Any indication that someone has been to this area.
His heart thumped. “Is there?”
No.
“Can you be sure?”
Yes.
“Should I take some of the soil with me?”
No. It isn’t contaminated.
Kaden hesitated, a dull ache settling in his chest. These had been Joe’s people. Some had been his friends.
Some were similar to friends—those like me. But I know what the word means now. They weren’t friends. Not like you. You are a real friend.
Kaden headed back toward the road, the bag heavy at his side with alien metal and almost three thousand bodies. A small, irrational part of him wanted to study the fragments under a microscope and he was sort of glad he didn’t have one. Half amile later, as he approached the road, he heard the sound of several vehicles, a much louder noise than he’d have expected.
Wait. Hide.
Kaden slipped behind a tree. He gaped in horror as he took in the line of army vehicles coming his way. He ducked back behind the trunk and clutched the bag more tightly. Was it too much of a leap to think they were coming to look for whatever had fallen out of the sky?
Army? Oh, I see.
The last vehicle passed and Kaden hurried on, keeping off the road until it joined the main road about two hundred metres further on. There were people around now, more traffic, no more army and he exhaled.
Dispose of everything in water.
Kaden winced. “Is that really a good idea? What if it does something to the river?” He tried not to think about worse possibilities. What if someone was still alive?
No one is alive. Find a lake. A river. We saw one from the bus.
“There won’t be any proof then.”
That is preferable. The ship and its contents have no value to Earth, nor do they pose a threat. They would only cause alarm. The metal will decompose. Organic remains have already deteriorated.
Instead of waiting for the bus, Kaden kept walking. It was ridiculous, but he kept thinking an army vehicle would pull up at his side and he’d be dragged into it. He moved away from the curb.As if that would stop it happening.
The craft did not fall at the speed of a meteorite. It probably triggered an alert. The other planet we investigated saw us land. Two sent their defenders. They didn’t last long.
Kaden shuddered. “Well, the army is only going to find a hole.”
We were lucky we arrived when we did.
When Kaden reached the river, he headed off the road and down the bank. As soon as he was under the bridge and hidden, he tipped up the bag and watched the contents slide into the current. The fragments vanished almost immediately.
A pang of regret flickered through him, then faded as Joe’s presence settled in his mind.
You did the right thing. Thank you.
Kaden hoped Joe was right.
~~~
Joe had something else he needed to keep from Kaden. Gash and Lanu were now inside Harris. Perhaps they’d registered he was inside Kaden when Harris had come to Kaden’s bedsit. Once they’d freed themselves from the culture medium and hidden in Harris’ hair, they must have decided to do what Joe had done and enter Harris’ body. What they hadn’t been able to do was blend. Probably because they wereothersand not like him. Joe wished he’d been able to shed the medium before he entered Kaden, but he’d linked with it and had to make Kaden swallow it all.
He’d heard Gash and Lanu call him from Harris’ stomach and ignored them. They were asking how to integrate. As if he’d tell them! He was as sure as he could be that no one else was still alive, either in the building or in the remains of the spacecraft.
