“How do I get this damned thing started again?” Jonas asked.
“There’s no need. It’s gone.”
He snorted a harsh laugh. “Yeah, right. Well, when you’ve quit having your moment of epiphany, perhaps you’d like to take a look at the map screen.”
Shardelle did so, and for a moment could not make much of the graphics displayed there.
They did not seem to make much sense.
“About thirty of them,” said Jonas.
Then it did make sense. There were thirty hooders scattered all around them. They were moving, but seemed to be holding off for the present.
“You say the bill of a gabbleduck was found in the mountains?” Jonas asked.
“Yes.”
Jonas turned off the ATV’s engine. Moving the vehicle back into a stand of flute grass had been the best they could do. Hopefully the hooders would attack the gabbleduck and be too sated by that to attack them. There was no way to hide completely. He had studied the hooder sensorium and knew it would pick up body heat even through the skin of the ATV. Leaving the engine running would generate more heat to further attract attention.
“Nothing else?” he asked.
“It’s damned annoying. There should be more-bones at least.”
They were having a perfectly sensible conversation, sitting in the ATV, waiting to die. The nearest monitor force had sent a transport, but that would not be here for another hour. The hooders, it now seemed evident, were holding off until the gabbleduck finally expired. That could happen at any moment.
“But the tricones grind away all remains, which was why that bill was found in the mountains.”
Jonas wondered for just how many millions of years the tricones had been grinding stuff away. He auged through to the Tagreb and directly into the database maintained by those researching the mollusks. It did not take him long to discover that the tricone genome was just as concise and devoid of rubbish as that of the hooder. He connected then to the AI.
“Rodol, are you listening in?”
“I am.”
“Good.”
To Shardelle he said, “Three ancient races, the physical technological remains of which probably would not fill the back of this ATV.”
She glanced at him, seemed about to say something, then abruptly returned her attention to the gabbleduck. He thought she was swallowing tears.
“Tricones are biogenetic artifacts as well,” he added.
“I think it’s nearly dead,” she said.
The gabbleduck seemed a sleepy old man, its head nodding, bill lowering to its chest, then jerking up again. Removing his QC laser, Jonas laid it on the console before him. They both stared at it. He guessed she understood his intent. They both knew how hooders fed.
“But of biogenetic artifacts left by those races there are many: plants obviously made to refine metals from soil, worms made to accumulate radioactives in their bodies, and perhaps many others we don’t recognize. You know there are theories that even some Terran life forms are such artifacts? Why do some creatures carry a venomous punch so far in excess of that required to kill their prey? Why the chalk builders, the coral makers, why this, why that? Much was attributed to Gaean theories. Now there is some doubt.”
“You’ll be getting to a point sometime soon,” said Shardelle. “I think we are running out of time for discussion … Oh hell.” She leant forward.
The gabbleduck held out a claw.
“Kzzz lub luha Brogon,” it stated, its voice clear over exterior com, then it abruptly sagged and its bill came down to rest upon its chest. The light went out of its eyes.
Jonas lowered his gaze to the map screen.
“They’re coming.”
He picked up his QC laser.
A rushing hissing impinged. Jonas could feel the ATV vibrating. He closed his eyes and swallowed dryly. What did his theories matter now? And, should he not state them, Rodol would have most certainly worked it all out.
The first hooder came in from the right, its front end rearing thirty meters into the air, then coming down like a striking snake on the mountainous corpse. It began feeding, its long body rippling down its length. He did not see the second approach, just suddenly there were two hooders there, tearing at the corpse. Then a crash and the ATV shifted to one side, bouncing on its suspension as another of the monstrous creatures came past. Another rose up behind the others, vertical rows of eyes glowing, eating utensils opening out in a deadly glassy array. Down.
Corpse jerked this way and that. Limbs conveyed away, sheets of skin peeled, fat and muscle and sprays of milky blood. Soon there was more hooder to be seen than gabbleduck: a great black Gordian tangle, racketing with the sound of some vast machine shop. It took less than an hour. One hooder slid away, then another. Jonas waited for one to come straight at the ATV. He wondered when he would fire the first shot through the side of Shardelle’s head. When it hit the vehicle, when it tore it open, or at the point when one of those cowls poised above them? One of the creatures came close, shaking the ATV and jouncing it along the ground as its carapace worked like some giant rough saw down the side of the bodywork. Then they were all gone, and he was staring down at the map screen watching their transponder signals depart.
“I guess they’ve eaten enough,” said Shardelle.
There was nothing solid left, only fluids spattered on ground that looked as if it had been ploughed.
“Bones as well-everything,” said Jonas. “But then that is probably their purpose.”
She looked at him, sharp, annoyed. He stood and headed for the door and she followed.
“You want to know what The Gabble is?” he asked, standing at the edge of the churned ground.
“Of course I do.”
He gestured to the mess before them. “Something made the hooders and the tricones.
The hooders were most certainly a weapon in some war and the tricones made to digest the physical remnants of a civilization.”
“But why?”
“We’ll probably never know the answer to that. Tricones and hooders possess the same planetary genome as the gabbleducks, which means the gabbleducks probably made them. But their final purpose might not be the gabbleduck’s own.”
“You hinted that you knew what The Gabble is,” said Shardelle stubbornly.
“Maybe it’s a language of non-meaning: words spoken by a race that has given up, withdrawn, even chosen to forego intelligence. A race become so self-effacing it has made tricones to wipe out every trace of its civilization, and turned its own war machines to the purpose of destroying even the remains of its own devolved descendents. Or perhaps it’s even worse than that.”
“How could it possibly be worse?”
“Perhaps they lost some war, and this was done to them by the victors: their civilization erased, their creatures turned upon them-just enough mind remaining to them so they always remember what happened, that scrap of intelligence just enough for them to know how to hold off the hooders until they die.”
Shardelle shivered. Jonas felt an immense sadness at the core of which grew the seed of new purpose. Calypse hung above the far horizon, etched out by the setting sun, and, silhouetted, came the ECS transport. Tragedy here, or choice-he did not know. He swore to himself, in that moment, that one day he would.