far too early in the game to accept them as anything more than impulsive conjecture.
Evidence. It was time to amass some hard, cold evidence. To date they had spent nearly all their time out in the field. Now it was time to sit down in the lab, to dissect a serious number of specimens in the search for links between species and types, and to let the camp’s AI engage in some fundamental extrapolation and sequence-crunching. In short, it was time to buckle down to the kind of time-intensive, repetitive, methodical, frequently boring work that constituted the greater preponderance of real science.
His line of thought changed to something else entirely when Haviti moved closer to him. It changed again, and not for the better this time, when she pointed to the west.
“Is that cloud moving?”
He squinted. His night vision had never been the best. Flipping down his visor, he joined her in studying the expanding phenomenon.
“It’s moving, but I’m not so sure it’s a cloud.”
“It is not.” Valnadireb’s huge compound eyes needed no artificial assistance to discern the true nature of the star-muting shadow. “It’s alive, and it is coming this way.”
More than the mood was broken as for the second time that day the four scientists unlimbered their sidearms. There was nothing to indicate that the dark mass would prove to be hostile, but its sheer size dictated caution. Better to be prepared than to be caught off guard and forced into making life-or-death decisions at the last moment.
As it turned out, the decision to take up arms proved prudent.
The sound of the onrushing shadow was surprising. A whispery hum, it was anything but threatening. That did not prevent N’kosi, ever the enthusiastic researcher, from letting out a yelp of surprise when the first of the gently parachuting larvae spiraled down to land on his arm. Half again as long as the scientist’s extended limb and nearly as wide, the larva was almost paper-thin. On contact with his forearm it lay there light as a leaf, allowing him to examine it closely. The pale, translucent form weighed next to nothing. A single black dot at one end hinted at the location of a very primitive eyespot.
“It’s like tissue.” As he addressed his colleagues, N’kosi raised his arm slowly up and down. “I don’t see any indication of…”
He grunted in pain as the larva contracted sharply around his forearm. Shrinking and tightening with frightening speed, it was transformed from a ten-centimeter-wide strip of pale protein into a swiftly shrinking tourniquet. Setting aside his pistol, N’kosi used his free hand to try and pull it off. Not only did the “flimsy” material fail to break, it burned his clutching fingers on contact.
“Get it off!” he yelled to his companions. Already the now wirelike strip was cutting off the flow of blood to his forearm and hand and threatening to slice right through his protective shirtsleeve into his flesh.
Haviti and Tellenberg fumbled for the knives contained in their field multitools. By the time either of them could get a blade out, an alert Valnadireb had clipped the shrunken larva in half. Using both foothands and truhands, he pulled it apart. The caustic fluid the migrating alien maggot secreted might sear human skin, but it barely left a mark on the thranx’s much tougher chitinous exoskeleton.
“Thanks, Val.” A grimacing N’kosi was rubbing his arm, stimulating the flow of blood to his throbbing hand.
They had no time to commiserate or study the dead creature now lying on the deck, because as the dozen or so enormous soaring night fliers continued passing overhead, blotting out the sky, their teeming progeny drifted downward like slow rain. Each of the nearly silent gliders released dozens, hundreds of the deceptively innocuous larvae from a line of multiple ventral cloaca. These floated downward or were carried off by gentle breezes like so much shredded tissue paper. The quartet of edgy scientists
Evidence. It was time to amass some hard, cold evidence. To date they had spent nearly all their time out in the field. Now it was time to sit down in the lab, to dissect a serious number of specimens in the search for links between species and types, and to let the camp’s AI engage in some fundamental extrapolation and sequence-crunching. In short, it was time to buckle down to the kind of time-intensive, repetitive, methodical, frequently boring work that constituted the greater preponderance of real science.
His line of thought changed to something else entirely when Haviti moved closer to him. It changed again, and not for the better this time, when she pointed to the west.
“Is that cloud moving?”
He squinted. His night vision had never been the best. Flipping down his visor, he joined her in studying the expanding phenomenon.
“It’s moving, but I’m not so sure it’s a cloud.”
“It is not.” Valnadireb’s huge compound eyes needed no artificial assistance to discern the true nature of the star-muting shadow. “It’s alive, and it is coming this way.”
More than the mood was broken as for the second time that day the four scientists unlimbered their sidearms. There was nothing to indicate that the dark mass would prove to be hostile, but its sheer size dictated caution. Better to be prepared than to be caught off guard and forced into making life-or-death decisions at the last moment.
As it turned out, the decision to take up arms proved prudent.
The sound of the onrushing shadow was surprising. A whispery hum, it was anything but threatening. That did not prevent N’kosi, ever the enthusiastic researcher, from letting out a yelp of surprise when the first of the gently parachuting larvae spiraled down to land on his arm. Half again as long as the scientist’s extended limb and nearly as wide, the larva was almost paper-thin. On contact with his forearm it lay there light as a leaf, allowing him to examine it closely. The pale, translucent form weighed next to nothing. A single black dot at one end hinted at the location of a very primitive eyespot.
“It’s like tissue.” As he addressed his colleagues, N’kosi raised his arm slowly up and down. “I don’t see any indication of…”
He grunted in pain as the larva contracted sharply around his forearm. Shrinking and tightening with frightening speed, it was transformed from a ten-centimeter-wide strip of pale protein into a swiftly shrinking tourniquet. Setting aside his pistol, N’kosi used his free hand to try and pull it off. Not only did the “flimsy” material fail to break, it burned his clutching fingers on contact.
“Get it off!” he yelled to his companions. Already the now wirelike strip was cutting off the flow of blood to his forearm and hand and threatening to slice right through his protective shirtsleeve into his flesh.
Haviti and Tellenberg fumbled for the knives contained in their field multitools. By the time either of them could get a blade out, an alert Valnadireb had clipped the shrunken larva in half. Using both foothands and truhands, he pulled it apart. The caustic fluid the migrating alien maggot secreted might sear human skin, but it barely left a mark on the thranx’s much tougher chitinous exoskeleton.
“Thanks, Val.” A grimacing N’kosi was rubbing his arm, stimulating the flow of blood to his throbbing hand.
They had no time to commiserate or study the dead creature now lying on the deck, because as the dozen or so enormous soaring night fliers continued passing overhead, blotting out the sky, their teeming progeny drifted downward like slow rain. Each of the nearly silent gliders released dozens, hundreds of the deceptively innocuous larvae from a line of multiple ventral cloaca. These floated downward or were carried off by gentle breezes like so much shredded tissue paper. The quartet of edgy scientists
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