Warren Fahy - Fragment

“Yeah, guess so.” The biologist nodded.

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 sugar, a pile of salt, a bowl of freshwater, 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, 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 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.”