“I want you to check what’s with that road,” the jure ordered him. “Maybe we can leave the ship here.”
They landed with a strong jolt, and Gill pulled on a black Antyran exoskeleton he found in an alcove near the sleeping tubes. This way, he would be spared from breathing the unknown germs infesting Mapu’s atmosphere. Too bad he couldn’t use the invisible armor suits of the Grammians to move unnoticed, but they didn’t fit him. Moreover, he had no idea how to operate them and wasn’t at all curious to sniff the contents of the brown atmosphere puffed by Zhan’s children. The armor suits were still stuck on the floor of the ship’s bridge—missing, of course, their Grammian tenants, extracted with great labor through the rear opening, who were now floating, stone-cold frozen, somewhere in the interstellar space.
As he stepped out, he noticed the ship was glowing like hot metal. Their approach must have been visible from a great distance, despite the tremendous speed of their vessel.
“Plasma trapped in the shield,” replied Ugo to his unspoken question. “It will go out soon.”
Gill didn’t ask how the abomination knew such things; it was obvious that he had learned many of the gods’ secrets in seven hundred years.
The world had a dense atmosphere, enriched by strange, un-Antyran aromas. His helmet’s filter allowed the hypnotic fragrances to pass unhindered after blocking the dangerous particles. As he avidly inhaled the planet’s air, he couldn’t help but think that even the legendary Antyran aromaries couldn’t melt essences close to the ones smelled here. They didn’t have the privilege to smell the unbelievable texture of combinations, the many surprises hidden in peripheral nuances—from sweet to bitter, stinging ones.
Each and every fragrance would have caused a stir in an aromary dome, and he could smell hundreds!
The strange vegetation was rustling under his feet. The optical spectrum had changed into a more comfortable one, now that he was watching the world through an Antyran helmet and not a Grammian display. Although it was still dark, the colors somewhat resembled the ones during daytime. The plants were an intense green, and Gill was convinced that it wasn’t an artifact of the helmet’s visor but their natural hue!
Bizarre species filled him with awe at every turn. He would have liked to camp in that place for months, to dip his nostrils in the odors of the ground walked on for the first time by the feet of an Antyran, to harvest its fragrances in a unique collection of flavors unmatched in all the history of the aromaries.
Gill turned his eyes to the sky, longing for the purple bacteria so widespread on Antyra. Somewhere at the horizon, the planet’s moon was rising over the hills, lighting the surroundings. The atmospheric moisture hid the details of its arid surface. Another desert world, he concluded, judging by its color.
After a few minutes, he reached the strange road of the natives. He jumped the ditch and landed on a hard, black surface painted with a white stripe right in the middle. It wasn’t made of metal or plastoceramics as he expected—it consisted of pebbles stuck in some other material. He touched it with the sensor on his left wrist and waited for a few moments to sniff the composition. The tiny screen scrolled a long list of complicated formulas, all indicating a mixture of hydrocarbons. A planet that hadn’t exhausted its resources yet, he thought with a pinch of envy. Perhaps tar. If he remembered well, Antyrans used something like that a few hundred years ago, before depleting it.
“What do you think they use it for?”
“We can’t stay here,” said Ugo.
A wild humming erupted in the night, sending ice spikes down his tail. He couldn’t tell the direction of the noise, but the acoustic sensors incorporated in his suit’s fabric showed that the source was coming from behind. He turned around, ready to face the approaching threat.
“What is this noise? Are they attacking us?”
He had barely finished the sentence when two powerful lights ripped the darkness, blinding him. A primitive, noisy assault chariot armed with a huge frontal chrome bar—no doubt built to crush the foot soldiers—leaped straight for him. He froze in place, startled by the apparition, but the un-Antyran reflexes of the abomination worked flawlessly this time, too, distorting the space and forcing him to jump out of harm’s way.
The pilot of the vehicle veered off with a sinister grinding noise and crashed into the ditch on the right side of the road, flipping over. Only then did Gill notice that the “thing” had wheels! He cautiously approached the vehicle, whose lights were still shining, and saw how its occupants—in a state of shock—were trying to break free from the twisted hatch.
“¡Aaaaiiii!” a creature yelled at the sight of him.
It started to talk in a weird language, dotted by strange inflections.
“¡Alfonsito! ¿Qué es lo que muestran? ¡Tengo miedo!”89
The creature appeared to be a female; she was smaller in stature and stouter than the male beside her. She had a sort of curly black fur growing on her head and wore a blue outfit. He felt a bit disappointed by this because he was hoping to find her covered in the strange scaly things he saw from a distance through the eyes of the Sigian. That would have been awesome. Dressed like that, she lost some of the strangeness that any alien was supposed to flaunt—especially on a first date.
What he saw wasn’t all that different from the Antyrans, except that any of their parts examined up close didn’t resemble theirs. The female—at least he supposed it was a “she”—had some walloping chest protuberances, their shape being visible through the garments. He didn’t have the slightest idea what their use could be. At first look, they didn’t appear to serve any conceivable purpose and surely hindered her in her daily chores. But the bumps didn’t seem to be a disease or deformity—the other female in the group had a pair of same things on her chest. Their waists were massive, much larger than those of the Antyrans. Otherwise, they had two arms, two feet, and a sort of small trunk on their faces. Yes. And they had no tail.
The creatures were of different sizes. The second female was almost as stout as the first one, and the male between them had fur even on his face! He displayed a prominent belly, almost certainly pregnant. It appeared that on Mapu, the males were holding the eggs. Or maybe he belonged to a different species related to the females? A detailed examination might have helped him to understand it better, but it didn’t seem the brightest idea to drag them forcefully into his ship. Anyway, Ugo would oppose the slightest transgression from their mission. Along with them were another two beings of smaller stature: their children, missing the ridiculous chest swellings and large bellies.
“¡El chupacabras!” shouted the other female.
On hearing the word, the aliens awoke from shock and started to scream like mad, deafening him—their children being the loudest, of course. They immediately fled into the night, still screaming in terror. Gill listened to them for a while—howling through the forest and banging into the trees—before he went to check their overturned vehicle. A thick cloud of steam was coming out of it.
“What the heck is this chupacabras?” he asked, intrigued.
If Ugo could have done it, he would have shrugged. But unfortunately, he had lost this ability seven years ago, when he died. Therefore, the jure contented himself with shrugging in his mind.
When Gill reached the vehicle, he knelt to look inside. He saw a kind of thin wheel used to steer the chariot. It didn’t have an autopilot, which wasn’t exactly a surprise. It looked extremely primitive, missing even an infrared display. He instantly felt admiration for the natives; they needed a big dose of courage—or rather, insanity—to get inside that thing and drive through the night!
He walked around to the back of the vehicle, and he quickly noticed a pipe blackened at its end, coming from the engine box.