“What the hell is it?” cried the perspiring technician.
Cloye whimpered. “I d-don’t know. It wasn’t there before.”
Yul gazed in alarm. His jaw dropped. The girl was infected by one of the pods! Shit, he had kissed her! It must have grown in the time they had flown to Remus and stalked Hresh’s complex. “You said you were down in Mathias’s lab? Something about a moth?”
“Y-yes. Mathias showed me the tank in the lab, said to be on the lookout for similar ones in Hresh’s compounds. The place was all helter-skelter as if a fire had gone through.”
Yul swore. “The thing must have latched onto you down there. How?”
“I don’t know!”
Hresh stroked his chin, his eyes faraway. “Remarkable. Transmitted by airborne spores?”
“No, from the moth!” growled Yul.
Cloye writhed, pulling at the thing, but it only wound tighter. “Get it off me!” she cried. The plant ring coiled more securely about her shoulder.
“Calm down, relax,” reassured Yul. He looked anything but reassured. “The plant just wants a place of stasis. It doesn’t want to harm its host.”
“I don’t care what it wants! Get it the fuck off!”
“What’s this about a moth?” Hresh moved in, regarding Cloye intently.
Yul cringed. He recalled the creature back in the Orb’s tank room and could relate to Cloye’s horror. “I curse the day Mathias sent us out to collect specimens on Xeses,” he mumbled.
Hresh gazed at him, examining the thing closer. “There appear to be small nodules growing from its tips.”
“They’re pods,” grunted Yul.
“They demand study.”
“Screw the studies!” cried Yul. “Get it off her.” He looked about desperately. If Cloye were down in Mathias’s lab and got infected, what did that say about him? He pawed fingers over his body, but felt nothing. Hresh moved in, staring at him. “What’s this about a damn moth, I say?”
Seeing Yul’s look of dismay, Cloye cried, “I told you, Mathias brought me down to show me what kind of tech to watch out for.”
Yul’s mouth sagged.
“Mathias sent you, you said—to this place Xeses?” Hresh asked matter-of-factly. “To search for plants?”
Yul nodded, not liking the breathless look in the man’s eyes.
Hresh seemed to ponder, as if a million variables coursed through that mind of his. “Mathias must have picked up on my idea long ago, a search for the perfect host. Did I jot it down in a journal? Pity.”
With an impatient lunge, he seized the assistant’s tongs and forcibly ripped the thing clean from Cloye’s shoulder. She screamed in agony, fell to her knees, an angry red welt where the suckers had been extracted, dragging the skin with them.
“What the hell did you do that for?” Yul cried, arching toward Hresh. “You hurt her.”
Hresh ignored him and moved toward the Biogron.
“Wait.” Yul lifted an arm to stop the man.
“Stay back!” cried Hresh. One of his security guards took hold of Yul. Yul brushed him aside and Hresh twisted away from Yul’s metal fingers as his men restrained the mercenary. Yul struggled to fight them while Cloye slung the torn flap of her assassin’s suit over her naked shoulder, glaring at the ogling men.
Hresh dropped the pod into a pressurized tube that ran from the table to the top of the glass case, the Biogron. He quickly resealed the pressurized cap, then flicked a switch on the machine. The pod was instantly sucked into the vacuum, floating in free space with the other puffballs. It dangled there for some moments before the white bouncing puffballs seemed to notice anything untoward and began to speed up.
“You see, Vrean,” chuckled Hresh, “electronic circuitry, third generation cyborgs, they have no intelligence. But the life force does! These bots are just buckets of bolts clambering around, running clever algorithms. Stiff as starched sheets. But life is an altogether different thing. The magic of consciousness... Every thinker, scientist, philosopher, spiritualist has pondered over that intangible mystery of the universe, the essence of the unknown. I took the search a step further. To tap the energy of the creatures in this box, through this box, and infuse the neural-net of a mechanical avatar with their wisdom, their intelligence!”
He strode over to a covered mass, flush to the nearby wall, that rose head height over anything else in the lab and pulled off a silver gleaming tarp.
Yul gazed at Cloye who stared back at him. Together they looked upon the metallic exoskeleton of some elder beast. Raised on its hind legs and shortened forelimbs, it glistened in the bright light. On its back, curled a metallic shield, some kind of spiked dome, spreading as a peacock might fan its tail. The avatar sported an armadillo-like look to it, with a head, though of plated steel, sporting a great horn like a triceratops.
Hresh smiled proudly. “What is it that causes the neuron to fire, Vrean, to make new pathways? We don’t know. We just observe it happening in the human brain and formulate clever theories about it. In the same way, we don’t know why one mass attracts another, like the orbiting planets pulled toward their sun. We call it gravity but it’s just a word. We can only observe it, not understand the ‘why’ of it.”
The puffballs swirled furiously in their contained environment, sensing an invasive force. They surrounded the foreign pod with brutal tenacity and fused to its surface like barnacles. Yul likened the scene to white blood cells swarming foreign particles to attack pathogens in the blood.
The pod flared and surged red. It formed spikes on its surface. The barbs punctured the invading grey masses which quivered and folded like cards and which bled out a
