Chameleon in Chrome

*****

This is written from the viewpoint of several hundred years in the future and most of this bit is on Earth, which is just fine, though there are some changes, and not big ones, either.

It wasn't the great invasion long foretold by the urban myth people and conspiracy theorists of a few centuries ago, but there was a small number of aliens on Earth now. Most of them were alone and though they all knew that there were others like them here, none of them knew specifics or locations.

They'd been sent here to learn, just as Earth governments had sent some people to the alien's point of origin. It was an exchange policy.

Our story concerns one of these exchange students. At the point where we begin, he is in a very rural part of Central America and he hopes to be gone very shortly. He's not crazy about the local humans and there is the threat of another hurricane passing through at any time. He's already been through one, thanks.

He relates to the general tale in that he's an Anubian, so allow me to set a few things out about them if this is the first chapter that you've ever read of this.

The way that we walk - us humans that is, is another way to categorize us on this planet that we love so much. We walk in a way known as Plantigrade, which means that we walk using our toes and all of our feet. The system works not bad for us and it's how we've all gotten around for the past bunch of millennia.

As long as we're walking and not running.

When we run, we tend to use our toes more and not much of the rest of our feet any farther back than the balls of our feet.

When we do that, we are unconsciously approximating the way that another set of animals here get around. Those types are, most of them, capable of quieter and quicker locomotion than we are.

Those creatures walk on their lower digits all the time and their way is known as digitigrade.

Anubians aren't from here, but they walk as digitigrades all of the time with one difference. Their back feet are much larger and stronger than their front feet, much wider too, and that allows them to walk on four legs - or just the back ones if they want. And their back legs are shaped like canine back legs.

Their hands aren't paws though they can use them that way or they can use them as hands, mostly because of their thumb joints, which have a much larger range of motion than ours do. So they can walk or run on all fours without spraining their thumbs.

For a good visual, in this work of fiction, I've made it so that once humans meet them; they call them Anubians because to us, they really resemble a lot of pictures that you might have seen of the old Egyptian god, Anubis.

0_o

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D'Jymm walked along the old grating, careful to keep an eye on exactly what it was that he was expecting to bear his weight. Some of the catwalks looked as though the winds which would be blown inland by the next tropical cyclone whenever it came would surely rip them clean off. But by the time that you actually got to them wondering if they stood a chance to hold you up, you found that they only looked like that. They were fine to walk across or along.

He understood things in terms of the way these things were constructed; a large flat area of grating was also an area where maintenance work might be expected to be done, so they were often built with a bit of load-bearing potential.

Conversely, some sections looked like they might only have been there for less than a decade and they turned out to be just hanging on, deathtraps to merely step on.

Of more concern were the ladders and thin, one man catwalks up here. He wasn't as thin as a cat of any sort for one thing.

And where he was at the moment, it was a long way down.

He looked off through the rain into the distance for a few moments. This place wasn't as old as it had appeared at first glance. But it was abandoned and he surmised that it might have been one of the last of it's kind in this part of the world. He thought about it and supposed that if that had been the case, then when humans had finally weaned themselves off running their vehicles on hydrocarbon fuels, the last few running places like this would have been shut down with little or no notice.

That was an aspect which didn't make any sense to him. Even if the facility had been decommissioned, why was it still standing here the way that it was? There must be a thousand electric motors here, many of them large and expensive. And they'd been selected for outside use, every one that he saw was the totally enclosed type. The paint on the outside would go dull in the first decade or two, but that was about it.

He looked around, trying to imagine how many ... miles of piping of all sizes that he could see.

And if they ever had to burn off volatile organic compounds, there had to be incinerators of some kind here. If those incinerators were of the catalytic type, then you needed a catalyst and far more often than not, platinum was the material used for that.

He looked around again, trying to imagine the amount of platinum a place like this would need. If the catalyst wasn't all neutralized, there was a hell of a lot of money here.

He'd seen the first tendrils of vines and other leafy tendrils growing up one wall of the office building, but it was the start. Another thirty years, he reckoned, and no one would ever know to look at the place that there was a refinery under the shrubbery.

Another thought caused him to smile at the irony.

Just like the dead cities in the jungle around here and across the region; the Olmecs, Aztecs, and the Mayans, he thought, certain that he'd left out a couple that he didn't know about due to his being an unintentional immigrant.

The people themselves - well, their descendants really, they lived on today, but the ancient civilizations were buried under leafy greens.

Looking down, he saw a few vehicles sitting around, trucks, mobile cranes, transport lifters and utility vehicles for the most part. They seemed to have adjusted easily to their later role, rusting quietly while providing homes for the field mice. He knew that there were likely more sitting around than he could see.

He didn't know exactly when this place had been left behind by it's workers and it's owners, but judging by the reclamation work done by the surrounding rainforest, it might have been as long as fifty years or as little as twenty. He wasn't from around here, so he had no definite way to tell.

He'd only known that he'd had to get past some galvanized chain link fencing to get inside the perimeter.

