Previous: Chapter Five: The Hunting Party
Sometimes it takes a catastrophe to alert people to danger. Most of the time, catastrophe is not enough.
The Whole Earth Climate Accord was now entering its sixth decade. Its 150 charter and joining nations maintained the carbon neutrality that most had achieved within ten years of ratification. But not every country was signatory to WECA, and, even were compliance universal among the nations of the earth, it was clear to almost everyone that much of the previous centuries’ predictions of anthropogenic impact to Earth’s climate were now fulfilled, with most of those predictions alarmingly ahead of schedule.
As the 21st century waxed and waned, meteorologists adjusted to the new climate, extending the scales by which human beings reckoned extreme weather. The first declared Category 6 hurricane, Henrietta, formed over the Caribbean Sea, crossed into the Gulf of Mexico via the narrow isthmus separating Cuba from the Yucatan Peninsula, to visit fury upon the Gulf Coast not once, but twice. Whole towns had been swallowed or swept away. One of those struck had been Sustainaville, the ad-hoc town of beach bungalows and recycled habitat modules which served as home to a seasonally varying population of surfers, Rocket People, and destination tourists.
The damage to the rest of Sustainaville was severe, and several dozen residents had found themselves, along with their hab module homes, swept out into the Gulf by the surge, as Henrietta backed off for a second attempt. (That story is told in SLAM! A Captain Bender Adventure).
Sustainaville was full of single-pass learners, and the rebuilt town was now a planetary exemplar of coastal defense strategy. A better part of a year after the disaster, a memorial park on the windward edge of South Padre Island commemorated the local survivors of Henrietta, but there were also other, perhaps more permanent, reminders of the storm. Most prominent was the debris field deposited against the scrub pines atop the dunes running both north and south along the beach.
Known locally as “Henrietta’s Gift,” everything from disarticulated house lumber to uprooted trees lay tangled in a five to twenty meter tall berm of debris, running parallel to the strand, for 75 kilometers in both directions. Since the storm, crews had cleared beach access roads and firebreaks, at some expense, but the volume of material, arguably the largest (though inadvertant) anthropogenic megastructure since the Great Wall of China, was such that it was predicted to be several years, if ever, before this evidence of Henrietta’s power would be erased from the strand.
Merl stood before the towering mountain range of tangled wood, hearing, but unable to see, the Gulf waves crashing against the shoreline less than a hundred meters away. The inland wall of Henrietta’s Gift stretched to Merl’s left and right from horizon to horizon, blocking any possible sight of the shoreline.
Merl kicked a piece of matted driftwood. “We should have brought chainsaws.”
Jo said, quietly, “Nah, mate, you’d just scare our new friend.” There was something in Jo’s voice that made everyone turn to look.
Jo was staring at a point near the ground of the margin of the debris berm. The others strained their eyes.
Frances was the first to spot it, and whispered “Oh, yes! Hello, Lil’ Pooper!”
Standing quietly in the morning shade of the Gift was a wallaby, a joey. Its rabbit like ears rotated back and forth like independent radar dishes as it sniffed the air in their direction. Drawn up to its full height, as it was now, it appeared to stand about half a meter tall. “What do we do?” asked Merl, sotto voce.
Jo was dismounting, very slowly, on the opposite side of the horse from the wallaby. “Just be calm. If this little one was going to be spooked easily, it’d already be long gone. Let’s just make our first contact a pleasant one for everybody.”
Jo stepped heel to toe in the sand around the horse, drawing a camera slowly from its holster. Getting the drop on the joey. Frances thought that this Aussie might make an excellent Texas Ranger.
The morning was nearly ideal for photography. A high overcast cloud layer diffused an even light, with any direct sunlight filtered by the towering wall of hurricane debris.
The wallaby continued to regard the little group peacefully, and began to groom its face and ears with its hands. Jo stopped about ten meters away, and raised the camera.
Suddenly, there was a commotion to Jo’s left, just out of view. As Jo turned to face the sound, a second, adult wallaby erupted from a thicket five meters away, and bounded straight into Jo’s legs. Jo lost balance, and fell bottom first onto the sandy soil. The wallaby recovered, used Jo’s chest as a launch pad, and was seen no more.
“LOOK!” cried Frances.
Jo’s wallaby had just been the scout for a stampede. An even dozen individuals hopped past the astonished ranchers, streaming through and around the group of horses and humans, only to vanish, in less than a minute, into the impossible mountain of storm debris.
The only sound remaining was the crash of unseen ocean waves.
“Did you get a picture?” Frances asked.
Jo’s eyes did a quick search of the sandy soil, now freshly disturbed by hundreds of footprints.
“It’s gone. One of them took my camera.”
“Because of course they did,” sighed Frances.
MaryLiz opened one of Fusion’s saddlebags and removed a broad flat case containing a camera drone. She installed a fresh battery and pitched the drone skyward. Under manual control, the drone ventured a hundred meters south over open ground, then adjusted its course to fly along the top of the debris pile. The others clustered around MaryLiz’s remote screen to watch an unfolding endless landscape of jumbled timber and tree branches.
“That layer’s at least ten meters thick. You’re not going to see anything,” protested Frances.
“I’m not trying to see them. Look at the upper right hand corner. Watch carefully – see if you spot anything different.”
The flight of the drone continued. It had almost reached their position along the wall when a notification icon lit in the part of the screen MaryLiz had pointed out.
“Oh, that’s good,” said Frances, “that’s very good.”
“I set the drone to have the same wifi ID as our repeater,” said MaryLiz to a bewildered looking Jo and Merl. “If any of the cameras survived the trip, and are still charged, they should connect to the network. We can probably get a pretty good idea of where they all are.”
MaryLiz piloted the drone through three more passes of a half-kilometer stretch of Henrietta’s Gift. Here and there, the lost cameras responded with signals over a 200 meter stretch of the wall, centered just a few meters south of where Merl’s tracking had led them. MaryLiz entered a waypoint into the drone’s memory for each signal. In the end, they had twenty candidate locations for the fifty lost cameras (fifty-one, counting Jo’s).
Frances downloaded the lost camera waypoints from the drone, and walked towards the nearest one. The target spot picked up by the drone was perhaps ten meters into the debris pile, which was so hopelessly dense that there was no hope of spotting the camera, even if it had been within arm’s reach.
Frances didn’t need to. The signal from the camera was still strong. Frances set up a hotspot device with the same ID as the repeater they’d used during the original shoot, and the camera connected to it automatically.
The camera was still set to night vision mode, and a ghostly image appeared. A jumble of sticks and cut lumber appeared. The camera had come to rest pointed downward at the sand. Among the natural shapes were a number of dark, squarish objects.
Jo was looking over Frances’ shoulder. “Are those…”
“Three more cameras,” said Frances. “No, four, look at that shadow on the left edge.”
“I don’t want to second guess the sequencer, but I think we’ve got Red-necked Wallaby. They have pretty good manual dexterity, but carrying five cameras at once is not something they’d ordinarily find easy to do.”
“So they made multiple trips. Or multiple individuals decided to put their trophies in the same case.” Frances shivered. “Either way, I have to say I’m a little spooked. Is pack rat behavior a wallaby thing?”
“No. It’s not. They’re foragers, browsers. Takeaway’s not their thing.”
The little party wandered up and down the landward side of the wall, looking for breaks large enough to enter, but found none. There was no sign of the wallabies, who were apparently all hiding in the pile as the day grew warmer.
At noon, MaryLiz called it, and by half past, they were back at the ranch for lunch.