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Zero clicked the seat harness and grabbed the handles of the Steadicam, which swung down weightlessly from the ceiling. He put the wide viewfinder to his left eye just as the Osprey yanked them off the deck.

“Woo-Hoooo!”
the driver yelled.

They swung out over the ocean. Zero gulped as he aimed the camera out the window.

Nell led the presidential envoy past workstations where scientists monitored remote cameras.

One screen showed disk-ants rolling down trails; another glimpsed nasty-looking creatures seemingly attacking the camera.

Each monitor Pound looked at seemed to go dead on cue. The scientists observing them groaned as if they had come to expect it.

Pound turned to Dr. Cato. “I really must insis—”

“You may want to video this,” Nell said, patting Pound’s arm. “For the President.”

Persuaded by Nell’s persistence, Pound awkwardly placed a glossy white plastic headband camera over his head and extended the arm of its viewfinder, wondering where his promised cameraman was. He centered the third-eye-like lens on his forehead, then tapped the side, illuminating a green operating light under the viewfinder’s miniature screen.

Three large, vicious-looking yellow-and-black insects shot through a clear tube into the viewing theater.

“Japanese giant hornets,” Dr. Cato said, appreciatively.

“A hunting pack of thirty can slaughter an entire hive of thirty thousand honeybees in less than five hours,” Nell said.

“Their larvae feed them an energy-boosting amino acid that enables them to fly twenty-five miles per hour for sixty miles,” Dr. Cato added.

“Whoa,” Pound said.

“Watch closely, Mr. Pound.” Dr. Cato pointed at the chamber to make sure the envoy didn’t miss it. “A single Japanese giant hornet can kill forty bees a minute. They chop them to pieces with their mandibles. Scouts spray a pheromone to mark their prey. Then they attack as a pack.”

“Their stingers pump venom so powerful it dissolves human flesh,” Nell said. “They kill about forty people a year in Japan.”

“We’ve been upping the stakes lately.” Dr. Cato chuckled.

“Christ! I’ve never even heard of them.” Pound’s eyes were glued to the specimen chamber.

Nell glanced at Dr. Cato. “OK, Steve, let in the Henders wasps.”

High-speed cameras whirred as their motors revved up and locked on two five-inch-long Henders “wasps” that emerged from a tube and hovered vertically on five transparent wings.

Their dragonfly-like abdomens swung forward as they tackled the Japanese hornets in midair.

With their ten double-jointed jackknifelike legs, the Henders wasps ruthlessly sliced the hornets into pieces that fell to the ground still moving.

As the ring of eyes on their “heads” kept watch, the wasps landed on five legs. They dipped their tails to devour the sliced bits with five-jawed maws.

“Yuck,” the Presidential envoy said. “They eat with their
butts?”

“They have two brains, Mr. Pound,” Dr. Cato said grimly.

“Like many of the creatures we’ve studied here,” Nell said.

Pound looked confused.

“Is this how
every
experiment has gone so far, Nell?” Dr. Cato asked quietly.

Henders Wasp
Pentapterus tomobranchiophorus
(and Japanese Giant Hornets,
Vespa mandarinia)
(after
Wirth et al,
Annals of the La Jolla
Natural History Museum
, vol. 47: 1-112)

Nell nodded, sharing a worried look with him.

Pound fiddled with a knob on his headcam.

“Henders species,” Nell continued, “have not only matched every common species we’ve tested, Mr. Pound—they’ve completely annihilated them.”

The envoy shrugged. “Sounds like we’re talking about a bunch of bugs. Why can’t we just spray a little DDT and be done with it?”

“We’re talking about a lot more than bugs, Mr. Pound,” Nell sighed.

“There are creatures here bigger than tigers, according to Nell,” Dr. Cato said.

“Spigers, I call them, Mr. Pound,” she said. “Eight-legged creatures at least three times the size of tigers.”

“Ham,” Pound said, feeling lightheaded. “Call me Ham, please. Why can’t we see some of those? Spigers? That’s what I really need to see!”

