Fragment

12:51 P.M.

The scientists and technicians quickly donned blue cleansuits as they prepared to evacuate StatLab.

Nell watched through the window as the first wave of scientists boarded the first two Sea Dragon helicopters. All carried sleek titanium hard-drive containers and stacks of aluminum specimen cases onto the loading ramps, which slowly rose like drawbridges as the helos took off.

“Damn it, Briggs,” she said, “these suits are a waste of time. Any microbes here must have evolved to attack a totally different biology from ours. Zero and I breathed the air on this island and nothing happened to us!”

Briggs rolled his eyes. “Interesting theory, Nell. Better start suiting up!”

She looked over Otto’s shoulder at the static-filled screen. “You go ahead, Briggs. Come on, Otto! Keep trying to make contact with them!”

Briggs frowned as Otto typed rapidly, the aluminum splint on his thumb clicking the computer keys.

“Can’t you reel that thing in any faster?” Pound complained. The arrows of ripples on the lake’s surface all pointed straight at the mired rover.

“Stop reeling it in,” Zero said.

“OK. I’m cutting it loose!” Kirk said.

“Good thinking!” Zero agreed.

Kirk flicked a button and a cable-shear on the end of the robot arm chopped the tether. The monitor went black.

“I’ve got a satellite phone,” Pound suggested.

Kirk shook his head. “Good luck using a satphone inside this thing. You need to be out in the open.”

“Do you think we can step outside for a minute?” the presidential envoy asked.

“Are you kidding?” Zero laughed.

“We don’t have cleansuits on this rig,” Kirk said.

“Zero’s been out there and lived,” Pound reminded them, stubbornly. His face was slick with sweat.

“Germs aren’t the problem.”

Two giant animals with iridescent green-and-red plates rippling down their bodies exploded from the water in front of the windows. They flew up into the air in a jet of white spray that drenched the rover.

When the “mega-mantises” landed on the roof they jolted the rover forward, nosing it deeper into the black lake.

The five men heard the creatures’ legs scrambling mightily overhead as one of them fell off to the left side, hitting the mud and surging backward into the lake.

An explosive BANG stunned their ears. The cabin’s roof cracked with tendrils of sunlight as a shock wave shattered the overhead fluorescent light fixtures.

“That was a claw strike,” Quentin shouted, holding his head.

“We gotta get out of here!” Andy yelled.

“That thing’ll open this up like a walnut!”

Kirk climbed out of the cockpit and squeezed past the others to the rear of the rover.

He yanked open a cabinet door on the wall. Inside were four sinister long-barreled guns attached to backpacks with tubes and straps.

“We should be able to hold a circle long enough to get off a call, I think,” he told them, passing one of the weapons to Quentin.

“Flamethrowers?” Quentin said, impressed, as he passed one along to Andy, who quickly handed it off to Pound.

Kirk nodded, handing him another. “Strap the fuel tank on your back. Tighten it with the belly strap.”

“That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” Quentin said.

“Careful now,” Kirk said.

“Zero, will you join us?” Pound asked the cameraman. “We could use a little advice if something comes at us. You’re the only one who’s been out there.”

Zero saw the mega-mantis’s arms ratcheting for another strike on the domed window behind Pound. “Get down!” He ducked to the floor, putting his hands over the back of his head and ears.

The shock wave knocked all of the other men over. It also spread three fine cracks through the forward bubble window.

“Give me one of those, God damn it!” Zero snarled.

“Plus one of these!” Pound’s ears rang as he thrust a very NASA-looking plastic headband at Zero. “It’s a head-cam- hands free!”

Zero stared at Pound as if he’d suddenly burst into song.

“Tap the side to send video back to the lab on Channel One,” Pound told the cameraman. “We’re out of range now, but it will reach them if you can get within a mile of the lab. It holds twenty-five hours on each memory stick. That’s a viewfinder on that arm there.”

“Will it give me brain cancer?”

“Of course not!” Pound scoffed.

Zero couldn’t resist placing it around his head and swinging the viewfinder into place. He squinted into the small transparent screen that hung about two inches in front of his left eye. “OK.”

Another bone-rattling blast seemed to crack the roof. A shard of knife-edged plastic grazed Andy’s arm. He screamed as the mega-mantis on the roof tightened tendons like trebuchets inside its massive forelimbs to let loose another strike across the middle window.

The five men reeled at the shock wave. Kirk staggered to the hatch, unsealed it, and kicked it open.

The arm of a mega-mantis reached down over the hatchway, followed by a giant multicolored compound eye.

“Hit it!” Kirk screamed.

He and Zero shot thirty-foot streams of fire out the hatch, frying the eyeball that was the size of a Weber barbecue grill.

Through the forward window they could see the wounded mega-mantis lurch from the roof back into the lake, pushing the rover even deeper into the muddy bank. The middle window was now half-covered with water that churned as other creatures surfaced from the deep to tear into the injured giant.

Kirk and Zero cut the flames, and all five men jumped out onto the green shore of the boiling lake.

They smelled the treacle stench of death and sulfur in the air, and the humidity slapped a sheen of sweat on their skin immediately. The creatures wrestling in the water clacked and squeaked as they shredded the fallen mega-mantis in a feeding frenzy, turning the surface pale blue.

A shrill insect noise from the distant jungle choked the air.

The men ran in a group from the water’s edge and quickly formed a circle around Pound.

Andy was the only one without a flamethrower.

Pound fussed nervously with his satellite phone, his flame thrower slung over his shoulder by the strap.

The buttons on the phone looked like a chaos of symbols as Pound tried to sort out what he had to push and in what order. Blood trickled from one of his ears. The shellshock of the mantis strikes had fogged his brain, along with lack of sleep and a voracious fever.

The others blasted the flamethrowers to defend their circle, as more swarms emerged from the crowns of the trio of nearby trees.

Quentin dropped his flamethrower. “Cover me!” he yelled to Andy.

“Huh?”

Without replying, Quentin ran to the tallest tree on the edge of the lake and extended a stethoscope to its trunk. The roiling water turned milky blue beside him as the battle under the surface spread.

Mega-Mantis

Magnisquilla manningi

(after Echevarria et al, Proceedings of the

Woods Hole Scientific Meetings, vol. 92: 61)

“What’s he doing, giving it a checkup?” Kirk yelled, stunned.

“Yeah… yeah… yeah! This thing has hearts,” Quentin shouted. “It’s an animal! I knew it had to have a vascular distribution system-”

The tree suddenly retracted into the ground. It clamped its fronds down over Quentin like an umbrella closing.

The ground quaked violently under their feet, causing Pound to punch the wrong last digit on the satphone. “God damn it!” he screeched. The rocking earth pitched him backwards. As he hit the ground, the butt of the flamethrower broke his fall and he accidentally fired a stream out its muzzle behind him-which torched the rover’s still-open hatchway.

Frothing waves splashed the lake shore near the trees, where they could still hear Quentin screaming under the tightly closed fronds.

“Quentin!” Andy shouted frantically, running toward the tree.

“Andy! Don’t!” Zero yelled.

Fronds of the other two trees leaned forward over Andy and a shimmering creature that seemed to be a larger version of a shrimpanzee descended on a bungeelike tail and snatched Andy, who screamed as it yanked him off the ground, all in a second.

The earthquake finally settled and stopped.

A wave of creatures came out of the wall of jungle a hundred yards away, and headed straight for the men.

Zero turned and ran.

Pound and Kirk ran, too.