see the need for secrecy, but it was still a condition I was bound by.
'I'm not at liberty to say what I think,' I told them. 'I'm sure if there is a continuing problem you'll be put in the picture.'
'Thank you. I think that answers my question…
'Before our Order left Earth,' he went on, 'the Vatican gave us instructions on what to do if we met aliens. What the theological position was. Did they have souls? It's a very old question, predating space travel by centuries. Saint Paul was quite definite: The Resurrection applied to 'everything in the Heavens and everything on Earth.' The early church writers said we need not worry until we actually knew if they existed or not. To insist that 'God could not have made other worlds' was declared a heresy in the thirteenth century-and that covers alternate or parallel universes as well! Good aliens may have already experienced 'baptism by desire.' Still, it's an area of imprecision.'
'But if aliens do exist, good or bad, you do have precise instructions?'
'We got some pretty comprehensive manuals when we set out. As far as that precise situation goes, I've never had cause to look, though no doubt it exercised our Founding Father when we first landed, along with a lot of other concerns. I'll have to get Brother Librarian to find them. But we have to be orthodox. We're too far from the Holy Father to risk departing from his instructions. Perhaps he'll send us a laser message.'
If Earth's lasers aren't all busy with another thing, I thought.
'Don't go out at night,' said Dimity. 'Keep your lights on and your doors locked. Don't go out unarmed even in daylight. Don't go out alone.'
'Now there's something odd,' said Dimity as we flew toward Munchen .
Although ground-effect air cars were common, there was still plenty of wheeled traffic, particularly for heavy hauling. The road we were passing over turned south and led to the industrial districts of Glenrothes and Gelsenkirchen, then on to Dresden (still sometimes Neue Dresden), which had been created deliberately to recapitulate the history of its famous namesake town on Old Earth, and was famous for its experiments in low- gravity baroque architecture and artistic china.
Glenrothes and Gelsenkirchen shared a small landing field well out of the way of the main port's traffic and had some industries based on recycling redundant or obsolescent space material, the equivalent of old-time ship- breaking. Old, material-fatigued or overly damaged spacecraft were disassembled there and their component parts generally taken to Munchen for resale. A spacecraft life system, for example, had all sorts of uses for someone needing a habitat when establishing a new farm, whether on land or sea, and their complex computer hardware and powerful engines always found plenty of uses in things like industrial process control and mining. Sometimes, of course, old ships were cannibalized for new ones.
There were plenty of spaceships getting hard wear in our cluttered and dusty system, filled as it was with minable asteroids, and ship-breaking was quite a busy industry. It reminded me a little, and unpleasantly, of the way criminals had been dissembled for organ banks until modern medicine made such customs unnecessary, which was silly and irrational of me. But possibly others felt the same, because, apart from the fact that it was
