To no effect. It gnashed and swatted until it began to tire. After a while it realized the futility of its efforts. The mechno released the ursilar. It tucked tail between its legs and lumbered off among the ruins to hide behind a pile of twisted metal in the bombed-out street.
The mechno left it alone. As long as the beast didn’t venture near the water, it remained neutral. But the other beast was not compliant. It ran beneath the hovering mechnos, rearing on its hind legs, swatting upward and roaring at the top of its lungs. The second mechno reached out and dragged it by a hind claw far up in the air, then let it fall from a fifty-foot height where it thunked on its head, snapping vertebrae and front limbs.
Dez rubbed his jaw in speculative wonder. “Very interesting. Cooperation, and success in less than two minutes. Remarkable. I’ll pass this holo footage onto my behavior analyst experts for processing.” He spoke into a recorder disc pinned to his white lab coat. “Mechno #1 kills its aggressor while leaving the other alone. Both mechnos exhibited mutual cooperation though visual and auditory cues. Though there never appears to be any signals transmitted between the two. Again, remarkable. Perhaps a psychic link between the species? Not impossible. We may never know.”
One of the engineers gasped. “Sir!”
Dez’s eyes flicked back to the holo view. “Wait now…this is unexpected.”
Mechno #2 had detected the cowering ursilar rustling among the metal and concrete rubble and moved to accost the survivor. Was it evincing second thoughts? Dez, perhaps worried about the cost in securing more ursilars for testing, grabbed the nearest assistant by the arm.
“Recovery operation! Code yellow and evasive security restraints!” Dez cried.
A white-faced engineer touched some buttons on the virtual holo pad. Within moments the two mechnos became docile and descended to the ground, placid as picked plums.
“What did you do?” exclaimed Regers.
“Initiated emergency measures.”
Dez signaled to another operator. A grey-haired woman touched another holo tab which lifted the containment wall and the ursilar hastily scurried back to the safety of its cage. The mechnos, still not fully recovered from their daze, zigzagged up into the air.
“We figured out a way to semi-sedate them,” said Dez. “We pipe calming soporific into their air mixture. But that may not be effective too much longer. They keep adapting and resisting our manipulations. Like just yesterday, the mechno on the right, driven by a moth with greyer tinge on its wings, dropped behind the ruins of a communication tower as a way to avoid our cameras during a key moment. To this day we have no idea what it was up to back there.”
Regers grunted. “Go figure.” Secretly, he was amused at the degree to which Dez got excited over every piece of trivia related to these bugs.
“As I mentioned, we’ve managed to breed more dragonflies. Actually, they are more quasi-moths than dragonflies. Each brood is a unique variation. Never the same batch. Possibly an adaptive survival trait. What do you think?”
“Not much. A bunch of bully bugs dressed up in metal suits beating on innocent prehistoric beasts,” growled Regers.
Jennings had nothing to say.
Dez frowned, his mood one of detachment. “From time to time I allow lay people like you to witness the experiments. Sometimes these observers offer valuable insights, most often not. My motives for showing you this simulation are twofold: scientific curiosity and recording a gut reaction. Your visual cues and body language are being recorded by hidden cameras as an extra layer of data for my research team—” He cleared his throat. “The irony of this demonstration is complex and part of the reason I called you to witness this. As you know, these are Lepidoptera spawned from the plant pods you and your friend Yul harvested from Xeses in The Dim Zone.”
“How could I forget?” snarled Regers. “I only wish Yul was down in that arena—and that I had been present to deliver the pods myself, to stuff them down your throat, rather than being stuffed myself in a bug tank on an alien moon.” He peered with loathing at Dez. “No thanks to the indifference of you and your lunatic boss, Mathias.”
Dez winced and looked away. “We made copies as best we could, Regers, of the hardware and inner workings of the armature we brought back from Hresh’s installation. You’ve been paid handsomely for your efforts—so quit complaining. The armature houses a ‘brain’, or containment tank—‘Bio-Imagron’ as Hresh called this quintessence of the technology.”
“What the hell is that?”
Dez gave a nervous chuckle. “The interface between alien and machine. In the case of the mechnobot and dragonfly, the ‘Imagron’ is like a vault-like container, positioned in the mechno’s center. The one you saw on Remus was ruptured. The subject, the dragonfly, the ‘Bio’ in Bio-Imagron, could slip in and out at will. To devastating effect. I’m not sure what Hresh had planned, but he wanted to keep the beast contained in the vault, not fly free…to make it a slave that he could use to his advantage to control the outer mechnobot. The alien’s feral intelligence and natural instinct for survival could guide the advanced hardware in case of attack. Its predatorial instinct could be used to drive the AI circuits and outwit unruly enemies such as a Mentera flagship. Quite ingenious, if you ask me—the ultimate military application. As much as I dislike the man, it’s a testament to Hresh’s near genius and creative imagination. According to his last notes left at Cyber Corp, his prototype was successful. After he fled the
