Evaluate: A Spo novella (Alien Cadets)

by Garrett, Corrie

  Evaluate

  Corrie Garrett

  Copyright 2016. All rights Reserved.

  Kindle Edition

  Part 1

  Eto’s eyestalks vibrated with the roar of the helicopter as they flew south along the coast of California, following the curve of Earth’s largest ocean. The sun was just sliding above the hills to his left, beginning what, he hoped, would be his last day on this planet. His pilot lowered their altitude as the sun rose, staying in the shadow of the hills for a few more moments. She was a human woman. Perhaps she suspected the nature of Eto’s task today and intuitively dreaded the coming day. More likely, she was remembering to fly low, as he had requested.

  The water was a shifting metallic blue in the distance, edging toward a pale, gray shore. He felt the need to appreciate it before he finished his assignment here. The currents were slowly carrying the dust and debris of Europe, their small, devastated continent, to the corners of the planet. If he ever returned, it wouldn’t look like this. Great swaths of the Atlantic were already turning a muddy greenish-brown. The linguists who’d come to Earth and done a rough and ready study of the prominent languages, had told him the etymology of the ocean names, but he could not now recall.

  One of those linguists crouched behind him now, his eyestalks rolled into tight, frightened balls. He had volunteered to assist Eto during the past weeks of the planetary evaluation, but he was still uncomfortable trusting human devices. He was no coward, no Spo who lived to adulthood could be called a coward, but Eto could not deny that this was a trying situation.

  Any new planet was an assault on the senses, and this one added the further threat of a destabilized environment. Currently, all the moist, bacteria-laden smells of Earth were muted, but as soon as the helicopter landed and they opened the doors, they would flood back in. Even after three weeks, Eto still could not completely ignore the smells. Yet it was a striking world, if one could subdue his natural distaste of the unpleasant odors and textures, and the appropriate fear of the sporadic natural disasters.

  “What were their names?” Eto asked the linguist abruptly. “The countries immediately affected by the explosion?”

  “Ah, the European Union?”

  “No, the names of the individual regions.”

  “I believe… France, Switzerland, parts of Italy and Germany.”

  Eto twitched an eyestalk in acknowledgement. He was in a strange mood: he felt a need for clarity, for precision, for… mourning?

  It was not his people’s doing, the cataclysmic explosion that wreaked havoc on this planet. In fact, the Spo were already evaluating the oceans surrounding Europe, testing the atmospheric debris, calculating the scope and cost of seeding the Earth with their great engines that could condense the particulate matter and eventually restore the biomes, if not to what they once were, then at least to commensurate levels of oxygen and translucency for the recovery of most sea life. Still, much would be lost, even if they decided to do this. If they decided not to…

  Though he could not see it happening, he knew that giant schools of fish were dying, poisoned by the irradiated dust, magnificent kelp beds were withering for lack of sunlight, and the large predators with enough body mass to withstand the immediate effects of the poison, were entering the desperate throes of madness and starvation.

  His people didn’t need any earthly resources, but if they wanted to make profit on the sale of earthly culture, the humans needed a viable planet. It was hard not to despise these people, who had wantonly kicked their planet off a cliff, though he knew the gravity and consequences of his evaluation required him to be impartial. But he could not completely ignore the rampant disregard shown by the humans who had perpetrated this global catastrophe for their own survival. It was—the mere word filled him with repugnance—suicidal. There was nothing worse to say.

  Not far ahead of them, on the beach, Eto spotted two huge and mottled lumps. He could make out a giant tail and gash of a mouth on each.

  “What are those?” Eto barked into the ear of the human pilot. She jumped and the helicopter rolled sickeningly to the right. Eto braced a hand against the roof and sunk his claws into the metal. The linguist squeaked and grabbed at the straps on the walls. The clear door next to Eto yawned with the potential for a plummeting death, but he merely glanced at it while the pilot righted them.

  “What is that?” Eto repeated. “There. Those two great mounds on the beach.” He pointed with his free hand.

  “I think,” the pilot peered through the clear visor on her round helmet, “two whales have beached themselves.”

  Eto swiveled his eyestalks to take in the whales and the surrounding waves. “There are more behind them, I believe. I wish to see this… this…”

  The linguist flushed an interesting purple with anxiety, but he provided the word Eto was searching for without unrolling his eyestalks. “Phenomenon.”

  “Yes, I wish to see this phenomenon,” Eto repeated to the pilot. “Are you able to land near those beasts?”

  “Yes.”

  She was terse today, more than she had been before during the few weeks she’d served him as a pilot. It was inevitable. He wondered if it was the executions or the destruction of the islands that silenced her.

  The pilot banked toward the beach, more gently this time, as she lowered their altitude.

  As the helicopter obliquely descended, the edge of the sprawling city Eto was returning to disappeared from view. It was called Los Angeles, or ‘the angels,’ which the linguist insisted was common tongue.

  The pilot cut the motion of the rotor blades as soon as the craft was situated, causing both the swirling dust and the noise to swiftly cease. After the prolonged roar of flight, the silence was sudden and damping, like a scream muffled mid-breath.

