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The ride to base was much too slow for Hubcap. He knew that it was important to get the sedated people to the medcenter for a checkup as soon as possible, but from what he’d seen, none of them had been frenzying long enough to have suffered any lasting damage. And the fistfight hadn’t been all that dangerous. The people involved didn’t know how to fight. Luckily for them.
“Andalé! Chop chop!” he urged the workers as they re-entered the car after handing off their teammates to the medical staff. Hubcap and the camera crew hadn’t moved from their seats. “We’ve got aliens to find!”
The workers hurried into place, including the new people to replace the frenzy victims. In moments they were buckled in, and the aircar roared skyward.
This time, Owen directed the pilot to aim for the other side of the river, with hopes that there would be a better view from there. He speculated out loud about whether the alien captured by the doom bat had been killed by claws or frenzy, or whether the life forms on this planet simply reacted differently than humans did.
“At any rate, it wasn’t our fault!” Owen concluded with a nervous laugh. Hubcap said nothing. It sounded like Owen was trying to convince himself more than anything.
Hubcap pressed his forehead to the window with a click of metal on glass, eyes scanning the ground for bright colors. Nothing yet. Just the flooded river winding through hilly areas like an indecisive snake. The flat patch of ground that the pilot aimed for looked much like the meadows they’d landed in before: the trees were the same mishmash of shapes, and the critters made similar birdlike noises. Hubcap didn’t see anything new and exciting as they landed. It wasn’t until everyone had disembarked and picked a walking direction that something surfaced.
That was when four of the biologists blundered past a nest of vicious little anklebiters that no one had seen yet.
“Ah! What the—” A tall woman with curly black hair swore creatively, shaking one foot like she was trying to kick down a tree. Clinging to her ankle was a blur of gray fur that grunted angrily.
The older man beside her, previously stern-faced and serious, did a mad dance to shake loose the creatures on his own legs. Two other biologists behind them also stomped and kicked, one reaching for the attacker at his knee before thinking better of it and brushing the thing off with a fallen branch.
Hubcap laughed heartily.
“You know, you could offer to help,” Elliot pointed out as Graham filmed them both.
“I could,” Hubcap admitted. “The beasties do look unlikely to damage my superior metal skin. But they appear to have regular teeth, not drillbit heads like the supergophers, so I think the humans can handle it.” He gave the scene an appraising glance. The little piranha-squirrels were successfully being shaken off. “I daresay they have the situation well in hand.”
“Don’t say—” Elliot began.
“...Or in foot!” Hubcap added, proud of himself.
Elliot just shook his head.
“All right, enough of that,” Owen said to no one in particular. He strode forward, helping to shoo away the last of the creatures. “Does anyone need bandages or antiseptic? I’m sure you’ve all had your shots.” He urged the group away from the bushes.
Xian already had his medkit open. He made the rounds swiftly while the critters grunted and chattered from their nest. This sounded pretty clearly to Hubcap like “And don’t come back!” He chortled to the cameras about it.
When the various nips were tended to and the medkit was stowed away, Owen led the expedition onward. “This way!” he declared, blazing a trail through some dense yellow bushes, apparently following his scanner more than common sense.
Hubcap walked around the bushes while the humans obediently pushed through behind Owen. “Fancy meeting you here,” he said on the other side. Vic filmed both his grin and Elliot’s disapproving look. Hubcap smiled wider. He strolled ahead, glad to see that Owen had found the alien equivalent of a deer trail, which would make for easier going.
This route took them north of the cliffside that they had originally climbed, and past a small waterfall that Hubcap had thought he’d heard earlier. It was all new territory up here, but so far there were no color-changing aliens.
Hubcap peered over Owen’s shoulder at the scanner. “Are we close?” he asked.
Owen shook his head. “It’s hard to say. There’s nothing coming up nearby, but this model doesn’t have a very wide range. We know the water is that way, and the beach where we observed them this morning is farther along, so this is the way we will go.”
“Good enough,” Hubcap said. He moved back to walk with Elliot. Short minutes later, they saw the river from a safe distance. Nothing interesting happened there. They moved along the banks further north, sneaking through the scenery until a massive rocky bluff reared before them, blocking their way. Biologists grumbled about having to go all the way around and possibly lose the river.
Owen led the way out of the undergrowth to where they could get a better view. The mesa was roughly the size of a shopping mall. More grumbling sounded.
Hubcap spoke up. “Wait a sec. I’ll scout,” he announced, striding up to the near-vertical cliff face. “Higher elevation equals better view and all that.” No one stopped him, so he began climbing. He knew he made it look easy. With silent skill, he clambered upward until he reached the distant top.
Bird poop painted the surface. He made a mental note to complain about it when he wasn’t trying to be stealthy. Instead, he ran on quiet feet to the edge nearest the vast river, and looked down.
He stared in amazement.
It hadn’t been visible from ground level, but the water in the center of the river was less muddy, like there was a barrier that he couldn’t quite see straining out the silt. Under this clear water were buildings. Lots of them, looking like they were made of stone and decorated with those same bright shells. They went down a long way, farther than he could make out, and most of them were peppered with windows, even on the roofs. There were long-bodied shapes swimming to and fro throughout the underwater village.
Hubcap could almost hear the applause from the many awards ceremonies in his future.
