X Bear had been very busy for the last year integrating into local society and learning as much as he could about Dirt ways of life. He knew that the local ‘Humans’ called their planet ‘Earth’ but he still thought of it as Dirt as he relied on his communicator for translations and that is how it kept being translated. The software of the translators was extremely difficult to change once certain standards had been set.

  He had quickly realised that he would need a source of income in order to live in this society even after Jonathan’s parents had inexplicably adopted him into their family. They had even offered him an allowance, but X Bear insisted on earning his own way. Initially he was concerned that he would have difficulty in trading some of his skills for credit, considering his primary skill was as an Intergalactic spy - a talent he did not see in any of the job listings. However, one day when he was walking along with Jonathan and being shown the sights of the city, a man in a dark suit approached them and kneeling down on one knee, looked into X Bear’s eyes.

  “I say,” he said, “You have an incredibly effective costume. Who do you work for?”

  X Bear declined to mention the Imperial Exploration Service Special Affairs Division and simply answered, “No one, Sir,” and raised his hat in greeting.

  The man clapped his hands in happiness and said, “That’s joyful news!”

  X Bear replaced his hat firmly on his head and looked inquiringly at the man, “Why?” he asked.

  “Oh. Pardon me for my rudeness,” said the man as he reached into his waistcoat pocket and produced a business card which he handed to X Bear. X Bear examined the simple white card with black writing as the man said, “I am Mister Oliver Finch, marketing director of Ogilvy, Ogilvy, Ponce and Seymour.”

  “OOPS?” interrupted Jonathan, “Isn’t that an unfortunate series of initials?”

  Looking at the boy with a smile, Mr Finch replied, “Yes, you would think so, but we have turned it around. Our business motto is ‘Don’t make a mistake, use OOPS’. Rather catchy don’t you think?”

  “How can I help you, Mister Finch?” asked X Bear politely.

  “Ah, yes,” continued Mr Finch, “We are currently doing a marketing campaign for a series of breakfast and sandwich spreads and were at a loss as to how to promote this new line. Then I saw you and my prayers were answered.”

  “Answered?” asked X Bear, suspecting what Mr Finch was about to say.

  “Indeed yes,” he replied, “Answered. There is not a lot of call these days for marmalade, especially amongst the young and we did not have a plan how we would approach the problem until I saw you there! Paddington!”

  “I’m not Paddington,” said X Bear, giving his cover name, “I am Xavier Black.”

  “That’s as may be, but you could easily pretend to be Paddington and that’s all that matters to us,” said Mr Finch, “Will you come with me so we can discuss terms?”

  X Bear looked at Jonathan who shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “Why not?” and off they went with Mr Finch to the offices of OOPS, advertising and marketing consultants.

  Jonathan’s father created a trust account for X Bear which solved all the difficult identification issues and soon X Bear had a substantial income from consulting and appearance fees. One of his first purchases was a state of the art portable computer and private Internet access. Soon he was trolling through the torrent of data that comprised the Internet and obtained a very detailed picture of this Human civilisation.

  He had various feeds and search bots set up to pick up any news of alien invasions or encounters. Unfortunately this meant a lot of imaginary stories. These Humans just made up anything and everything. Even their documentaries had to be filtered for propaganda and irrelevancies in order to gain nuggets of truth.

  X Bear had learned there were unconfirmed stories from most of the test subjects but no one of any importance believed their stories of abduction and testing. The cow abduction happened to fit in very neatly with the urban myth of alien cow abductions which was very convenient.

  One Summer’s day he had returned home from a recent photo shoot promoting that infernal marmalade (“Why couldn’t that Paddington have like something better, like a nice cold beer?” thought X Bear) when one of his search bots came back with an urgent result. An emergency call had been recorded for a disturbance with several dead cows and a human with gunfire and explosions. This in itself wouldn’t have been odd in many places on Dirt, but in this case it was in a secluded valley in country New Zealand.

  “I have been idle too long,” thought X Bear, “I am going to investigate. I may not get there in time but I should be able to determine if this is one of the first hunts.”

