Mirabile (35 page)

“Keep scowling like that, Annie,” Leo muttered at me under his breath, “and Chris will never speak to you again.”

Times I wish my face didn’t show every damn thing that goes through my mind. I made an effort. It must not have worked because Leo grinned and tickled me under the table, which did earn him a grin back.

After I polished my bowl, I looked around the table and said, “Okay, who’s got what to report?”

“Me!” said Jen, triumphantly, overriding the rest. So the rest let her have the floor without so much as a squabble. Being gnawed gives you certain proprietary rights, even in this lively a
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bunch.

“So,” I said. “What do we get if they breed with each other?”

She pulled out a sheaf of hard copy. She’d been sitting on it, literally. It was still warm from her bottom when it reached my hands.

“It’s hard to tell, Mama Jason, because it’ll depend on which one breeds with which one. Maybe the others aren’t viable. But the two you and Noisy killed would have been. You see if I’m right.” She glanced at Beate and explained, “Better if somebody checks, so I know I’m doing it right.”

Then she turned back to me. “The bad news is, chances are the rest of them can breed more little frankenswine.”

“Just what we needed,” I said, and Jen nudged Beate and said, “See? Told you she’d say that.”

I was reading Jen’s hard copy but I didn’t miss the grin back that Beate gave her—or Elly’s chuckle, either.

The hard copy was nothing to chuckle over though. She’d printed out all the steps she’d gone through to get to it, so I could follow along, fully aware that she’d gotten the procedure right. If the procedure was right, so were the conclusions, and she’d summed those up correctly, too. If the two frankenswine we’d killed had bred, they’d have bred more frankenswine.

“Leo? I counted about seven of them. Does that jibe with your count?”

“I made it eight, not counting the two we blew away.”

“Any reason to think they’re all from the same litter?”

“Statistical reason. That’s an unlikely sort of Dragon’s Tooth to happen twice or more in a season. Wild boar have large litters—up to twelve at a time.”

I’d been thinking the same myself, but I hated like hell having it confirmed.

“Don’t blame the messenger,” Leo said—but the smile he gave me said he wasn’t about to take my snarl personally no matter what my face did in his direction, which was enough to make me smile back, of course. “Maybe some of them aren’t viable.”

“Twelve in a litter,” I said. “Jen, can you run a probability program?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Then you take these”—I handed back the hard copy—“and you run me one. I want to know the odds on the next, oh, ten generations. How many frankenswine are we likely to wind up with?”

“Mama Jason?” That was Ilanith. I nodded at her and she said, “I read up on wild boar. They can have two litters a year. Maybe they won’t on Mirabile, but they could back on Earth. So…” She held out both hands in Jen’s direction.

Worse and worse. To Jen, I said, “So plot probability for two generations a year.

Worst case.”

“Want a best case, too, Mama Jason?”

“Only if it makes you feel better,” I said. “It’s worst case we have to plan for.”

She gave it earnest thought, then she said, “I’ll run a best case, too. After all, I was the one got chewed—but Chris is right about how good they taste. Maybe we could just eat them all.”

The damage to Loch Moose’s vegetation said different, but I didn’t say it—let her have her best case. I had a feeling it wouldn’t look much better than worst case.

“Next up,” I said, and turned to Susan. “Have you got a line on what produced

’em?”

She’d been awfully quiet through dinner and she didn’t look like she much wanted to talk now.

“Yeah,” she said, grudgingly, “and you’re not gonna like that, either.”

“Worst case,” I said, shrugging.

“They didn’t come from moles.”

“Meaning… ?”

“The gene-read says they came from Earth-authentic wild boar. Meaning we’ve got wild boar loose in the woods somewhere, as well as the frankenswine.”

And Leo and I had thought ourselves safe sitting on that rock outcrop. I looked at him and he looked at me. Either he whistled or I did. I rubbed the back of my neck, where the hairs had suddenly stood up.

“Elly,” I said, “nobody’s to go into the woods until we get this sorted out. And nobody so much as goes from the lodge to the hovers without a shotgun.”

Elly frowned. “How is it possible we’ve had something that dangerous around long enough to have a litter—and nobody spotted it?”

“I think it’s likely it shifted range. Maybe because of bad foraging conditions elsewhere. Maybe because it wanted a quieter neighborhood for its brood.”

