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“That is all kinds of nifty,” Hubcap said, flipping over the colorful scale and holding it up for the cameras with a hangar wall as backdrop. “It looks like it’s made of fire.” It also seemed to have come from something shaped like neither a clam nor a mermaid, but Hubcap was ignoring that fact. He’d privately revised his guess to “alien lobster.” Time would tell. He’d noted its scent, and looked forward to searching. The mood was optimistic.
Elliot had watched him take a good sniff in the cold morning air, and was making a point now of discussing the detailed texture of the one he held. The human knew full well that Hubcap’s fingertips weren’t calibrated to that degree.
“It feels like a topographical map of the desert,” Elliot said to Dale. “This part has sand dunes, and these edges have rock formations like the ones in Utah. What do you think, Hubcap?”
With hands pressed together in front of his closed mouth, Hubcap regarded his grinning co-host. “I think,” he said, “That I will find it first, no matter what it feels like.”
“Okay,” Elliot said, grin still in place. “You do have the superior robot senses, after all.”
“That’s right.”
“So, Owen!” Elliot turned to address the slender biologist who was once again the crew chief. “Do you think the bright colors are a sign that the creature is poisonous?”
Owen stowed the last of the gear they would need in the aircar, breath puffing in the cold. “It certainly could be,” he said. “As far as we’ve been able to tell, the same principles apply here as on Earth — tasty edible creatures try to blend in while the deadly ones make clear warnings. Of course, with armor like this, it’s hard to imagine an animal needing poison. But it could either be mimicking the coloration of a legitimately poisonous animal, or it becomes poisonous if it eats the right diet. Lots of possibilities; science is fun that way!”
Hubcap blinked his wiper panels. “Thank you for that rundown. So, do we know what the thingies look like?” He tapped a metal finger on the plate-sized piece he held.
“Nope!” Owen said cheerfully. “This is all we know about them.” He waved to the half dozen other scales distributed through the group. They ranged in color from Hubcap’s fiery red to Elliot’s purple/black to those that the half dozen biologists held that were everything in between. Each piece was curved into either a dome or a cylinder, adorned with small ridges and dull spikes, and they were very, very tough. Owen had demonstrated this right off the bat by flinging one like a discus against the wall.
It had rebounded and nearly hit Hubcap, who had to be convinced not to start a frisbee war. He was still looking for an excuse to throw the one he held now.
“Well, let’s go learn some more!” Elliot said. He handed his piece to Owen, who collected the others and led the way into the aircar. Hubcap hurried to get a good seat. This might just be an exciting trip.
Minutes later, the vehicle was speeding over the landscape at hovering height. Hubcap knew they would be going higher soon, since mountains were approaching fast and there were no good routes straight through. He would have asked about their flight path if it wasn’t a struggle to be heard. This aircar was a bigger enclosed model, but it was no quieter than the first.
That didn’t stop Owen. “Did anyone tell you about these mountains?” he called back from the copilot’s seat, shouting over the thunder of the engines. “They’re called the Razor Range!”
Hubcap raised his own volume. “Yes, because they’re sharp enough to make the sky bleed. We heard about the rainstorms.” An official on the shuttle ride from the space station had gone into detail in describing the local environment. Hubcap hoped that Owen wasn’t about to repeat the lecture.
“That’s right; they’re like one long bladed mountain,” Owen said with all the delight of a science geek who gets to explain something. If the cameras had been filming anything other than silent background shots right now, it could have been useful footage. But with the engines this loud, it was just conversation. “The seasonal rainstorms tend to run up against them before reaching us out here.” Owen continued, pointing down at the temperate land speeding past. “This would look very different if those mountains weren’t there.”
“So does that mean there’s rainforest on the other side?” Elliot asked, prompting an avalanche of data. Hubcap didn’t bother interrupting.
“It’s not a rainforest like the kind you’re probably thinking of,” Owen replied. “Most of the year is dry, so the trees have to be able to withstand drought. But all that rain does make things interesting this time of year. There’s widespread flooding that’s still at its peak now, even though the rains have cut back to a storm every few days instead of each morning.”