As he'd neared a likely-looking place earlier, D'Jymm noticed some of the signage as he got to the fence and he looked at it.

He could read English well, but these signs were in Spanish, almost all of them, and he supposed that it was all the standard warnings that most industrial places post about working safely or watching out for vehicle traffic and things such as that. Those things didn't bother him, as things like that usually applied when the facility was operational.

It was the few scrawly-looking, handmade-ish ones that he saw which caused him to wonder. They were newer, yet looked more weathered, and he saw that two of them had crude, cartoonish skulls adorning them.

He took out his communicator and held it up so that it could translate what he saw.

The well-made ones turned out to be just the sort of thing that he'd guessed. The hand-written, cheaply-produced ones, a few of them fading or chipping read far differently.

There were warnings that the facility was haunted.

Those ones were a little problematic for him to figure out. He understood everything but what was to be feared. Shm'Sha have no understanding or knowledge of hauntings or ghosts.

He didn't think that he needed to be bothered much by whatever those warnings referenced, and in any case, he's seen nothing there thus far but a deserted, dead, refinery facility.

Then he came to one which alluded to something else and it took his communicator more than a minute to produce anything for him to read.

Something about Nahuals.

The word felt a little vaguely familiar as he played it through his mind. He'd never seen the word written but he had a recollection of hearing something like it once, if he was thinking the pronunciation correctly.

He had no real clue beyond that and waited while the processors in his communicator churned through, even searching dialects as they went.

Finally, he had a few thin results, but they made little sense to him until he translated back into English since translating into his language just lost the context.

His eyebrows rose while his eyes opened a little wider as he read about shape shifters and such along with a long history in the area going back far more than a millennium. He felt a little uncomfortable, though not because of the warning on the sign.

During his first year on Earth, he'd traveled during his vacation time to Egypt, wanting to see the reason for the name by which his kind was known to many humans. He was treated well by the local humans, who no doubt were used to seeing people such as himself and he came away with a good feeling about it all.

It was far different the following year when he'd traveled to Mexico to do a little sightseeing and it had proven to be a disastrous choice. He'd been yelled at, screamed to, threatened, and on occasion even chased for a short distance. Apparently there were some humans there who'd thought that he was one of these things that the communicator listed.

There was a word there as well on his screen which was a little new to him.

Werewolf.

Reading about that caused at least a little of it all to make a bit of sense though he noted that this was also supposed to be a human legend.

He put the device away and looked around for a moment and wondered briefly about the wisdom of coming here, but tossed the concern a few seconds later.

He was here because he needed something.

He hoped to get what he needed for the ship and then he'd be gone, deciding never to return to this planet of idiots.

He'd vaulted the fence and looked for a way up the nearest refractory tower.

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From up where he was now, he almost couldn't see any of the chain link fence at all, though he knew that most of it still had to be there, it was just under the green canopy which had grown there since the last time that anyone had mown the miles of lawn which had been here at some point.

That was the human way of doing these things, he thought. Build something ugly, but surround it with green space.

He went on all fours wherever he could, wanting to spread his three hundred and eight pounds out better and though he was nimble and quick, his footpads often slipped so that the grating dug in between the pads which was uncomfortable to say the least and he had to test his footing so that he didn't rip a toenail out if one of them had gotten caught without him noticing. Even flat sections where the flooring had been made out of checkerplate were hazardous if the paint hadn't worn off because it was slippery on a day like today due to the rain.

The sun obviously wasn't bothering him at all today. It was darkly overcast, so while nothing was beating heat down on the fur at the back of his neck, the tiny flying vampire mosquito insect-things were certainly appreciating him whenever he was at or near ground level if the wind slowed or stopped.

As he rounded the upper stack of one of the refraction towers, he wanted to mutter about his luck.

He was looking at the tubing used for the inlets of the remote exhaust sampling systems, but the ones here had been damaged.

Something large had ...

His eyes followed along and he looked down. Far below, a section of scrubber lay broken up, it's outer cover rusting peacefully. Somehow that section had broken loose some time ago and had hit the sampling tubes on the way down. He looked to make certain, but he already knew that the rest of the tubes that he wanted were most often far from where he could reach them. Predictably, the tubing that he could get to was twisted and bent beyond redemption.

He shook his head and looked away at the next tower. From where he stood, he could see the same tubing on that tower and it looked fine, just what he wanted.

But the only way to get there was to climb back down and then walk over there and start climbing up again.

Wonderful.

He looked at the daylight and guessed as to how long he had before it might get dark and decided to begin his next journey in the morning.

As he walked back to where he'd need to climb back down, he began to think back. It was a little natural, he guessed. One thought begins another, especially if they are related, like how in the nine hells he'd gotten into this long, seemingly never-ending nightmare in the first place.

He'd heard and read about the way that in some documented cases, human beings who, when confronted with the reality that they faced a long or possibly a permanent future in the vast blackness of space, whether by choice or circumstance, lost their way - their internal compass or guidance system simply failed. And the result was to other humans (or even to his own kind if they observed it in humans), a form of madness.