“A fifty-mile shift would be nothing to a wild boar,” Ilanith put in. “And you wouldn’t have seen it unless it wanted to be seen. They’ve got lousy eyesight, but they make up for it by being a lot better at hearing and smelling than a human. They avoid humans unless the human makes a point of it.”

Glen Sonics Dollery, who’d been taking this all in from up the table, said, “Then they might have moved here from the area around Ranomafana. Don’t know if you heard, Annie, but they’re having a bad drought there. Lots of animals dead, lots of trees dying.”

“Trees dying,” I said. “They sure that’s drought and not a brand new predator?”

He leaned back and considered the question. “The fellow I stayed with said drought and I wasn’t there long enough to disbelieve him. I haven’t a woods’ eye, Annie. Leo could probably tell you at a glance if the damage was lack of water or…”

I eyed Leo. If memory served, he’d opened that territory.

“Drought isn’t the likely explanation,” Leo said. “Not in that area. I’ll call around and see what I can find out.”

Dollery said, “Are you folks still planning to trap one of the frankenswine? Even with this other thing loose in the woods?”

Leo nodded; so did Beate. “We’ll keep our eyes on the undergrowth as well as the underground,” Leo added.

“Maybe I can help, then,” Dollery said. “I may not have a woods’ eye, but I’ve got some equipment you could use as an ear for things happening underground. I might even be able to tune it to a specific creature.”

“Your department,” I said to Leo. He nodded at Dollery.

Elly said, “Maybe the wild boar isn’t as dangerous as its offspring. If it’s kept away from humans so long, why should it change its habits now?”

“Because we blew away two of its children this afternoon,” I said. “If Ilanith’s right about its sense of smell, it knows who was responsible. How did you feel about Jen? Double that for our wild sow. If she’s bright enough to carry a grudge, she’s carrying one helluva of a king-sized one against us.”

Leo’s plan to capture one of the frankenswine awaited the arrival of some sheet steel, but we did make one last foray outside before we lost the light. Dollery’d done some tinkering, and we drove a series of sensors into the ground that would theoretically let us know if anything nasty tunneled close to the lodge. Finding out how far from the lodge we had to go for ground soft enough to drive them into was reassuring—at least, if you didn’t count the possibility of mama boar showing up on the porch, tusks curled and ready for vengeance. I said as much.

“Quit growling,” Leo told me. “The sensors will pick up anything that so much as pussyfoots
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this close to the lodge. That should hold us for the night. We can worry about the fine-tuning tomorrow.”

I snorted. “Meaning nobody sleeps through the night. We get roused for every clashing or red deer in the neighborhood.”

“Cheer up,” he said. He grinned at me. “Maybe for once we’ll get a good look at the Loch Moose monster.”

“Ah,” I said, “but do you really want a good look at the Loch Moose monster?”

We went in, still chuckling at each other, and packed it in for the night.

Turned out it wasn’t the frankenswine or the wild boar or even the Loch Moose monster that disturbed our sleep.

“Wake up, Annie,” Leo whispered. “We’ve got company.”

“If it’s a clashing, I don’t wanna hear about it.” I don’t take kindly to being awakened in the middle of the night.

“It’s one of the smaller Loch Moose monsters,” Leo said.

There was enough of a smile in the voice that I caught on even before I heard the barely suppressed giggle of one of Elly’s kids. I made an effort and came fully awake.

Middle-of-the-night visits at Loch Moose Lodge are not out of the ordinary, but they’re always interesting, one way or another.

“Shield your eyes, I’m turning the light on,” I said. When I could see again, I saw that it was Jen.

Despite the giggle I’d heard, her face was solemn. I planted an elbow on Leo’s chest, peered across at her and said, “What’s up?”

“I tried and tried, but I don’t know enough yet, Mama Jason. How do I find out what the wild boar came from?”

“The automatic program only handles one step back—if it does that,” I said. “We might be able to do it manually. But the easiest way is to get a cell sample from the wild boar and analyze that.

Only way to be sure, anyhow.”

She sighed heavily and the frown furrowed deeper into a forehead that was never meant to frown.

“Is this important?” I could feel my face slipping into a frown to match hers.

“You should be asleep. I need you rested and awake for action tomorrow.”