Hubcap found a few things in the lecture interesting despite himself, and when the river at the foot of the mountains appeared with muddy glory, he leaned forward in his harness for a better look.
“Which way is the waterfall?” he asked, searching for the landmark Owen had described. “Oh wait; I see it!” Owen pointed it out anyway, talking about how the flow of water from the flooded area above widened the existing river.
The camera crew aimed downward, doing their best to focus on the distant scenery. Hubcap watched with interest as the aircar rose to follow the waterfall. This was at the southern tip of the Razor Range, where a crack in the sharp wall dipped just low enough for dark water to pour over. “That must be some massive flooding,” Hubcap said.
He felt Elliot tap his side. “What did you say about encouraging him?” the human asked.
“You hush while I’m being hypocritical.”
Then the roaring engines raised them up to the break in the mountainside, and the car darted into the shadowy chasm just above the water.
Hubcap threw his hands into the air as rock walls sped by on either side, and he made happy roller coaster yells.
“Wooooo, yeah!”
Beside him, Elliot was shaking his head. Then the scene brightened as the other side raced toward them with a splash of brilliant blue sky.
When the little aircar shot out of the rift, it suddenly seemed tiny indeed as it hovered over a vast green forest with muddy water glinting between the trees.
“Will you look at that,” Elliot said.
“Oh, I’m looking!” Hubcap answered. “I’ve always wanted to swim through a jungle!”
“It’s not really a jungle,” Owen said. “It’s a forest, but...”
“Curses, I set him off again,” Hubcap said, glancing at a muted camera. He sat back to withstand more lecturing, and watched out the windows with interest. Vic had said that the showrunner was looking for eye-catching footage. This looked pretty eye-catching to Hubcap.
It soon became obvious that the whole forest wasn’t flooded, only the area surrounding the river. The aircar slowed to follow the curves of the original riverbed, which was visible only because there were no trees there. Owen urged the pilot to go lower, while the biologists peered intently out the windows.
“Keep your eyes open for flashes of color!” Owen yelled. “They’ll probably be washed up against rocks and fallen trees. That’s how we found the other ones.”
The aircar traced the path of the river, finding nothing more than water, weird trees, and colorful flying creatures that looked like bats who wanted to be parrots when they grew up. Hubcap pointed out a couple for Graham to film.
“There! Set down there!” Owen said, pointing, and the pilot angled the car downward. The river was still wide here, but it bent sharply, with a gravelly beach on the inside of the curve and a herd of large gray boulders on the outside. Owen was talking about the mechanics of the water flow in relation to digging canyons and pushing big rocks about, but Hubcap’s attention was on the flight path of the aircar.
For a moment he thought the car would be landing on the beach, but he was wrong. Instead, Owen directed it to hover over the rocks. The noisy flight engines turned off with alarming suddenness, to be replaced by the quiet hum of the hover engine and a chorus of what passed for native birdsong. Hubcap tried to locate whatever was making the chirps and squeaks, but had no luck. Apparently they weren’t scared into silence by aircar engines. They were staying hidden, though.
Hubcap saw the camera jockeys turn their volume on. He started to narrate for the nearest two, but he was interrupted by a worker spotting color among the dark rocks. The pilot didn’t need Owen’s urging to float over in the right direction. Once, the sighting was confirmed, the biologists started getting out of their seats. Hubcap did the same. They weren’t about to make fascinating discoveries without him.
“We’re not going to land?” Elliot asked, unbuckling his harness.
“Nope!” Owen told him cheerfully. “There’s nowhere flat enough. We’ll stick with a getaway landing. Those come in handy when the wildlife gets restive!”
“Oh goody,” Hubcap said, heading for the door. “Restive wildlife makes for great TV!”
He was caught before he could throw the door open and make a wild dive into the muddy depths. Apparently there were ladders for this sort of thing. How boring.
