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When Otto hesitated for a moment, two reddish-brown animals the size of squirrels rocketed from the jungle into the box. They were followed by two flying bugs that zipped through the air and wriggled under the door before it closed and sealed.
‘Great work, Otto.’ Nell patted his back.
‘Looks like you bagged a couple island rats, too. Look!’ Andy Beasley pointed out the window.
The cylindrical trap was thrashing on the end of the robotic arm.
‘Yikes.’ Otto stopped retracting the arm as the trap shook violently. Its transparent walls were spattered and smeared with swirling blue gore.
‘Oh dear,’ Andy said.
‘Blue Slurpee. My favorite,’ Otto said.
When the trap finally stopped shaking it looked like a blueberry smoothie had been frappéd inside.
‘OK, retrieve that and let’s dissect whatever’s left,’ Nell told them. ‘Then we’ll set another trap. You better shut the door a little sooner next time, Otto.’
‘Yeah, guess so.’ The biologist nodded agreement.
He maneuvered the trap into an airlock, where conveyor belts transported it through a second hatch into the specimen dock, which they had informally dubbed the ‘trough,’ an observation chamber that spanned the length of Section One.
This section of StatLab had been designed as an experimental Mars specimen collection station, but it doubled as a mobile medical lab that could be dropped into disease hot zones. The lab was part of a pilot program that focused NASA’s unique expertise on Earth-bound applications. Additional funding earmarked for ‘Dual-Planet Technologies’ had provided NASA with the resources that had made the program possible. But no one thought StatLab would ever be called into action, and NASA technicians now crawled nervously over every inch of the lab to ensure that it met all system requirements by at least a twofold safety margin. Nothing freaked out NASA technicians more than planning for unknown contingencies.
Six high-resolution screens hung over the long ‘trough.’ Under the top surface of the trough, six video cameras no bigger than breath mints slid along silver threads on X and Y axes, each covering a sixth of the long viewing chamber.
The robotic arm deposited the trap on the conveyor belt, and the airtight hatch closed behind it, sealing with a backwards hiss. The conveyer slid the trap to the center of the trough, where the six scientists had gathered.
‘Let’s hope this soup is chunky,’ murmured Quentin Brancato, another biologist flown in by NASA. He stuck his hands into two butyl rubber gloves that extended on accordioned Kevlar arms into the observation chamber. He opened the door of the trap manually.
‘Careful,’ Nell warned.
‘Don’t worry,’ Quentin replied. ‘These gloves are pretty tough, Nell.’
Several other scientists stood at the controls of a number of smaller traps. Each trap contained a different bait: a piece of hot dog, a spoonful of vegetable succotash, a potted Venus flytrap, a cup of honey, a pile of salt, a bowl of fresh water, all supplied by the galley of the Enterprise. Except for the Venus flytrap, which was a pet Quentin had smuggled onto the flight over. As punishment for breaking the rules, he’d had to sacrifice ‘Audrey’ to science.
Inspired by the idea, Nell had requested that dozens of plant species be shipped in. These included flats of crabgrass, potted pines, 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 the acrylic. 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.
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.
‘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 sprung 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 specimens inside could be released.
The other specimens from the original trap seemed dead, victims of a frenzied carnage. The original hot dog was nowhere to be found.
The two largest animals they had captured were about the size of tailless muskrats or squirrels. Both had eight legs. Though its side was ravaged by its rival, one specimen was clearly more complete. It had bitten off its rival’s head and seemed to have died choking on it.
‘What…is that?’ stuttered Quentin.
‘Jesus, I’ve never seen anything like that,’ one scientist whispered.
‘God,’ Andy giggled.
‘OK, let’s settle down.’ Otto was clearly rattled himself. ‘I’ll dissect. Quentin, you operate the camera.’
‘Gladly.’ Quentin quickly relinquished the glove box to Otto.
Otto reached in and cleared away the other animal parts, which included a few half-bitten disk-ants; a half-eaten two-legged thing that looked like a grasshopper fused with a toad; a headless island ‘rat,’ as Andy had called it; and, surprisingly, a few chunks of a mouse-sized species.
Each partial specimen was passed down the trough to be rinsed and prepared for preservation. The strangeness of the body parts sent a chill down the assembly line of scientists.
‘What are we looking at here?’ one said.
‘I don’t fucking believe this,’ another muttered, uneasily.
‘Let’s take this one step at a time,’ Otto told them. ‘All right, people, we’re about to conduct the first dissection of a Henders specimen.’
Otto spread the largest intact animal out on its belly. He washed the blue gore from its velvetlike fur, which turned out to be coffee-ground brown with black and white stripes on its haunches. Strips of iridescent fur radiated over its softball-sized head. The head of the second rat made a bulge in its throat the size of a baseball.
As the last blue liquid was rinsed off, everyone gasped at the impossible specimen.
‘OK, let’s see what we’re dealing with here.’ Otto’s voice cracked. His hands were shaking.
‘Steady now,’ Nell said.
Quentin moved the video camera across the top of the chamber until it was directly over the subject, and then zoomed in, providing an enlarged view on the plasma screens above the trough.
Otto placed his gloved left hand over the specimen’s head and blocked throat.
Nell perched on one of the high stools next to Otto and opened her sketchpad. ‘Just take it easy now,’ she said calmly. She started to sketch a diagram. ‘The fur coloration on its haunches looks like an okapi.’
