Warren Fahy - Fragment

“Yeah, a big one on a convex mirror. These things don’t back down, man!”

Zero raised the camera from his eye. “Um-can we go now, guys?”

The driver lifted his foot from the brakes just as a white-and-yellow jellyfish-like thing splattered on the middle bubble, clawing it with spiderlike arms and a rodent-toothed maw.

As the rover jolted forward, the creature was torn off, leaving a meringue ring behind.

The driver hit the throttle: a hail of thuds drummed against the starboard hull as they crossed the corridor.

The five men clung to the safety straps as the rover bulldozed deeper into the jungle. Parting trees splattered it with juices and eggs as they broke apart, and though their fanlike fronds brushed off some of the debris, when the rover finally emerged from the forest onto a green slope its roof was snarled with foliage and yellow clover was spreading over its fenders.

“OK,” Quentin said. “That slope across this meadow goes up to the desert area in the center of the island. It’s the lake on the other side of the core that we really want to take a look at!”

They plowed down the green meadow, relieved to be in open country.

To their left they could see a spill-basin where water seemed to have flowed in from a narrow crack in the outer wall. A white rind of crystals surrounded the oval pool at the end of the narrow stream, resembling a sperm cell that had impregnated the crack in the island cliff.

Zero pointed to the south, panning his camera. “What’s that?”

“It looks like saltwater,” the driver answered.

A dead zone of white salt crystals, barren of life, surrounded the pool at the end of the stream. As the rover moved down the slope they caught a glimpse of daylight and ocean through the fissure in the cliff from which the pool must have been fed.

“Seawater must get in at high tide or during storms,” Zero said.

“That crack looks pretty recent,” Andy pointed out.

“Based on the salt buildup on the rocks, that pool must be at least a few decades old,” Quentin corrected.

“I meant recent by geological standards.”

“Everything’s recent by geological standards.”

The rover climbed the other side of the meadow. The landscape dried out as they passed from the clover to the barren core of weather-carved rock formations at the island’s center.

The driver searched for a passable route through the core to give them a shortcut across the island.

The rumble of the rover vibrated the rock and sand, waking the hives.

The low-frequency vibrations triggered pheromone signals inside the purple honeycombed towers that lined the flat bottom of the ravine.

The pheromones stimulated hundreds of drones.

Budlike panels under the drones’ heads popped open. Three translucent wings expanded like blue flowers.

The fanged lamprey-mouths flexed on their abdomens, ready to latch onto passing prey to suck its blood and feed their colonies.

The towering hives were the nurseries of drill-worms. These half-worms were their juvenile form. When they matured, the vampire drones would double in size by growing a new segment shaped like a drill bit with three legs and a second brain and mouth. Then they would leave the hive to hunt in the jungle, drilling through the hard sheaths of the trees.

A mature drill-worm bitten in half could regenerate its other half. Either segment could mate and give birth to polyplike eggs- eggs that multiplied into new hives that budded vampire drones.

The XATV-9 throttled forward across the canyon’s flat bottom, which cut directly across the island’s arid core.

The men observed a gallery of urchinlike cacti, yuccalike trees, and bloated purple towers lining the canyon walls to either side of the rover. The towers reminded Zero of termite mounds or pillar coral.

The driver turned on the outboard mikes again and as the rover passed the men inside heard the sibilant buzz of the purple hives coming to life. Blue swarms emerged, attacking the rover’s windows then retreating to their hives.

The silent men gazed through the rover’s windows down the lush green slope on the far side of the island’s core. The lake in the distance lay still and dark inside the outer ring of the jungle.

“There it is.” Quentin pointed over the driver’s shoulder as they roared down to the green plain at sixty miles an hour, headed straight for the lake.

The rover braked abruptly and stopped at the water’s edge.

A hundred yards to their left rose the outer ring of the jungle, rimming the far side of the lake.

Only thirty feet to their right, an isolated cluster of three tall trees rose on the shore. Two of the three trunks split into three branches, each of which bore crowns of long fronds covered with green clover. Like a broken umbrella, the tallest tree pointed five splaying fronds up into the air. Chains of red berries dangled under the fronds of all three trees, twitching and coiling as they caught bugs lured by the fruit.

“We should not stop,” said Zero.

“We’re safe, don’t worry,” said the driver.

Radio static burst from the speakers, and they heard Briggs’s voice: “We’re evacuating StatLab. Repeat, we are evacuating StatLab! Return-base-”

Then they could hear Nell’s voice over the breaking signal. “We’re los-transmission signal. The com-array-choked-tation- over?”

“Oh great,” Quentin groaned.

“The clover must be eating StatLab’s dish.” Andy turned pale.

Pound frowned. “Are we in danger here, if we can’t go back to the lab?”

The driver shook his head. “We’ll just radio Enterprise. She’ll send a transport. They’ll hook on and take us home.”

“How can they take this thing back to a ship?” Zero asked. “Who knows what’s stuck to it now?”

“They’ll take us to the Philippine Sea ,”the driver said.

“They’ll sterilize and quarantine it there,” Quentin said.

“Don’t worry,” the driver said. “They’ll hose this thing down with chlorine dioxide, formaldehyde-hell, the Navy’ll probably scuttle the whole damn ship when this is over, just to be on the safe side. They’re plenty paranoid.”

Pound grabbed the radio mike. “StatLab, proceed with evacuation. We’ll catch our own ride home.”

They heard Briggs’s voice over the radio: “Can’t-Over?”

Pound shouted into the radio. “We’ll get our own ride home, StatLab. Copy?”

Nell and the technicians stared over Otto’s shoulder as the video feed broke up.

“Damn, we lost them!”

“Keep trying,” Nell urged.

“Their com array must be damaged.” Otto checked the camera overlooking one of StatLab’s microwave dishes. “It’s definitely not on our end.”

“OK,” Briggs said. “That’s it! I want all hard drives packed and ready to go when the Sea Dragon gets here, people. All euthanized specimens need to be sealed in sterilized specimen cases. No live specimens are to leave the island under absolutely any circumstances. No pets! And no souvenirs!”

The men inside the rover heard nothing but a blizzard of white noise on the radio.

“Yeah, their com array’s definitely down,” Quentin said.

Andy nodded. “Lichenovores must have gotten to it.”

“Clovores, you mean.”

“Oh right.”

“How’d you guys like to get a look inside the lake?” asked the driver, who still seemed reassuringly gung ho, despite being cut off from the lab.

Quentin glanced at Andy, arching his eyebrows. “You can actually do that?”