“Everybody watch your step on the way down,” Owen said. “And be careful of slippery rocks — things still look wet from the rain. Make sure you can get back to the rock we’re setting down on.” He kept up the advice as the biologists opened the door and set up the ladder, which was made from metal cable and steps. A few of the local experts went down first to demonstrate the safest technique, then it was the newbies’ turn. “Make sure each handhold and foothold is secure before moving on to the next,” Owen advised, gesturing toward the open door.
“Got it,” Hubcap said with a salute. He turned to the rest of his crew. “Come, meatbags; there is exploratory science to be done!” With that, he swung over the side of the aircar with what he knew looked like careless abandon, but was really a move that he had perfected over years of water rescues. He led the way down the swaying ladder with Elliot explaining to Owen that the robot really did know what he was doing.
He made landfall easily on the largest rock. The humans took their sweet time behind him. He sniffed about while they dithered over whether or not to leave the puffy jackets behind since the morning was heating up. Nothing smelled like the shell he’d held earlier — or rather everything did, since it had stunk of algae and mud. Hubcap peered between boulders.
Jacket-less, Elliot made his way to the ground with the camera crew moving slowly behind him. A glance showed that Graham had chosen to stay in the aircar and film from above.
A reasonable idea, Hubcap admitted as he stepped out of the way of several locals climbing down. We may want a view from up there, and I suppose Graham is a little old for the acrobatics. A brief flailing of arms on ground level reminded him that it could be worse. Two biologists were giving Dale a hand before he could lose his balance or his camera. No one had frenzied. Good enough.
Soon everyone was down on the rocks who was going to be. The aircar left its ladder ready, hovering in place with Graham filming from the open door in the company of locals who pointed things out to him.
“They were over that way,” someone was saying. Hubcap focused his attention back on the task at hand, and hopped merrily over the damp rocks in the search for colorful mystery shells. The sun was bright and the air was full of alien birdsong. With less frenzy to worry about outdoors, he found himself looking forward to filming with more optimism than the day before.
There would be interesting things here; he just knew it.
There had better be.
––––––––
Elliot picked up a domed shell fragment that reminded him of a Scatterball kneepad: smooth and white on the inside. He flipped it over to find the outside covered in spikes like something from the more violent street leagues. The white color turned yellow at the edges, then swiftly changed to dark purple across the craggy outer surface. Sky blue spikes poked out everywhere. Elliot compared its shape to the others scattered about, and he wondered what kind of body part it had fit over.
The smell of it reached his nose, making him exhale forcefully. Whoo, ripe seafood, he thought. With water moss and mildew. I hope somebody packed hand sanitizer.
As he thought it, he heard Hubcap call out, “Look at me, I have red hair!”
Elliot looked up to see the robot capering about on a flat rock with an orange-red scale on his head.
Elliot wrinkled his nose. “Careful, you’ll get alien algae on you,” he said.
Hubcap didn’t let that deter him. He left the scummy helmet in place, and took off bounding from rock to rock with a disregard for the deep, dark river that lurked below. Elliot shook his head, thinking that if it had been a human jumping around like that, he would have called him careless. But this was Hubcap, and he always moved like that. He had a surprisingly good safety record to back it up.
“Sign of life!” crowed Owen. Elliot turned to see everyone converging on the crew chief, who was pointing towards the water and leaping boulders much like Hubcap had. He stopped on a low rock in the shade of several trees that drooped like yellow celery. Vic and Tarja were right behind him, aiming cameras.
“What? What did you see?” Elliot called, setting the shell down and making his hasty way over.
“Something fast and pale, down there,” the biologist said in excitement. “It looked massive!”
Everyone peered into the depths, but try as they might, no one could make out anything farther than a foot or so. Hubcap started looking around for a “pokin’ stick,” while Owen described what he’d seen. Elliot listened carefully.
“It was kind of drifting at first,” Owen said. “Moving slowly like it didn’t want to get our attention, then I guess it saw me, because it sort of jerked sideways and disappeared. I think it kicked off the rock to go deeper.”
“What was it shaped like?” Elliot prompted.