‘Yeah.’ Andy nodded, frowning at the captured specimen. ‘People thought okapis were a hoax when they were first discovered. They thought they were giraffes, zebras, and buffalo stitched together…’
‘They’d never believe this freaking thing.’ Quentin gawped at the red-furred chimera.
‘The stripes must confuse predators,’ Nell theorized.
‘Come on, this thing is a predator,’ Otto said.
‘I think it’s probably both–predator and prey,’ she said. ‘The front looks fierce and the back says “I better hide my ass with camouflage while I run the hell out of here.”’
‘Hunters that are hunted?’
‘That hunt each other,’ said Andy.
‘Check out that tail.’
‘Are we sure it’s dead?’
‘Let’s find out,’ Otto said. ‘Beginning narration of dissection at…’ He consulted his watch. ‘…two forty-two p.m. This is the first dissection of a Henders specimen. It is a fur-bearing, eight-legged animal, about thirty-five centimeters long, with okapi-like zebra stripes on its haunches, reddish-brown fur of the texture of really plush velvet or velour on its back, and bright stripes of fur around its face that change color at different angles.’
He twisted its round head. They could see iridescent stripes radiating around its toothy mouth.
‘Good God,’ Andy said. ‘It has crab claws on its face!’
‘The specimen appears to have four front legs that may function more like arms,’ Otto continued. ‘The first pair is connected to its lower jaw and is furless. These seem to be chelate appendages with slender pincers that are white in color…very strange. They emerge from a wide lower jaw of an almost frog-or birdlike hinged mouth with long teeth that are packed close together and seem to be rather sharp. The teeth are extremely hard and dark gray. The mouth has dark blue lips drawn back that can apparently close over the teeth.’
‘What is that, a skullcap?’ Nell’s pencil flew as she sketched the outlines of the animal. ‘On top of its head?’
‘The subject appears to have a light brown, furless cranial cap of some sort,’ Otto said.
‘Jesus,’ Quentin said. ‘Either I’m dreaming or we are making history here, folks.’
‘You aren’t dreaming,’ Nell told him.
The scientists clapped and whooped, finally releasing their anxiety and exhilaration.
Nell quickly penciled in the snaggle-toothed mouth in the creature’s round head, her face frozen with grim concentration. This animal looked like a miniature version of the deadly lunging animals she had seen on the beach, except that its jaws were horizontal instead of vertical like the ones that came from the crevasse.
‘It looks like a deep-sea angler,’ Andy said.
‘Like a cat crossed with a spider.’ Nell carved its outline deep into the sheet of paper with her pencil.
‘Right, like the spigers you mentioned,’ Quentin said.
‘Right.’ Nell nodded.
‘The specimen has a pair of large green-red-and-blue eyes with three optical hemispheres,’ Otto narrated, and he tested the flexibility of the creature’s eyes with a poking index finger. ‘The eyes are mounted on short stalks that pivot or swivel inside a socket in its head. They also toggle in a socket at the end of the stalks, apparently, having a very ingenious mechanism.’
‘I sure hope that thing’s dead,’ Andy said.
Otto ignored him and wiggled the forelegs behind the head to see how they bent. ‘The large legs behind the head are very muscular and have spines at the end. They are fur-bearing, but the heavy spikelike spines are hairless, hard black exoskeleton or horn, and they seem to have a very sharp edge.’
‘They look like praying mantis arms.’
‘Yeah, that’s how they fold,’ Otto agreed. ‘They may be able to act as shears or vises, too.’
‘Or spears,’ Nell suggested, shivering as she thought of what the others must have faced inside the crevasse. ‘The spigers speared the sand in front of them to back away from the water.’
Otto continued. ‘These mantislike subchelate arms are articulated to a bony ring under the skin, from which the neck musculature also extends. The next pair of limbs appears to be true legs. They resemble a quadruped’s forelegs…with one extra joint…and they seem to be attached to a broad central ring of bone that can be felt under the dermis and which forms a medial hump on the dorsal surface of the animal.’
‘Those are eyes!’ Nell exclaimed.
‘Huh? Where?’ Andy said.
‘See, on top of that hump on its back, Otto?’
‘Oh,’ Andy said.
‘There are eyes on the medial hump,’ Otto confirmed, rinsing off more blue blood. ‘Which are similar to the eyes on the head.’
‘Do you think it has a second set of optic lobes in its back?’ Nell asked. ‘I mean, look, they’re image-forming eyes, not just light-intensity receptors.’
‘Either there’s a brain under there or they have ridiculously long optic nerves,’ Andy concurred.
Otto continued his description. ‘There are three eyes on the central hump, reminiscent of the eyes on a jumping spider. One eye looks directly behind and one to each side. They each toggle inside a socket. I think you’re right, Nell. There could be some kind of ganglion structure under this hump. There’s a cranial cap on top of it similar to the one on the head of the animal.’ As Andy winced, Otto tapped the brown chitinous cap on the hump between the eyes, testing to see if there was any reflex action left in the animal. There wasn’t.
Otto picked up a pair of dissection scissors and cut carefully along the mid-line of the cranial cap. He pulled each half apart with forceps. ‘Yep, it’s got a second brain.’ He looked up at Nell. ‘This isn’t just some enlarged ganglion.’