Elliot’s voice reached his ear sensors, in an attempt at a whispered shout. “Heyyyy. What do you see?”
Hubcap snapped out of his trance and hurried back to the other side, full of excitement. He poked his head over the side.
“Guys. Guys. You have to see this. Gimme a camera, one of the little ones. Go ahead and throw it, quick!”
Tarja did so without asking questions.
Owen was full of them. “What is it? What’s there?” The biologist clamored for answers, sidling back and forth, looking for a handhold. “Is there a way up on the other side?”
Hubcap scooted back from the edge, fiddling with the camera. He needed a good zoom for this, with water-penetrating properties. Ah, there we go, he thought. Now, let’s film some historic footage!
It was an amazing scene down there. Once he had the camera at the right setting, he could pick out the details. The stonework was very impressive for something that was apparently made underwater, and it all seemed designed to mimic the natural wear patterns of the river. There were no hard lines anywhere, only smooth curves and rounded doors. And the place was full of swimming armored creatures.
He’d assumed at first glance that they were the same aliens that he’d been seeing for the past few days, but he realized he was wrong. They did the same color-changing, and they had the same upper body shape and beaky face, but there were distinct differences. The biggest of which was the fact that the long torsos on these beings ended in fishy tails instead of hind feet. They looked a lot like eels with arms, and even those were shaped differently: longer, with webbed fingers. The crab-scale armor covered everything, fitting together amazingly well. Those pieces that the humans had found by the rocks appeared to have been the crudest of cast-off attempts. Many of these finished plates even had detailed pictures carved into them.
Not all of the aliens were wearing armor, Hubcap noticed — there seemed to be a distinct military caste, swimming with spears and alert posture. The civilians darted and swam at a leisurely pace, some carrying things, some tending to smaller ones that must be children. They certainly had the bigger eyes and rounded features of much Earth young. Most of the kids were clumsy in their swimming, though one older youth was moving with surprising speed, chasing after a large sharptoothed fish.
Hubcap filmed the progress of those two through the center of town, wondering why the other aliens were ignoring the dangerous-looking animal. It was obviously predatory, after all, and...
And a pet. He watched in amazement as the color-changing alien caught up to the fish and tackled it in a joyous hug. Moments later, the alien was throwing something out of the water, while the fish leapt to catch it.
Hubcap pulled back out of sight, even though the pair was looking in a different direction. It was easy to forget, while looking through the camera, how far away they were. He waited for half a second, then moved back and spied shamelessly.
Wow. Hey, that building looks like a store, he thought, I think they’re selling plants. And ... is that a restaurant? It certainly looked like one, with balconies set up against the side of the building for visitors to rest on. There was even a waiter, whose colors rippled in gentle pinks and greens, offering a basket full of something edible to one visitor after another. Hubcap couldn’t make out what the things were — fruits, eggs, alien cheese — but he could appreciate the white spiral pattern woven into the green basket, which matched the single armor plate that the waiter wore. Dark blue with a carved white pattern, this shell plate was centered on the alien’s chest with loops over its shoulders. Maybe it was a nametag, maybe the logo of the foodmakers, or the restaurant itself. For all Hubcap knew, it could be the sign of a criminal working off a sentence, or a traveling fungus salesman with free samples.
This is astounding, Hubcap thought. It’s all so civilized! And we couldn’t see any of it from the shore. He dialed back out of the water to look at the muddy beach. Movement caught his eye, turning out to be a mating pair of landwalkers doing their business in the shallows. After a cursory glance, he looked away, then paused when he noticed a number of the aquatic creatures swimming toward the landwalkers.
Well hello, Hubcap thought, zooming back in, What’s this, then? A territory dispute? He expected the waterborne ones to attack, or at least gently usher away the preoccupied pair — the ones in the water wore armor, while the others didn’t — but that wasn’t the case.
To Hubcap’s surprise, the small group of swimmers halted at a respectful distance, and waited while the pair shook and flickered themselves into a collapse.
That really does look like frenzy — now what? He watched the two still forms lying in the shallow water, with their own fertilized eggs floating in clouds around them. The water creatures were moving in. Aha, now they eat the land creatures’ young! Fiendish!
But again he had guessed wrong. The aquatic aliens began gathering up the eggs with an air of extreme gentleness, ushering the floating things into woven baskets and taking pains to make sure they had collected every last one. They even went so far as to carefully move the two breeders. Hubcap was wondering if they were saving the eggs to eat later when the sleeping pair began to wake up.
Oh, now for a fight? But there were no hostilities. The pair’s flesh lit up with lavender patterns that the others copied — a greeting of some sort — then they casually walked out of the water and strolled away without a backward glance.
The hell?
He zoomed back and forth between the departing land creatures and those in the water, who were swimming away with their covered baskets. Hubcap followed the swimmers until they entered a large building with guards posted outside. The two guards raised their spears and made more of the greeting-flares, then they floated aside to let the baskets past.
“Psst! Hey! Hubcap!” Distant human voices brought him back to himself. He took another quick look around the village, then shut off the camera and wriggled back along the rock.
“Oh, you guys are not gonna believe this!” he said, getting to his feet and hurrying to rejoin the humans. A conversation from several days earlier popped into his head. “Elliot! I told you there’d be mermaids!”