Mirabile (36 page)

“I saw,” he said, very quietly, and he nodded and turned to go.

I caught his hand. “I haven’t heard what I need to hear.”

He smiled. “I’ll be careful, Annie. I promise.”

That earned him another kiss. Then we both got back to business. First thing I did was double-check Susan’s backread on the frankenswine genes. Sheer wishful thinking. I knew she didn’t make mistakes like that. Sure enough, the frankenswine back-read to wild boar and damn those geneticists back on Earth!

Because of Jen’s late-night visit, the next thing I tried was reading a step further back, to see if I could figure out what the wild boar had chained up from. No luck there. Like Jen, I’d have to wait till I had a sample of wild boar to work from.

A celebratory “GRONK!” from the lobby told me the hunting party had returned and I took the stairs two at a time. Never heard such a cacophony in my life.

Leo and Beate had set their makeshift cage dead center and it wasn’t just the nosey parkers exclaiming over their catch that made the room reverberate. Hideous snorts of rage came from the cage, now and again punctuated by the scrape of tusk on metal as the frankenswine tried to gouge its way through. Luckily, those flipper feet couldn’t get much purchase on sheet metal, but nevertheless three people were very hastily trying to reinforce the cage where it had already deformed from repeated impacts.

Mabob paced back and forth excitedly and answered the frankenswine’s grunts and snorts with challenging gronks of his own.

“Outside!” I bellowed over the noise. “Where’s your sense, for god’s sake?” I glared at Leo, who simply grinned back and swung a hand to indicate the gaggle of onlookers.

Elly did what I couldn’t. “Outside,” she said. She didn’t even have to raise her voice to cut through the excitement. “Take that thing outside this minute!”

You never saw such an abashed bunch in your life. The cage and its squealing contents got hefted up and taken outside that minute. Even Mabob looked hangdog, thoroughly ashamed of his behavior. He whistled anxiously at Elly until she took pity on him and scratched his head.

“It’s not your fault, Mabob,” she told him. “I’d have credited Leo and Beate with more sense, though.” She raised her voice and pierced the cacophony once more. “I want all you kids inside now! The same goes for any adult who is not armed.” Elly, who was armed, put her free hand on her hip and glared. “Move.”

There was no grumbling, no reluctance—we just moved, as commanded.

Which meant I had to dash upstairs for my shotgun before I could get a good close look at Leo’s prize captive. I was coming down the stairs at a good clip (you don’t run with a loaded shotgun in your hand) when I heard Dollery’s alarm go off.

I ran the rest of the way, never mind the loaded shotgun. As I elbowed my way through the crowd at the door, I heard two shots, then a third. My gun was up and ready when I hit the porch. I got a single quick glimpse of something huge and grey charging Leo at incredible speed.

Ten yards—five yards— My shot and Elly’s went off simultaneously—but it was Elly’s that did the job. The creature dropped.

Momentum tumbled it head over heels and it slid to a stop scant inches from Leo.

Leo, with perfect equanimity, lowered his gun and put a fifth round into its throat, just to make sure. It finally stopped moving.

“Susan!” Elly yelled over her shoulder into the lodge. “Bring your gun!”

I was reloading. “There’s at least one more of them,” I called down from the porch. “Don’t relax yet.”

They hadn’t; they were reloading as fast as I was. Elly snapped her gun shut and nodded crisply.

“That’s why I called Susan,” she said. “Next to Beate, she’s the best shot here.” Her brilliant smile returned. “I know you’ll want to examine that thing, Annie, but I want you covered the
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entire time.”

“Thanks,” I said. “And thanks for saving Leo’s butt for me. I appreciate it.”

“Didn’t want to lose Loch Moose’s best bedtime story teller,” she said. “The kids would never have forgiven me.”

Susan pushed her way through the crowd of onlookers at the door, took strict instructions from Elly and took up her post. Beate stood by the frankenswine’s cage but turned all her attention on the underbrush that surrounded the clearing.

I went down the steps to Leo’s side. He didn’t seem to be missing any body parts. Relief washed over me and I gave him a huge dopey grin just on general principles.

Then I went down on one knee to get a good look at the critter. I didn’t lay my shotgun aside.

