Warren Fahy - Fragment

“Their stingers pump venom so powerful it dissolves human flesh,” Nell said. “They kill about forty people a year in Japan.”

“We’ve been upping the stakes lately.” Dr. Cato chuckled.

“Christ! I’ve never even heard of them.” Pound’s eyes were glued to the specimen chamber.

Nell glanced at Dr. Cato. “OK, Steve, let in the Henders wasps.”

High-speed cameras whirred as their motors revved up and locked on two five-inch-long Henders “wasps” that emerged from a tube and hovered vertically on five transparent wings.

Their dragonfly-like abdomens swung forward as they tackled the Japanese hornets in midair.

With their ten double-jointed jackknifelike legs, the Henders wasps ruthlessly sliced the hornets into pieces that fell to the ground still moving.

As the ring of eyes on their “heads” kept watch, the wasps landed on five legs. They dipped their tails to devour the sliced bits with five-jawed maws.

“Yuck,” the Presidential envoy said. “They eat with their butts?”

“They have two brains, Mr. Pound,” Dr. Cato said grimly.

“Like many of the creatures we’ve studied here,” Nell said.

Pound looked confused.

“Is this how every experiment has gone so far, Nell?” Dr. Cato asked quietly.

Henders Wasp

Pentapterus tomobranchiophorus

(and Japanese Giant Hornets, Vespa mandarinia)

(after Wirth et al, Annals of the La Jolla Natural History Museum , vol. 47: 1-112)

Nell nodded, sharing a worried look with him.

Pound fiddled with a knob on his headcam.

“Henders species,” Nell continued, “have not only matched every common species we’ve tested, Mr. Pound-they’ve completely annihilated them.”

The envoy shrugged. “Sounds like we’re talking about a bunch of bugs. Why can’t we just spray a little DDT and be done with it?”

“We’re talking about a lot more than bugs, Mr. Pound,” Nell sighed.

“There are creatures here bigger than tigers, according to Nell,” Dr. Cato said.

“Spigers, I call them, Mr. Pound,” she said. “Eight-legged creatures at least three times the size of tigers.”

“Ham,” Pound said, feeling lightheaded. “Call me Ham, please. Why can’t we see some of those? Spigers? That’s what I really need to see!”

The Trident’s sequestered crew played checkers and sat around the decks, utterly bored. Nineteen days of looking at a beach they could not set foot on was mixing an explosive cocktail of anger, fear, and insanity.

At night, they could see the spy satellites watching them, slowly crossing each other’s paths in a precise and perpetual changing of the guard overhead, like the guards at Buckingham Palace.

Cynthea, Captain Sol, and First Mate Warburton stood on the prow of the Trident. They watched the roaring Osprey pass over the inlet in which they were anchored.

“There he goes,” Warburton exclaimed. “Lucky bastard!” Captain Sol shook his head. “I don’t envy him.” Cynthea peered through her opera glasses at the helicopter carrying the rover until it had disappeared behind the island’s cliff. “Come on, Zero!” she urged, squeezing a crimson-nailed fist. “If you come through for me, you are my lord and master for all eternity, baby!”

Captain Sol and Warburton exchanged wide-eyed looks.

“Watch this, Mr. Pound,” insisted Dr. Cato.

“Otto is going to send in one of our last remote-operated vehicles,” Nell explained.

Dr. Cato tapped Otto’s shoulder and startled him as he sat at one of the workstations in Section Four. “Where are we going now, young man?”

Otto pulled up his VR goggles and grinned up at Pound. The biologist’s left thumb was encased in an aluminum splint. It had not stopped him from operating the ROVs he’d helped design.

He was feeling no pain, thanks to the kick-ass Novocain pads the Navy doctor had given him for his thumb. “Welcome to the jungle, guys.” Otto put the VR goggles back on. “We’re about to penetrate the outer edge with a small robotic vehicle and take a little peek inside. This usually only lasts a few seconds, so don’t blink!”

“All right.” Pound glanced reprovingly at Cato and Nell. “Now we’re getting somewhere!”

“We’ve already deployed about eighty ROVs,” Nell said, patiently. “We only have about a dozen left. We’ve made it pretty far across the fields, all the way to the rim of the island. But we’re using all the rest now to try to get into the jungle, where most of the action seems to be.”

The ROV was the coolest Christmas present a seven-year-old kid could ever imagine finding under the tree. Several outboard cameras captured images as it emerged from a rack under Section One. The remote-controlled vehicle turned left on the slope toward the jungle.

With the soft zither of servomotors the robotic vehicle rolled over purple patches of Henders “clover” and left brown tracks behind it in a rearview cam that showed in the bottom half of the screen.

Otto steered it toward the edge of the jungle and slowed down.

“Hang on,” he said, and throttled the ROV into an opening between the trees. On the monitor above, the ROVs camera weaved swiftly around the trunks of trees that looked like palms crossed with cactus. Some were covered with reptilian scales, thorns, what might have been eyes-even snapping mouths.

Slaloming around the tree trunks, the ROV came to a tunnellike corridor lined by dense trees whose trunks were curved like ribs or giant tusks and whose interlacing canopies of mistletoelike clover were pierced by sunbeams. The ROV raced under the dangling clusters, chains, and spirals of colored berries on translucent tendrils that rose and fell like jellyfish tentacles along the corridor.

A streaming horde of insects and animals buzzed and roared past the speeding ROV, rushing toward it in the lower screen from the rear-cam. Otto zigzagged down the curving tunnel as a rush of creatures seemed to miss it at every turn. He hung a right turn at breakneck speed as the corridor forked. They could make out nothing but a whirl of blurring shapes hurtling around the ROV as it raced down the jungle tunnel.

Something large darted out from the side.

The rover’s camera dove into the dirt. A bird feather was all they could identify, pressed against the lens.

“Yee-haw!” Otto pulled off his VR goggles. “We see lots of bird feathers,” he explained to Pound, who stared at the screen with a blank expression.

“I want you to give me some of your best ROV footage inside the jungle, Dr. Cato, to show to the President,” he said.

“Well, that was it, right there!” Otto announced triumphantly.

“That’s as far as you’ve gotten?” Pound asked.

“That’s the record, man!” Otto gave Nell a low-five. “You can see why those bastards have eyes in the back of their heads, Nell! We rigged a rearview cam that I could see in the bottom half of the goggles that time. There is no way I’d have gotten that far without it. But man, that is a LOT of stuff to process-they need two brains!”

Dr. Cato pointed at another monitor, noticing Pound’s eyes glazing. “Look at this remote we were able to set up next to a disk-ant trail, Mr. Pound. This one’s lasted three days. Right, Otto?”

“Ri-”

The camera went dead.

“-ght.” Otto looked at Pound and shrugged.

“I still don’t understand why we can’t just go down to Section One and take a look inside the jungle there!” Pound complained. “What’s the point of having all this million-dollar equipment if we can’t even use it when we need to?”