  The pilot took several deep breaths while her hands still held the controls. Her knuckles were white, but Eto did not know the humans well enough to gauge her emotions. The humans had no skin color to indicate their state as his people did.

  “I will investigate. You may remain aboard if you wish,” Eto told her.

  He used the small lever to open the door next to him and dismounted into the sand. The wet, salty wind of the ocean stung his eyestalks and made his flat nostrils quiver slightly. The smell of a new planet was always distasteful, but the only way past was through, so he inhaled deeply although the cold air burned the soft tissue of his lungs, and he felt almost suffocated with the moisture.

  At least the sand felt good beneath his bare, clawed feet, although it was too soft. His home planet was largely desert. He had not been there in four years.

  Eto stretched to his full height, cramped muscles tense from hunching in the helicopter, while he pondered the whales. The nearer one was at least five spans long, which put it a trifle longer than the helicopter. The second, which was still half in the water, seemed to be smaller. The waves broke around it and siphoned sand away with each retreat, leaving the creature on a slowly eroding platform.

  The nearer whale had rolled slightly away from the water, and it seemed to be expanding slightly and then contracting. With amazement, Eto realized the thing was breathing.

  It had been immediately clear to him that the animal was an air-breather—its mass and structure spoke of lungs, and there was the obvious lack of gills, but he had not expected that it was still alive.

  He shuffled through the soft sand toward its head. The grit clung to his toes and ankles, all four feet immediately gummed up with the stuff.

  “Sand should be dry.” He shook two of his feet and then shook the other two.

  Seized by a rare feeling of imprudence and impatience, Eto allowed himself to j
ump.

  A Spo’s strength was in its legs, and its glory was in its jump. It was not something one did in polite circumstances, or before smaller aliens who would thus be unfairly intimidated by the Spo’s superiority. But Eto was a warrior above all, a Spo who had slain more Merith in the late wars than any other Spo warrior. Being sent to evaluate the potential of this world was an honor, but it was a hollow honor to one who had no desire to rise in the Spo political hierarchy.

  So now, just once, a jump. He used all four legs to launch himself up and over the whale to the other side. It was exhilarating to fly through the air without the metal blades of the helicopter, or hover engine and exhaust chutes of a shuttle, hampering him. He landed on three feet, sinking almost to his knees in the sand while he used his fourth leg and arms to balance.

  He half expected the pilot woman to shriek, but instead it was the man he’d landed next to who uttered a furious expletive. Eto had not seen him, as he was standing very close to the far side of the whale. Even though the man must have seen the helicopter land, he seemed very surprised to see Eto.

  He had fallen down onto his rear, and uttered the expletive again. He was wearing a thick black jacket with the letters, LAFD, Los Angeles Fire Department. One sleeve was torn, and Eto could smell dried blood. The man had a disfiguring scrape on one cheek, in much the same place as the scar on Eto’s own face.

  Eto sighed. He was a diplomat now, or at best, the liaison of an occupational army. He had certain duties to the indigenous species that did not include scaring them out of their strange, possibly suicidal, wits.

  “I apologize for scaring to you,” Eto said in English. He did not offer the man help to rise, as that would probably scare him more.

  The man scrambled to his feet. “I probably should have realized one of you was in there.”

  Eto parsed his words. “Yes. We are using helicopters for travel. Though not all of them.”

  The man rocked backward onto his heels, unconsciously leaning away from Eto, but he didn’t leave. He seemed to be waiting for something. Violence, perhaps?

  “Why are you here?” the man finally said.

  “I am return to—returning to the city of Los Angeles to depart. I stopped to see this phenomenon.”

  “Depart,” he repeated flatly. “Right.”

  “Are you not afraid?” Eto asked. The humans he had met so far, especially the ones taken by surprise, had been either mute with shock or loudly hostile—both fearful reactions.

  The man stared at him and then looked back at the whale. “You didn’t even know I was here, so I figure you’re not here to kill me. I hate that you executed those people in Washington and everywhere, but I don’t have anything here to attack you with.” He spread his hands and stared at them. “So, I guess I don’t have any reason to be afraid.”

  The man put his hand against the whale’s skin and said nothing else. Eto realized he was looking in the animal’s eye. It was small, black, and intense. It was still wet, but beginning to glaze.

  Eto moved closer and the whale’s eye shifted. Did it know it was dying? Had it come here on purpose to die, after it realized it was poisoned? An animal of this size could have traveled far in the months since the catastrophe.

  And why was this man here, touching it while it died?

  An observation of a planet’s fauna often gave insight into the dominant species. At this point in their development, human-animal interactions were most likely for work, companionship, recreation, worship, or research. Eto had not had much chance to observe their interactions in person.

  The whale continued to watch him, and Eto felt a moment of unease. While some terrestrial animals seemed intelligent, namely whales, pigs, apes, and some talkative birds, none had given sign of true sentience—at least, not sentience in Council terms. But this animal gazed at him, and he wondered if it knew that he was alien. Did it stare at him in wonder, knowing this was something never seen on Earth before this last month and probably never seen by its kind at all?

  With a ripple of flesh, the whale exhaled again and blinked slowly.