“Mabob heard it before the alarm went off,” Leo said. “That was all the warning we got. The damn thing didn’t even stop to issue a challenge, just came straight at us.” He glanced at the caged frankenswine. “Straight at , Annie. And at about us thirty miles an hour!”

“I saw how fast it was. Lucky for us Elly was faster.”

The corner of his mouth twitched up in half a smile. “And here I thought it was your shot that took it out.”

“Disappointed?”

He gave me a full grin. “Not as long as it’s dead.”

Practical man—I like that.

The carcass was our wild sow, and I had no doubt she’d been the mother of the caged frankenswine behind us. She’d attacked the humans, not the cage. That made her altogether too bright.

And I really didn’t like the looks of the wounds I found on her body. The first shot had taken her full in the face—and hadn’t penetrated the skull. The second, at the shoulders, hadn’t gotten through the thick hide.

Elly’s shot had been the one that took her down, all right. She’d gotten it in the spine, from above. That had penetrated. So had the shot to the throat.

I took out my knife and started probing for places you could shoot it successfully. There weren’t enough of them. The heart was low and behind the leg, which made it a tough shot when the thing was charging you face on.

Mabob came tentatively over to pick up scraps and swallow them down. I saw he was keeping an eye on the brush, too.

“Hey, Mabob! Leave some for the rest of us!” Chris, shotgun in hand, made shooing movements at him from the porch. “Annie, anything you don’t need, I claim.”

“All right,” I said. “Send out four people to help us get this into the kitchen.”

It took that many, too. It was big! I couldn’t think of a single native Mirabilan predator that was big enough or fast enough to take one of those down. I wasn’t even sure there was anything Earth-authentic that could do it either, short of Elly and a well-placed shot.

I gave the frankenswine some further consideration. After I’d gotten a cell sample from it, I said,

“Leave it in the clearing—in its cage. If papa shows up to rescue it, shoot to kill. Best you watch from the porch and aim for the spine or throat. Leo—”

He nodded. “I’ll call Nikolai and Mike and warn them what they’re up against.”

“Put out a general warning as well,” I said. “We don’t know how many there are or how far they may have ranged.”

In the kitchen, I collected what samples I needed, plus a good hefty chunk for storage. You never know what you might need some day

, so I saved the ovaries as well. Mirabile might never be ready for wild boar, but I don’t burn
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bridges before I

come to them.

Took the sample of the wild sow to Jen. “Here,” I said. “You first, as promised.”

“Mama Jason…” She stuffed a sample into the analyzer, then handed the rest back to me. The worry hadn’t left her face. “You’ll check it, won’t you? Make sure I’m doing it right?”

I nodded. “Sure thing.”

“But tell me first.”

Well, that wouldn’t hurt any, as far as I could see, but it was still odd behavior coming from Jen.

I nodded again. “Trade you for your probability study. And you let me know the minute you find out anything.”

She gave a sigh of relief. “I will, I promise.”

I took the sheaf of papers she offered and headed back to my room to have a good long look.

Her “best case” promised ecological disaster. Worst case really was

. If we were lucky, we’d wind up with frankenswine. If the wild boar bred true, we’d be overrun with them in five years. I believed her figures, but I ran my own set because I didn’t want to believe her figures. Didn’t help.

What with two litters a year—even if only one or two offspring were viable—and no natural predators, the wild boar could outbreed anything on Mirabile.

All my life, I’ve been grateful that those geneticists back on Earth hadn’t included diseases on their list of keepers. Now I was almost sorry. If there’d been any disease that could cut the wild boar population to a manageable level, I’d have turned it loose in a second.

I stuffed a sample of wild boar into my analyzer. Jen was right: we needed to know what they were coming from. I didn’t get right to it, though—got a call from Mike and Nikolai.

“Uh, hi, Annie,” said Nikolai, looking a bit worse for the weather. “We had to kill one.”

“Good,” I said. “Are you two okay?”

“We’re fine,” he said. Then he caught up with me. “‘Good’?” he repeated.

“That’s what I told him,” Mike put in. “He didn’t believe me. Annie, these things make the damndest mess of the ecology. You wouldn’t believe what they’ve done to Ranomafana, and everybody here was ascribing it to drought or to something Mirabilan.”