Owen made vague hand gestures. “Blurry. Big, definitely — longer than I am tall — and I got the distinct impression that there were lots of legs. Stiff ones, not flippers or tentacles. I suppose it could be something crustacean in phenotype.” He chattered away in a cloud of scientific excitement.
Hubcap trotted over with a hefty tree branch that looked like it had been moldering under the water for a long time. Eliot and the other humans gave him a wide berth.
“Heeeere fishy fishy fishy,” the robot chanted happily. He thrust the slimy branch into the water, poking about for all he was worth, but nothing surfaced. The branch was only visible for a short distance before the end disappeared into the murky green-brown. The robot soon gave up and tossed the branch out into the river, where it sank without a trace. “No fishy. I am made sad.”
Elliot patted his shoulder. “You tried. We’d need a high-powered searchlight to find anything in this water.”
The robot shook his head. “I was hoping it was just hiding, and would show up on heat vision with a little persuading. But no luck.” He blinked, adjusting his eyes, and looked up like he’d had a good idea. “I could jump in and swim around—”
“Nope,” Elliot said.
Owen chimed in. “No, let’s look for more shells, shall we?” he suggested. He ushered the robot away from the edge, distracting him by pointing out that there was a boulder to look behind that only he could reach. Moments later, Hubcap was leaping across open water to land like a gecko on the side of a large sloping rock. Elliot watched him scramble over to the other side, and complimented Owen on his Hubcap-handling technique.
“Well, he does remind me of my young cousins,” Owen admitted. “There’s no way to convince them not to do something they’ve set their minds to, except by giving them something else to do instead.”
Elliot nodded. “That about covers it,” he said.
“Jaaaaaackpot!” the robot yelled from the top of the boulder. “I found stuff!” He ducked back down out of sight.
“What kind of stuff?” Owen wanted to know. “Is it portable?” He edged along the boulder he stood on, visibly looking for a way across that wouldn’t leave him swimming. Elliot made sure the cameras were pointed in that direction. Vic was already on it.
“Yeah, lemme move some plants first,” said Hubcap, followed by splashing and scraping sounds. Moments later the robot reappeared with an armload of colorful things. “They’re kind of beat up, but here you go!” He made another dramatic leap across the water and landed awkwardly, barely managing not to drop anything.
The biologists all got grabby with the pile. Elliot let them have first dibs on the interesting pieces, then picked up a yellow shard. He held it up for Tarja’s camera while Dale and Vic covered the rest. It looked like lemon rind crossed with a crab shell.
“This is fascinating,” Owen said. “These cracks could be from an impact with a rock, or the jaw of a predator — while these holes and cuts appear to have been ground out.”
“Maybe a burrowing parasite?” suggested a woman whose hair was an explosion of blonde ringlets, as she held a shell above her head to look through the hole.
“That’s possible,” Owen agreed. “They’re definitely not made by impact. See there’s no sign of cracking, and these hairline scratches around the holes indicate repeated circular motions.” He held up a purple fragment with one perfectly round hole bored through the edge of it. As he kept talking, fellow biologists crowded around to inspect it and offer their own theories.
Elliot regarded the piece that he held, finding nothing more significant than a missing chunk that appeared to have been broken off. There were no marks that he could find — well, no big ones, anyway. He squinted closer, second-guessing himself while the others talked.
“This one seems to have been broken by the grinding action,” said a black woman with a short fuzz of hair. “See the scrapes at the edge of the crack here?”
“And this one has an abortive attempt!” added a white man with similar hair. “Look, there are swirling scrape marks, but it doesn’t make it all the way through.”
“Oh, maybe the parasite was scraped off before it got that far,” the woman said.
“I wonder if these are predatory parasites, or just barnacle-style hitchhikers that dig too deep?” suggested the blonde woman.
“I’d bet on predatory,” Owen said. “There’s no reason why something would need to keep digging like that just to stay in place. Look, the marks would be right under where it sat. No, this has to be some sort of rasping tongue, or similar action.”
