Melon babbled away, trying to be reassuring, saying that he may have been too conservative in his estimates of how long the brain could be dead before the alien technology could no longer read it. We had cut our travel time in half, but would it be enough? The humans were nearly spent; their heads hung forward as they panted, hunched over their handlebars, dead legs endlessly pushing at the pedals. We entered the Manoogla Heights. That meant hills – big ones. The humans would have suffered, tackling them on their bikes, even with fresh legs, so I ordered the dismount. We’d be just as quick on foot. The ship actually wasn’t hidden very deeply into the Heights, relative to where we’d entered the area. Besides, with the way the terrain turned rocky – where the shards of the oddly missing mountains were – the Kambulance might not have made it through the smaller gaps between boulders and jagged, jutting rocks. Another consideration was those bloody lizards. Whilst I could heat-scan for them, they liked to hide under and behind rocks and explode as you went past.