The
Trident’s
sequestered crew played checkers and sat around the decks, utterly bored. Nineteen days of looking at a beach they could not set foot on was mixing an explosive cocktail of anger, fear, and insanity.

At night, they could see the spy satellites watching them, slowly crossing each other’s paths in a precise and perpetual changing of the guard overhead, like the guards at Buckingham Palace.

Cynthea, Captain Sol, and First Mate Warburton stood on the prow of the
Trident.
They watched the roaring Osprey pass over the inlet in which they were anchored.

“There he goes,” Warburton exclaimed. “Lucky bastard!” Captain Sol shook his head. “I don’t envy him.” Cynthea peered through her opera glasses at the helicopter carrying the rover until it had disappeared behind the island’s cliff. “Come on, Zero!” she urged, squeezing a crimson-nailed fist. “If you come through for me, you are my lord and master for all eternity, baby!”

Captain Sol and Warburton exchanged wide-eyed looks.

“Watch this, Mr. Pound,” insisted Dr. Cato.

“Otto is going to send in one of our last remote-operated vehicles,” Nell explained.

Dr. Cato tapped Otto’s shoulder and startled him as he sat at one of the workstations in Section Four. “Where are we going now, young man?”

Otto pulled up his VR goggles and grinned up at Pound. The biologist’s left thumb was encased in an aluminum splint. It had not stopped him from operating the ROVs he’d helped design.

He was feeling no pain, thanks to the kick-ass Novocain pads the Navy doctor had given him for his thumb. “Welcome to the jungle, guys.” Otto put the VR goggles back on. “We’re about to penetrate the outer edge with a small robotic vehicle and take a little peek inside. This usually only lasts a few seconds, so don’t blink!”

“All right.” Pound glanced reprovingly at Cato and Nell. “Now we’re getting somewhere!”

“We’ve already deployed about eighty ROVs,” Nell said, patiently. “We only have about a dozen left. We’ve made it pretty far across the fields, all the way to the rim of the island. But we’re using all the rest now to try to get into the jungle, where most of the action seems to be.”

The ROV was the coolest Christmas present a seven-year-old kid could ever imagine finding under the tree. Several outboard cameras captured images as it emerged from a rack under Section One. The remote-controlled vehicle turned left on the slope toward the jungle.

With the soft zither of servomotors the robotic vehicle rolled over purple patches of Henders “clover” and left brown tracks behind it in a rearview cam that showed in the bottom half of the screen.

Otto steered it toward the edge of the jungle and slowed down.

“Hang on,” he said, and throttled the ROV into an opening between the trees. On the monitor above, the ROVs camera weaved swiftly around the trunks of trees that looked like palms crossed with cactus. Some were covered with reptilian scales, thorns, what might have been eyes—even snapping mouths.

Slaloming around the tree trunks, the ROV came to a tunnellike corridor lined by dense trees whose trunks were curved like ribs or giant tusks and whose interlacing canopies of mistletoelike clover were pierced by sunbeams. The ROV raced under the dangling clusters, chains, and spirals of colored berries on translucent tendrils that rose and fell like jellyfish tentacles along the corridor.

A streaming horde of insects and animals buzzed and roared past the speeding ROV, rushing toward it in the lower screen
from the rear-cam. Otto zigzagged down the curving tunnel as a rush of creatures seemed to miss it at every turn. He hung a right turn at breakneck speed as the corridor forked. They could make out nothing but a whirl of blurring shapes hurtling around the ROV as it raced down the jungle tunnel.

Something large darted out from the side.

The rover’s camera dove into the dirt. A bird feather was all they could identify, pressed against the lens.

“Yee-haw!” Otto pulled off his VR goggles. “We see lots of bird feathers,” he explained to Pound, who stared at the screen with a blank expression.

“I want you to give me some of your best ROV footage inside the jungle, Dr. Cato, to show to the President,” he said.

“Well, that was it, right there!” Otto announced triumphantly.

“That’s as far as you’ve gotten?” Pound asked.