She gnawed her lip. “It’s important. Will you get a cell sample from the wild boar tomorrow?”

I looked down at Leo, then back at Jen. “That’s high on my priority list, kiddo.”

“Will you tell me first? Where the wild boars are coming from, I mean.”

“You can do the gene-read yourself,” I said, “ you get enough sleep you can see if straight.”

That should have been enough to send her scooting, but it wasn’t. She shifted her weight, enough to let me know her leg was aching. “It has to be right,” she said. “Me first after you. Not Ilanith or Susan.”

Not what I’d‘ve called the usual request. I cocked my head suspiciously, but she didn’t back down. If anything, the small face set stubborner. “Okay,” I said, “I guess you earned it. You do it; I’ll check it.”

Relief spread instantly across her features. It hadn’t been the leg that was hurting, after all.

“Thanks, Mama Jason!”

“Now, off to bed with you, kiddo, before Elly catches you up this late and feeds you to the Loch Moose monster!”

“G’night, Mama Jason.” She leaned across Leo to give me a kiss on the cheek.

“G’night, Noisy.” Leo got a kiss too and then she was gone.

I was still wearing an elbow hole in Leo’s chest, thinking about it.

“‘Not Susan or Ilanith’?” he said, shifting my elbow. “What do you suppose that’s all about?”

“Damnify know,” I told him. “But I’m sure gonna find out. In the morning. Or, at least,
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sometime when I’m awake. G’night, Leo,” and I gave him a pretty thorough good-night kiss before I fell asleep again

. Made up for the elbow hole some.

I dawdled over breakfast, knowing I was stuck with the computer for the rest of the day. The plates of sheet metal had arrived and Leo and Beate were gearing up to catch us a frankenswine or two.

I felt better that Beate was going along with the plan. No offense to Leo, but the more I read about wild boar, the less happy I was having anybody in the woods.

Younger, faster reflexes were in order. Dollery’s probes would give them some warning and the sheet metal some measure of protection but still…

I made Leo call Ranomafana before he got away from me though. Turned out they’d lost an entire bed of bulbs last spring and hadn’t thought to mention it to anybody.

“The whole damn population’s getting too lax,” I said. “Need a good shake—each and every one of ’em.”

Leo laughed. “I shook him for you, Annie. I left orders nobody was to go out unarmed—and told them why. I guarantee the next time anybody in Ranomafana sees anything out of the ordinary, we get notified immediately.”

“Good. At least that’s accomplished something.”

I turned and put in a call to the lab. It wasn’t Mike I got but Nikolai, one of my favorite examples of good genes in action.

Of course, that also meant he was mad as a hatter that Mike hadn’t let him come charging up to Loch Moose the minute he heard what was going on.

“Down, kiddo,” I said. “I want you and Mike, fully armed and all eyes peeled, up at Ranomafana as soon as you can get there without wrapping the hover around a tree. There may still be frankenswine or wild boar in the area. Be ready for either. I want a full workup on the EC, with special emphasis on the supposed drought damage. I want it yesterday.”

He grinned and stopped trying to jump out of the screen at me. “What’s the policy, Annie? You want them saved, right?”

That was the crucial question, all right, but I’d answered it the day before. I shook my head. “Shoot anything that charges you, Nikolai—above or below ground. Save a cell sample of each. We can always reconstruct if we decide they’re keepers, but I don’t want you or Mike taking any chances. You haven’t seen how fast or how nasty these little buggers are.”

He nodded as solemnly as Jen would have. Then he grinned a descendant of Leo’s grin and said, “You’ve been hanging out with Elly too much—you’re picking up her Voice of Command.”

“Whatever works,” I said, grinning back. “And, Nikolai, we haven’t dealt with any wild boar yet.

Judging from the information in ships’ files, they’re as fast and as nasty as the frankenswine, only they weigh up to three hundred pounds.”

His eyebrows went up and he gave a short, sharp whistle. “We’ll read up on the way. We’ll be careful, Annie, I promise.” He nodded again, this time over my shoulder. “I promise, Leo.”

I passed a few more specific instructions to Mike, then I broke the connection and turned back to Leo.

“I heard what I needed: don’t take chances with them. You don’t think they’re keepers, do you, Annie?”

“You saw what they’ve done to the smoking pines.”