  He then carefully packed his suitcase, ensured his weapons were primed and ready and left for his hidden space ship still safely on top of the roof of Paddington Station. His ship’s proximity detector hadn’t alerted him in all this time, so he was very surprised as he leapt up to the roof using his anti gravity belt and saw a collection of dead cats arrayed around his camouflaged ship. All was quiet as he saw a pigeon fly quickly to his ship followed by a fast moving tabby cat. As the cat reached about five feet from the edge of the ship the laser defence rapidly popped up and zapped the cat with a flash. The cat was briefly highlighted by the light and dropped to the ground with an acrid smell of sizzled fur. Then a flock of pigeons flew down from the neighbouring walls and settled onto his ship.

  X Bear deactivated the camouflage and the pigeons all flew away, revealing his nice black ship now covered in a crusty layer of white. He approached slowly in amazement, stepping over the bodies of several dead cats in varying stages of decomposition, and wondered at how much poo a flock of pigeons could produce in a year. “This will never come off in a car wash,” he mused, “Lucky for me this ship can fly using sensors.”

  He pressed the door lock and with a crack as the hardened bird poo was broken through, the door opened and he could get into his ship. Before closing the door he called to the birds, “You have had your fun. When I get back we will adopt a new plan.”

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  X Bear noticed that he had turned off the auto notification when he had fiddled with the settings last time he left the ship. Muttering about various pigeon pie recipes, X Bear programmed the ship to get to New Zealand as fast as possible with only a slight detour through a strong rain cloud formation on the way. “That should clean the ship,” hoped X Bear as he settled in for his one hour trip.

  ****

  Looking through his beautifully cleaned front screen, X Bear maintained a position high above the valley and used high magnification on his instruments to see the action. During the flight over he had picked up the presence of the Hunting Lodge Shuttle and watched it leave via his instruments. The hunt may have completed but he should still be able to do some investigating.

  He landed his ship away from the action setting his camouflage to represent a bush and ensuring all the defence and notification settings were correct. With practiced speed X Bear moved rapidly through the woods until he was watching some humans examine the site of a crashed truck and dead animals. He climbed up to some lower branches and gathered his cloak around him effectively making him almost invisible.

  X Bear raised his vision goggles and zoomed in to watch the activities. The humans were concentrating on a dead human and he couldn’t see through the forest of legs and bodies so he looked closer at the cows. The wounds that seemed to kill the cows were definitely laser blasts based on the size and style of the entry hole. Whoever had fired those shots was an expert with only one shot per cow. “What were experienced hunters doing here?” he pondered, and then saw the lead cow almost blasted into blackness with multiple laser blasts. “Ahhh,” he reasoned, “Once the Hunt Master had killed the cows one of the hunters ‘made the kill’. This is one of the first hunts. It has begun.”

  He noticed the stain on the middle of the road between the cows and the truck and looked closer. The skid marks were from an armoured body suit favoured by HTI scouts. “So one of the scouts has been killed. I wonder if it was an accident or deliberate?” he thought.

  A sound close to his hiding position froze X Bear. Footsteps approached and stopped next to his tree. Looking down carefully he saw two human older teenagers nervously watching all the action.

  “Do you reckon they’re after us, Danny?” asked Lenny squinting to see what was happening. His glasses had fallen off during his flight from the farmer and he was having trouble seeing too much.

  “Nah,” replied Danny, “I reckon they’re here for somethin’ else. Nuthin’ to do with us, mate.”

  “There’s a lot of police and military here,” said Lenny, squinting hard through a small space formed by his fingers to improve his vision, “and isn’t that Farmer Simmons talking to them?”

  “Yeah,” said Danny, “but they must be talking about the crashed truck and the dead cows. I reckon it was cattle rustlers who crashed.”

  “We’ve been here all night, Danny,” moaned Lenny, “Can’t we go home?”

  “Not while they’re all out there,” said Danny pointing at the soldiers and policeman looking around and poking everything in sight, “We’ve got to stay put. Right here looks good.”

  X Bear sighed silently, wondering how he would get these stupid humans to move. For now he would continue his long distance monitoring.

  Ten minutes later he felt he had enough information and wanted to get to the other side. He had been listening to the meaningless chatter of the two boys when they said something interesting.

  “Hey Lenny,” said Danny mischievously, “You know how these woods are rarely explored, being in a hidden valley and all?”