“It’s clever and it stays clear of people,” Nikolai said. “Nobody ever saw one.

We only found it because we tracked it.”

“And we tracked it from the dead trees it left in its wake,” Mike put in darkly.

“Our turn to warn you

, Annie,” Nikolai went on. “We stalked the thing for twenty minutes, chased it for another twenty—then, no warning, it turned and charged us.

And you should see that thing move!”

“I have,” I said.

There was silence for a moment, then Mike said, “You’re gonna get an argument on this one, Annie.”

He thought I meant to keep the wild boar. What with my reputation, I suppose that was fair, if only because he’d had such a close brush he wasn’t thinking.

“I doubt that, Mike,” I said and watched him stop and think. “Here’s the probability run Jen did on future population.”

He swapped me for his preliminary report on the EC at Ranomafana. It only confirmed what I already knew. The wild boar ate anything—Earth-authentic, Mirabilan, didn’t matter. Stuff that would poison ninety percent of our

Earth-authentics, the wild boar ate safely. The frankenswine ate same—with heavy metal sauce.

And I wanted to personally gnaw the roots of anybody in Ranomafana who hadn’t bothered to report such obvious and widespread damage to their local EC.

Mike looked up from the probability study and said, “You can’t keep these, Annie—”

“I know,” I said, before he could work himself up into a real state.

He took a deep breath and visibly calmed. “So now what?”

I took a deep breath, too. “Order a hunt,” I said. “We can’t afford to keep them… but try for a cell sample from each one.”

His hackles went up again. I could see his jaw set.

I threw up both hands to fend off protests. “I’m not asking you to save the beast, I’m asking you to save its potential. Suppose we don’t have any embryos for pig in the ships’ banks? We’ve been shorted before.”

He nodded—grudgingly—but he nodded.

“I also need you to run a backread on your wild boar. I need to know whether we’ve got one source or two.”

“Will do, Annie. And I’ll save you a cell sample from it, too.”

Relieved now, Mike was trying to make me feel better about the decision.

I gave him half a smile. “Save the whole carcass. Chris has a stack of recipes she wants to try while she’s got the chance.”

“She can try them on me,” he said. Good humor restored, he broke the connection.

Problem was, making the decision—even if I knew it was the right one—had done nothing to restore my good humor.

“We hafta kill ’em?” said a voice from behind me. “Even if they’re Earth-authentic?”

I turned to face Jen. She’d come in while I was occupied.

“Yeah, kiddo,” I said. “We hafta. Otherwise they’re likely to ruin Mirabile.”

She nodded solemnly. “Then why are you saving their cells for the files?”

“Because maybe someday your great-great-grandchild might like a taste of pork.

Maybe someday we’ll need the wild boar or even the frankenswine genes, that’s why.”

She looked scornful. “Why would anybody need frankenswine genes?”

“Because heavy metals didn’t poison the one we shot—and they also didn’t poison us when we ate the one we shot. All the heavy metals wound up in the fat Chris stripped off the carcass, so the rest was safe to eat. That might be real useful someday or someplace.”

She made a disgusted face at me, tongue hung out and disbelieving. “Someplace?

Where?”

I grinned at her. “From what I read in ships’ files about Earth during the Bad Years, they could have used a critter that could metabolize heavy metals and was still safe for humans to eat. Maybe we’ll have Bad Years on Mirabile someday.”

“Never,” she said. “I won’t let em.”

There’s nothing so fierce as a ten-year-old. “Remember that when you have to make a decision about keepers or not, then,” I said. “So, what did you find out about the source of the wild boar?”

“Red deer,” she said. “I checked it four times, but you hafta check it too.”

I let her at the computer so she could call up her gene-reads. From where I sat there was no doubt she’d done them right—all four times—but she was so insistent that I ran my own as well.

“No doubt about it, kiddo,” I said when I’d finished.

“The wild boar came from one of the red deer.”

“Does that mean we hafta kill the red deer?”

“It means we hafta gene-read them all and try to stabilize the herd. Not easy with wild things.

That’ll keep us hopping for a few years.” I grinned at her. “At least it’ll give me a good excuse to spend a lot of time at Loch Moose Lodge…”

She gnawed her lip. “But you’d be too busy with the deer to have fun,” she said.