“That’s the record, man!” Otto gave Nell a low-five. “You can see why those bastards have eyes in the back of their heads, Nell! We rigged a rearview cam that I could see in the bottom half of the goggles that time. There is no way I’d have gotten that far without it. But man, that is a LOT of stuff to process—they
need
two brains!”

Dr. Cato pointed at another monitor, noticing Pound’s eyes glazing. “Look at this remote we were able to set up next to a disk-ant trail, Mr. Pound. This one’s lasted three days. Right, Otto?”

“Ri—”

The camera went dead.

“—ght.” Otto looked at Pound and shrugged.

“I still don’t understand why we can’t just go down to Section One and take a look inside the jungle there!” Pound complained. “What’s the point of having all this million-dollar equipment if we can’t even use it when we need to?”

Briggs slammed Section Two’s lower hatch behind him. It sealed with a squeaking
hiss
as he sagged against it to catch his breath.

He ripped off his helmet, and the bulbous blue cleansuit deflated. He straightened up as he addressed the eleven jumpy scientists in Section Two, who were staring at him, bug-eyed, from their workstations. “Duct tape is not an option!” the NASA technician announced. “Listen up!” Briggs barked as he extricated himself from the cumbersome suit. “Section One is now officially
off limits!”

He kicked off the last leg of the cleansuit and surveyed the scientists with an almost contemptuous air. “And drill-worms
fly.
Yeah, just for everyone’s information, OK? And those damn worms are getting through the inner lining of the vestibule down there.”

Briggs casually rapped his knuckles on the hatch window behind him. Everyone flinched as drill-worms viciously attacked the other side.

The animals’ trio of spiked, folding legs resembled glossy black landing gear on a 1950s sci-fi rocket ship. Their sucked-lozenge heads had three ring-shaped eyes and a flexible neck. They hovered and twisted with precision in midair, using black wings that popped like flower petals from a three-paneled bud under their necks.

They bent their yellow drill-bit abdomens to the window. Their grappling-hooked forefeet scrabbled over its slippery surface.

Briggs looked over his shoulder and jumped as he saw the alien creatures so close at hand.

“OK.” He turned back to the other scientists. “Drill-worms have now penetrated the vestibule! But that’s not what breached Section One’s hull. Something else did that. Hello, is there a doctor in the house? Because we lowly NASA technicians are a little out of our league here, OK? I can’t guarantee our safety if you can’t tell me what’s going on!”

“Hey, we’re just here to collect data,” said Andy, sarcastically.

Andy wore a bright tie-dyed T-shirt streaked red, yellow, and green. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a year. “All those prima
donnas on the
Enterprise
are supposed to figure it out for us. Or so we’ve been told.”

“In so many words,” Quentin grunted. “There’s a couple up in Section Four right now getting a tour, if you want to complain, Briggs.” He aimed a finger at a plasma screen showing a rooftop view. “Hey, check it out: Henders lichen is spreading over us
right now.”

Red and yellow scales bloomed over the roof in Quentin’s monitor. The lichenlike growth visibly spread in polygons that changed color and shape, seeming to feed voraciously on the layers of white paint, gray primer, and steel. Each hexagonal tile was bisected by a half-hex “fin” angled to catch the sun. Sunlight turned these sail-fins green as they fluttered in the wind. A permanent cloud of angry bugs swarmed where the jungle was relentlessly swallowing Section One, like antibodies reacting to a wound.

“This crud turns red on iron, yellow on acrylic, and white on paint, man.” Quentin shook his head in admiration and pulled off a bite of a Zagnut bar. “I think it’s actually eating the lab,” he mumbled.

“Some bacteria eat metal, gold, even CDs,” Andy said. “Bacteria probably ate the limestone in giant caves—in addition to your teeth, Quentin.”

Quentin shrugged. “It’s photosynthesizing, too.” He clicked two keys and zoomed in as he tore off another chew. “See those scales—the ones catching the sun are tinged green. Henders lichen eats whatever it can get, man,” he said with his mouth full the entire time.

Andy frowned. “The maximum growth rate of lichens is about one to two centimeters per year.”