“My kind of man, an enterprising thief.”
Dez wrinkled his nose. “Oddly, the ‘Imagron’ was still functioning, despite the rupture, though Hresh’s model clearly stipulated that the alien be entombed in the sealed chamber indefinitely.”
“You’re repeating yourself, Dez. Sign of old age?”
Dez gnashed his teeth. “Onward to test #2.”
“What this time? A rhino and dinosaur mix?”
“Test 2 is another containment scenario. To test cooperation, pecking order, degree of feral aptitude, fight or flight tendencies, and other adaptive mechanisms.”
Both Regers and Jennings flinched in bleary-eyed resignation.
Dez paged somebody on his communicator and pointed a finger as a short, stocky man walked into the room. “This is Jessel Vrand, one of our senior remote mechno drone operators. Vrand is contracted from NOA.”
Regers peered at him closely through critical eyes. Military brush-cut, marine-trained, if he ever saw one. With no words spoken or expression revealed, the man fitted his fingers around the holo controls floating in midair before him. The dome of a ceiling in the test chamber opened to inject a new mechno into the mix, larger, but of similar quality and design like the others.
“Vrand will operate this mechnobot, a shielded, impregnable hulk, similar to the other two. The mechno, I dub MXTR. It will test the mettle and ingenuity of Xesian insects so that we can pattern their behavior.”
Down the mechno glided, a shape not dissimilar to the upright slab-shaped molar from Remus, only more intimidating. The others paused, their anti-grav units keeping them a dozen feet above the clear water stream. Vrand’s mechno jerked forward into the first mechno’s path. MXTR’s questing external arm prodded this more docile one while hovering over its turf. Alien mechno-moth #1 did nothing, but waited in curiosity for the intruder to make the next move. Vrand propelled his charge ever closer. Without warning, mechno #1 lashed out its robot appendage to bash MXTR aside. The move did nothing except knock Vrand’s drone vehicle backward. Vrand unleashed robot fire on the aggressive mechno’s armature. Bright rays deflected off the gleaming titanium. Vrand got MXTR out of the way. He worked the controls with aggressive intent and smashed the hulk forth to bring mechno #1 down into the water. Now a show of flagrant aggression, this act at last brought its twin, the more dominant mechno #2, surging in to defend its habitat.
“Up the ante,” commanded Dez. “Quit toying around, Vrand. Push these titanium hulks to their limits!”
“As you like.” Vrand’s grim smile did not escape Regers as the NOA man sent mechno #1 tumbling through the stream.
Vrand’s mechno boxed #1’s turret with its outstretched robot arms and sent it spinning back on land. The second hovered angrily to retaliate while its dripping peer jerked to its upright self again. Mechno #2 swept in to dive bomb the aggressive intruder.
Vrand’s bot forced mechno #2 on to open ground, firing hostile beams from its turret to land square on its central frame. Two hyenas got cornered by the shore. Running amok, they were pegged by fire and lay dead in the shallows. Both mechnos took the abuse, but riddled with stray blasts, mechno #2 was propelled backward. It swayed then toppled while mechno #1 smoked and sizzled.
The yellow flares penetrated mechno #1’s armor. Energy beams sizzled and sparked off its metal. Robot arms flailed wildly, heated to dangerous levels.
The mechno lay supine in the dirt, smoking, unmoving. But then an amazing thing happened. The metal started to melt in a rippling pool in the mechno’s center. A hole sprouted like a termite burrowing out from within.
“Shut the power down!” cried Dez.
“It’s useless. Look, they’re burrowing out, flying free,” cried one of the engineers.
A grey-winged thing burst out of the dissolving armature and shot high up into air. The other was also burrowing out of its metallic prison, then it came rocketing out to smack headlong into MXTR’s offending armor. The thing pierced through the titanium. Vrand’s bot spurted and sparked, then fell face first in the dirt.
Vrand sagged back, licking his lips. “Fucking hell. That’s not supposed to happen.”
Dez stared in dismay. Regers and Deakes laughed out loud and high fived each other. “Fucking A, Dez! You’re a real hero. Plus one for the moths.”
The moths flitted around each other in a strange flurry. Their habitat lay now in disarray with smoking metal and some of the animal bodies caught in the crossfire, floating in the creek. Other wildlife—wild foxes, hyenas and rats—ran amok, spooked by mechno blasts and deafening clamor with the sizzling mechno half in, half out of the clear stream.
One of the moths flew too close to the other in its wild frenzy and smacked it head on. The larger moth, under attack by its peer, feinted. It dodged a gnashing strike. While the other was caught off guard, the larger lashed out, teeth and claws catching the victim’s neck and ripping its head off. Strange, multicolored fluid ran out of the decapitated moth’s neck as it spun helplessly in midair then fell, flopping in circles in the dust. The thorax twitched. It was still alive for some moments, pumping out life fluids, then lay still. The surviving creature landed and rolled the carcass in the dust with its two front legs, spitting a gummy liquid on it from between mandibles and weaving some kind of fantastic thread from thorax. Round and round it wrapped the thread as would a spider, then clawed a hole in the soil not far from the shore where it shoved the head in and the dead, unmoving thorax. After covering up the hole with its black, fidgety digits, it patted the earth and proceeded to clean its mandibles, as if in a primitive burial ceremony.
The scientists gaped in incomprehension for this was something