He'd never been confronted with the possibility of being lost and looking at certain death out in space, though he'd been there often enough. His concern was the possibility of never getting off this rock again which was depressing enough as it was.

Here he was, situated by his own guess, very near to the anus of a world where he no longer wished to be and never really had, given that he'd been assigned here in the first place. And he was fine with it no matter where he was.

Then again, he wasn't human.

He was still Shm'Sha, his name was still D'Jymm and though he was now very definitely where he did not wish to be, he hadn't lost the ability to cope with his situation.

He'd been selected by representatives of the Royal family for this assignment. It was a bit of détente where his home world and Earth traded the offer of training at various levels because both civilisations envisioned incredible trade opportunities between them.

And also, it offered possibly a few chances to spy on each other a little. Nothing harmful was meant, his handlers had explained to him, but if during his education, he saw something useful in Earth technology or the way that things were done to advantage, he was to try to sample or record what he could.

It didn't really apply to the disciplines and areas of his expertise, but all the same, D'Jymm had been put through the same training programs as their best intelligence agents and he'd excelled, especially in his awareness of things happening around him, his ability to think on his feet, and his exceptional speed and power in any sort of combat and there was a reason for that.

Shm'Sha are very different from humans - a fact which is obvious only to look at them, but there are other differences. His mother had been born with the gift - in a Shm'Sha way, of magical ability.

D'Jymm didn't share that gift, though he had gotten something else that his mother did not have. He could sense an opponent's distance and position relative to his own far beyond only exceptionally well. He augmented it by adding his other senses when he could as applicable to the particular situation. For example, what he felt would be added to if his opponent was within sight, or audible range, or close enough to feel body heat, these sort of things. But at the heart of his uncanny ability lay what he 'knew', calling it what he just felt because he had no other way to explain it.

His strategic and tactical abilities had almost gotten him transferred to the Intelligence Sector, but someone in his chain of command had decided that he ought to stay the course until the assignment was complete.

After that, however, there were great expectations of him in the future.

Originally on Earth to study human methodology relating to interplanetary navigation and shipping, he'd gotten an urgent message almost at the end of his second year.

There had been an attempted coup on his home world and because he was a member of one of the three 'favored clans' charged with protecting the royal family for centuries - who in the opinion of those rulers, had very nearly failed in their ancient appointed task, he and several thousand others were suddenly personae non-grata on the world where they'd been born.

Oh, and the High Council was no longer paying his way.

He still found it idiotic.

He hadn't been there to take part in the desperate defense of the high family because he was on Earth at the time of the event - which was where they'd sent him.

So all of that promising future would now never come to pass, any of it. He was here to scrounge for plumbing parts so that his ship wouldn't fry him when it fell apart if he didn't fix it soon.

He remembered the cold feeling in his gut when he'd learned that he was never to return home. He was still dealing with that.

It had taken months to find out where the others of his clan were fleeing to, but armed with that information, he decided to try to make his way there with what little currency that he still had saved.

Well, to be honest, it was a lot of money.

So he'd hired on to crew on a fast freighter, but it hadn't worked out well.

Well, not at first.

As it turned out, the rest of the crew already knew of his predicament from the stories on the newswires. It didn't really matter, he supposed. Besides being a bunch of Class A assholes, that lot had turned out to be smugglers who were not above trying their hand at piracy if it looked like there was an easy mark nearby to rob.

A bit of a shame that they were greedy as well as stupid.

The agreement that he'd worked out with the captain had been that he'd work for his passage. What he learned was that the real expectation was that he was the new slave to just about all of them. That detail had only been made clear to him by their actions afterwards.

They treated him with disdain over what he was, as though they and their human culture were more advanced than he was in his own Shm'Sha one and they heaped derision on him, calling him 'Dog' or 'Nubi', a reference to the term 'Anubian' that the humans had come up with for his kind.

He went to see the captain over his treatment and he was told that if he didn't like the way that things were he could spend his time in the brig and be put off at their next port of call.

"Or," the captain had smiled, "we might just save the expense of the food by killing you and shoving your carcass out through the airlock.

"It's twenty to one, furball. Every one of us is armed and you're not. Take it or leave it."

There had only been one time that things had gotten tense and that was when D'Jymm had changed the agreement himself because two of these fools in the crew had orders for him at the same time. Once they realized that, they kept yelling their commands while they stood next to each other before him.

Now on average, Anubians, especially male ones, tend to stand taller than the average human male and they tend to weigh a fair bit more as well. They can increase the height effect by standing a little higher on their feet when they are walking two-legged.

D'Jymm had roared his frustration right back in their faces and both of the fools had jumped back, pointing their weapons at him just as the captain arrived. He raised his shooter as well, but the reaction that came from D'Jymm wasn't anything like they'd have expected because they thought that he'd react in a human manner.

He took the captain's weapon right out of his hand and pointed it at all three.