Phase IV The Expedition Eats Its Specimens

The first deliberate hunt occurred on Asteria's second moon. They selected a common medium-sized grazer whose population surveys showed no local conservation concern. Marissa insisted that they take one animal and use as much of it as possible. Rick reminded her that he had been ordered not to solve ordinary wildlife problems for them.

Bethany tracked the herd. Quincy and Jules drove two animals away from a steep ravine. Patrick retrieved the carcass after the kill and carried it back to the field shelter with a level of casual efficiency that made several of them uncomfortable. The first meal produced from the recovered matter was an Earth-style vegetable stew. No part of it looked like the animal they had killed. That somehow made it stranger.

"Classification becomes morally easier when the classified thing remains on the other side of a scanner. Cousteau ate on expeditions. Darwin collected animals. Field biology has never been as clean as retrospective documentaries make it appear."

At dusk on a permitted Tau Ceti moon site, a large quadrupedal predator emerged from broken vegetation approximately eighty meters from camp. It was nearly three meters long, low at the shoulder, and covered in dark flexible scales. Bethany saw it first. It did not stalk. It accelerated.

Rick raised his rifle but did not fire. At sixty meters the animal continued directly toward them. At forty, Patrick moved between Sabrina and the approach vector. At thirty, Marissa shouted at Rick. He still waited. At approximately twenty meters the predator lowered its head, opened four lateral jaw plates, and increased speed.

Rick fired once. The animal collapsed before reaching the outer sample markers. His explanation afterward was simple: until the final acceleration, he could not exclude territorial bluffing, curiosity, or a charge that would terminate before contact. His contract did not authorize him to shoot wildlife merely because it frightened them.

Rick: "You hired me to protect you, Doctor. You did not hire me to make the wilderness safe." Marissa: "At twenty meters I was prepared to renegotiate."

In the Gliese 687 system, the first assimilator failed. Andrew needed two field-control assemblies and a set of precision lattice elements. They did not have them. A local contact knew people who did. The people arrived in a battered surface transport with no company markings, no verifiable business registry, and enough weapons to make Eduardo stop pretending this was a legitimate transaction.

They never called themselves pirates. The expedition never called them pirates. Patrick later observed that this was the most polite conversation he had ever recorded between two groups who mutually believed the other group might shoot them. Their final price was two Vertikron rifles. Marissa authorized the trade. Eduardo did not speak to her for forty-three minutes. Patrick timed it.