Elliot didn’t have much to add to the conversation. When he was sure that the cameras had recorded enough of him standing there looking thoughtful, he crouched to join Hubcap in playing jigsaw puzzle with some of the shells. Tarja filmed from the edge of the huddle. The robot still had the red shell dripping down his neck. He looked to Elliot like a particularly unhinged conspiracy theorist as he studied the colorful pieces before him.
Elliot cocked his head. “You know there’s a good chance that these all came from different animals, right?”
“Oh, sure. But this is fun.”
Elliot nodded. “True enough. Hey, this one’s different,” he said, picking up a dark blue scale with a much bigger area ground down to a pale blue-white. He ignored Hubcap’s noises of irritation and waved it above his head. “Owen! Here’s another clue.”
The head biologist snatched it up with an exclamation of great interest, and the cameras followed him intently. “Oh wow, this is huge!” Owen said. “Imagine the size of the parasite that could do this!” He and the others were off again, chattering away about the possibilities. Elliot waited for a moment then went back to the puzzle. Hubcap was arranging the pieces in a new way, and Elliot wanted to see if he’d figured out anything important.
He had not. “As best I can tell,” the robot said, “This beast was a large segmented snake, with many heads. Yep, that’s got to be it.”
“I see.”
“My work here is done!” Hubcap said. “I shall now climb more rocks and attempt to spot one of the things, thus proving my theory.”
“You do that,” Elliot said. He glanced at the huddle while the robot once again leapt into space. The thump of his landing on another boulder was pretty quiet for someone with metal feet.
Elliot got up and found a different vantage point to climb: a cluster of rocks farther from the water. He set his feet with care on the damp surface. Slipping now would be both dangerous and humiliating, especially since Tarja was still tracking him with the camera.
The biologists sounded like they’d be at it for some time. Normally Elliot would be down there with them, in front of all the cameras asking questions, but today he just couldn’t. Not when he stood a chance of spotting something “riveting and eye-catching” to film instead.
He saw Tarja elbow Vic to point out the absence of both co-hosts. While Elliot chose his next step and pretended not to watch, Vic sent Tarja and Dale to follow them. She also had a quiet word with Owen, who had to be pried away from the shells. By the looks of it, the head biologist was briefly concerned about the guests he was supposed to be keeping an eye on. But Vic calmed him down.
Probably pointing out that we’re not that far away, Elliot thought. And if we spot something good from up here, they can all scramble to join us. Whatever she’d said, Owen turned his attention back to the shell he was holding.
Elliot made sure to stay in view as he set his feet on the top of the first rock. Shading his eyes, he peered around dramatically for the sake of the cameras. Nothing moved aside from the water. Determined, he sought handholds and climbed higher.
Motion caught his eye as he reached the top, but it turned out to be a leafy frond dipping in the breeze. Branches and other debris were caught between boulders, a sign of higher floodwaters in the past. Elliot moved to address the cameras at the foot of the boulder, keeping his balance with one hand on a straight branch that was wedged between the rocks. Something small bounced off his head.
“Ow.” He looked around to find Hubcap holding a handful of nuts or pebbles or something, and wearing a wide grin.
“Two points for me!” the robot exclaimed, tossing another.
Elliot dodged that one, bumping against the branch and knocking it loose from its perch. Hubcap kept up his cheerful barrage. Elliot decided that enough was enough.
“All right, you varlet!” he exclaimed, hopping to his feet and grasping the end of the branch. “Now you face the wrath of Excalibur!” With a mighty wrench, he pulled it free and aimed it at Hubcap’s startled face. “En garde!”
At Hubcap’s look, Elliot froze. The stick of wood ended in a very sharp splash of red. He stared down at the pointed shard of red shell that was tied to the pole with some sort of sinew.
Hubcap said it first. “That’s a spear.”
“Yes,” Elliot said, his pulse speeding up. “Yes it is.” He brought the point close to his face, reaching out a cautious fingertip to test its sharpness. It was very sharp.
“The question now is...” Hubcap began.
“...Who made it, when there’s not supposed to be intelligent life on this planet?” Elliot finished. He held the spear aloft, in full view of the cameras. “Hey Owen!”