  “It’s not hidden,” said Lenny, “It’s on the map and called Pleasant Valley.”

  “Ah,” said Danny, “That is the cover name. Didn’t you hear about the experiments they were doing with Australian Koalas imported here in the sixties?”

  “What are you talking about Danny?” said Lenny, “You’re not having me on again are you?”

  “No, mate. No,” said Danny reassuringly, “In the sixties in the height of the Cold War, American scientists working with Kiwi scientists dabbled in forbidden biological experiments.”

  Lenny was looking concerned now and looking as Danny said, “Stop teasing me Danny. I don’t believe you.”

  “You know how Koalas sleep like over 20 hours and all they do is eat Eucalyptus leaves and stuff?” asked Danny.

  “Uh huh,” agreed Lenny.

  “Well, these scientists fiddled with these Koala’s DNA and must’ve flipped a wrong switch or something and quickly shut down the research and abandoned this valley.”

  “What?” said Lenny, concerned, “What did they do?”

  “They say the Koalas now slept only four hours a day and ate more than Eucalyptus leaves and were very angry from lack of sleep. They now eat meat,” said Danny conspiratorially.

  “Bull,” said Lenny as he looked around fearfully, “We don’t have anything like that here.”

  “Look around, mate,” said Denny pointing into the woods around them, “Have you seen anything moving?”

  “No,” said Lenny doubtfully.

  “That’s because the Drop Bears have got ‘em,” said Danny, “It’s true.”

  Lenny shook his head and then Danny quickly slapped him on the shoulders and Lenny screamed.

  Danny laughed and pointed at Lenny, “Just jokin’ man. You should have seen your face!”

  Some of the soldiers had looked up as they heard the scream and a couple started walking slowly in their direction.

  X Bear slowly untangled his cape and then dropped on to the boys, snarling with his teeth bared.

  “Aaarrgh!!” screamed Danny as he leaped up and ran towards the soldiers, “Help! Drop Bears!” with Lenny close behind.

  Smiling at a job well done, X Bear vanished into the woods and made his way across to the other side to continue his investigations.

  ****

  Later that evening X Bear returned to the roof of Paddington Station and parked his clean ship in the middle of the white circle of bird poo that marked his parking place. He stared at the watching line of pigeons and pointing at them said, “This time will be different.”

  X Bear searched around the roof and soon found what he was looking for, a metallic box containing a link to the station’s power source. All space ships were equipped with a deflection shield designed to deflect anything which was in the ship’s way such as small rocks and space dust. Larger deflectors were employed by ships of war and with enough power they could deflect almost anything that was in the way or was thrown at them. The only problem was when the deflector shield was engaged the ship’s weapons couldn’t fire out as projectile weapons were deflected back towards the ship - which would be bad - or laser weapons overheated the deflectors and weakened them. Research on a solution to this problem stalled many centuries ago since the unification wars and there had been no interstellar war since then. Popular sources supported by HTI and others said this was due to the societal circuit breaking effects of legal, safe and rare hunting.

  If X Bear just turned on the deflector shield, even on a low setting, his ship’s power would be drained quickly. In space the ship’s power was replenished using solar power uninterrupted by atmosphere and so was rarely an issue. Within atmosphere, the effects of pollution and the frequent cloudy days meant the solar collectors never gathered enough energy beyond maintaining basic systems. As Paddington Station was very busy, X Bear was confident that his small tap into the power supply would hardly be noticed.

  He stepped back from his handywork and turned on the deflector shield on it’s lowest settings. He did not bother with the laser defence as this should not be needed. X Bear then stood back and waited.

  “Come on,” he said to the pigeons, encouraging them to sit on his clean space ship.

  Finally one of the more adventurous pigeons flew across and tried landing on top of the ship. The pigeon immediately started sliding off and he tried to scramble with flapping wings back on to the ship but slid off the other side before landing on the ground head first with his tail in the air and wings splayed alongside him.

  X Bear laughed and said to the pigeons, “There. That should work.”

  The fallen pigeon righted itself and stared at X Bear indignantly.

  “What are you going to do about it? Bye!” X Bear scoffed at the pigeon.

  He engaged the camouflage setting and walked away as his ship disappeared behind an image of boxes with birds landing and sliding through the image.