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Elliot squinted through the glare of early-morning light as the aircar lowered into the clearing on its quiet hover engine. Once past the tree canopy, the sun was hidden and Elliot could better see the branches that the car had snapped the day before. There’d apparently been no rain overnight, since things looked dry. The aircar set down gently on the purple grass. Harnesses started unbuckling before the engines shut off. Elliot was one of the first people out, but Hubcap beat him to the tree line.
“Hang together now, folks,” Owen called. “No straying ahead in alien territory.”
Vic chimed in, reminding the robot that he knew better. Hubcap muttered and slouched back to wait.
Elliot got to pat him on the head for once. “Patience, young one,” Elliot said in his best grandfatherly tone.
Hubcap scoffed. “I’ve spent plenty of time in my life being patient. When you’ve wasted an entire day sifting through beach sand looking for traces of jewelry or fillings that aren’t there, then you can talk to me about patience.” He pointed at Elliot. “And this was no fun-filled time with cheerful people either, mind you. This was townsfolk flipping out because someone was missing. I’d like to see you be patient through a day of that.”
Elliot put his hands together and bobbed his head. “I bow to your superior experience and suffering.”
Owen clapped his hands once for attention. “All right everybody, let’s take it slow and try not to scare anything off. If you catch sight of something, let me know. Has everyone got their SedEgg in reach?”
Everyone did. The crowd moved out with Owen in the lead. There were about a dozen people here today, each biologist with their own low-quality camera and each with many coworkers back at base eager to go in their stead. The group had been kept small so they didn’t startle the aliens. Only essential professionals made the cut. Dr. Rhodes had elected not to come, since his translator was useless and, according to muttered opinion, so was he. It was down to Owen’s best and the TV crew.
Elliot was grateful to be part of this. Even so, he realized that he was markedly more stressed than he’d been the day before. The show’s ratings were suddenly guaranteed to be good, and their sponsor would undoubtedly treat them like treasured favorites. But now they had to get the best footage possible so that it could be shared with news organizations and viewed by millions. As he had pointed out to Hubcap, they were literally writing the history books. Their writing had better be good.
The group walked quietly, scanning the area for all they were worth. Elliot was fascinated by the shapes of the trees, which ranged from the droopy things at the shore to the straight orange trunks near the clearing, to some that twisted into blue spirals with branches splitting off in every direction. He’d expected the plants in an alien forest to look different from their Earth counterparts, and he wasn’t disappointed. Mostly he was glad that they were so eye-catching. Made for good television. And for an interesting walk. Even the scents were alien; he kept getting whiffs of spice and mud and fruity sweetness in odd combinations.
The muddy river sparkled through the underbrush. Owen led the group on a path parallel to it, likely for ease of navigation. Occasional chirps of what passed for birdsong filtered through the foliage, but no color-changing alien people appeared, despite Hubcap’s echoing conversation with the birds.
As the group rounded a corner made up of boulders and fallen logs, snarling filled the air. Elliot saw a blur of motion.
He was already moving when Hubcap shoved him out of harm’s way, giving Owen the same treatment with his other hand. Elliot tumbled to the ground while something bulldog-sized barreled past. Hubcap spun to avoid it while the humans scattered.
Elliot scrambled to his feet, slipping on leaves that smelled like curry. Owen was pulling him toward the bushes while Hubcap stared down an angry ball of black fur and snapping teeth. It circled around the robot back toward the cave it had charged from, snarling fiercely. The camera crew hid in the plantlife while the biologists stood with with stun guns out, waiting to see what it would do.
“It’s territorial!” Owen shouted. “Give it space!” He pulled Elliot farther away, and Elliot went willingly. Hubcap held the creature’s gaze while he took one measured step back, then another. The animal kept snarling, but it didn’t charge again.
When the robot was level with the ring of humans, the toothy fluffball stepped into its cave to regard them from the shadows. It didn’t stop snarling in one long uneven rumble.
Elliot looked around for more dangers as he followed Owen closely, giving the creature a wide berth. It might have been cute under other circumstances, but Elliot was more concerned with the teeth than the silky fur. Many dog breeders on Earth would have been jealous. He sought out the cameras while he and Owen joined the rest of the expedition. The crew regrouped on the far side of the area.
While Owen did a headcount, Elliot gave a rueful narration to Vic’s camera, interspersed with Hubcap’s usual opinions. “That was exciting!” Elliot said. “Nothing like walking too close to something’s lair to get the blood moving.”
“Your blood would have moved outside your body if it’d caught you,” Hubcap said. “You’re welcome.”
