Shin chuckled and sank teeth into his lower lip. The man turned the wheel and ran them through the surf, the seatruck’s balloon tires extending from their wells in the hull as the vehicle lumbered up on the sand. He brought it to a stop three meters up from the wave line and at the foot of low cream-colored dunes. Bits of scrubby vegetation—something that looked like white-spotted succulents—grew in lace-like patterns across the dune face.

“Wait,” Kalico called as Yoshimura opened the door. “Take a good hard look before you step out. Give it a couple of minutes so we can see if anything comes to investigate. Shin, keep an eye on the sky. No telling what those polka dots are that you’ve seen. Or who knows what else might be flying around.”

“It’s just a couple of samples,” Yoshimura told her.

“Yeah,” Kalico agreed. “The good news is that there’s no root mat. It’s wide open. We can see for a kilometer in every direction. The only place anything big can camouflage itself is back in the dunes, not on this flat sand. And listen, if something pops up, freeze until I can shoot it. Hopefully, like with mobbers, if whatever it is doesn’t recognize you as prey, it might ignore you.”

“You got it.” Yoshimura told her. “Thank God you came along, Supervisor. I mean, we’ve listened, tried to learn. But having you here, it really brings this place home.”

She opened the roof hatch and climbed up until she had a good view in all directions. Fifty meters to the south along the flat strip of sand, she could see some kind of life-forms—maybe the size of footballs—that charged in and out of the surf. In the distance to the north, a collection of flying hunters were diving into the breakers, but they were a good half a kilometer away.

Wind whipped her hair around as she studied the dunes, seeing no movement, no tracks. Nothing made a mound, no shape that wasn’t entirely natural.

As she glanced back at the surf, the seatruck’s tracks where it had rolled out of the water were being scrubbed away. Out beyond the breakers, something stuck up. Dark, gleaming, like a tennis-ball-sized eye on a stalk. She had no clue what it might be. Then it slipped back into the water, leaving only the long breaker to crest and waste itself on a retreating wave.

“Supervisor?” Yoshimura called up. “You see anything?”

She gave one last look at the sky, checked the flying things up north; they seemed to be going the other way.

“No.” She dropped down through the roof hatch. “But I don’t like it. Can you just throw these sample jars out, maybe tied to a string or something?”