There, on the screen, was a floating shuttlecraft, fluttering along the sand, stirring clouds of dust in its wake. It had not issued the recognition signal; any naoli would have done that. Which meant it was more than likely a human
The Isolator tapped one of the monitoring posts which the shuttlecraft was approaching, released a spy-bee from the distant outpost's storage unit. As the bee spun out across the desert, the Isolator guided it, watching what the mechanical insect saw as the images were projected on the largest of the screens. In moments, the shuttlecraft appeared in a swirl of sand. He directed the spy-bee directly at it, toward the windscreen. The mite passed through the whirl of dust, shot across the hood of the vehicle, then hovered inches from the window. Beyond the screen, a naoli sat at the wheel, peering ahead at the shimmering heat blankets rising from the sands.
The Isolator felt despair as it looked at the lizard face. It was about to destroy the spy-bee and return, its attention to the making of gnomes and other baubles when it thought to turn the bee's attention on the passenger's seat. And there, of course, was the boy, Leo.
There was no more time for gnomes.
Within the vat, the Isolator rejoiced. It heaved upward in a great, joyous surge, pushing stickily against the cap of the vat which it could have penetrated had it wanted. It splashed down into itself, then ceased its celebration and turned to the chore at hand.
It had killing to do.
'Look at this, Hulann,' Leo said, leaning forward in his seat, straining against the automatic belt that held him.
Hulann shifted his eyes from the terrain ahead. It was not necessary to watch the path so cautiously in a shuttle-craft, and he had only been using that as an excuse to avoid conversation and let his mind race through the plethora of new data it had accumulated in such a short period of time. It was good, now, to give his eyes a rest. 'Look at what?'
'Out the window. A mud wasp,' the boy said.
Hulann looked, and when he could not spot it immediately, asked the boy to show him.
Leo leaned even farther forward, pressing a finger against the glass toward the hovering wasp. 'How can it do that? 'he asked.
Hulann looked, found the mud wasp, and felt his scalp tighten painfully as fear gripped him, squeezed him, and nearly voided his lungs of air.
'How can it do that?' Leo repeated.. 'It's flying against us, yet it's standing still.'
'A machine,' Hulann explained.
'Machine?'
'A naoli weapon,' Hulann said, gripping the wheel, his eyes riveted to the electronic mite hovering before them. 'Or, rather, a scout for a weapons system. The thing directing it is called a Region Isolator.'
Leo frowned, made slits of his eyes. 'I've heard about them. But no one really knows what they do. No one has ever gotten close enough to find out'
'I know. The Isolator is deadly. It is also expensive and prohibits mass production because of the time involved in structuring one. They were used sparingly in the war-or it would have all been over much sooner than it was.'
'What is it?'
'The Isolator itself is a huge mass of large cells with oval nuclei that require the bulk of the cell shell. The overall mass must be as large or larger than one of your houses.'
Leo made an appropriate whistle of appreciation.
'Of its billions of component parts, each is identical to the last. This lack of cellular diversification and specialization is possible because every cell of the creature is capable of life without relying on the others and contains all life processes within its cell wall.'
'It sounds like one large amoeba made up of millions of smaller amoeba,' Leo said.
'Somewhat. But it has other powers-which contribute to its effectiveness as a weapon.'
'Such as?' Leo asked.
'The Isolator was created through the same techniques used to develop the Hunters, through gene juggling and careful genetic engineering, though the subject was not a human foetus this time. It was, instead, a small jelly fish of my home world, an animal that had exhibited rudimentary intelligence and the capacity to learn. The genetic engineers worked from there, and rumor has it that the project required more than three hundred years. It was begun during a past war the naoli was engaged in and was not completed in time to be used in that conflict, was not completed until this new war had broken out between our peoples.
'The Isolator has been imbued with a-a Proteus power. It is able to assume any form it wishes. It can use its mass to break off parts and form organic weapons. And if it wants, it can have that organic weapon reproduce itself on and on. It is a genetic engineer, using its own mass to make its children. And it is intelligent, not just a machine-like being. Not like you or I, of course, but clever enough to out-think us.'
'It doesn't sound good,' Leo said.
'It isn't.'
'You aren't giving up, are you?'
'No.'
Leo grabbed Hulann's heavy biceps and squeezed, grinned at the scaly naoli. Hulann grinned back, though he did not much feel in the mood for such a pleasantry.
The spy-bee ceased to hover and snapped against the windscreen, shattering into dozens of little bits and leaving a chip on the plastiglass.
'It broke! 'Leo said.
'The Isolator ordered it to destruction,' Hulann corrected hint 'But why?'
'Don't get your hopes up,' the alien said, pulling his lips back from his teeth, baring the gleaming points, his four nostrils flared and his eyes wide and cautious. 'If the Isolator has destroyed the bee, that can only mean that it is already sending a weapon for us and does not need the little mechanical monitor any longer.'
'Oh,' Leo said. He crouched a little deeper into his chair, watching the sky which had begun to cloud over with low, gray blankets of mist like a burnished steel bowl laid over the world. He searched the flat stretches of sand in all directions, peering intently through wavering fingers of hot air that sought to delude him. 'I don't see anything,' he said at last.
'You won't,' Hulann said. 'It will come too quickly for that.'
'What can we do?'
'Wait'
'There must be something more!'
'We can drive,' Hulann said. 'We can make this shut-tlecraft move as swiftly as it can. The Isolator only covers an area of a hundred or two hundred miles square, depending on the model. If we drive fast and long enough, we should escape its territory-though I have never heard of anyone escaping an Isolator.'
'That's pessimism,' Leo said.
'That's right,' the alien agreed.
There was dark sky.
And sand.
And something else on its way, something they could not define or imagine until it was upon them
Within the vat, the independent cells of the Isolator worked together according to the dictates of their group consciousness. It was true, as Hulann had told the boy, that each individual cell was perfectly capable of sustaining life on its own. But the intelligence of the beast was a conglomerate one. And all the cells had been programmed, by the naoli engineers, to respect the need for group action above the natural urge and ability of each particle to separate itself and exist in isolation.
The mother mass burbled contentedly, like a fat baby chuckling deeply in its throat, lying there in the bottom of the vat, contemplating its catalogue of destructive devices and employing its limited but genuine imagination to modify the catalogue items to make them even more deadly than they had been intended. It was an amber jelly now, shot through with streaks of green as bright as newly mown grass and blotted with patches of gray as the cells combined to function in various specialized fashions at least through this moment of crisis when every resource had to be called upon and used.