Headcount done, Owen ushered the group forward. Elliot didn’t object. He could still hear the thing growling faintly. But, he realized, no one had frenzied in the moment of heightened emotion, and that was a great sign. He tried to calm his heart rate as he walked. A quick sniff of his palms told him that the smell of the leaves would thankfully not be following him around all day, and that helped.
Things were much calmer after the scare. The group covered a lot of ground without anything jumping out at them, and with plenty of nonthreatening animals to see. Alien insects gathered in clouds while a variety of bat-winged creatures snapped them up; snakelike beasties with many legs twined around the tree trunks, and something that sounded like a foghorn hooted in the distance at uneven intervals. One woman spotted an indigo scale lying on the ground among the bushes, but for the longest time that was all they found.
Then suddenly, they found all too much.
Elliot was right behind Hubcap and Owen as they passed through a screen of bushes. Owen gasped and Hubcap cried out in anguish. It took Elliot a moment to see past them — he spotted trees, rocks, an overflowing pond — but then he saw what they’d seen, and he wanted to unsee it.
The ground was littered with alien bodies.
None of the still forms seemed to have been injured, but they were all a dull translucent white, like albino snakes, and they lay sprawled in every direction.
“No, Rainbow,” Hubcap said, dropping to his knees beside one and touching it with more emotion than Elliot had ever seen him display.
“What happened?” he asked Owen, unsure how to deal with the robot’s mourning.
Owen was examining another body, feeling for a pulse and looking for wounds. “It’s too soon to say for certain,” he said as the rest of the humans spilled into the clearing. “If I had to guess though, I’d say frenzy.”
“Can you be sure?” Elliot asked, trying to keep his calm in front of the cameras.
Owen shook his head. “Not without a full examination. But I don’t see any signs of violence.”
Elliot nodded silently. He crouched next to Hubcap. “You okay?” he asked, too quietly for the cameras. Behind him he heard Graham tactfully turn away.
Hubcap shook his head. “We just met them,” he said. “They were supposed to be different.”
“Different how?” Elliot asked, confused.
The robot pointed skyward. “This is a new race of intelligent life, amazing and exotic; they were supposed to live forever, or at least a really long time!”
Elliot shook his head. “Who said that?”
Hubcap waved his hands. “I did, dammit!” He lapsed into silence, staring at the fallen alien on the ground before him.
Elliot said nothing. The fact that Hubcap had used a real swear word told him that this wasn’t a casual conversation. He tried to think of something to say. “I’m sure we’ll meet more of them,” he tried. “This is just a freak frenzy accident—”
Hubcap was shaking his head. “And what if we can’t protect the rest of them?” he asked bitterly. “What if they’re immune to the sedatives like those seashore animals are? This will just happen again, and we’ll have to watch them die.”
Elliot had no response for that.
The biologists started unpacking foldable stretchers. For a crazy moment Elliot thought they must have found survivors, but then he realized they were collecting cadavers for autopsy.
Hubcap followed his stare, then turned away in disgust.
Elliot got up and went to talk with Owen quietly. He suggested that taking the alien dead might be robbing the survivors of closure and death rites. But his hypothetical concerns didn’t make a dent in the biologist’s scientific curiosity. Owen just replied that it was pure luck that they had discovered the bodies before any scavengers did, and that they should make the most of it.
Elliot returned to his partner in silence. The pair sat and watched as the crew worked, ferrying the aliens back through the trees, and they didn’t offer to help. Elliot was grateful for Vic’s discretion in directing the cameras elsewhere. She could get some face time from one of the co-hosts when Hubcap wasn’t so uncharacteristically fragile.
The robot only deigned to get up when one of the younger workers began to freak out over touching the bodies. Elliot saw the signs of frenzy when Hubcap did, but he didn’t move. Hubcap had it covered.
“Sit down,” Hubcap ordered the man, who was rubbing his hands frantically on his pant legs. “Right now.”
Not hearing him, the man kept babbling about alien germs until the robot stalked over and stamped his SedEgg square on the man’s chest. Then he stuck a hand under each arm and lowered the slumping worker to the ground, laying him out next to the alien he’d been about to move.
“Medic,” Hubcap said as three other workers came running up. He returned to sit next to Elliot while the rest of the aliens were carried away. Hubcap instructed the workers to be especially careful with the one he’d named Rainbow, and Elliot had to ask how he could tell them apart.
Apparently the robot had good enough vision and memory to recognize the subtle patterns of gray on its beak, which was the only part of the body that hadn’t changed color. Elliot kept his amazement to himself. He should have known better by now.
“All right everyone, that’s the lot of them,” Owen was saying. “Let’s get back to base to deliver the load, then come back for more exploring. The day is still young.”
The TV crew followed the workers silently to the car.