Warren Fahy - Fragment

“Want to listen in?”

“Yeah!” Quentin said.

The driver pressed a button on the dash that turned on the outboard microphones.

Over the speakers came a deafening drone of insects. The sound was punctuated by hoarse shrieks, anguished screams, and bloodcurdling howls that sounded like a haunted house ride.

“Jesus H. Christ,” the driver muttered. He turned and looked at the others.

“Hey!” Andy pointed up the corridor to the right.

A wave of badger-sized animals pounced with astonishing speed after a pack of fleeing Henders rats.

The rats jumped thirty feet through the air down the corridor and landed right in front of the rover. Changing direction, they stayed one step ahead of the badgers, who hammered into the bank of earth right behind them.

One of the yellow-striped badgers tripped on a fallen branch. It was attacked by rats that doubled back, swiftly followed by a wave of disk-ants and wasps coming up from the rear. A deadly gang-fight instantly ensued.

As the badger struggled to shake off its attackers, a dog-sized animal with a head like a grouper and a crown of eyes plunged out of the trees directly across the corridor from the rover and devoured them all with bone-crunching jaws. The retreating grouper shook its head and threw off a few rats, which skittered over the ground and were immediately buried by a swarm of what looked like mouse-sized barracudas with twenty rippling legs, and a platoon of disk-ants hurled into the fray.

The fractal explosion of violence left the human beings inside the rover speechless.

Bugs smashed into the right hemisphere of the front window, building up a coating of pulpy blue slime that other creatures tried to eat quickly before being attacked.

It was a perpetual street riot, Zero thought, as he tried to suck it all into his lens, his heart pounding. He could die after this-if he survived it-and ascend to photographer Valhalla.

The scientists watching the video feed from the safety to StatLab fell silent.

Nell’s awe overcame her fear as she contemplated the alien world unfolding on the high-def monitor. The rhythms of carnage and regeneration were so obscenely accelerated it was like watching a war inside a maternity room.

We don’t belong here , she thought. Nothing from our world belongs here.

Pound looked pale. “Just what are we looking at, gentlemen? Please cut the damn sound!”

“Sure thing,” the driver agreed.

The others stared with open mouths at the hurricane of death and birth swirling outside.

“Uh, yes, OK, this is completely alien animal life,” Quentin said. “I mean, it has DNA, RNA, basic cellular components, it uses ATP as an energy currency just like other organisms on the planet, all right? But these animals resemble nothing science has ever seen. Instead of a vertebrate design, we’re talking about a segmented endoskeleton that looks like a vestigial exoskeleton. The bugs here have exoskeletons like most of the insects on the planet, but their body plans have a radial symmetry that is totally alien. The plants are not only photosynthetic but heterotrophic -carnivorous , actually-and they all have copper-based blood.”

“They can’t be plants if they have blood, Quentin,” Andy protested. “Some of the larger forms appear to be photosynthetic organisms that are firmly rooted in the soil, but they’re not really plants.”

Quentin pointed. “Even these things that look like big palm trees, Mr. Pound, have copper-based blood. I don’t know how they pump it up so high, but I think they must have hearts-really big hearts. If so, then we’ll definitely know they’re not plants.”

“We think they might actually be related to the disk-ants and the other bugs,” Andy said.

“Did you say ‘alien’?” Pound’s head was swimming. “You mean this stuff came from another planet?”

“No, it’s alien but it came from this planet,” Andy said.

“How can that be?”

Quentin had a fixed grin on his face as he gazed up and down the corridor outside the window. “We think Henders Island is all that’s left of the supercontinent this stuff crawled out on more than half a billion years ago.” He shot a quick glance at Pound. “It’s been evolving separately ever since.”

“Holy shit, everything’s dropping eggs and babies,” the driver exclaimed. “Look at ’em crawling on the glass there!”

A disk-ant rolled across the curve of the window, dropping miniatures that rolled away from it to gorge on splattered blue blood.

“Every Henders organism we’ve studied can breed at birth,” Quentin said.

The driver nodded his head, impressed. “Born ready,” he said.

“Some are born pregnant,” Andy said. “They mate in the womb.”

“Now, that ain’t right.” The driver looked back at Andy angrily.

Jumping like supercharged frogs or grasshoppers, a wave of guinea pig-sized animals with coffee-brown pelts and leaf-green stripes on their haunches swept down the corridor.

“More Henders rats?” Pound asked as they flew past.

“I don’t think so. They’re something else. Here come some rats.”

“Those are rats?” Pound smirked. “They don’t look anything like rats!”

“They’re not rats. They’re not even vertebrates,” Andy told him. “They’re more like mongoose crossed with praying mantises. We just call them rats. They use those spike arms like kung fu masters and spear animals so fast you can’t even see it happen.”

“Look how they move, man!” Quentin said, breaking into a giggle. “When they jump they launch themselves through the air off their tails! Check it out! Nell, you were right!” he shouted at Zero’s camera.

“Yeah, baby!” Otto cheered, staring at the screen.

Briggs looked at the image, slack-jawed.

“Don’t stay too long, guys,” Nell whispered. “Can we get radio contact, Otto?”

Andy and Quentin looked at each other with wide congratulatory grins on their faces.

They all flinched as a badger-sized creature landed on top of the right-side bubble window with a rat in its jaws.

The driver grabbed the gearshift. “What the hell is that?”

“Rats get pretty big, I guess,” Quentin said.

“Or it may be a different species,” Andy said. “Its coloring is different.”

“Maybe the coloring changes as they get older…”

The coconut-sized head of the animal, which looked like an overgrown Henders rat, peered at them from the end of its telescoping neck.

It had the Bruegel nightmare face of a deep-sea fish, with large eyes on stems and lips that seemed to open in a smile around rows of dark fangs. Iridescent stripes of fur on its face pulsed waves of color away from its mouth.

Its spiked front arms tapped the window as its eyes panned in quick motions. Quentin, Andy, Pound, Zero, and the driver all thought the three “pupils” in each eye were staring directly at them-and in fact the compound eyes actually were focused on each of them simultaneously, though the pupils were an optical illusion. Its body moved around, continuously adjusting its position on the window, but its head remained almost stationary on its flexible neck as it looked through the window at them.

“We know mantis shrimp have at least eight classes of color receptors,” Quentin said worshipfully. “Humans only have three!”

“Christ,” Pound said. “Shrimps see better than us?”

“Not shrimp, really,” Andy said. “Somebody just called them shrimp when they were discovered, but they’re a totally different family.”