  The man made a fist with his free hand. Eto wondered if this were a death rite. “It was poisoned by the irradiated dust. Do these animals usually come to land to die?”

  The man shook his head. “It might not have been poisoned. Sometimes this happens to a pod of whales when the bull is sick. It might not have been us.”

  Eto understood his response. The man could not digest the horrors that his people had wrought on their world and sought to deny the consequences, but it had the opposite effect on Eto. “Do you mean to say that these animals would kill themselves before, for no reason?”

  The man frowned. “We don’t always know the reason, but like I said, they’re usually ill. In the past, if we had enough time, sometimes the coast guard would try to airlift or drag them back into the ocean. It doesn’t usually happen here, but occasionally down in Baja…” he trailed off, perhaps realizing that Eto did not need to know these details or would not understand. “Anyway, there’s no one to do it now. Most of us are on cleanup and the Navy guys, at least the ones that survived the quakes, have their hands full.”

  “They would try to save the whale? Even though it chose death?”

  The man backed up a step and his forehead wrinkled. “Yes, of course we would. We’re not… not savages.”

  “I do not know that word, ‘savages.’”

  “It means… brutes. Animals.”

  “But you are animals.”

  “He means pre-sentient tool user or early man,” said the linguist in the Spo language. He was shuffling around the tail toward them. “Also, there is another whale in the surf who will soon join these,” he added in English.

  The man stepped away quickly with another terse word, clearly not wanting to be caught between two aliens.

  Eto looked toward the ocean. A sudden spout of misty air showed the location of the third whale, and in the trough of the next wave, Eto could see its back.

  “It is his family?” he asked the man. “They all come to die with this one?”

  “Usually, they don’t. But sometimes.”

  The man had the bearing of a warrior, as best Eto could tell, but he also looked as if he might be in pain, and Eto had the unusual desire to comfort him. Perhaps it was just the injury on the man’s face that made him more appealing.

  “It is best. Look at this bull,” Eto used the man’s word carefully. “It has chosen to die, perhaps wrongly, perhaps not, but it is not right that he die alone. The animals follow their instinct to accompany him into death. It is fitting.”

  The man looked between Eto and the ocean, but he was visibly angry, with vertical furrows and a downturned mouth. “Like hell it is. Is that why you guys slaughtered those families in D.C.? Of course. You think families should die together. You’ll have us die as one big family and keep Earth for yourselves.”

  Eto flushed with an angry color, offended and frustrated that the man rejected his offer of comfort. He should have known better than to expect an understanding of minds and motives in a matter of minutes after weeks of trying, but he’d allowed himself to create a false equivalency between himself and this man with the cut face.

  Eto turned abruptly to go, and refrained from jumping. He was a diplomat, and he would do his duty and all that it required of him. No more.

  He would leave the whales to die on the beach, and he would leave humanity to die on this planet, if he so decided.

  Indeed, if the whole ecosystem were bent toward suicidal behavior, there would be no other rational choice. He would not regret it.

  He gestured sharply, and the linguist accompanied him back to the helicopter.

  Part 2

  Aaron watched the two aliens walk away. They were ungainly and grotesque in the wet sand, like giant praying mantises wading through the mud. The big one hadn’t been ungainly when it jumped, though. It had scared the crap out of him. The glare on the helicopter windows had kept him
from seeing that there were aliens inside when it landed.

  The jumper hadn’t answered his questions, which was its own answer. Perhaps they were going to kill off what remained of humanity, despite their initial claims to the contrary. Was there anything he could do about it?

  Aaron leaned his forehead against the dying whale. It was a useless, tragic death, but it was peaceful. So many people had died these last months, and there was never time to come to grips with it. Perhaps it was sick, but he’d felt the need to stay by the whale while it died. It had beached itself overnight, and he’d only seen it this morning as he wandered away from the city.

  And he knew, in the grand scheme of things, it was just a whale. Millions of people had died in Europe after the terrorists attacked the Large Hadron Collider. He did the terrorists the favor of believing that they hadn’t known what would happen. The scientists said it was a one-in-a-million chance, the chain reaction that had occurred after that attack. That didn’t really matter. It was done, and a huge section of northern Europe had essentially been vaporized.

  If he’d given it any thought before, he’d have assumed that would be the kind of thing you would feel, no matter where in the world you were. But it wasn’t. It had been morning in Switzerland but still nighttime in Los Angeles. He’d been asleep. His phone had gone off, an emergency warning from the city to expect earthquakes and tsunamis.

  Almost immediately after that, he’d gotten an alert from his chief to report to their firehouse for briefing. He’d heard the news about the Large Hadron Collider as he drove, and he’d tried to look up at the sky, wondering if this was it. He couldn’t see the stars, the normal smog in L.A. was already too thick, and he’d wondered if he’d ever see them again or if all that dust had already gone up and blotted everything out.

  He’d read a few post-apocalyptic novels and seen some of the movies with his girlfriend. It had seemed inconceivable that the apocalypse might have already happened, that millions had died and millions more in North Africa, the Middle East, and Russia were experiencing massive earthquakes.