Fragment by Warren Fahy

“Audrey” to science.
    Inspired by the idea, Nell had requested that dozens of plant species be shipped in. These included flats of crabgrass, pottedpines, wheat, and cactus. All would be exposed to the island around the lab for observation.
    Other scientists, spread out along the trough, controlled the cameras, aiming them in the direction of the specimen retrieval trap.
    Quentin released the seal mechanism at the top of the cylinder. As he lifted the lid, two flying creatures that looked like whirligigs escaped the hatch.
    The pair rose like helicopters, hovering without spinning inside the trough. Their five wings shook off a blue mist. Their abdomens curled beneath them like scorpion tails as they dove straight for the hot-dog-baited trap.
    Their heads kept a lookout with a ring of eyes as their legs grabbed the meat and stuffed it into an abdominal maw. Their bodies immediately thickened.
    After a stunned moment, the scientist controlling the hot-dog trap remembered to seal the two creatures inside.
    “Got ’em!”
    “Good work!” Nell breathed.
    Quentin inverted the specimen retrieval capsule and dumped the contents onto the illuminated white floor of the trough. Several distinguishable bodies tumbled out in the blue slurry.
    He drew a nozzle on a spring-loaded hose from the side of the trough and rinsed the mangled specimens with a jet of water. The blue blood and water sluiced into drains spaced two feet apart in the trough.
    Three large disk-ants crawled out of the gore, leaving a trail of blue}}}}}}} behind them as they rolled. Then they flopped on their sides and crawled like pill-bugs, their upper arms flicking off droplets of blood, which spattered around them like ink from a fountain pen. They flipped over and did the same thing on the other side before tipping onto their edges and getting a rolling start, hurling themselves like discuses into the air, at the faces of the mesmerized scientists.
    Some caromed off the sides of the trough, their legs retracting into white, diamond-hard tips that visibly gouged and nicked theacrylic. As they banged against the chamber walls they threw off dozens of smaller disk-ants. These rolled down the walls, trailing threads of light blue liquid.
    The scientists controlling the cameras zoomed in to watch these juvenile ants wheel toward the baited traps. The rolling bugs hurled themselves onto the sugar and vegetables and even the Venus flytrap. This they devoured from the inside out as its traps triggered one after another.
    “Bye, Audrey,” Quentin muttered mournfully and Nell patted his shoulder, staring openmouthed beside him.
    One large disk-ant rolled to the trap baited with a pile of salt. It turned on its side to feed, but then, before the trap could be sprung, it reared back abruptly on its edge and rolled away, and others in its vicinity scattered.
    “Trap the juveniles by themselves, if you can,” Nell instructed. “And we need to get tissue samples from the other specimens, Otto, so we can do bacterial cultures and HPLC and Mass Spec GC profiles. We need to dissect these things to see if they have any venom sacs we should know about.”
    Several scientists sprang their traps at her urging and isolated a few dozen specimens. Reaching their hands into the extendable gloves, they placed the sprung traps into airlocks spaced inside the trough. In the close-up view from the cameras above, they could see the tiny creatures leaping onto their gloves.
    “They seem to attack anything that moves,” Nell observed.
    “Yeah, no matter how big it is,” Andy said.
    “Don’t worry, there’s no way they can get through butyl rubber,” Quentin said.
    “Ever seen
The Andromeda Strain?”
    “Or
Alien?”
Andy said.
    “Come on, guys.”
    The scientists placed their traps in the airlocks, where the outside of the traps were sterilized with a chlorine dioxide bath. They opened the hatches and transferred the traps to individual observation chambers, where the live