Fragment. Warren Fahy
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had not encountered anything dangerous. The few small creatures they had spotted emerging from Henders’s jungle had moved too swiftly to be seen clearly or filmed with the limited equipment the half-dozen scientists and dozen technicians had been able to set up at the time.
Six scientists and three lab technicians now watched the lab’s robotic arm lower the first specimen trap–a cylindrical chamber of clear acrylic about the size and shape of a hatbox.
‘Dinner is served,’ Otto announced as he operated the arm and maneuvered the trap closer to the jungle’s edge.
Otto Inman was a moon-faced, ponytailed NASA exobiologist the Navy had flown in from Kennedy. A turbo-nerd since elementary school, he’d found himself in geek heaven after scoring a job on a NASA research team fresh out of grad school. Although he had also been offered a job at Disney Imagineering in Orlando, it was not even a decision for him. After three years at NASA, Otto still could not imagine being blasé about going to work in the morning.
This, however, was the first time any urgency had been attached to the exobiologist’s job. This would be the first field test for many of the toys he’d had a hand in designing, including the lab’s Specimen Retrieval and Remote Operated Vehicle Deployment systems, and Otto was thrilled to see his theoretical systems given a trial by fire.
He maneuvered the robotic arm with a motion-capture glove, skillfully positioning the specimen trap on the scorched earth at the forest’s edge. The trap was baited with one hot dog, courtesy of the U.S. Navy.
‘A hot dog?’ asked Andy Beasley.
‘Hey, we had to improvise, all right?’ Otto replied. ‘Besides, all life forms love hot dogs.’
Nell had made sure to include Andy in the on-site crew. The marine biologist could not have been more delighted, but she worried that he didn’t take the danger seriously enough. When she’d told the NASA staff and Andy about the lunging creature on the beach, they’d mostly responded with polite silence and skeptical looks, which only increased her determination to discover what was really happening on Henders Island.
Otto raised the door on the side of the trap. He disengaged the motion-capture to lock the arm in place.
They waited.
Nell barely breathed.
After three seconds, a disk-ant the size of a half-dollar rolled out between two trees. It proceeded slowly on a straight line directly toward the trap. About eighteen inches from the open door, it stopped.
‘There’s one of your critters, Nell,’ Otto whispered. ‘You were right!’
Suddenly, a dozen disk-ants rolled out of the forest behind the scout. As they rolled they tilted in different directions and launched themselves like Frisbees at the hot dog inside the trap.
‘Jesus,’ Otto breathed.
‘Close it!’ Nell ordered.
When Otto hesitated for a moment, two reddish-brown animals the size of squirrels rocketed from the jungle into the box. They were followed by two flying bugs that zipped through the air and wriggled under the door before it closed and sealed.
‘Great work, Otto.’ Nell patted his back.
‘Looks like you bagged a couple island rats, too. Look!’ Andy Beasley pointed out the window.
The cylindrical trap was thrashing on the end of the robotic arm.
‘Yikes.’ Otto stopped retracting the arm as the trap shook violently. Its transparent walls were spattered and smeared with swirling blue gore.
‘Oh dear,’ Andy said.
‘Blue Slurpee. My favorite,’ Otto said.
When the trap finally stopped shaking it looked like a blueberry smoothie had been frappéd inside.
‘OK, retrieve that and let’s dissect whatever’s left,’ Nell told them. ‘Then we’ll set another trap. You better shut the door a little sooner next time, Otto.’
‘Yeah, guess so.’ The biologist nodded agreement.
He maneuvered the trap into an airlock, where conveyor belts transported it through a second hatch into the specimen dock, which they had informally dubbed the ‘trough,’ an observation chamber that spanned the length of Section One.
This section of StatLab had been designed as an experimental Mars specimen collection station, but it doubled as a mobile medical lab that could be dropped into disease hot zones. The lab was part of a pilot program that focused NASA’s unique expertise on Earth-bound applications. Additional funding earmarked for ‘Dual-Planet Technologies’ had provided NASA with the resources that had made the program possible. But no one thought StatLab would ever be called into action, and NASA technicians now crawled nervously over every inch of the lab to ensure that it met all system requirements by at least a twofold safety margin. Nothing freaked out NASA technicians more than planning for unknown contingencies.
Six high-resolution screens hung over the long ‘trough.’ Under the top surface of the trough, six video cameras no bigger than breath mints slid along silver threads on X and Y axes, each covering a sixth of the long viewing chamber.
The robotic arm deposited the trap on the conveyor belt, and the airtight hatch closed behind it, sealing with a backwards hiss. The conveyer slid the trap to the center of the trough, where the six scientists had gathered.
‘Let’s hope this soup is chunky,’ murmured Quentin Brancato, another biologist flown in by NASA. He stuck his hands into two butyl rubber gloves that extended on accordioned Kevlar arms into the observation chamber. He opened the door of the trap manually.
‘Careful,’ Nell warned.
‘Don’t worry,’ Quentin replied. ‘These gloves are pretty tough, Nell.’
Several other scientists stood at the controls of a number of smaller traps. Each trap contained a different bait: a piece of hot dog, a spoonful of vegetable succotash, a potted Venus flytrap, a cup of honey, a pile of salt, a bowl of fresh water, all supplied by the galley of the Enterprise. Except for the Venus flytrap, which was a pet Quentin had smuggled onto the flight over. As punishment for breaking the rules, he’d had to sacrifice ‘Audrey’ to science.
Inspired by the idea, Nell had requested that dozens of plant species be shipped in. These included flats of crabgrass, potted pines, wheat, and cactus. All would be exposed to the island around the lab for observation.
Other scientists, spread out along the trough, controlled the cameras, aiming them in the direction of the specimen retrieval trap.
Quentin released the seal mechanism at the top of the cylinder. As he lifted the lid, two flying creatures that looked like whirligigs escaped the hatch.
The pair rose like helicopters, hovering without spinning inside the trough. Their five wings shook off a blue mist. Their abdomens curled beneath them like scorpion tails as they dove straight for the hot-dog-baited trap.
Their heads kept a lookout with a ring of eyes as their legs grabbed the meat and stuffed it into an abdominal maw. Their bodies immediately thickened.
After a stunned moment, the scientist controlling the hot-dog trap remembered to seal the two creatures inside.
‘Got ’em!’
‘Good work!’ Nell breathed.
Quentin inverted the specimen retrieval capsule and dumped the contents onto the illuminated white floor of the trough. Several distinguishable bodies tumbled out in the blue slurry.
He drew a nozzle on a spring-loaded hose from the side of the trough and rinsed the mangled specimens with a jet of water. The blue blood and water sluiced into drains spaced two feet apart in the trough.
Three large disk-ants crawled out of the gore, leaving a trail of blue } } } } } } } behind them as they rolled. Then they flopped on their sides and crawled like pill-bugs, their upper arms flicking off droplets